Good Grief — Sandy Beal E8

It just didn't know a lot of things just didn't so some of the stuff I'm about to tell you, I mean, if you're pissed now, you're going to get even more piste off because I never knew anything and you never said it's it's like for you to hear all of this, well else not what I want to hear, but if it gil is what it is. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not fine. Bullshit. Yeah. Shot from My Heart Radio.

I'm Melissa Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy Beale an I Heart original podcast, Chapter eight, Good Grief. The first time I went to Maine to meet with the Bell family. It was summer and the drive from

the airport was lush and green. It was on this trip when Ronnie, Sandy's youngest brother, asked me what I hoped to achieve with the podcast when Sandy's mother, Joanne, gave me the coat her daughter was wearing on the night of her death, and when I first got real sense of Sandy as a person, the Sandy the family described to me, she was fearless. Five months later, I flew back to Maine with my producer to see the

Bells in person again. It was late fall and the trees were a mix of orange and brown and green. I was returning under different circumstances than my first trip. This visit had a particular objective to observe and record an emergency family meeting that Kim had called. Kim wanted to share with the Bells what she had come to believe was true that Sandy had died by suicide. The meeting was set to take place at Sandy's brother Steven's home.

To set the scene, imagine a tidy ranch style house, a kitchen teeming with food, two small dogs running around underfoot. I arrived before the rest of the family and made small talk with Stephen and his wife. Soon, Michael and his wife showed up with Joanne, who was wearing suede cowboy boots bedazzled with rhyan stones. We hugged, talked, about booster shots and COVID variants, and we waited together for

Kim right I'm gone phoned in. I was like, Oh, this is really You can hear the nervousness in Kim's voice leading up to this meeting. She was really worried about how the Beals would respond to what she had to tell them. She didn't know if they'd see things her way, or if they'd reject her position and judge her for siding with the police. For decades, there's been a collective story that they all agreed on around Sandy's death that whatever happened to Sandy, she hadn't died by suicide.

Kim had previously been part of the group, In fact, the leader of the group, the one pushing to reopen Sandy's case, convinced that there was something there. Now, she worried that she had blown Sandy's death up into something it wasn't and wasted their time, added extra pain to their suffering. She knew the Bills loved her and were appreciative of all her work, but there was a part of her that was scared she would need to beg

for their forgiveness. My notes are like I was really hoping that I'd have time to sit down and get really but it's it's just been too hard. It is, do you have Within a few minutes of Kim's arrival, the group migrated into the living room and took seats around a boom mic that I had brought. It was a strange dichonomy, the most intimate of conversations undertaken with the knowledge that everything was being recorded. Kim sat in a large, pillowy recliner that seemed to swallow her frame.

Her feet didn't quite reach the floor, and she kept readjusting her position, trying to get comfortable. I think that the answers that I'm going to give you today will naturally make that a closing place. Anyway, there are still some answers that need to happen, but I think as far as the story is concerned, it's shifted, and so I'm hoping that we get more information after this, and but we may not. So I just want to kind of share with you what we've uncovered in the past

few months since we saw you in June. Anyway, Armed with her notes, Kim began recounting her conversation with Bernie. She told them how she went in fighting with a head of steam, arguing and asking critical questions. She told the family how they discussed Sandy's efforts to become a police officer and ride alongs that she did, likely as part of an official Explorer program. And so I'm just listening and I said, well, what about the Explorers program.

I'm like, so explained that. He said it was a way that we encouraged people in high school to come became cops seek for and they're having a hard time recruiting new police officers, so they were going to the high schools, hence the ride along program and the Explorers. And I'm like, so, you have a girl that wants to be a cop, and she's doing everything you guys

asked her to do. She told them how Bernie acknowledged that there was likely serious sexual misconduct taking place, and how she was disarmed by his compassion and his frankness. He said, if I was on the watch, they would have all been terminated because I wouldn't have put up with any of that. And I'm like, you know, if you you see all these questions that we have, everything

we've already talked about, no answers have been given. All these different things that are discrepancies, and you can see from our point of view that we have questions. He's like, I absolutely see from your point of view all of this, everything you're saying makes sense. I watched Kim as she attempted to replicate her conversation with Bernie, trying to create the same conditions that had led to her own awakening.

