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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 DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Brands are spending more on e commerce advertising due to projected rising online sales.
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ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter dot com, slash murder. That's ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r d er. Let ZipRecruiter take finding quality, qualified candidates off your plate so you can focus on growing your business. Go to zip recruiter, calm, slash murder, zip recruiter the smartest way to hire Good evening on a warm night in September nineteen eighty five, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in west Side Park in Munsey, Indiana. Their killer has never
been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a dungeon and dragon's devote The case grew cold. Only decades later did a dogged police investigator narrow the scope to a suspect whose name has never
been publicly revealed until now. Keith Roysden and Douglas Walker, authors of Wicked Munsey and Munseye Murder in Mayhem, have followed the investigation into the West Side Park murders for decades, and for the first time Time report the complete and untold story. The book that we're profiling this evening is The West Side Park Murders, Monsey's most notorious cold case, with my special guest journalist and author Keith Roysden. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.
Keith Roysden, thanks for having me. Dan, thank you so much. Let's start with how you came to be involved with this, and also we mentioned your co author, Douglas Walker. Give us your background that led to this as well your professional background and also your connection to this area of Monsey, Indiana.
Mounsey is about forty five minutes fifty minutes north east of Indianapolis, and it has a long history as a blue collar town. The one that also has the strange kind of cultural artifact because the sociological study from the nineteen twenties, and it's been mentioned in many pop culture venues like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The opening scenes of the movie were set in Monthly, So Munsey's always been this kind of strange microcosm of the nation.
But also it is this hot mid over the decades of crime, corruption, fairly unsavory elements, so as newspaper reporters, and Doug is still an active newspaper reporter for the Star Press newspaper here in Muncie. I took a buy out a couple of years ago before we started work on the West Side Park Murders book, so as newspaper reporters, we had come into contact many times with some pretty
interesting stories. The Westside Park murders occurred in as you said, September nineteen eighty five, and I believe the first article that we Dug and I wrote about the murders was in nineteen ninety seven, and at that time we kind of recapped the case and had the first really public statements from Kimberly's stepfather, who had lived under this cloud
of suspicion for twelve years. And after nineteen ninety seven, we continued to write when there would be a significant development or a significant anniversary, and in twenty ten we kind of informally launched a series that we did called Cold Case Munsey, which was about I had to count them up the other day because I wasn't sure how
many had appeared. It was about more than thirty four unsolved murders here in Munsey and Delaware County, and it seemed natural to start with the West Side Park case because it was the one that everyone remembers. I personally liked giving some publicity to once where the victims had been totally forgotten over the decades. There was nothing remotely resembling an active investigation, not even a cold case. Really, they were totally forgotten. The West Side Park was not
forgotten by people. It had left a real I don't know scar is the right word, but it definitely left a mark on the community because of the nature of the crime and how totally mystifying the case was to
many people. So in twenty ten we did a fairly extensive twenty fifth anniversary story and that started the ball rolling again in that within a couple of years, the Munthly Police Department had assigned a promising younger investigator to look at their extensive files on the case, boxes and boxes in a room in Munsely City Hall, and all along we kind of knew that we would be coming
back to the case at some point. Kimberly's father, who was a physician locally, had really helped us greatly with the story in twenty ten and had basically the man has the most I guess optimistic and realistic attitude I think a parent could ever have. Since that he thought maybe some good would come from this horrible event at some point in the future, if nothing else, kind of bringing the community together, and so he had cooperated with
the twenty ten case. In twenty eighteen, when our second true crime book was out, doctor Dowell was the first person in line at a book signing for it at Mantrista Cultural Center. Share Muncy and Doug and I had kind of looked at each other, and then we broached the subject with the doctor and said, you know, what would you think if we did Because obviously we'd written regular articles for the newspaper, we asked, what would you think if if we did a full fledged treatment of this,
possibly as a book length treatment of it. And doctor Dowe just seemed quite pleased with the idea. He really liked the possibility that his daughter's murder and Ethan's murder would continue to get some attention. And now we were approaching the thirty fifth anniversary, still a couple of years away from it, but I think he knew that as everyone was aging and memories were fading, there was the possibility that this was an opportunity for a big splash to get the word out, to get the facts as
they're known out. So he was totally cooperative, very encouraging, sat down with Doug for interviews, loan of family photos, things like that.
Let's get to this faithful evening September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty five, and there was a police officer, a patrolman from the Munsey Police Department, patrolman Terry Winters. He's a thirty four year old guy, and so he is at west Side Park. Tell us what this officer was doing outside west Side Park or in west Side Park that evening September twenty eight.
Well, strangely, over the years there was this mistake and assumption that he just happened to be in the park, but the truth was he was still on duty. A lot of people mistakenly believed that he had been off duty and they found it suspicious that at almost midnight on this evening that he would be there in the park, but he was on duty. One of his duties was to as midnight approached kind of encourage people to get out of the park, to drive off and go home.
