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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. Some said the killer couldn't be a local. Others claimed he was the wealthy son of a prominent Morgantown family. Whispers spread that Meret and Karen were sacrificed by satanic cult who had been victims of a madman poised to strike again. Then the handwritten letters began to arrive. You will locate the bodies of the girls covered over with brush. Look carefully, the animals are now on the move. Investigators didn't find too few suspects. They had far too many.
There was the campus janitor where the fur fetish, the harmless delivery man who beat a woman nearly to death they're nursing home orderly with the bloody broomstick. And the bouncer with the girlish laugh who threatened to cut off people's heads. Local authors Jeffrey C. Fuller and S. James McLaughlin tell the complete story of the murders for the
first time. The book they were featuring this evening is The w VU co Ed Murders Who killed Merret and Karen, with my special guest journalists Jeff Fuller and S. James McLoughlin. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Jeff Fuller and S. James McLaughlin. Hi, Dan, good evening. Thank you very much for agreen to this interview.
Let me start off with you, Sarah. Let's I won't ask how you got became involved with this story because that is involved in our interview and occurs later in this story. But why don't I get you, Sarah to tell us a little bit of the background about married Ellen Maleric and Karen Ferrell and get this a little bit of the setting for where this incredible story occurs.
Sure, Merret and Karen had met at WVU. They were both freshmen. Karen was from a little town called Quinnwood in West Virginia and married was from Smoke Rise, New Jersey, which was sort of an upper class area. And they became really fast friends. And it wasn't really their typical behavior to hitchhike, but with the way that the transportation was set up at WU West Virginia University, they lived
really far out in a dorm called Beverly Manor. They lived in the Westchester Hall of Beverly Manor, and the buses would stop running at I think it was seven PM something like that on a Sunday, and they had gone to see a movie together and the movie didn't let out until after ten thirty at night, so they had the option to either walk back to their dorms.
This was January, January eighteenth, nineteen seventy. It was freezing cold, it was snowing, there was probably ice, and a lot of their trips, because this is West Virginia, a lot of that was going to be uphill on the way back, So they opted to hitchhike, and they were last seen
getting into a cream collared car and they disappeared. The local police considered them runaways and didn't really look into the case very much until the state police set in, and then that's when it became an actual missing person's case. And I can go further if you want. That's that's sort of how they are part of this story, how they met and why they were important to this story.
You talked about Morgantown police being involved till the state police intervened. Here, Jeff tell us about the what Morgantown police do? What information did they find? These women are disappeared, have disappeared, So how do they proceed?
Well, they issued the contact the safely the FBI, a kind of standard procedure and said that they're missing. They they had over some time the subsequent a couple of weeks after they disappeared, they got they had tips coming in from different places, and uh, you know, they would
follow up on these specific tips. But our biggest problem, serious and my problem in writing a book is was the records from the Morgantime police are all are long gone, So we only had news accounts and interviews and things like that, which you know, gave us a picture of what was happening, but not uh, definitive, definitive picture. And so it appears that they largely decided that, as Sarah said, the girls ran away and they didn't know where to look.
So they didn't actually do that much apparently, other than follow up on tips that came in.
Now, tell us about the state police. When when did they get involved, and who from the state police gets involved?
Well, they they they were already in town because there was the county prosecutor had gotten in his car on January second, and the car had exploded when he turned the ignission key. So there were state police and some probably some FBI people, and there's the brand new ATS was also in town. But they were, you know, looking into how did that crime happen, what happened, you know,
who may have been responsible. And in the process they begin to hear rumors of a connection between the disappearance and the bombing, and those rumors probably they weren't, as it turned out, really based on anything, but they probably arose because West Virginia at the time, especially, it was fairly you know, we were appeared to be at least fairly local. I mean, Karen and I found out later we weren't as low crime and safe as we thought.
But anyway, the general perception was that there was no crime in that, you know, and then these two big crimes happened within a couple of weeks of each other, and everyone sort of or a lot of people started thinking, well, they must be connected. So the state police went to the Westchester Hall to interview anyone you know who lived on the fourth floor of Westchester Hall where married and Karen lived and see if they could find a connection between the two. They didn't. This was in late March.