She spoke calmly and carefully, referring often to her notes, before she got to the piece of evidence that had clicked everything into place for her. To help them visualize the scene, she printed from the Internet a picture of an old Ford Pinto, just like the one Sandy used to drive. So if you look at this, this is the steering wheel, so it matches up if you were to brace it. There here you can pass that if

you were to brace it. It's it just started feeling like making sense to me that that she did use that that's the only possible way that she could have pulled that trigger, as if it was had support of something. But when he said that the gunpotter was on the steering wheel and it was spray and back, and I'm like, he goes they He said, Kim, we can't we can't deny the trajectory of this. When when he said the there's gunpowder on the steering wheel, that was kind of like,

that's kind of very futable. So it was almost like a an Aha moment, like a wake up call of oh my god, that could possibly really be true. At this Kim pivoted away from the forensic evidence and started speaking from her gut. She now had a new understanding of Sandy and her last month, and she shared this with the Beals, how she believed Sandy had been used and abused by men in power, and how this had broken her. I think someone was there before. I think she was alone then, And this is just my my

knowing her and thinking through the situation. It's dark, it's twenty seven degrees outside, she just had sex with somebody. She's alone, she's trying to get out, and I think the trying to get out was possibly the straw that broke the camel's back, and she just said fuck it. Joanne had been listening intently. Now she interrupted, I think you're right. I think the last hurrah was she was trying to get out. Joanne's words they rushed out of her as though they had been waiting to be released.

I think she just said a kid, she had already been rejected, she had already had the abortion. And I think the whole thing just blew up. And maybe I'm wrong, and uh, I kept that tomorrow itself for a look. Now, I did not expect to hear Joanne agree with Kim and acknowledge so openly that she believed if Sandy had died by suicide. And I got the sense that Kim had given her permission to say the hard part out loud, and that it came as a tremendous relief. The room

was quiet. Everyone seemed to be reflecting on the Sandy that they knew, each of them conjuring their own memory of Sandy and trying to square Kim's new story with their own. And then Stephen broke the silence. Well, I'm gonna be the man out. I dispute what the guy says. I'm flat asked the spear that I don't think she'd put the goddam gone on a steering oil. And yes, they can replicate it, they don't want to replicate it. I can put a man on a goddamn who and

they could replicate that. I know I'm saying Sandy did not shoot herself. I'm gonna go to my freaking grave saying that. You know, and it's compelling. I'll give you that. You know, the guys trying and I get that he's trying to be empathetic with our situation. But you know, I'm sorry he's selling. I ain't buy it. No Thick again, I'm sorry. Sorry. Stephen left the room upset, but about five minutes later he came back and rejoined his family. Uh, trust me, in folks, I'm not trying to you know,

it's nothing about anybody. I take issue with what it is or trying to say. And you know, and I understand if you know other people don't share my stance. I get it. You know this is something that I you're right there, I gotta graph with all my own Right now, I don't see it yet. You know, maybe something, it might take something, a little something else to make me see the light. You know, maybe I'm seeing what I want to see. I don't know. Could be, but right now I do not know. You're not going to

convince me that she did it. As the family continued to talk, the sun streaming in the windows and filling the room with light. It felt as though I was seeing them shift and adjust their beliefs in real time, torn between two versions of an event that had to find their lives. Even Joanne, who had sounded so sure at first, vacillated returning back again to the police dug and all the sketchy behavior she witnessed in the aftermath of Sandy's death. Sometimes she seemed to travel this distance

between suicide and murder in the same breath. Stephen was the most vocal about his views, while his brothers Michael and Ronnie quietly contemplated the situation without giving much away. They listened, nodded, winced at times, and then Ronnie spoke up in his calm and reserved way, Well, you know, for forty four years and nine months, we've tried like every scenario. Did she did, she not, she didn't, Why she didn't, Who's responsible? We don't know. Then, I guess