And he also had a police dog a canine officer, and that gave him opportunity to let the canine officer run it a little bit in the park. So Officer Winters saw a car sitting on a west side park is not very wide. I mean, you can see from the nearest street, White River Boulevard, you can see clear to the White River on the other side of it. It's not extremely long, but it's very kind of a deep park and very long and linear with a lot
of trees. And he saw there was a car parked on a little lane closer to the river side of the park. So he thought, okay, I need to tell these people. They're probably parked there for the reasons you might assume that the people were parked in a park at almost midnight. I need to tell these people to move along. And he walked up with his flashlight and showed it in the car and was and I'll never forget him telling us this. He was so startled by what he saw. He turned a light off for a
moment and then he turned it back on. And of course there are these two young people in the car, and each one has been shot. And so he immediately of course radioed that in very quickly, a lot of monthly police personnel are there, and they start doing what is obviously the standard police procedure of stationing people at the entrances to the park and not allowing people to get into the park, theoretically not allowing people leave the park, and also keeping a record of all the personnel who
are coming and going. They authorized personnel, and very quickly, considering how late it was, the newspaper, which was one of two at the time, the Monthly Star, had a reporter there and they were able to do a story for the next day's paper that did not have names
of the victims, but it did have a photograph. And really, when you consider how much more mobile is a or forces that took to cover a story like that in a brief period of time thirty five years ago compared to now, when I could stand there with my iPhone and take pictures and post them to online stories and things like that, I mean, it's remarkable that they got a twelve paragraph story with a photo in that next
morning's paper. But the investigation continued through that night and police were incredibly frustrated by how really little evidence there was, because they initially believed and It's probably the case that the killer stood outside the car, pointed as his or gun fired into the car, and didn't really have any contact in the manner of touching the victims or anything like that. So words spread very quickly, and by the next day it was just spreading like wildfire through the entire city.
Tell us about the parents of Ethan?
How old is he?
And Kimberly? Tell us about their parents. You mentioned Anthony Kimberly's physician father, but tell us about the parents.
The doctor Dowell was a physician at Law Memorial Hospital here in Muncie and his he and his wife had separated by that point. He was living in Indianapolis, I believe, and so that's where he was when he got the word. Ethan's parents. They're the family owns a local factory. So both very responsible, well known members of the community. Figures
that a lot of people know. And after Kimberly's parents separated and divorced, her mom had remarried and her stepfather, Donald Vogel Saying, was an official in the athletic department at Boston University here in Munsie. And so really these were as in a way, kind of high profile families as you could possibly imagine, which, as we note when we quote people in the book, you know, people would say this kind of thing just doesn't happen to It
doesn't happen in our community. What they really mean is it doesn't happen to people like us, because of course, every community, especially Munsey, has people who are killed and horrible crimes, and usually it's considered a thing that happens to someone else. In this case, that happened to people who are well known and young people or well liked.
Ethan was sixteen years old, Kimberly was fifteen years old, and they had gone to just like a week before the North Side High School football team had opened its fall football season, and they had gone to the hat and I believed that they were both part of some kind of homecoming court type activities that first week, and then a week later on a Saturday night, they were
there in the park. And of course, you know, Monthsly, like any city in the Midwest is especially nineteen eighty five, but even today, I think young people would say, there are always a limited number of things that you could do, and you could go to a movie, you could go to a concert, maybe a concert in Indianapolis if you were old enough, or you could find a quiet place to sit and talk and you know, maybe you bought
a pizza or something like that. So it was immediately one of those situations where people were undering, Okay, why were they there? What were they doing there? And that great deal of speculation considering two elements that were in Ethan's Volkswagen rabbit hatchback with them. One was a switchblade type knife that was on the dashboard and one was a gun holster that was partially under Ethan's leg between
his leg and the seat of the car. And going on thirty five years later, that holster in the DNA evidence that might have been part of that would continue
to be an element of the case. But of course, like everything else, when you don't really have and police did not, when they don't have a tremendous amount of facts, when they don't have answers, a lot of speculation starts, not only about what might be possible un sitimate avenues of their investigation, but also things that rapidly turned into dead ends.
Now police call for make a pola for people to come forward that are witnesses, and very interestingly, another marshal from a nearby town comes forward along with other witnesses to say that they saw something in the park that night. And you might have mentioned that there was about a dozen cars that were discerned to have been in that
park that night around that eleven PM. And so police ask for people to come forward tell us first about this nearby town marshall that said he had something, that he actually witnessed it in the park that night.