By this time, they didn't find the connection that they hoped to find, but they did get very drawn into the case because they didn't unders they didn't realize it had been so severe and that these two people have been missing without a trace for three months.
So, as you say, Sarah, as Jeffa said, the emphasis was on the LaRita case with the sensational explosion and trying to kill this prosecutor potentially. But what it did have as an effect was is that the story of Merit and Karen now got a lot of traction in the media, didn't it.
Yeah, this wasn't the only reason that their case got attention, but it's sad that it had to come from other places. So we have Larita's bombing and that's what brings in the state police, who are actually investigating it as a
missing person and not a runaway. But then we have these mysterious letters that are postmarked from Cumberland, Maryland that are taunting the whereabouts of these young women, and so the state police are sort of galvanized at that point through the governor to try and find these women, because the assumption is at this point that whoever's writing these letters that are only signed with a triangle their suspect number one.
At this point.
So how do they proceed with the investigation of these triangle letters? What does it lead to?
Well, in the second letter there is a crudely drawn map and it has directions that you go twenty five miles south from the most southern tip of Morgantown and then one mile into the woods. And the police took that seriously. They got in their cars and they drove and they went twenty five miles and then they want one more and they found themselves in downtown Grafton, and they were not in the middle of the woods. They
were in the middle of a fairly large city. But it was around this time that there were also some items of the girls that were being collected in the searches from the National Guard, and so a lot of the roles that leads south from Morgantown were being searched and they were finding their their licenses, broken compacts, They found prescription pills and prescription classes, things like that. So they finally got on the trail of where they had been, or at least where their killer had been.
Now at the same well around this time as well, they find a couple of witnesses, this person named Itsy from the school and her boyfriend Skip. What did those two people tell state police?
Do you want say that?
Joe? Yeah? Okay, yeah. They actually assumed Skip it's She was also on the fourth floor at Westchester Hall and sort of heard the commotion. There were a lot of the people waiting up to see the night that they disappeared, waiting up to see if they would come back. And she came out of her dorm room and asked what was going on, and they said, oh, you haven't heard Merrick and Karen are missing, And she said, well, I
just saw them at a movie. Skip and I were at a movie at downtown at the Metropolitan Seer and they Skipped and Itsy had decided to take the bus rather than a hitchhike, so they split off from the girls, and the girls started hitchhiking, and so Skip and Itsy had seen the two of them. A car stopped for them, a small white car, apparently a Cadillac or Chevy or they weren't sure. And they had got gotten into that car and the car had driven pats them and disappeared
into the night. Now, when the car went past them, they married and Karen did not even acknowledge skipping itsy. Now, maybe they were talking and not paying attention, or maybe they weren't able to acknowledge because they had been told not to, so that's unclear, but they essentially were from that point looking for a white car, either Cadillac or Chevy, and Chevy was the leading contender, driven by a young man,
dark hair, and the descriptions were variously kipping itty. The descriptions were variously between somewhere between twenty five and forty. They weren't sure the age of the man, but he was very clean cut and also didn't signal them or anything, didn't acknowledge them.
And this car was like a white or cream colored car that it had sins on the back.
Now, Sarah, there was another person that came forward, Donna de Young, And it's important regarding the petition that she initiates or wants to initiate tell us about Donna de Young what she says to a police.
Donna had been friends with Married. They had gone to school in New Jersey, I think from grade school through graduation, and they were actually roommates in college. She was Married's roommate, and she was very, very concerned when they went missing. She said that wasn't like merit at all, and she contributed quite a bit to try and help them find the girls. She and Married actually had matching purses, and so she sent her purse into the police so that
they would know exactly what they were looking for. And she claimed that she got a strange phone call from a man with a strange accent, and he was telling her what she needed to get the police to do in order to find these girls. And we're not sure exactly if that was someone who had been in law enforcement or if this was someone that was just trying to help and thought this was the best way. But she tried to take this to the police. They weren't sure whether or not to take her seriously or not.
