This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
When you have a loved one and you find those little inconsistencies, It's hard to sleep when you know that something is not right.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. In nineteen eighty six, seventeen year old Keith Warren was found hanging from a tree in Silver Spring, Maryland. His sister wanted answers how did he die? It was ruled a suicide, but there were so many suspicious things about Keith's death. I talked to filmmaker April Speaks about her docuseries Uprooted, which covers Keith's case.
So when you talk to people about this series, what do you say, what's your kind of really quick elevator pitch, you know, a couple of sentences of what the story is about.
Typically, the way I would describe this series is to kind of talk about what happens. You know, I said, you know, there was a seventeen year old young man who was killed in a who was found whose body was found hanging from a tree in Silver Spring, Maryland
in nineteen eighty six. But you know, the more I think about it, and especially now that I've had some time to reflect and kind of sort of be distance from it a little bit in terms of time, I would really describe it as a story about grief, a family's grief and loss, and a mixed bag of unanswered questions. And you know, it is essentially about a young man named Keith Warne who grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In nineteen eighty six, he was found hanging from a tree and the police immediately ruled it a suicide and the family said, no way, this can't be possible. And they've been on a quest ever since then to find justice for their son, their brother, their nephew, just to find answers and ultimately to find their form what they would consider to be justice, because I think that, you know, justice looks different for different people in terms of what
that means. And so what they were looking for was for the death certificate to be changed because the death certificate was ruled suicide on the death certificate and they wanted it to be changed from suicide to undetermined because there were so many questions. So it wasn't even so much that they were, you know, searching for a killer or searching for you know, who done it. They just wanted a piece of paper changed. So it's a heartbreaking story.
What was your before we get into the actual story about Keith? What was your end? Did you know his mom or who did you know? Or did you just reach out kind of cold call somebody.
This story came to me through now this the EP.
Matt McDonough heard about this story on a podcast and reached out to Sherry Warren and just said, this is a fascinating story.
Can I talk to you more about it?
And became friends with Sherry, and then Matt approached me about the story and as someone who used to live in Silver Spring, who went to undergrad University of Maryland and College Park. Spent a lot of my growing up years going back and if I had a lot of family in Maryland, so Maryland, that Maryland DC area is kind of like a second home to me. And so
to hear about this story, it piqued my interest. And also just hearing about Sherry also just as another black woman just trying to find justice for her brother, was of interest. So anyways, Matt reached out to me, and he and I teamed up and we started developing the story and you know, just hearing more from Sherry and trying to put pieces together and bring it to life. So that's kind of my involvement with this story kind
of came through through Matt. And like I said, once I met Sherry, honestly, like once I heard the story itself, it's like just even without meeting Sherry, just the story in and of itself. And I think I had actually seen some of the photos, the photographs of Keith in the woods. I immediately had a bunch of questions which we can talk about, but like I just had a
bunch of questions just off of the photos themselves. And like I said, and then after that, then meeting Sherry was kind of what I think sort of kickstarted the whole journey.
You know, in my stories, even though I write about historical crime and my stories, I'm always searching for the heroes, specifically, I'm always on the hunt for female heroes. And we have Sherry, and we have his mother. You have women who are really in men, but really women who are stepping in and I know that they're his family members, but they felt so strongly before we jump into Keith's story, Can you tell me what your impression of is is Why is this so important to them? Is it something
about saving his reputation? I don't that's not the right phrase, but you know, I mean, what is it that drove them so much?
That's a really great question. There's a couple of things at play, I think. I think dignity is part of it, especially when you know someone so well and you know
there's always just that nagging you know. It's like it's like when someone lies on you, right, Like, I think we all have that instinct when someone tells a lie about you that you just that you're just like this, this is not true about me, And for a lot of us, it just continues to nag at you until you're able to prove and say, like, this is just
not the truth. I think that there's a level of dignity of a person, that person being Keith Warren, and you know your brother, you know your son, you just know that this is not something that they would do and just want to prove that. I think there's also another element of accountability and really wanting the police department to take accountability for at the end of the day, an investigation that was never conducted. This case would have
probably been different if an investigation had been done. And I think that a big part of it, at the at the core of it is that to be so sure of yourself to rule it a suicide without an investigation, I think that that's something that weighs very heavily on the family, that that's something that just needs to be righted,
it needs to be corrected. And then, like I said, you know, in addition to that, it's like we know this person and this is just this isn't right, This isn't the truth, This isn't the truth of the matter, and we don't know what the truth is. You know, even to this day, even the family themselves will say even Sherry will say, we don't know, we don't know
what happened. We're not even you know, even when we did this series, you know, she would constantly say, I'm not looking to find you know, the killer, because we can't. There was no investigation, we don't have any evidence.