Well, it sounds like kind of kind of a cliche in that there is somebody who might be a witness to the crime, but because they were in a place where they probably shouldn't have been, along with someone they shouldn't have been with, there's always this element of reluctance. And I will mention that it's been an education to me. Even though I worked at the newspaper at the time, I didn't cover the initial case, but it's been an education to me to see what is written in articles
and what is not written in articles. I mean, I've always known that as I chose what to put in my coverage of cases, or of meetings for that matter, of public meetings, government meetings, elections, But there's not a lot of detail about some of the initial witnesses, suspects, and leads the police pursued in nineteen eighty five and
the months that followed. So a lot of this came from interviews that we did in twenty nineteen, including with Marvin Campbell, who was the deputy chief of police at the time and who is still has almost unshakable beliefs in the case and the way that he believes it
played out. But one of the things that came out of these twenty nineteen interviews with Marvin is that there was a deputy from one of the towns in the area here who was there that night and had not been revealed at all in the initial stories, but he came forward in the days following the crime and came to Muzzi Police and said, Okay, well he didn't say it this way, I'm sure, but the good news is I might have seen something to help your investigation to bad news is I was there with a woman and
we probably shouldn't have been there, and so now you know, I've got some exposure and she's got some exposure if this gets out. But he had provided Marvin Campbell with this element of I saw this vehicle and I saw this man behind the wheel who had kind of stared at me and maybe in a kind of an effort to intimidate me and get me to leave. I saw
him go ahead. And when that didn't work, and when he didn't intend date this Deputy Marshall, the car pulled away, and when the general vicinity of where the shooting happened, uh, just a few moments later, but that was corroberated by a couple of other people were in the park that night and that yes, we saw a vehicle that looked vaguely like this vehicle. So police really started to focus very narrowly to some extent, they certainly fielded hundreds of calls.
I think it even got to the point that they implement They did local implementation of the Crime Stoppers CHIP line in the wake of this, maybe not just for this case, but but the idea that, you know, we're overwhelmed almost of the calls. People think, you know, everybody, they see the grocery store matches, you know, the characteristics
of a suspect. So the deputies comments and subsequent comments from other people kind of sparked this narrow wing of the focus of the initial investigators to Donald Vogel Kase Kimberly's stepfather, the unrationaly athletic official.
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You talked about Deputy Chief of Police Marvin Campbell looking at DONALDS. Vogel Ga, saying as a really good sauspect. Other than the typical reason that you would look at family first, what in his mind was the reason why in his mind, Donald was a suspect.
I think that very quickly they began to look at vehicles, in particular, vehicles that were there that night belonged to mister vocal cassaying, and later, as the focus kind of widened,
that belonged to other people too. So when you know, it's one of those things that even now, certainly I think, you know, if I was a witness to a crime, I'm not really sure that I would be able to say later, oh, that was a dark blue nineteen eighty three Monte Carlo or something like that, you know, But people who are more capable of that were beginning to
identify vehicles. And I can't tell you for certain exactly why Marvin Campbell linked those two, but he became pretty convinced that the car owned by mister Vogogassang came close enough to the general description of a car that was in the park that night that that kind of solid fied for. Another element of this is that mister Vogogassaying came to the park that night. He was stopped by a police officer at one of the entrances and he said,
I'm here because I'm looking for my stepdaughter. Her mom is really concerned. You know, she was supposed to be home by eleven I think it was, and we haven't heard from her. And I'm not sure how much they kind of broke the news to him right there on the spot, or how much he was able to kind
of infer from from what they weren't saying. But I've been at crime scenes on a number of occasions when family showed up and it's this very tense, potentially very emotional moment, and sometimes, you know, I don't know if it's that whole you know, criminal always returns to the scene of the crime type cliche, or whether as the days went on, the combination of him coming to the scene that night looking for her and these any similarity vehicles and things just kind of started the gears going
for Marvin Campbell and some of the investigators. That might be the case, but certainly those two things, I mean, you hate to say that that he wouldn't have have had the kind of hanging over where we said all these years if he hadn't shown up at the park, but he did. And I think that kind of uh, maybe furthered that suspicion a little bit in Marvin Campbell's mind.
Tell us about the composite drawing, What where did they get this witness for this rendition and in terms of Campbell, did it lead him to further be convinced that Donald Vogazang Vogel Gazang was a good suspect.
You know, the the cobs. The drawing doesn't look anything like Don vogel Gasang. And I think right from the beginning there was that kind of branching of beliefs between these two series, and probably there were other theories too,
but they eventually started fro in a way. But you had this impression that her stepfather was there and they had a similar vehicle, and you know, maybe the deputy Marshall Town Marshall who was there do something or suspected something later based on having seen a vehicle having a kind of the staredown of a guy. And then you had this copst the drawing which came out within a week or so. That plainly did not look like a
middle aged university athletic department official. It looked much more like a young person, you know, early twenties, mid twenties, much more frankly the age and kind of demographic for somebody to be in the park, whether it was you know, for you know, whatever reason. I mean, I enjoyed the solitude, I eat my pizza there, I'm there for some illicit purpose,
all those things. So those two things didn't really match up, but I think they continued still kind of parallel, and frankly, the suspicion about her stepfather probably was a dominant because, like I said about when there are a lack of facts in a case, the public filling that void with rumors and suggestions and things like that. Probably because that was the the I say this air quotes neater theory.
Certainly, Kimberly Dowell's mom is Nancy vocal gazang. You rite that she was a staunch support of her husband. They had asked her about her husband's whereabouts, So was in terms of the police, or at least what you write, was it a seemingly solid alibi for Donald that night?