And when she wasn't getting the answers that she wanted, or she wasn't getting the reaction that she wanted. She and a handful of other students that were concerned went to the university president and he helped get them an audience with a governor, and with that petition, they were able to talk to the governor and try to get a little more coverage on this case and get a little more manpower behind it.
A little aside here, just so we keep referring to Merit and Karen as girls, and there was a couple of reasons for that. One isn't the age majority of the time was twenty one, so they technically were underage. And also that's how essentially how women were referred to, but women of that age were referred to at a time. So you know, we're not trying to be disrespectful or anything. Nowadays you'd said it was too young wound, but anyway, I just wanted to clarify that.
So police are also there's an event on February seventeenth where a couple young women, Candy Bales and Cindy Smith. What happens with this and what do police believe might be this relation this crimes relation to Karen and Merritt.
Candy and Cindy had also been hit hiking. They had been right across from the Mountain layer a little strip in between the lanes called Grumbne Island, and they were picked up by two young men and a red gto and they were being They were asking them to drop them off at their dorms, but then then kept going towards Star City and Osage, which was the opposite direction in which they needed to go, and they were driving really recklessly. They were driving fast, they were skipping red lights,
and they were ignoring the girls. When they're saying, hey, I need to get back. I told my boyfriend I would be there. The girls are really scared because they're
being ignored. They're not sure where they're being taken. And they noticed there's a crate of soda bottles glass Toto bottles in the backseat, so Candy grabs one and hides it in her jacket, and when the two men finally stop and get out, she grabs Cindy and pulls her out of the car and they try to make a run for it, and one of the men tries to grab her, and he grabs Candy by the throat, and so she hits them in the head with his bottle and she breaks the bottle on him, and he finally
lets her go and they're able to kind of hide from them and walk down along the street. They're in no stage at this point, and they're able to hide behind some cars along the road until they feel that it's safe, and then they hitchhike again to get back into more Town. And they didn't really want to tell any one because Candy was afraid that she would go to jail for assault, and the other girls in her dorm were like, Hey, if you don't tell the police
about this, this could happen to someone else. And so that's when she decides that she is going to figure out who this man is, and she does a lot of legwork. She does some detective work to find out who this person is because when she calls the police, they don't give her much of a reaction. So she knew that she has his name, she can bring forth
a stronger case. And she remembered seeing his name, I think on his shirt, like his first name, and she knew that the bottles in the back were from RCI Cola, and so she took a chance that he worked at that warehouse, and she called all of the numbers that she could find and then the number that she got from the warehouse when she called and asked for his first name until she finally found and then she took that information to the police, but not until after she
stocked him so she could see his face and make sure that it was him, and she said he saw her and he was quite shook.
Yeah.
Yeah, another little scene setting thing here. We're talking about hitchhiking a lot, and that seemed very strange to a lot of people nowadays. But at time West Virginia had a split campus. Well it still does now, but transportation is better. They had a split campus which about a mile apart, and what that meant was that a lot of students hitchhiked constantly. So down on Grumbine's Island, right in front of the student union, there would be dozens
and dozens of people hitchhiking. So hitchhiking was not sort of two individuals or four individuals taking a chance. It was a common method of transportation at the time. And the car a car would stop and as many students as could fit would pile into the car and that would drive away. So that was very common.
Tell Us AB troopers Gooden and Mitchell and also their sergeant Heiss, and just the character of Gooden and some of the ideas he had regarding this murder. For these murders.
Yeah, well, Preston Gooden was one of the troopers who had a lot of experience coming into the Saint Police and he had been and he'd taken whats of courses, he had trained with various police institutions and one of the things he was especially good at was investigation. That's what he had. His background was in Mitchell. Mitchell was a sergeant. He was kind of in charge, but actually
much of the investigation. Harold Ama named Larry. Harold was also a trooper and Preston Gooden were together and Preston Gooden was very careful, did things by the book, and he became very concerned about what not only what might have happened to the two girls married and Karen, but also at the frequency with which similar things happen were happening, like with Cindy and Candy. That kind of thing seemed
to happen a lot. And we've got some of that in the book of their interviews with people in Westchester.