we're never gonna know. Even if somebody come forward today, yeah I did it. No one's going to jail, especially an other than guys. Yeah, pops, right, Yeah, So in my mind, I think we've come to the end of the room. When loves the girl I watched the Bills leave that meeting with Kim with a demanding task ahead. They could choose to believe what Kim now believed, that Sandy died by suicide, or they could continue with the story they believed for decades, and I can understand why

they take the latter route. Both stories were compelling, both were possible, and the journey to replace a long held belief with something new and contradictory is not an easy one. I think that we faced this kind of crossroads many times in life, and we you know, again, we're given the choice between the safety of holding onto what we know or the ambiguity of releasing what we thought we knew and reaching for something a little more adequate, recognizing

that that that process is not a comfortable one. Robert Niemeyer is a professor of psychology at the University of Memphis and an authority on bereavement in grief. Well, of course, this is a larger question that goes beyond grief and bereavement. We can hold onto our own views, sometimes almost in a kind of hostile stance of refusing to accept the alternative story, and that's the path of defensiveness and sameness

and anger and resistance. But the other is the path of grieving, may be coming to terms with the reality of tragedy in life and the impermanence of love and the ambiguity of of our position as human beings. Kim let go of what she had believed, and it was really painful. She told me that she felt as though

she was grieving Sandy's death all over again. For a family, I understood the cost of changing their minds to accept that Sandy had died by suicide required them to redefine their understanding of her as a person and, by extension, their relationship to her. It often, especially in the case of traumatic loss, shakes up our assumptive world, as we call it. That whole world of assumptions about how life

is or should be. Our sense of justice, our sense of control, our sense of the reality we thought we were living, or the reality of a loved one we thought we knew, can be deeply unsettling, as we have to essentially revise our life narrative, the story of who we are and whose we are, in the context of often a significant and and and soul shattering loss. The dramatic thing for them, of course, is that they have experienced the shattering of their narrative, their story, not once,

but twice, forty or four years apart. Robert explained to me that grieving a suicide often brings up complicated feelings for families, such as guilt and anger the failure to protect or save that person, particularly if we are a parent, particularly if we are an older sibling, where we feel some duty of care toward this vulnerable person, and somehow

we missed the signals. We we didn't have the you know, the deep understanding of what was happening for them at the time that might have led us to make a difference. All of that is denied us, and so we're left with a struggle to realign the relationship with them, um and to figure out how they fit into our lives. Now. What I hope it brings though, is compassion of her as the young woman she was attempting to move into a life that had its own audacious and probably chaotic

and likely complicated dimensions. Ironically, they have ended up having to sort out those complications for her in in a proxy way as they attempt to make sense of her life, maybe at a time that she herself could not making sense of Sandy and the complications she was struggling with. Is what I've tried to do with this podcast and the complications in Sandy's life, they had something in common. They all revolved around law enforcement, and so in a

way did her death, which I think is telling. I found myself returning to a single page in Sandy's full police file where Detective Shosholski cataloged the evidence in Sandy's car and specifically the items sitting on her dashboard. The items on her dash they all had to do with cops. There was the duty rig for carrying police equipment, a lone business card from a Pig County cop, clippings about police officers, presumably from a local newspaper, and a card

showing the shift's schedule. I thought it was strange that Sandy would store so many items, including a belt, on her small dashboard. Wouldn't they fall down when she drove? As I read and re read this list, picturing the scene, I suddenly imagined Sandy placing the items there ceremoniously surrounding herself with police paraphernilia to make a statement. I had long been suspicious of the location of Sandy's death because of who hung out there. But I could now see

how the pollard might have been a symbolic choice by Sandy. Doug, the state trooper, the instructors and the Explorer program, and the cops who called Shallski. I think a good many of them hurt Sandy. They took advantage of her youthful passion, her blind ambition, and her desire for acceptance. As she wrote in her letter to Doug, I never want another man to ever want me. I just want to leave and forget the pain. Sandy was looking for love and