I certainly think that it was. Again, this plays into those cliches of well, of course the loyal wife defends the husband, and whether that's, you know, it is a cliche, and whether that's relevant in all to this. I don't
know that anybody could possibly know. But as you're eliminating possibilities, always keeping some in the back of your mind, and always obviously keeping notes in your files and things like that, almost certainly that would I guess, lean toward ruling him out on the part of some investigators, but plainly it
never did. One of the more illuminating interviews that we did, of course, in twenty nineteen for the book, was with Marvin Campbell, who still believes that the stepfather had some involvement. I mean, it's fascinating to see how many people when we see comments about this case on social media, they have their own theories. They often include him, They often
include a police officer, sometimes Terry Winters. It's the persistence of these theories in the light of you know, this person saying you know, no, that couldn't have happened, or Nancy vogel kasaying saying he's not guilty. I sent him looking for her. I don't have any doubts about his involvement. You know, those things are very compelling and certainly helped drive a lot of investigations, yet they persist in the minds of the public.
Let's talk about Nancy Vogogazang, still mourning her daughter. This is two years later, Christmas Eve, nineteen eighty seven, and she's attending a Cadillite candilight service at her church. What happens at the church.
Well, this is one of those things that just adds a horrible twist to this case, in that missus vocals who had gone through so much. I mean, no one can ever possibly imagine how horrible it would be to lose your child, especially in a manner like this. And she became ill that night at the Christmas service and passed away, and you know it. I mean, certainly the
family was well known in Muncie. But I think the thing that drove the newspaper to do a relatively short but still nevertheless a short story on page one the next day was that she had had this tragic event in her life only two years before. And of course, other things like tragedies become magnified when it's around Christmas time. Or the Christmas season or something like that. But she
passed away at that Christmas service. And you know, if you're of the kind to and modern day investigators certainly are, if you're the kind to believe that Don Vogel saying was just a tragic figure in this rawley accused lost his stepdaughter and then two years later, this is why.
What do police make of Kimberly Dowells wedn't I didn't mention this, but you write that she got Nancy got a call, a phone call not long after Kim was killed. And what does this killer have to say? What does he impart to the grieving Nancy Vogel gazing.
Well, you know the horrible thing about this is that and I have to say, you know, it's the kind of thing that now you would think what somebody would say on social media, But Nancy got this this call that said, in effect, you know, your daughter was just an innocent bystander her, you know, the voice she was there with was the targeted. The comment was he got what he deserved, which there's never been any proof that
that was the case. But for Nancy to hear that this random phone call comes to their I pictured you know, a wall on a phone on the wall of their kitchen or something like that, and for Nancy to pick up the phone and hear this this voice saying, you know, well, it's kind of too bad that your daughter died. But she was she was just a casualty of what happened to Ethan, just as as cool and heartless the thing as anybody could possibly say.
Let's talk about James Jimmy Swingley. You right that he had left a monthly for Florida shortly after the murder, and some people had said that he had left the day after, and you take talk about when he returned in August eighty six. Talk about James Jimmy Swingley and his departure and his return in August eighty six.
Well, there are a lot of, I think perfectly reasonable, some greater known and some greater unknown suspects and theories in this case. As more modern day investigators looked at this case, they started piecing things together about Jimmy Swallowing. And one of the things that they that they noted is that from almost the beginning he had been cited as someone who had told people that he had been in the park that night. He even told again, this is things that are relayed to police, so it's first
or secondhand. And in many ways he had relayed to people that he had been with somebody who had shot the two teenagers. He had relayed to somebody that he shot the two teenagers, that he was there for some kind of a drug deal, which fueled the idea that many people have that Ethan and Kimberly were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that somebody thought that they saw something, and maybe they did and maybe they
did not. Swingley has had a pretty fascinating history of tragedy in his family and some criminal activity on his part leading up to this time, so he was certainly on the radar of police at that time, and at some point after this he was even and Muncie Police, like a lot of police departments, relied on a lot of techniques at the time that maybe are not as heavily relied on today, but one of the at some point he was given what is popularly kind of termed
the light detector test, and had produced fairly damning responses to a couple of questions about the park. If he knew what happened in the park, if he had anything to do with the park that night, So he was really on the radar of police over the years, and then in nineteen ninety six, I believe it was he had his own more immediate for him, and more so
than just being questioned about Westside Park. He had his own more immediate set of legal circumstances, and it kind of and certainly I'll tell you about that if you'd like, but it kind of took him off the chessboard as far as active investigations for a long time. And really only in the past ten years have people returned to him than when I say people, I mean police investigators. Only in the most recent few years have people kind
of returned to him as a possible focus. One thing I've I was and Douglas Walker and I had written a couple of articles in the twenty ten's in which police said, you know, we have a much harder lock on a suspect here. We believe we know who did it, we believe there's a person of interest, but they kind
of didn't want to get too detailed about it. But we got indications that the person was in prison, which certainly also kind of camps down some of the urgency of moving forward on a case, but he was increasingly a person of interest for monthly police, particularly one investigator.