And they kept going back and back to Westchester. They would scour the streets looking for a similar car they would, you know, they just they did a lot of that kind of thing, trying to follow up everything, and they spent long hours at that until at one point on April sixteenth, about eleven in the morning, they started hearing some of the radio traffic and realized the girls had been found about ten miles south of Moregontown.
Tell us the state that the police find the bodies of Merit and Karen, and what do they derive evidence wise?
As a result, the bodies were found under a really crudely constructed tomb, that's what the media called it. It wasn't necessarily a tomb. It was very large rocks and a forked tree and branches, lots of brush that were covering them. And as they were dissecting this and pulling everything off, they realized that the girls were missing. Karen was missing her one of her shoes, Marrit was missing both of her boots, and Karen was missing a colt. But both of them did not have their heads and
those were not found on any of the lands. It wasn't found ever to this day.
Yeah, we have a lot of mines, and so they were searching minds and so forth. They looked all over the place, drained ponds and couldn't find anything.
What was there? Was there any indication of sexual assault or any kind of sexual contact, There.
Wasn't really a good way to test it. They had been in the in the weather for eighty eight days. Karen was sort of on the top, and she had taken the most damage from the elements and from animals, so they weren't able to ascertain whether that was or was not. Just there wasn't enough to testifind any evidence either way. But the way that they were found fully closed.
Merrit was still wearing her stockings and she had a cigarette pack that she had tucked in the waist van with one cigarette, So it seemed really unlikely that they had been assaulted and then dressed themselves back so carefully.
So what happened in terms of suspects emerging.
Well, the first suspect they had was a man named Thrasher who lived nearby. They had they had been canvassing the neighborhood. They being Harold and Gooden, had been came canassing the neighborhood and they stopped by Lloyd and Thomas uh a Vilma's place and a farm, and they found out that there was a young man who named Eddie or you know, Charles Edward, but he was they called him Eddie, and he was had been a janitor at Westchester Hall, and he became the first person they looked
into as a suspect. Now, subsequently there were many suspects. We have the whole section of the book that deals with the various people who are doing different kinds of bad things or had drawn the attention of authorities for various reasons that they thought might have been married in Karen, or might have been the killers of married Careen Well.
And we also still had the letter writers at this point.
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things the police did was the same police did was take handwriting samples of everybody they talked to, whether they were suspects or not. But they wanted to compare those handwriting samples to the letters.
Exactly a lot go ahead. Sorry.
There was actually a good better police work that went into tracking down the letter writer. I mean thousands and thousands of handwriting samples taken checked from voter registration and they were actually able to track the letter writers to a psychic science church in both summerset pa and Cumberland,
Maryland with several members. They were able to track them down and they found out that the person that was writing them was a Reverend Hoover, and he was doing a seance and talking to a doctor Spencer who was telling him how to find the bodies. And they were eventually cleared. They were found to have nothing to do with the crimes.
Doctor Spencer, by the way, he had died. I'm not sure when that was. I think the eighteen hundred. He was this body's spirit that River Hoover was communicating with.
There was a dentist, Elius Costians Costians. He was a speck for a little while. Why was this dentist a suspect.
Well, he Donna, the roommate that we spoke of before sealed it a call about eleven o'clock Monday morning after the girl's disappeared on Sunday night, and the call came from the dentist or If Costianus, who was you know prompt, very prominent local dentist, and he had uh fixed marriage. He had an appointment marriage and had an appointment with him the previous Monday, and he had started working on a Roottaniel kind of procedure and she was supposed to show
up at his office that Monday at eleven. Now it police thought it was odd at the time that that why would the dentist call the dorm to try and figure out where the patient was? You know, it's it just seemed odd and they kind of thought it might be alibiing behavior. You know that he was like, I'm not going I see I called and so they did talk to him. At the time, they didn't really investigate much at all. It is somebody had to talk with him and ruled it out, but there wasn't there wasn't
any strong reason grugle him out or in. At the time, he.
