Safe - Talina Zar E7

Ricinus communis is an exotic perennial plant with oversized purplish leaves, bulbous seed pods, and blooms in various striking colors. It's a pretty plant, often grown in decorative gardens. The seeds, called castor beans, which are about the size of a peanut, can be pressed into castor oil, which has several uses as a preservative in food and an ingredient in cosmetic products. But the seeds are probably more famously known for their lethal nature, as they contain a toxin risin that can

Cruise and hazmat suits are seen entering a male facility near washing after letters sent to President Barack Obama and a Mississippi senator test positive for risin.

The FBI is also investigating letters sent to the Pentagon that tested positive for the deadly poison ricin.

The details of an arrest at the Canada US border of a person suspected of sending a letter containing a deadly poison to Donald Trump's White House.

Despite their potential for deadly use, you can legally buy Castban's online or in a gardening store, and if you happen upon them by accident, it's likely you wouldn't recognize the fatal power they contain.

Investigator Elliot located a small firebox safe in one of the bedroom closets.

Corey states she.

Does not have a key for it and it hasn't been opened in probably ten years.

Detective Weber noted that during one of the searches of Teleina and Corey's house, the investigator stumbled on a small safe. Corey insists that the safe can't be opened, but Weber is not so easily deterred.

I located several sets of keys hanging in the closet by the front door. The first key I tried opened the safe. The findings inside the safe were extremely significant. Inside the safe, among other things, were three small packages of bubble wrap. Inside the packages were castor beans and seeds to grow castor beans, specifically Ricinus communists.

The police can't take the beans, they aren't included in the search warrant, but they can take Corey's computers, and in one of them they find a Microsoft word file created in twenty twelve titled making Risin from iHeart podcasts. I'm Melissa Jelson, and this is what happened to Telenazar.

And I slung open the door and me and Rachel standing there, and she goes, oh my god, this thing sounds like bath.

Well, the only reason it has to do with anything is just because my understanding it was there one day and now it's not.

She goes, well, Corey butchered that thing, and I'm like what she said. Yeah, she ket that horse up in tiny little pieces and dumped it out for the kayadt.

He rope was fucking hell, what's going on here? We thought we thought we had her.

My husband and I spent every penny we had to move to his confident and we went through a tough time where we didn't have much money.

Episode seven, Safe Tell me when you first learned about what had happened in Wisconsin.

She had been involved in a robbery. That's how she got her felony.

Early on in Jess's investigation, she doesn't know much about Corey's past criminal conviction, just that she had one in Wisconsin in twenty fourteen, until a woman named Sherry Ziegler joins the Justice for Teleina Facebook group.

And then Sherry told me the exact story of what had happened.

Sherry and her husband Michael lived still live in Middleton, Wisconsin. It's a suburb of Madison, a friendly place, according to its motto, the good neighbor City. Cherry said, for the first twenty years they lived there, they never really locked their doors, but that all starts to change when the Zieglers get back from a trip to Florida at the end of March twenty fourteen. It's then that they experience

She said it looked like kitty litter on her bed, her pillow, all over her dresser. Yeah, she called it kitty litter.

The couple are exhausted, and since nothing else appears disturbed, they've write it off as a weird prank. They unpack, return their travel money to their safe, sweep the weird pebbles out of their sheets go to bed. A month passes without incident, and then one night, Mike goes to get some items from the safe in their bedroom closet and finds the safe's not there. Shery tells Jess it was filled with the usual valuables.

It was like a thousand dollars worth of cash. The deed to their house like a bunch of important stuff that you've keep in a safe.

Right this time, the Zieglers call the police. A deputy comes by, makes a report, and begins an investigation, but without any leads or evidence, the case goes stale. And then a month after that, Cherry gets a credit card statement in the mail. It's from a card she never activated, and it's only now she realizes it's missing from where she left it in a dish on the kitchen counter.

A credit card bill had come in the mail for a credit card she knew she had not opened yet, and that's what led her to check the statement find out where the money was spent.