In eighty six, gosh, let me mention a story and you just tell me what you think, and then I promise we will start talking about Keith. So At a convention several years ago, I interviewed a man who was the father of a geologist named Daniel Robinson. I don't know if you've heard about this case in twenty twenty one. He was a black man in Arizona who just disappeared in the desert. He went to a site, one of
his work sites, and he vanished. And the reason that we were talking about the story besides that you know he was a missing person that you know, this happened right when the Gabby Patito case was coming out, and his father was disturbed because you know, of course how much attension that case received while his son went missing under mysterious circumstances, and you know, of course, this is we're leading up to how much do you think the dismissing from the police in Maryland that this was just
a suicide and this was nothing else had to do with the fact that he was a man of color.
Absolutely, I absolutely think that that had something to do with it. And I think that in ruling it a suicide was their way of making it go away. And I think that they thought they were just gonna, you know, come to the scene and just say, you know, write something on a piece of paper, and that in no
time it would be forgotten. And I also think that, you know, going back to your question about why have they been pursuing why have they been so persistent in this, I do think that there's something about erasure, you know, of a loved one, that there's just no acknowledgment, there's no acknowledgment of the passing of a life, of a life gone. And yeah, I do think that the police department, the media, there was no media at that time done on this case. I think everyone just kind of brushed
it off. I think labeling it as a suicide was an easy way to brush it off without having to point fingers at anyone, without having to implicate anyone. He acted alone. He did this by himself. He was in the woods. This was all him. Case closed, move on. So yes, I definitely think that that was part of it. And at the same time, I also think that that was a big reason why the family was so adamant in proving that that could not have been the case.
There were so many little things, even from from day one, there were things that just didn't add up. And I don't think when you're when you have a loved one and you find those little inconsistencies, it's hard to sleep when, yeah, when you know that something is not right.
Tell me about Keith, kind of start from the beginning. What do we know about him? What kind of kid is this? He turns into a teenager? What is he like?
Yeah? So Keith Warren.
From what we gathered about him through Sherry, through friends and artifacts that we found is that Keith was a typical teenager. He liked to play basketball, He loved to listen to music. You know, he had his favorite rock bands. He listened to You Two, he listened to the Police, He had friends. He was about to go to college. He had just graduated from high school that summer and was preparing to go to college.
He was just a typical teenager.
He lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is right outside of the nation's capital, living in a diverse neighborhood, you know, being a black family living in what was known as Georgian colonies. You know, he some people would describe him as different me and you know when they said that, they meant he was just kind of the guy that knew everybody, that hung out with everyone, but also just had his you know, his own way about things and
his own way of doing things. He was a typical kid, you know, atypical kid getting ready to go off to college and start his life as an adult and home wife. So he lived with his mother. His mother, Mary Cooey, raised him and his sisters Sherrie. Their father lived in North They were not together. His father lived in North Carolina, and they moved, the three of them moved at a young age.
They moved to Silver Spring.
So he had grown up in the home with Mary and with Sherry, and the three of them were like the three Musketeers. I mean, they were inseparable. Everyone in that community knew Sherry, they knew Keith, they knew Mary, you know, and it was a community and they were
just getting along, you know. But like I said, and also I will say too, you know, the three of them were close, and they also had a very close extended family also, so they had you know, uncles, aunts who lived in North Carolina still that they went you know to visit very often. Mary had, I know, she had a couple of brothers and you know a sister as well, sister in New Jersey and a couple of
brothers in North Carolina. That they were very close as well, and they would travel back and forth to visit those that family quite often. So they would go back to North Carolina. They own you know, acres of land in Behama, North Carolina. They would go and spend holidays or you know, does at any given moment go there. And then the same thing with New Jersey they would go and visit there.
So they were a tight knit family in terms of the three of them, but then also their extended family was very close as well.
So you said he had friends in high school, did he date at all?
There were rumors of you know, he liked this person or he liked that person. In all honesty, it's hard to get a sense of specifically who was his girlfriend, Who was he dating at the time, Who was this?
Who was that?
Because none of the friends would talk to us, Sherry was not aware of, you know, a specific girlfriend do you know that he had. But we did find letters. There were letters that you know, some of the girls in his class had written him, but all of those letters were like very friendly, you know, yeah, close friends, but you know, they were all kind of on a friendship level. We didn't find any letters that were you know, love letters or anything like that.