What were the crimes that he was incarcerated for and what were the types of crimes that that he was known for and had a record for.
You know, Munsey is a wonderful community with a lot of really great caring people, and Munsi is a community with a lot of kind of strange crime and criminal element probably like any like any community really certainly, uh I if you if you kind of measured by over
the course of decades. But Jimmy Swingley had been charged for a period of time with racketeering and a case that that involved a number of men who are committed burglaries, including business burglaries in Indiana and Ohio where we're about one county over from the Ohio state line here, and so so certainly, like I said earlier, he was on
people's radar, uh before before this. The the thing that really I guess kind of cemented his his legal standing was in looking at the date here, it was a murder that was totally Ever later, of course to Westside Park, Munsey has had at various times such greater level of homicide activity, and certainly in sometimes the nineteen eighties and
nineteen nineties it was pretty high. And in November nineteen ninety six, a thirty two year old man named Brian Enscow had been found in his apartment in Muncie and he was nearly decapitated, and apparently there had been disputes kind of ongoing between Ensco and his room mate as far as Rent and James Swingley was a friend of one of the roommates. Swingley didn't really have any what I guess you would call it courtney kind of standing
in this dispute. It wasn't like the money was going to go to him or anything, but he apparently took offense on behalf of his friend who was owed Rent money. So while there was certainly some activity for more than one person that greatly harmed Brian Inscow that night in November nineteen ninety six, prosecutors at the time really came to focus on Jimmy Swingley as the person who had after the roommate, had beaten Ensco with a shovel and
then maybe did further injuries serious injuries to him. They came to focus on on Swingley cutting Brian Inskow's throat, so much so that within the course of two years, because it took a while, obviously for charges to be filed in a case where there was probably more than one person involved in a dispute that led to actual retality, over the course of two years, they filed a murder charge against Swingley and that resulted in in April nineteen
ninety nine, Stephen Caldemier, who was the judge of Circuit Court at that time, sentencing swing eight to sixty five years in prison after he was found kuilty.
Yes introduce a important character an investigator Nathan Sloane tell us about Nason Sloan and how when does he come into the picture and as it was out.
Of what well, as is probably the case in a lot of communities with a lot of police departments, cold cases that are particularly still high profile for the police department and for the public, those get second looks a number of times. Sometimes stories and TV shows make you think all of these go into a dusty file cabinet and they're never brought up again. And certainly that does happen with some that so much time has passed, there's very little hope of someone coming forward with the West
Side Park case. Over the years, Moncie Police had said, you know, here's a really good, young, promising investigator. Let's let him go through all these files and see if they see anything that previous investigators have missed, especially something that might have been missed at the time of the original investigation. So Nate Sloan was in the early twenty tens, was that investigator. After our story appeared on the twenty
fifth anniversary in twenty ten, apparently people started calling. One of the things we always tried to do with all of our cold case stories was put a point of contact in the story for whatever police department was working on the case, so that if someone knew something, they could call this number and ask for this particularly detective.
But after our twenty ten story appeared, people started calling the Munthly Police Department, and the chief of the time said, we're going to give these calls to Nate Sloan and we're going to let him look through these boxes and see what develops. So in about twenty probably twenty eleven, but I know for a fact twenty twelve, Nate Sloan started really cultivating tips. He would have members of the public calling and telling unlikely stories, likely stories, and he would,
you know, pour overall police files. And I think he made some joke about how he locked himself in a room with all the files in the case for a couple of weeks, and sometimes he would have police officers other officers who would come to him and say, you know, this didn't get a lot of attention back at the time,
but maybe you ought to consider looking at this. So after our twenty ten story and people knew that the department was actively looking at it again, I don't think that twenty ten story even mentioned Sloan by name, But within a couple of years he was really the person
that all that information got channeled to. And we detail in the book a lot of the really truly fascinating elements of this investigation that he worked through, not just having to do with Jimmy Swingley, but having to do with One of the most fascinating parts of this whole thing has been possible links to some killings in Concordia, Kansas, in which a couple of young people a little older than Dixon A. Dowell were killed out there in the early eighties, and a man who appeared in West Side
Park here two nights after the killing that people that ultimately were able to decades later were able to place him in Kansas at the time of those killings in Kansas, not necessarily at the same spot, but certainly in Kansas. So Sloan started working all all these leads and new ones kept coming in, and he's very, very dedicated to it. At the same time, he and other officers are doing
a number of investigations all the time. They've always got cases open on their desks, and he and others started working these leads that had not been fully explored in the past. They started doing new interviews, and really all through the twenty tens, they regularly met to talk with people and ask them what do you know about this case? And sometimes they would say what do you know about
this person or that person? And sometimes they would be I don't know if surprised as the right word, but they would be surprised to go talk to someone and almost out of the blue, that person would say, oh, yeah, you're asking me about Jimmy Swingley, right, And it was kind of startling to them to find how very much in the undercurrent of the community there was people who thought, no, it's not the step farther. No, it's not the canine
officer who was there on the scene. No, it's not you know, this person or that person or some random you know, directer you never heard of. It's this person who is repeatedly again reportedly told people that he had some involvement. He did it himself, he was there when somebody else did it. He had left the community right after that, and it just kind of kind of jelled as Nate Sloan was looking at this and talking to people.