Was also seen on campus with a white Cadillac Cadillac picking up hitchhiking co eds.
Now we get back to this Sergeant Heiss, and he believes that the case is linked inextricably to these triangle letters. And so in this particular case, because of that, you have Troopers Gooden and Mitchell and others disagreeing with him. What does this lead to in terms of profiling and sort of the direction of the case and suspects.
Well, I think that some people did agree that there was a ritualistic aspect to it, since their heads were missing. But there wasn't a single person who would ever go on record outside of heist that said that they saw triangles as well.
Yeah, and he detectifies kind of early on had decided that apparently had decided that the two had run away, and he wasn't really but he also he's the one that saw various kinds of mystical connections and triangles on the grave and so on and so forth. But no one else seems to have seen that stuff, or at least won't say they did.
I mean, Amon so far as to say and depressed that they didn't know what he was talking about.
Well, yeah, how does William Gerkin become a suspect? And why?
I'll let you take that one, Jeff.
Well, that's Jerkin, by the way. He was a kind of high flying, high flying students at w VU. He was in aerospace engineering, but then he'd had started having some some issues, some personal issues, and had was basically was hospitalized several times. Now, what happened was there there was a rumor floating around among other frat fraternity guys and kind of around the school that Jerkin had written a story about decapitating two women in the fall in
nineteen sixty nine. He had written that story. Now everyone talked who was talking to about police had a different version of the story that in some jerky was the was decapitated or he was the ones you know killed, it was a knife fight, it was gone. I mean, it was just various different versions of the story and no one could haven't produced the story. So there really
wasn't anywhere to go with that. Now. As it turned out, he was having some problems, personal problems, and that just added to the rumor.
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now you'll get your free first free refill free. That's your first refill free at get quip dot com slash shocking g E t q u i P dot com slash shocking Quip, the Good Habits Company. Now we were talking about what would lead to further suspects, and then we talk about January nineteen seventy six and a man confesses to killing and decapitating two college girls. Who is this and tell us more about this January nineteen seventy six confession, Sarah.
I was gonna let just have that one. Eugene Paul Clawson was actually an inmate in a New Jersey prison, and he wrote a letter to the West Virginia State Police claiming that he had killed both the girls and looking a little bit closer at Clawson, that he had had a cellmate that was trying to help him perpetuate this idea, that he wasn't able to sleep, that he was haunted by his actions, and that he just couldn't
hold it in anymore and he had to confess. And when when he was asked about about the crime, about what he did exactly, and he wrote like a I think it was a forty four page statement and it was just absolutely outlandish, all of the markers of several fetishes.
And.
It was not really adding up with the evidence necessarily, and whenever he would be confronted with some of these he would change his story. He claimed that he kept the heads and he had buried them under the house next to where he grew up, and then he changed that story to he threw them in a crevasse on conn Hill and Pennsylvania, and so there was a search there. They put cameras into the grounds and they found some hairs,
human hairs from animal nests. But at that point they weren't really able to test hair with DNA that didn't have a bulb, and so they were only able to look at this hair underneath a microscope and say, will this could be one of the girls. It's sort of reddish and dyed, and they thought maybe it might be married's hair because she colored her hair. But he he also changed his mind and decided that he hadn't done the crimes. And that here. To understand Clausen, you have
to realize that there there was a mental deficit. He was learning disabled. He had Kleinfelter syndrome, so he was x X y, there are a.
Lot of.
Like the situation was really stacked against him with his physical deformities, and just basically that that syndrome usually plays a part in impotence, really really highly, and he was claiming that he was raping them several times and it wasn't really adding up to his physical condition, it wasn't adding up with the evidence. And then he claimed that he made this up because he wanted to be taken from the New Jersey prison to the West Virginia prison,
which was closer to where his mother lived. And he thought that once he was found not guilty because he didn't really do it, that he would be free, and it doesn't quite.