So it's kind of it's hard to say.
I think, you know, we've talked to some people and there's like rumors that he may have liked this person or liked that person, but it's hard to say definitively because you know, no one would talk and those people that they said it was still a thing of like, well, I think I'm not sure, you know, So there was never a definitive girlfriend that he had per se.
So, I mean, you've just said this twice. Why wouldn't they talk to you all? Was it just because it was so long ago, or were they uncomfortable about something?
It's TV.
I get it. A lot of people don't want to be on TV.
That to me is the number one question.
Well, you know, I have many questions after doing this case, but that, to me was the most baffling thing because we talked to some of his friends, his so called friends. They would talk to us on the phone, but when it came time to do an interview, they wouldn't say anything. And even when we talked to them on the phone, they were still being cagey, you know, they were still being a little bit well, I don't want to say.
I don't know.
I feel like someone knows something why they won't speak out.
I don't know. I don't know.
I can make theories assumptions as to what that was, what people knew and didn't want to say that they knew who people knew. In terms of who was involved, I think there may have been some names of people that were thrown around that. You know, it's like if you know such and such was involved, and you don't want to say that person's name, then you just decide to stay out of it. There was one person we
spoke to on the phone. They were great, They said, oh, I want to speak out and I want to, you know, defend Keith's name. When it came time to do the interview, she backed out as almost as if someone had gotten into their ear and said, oh, don't do that, because they were they were very excited to do the interview at one point and then all of a sudden, maybe it was cold feet, I don't know, but there's also just, you know, this feeling like why is there such a
hesitance to talk? And did she talk to someone else that made them feel like they shouldn't talk to us?
So I don't know.
I know that he was from a diverse community, but I just wonder if there was in that community the same kind of sense I get about, of course police, you know, not trusting the police perhaps, but also not really not trusting the media either. And I wonder if that kind of over to you all, even though you were reporting on something that was almost forty years old, I mean eighty six and this came out in twenty
twenty two, right on Discovery Plus correct. Yeah, I mean, I just wonder if that still kind of sticks with with people, and maybe they're not hiding anything, but it's sort of like, I'm not going to put myself out there because I don't like the way other stories have been framed in the past.
It's totally possible, and you know, I've experienced that we you know, I've heard that on this show. On other shows I've worked on, I've heard that, I heard a similar you know, a similar sentiment. I think with this with this series, what we really tried to emphasize was that we're not trying to We're not trying to implicate anyone again because we can't. We literally just wanted someone to come on and pretty much just talk about Keith's character.
You know, our sort of angle with the Friends was simply, can you come on and just say Keith was a great tell us a story about one time we were by the lockers and Keith said this funny joke, like, we don't need to ask you anything because again, because we're not trying to quote unquote solve the case on this, all we want you to do is tell us what was great about Keith. And they would tell us on the phone, like Keith was such a great guy, he was so great, he was so great, he was so great.
Just say that same thing on camera, and they wouldn't, So, you know, yeah, there is a possibility they may not trust the media. We try to mitigate that a bit by just saying like, we're not trying to pull a gotcha, We're not trying to trap you in anything or make it look like you're saying something you're not.
We just want someone to speak for him.
You know. It's like he's no longer here. He can't speak for himself. We have all these family members who can speak from that side, but nobody can tell us what Keith was like at school except for his friends.
I don't know.
In doing this show, that was one of those things that really kind of struck a nerve for me. You know, if you imagine Keith being a young man going about his business, and you know, you're having these interactions with people you think you believe to be your friends. Right, And if I were to think about that, if I think about the people who are in my circle who I call to be my friends, and God forbid, if something were to happen to me at any moment, the idea that the people that have been in my.
House, who have eaten my food, have been in my car.
Shared your life with you, yeah.
Shared life with me and know me, and when asked about my character or asked about who I am, they have nothing to say, Like no one will defend me. No one will even just speak a good word about that one time I at April's house and we played checkers or whatever, Like, no one has anything to say. Yeah, I just found that to be quite disturbing.
Take me to wherever we need to go to set up this awful event that happens. How far back do we go to kind of set this scene up?