Let this as an opportunity to stop for these messages. You talked about Nate Sloan doing his due diligence and trying to eliminate everyone and not just focusing on James Swingley, but investigating and reinterviewing and interviewing new people. He even spoke to I believe Swingley's wife ex wife spoke to the mother I believe as well. So right the But there is an opportunity, he believes to be able to go to Wabash Correctional Center and actually speak to James Swingley.
What happens when he does that, what year is that and when and what is the result of that interview.
Wely It's interesting because he and another officer went there twice. They went, I believe in twenty twelve, and you know, certainly this is probably not an unknown occurrence. But when they got there, Jimmy Swingley, who was willing to talk to them, f off. Basically, you know, he told me, I don't want anything to I don't want to talk
to you. People. Go away, And of course, in the incidence like that, you do, I mean, when you're just going there kind of hoping that somebody over the course of twenty years has maybe gotten remorseful, or maybe they legitimately have someone else who they can point to and say, Okay, yeah, I was there. That element of the story is true. I was there, but it was this guy who did it.
So when they went in twenty twelve and Jimmy Swimley basically told him to beat it, Sloan and the other investigators who would kind of work with him on and off over the years, were they kind of bided their time.
They kind of waited to see what would happen next, and by twenty eighteen, Sloan felt like he had and I enumerate these in one of the chapters in the book Sloan felt like he had a number of elements that he could draw from to go to court and get a warrant to collect a sample of Jimmy Swingley's DNA. So the second time they went back to the Wabash Correctional Facility, which is on the other side of the
status near the Illinois state line. They went in twenty eighteen and were able and basically you laid it out for him and said, we've got a court order, we can get a sample of your DNA. And he not only cooperated and gave a sample of his DNA, but sat down with him for a little while, you know, forty five minutes or something like that, and talked to them and denied that he had anything to do with
it at all. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that there were number of avenues that he raised with him, but came away saying, you know, I've always heard about that, but I've heard it was their stepfather. So while they had a DNA sample of the person who ultimately and probably even really by that point, but ultimately became the focus of their investigation and was certainly their best person
of interest. While they had a DNA sample, they did not have any kind of, uh, you know, remorseful confession or anything like that. It was just pretty much kind of what they expected and not that different from their first encounter, except that it was a lot more cordial.
Where were they trying to extract the DNA sample from? What piece of evidence were they it was that they feel was their best bet for a DNA sample.
Well, and I mentioned it earlier, but one of the very very few pieces of physical evidence in this case was the the gun holster that was partially under Ethan's leg between his leg and the car seat that night when they were found. And at the time that had caused a lot of consternation because that and the knife that was found on the dashboard of the car kind of led some people to think, well, you know, Ethan
came there armed. He must have been expecting something, and you know, maybe maybe you would go to a park and you would have some way to defend yourself if you're going to be there at almost midnight. I mean maybe I would I probably just stay home and be in a park at midnight. But so the the knife and then the holster were over the years a focus on the part of investigators the holster, so much so because while the knife might have been something that people
believed that Ethan owned, the holster was not. He was never known to have a gun, or certainly have a gun that would have a holster on it. So the kind of the theory was that whoever had shot the two teenagers had pulled a gun off his off his belt,
the holster came with it. He shot through the car window, and at some point the holster fell off, and when Ethan slumped or recoiled or something like that, that the holster where it had fallen off kind of partially went under him a little bit, so that it certainly was not something that the shooter could just casually in a dark car in a dark park after you just fired a gun, not something you would casually reach in or retrieve.
So while there's certainly been strides in evidence and DNA matching and DNA cultivation for that matter, since nineteen eighty five, they were hoping that by getting this DNA sample of James Jimmy Swingling, they'd be able to match it to something from the holster, and they were not able to do that. That was very frustrating for them, obviously, because
they had had some element of high hopes. Obviously they wouldn't have gotten a warrant from a judge to get the DNA sample if they hadn't hoped that something might come of it. But probably because of by that point thirty thirty four years, thirty three years of deterioration of a lever Holster. And you know, I don't I don't have any reason to think there was any kind of bad handling of it or anything like that by police.
But certainly, certainly things do happen, and they break down and they become less certain, and it just did not. It was not the conclusive link that they had hoped.
There was talk of, I mean, the idea that there was a drug deal and and Ethan was by various witnesses and through the rumor mill, and and again various witnesses attested that Ethan was involved, could have been involved in some marijuana deal or some drug deal gone back. What we didn't mention is the coroner's autopsy reports indicating any kind of drug use from these two people. What were those results.