And Sherry calls the credit card company and they tell her that the card was activated a few weeks earlier from the landline inside her home. She knows she didn't activate it, so who did. Looking at the charges on her statement, she recognizes some of the businesses where the card was used. Among them is the gas station down the road. So much like Jess would, I imagine, Cherry heads over to the quick trip and demands to see the video footage of the transaction.

Her and her little self, which I can attest to at this point is maybe one hundred and twenty pounds of older lady. She's a wonderful human. I really like Sherry, but she's anybody little thing going down there asking for receipts and videos. And I mean Biddleton and Verona is pretty small so and she's lived there a long time, so she had a couple relationships and wasn't afraid to go up and say, hey, I want to look at this video.

And who does Sherry see using the card issued in her name? Her neighbor, Corey Shehry told Jess that Corey and her husband Alec had moved in next door a few months earlier, and from the beginning it had been a tense relationship.

She said it was always just an uncomfortable dynamic, that her and Corey never really hit it off at all, but Mike and Corey seem to have some kind of like neighborly relationship.

Sherry reports her discovery to the police, and later that day they arrest Corey.

I began by asking Corey if she was aware that her neighbor to the direct north had been burglarized, to which she said yes.

Well, Sherry wasn't able to listen in on the conversation between Corey and the arresting officers. I was able to obtain the police report, which goes into detail about this interaction as well as their full investigation. You're about to hear re enacted selections of the police report.

I began to show Corey Adams the still photographs of the suspect inside the Quick Trip located on West Mineral Point Road. I asked Corey if she recognized the subject in the photograph, from which she said, it sure looks like me, It sure looks like me. I then showed Corey Adams the photograph of the vehicle buying gas at the Quick Trip on East Varona Avenue and asked her if that was the vehicle which was sitting in her driveway,

I'm racking my brain trying to make sense of this.

I informed Corey Adams that the evidence against her at this point was very incriminating and that if she had any involvement with this crime, now is the time to tell me the truth.

Corey continues to say she doesn't know anything about any crimes committed against her name. Corey is later charged with four counts of fraudulent use of a credit card. However, the police are never able to connect Corey to the missing safe or find proof that she entered the Ziegler's house illegally. Here's Jess again.

Sherry insists that Corey was in her home, and she's convinced that she had to come in the house gotten a letter because it had to be done from her phone.

In court, Corey ultimately takes a plea bargain, admitting to one count of fraudulently using a credit card. She denies stealing it, though instead she claims she simply found the activated credit card outside on the ground and decided to use it. Judge William E. Hanrahan is skeptical. Here's a reenactment of some of his comments in court.

All right, so somebody else had access, got into the house and took the time to use that home phone to activate the credit card, and somehow had access to the last port digits of the victim's social Security number, and took all these affirmative steps, but didn't have the wherewithal to hang on to the card when they left the house. And your client just happened to pick up that exact, same, newly activated card and had the lapse of judgment enough to stick it in her pocket and

The judge doesn't buy Corey's explanation, and neither do the Zieglers. Even though she pleads guilty, they still have so many questions. Here's the recreation of parts of Sherry's victim impact statement that was read in court.

This defendant is being charged and convicted of the fraudulent use of my credit card, but the underlying concern is so much greater than that.

It is this how did she get my credit card?

Sherry explains that she spoke with the credit card company and they were able to pinpoint the exact time and date that the credit card was activated.

We left our house at six point thirty that night and the card was activated at seven o'clock the same night. The credit card was activated from our home phone, and the credit card company reported that it was activated by a woman.

That woman knew.

The last four digits of my social security number.

Cherry tells the judge she believes the woman is her next door neighbor, Corey.

It seems so very obvious to us all that she was in our home while she knew we were gone. She found the new credit card sitting on the kitchen counter, She used our phone to activate it, and then she was seen using the credit card Shortly after that, she is seen on video using my credit card.