Work like that.
He would still have to finish his sentence. So he was a really interesting character. He was a very terrible person, but we don't believe that he's responsible, although he was convicted in seventy six and again in eighty one.
Yeah, you'm right about this. You writ about the problem also David Solomon being tied to this and wanting and believing that he had the right man, so he pursued this regardless. And when you did, both of you re examine the evidence and the confession itself. There were numerous contradictions and just there was just no way that you could corroborate any of the things that he said in that confession not true.
Yeah, yeah, And it wasn't just us. There was a man named George Castel who had been a lackwerk at the West Virginia Supreme Court when they were revealing the first conviction, and he couldn't believe that there had been the conviction, and he re examined every bit of a case, and he had said that he wanted to his draft you know, results report. He had said he had wanted to dismiss charges against CLASSM with prejudice, which means they
couldn't even refile. The case was that week. But the judge, for whatever reason, didn't go along the main you know, the head judge of Supreme Court. They don't go along with that recommendation. But they did overturn the seventy six verdict based on prejudicial evidence that was introduced by prosecutor Solomon, and so he had to be retried in nineteen eighty one.
Now, tell us, Jeff, how you become involved with the state police. Preston Gooden and others. Tell us about this involvement.
Yeah, I was living in Charleston's time, on the other side of the state. I was teaching classes, writing classes, and a gentleman who took one of my classes came up to me and asked me if I'd ever heard
the could murders for the investigation or anything. And he turned out to be he was retired, but he was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hall when he retired, and he wanted to go back and reinvestigate the case, which is how we both or how I got back into the got into the case because I was just sort of shadowing his investigation for a few years, starting in two thousand
and six, I believe it was. And he was convinced he had been sent up to Camden, New Jersey to take Clawson's initial confession and see if it made sense. Because Richard had a lot of training with the Marines and then in the police with the Saint Police in investigation but also in testing confessions and you know, figuring out what was true. And he came away from that believing that claus and that there was no way that
Clausen was making it all up. And Richard says every time he would say, well, it was pretty dark up there, how did you see? And then suddenly Clawson would have a flashlight, which he had never mentioned before. So they just kept being elements of the confession that appeared in response to Richard's questions, and he just thought, no, this
guy didn't do it. Well, everyone else thought he did do it, and Richard was essentially overruled, and that may have been because of the Richard called it a social verdict, which he said was it was basically a verdict by society. Society had decided that he was guilty, and he was kind of The case was rammed through without a thorough investigation, which Richard didn't approve of. So that's how I got back into it. He was reinvestigating a number of people.
Now, how does Charlie Herron and Eddie Thrasher get discussed again? And what is their connection via their grandparents?
Interestingly, well, Richard and I were had taken a trip to Morgantown. Richard had received some, you know, some tips various people who said that they had information, and we came up to Morningtown to talk to some of those people. Now, one of them told us that there was a he grew up in the area of the weird mines, the area where the bodies were found, and there was a
gentleman there by the name of Charlie Herron. This guy who was telling us this had been sent by He used to go to the Haren farm from Lloyd and Vilma to get eggs all the time. But his parents had told him don't go there when Charlie's there alone, because they were afraid of Charlie because he he was, I guess scary. He fought a lot considerably. He also
apparently used to set fires in the neighborhood. And this guy told us that Charlie used to torture animals, and I asked him he meant by that, because you know that's a large spectrum torturing animals. Well, he said that Charlie used to pull the legs off cats. So the point that he said that, Richard and I kind of exchanged glances because that's pretty significant kinds of torture. And when we left there, you know, we thank When we
left there, Richard said, well, let's go see Charlie. So we drove down the hill into Morgantown and talked to Charlie and Richard I was essentially a witness or someone standing there. I just stood there in his room, and Richard asked him some questions. And he had at this time of kind of a buncular manner about him when he was talking to people, and you know, kind of g shucks kind of thing. And at one point Charlie.