That there was no indication of any kind of drugs in their system of I mean, Ethan and Kimberly and Marvin Campbell noted in our twenty nineteen interview that we asked their friends and authorities at the time, which no doubt included people from the school and maybe from their churches. The idea that, you know, do you think either one of these kids had had any kind of drug use?
And Campbell said in twenty nineteen, No, we never found anybody who was willing to say that, So, you know, that didn't especially lend credence to the idea that they were there for some purpose. Sorry about that.
The idea though, too, that the depiction by newspapers was that this was a lover's lane murder, and not not to throw any blame towards these two teenagers, but that's you say that that was the way they depicted the murders itself. It was a lover's lane murder as well. Despite these newspaper depictions, What was Nathan Sloane's theory based on all those rumors and all those witness reports, whether
some of them were accurate or not. What was his theory his fundamental theory on what had happened that night to Ethan and Kimberly?
And why, you know, I don't know if he ever verbalized to me, you're publically, and I'm sure he is not publicly about it exactly what happened that night. But I do think that the elements that were were kind of a standard belief from the time, really persistent and have for thirty five years. And the idea that teenagers were there for no particular reason other than it was a good place to go. They may not have had any untoward kind of personal activity planned or anything like that.
Lover's laying kind of suppositions are not And you know, one of their friends that we talked to for the book said, there were times when I liked being on a nice night in late summer. I liked just being out somewhere, being in my car and looking at the stars and thinking about things. And God knows any of us even today, but certainly when we were teenagers, we would spend a lot of time in our own heads.
So I think this opposition was and still is that they were there for no untoward or inappropriate reasons other than it was a quiet place they could spend a little time together, They could just kind of exist hopefully
quietly and peacefully. Horribly that did not happen, but there was never anybody who really suggested that there was a concrete thing linking them to the person who killed them, that they were there for some kind of a drug deal, that the person who killed them was there because they knew them, you know, like you said, many the things they very quickly were able to eliminate, Like you know, that it was some kind of weird Dungeons and Dragons rivalry gone bad, that it was some kind of a
crosstown rivalry between north side students, which Ethan and Kimberly were, and south side students. I think eventually all that kind of faded away. Now whether whoever killed them was there in proximity to them and that was just total happitstance. I mean, really, I don't know if anybody can say, because certainly, the one of the things that over the years was I think the most frightening and the most unsettling to people was the idea that there was no
reason for it to have. At the same time, we can kind of comfort ourselves sometime by saying that this was there wasn't a reason behind this, There wasn't anybody who could be blamed for it except for the killer. There's also this very unsettling element of the idea that someone wandered through in their proximity and did this horrible
crime and wandered out. And over the years I talked to a lot of investigators, and Douglas Walker did also talked to a lot of investigators who were afraid that it would never be solved, that somebody did this and they left town and maybe they were in Winslow, Arizona, or Texar, Canada, Texas or something and they went to prison for something else, and or they got to a bar fight and they were killed, and the mystery would
never be solved. The only, possibly other most unsettling theory there is that it was someone who continued to live in the community with people and never was punished, and it was never outed. And I think that kind of those kind of CENTERI and how uncertain and unsettling those are is what's kept us in the public eye and what it certainly has driven investigators over the decades.
You write that Nathan Sloane found a lot of stuff that seemed to stack up incriminating and coincidental and circumstantial evidence. Sloane, you right, had found that Swingley's girlfriend in September eighty five, lived thirteen hundred feet away from where the bodies were found. He also said that Swingley had told a friend he was afraid that he'd be contacted regarding the murder in August eighty six, and we can we should discuss this.
He was pulled over after he came back, after he had left for Florida, he came back, he was pulled over police and gave his name as Kevin Dixon. What do you make about this pulled over by police but giving his name as a brother or giving the same last name as the victim of this crime, that he knows that he's a suspect for What do you make of that?
That's one of the things that and I never knew that until twenty nineteen. That's one of the things that just is baffling because it makes you wonder was that a slip of the tongue. Was that an inadvertent thing? I mean, certainly, there are plenty of times where people who are known for some kind of criminal activity, even if it's routine, don't necessarily they don't want to attract attention of police in the first place. But if they do by some random and minor thing as running a
stop sign. You know, they certainly don't want to have their idea on them, so that that kind of you know, sets off alarm bells of police. So it's not unheard of for someone to say a false name when asked who they are if they don't have a license and registration with them that would otherwise tip the officer off. Why that came out of his mouth, I just can't imagine, and I don't know that anybody can answer that, except possibly for Jimmy Swingley himself.
If I didn't know any better, it would be and there is no evidence in this book. You don't provide it, obviously, there's not much from him personally, But to give the name is Kevin Dixon in light of everything that had happened and that he knew had happened, and that he was again a suspect, He knew that he was some
sort of suspect by that time. For him to say that is very much like the phone call to Nancy Uh, you know Nancy Kim's mother in taunting and saying listen, you know your daughter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Ethan had to coming to him and this that can be not interpreted as informative or helpful.