Well, I think we can start in July of nineteen eighty six. I want to say it was the end of July. I think it was July twenty eighth, I believe was the date. It was a Tuesday for sure. You know, Keith was at home with his sister and his Actually he was at home with his mother because his sister was in New Jersey at the time visiting her aunt that I spoke about earlier. Keith gets a call, he talks, he hangs up, and he leaves the house. He tells his mother he's gonna go hang out with
some friends, and he leaves with his backpack. He's wearing a pair of shorts and a T shirt. He always wore these brown Timberland boots that he wore twenty four to seven. He wore them all the time. So it's kind of like his signature. Look, but he grabs all that and he leaves the house. And that's on Tuesday. Wednesday comes there's no Keith. You know, Mary realizes that Keith did not come home, as I think, as any
mother would. She starts to panic a bit and she calls the police, and the police tell her that she cannot file a missing person's report until he's been gone for forty eight hours.
So she says, okay, she goes back.
It was July thirty first, nineteen eighty six, when Keith's body was found. From what I remember from the case, there was a woman that was walking through the woods and found his body and called nine one one. She found his body, you know, in the woods and called nine one one. Now, apparently when the call was made it was stated that this is according to the EMT who arrived on the scene. When the call was made, it was said that there was a body found in
the basement. So when the EMT came to the house where the call came from, there was commotion. Oh no, no, no, no, it wasn't in the basement. The body was in the woods. It was found in the woods, and you know, one person came to the door and there was a scuffle, and you know, the EMT is like, okay, well wherever the body is, like, take us to the body. We have to you know, you know, we need to do these procedures, like we have to get there right away. So the one person says, no, I don't want to
take you back there. Then another person comes to the door, I can take you back there, but they were on crutches, so they were gonna go too slow.
Someone needs to take us to the body.
Yeah.
A third person comes and they say, okay, I'll take you. They take them to the woods and this is where they found Keith's body. Within this time, the police arrived and it was determined, and they called the coroner and determined this to be a suicide. Mind you, they made this determination on the scene and the family was not notified until several hours after this. So while all this is going on, Mary Cooey is at work in I believe she worked in Bethesda, Maryland.
If I remember.
Correctly, this is his mother, right, This is his mother, got it?
This is his mother Mary.
So Keith had several forms of identification on him. But yet and still she was not notified until several hours later. I think we read it was like seven hours later that she was notified that all of this happened. Apparently, the officer went to the house, there was no one there. Like I said, obviously she was at work. They went to a neighbor's house and the neighbor said, well, Mary's not at home, she's at work.
Here, I can give you her work number.
She even offered, like, you can use my telephone, you can call her at her job.
The officer did not call.
The officer did come to Mary's job many several hours later and notified her about what had happened. You know, I think the officer said to Mary that he committed suicide. And from my reading of the events, it sounds like the officer said to Mary, is there any reason why you think your son may have ended his own life? And in her I'm even at a loss for words, like I can't even imagine what's going through her mind
when you're at work and you're being told this information. Confusion, hurt, anger, sadness, all of the things.
Panic is probably the big one.
Yeah, panic, I mean all of it, So she says, I mean, I don't We had an argument about a car. You know, he was like buying a car and they had some little, you know, skirmish about a car. And so the officer took that and said, oh, well, this must have been and I believe that they wrote that in the report, like, oh, this is he ended his life after an argument with his parents about car. But mind you that he had already declared it a suicide even after or sorry, before that conversation with Mary. So
at any rate, Mary comes home. They called the coroner ruled it a suicide, and they also ordered the body to be taken to Collin's funeral home in Silver Spring. So Mary calls the funeral home or goes to the funeral home. She also calls her brother in North Carolina and asks him to come help, you know, just come help her figure all of this out. And the funeral home tells them that they can't see the body. This
is that night, that Thursday night. They tell them that they can't see the body because it's decomposed and they have to prep the body so they can't see it. They wanted to identify the body. They said, you can't see it. You have to come back in the morning. They go back in the morning. They let them see the body briefly.
You know.
According to the uncle Pete Harris, there was nothing like decomposed about his body that we couldn't look at him, touch him, you know, or just you know, spend a little time. At any rate, they gave them supposedly what was Keith's belongings, so they handed them the rope.
Geez.
Really, yeah, it's terrible. They gave him the rope and his boots and a couple of other artifacts that he had, you know, in his pockets or what heavy id and that kind of thing. They gave that to him. It's a sad situation all around, and everyone is grieving obviously. Like I said, there's there's these questions that are going through their head where they're saying something about this doesn't feel right a black man in the woods, you know.
Even according to Dallas Lip, who was the EMT on the scene, he said that when he arrived at the scene, it almost looked like Keith was sitting down.
You know. They said that he jumped off of a log.