He asked Charlie if he had any idea who might have done this, and Charlie started rattling off names, which was weird because we had talked to a lot of other people and everyone kind of reluctant, Lee would come up with one name. I always wondered about this guy, but Charlie had a whole list of names, and Richard thought that was odd and let it settle. And then a little while later he said, what kind of car
did you drive? It? Back then, Charlie, and Charlie's his whole demeanor change just got really cold, and he said, what do you want to know that for? Richard said, I'm just nosy, I guess, and Charlie said that those years is going to get you hurt. We're done. And so that's how Charlie became of interest. That turned out Charlie was the uncle of the first suspect Eddie Frasher,
So they lived in the same place. But the police back the state police back in nineteen seventy had no idea apparently that Charlie existed.
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Plus Now with the connection with Eddie Thresher and Charlie Herron, you also investigated the idea of about hacker and then research beheadings. What did you find it out about hacker and beheadings in the area.
Well, that that initially background two thousand and eight or two thousand line. Hacker Okay, Hacker had on December. Do you want to talk about that, sir, I can talk about Hacker, Yeah, Okay.
Hacker was originally from Brooklyn, New York, but his family migrated into the Montingelia Marin County area in West Virginia. And when Hacker was very small, he was actually working in the mines, which wasn't super uncommon, but he was. He was around when the Manoga mine disaster happened and there the explosion from that. From that that mine explosion, the people that were harmed were harmed viciously, I mean dismemberments. There were a lot of beheadings from the people that
were on the surface. And he would have seen that at a very young age that I'm sure that would have impacted him very greatly. Jeff had done some research into just finding articles along that area where the train would go between mining camps between West Virginia and Pennsylvania or Ohio, and he had collected probably what like twenty five different articles where there were men's founds without heads.
Yeahthing like that, nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty two, So that it was over a long period of time.
And in nineteen fifty two is when Hacker was arrested for killing two people in a bar in Fairmont, his girlfriend and a man there who had stood up to him when he was trying to drag her out of the bar and she didn't want to go. He actually left the bar and returned with a gun and he shot them both. And he did some time, but he was let out of prison early because he got to government. But the governor gave him a pardon for his efforts
in rescue miners, rescuing miners from another incident. And so when he was out of prison, do you remember the year?
Just yeah, And he got the parton in nineteen sixty six. And also it's important to know back then the state prison where he was being held had its own mining operation. So Hacker was both a prisoner and one of the leaders in the mind when he did this rescue and then got the pardon. And now he has got questions. Now he's got a start. This is fun.
Just go ahead.
The capitations. Strangely, when I was reading searching that they stopped in nineteen fifty two, they're wanting more, and then they started back up in nineteen sixty six and that corresponded to when or nineteen sixty seven, and I corresponded to when Hacker was led out of prison, and they continued. There were two or three more and then married and Karen followed by a man, Herbert Coben for and Hacker was arrested for that incapplication.
Let's talk about the book that you are writing, and at one point you realize that someone else is writing that book and you want to find out who that is, and you and Sarah eventually meet. Sarah tell us about this meeting.
I was finally able to get a hold of them. I don't really know how Facebook works. I think it goes into your junk mail account or something. So it wasn't instant. It took a while, and I wasn't sure if I would ever be able to talk to jos about this, but he was very amenable. He said, yeah, let's have and dinner, we'll talk about the case. And so he brought this big, old like statue full of
case files. And I realized that we had been talking for two hours and that wasn't merely enough, Like I wasn't going to be able to sit there and listen to everything that he had to say. And be able to absorb that. So at this point he asked me if I want to help him write the book, because in his mind I was already writing.
A book, and what else in terms of this meeting, in terms of decision other than the book itself.
Well, she and she typed up a she and another man, Kendalls Perkinson. I wanted to do a podcast, so we just ended up doing both.