It can really only be deemed as taunting. And this Kevin Dixon seems to be when he mentions that person's I don't know if there is a Kevin Dixon, but it seems to be in the same vein I think of taunting.
Belief that you know it. I don't think there is an actual Kevin Dixon, And it seemed so at the time. Of course, you know, the officer who pulled him over, it didn't didn't well I don't know this for a fact, but it didn't seem to click with him, even though it was only a matter of months. But but you know, it's it's it's so strange. It's just another odd element of this in that, you know, what would prompt him
to say it? Did he do it almost subconsciously? Did he do it as some kind of a taut It's just it's just strange and inexplicable, Like a lot of developments of this case are.
You also talk about a person named al hurtzt. What does he have to say? And again, what would be his motivation for making up this story?
You know, one of the things about almost any kind of group of people who were kind of on the fringe of If they're not involved in any kind of criminal activity themselves, maybe they are on the fringe of criminal activities. So you assume that many people who just kind of set around to shoot the breathe and they bs about things that they don't really know anything about.
You assume that a lot of it is just exactly that bsing, and a lot of it is really a you know, I kind of want to get this out there. I want to tell people about this experience. So when police were talking to people and al Hurst had passed away before the bulk of this latter day investigation took place, but when Hurst was talking to people, those people then later told authorities that on the night of the killings that al Hurst had been told by Jimmy Swingley, you
don't want to mess with me. I've already killed two people tonight, and he pulled out a gun and held it to Hurst's head and said, you know, I'll blow your brains out. You do not want to mess with me, And Hirst told people that later. Apparently, investigators, including Kate Sloan, talk to those people and they were understandably since a
lot of time had passed. They are understandably pretty hazy about how they had heard that and whether they ever heard that, or even, for that matter, how well ale Hurst knew Jimmy Swingley. But certainly another one of those you know does does Is that a tell? Is that a self implication? Is it just bragging? Is it bsing on the part of any number of people who are
involved in this scenario. It's hard to tell. And that's of course one of the things that police investigators are constantly weighing how much emphasis they shouldn't place on something that is told to them. In this case, there was enough that when Nate Sloan asked for a DNA warrant that that was among the things he cited. So he was fairly convinced that it was a telling recounting of an incident.
Right now, with this, Nathan Sloane, he thinks he has an opportunity with the DNA, but it's not a match. Like you mentioned the Holster itself, the DNA that was present there been deteriorated significantly enough that there was no match able to be had with Swingley, and so no more conviction. Now he resides with a sixty five year sentence. But as you write in the conclusion of this book, that doesn't mean he'll spend the rest of his life in prison. When is he scheduled to be released right now?
According to the Indiana Department of Correction, he's due to be released in twenty thirty, so about be nine years from now. I think the spring sometime nine years from then. And I mean, he's certainly done a number of things to try to get a sentence mitigator lessoned. He's not been successful in doing that with a judge in the case. It's not the judge who sentenced him, it's that judge's
successor on the bench of Delaware Circuit Court. And he's done things that certainly better himself, you know, various kinds of studies and programs and courses and things that he's gone through. He's also done things that certainly you want to if you're an inmate, you want to have on your record as far as saying, you know, I'm working toward rehabilitation. I'm not the same person I was in nineteen ninety six when this friend of my friends was killed.
And you know, certainly I imagine that anytime an inmate goes to a judge and says, would you consider some kind of leniency, whether it's you know, change in my status in the system, or earlier release or anything like that. So far that has not worked for him. And right now, the year twenty thirty is when he is supposed to be.
Released, and he'll be I think you right that he'll be about sixty seven years old till not not entirely many years left in his life anyway, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things about this is that I know that after thirty five years thirty five years ago, I seemed young, You seemed young. But the case is that this occurred at a time when all of these players were so young, and by their own hand, or in the case of Ethan and Kimberly certainly not by their own hand, their lives were just disrupted, shattered ended at such a young age, and it's just it's startling and tragic.
Yeah. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about the West Side Park murders, Munsey's most notorious cold case. This is a Arcadia Publishing and History Press released. Tell us about how they might find out more information. Do you have a website. Tell us about that.
Go to the website for History Press. You can do a search for the book. It just came out February eight, and the reaction to it seems to be pretty good. I based that mostly on comments that I'm getting, but also the fact that Amazon was selling it. All of their books are available on Amazon for people who are okay with online book selling as opposed to a local bookstore.
But Amazon it was out of stock for a few days, and they've always just recently gotten it back gotten it back in stock, So apparently there was a little more demand than maybe it was expected by either History Press or Amazon. But it's available there Amazon or History Press's website. And you know a friend of mine, well, my sister in law bought it from Barnes and Noble Online still exists, and so you can certainly find it out there if you'd lack.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Keith Roysden. It's been a pleasure. The West Side Park murders, Mounsey's most notorious cold case. Thank you so much. You have a great evening. Thank you so much.
Good night, thank you, good night.