There was no log that was anywhere in that vicinity. So there were already these things that were sort of like red flags. But the family at that time, they are these red flags and they're going something doesn't feel right. But Mary Cooey, I think, you know, she had always been trying to find out what was the you know,
what really happened. But there was also this part of them, you know, maybe not so much for Mary, but I think for some people in the family in the community, it was like, I guess that's what happened, you know, and you know, let's move on. Definitely for the police department, they thought that, you know, that was the end of the story. So Mary spent the next few years just trying to act on that instinct that something was not right.
Cut forward to nineteen ninety two. Sherry and Mary Cooey are at home and they get a knock on the door and they go into the door and there is an anonymous envelope with no return address, but it's just an envelope left on their door, and their copies of the photographs of Keith on that day when he was found hanging from the tree.
They had seen those, right, the police had showed them or.
No, no, nuts they had not seen those pictures.
Awful, So they get these.
Photos and immediately a number of additional alarm bells start to ring out, one being his shoes. He has on a pair of white tennis shoes. Whose shoes are these?
Yeah, not the boots.
Not the boots. Well, because then they had already given back the boots and they said these are this is what he had on the day of the that he was found. But you're looking at these photos and he has on white tennis shoes. He has on clothes. It's the middle of July. He has on this long sleeve shirt. It doesn't even fit him. He left the house in a pair of shorts. Now he has on a pair of jeans and a button down long sleeve shirt. There's
a person standing in the background. He's sitting on the floor. You can see the ties of the rope and the way that it's tied. Even the branch that he's supposedly hanging from wouldn't support him in order for him to be able to hang him. So so a lot more inconsistency started coming out through those photos, And honestly, I think that the photos are kind of what reopened this case in the eyes of the Warren family, but also
in terms of the media. That's when the media kind of then started to take notice and started reporting on this incident, because at that time, in nineteen eighty six, there was no report. We didn't find any there's no news stories at all about what happened to Keith in
nineteen eighty six. So when this happened with the photographs, this is what kind of opened up the case, reopened the case, and started this chain reaction of a slew of other events that took place of this family trying to get to the bottom of what happened and essentially trying to get the Montgomery County Police Department to admit that it was mishandled in the beginning because there was
no autopsy. There was no autopsy conducted, And at the end of the day, I feel like all of the issues and all of the red flags and all of the question marks surrounding this case come back to that there was no autopsy, there was no investigation conducted at the scene at all, and there's nothing to go back.
To when you spoke to Mary and Sherry, Were those your two main sources, do you think?
So we didn't speak to Mary because she had died passed away in two thousand and nine. Sorry, so she died not knowing what was happening, but Mary Kuei kept such detailed notes of everything. When we first came on the scene and we first went to Sherry's house, Sherry has in her basement boxes and boxes of documents.
It's documents upon documents upon documents.
Every single letter she wrote, every single you know, correspondence, every single phone call.
Even she documented everything.
So I kind of felt like I had Mary's voice through her writings and through all of the things that she saved. And so between that and then some of the people who were in the series that knew her, like Darryl Davis, Dell Walters, you know, one of her close friends also who doesn't appear in the dock, but she was someone that we talked to a lot. So it was like, through all of these accounts, this is kind of how we pieced together Mary's point of view the best that we could. But a big part of
that came through Sherry. So our big source of information was Sherry, and also Mary's detailed documentation of everything that had taken place starting in nineteen eighty six.
So, I mean, I know that you're looking at these photos and it is so odd based on what Mary had said, and what Sherry was confirming to you, I mean clothes and all of that stuff. And you're still evaluating as you're doing this series, you still have to evaluate, you know, as in journalism, we're having to evaluate both sides. Do you feel like Sherry was open with you and the crew one hundred percent about any kind of red
flags besides this dumb fight. It sounds like any kind of red flags coming from Keith about any kind of mental health struggles or anything like that. I mean, did you feel like, Okay, she is putting it all out there, or was this rainbows and bunny rabbits in his life was perfect?
No, not at all.
That was one of the first things that Sherry said to us, is that you know she could accept any of that.
Cherry was like, I'm not perfect, He's not.
You know. There was never a moment where she was trying to paint this picture that he was Saint Keith, you know, or anyone from that for that matter. But she would always say, but even that doesn't take away from the fact that there was no autopsy conducted. Yeah,
do you know what I mean? So like, even even if he did, that can be any number of speculations about what Keith did, who Keith was, who he dated, and that stuff comes up, you know, even even amongst ourselves of like maybe he was dating somebody he shouldn't have dated, and they were coming after her.