She used it multiple times.

Judge, I wish there was a way you could compel Corey to tell you and us how she got my credit card number. We just want her to admit that it was her who stole it. At least then we would know who was in our house that night.

Sherry reminds the judge that this incident was not the first intrusion into their home.

When we returned from a trip to Florida in March, we came home to stuff, kitty litter or broken sheet rock material scattered throughout our house, especially on my side of the bed and in my underwear drawer. This was very personal and I felt particularly scared.

And then there's the issue of the stolen safe, the valuables that were never recovered, and no one was held accountable for all of it. Was taking a toll on Sherry and Mike. So much for the good neighbor city.

Do we feel safe living next door to Corey? No?

Do our neighbors feel safe after our house was broken into? No, none of us feel safe anymore. We are good, law abiding people, and we have to live being afraid of our nigh This is no way to live.

The judge has some choice words for Corey before she leaves.

Now, I've been told that you've been punished enough by a conviction for this crime. I'm not feeling it. Honestly. I find this to be an aggravated offense. I don't know why, at age fifty two that this seemed like a good thing to do in fact, I don't really know the depth of what you've done. The most troubling aspect of this whole string of events here is that it wasn't against a major corporation. It's not against a stranger.

Corey is sentenced to two years probation in order to build a privacy fence between their two properties. The judge goes on to Warren Corey that her life is at a crossroads and it could easily be headed in the wrong direction.

You've got to know that what you've done is extremely wrong. You've got to know that somehow, somewhere along the way you slip the tracks. You have to figure out what went wrong, and you have to fix it.

Five years later, Corey is sitting in a small interview room in the Wagner County Sheriff's office answering questions about Tealina, and when Detective Weber asks about Corey's criminal history, she tells him a very different story. Than she told police in Wisconsin in twenty fourteen.

Somebody brought up at some point that you were charged with something and I don't remember what state.

Wisconsin or in Wisconsin, Wisconsin. Yes, So what happened in a nutshell my husband's.

Version, she's the victim. She tells Weber that she had befriended Mike Ziegler and he had helped her out financially during a rough patch. Corey says Mike offered her his wife's credit card to use for essentials like gas and groceries, and he said she could pay him back whenever she got the chance.

Well, the wife was jealous of him and I for no reason, and she had a canary and she pressed charges.

Weber doesn't take Corey's story at face value. Instead, the Wagner County Sheriff's office reaches out to authorities in Wisconsin for context. I imagine Weber got the same police reports. I have, the ones detailing the missing safe, the multiple break ins, the strange debris scattered all around the house. Weber also gets a tip a legend that Corey had not only stolen the Ziegler's credit card, but had actually tried to poison them. It sounds a little far fetched,

Is true, considering the beans were hidden in a safe inside of bubble wrap in a closet, and because Corey lied about having a key to it, and this made the history in Wisconsin in which she reportedly trying to poison people much more likely to be true.

And maybe that strange debris Sherry Ziegler found in her bed wasn't kitty litter after all. In July, the Wagner County Sheriff's office reaches out to Sherry, who later told all of.

This to Jess. One of the sheriffs said, well, if you think you still have any of it in your house, she said, you know, I don't think I do, but I'll go and look. And it just so happens that behind her dresser in her room she still had parts of it. I was kind of shocked, because this happened in twenty fourteen, and we're talking twenty twenty at this point, that she still had pieces of it. I was like, Wow, I don't think i'd have any of that left in

Wagner Investigators receive Sherry's package and hands it over to the FBI for testing. It comes back positive for risin.

And I was like, wow, she. I'm a huge Breaking Bad fan, love Breaking Bad. I remember the episode when Walter made Bryce no to castor beans. So that's where my head went, like her in a lab somewhere creating this powder, and really she was doing it in the shed in the backyard. So that was my Oh shit, we're in a lot of trouble.

Now Here's what Jess told me happened next, though I wasn't able to independently verify it.