she found cruelty. The police they didn't have to murder Sandy to be complicit in her death, and I think they deserve some of the blame for the loss of a teenage girl. I think there are people who know exactly what happened to Sandy. They just don't want to talk to me, And back then they didn't want to talk to the Bills either. To me, this is the

tragic heart of the story. For all the questions, the Bells had their people with answers, if any of the police officers who knew Sandy had been brave enough to talk to the Bells, if Prince George's County police had launched a misconduct probe in the wake of Sandy's death and been transparent with her family. And if anyone had listened to the bills, really listened to what they had to say, then maybe forty five years of doubt and uncertainty might have been avoided. Maybe Sandy she could have

been put to rest. In the weeks and months after we all gathered a main I reached out to the Bells periodically to check in on how they were doing. I was curious how they had processed the new information, but I was also hyper aware that their capacity for an interest in discussing Sandy's case with me was coming to a close. Us My investigation had found answers, but not the answers that they had necessarily wanted, since they were somewhat let down, although they never missed an opportunity

to express gratitude for my work. Here's what Stephen had to say when I called him one afternoon. I'm just going on with with life, really, I mean kind of going status quote. I mean, was suation normal? Um, that's not it. I don't know what else to say. I know myself, I've always saw it all along and we're never going to really get to the bottom of it. And it was nice as you know, trying to get to where we got now, which was which is good.

But uh, just it's for me. I'm always going to have questions and it's never gonna be really quite resolved to my satisfaction. Kim's epiphany for meeting with Bernie, it hadn't really changed anything for him. I had those gut feelings when you know, when you just kind of know something, you know what I mean, I'm looking at through jaded eyes. Maya, I'm so jaded, you know, I need to look at it through a different lens. Does that make any sense?

When I reached Michael, the oldest of the Bill brothers, he agreed with Stephen and told me he still has significant questions about the gun. So you still you still believe that probably someone else does involved. Sure, I certainly do. The police. Uh they're pretty good, you know, they can they can dig sh it up, and they can they can bury stuff. So I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that's buried. No one's gonna know about it. Ronnie, the youngest of the Bills, he just wanted to put

the whole thing behind him. He's getting married soon, starting a new chapter of his life. If he doesn't want to go there anymore, Like you said in the meeting, he considers at the end of the road. I came to understand through my conversations with the brothers that it was very possible the family would be living with these conflicting stories of Sandy's death and therefore her life forever, and maybe that was all right. Well, we've seen over and over now really twenty five years of search, the

majority of people are resilient to almost anything. George Banano is a psychologist at Columbia University. His research focuses on how human beings coped with bereavement, loss, and other potentially traumatic events. You know, everybody's moved on and lived their lives, you know, and it's now a person four decades in the past who they loved or who they had complex relationships with, and now they have a kind of a

a very complicated story about that person. But you know, there's probably enough distance that they can probably say, Okay, well, you know, we'll maybe hold both of these But you know, I don't think it would be as crucial or as critical and their wet to their well being to have a clear picture anymore in a sense, the need to have them reconciled as maybe long past. George's research has found that most people possess a natural resilience to trauma

and loss. The person is able to, uh, you know, concentrate, laugh, do what they need to do, um, take care of people they love, and be cared for by people they love, and they love them, you know, be close, have intimate interactions, and they you know, they're able to experience joy, and they're able to experience pain, and they're able to be to think about other things, um and and they simply continue on with their life. They don't forget the person.