Whatever.
You know, there's so many things. Maybe there maybe he had a mental break, maybe there's there's so many roads you could go down. But it doesn't negate the fact that there was no autopsy, that there was no investigation, and so Sherry, So Sherry was very open about that, like, you know, okay, I'll take that if something is found he did something, or there was an argument or something. How does that negate doing a proper investigation on how he died?
Right? Yeah? And I think that's such an interesting takeaway because, especially when I talk to people about missing people or unsolved cases, they are making that big point, we want justice, we want the person behind bars. We know this was murder, and so it's interesting that this is not how Sherry and her mother felt. So let me just talk about a little bit about forensics and your impression of all
of this. This bizarro nine to one one call where the EMS thought that there was a dead body in a basement and as a reminder to listeners eighty six no cell phones, So this is a slower process. You you know, call nine one one and you're trying to get a hold of Mary, and if she's in the bathroom, she's going to miss that call and all of that. So there's this call saying that there's a body in
the basement, that that's what they heard. Did anybody in that house who seemed very wishy washy with ems person on the crutches and you know, we don't want to go back out there, did anybody come under suspicion or do you feel like there was any reason that this was odd?
Absolutely? Absolutely, I do think it was odd. One of the people in that house knew Keith. Yeah, and so yeah, I wonder if there was some kind of flub there with saying, oh basement, oh woods, you know what did they know? You know what, what does this person know that made them flub in that way? But yeah, they one of the people in that house knew Keith. It
was very bizarre. And even even the whole the way that the EMT describes that scene just is a red flag to me, like, why is there such a skifuffle about who's gonna take him to the body, and who who called? And who's gonna take him? Like why why is this such a somebody called? You know who called? And just just take them there? Like, whoever called? Just take them there? Like why is this such a you know,
will you take them? No, you're taken you And I I'm sure it is traumatic in its own way to be walking through the woods and you know, find this body there.
You know what.
We interviewed Rodney Kendall, who was who also lived in Georgian colonies and was called to to come in and and and identify this body, you know, while Keith was still in the woods. And I think he's still traumatized to this day, Like it's it's got to do something
to you to see that. So I can imagine even when the EMT shows up at the door, whoever, you know, the person who made the initial phone call, I'm sure there's a level of like, I don't want to go back and see that, right, but it's still it still feels a little weird that you made this call and you can't remember if it's brasement or woods, and you know, and now there's this whole back and forth about who's
gonna who's gonna go? You know, it just seems really especially if you've come across this body and you know that, you know you have the e MT here, there's a possibility that maybe a life could be saved, maybe, and like you're spending time, you know, going back and forth about who's going to lead the way.
A couple more questions about the folks in the house. Did you figure out what the relationship was between the person in the house and Keith? Was just this an acquaintance from around the area? Yeah, No, one close to him then, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was more of an acquaintance.
They weren't.
They weren't like, you know, close friends. It was more of just an acquaintance from from around the way. And I think that they they may have had like mutual friends, so you know, Keith may have been closer friends with someone who knew him, but it was it was more just an acquaintance.
So he did not tell his mother or his sister who the friends were. When he left, he just said I'm going, and that was normal for Keith. He was just saying, I'm bouncing out of here, I'll see you a little bit, I'll be home before Dorric or something.
Yeah.
No, yeah, he didn't tell. He didn't say who he was going with. He just left the house. I mean he had kind of a circle of friends, if you will, like Sherry tells the story about. You know, they were always over the house that would just come over and eat, play games, or watch TV or whatever. But no, to our knowledge, he did not say I'm going to such and such as house or anything like that.
So I don't know if you know the answer to this. But did they know what the distance was between this woman who found his body between her house and the woods? How long of a walk was this? Do you have any idea?
It's a little hard to say because, especially in us investigating it now, that area of woods is now it's built up, it's a housing development.
Now, what I was getting at is if something happened in the basement and we don't know what happened. You know, he's wearing odd clothes. This is this a nighttime thing? I can't remember when you what's the timeframe that we're talking about when he was discovered versus when he left the house, When was up.
He was he left at night?
He or it was almost night when he left and when his body was found, I want to say it was more morning of Thursday, like that Thursday. So he left on a Tuesday, and then that Thursday was when he was found Thursday, the thirty first.
Is this a rural part of the woods? I mean, how could he not have been obviously not off a major trail, otherwise somebody would have seen him right right.