Every post office that her letter went through had to be shut down and inspected and tested because of what the poison ended up being. So I joke with Sherry all the time in regards to being, you know, one of those people that sends poison in the mail. I'm like, gosh, we you know you're a felon at this point, and we kind of giggle about it, and the poor sheriff, I'm sure, is beating his head against the wall, thinking

The Wagner County Sheriff's office passes the information along to Wisconsin so they can open their own investigation. But back in Oklahoma, Toalina's case remains at a standstill. Corey's still free on bond, Toleina is still missing, and the online sleuth are suddenly in the dark.

After Marty had died, we were kind of cut off from information in Oklahoma quite a bit. He was the one that police bar I was talking to, so then he'd feed it back to us, right.

Meanwhile, Corey goes about her business. In late August, she attempts to scrap to Lena's truck, a two thousand and seven Dodge Ram. She brings it to Budget Recycling along with the story that the truck had been given to her by a relative of a friend, and that it was kind of busted. The scrapyard says they can only give her about two hundred bucks, which is far less than the truck is worth, but she agrees and walks

When she moved to Wisconsin to be with her mom, I got not scared, but more worried because she was closer. Middleton is four and a half hours for me, so easy trip if she wanted to make it.

And there's one goall online that you know, between some misinformation and some fabrication.

It's unfortunate with Corey in Wisconsin, all of Jess's spies on the ground and Wagner are useless.

So there was nothing, no neighbors to eyeball, Corey, nobody like nobody.

For all the frenzy of the early investigation, things now start to slow way down. Summer turns into fall, turns into winter with no update on Telena. COVID meanwhile continues to lay siege to the country. By the end of twenty twenty, deaths from the virus are still climbing, and most public schools stay remote amid another COVID search. And while there's some hope that life will eventually go back to normal, the continued isolation, the high unemployment rates, the

Mom and I read were talking. Mom said, she's not coming back. I just know it. I just know what. They just have to find her body.

When she said it, I admitted, that's exactly what I thought to him, that, you know, we didn't know what in the world had happened to her, but we just thought, No, it's bad, it's bad.

The Wagner police have also lost hope that they'll find Teleina alive.

They had been down all the various things and it was absolutely no trail over and admitted they were pretty sure they were searching for a body, and they came and they did collect some DNA.

Swaps from mom.

That was hard on her that she did it, of course, because then it was she wanted her found.

She didn't want.

Her laying out someplace. We're in a fallow grave somewhere, you know. She wanted her found. Good morning, I'm.

A Sheriff Chris Elliott with a Wager County sheriff office.

On January twenty second, twenty twenty one, more than nine months since Telena disappeared, Wagner authorities addressed the public with a big update.

This press conference is regarding what originally started out as a missing person's investigation regarding Tolina Galloway.

Sheriff Chris Elliott starts off with the story about a woman in a totally different state who observes something unusual back over the summer.

On June eighth, the twenty twenty a witness in the area of Polk County, Arkansas, observed a pickup towing a small enclosed trailer.

The truck and trailer.

Will observed to be driving into a secluded area that is adjacent to the Quadchital National Force South Amna, Arkansas.

From inside her house, the woman notices a truck and U haul trailer turned down Woody Lane, a dead end logging road next to her property.

Now, this witness said that it was suspicious to her, so she went to investigate.

Wondering why a truck with a U haul is creeping down a private road, the woman, yet another fearless amateur sleuth, decides to follow it. When she eventually reaches the parked truck and trailer, they're deserted, no one is around, but something else catches her nose.

She went to the area to where she thought the truck was located the truck, walked up to the truck and denoted the tag number on the truck and then denoted that there was a foul odor came from the trailer, and then observed a foul smelling thick lake wood pooled in the floor of the trailer.

The woman quickly memorizes the licensed plate number of the truck and runs back to her house where she jots it down. Then she calls local police to report what she saw. A little while later, she spots the truck and the trailer leave. Inside, she sees a driver and a passenger. She waits all day for the police to show up, but she never sees them. Six months pass it's the day before Christmas. The weather is nice, and

She walks over to it.

The same witness was walking in the woods and came upon a wide box top fraser with a lid type shit.

The freezer is wrapped in duct tape. The woman doesn't open it. Instead, she goes home and tells her husband what she found, but it's Christmas Eve, so they wait to call the police until after the new year. Eventually, in the middle of January, a deputy comes out to take a look. The woman accompanies him down Woody Lane and into the forest. They approach the white freezer. The deputy throws back the lid. A face a human skull stares back at him.

They discovered what they believed at that time to be human remains inside the fraser. The Arkansas State Medical Examiner accepted jurisdiction of the remains and took possession of the fraser and conducted an autopsy. On January nineteenth, twenty twenty one, Wider County Sheriff's Office received a tent over report of identification from the Arkansas State Medical Examiner, identifying there were human remains as Toulena Galloway and classified the manner of death as homicide.

It was my son's birthday and we went out to dinner at Fish Jale. You're sitting at that round table in the center, and my phone kept going off off, and I was like, damn it bro out to dinner, LA. So I look at it and see this text and Nicole said they found her, and I was like, oh my god. So I kind of was like, I'm going to go outside quick, I'll be right back, and she was a master, was bawling, and then I started crying because I was like, how did they find her? And

At the press conference, police explained that Teleina's body had been methodically cut into pieces before being placed in the freezer. For Teleina's friends and family, finding out that she was gone and discarded in such a horrific way was especially hard to bear. Here's Nicole.

When I got the phone call telling me that they had found the body and how they found the body, that I really did have a meltdown. I was getting ready to go into a zoom call. At the time, I was working for a nonprofit and I called and I said, I can't do it. I can't do it. I just I just found out, and it really did hit me differently, especially because I knew in my heart that she was gone. I knew for a long time, but then after that it was really hard to know

Here's Cheryl Tolina's sister.

We all kind of knew in our gut something bad had happened, and.

Deep down.

We thought it'll be a body.

But where the.

How it was agonizing.

They did call us first, notified the family and went through every grouply detail and told us everything they found, what they saw on stuff. And the reason, of course, was because the following day it was going to be made public and they did not want us to be at all surprised or you know, shocked or traumatized by what came out publicly. They wanted to make sure we knew it first so that we were prepared. Now, I will give you this one part.

That we got that wasn't necessarily public.

The coroner who did the autopsy and all he had given a note specifically to the family that she had died by blunt force trauma to the skull or to the head.

There was so much dammage to the skull. He was very certain she had died instantly, and he believed that she was laying down when she was struck and probably sleeping.

Knowing Telena likely died instantly while she was sleeping was a relief of sorts, but it didn't take away the pain of knowing what someone did to her body.

The circumstances were far more gruesome than we could have ever imagined.

And I didn't expect it to be easy at all under any other circumstances that I did not expect something like that.

And I think it was just, oh my god.

This just certainly can't possibly be what happened, and it was.

It haunted me.

It haunted me.

What was she'll haunt me.

It is painful, horrifically painful, and I will cry, but I want she to know I am okay.

Even if I cry, I am okay.

Next time. On what happened to Tolenazar Corey is arrested for not one but two crimes in two states.

Corey Bondeley was arrested yesterday afternoon in Dane County, Wisconsin, and is currently in the Dane County Jail waiting transport back to Wager County, where she will face charges of murder in the first degree desecration of a human.

Course and Jess and the Internet sleuths can finally hang up their hats if they're willing to.

I don't think this is ever going to be over for me. It's so you're not going to put it down. I don't think I can.

What Happened to Tealinazar is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's written, reported, and hosted by me Melissa Jelson, with writing and story editing by Lauren Hansen. Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch. For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Carl Catele. Fact checking by Maya Shukri. Zoe Denkla is our associate producer. Jeremy Thal is our editor.