They just you know, continue living the life in the present. And if you think about it, I mean, beings have been around for a long time and we've thrived all over the planet, and we've always been able to keep moving on and keep going. That's just human nature. Kim has moved houses since she visited the Beals in Maine, resettling in a country home halfway between Houston and Austin. Being in the country has helped, she said. The blue bonnets and wild flowers are out the trees outside her

house are over three years old. She keeps a photo of Sandy on her desk, but she's put her files about the case out of sight in a closet, still close enough to access if she needs them, but not lining the walls of her bedroom like they used to Sandy's case. It's been a source of consistency in her life for decades, something to focus her boundless energy on, give her purpose, and now she considers it over. She's let go for the most part. She has answers, though

she says she still needs to find closure. She wants to go back to the Pollard and have a ceremony there to say goodbye before the family meeting. One of Kim's biggest concerns was disappointing Joanne. She feared that spending all those years investigating the case had prolonged Joanne's pain and stood in the way of healing. It's been a long time, hasn't it fighting? It's a long time fighting it. Yeah,

So I'm I'm most concerned mostly about you. I've had a few weeks to process it, and I'm still struggling with it. So just grieving, you know, I know what you mean. I was just telling I think it was Melissa, that this might be the last sit in that I might sit in. It depends on how I feel at the time, you know, because it drums everything back up. It's hard and it's hot, and that's why it is. But the journey it had bonded the two women. I got the sense that Joanne was profoundly touched by the

years that Kim had spent in service to Sandy. She was trying to hold people accountable, and she had kept Sandy's memory alive. We've come a long way with this. You have dog and dog and dog and dog. There's been many things that I have thought of and thought of and and just like we all have questions, but we'll probably never get all the answers. We've had a lot, We've learned a lot. I understand why the bills still

have questions, because I do too. There's still so much unknown about the network of police officers whose phone number Sandy wrote down in her address books, police officers who took her on ride alongs and drove her home at night after hanging out at the FOP lodge. But I'm pretty sure I know how she felt when she died. Because she wrote about it. I've reread her note to Dug many times, and what's clear is how alone, used

and powerless she felt. It's a stark reversal from where she was when she began policing, described by her friends and family as strong, ambitious, and secure. The main criticism I've heard about my podcast is that it's anti cop, that if a team girl was victimized in an Explorer program that was in the nineties seventies and doesn't reflect on what's happening now. But I want to tell you

about another Sandy. Sandra Burchmore died by suicide during the pandemic while pregnant, allegedly with the child of a married older cop who was an instructor in the Explorer program she had attended. A misconduct probe launched in the wake of her death has resulted in the resignation of one officer, with two others placed unpaid leave. I think there are many, many more Sandy's out there, girls and women who have been sexualized, mistreated, and eaten up by a police culture

where masculinity reigns. Sandy wasn't an anomaly, Joanne. She still has questions. She still hopes that Sandy Sheridan will come forward. She still believes that Doug was in the pollard the night Sandy died. She even had a dream about him recently where she confronted him outside a courthouse and gave him a piece of her mind. But ultimately she's come

to accept the possibility that Sandy died by suicide. She thinks that Sandy was consumed by hurt and felt as though she had no one to turn to, and she blames the police for putting her daughter in this position. Thinking back to when Sandy died, the worst part was the not knowing, she said, having only the fragments of Sandy's story and not being able to put them together in a way that made any sense. Today, she's learned how to live with them, not knowing, the lingering ambiguity,

the unanswered questions. She's found a way to put all that to the side, diffuse it of its power. Maybe she wasn't supposed to know everything, she said, It's just how it is, and she's at peace. So anyway, it was a hard time, and I don't know, we've been through enough a lot in this family. I say the Lord was good to me to give me a life to live this long. I waited two pounds and three ounces at birth. They told my mother and father I wouldn't live twenty four hours. And here I am Eddie too.

Joanne hopes she'll see Sandy in heaven, but for now, she's put the whole thing in a good place. She needed to. She's a fighter, always has been, but it was time for her to stop. Well, Honey, I've got to let you go. Okay? What Happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by Me Melissa Johnson. It's written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell. The podcast is edited by Aboo Safar, sound designed by Aaron Kaufman. Jason English is our executive producer. Research and production assistance by Merissa Brown.

Special thanks to Duncan Radell, Bethan Macaluso, Nikki Etre, and Pete Monica. To find out more about my investigation, follow me on Twitter at quasimato. That's qu A s I M A d o