Again, it's it's hard to get a sense of what those woods look like at that time. But from what I from what I gathered from the interviews that we've done, it doesn't It didn't sound like it was he was like deep in the woods, Like he was like back up in there.
This woman was walking her dog.
Yeah, you know, a woman was walking her dog, so you know, and she comes across this body. So again, like I'm not sure how deep those woods went at that particular time, but I don't get the sense that it was like they were far off of a beaten path.
I mean, I don't. I don't think that anyone.
You know, if you were casually driving through that development, you probably wouldn't be able to see it. But if you walked a few steps in and you were walking a dog, you would be able to see.
This, Okay, So I mean I guess what I had been thinking was that something happened in the basement, and it happened at night. Could they have conceivably carried him dead strangled, you know, from this house into wherever he was found in the woods. It's risky, but if it's in the middle of the night, two or three in the morning, I guess that's what I was thinking. But it does sound kind of complicated to sort out what
that distance would be. And I mean, if you have enough people, you can carry one person anywhere if you need it to.
Yeah, again, it's it's hard.
One of our big challenges with the show is trying to piece together what this neighborhood used to look like, and trying to piece it together through people who won't talk to you, yeah, you know, in terms of like the people who were there, and then trying to piece it together also with you know, someone like the EMT who was very open about what he saw, but you know,
he came after the fact, right right. But one of the things we did learn is that the way that the community used to be sort of designed at the time was the woods were sort of behind the houses. So now there's so many, you know, housing developments that are there that everything is kind of like back to back. So when you look when you're in someone's backyard, for example, you're looking at more house, there's like a little bit
of woods, but it's like more houses. And my understanding is that it used to be that it was just all woods back there, So I guess before that other development was built. So that has gone through our mind that that could be a possibility that something happened in that house in the basement and Keith was dragged out into the woods out the back.
It could have been anything. They could have drugged him, he could have been drunk, because they never did toxicology or anything on him exactly.
So after the photos were found in nineteen ninety two, it kind of kicked off this new investment.
It was Liker.
It made it brand new and now you know Mary, it kind of solidified or confirmed everything that Mary and Sherry had been thinking all along that something was not right, and that's how they you know, they went back to the police station, but also they went to local news and you know, they started reporting about it. At any rate, they actually had the body exhumed because they were like, we're going to do our own autopsy.
Wow.
So they had their body, they raised money and had the body exumed and got you know, forensics to do a an autopsy. So mind you this was several years later. But they found high doses of TCE in his system. There were things found in his system that it's like it could be embalming, it could not be embalming, like it's it raised some red flags about what was in his system. And so going back to your to your point, there is a possibility there. I think that something maybe
happened in the house. Maybe he was at a party and maybe he was poisoned.
Maybe maybe it was drugs.
We don't know, but there could have been something that happened there. If it's a bunch of teenagers going, oh my god, you know, freaking out, oh crap, like what happened, and they take him out and stage it to look like it was something other than what it was, it's a possibility. But again because there was no initial autopsy done. Yeah, we don't know who had.
Is this are these police photos? Who had access to these photos six years later that they could have anonymously dropped them off? Is it just the police do you think.
That's a good question?
And you know, another question that has never really been answered. I mean, these were copies, the ones that were dropped off at Mary's house were copies of police photos. So that's also been a question you know throughout, is like was this an inside job? Was this someone at the police department who realized something was awry and tried to give tip them off and give them a heads up?
Who could have left these?
There were no there was no return address left, right, So it's just very odd, like who would do that and what? And it was The other thid part about it is it was on Keith's birthday, which I don't know, it could be a coincidence that it was left that day, but that's so.
Specific something is happening with his friends, because that's that's weird. One thing that is always been a tragedy because I you know, I told you, you know, I work most of the time with historical crimes. What is so frustrating to me is what could be done now in these kind of crimes. And it's just I mean, you know, I know enough about you know, strangling with rope, where you've got somebody gripping on and you know, you can sometimes get DNA because that person's trying to get out
of the rope, right and they might scratch them. And that, to me is the tragic part of this is if they had just done some simple things, some swabs under his nails, something like that, I mean, anything that would have been difficult. I'm going to ask one more thing that I had forgotten to ask. So the police, nobody's reported any kind of at the funeral home, nobody reported any kind of trauma on him, right, Like there's no bruises or scratches or anything weird like that.