She's like, I wish you considered maybe bringing this to a larger audience and possibly doing a podcast. And I didn't even really listen to podcasts. I knew that some people were interested in them, but I was like, yeah, sure, whatever, I don't care. And then once he found out that I had talked to Jeff, he was like, oh, we have to get him to talk to us too, And so I was hoping that Jeff knew what a podcast
was as well, and he was amenable to that. So I was like, all right, well, I guess we're going to do a podcast and we're going to do a book. And the podcast went really really well. Through word of Mouse, we expected it to sort of Kenness Day in the Morgantown area.
Now with this research with the book, with the podcast. You talk about Jeff that one of the people that you were initially involved with, Sargeant Hall puts a veil up between you, so he thinks he has a different idea who killed Merret and Karen, and you have a completely different idea in your mind and your research with Sarah. Who emerges as the likely suspects in their murders and why.
Well, I don't it's another I don't know if we want to give that away entirely, but it's another man who hasn't been mentioned so far at all. But he was, and in fact he was the one that I kind of he was my leading suspect when Sarah and I first met, and I had been gathering a lot of information about him and his life. He had been arrested in Florida and convicted for kidnapped, kidnapping a woman, holding her captives and draining her blood, draining and drinking her blood.
She had escaped for three days, and she had escaped and brought the police. Now, police led by a man named Bob Letherreu, who we've talked with extensively believed that or change to believe that this man had killed at least six other women, maybe as many as twenty five or thirty, but they found pretty good evidence for six that could tie him to six deaths. They never found anything that definitively pinned any of those on him enough to be able to bring charges. But his sister was
a freshman at WU at the time. He had been born in Clarksburg, he grew up until he was about eleven, and then his family moved to Upper Saint Clair, Pennsylvania, which is about forty minutes north of here, in north of Moregontown. And his sister, like I said, was a freshman at WU in nineteen seventy, the same year that Merrit and Tiern were freshmen, and his older brother had graduated from w Med School. So there were lots oft and we found a lot more circumstantial evidence that he
was the one who did it. Sarah is not convinced that he is because we couldn't find I think because we couldn't find she didn't well, I'll let her go into that, but we couldn't find anything to definitively say that he had been the one who killed Merret and Careen.
Dan.
I will just say that I'm agnostic at this point, Like I don't feel that we have anything outside of circumstantial evidence. Jeff makes a strong case, but if we find that a connection that's just irrefutable, then I'll be on on team Jet.
Charlie Herron and and Eddie Thrasher. Why were they ruled out?
Yeah? They I think I think Eddie's handwriting didn't match uh, and that was easily were ruled out. But Eddie left town the day before the girl's bodies were found. He moved away from Morgantown and except for visits, never came back. Charlie left later that summer and moved in with some Amish with a Honist community in Pennsylvania. So that's suspicious.
And Eddie had also He had been working at Stirling Fasted on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth of January, and he had called in sick on the eighteenth, the day the girls disappeared. In the nineteenth he was not at work.
Interesting, when did the idea for this book start and when did it complete? When is it released? And just tell us about the status of the podcast.
The book was released in early October, first week of October, and I was doing pretty well and we sold out of the first printing and Moore's being run.
Jeff tell us this a little bit about the podcast, sorry, Sarah.
Okay, well, the podcast had a lot of listeners and was received very well, had I think almost all five star reviews, and eventually came the attention of the group in Los Angeles who wanted to do a larger series, which was also part of Sarah and Kendall's plan because by this time they had done another story which was said it nearby here in Frostburg and Cumberland, and they started a series called Applatch in my Syria and apparently
been doing very well. But Sarah could address that much more than me.
Let's just let the audience know about where they might be able to take a look at this book and where they could find this podcast.
Okay, Well, we have a website called co Ed Murders dot com co OE D n U R D E R s allovercase dot com and you can find links to both the podcast and you know, the book for ordering the book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all the stander retailers, and obviously the podcast you can download or hook up to at anytime, and it's it's a basically on every podcast platform.
Absolutely, thank you so much, Thank you so much for coming on, Sarah, James mcgloughlin and Jeff Fuller, the w VU co ed murders who killed Merit and Karen, thank you very much for this interview and you both have a great evening.
Thank you good night.
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