No, And it's weird because you know, like I said earlier, the funeral home said that his body was decomposed and you can't come and see the body and all this kind of stuff. But like, there wasn't any reports of any scratches, you know. We talked to Roger Mitchell, who is a medical examiner. He now works at Howard University and he's in the dock. But he talks about those signs of strangulation when they did that autopsy. You can
look at the signs. You can look at the neck, you can look at blood vessels, you can none of these were obstructed his neck, his spine, his chest, his eyes. Nothing indicated strangulation, you know, or hanging. There was there was no evidence of that in that report. So that's another thing of like a red flag that just physically the body, his body did not show signs of doing that to himself.
Yeah, it doesn't add up with the exception of Mary and Sherry. You must know more about this case than anybody else. What is your sense about what happened? I mean, just flat out what do you think? What is the most plausible thing that happened to Keith that night?
The best thing I can say, I do think something happened with his friends. I think something happened that night, whether it was a party, whether it was just a gathering or something I can't put my finger on, you know, what the event was and why, meaning was it an argument or you know, or just playing around and something went awry. But I do think something happened that night with his friends. My sense is that these friends were
trying to cover up something whatever. They were trying to cover up whatever happened in that house so that they wouldn't get in trouble for whatever. I'm not, you know, like I said, it could have been an accident. It could have or maybe it was malicious. But I think that they were trying to cover up something that happened, and in them trying to cover it, I think they did a botch job in trying to cover it up by making it look like he tied himself to a tree.
And on top of.
That, you had a police department who did not do what they were supposed to do, and you know, arrived on the scene and then you know, say, oh, we're just gonna sweep this under the rug. We're gonna label it this way, and let's all move on with our lives. There's also I mean, I won't go into all of this, but there's rumors and there's talks about the police department, the Montgomery County Police Department. The officer in particular, does he know the people, you know, in terms of the
people who were in that house, you know. So I just think that something happened in the house, they tried to cover it up, and in their trying to cover it up, the police came and covered up the cover up. So I think that there were multiple things happening in this case, and everything just went around and I think everything went awry, especially when the photos showed up at Mary Coui's store.
You said that those photos kind of reignited this investigation. Is Keith's case an open case right now? With silver Spring.
Even that is a big question mark.
So at the time when we were doing this series, when you talk to Chief Manger, who was the chief of police at that time, he would say, Oh, yes, the police messed up. The police have botched up this case. We're going to reopen the case. But then when you talk to the Montgomery County Police Department, they say it's closed. So even within their own department, there's not an agreement on whether the case is open or not.
Yeah, So I would.
Imagine that if today, if we were to go to Montgomery County and ask the police department, they'd probably say the case is closed. Yeah, But like I said, there's discrepancy there on whether it's officially an open or close case.
If someone has information on what happened to you know, Keith Warren, what should be done? How would they be able to pass on information?
Do you think I think a good way is to, you know, contact Sherry Warren.
You can contact myself, you.
Can get you know, if anyone has any type of information, even though you know, like I said, their whole thing was not to find out, you always want that closure. If someone knows anything by all means, I would say,
reach out to any of us first. Like you said, I don't know that reaching out to the police department would be the way to go initially, But if there's anyone that wanted to talk or that or that was a witness on that night, or you know, just has any information that they could share, by all means, please let us know.
Gosh, I hope that something happens, especially if this is murder, there's somebody out there that either knows something more than we do or did something very bad to this young man who is going to college. Sounds like he has a wonderful future. So you know, my hope is with this show, with you know, people watching, I mean, I just watched your show. It's out there. I'm hoping that something new comes. And it's so awful that Mary died
without having any answers. But let's hope that Sherry in you, because you're invested in this, can finally get some kind of closure to the story.
Yes, that would be amazing, and it would be a big Like you said, you use the right word is closure. You know, just that sense of just finding out what happened. There's just so many loose threads, just yeah, to find out answers would be a huge help.
I would imagine it would be like having somebody who's missing and you've never found the body, but you just know they're gone, they're dead, but you've never located the body. I mean that level of like emptiness, and I'm so sorry that Mary died without being able to feel that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very sad. It's very sad that she was never able to get to the body. You know, she died fighting this. She died trying to figure out you know, that's cherry believe, because it was like a really weird, mysterious illness that she came down with and she died like within a matter of days. It just happened so fast. And the thinking is that it's just you know, you build up that stress and anger and hurt and sometimes
it manifests itself in the body. And I do believe that she died trying to get to the bottom of this and trying to find out what happened, which is why I was so grateful for Sherry of you know, picking up the mantle and carrying it forward and going through this whole process of reliving everything for this docu series and kind of taking up that mantle for her mom. It's very unfortunate that she passed not knowing.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast to More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode
was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod