911 Operator:  911, what is your emergency?

Mark:  My wife has been shot.

911 Operator:  Who shot her?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  How long ago did this happen?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Okay. Did you just find her?

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  Where in the house is she?

Mark:  In the bathroom.

911 Operator:  Where is she shot?

Mark:  In the neck.

911 Operator:  Okay. I want you to lay the phone down, go in there and see if she’s got a pulse and see if she’s breathing, then come back to the phone.

Mark:  Right. She’s dead.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley:  I’m Yeardley.

Zibby:  And I’m Zibby. And we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley:  So, we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby:  To sit down with us and share their most interesting cases.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  And I’m Dave.

Dan:  We’re identical twins.

Dave:  And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan:  Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave:  Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan:  Names, locations, and certain details of these cases have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.

[music]

Zibby:  If these walls could talk is a case that we cover over two episodes, this marks Part 1 of 2.

Yeardley:  A husband breathlessly calls 911 to say that he just arrived home to find his wife dead of a gunshot wound. As the 911 operator immediately dispatches officers to the scene, she tries to get as much information as possible about what happened. But the husband’s odd behavior during the call raises some serious red flags. Lieutenant Scott returns to Small Town Dicks with another shocking case that involves clandestine recordings, suspect interviews, and good old fashioned detective work.

 Today on Small Town Dicks, we are so pleased to welcome back Lieutenant Scott.

Scott:  Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeardley:  And we have the usual suspects.

Dan:  Detective Dan. Glad to be here.

Dave:  Detective Dave. Good to see you.

Yeardley:  So, Lieutenant Scott, you have a really fascinating case for us today. Tell us how it comes to you.

Scott:  Okay, so this all began April 3rd, 1996, with a 911 call at about 10:00 PM. Mark, the caller, called 911 and reported that his wife had been shot. So, that prompted, obviously, an emergency response. But his behavior on the phone was really, very peculiar and became the point of scrutiny from the very beginning. The call taker did a really good job of making inquiry.

 Sometimes dispatchers, they work in this call driven environment, and they try to triage calls. And so, their focus is to take control, and sometimes they end up unwittingly over speaking, so information that we could glean from a conversation gets sidetracked because the call taker is not listening. In this case, she really did a good job of obtaining information, calling attention to things that were suspicious. Mark kept going away from the phone.

 Initially, he was directed to go away from the phone by the dispatcher to check on Rebecca.

Yeardley:  Who’s his wife.

Scott:  That’s his wife. Yeah. But then throughout the call, he kept going away from the phone. Just without warning, he just disappeared.

Zibby:  Was he at home, making this call at home, saying his wife was shot at home?

Scott:  Yes. They lived together just a little bit east of the campus in this university town. At one point, you notice on a review as investigators, that he would talk to himself. He seemed to be processing thoughts out loud. After police arrived and started talking to him, they noticed that his tone of voice would go really low, almost robotic, but he would say some things that you could hear, like these excited utterances, as we call them, I guess things like, “Oh, God, what am I going to do?” But his voice would lower.

 At one point, during the 911 call, he makes this whisper, and maybe for the sake of discussion, I won’t tell you what I think he says, because I don’t know that we ever figured out exactly what he says. I have a theory about what he said, but it’s clear that he’s processing things out loud to himself, and that ends up becoming really material in this investigation.

Yeardley:  In your presence, he’s processing things to himself.

Scott:  Mm-hmm.

Zibby:  How old is he, by the way?

Scott:  He was 43 years old at the time.

Zibby:  Okay. Did he have an apparent mental illness, or this just seemed to be a part of his character?

Scott:  He seemed to have his faculties about him. He seemed otherwise– He actually is very intelligent. Just had a high school education, but his IQ was pretty high. I mean, he was a pretty smart guy. He used a pretty expansive vocabulary. He seemed to be tracking.

Yeardley:  What do you mean by that?

Dan:  He’s following along with the conversation, just fine.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Scott:  But under stress, he had this quirk, and he would just talk out loud to himself.

Dave:  And not like Tourette’s.

Scott:  Not like Tourette’s. It was like I’m talking to myself outside myself to myself. It was really strange.

Dan:  We could listen to the 911 call, and I guarantee it’s going to prompt some questions.

Scott:  Yeah.

Dan:  The other side of this is, his actions during the 911 call really dictate the response by you guys and why he was initially detained.

Scott:  Right.

Dan:  I think we should listen to it.

Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Yeah, let’s listen to it.

911 Operator:  911, what is your emergency?

Mark:  My wife has been shot.

911 Operator:  What?

Mark:  My wife has been shot.

911 Operator:  What’s the address? [beep] Who shot her?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  How long ago did this happen?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Okay. Did you just find her?

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  What is your name? [beep] Is she alive?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Okay. Where’s the gun?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Where in the house is she?

Mark:  In the bathroom.

911 Operator:  Where is she shot?

Mark:  In the neck.

911 Operator:  Okay. I want you to lay the phone down, go in there and see if she’s got a pulse.

Mark:  Okay.

911 Operator:  If she’s breathing, then come back to the phone.

Mark:  Right. She’s dead.

911 Operator:  Okay. Why do you say that?

Mark:  She has no pulse.

911 Operator:  Okay. Did you look to see if she was breathing?

Mark:  Yeah, she’s not breathing.

911 Operator:  Okay. When did you last see her alive?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Did you see her this morning?

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  Okay. Have you been gone all this time?

Mark:  Hello?

911 Operator:  Where’s the gun?

Mark:  I don’t know.

911 Operator:  Did you see it in there?

Mark:  No.

911 Operator:  You didn’t see it in the bathroom?

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  Okay. Do you own a gun?

Mark:  No.

911 Operator:  Okay. I want you to tell me how you found her.

Mark:  On the floor.

911 Operator:  Okay. But how did you come into the house?

Mark:  Door [beep]

911 Operator:  I need you to stay on the phone. Okay. Don’t leave the phone again, all right? You understand that?

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  Okay. When did you last see your wife? I need to know how long ago this happened.

 Why do you keep leaving the phone? I need you on the phone. I need some answers, okay? I don’t want my officers to go in there with their guns drawn. I need you to understand something, okay? Right now, I don’t have any answers to any of my questions. If the officers get there and you’re not cooperating, they’re going to come in with their guns drawn.

Mark:  Yeah.

911 Operator:  All right? I need you to go outside with your hands up and meet the officers. Keep your hands up where they can see them, okay? All right. Go do that now.

Mark:  All right.

[call disconnects]

Zibby:  Okay. Holy shit.

Dan:  I think what first struck me about this call is he immediately says, “She was shot.”

Scott:  Exactly.

Dan:  How does he know?

Scott:  Right. Because he doesn’t have a gun.

Dan:  And he specifically says in the neck.

Scott:  Right.

Dave:  I had listened to the 911 call last night, as well as some other recordings, but I’ve never read a report on this or anything like that. But I remember listening to the 911 call, and then hearing you describing her injuries, and I had a, “Oh, there’s an issue with his 911 call.” And it’s you, Scott. You couldn’t readily tell where this injury was based on all the bleeding. And on the 911 call, the husband, Mark, is pretty clear where the injury was.

Scott:  Exactly. So, that’s a problem for him right off the bat.

Dan:  Mm-hmm.

Dave:  And he doesn’t see a gun. I love the breathiness of most of the answers are him exhaling when he says, yes. When he’s asked, “Do you own a gun?” “No.” Just flat.

Scott:  Just very flat. To me, it feels like this heavy breathing is contrived. Sounds like a rehearsed sort of a [quick breathing]

Dan:  I have to sound frantic on the phone to make it believable.

Scott:  And then when you ask these benign questions, [quick breathing] he’s doing his thing. And then she asks about the gun. “No.” And “on the floor.” It’s just strange. It’s a tell, right?

Dan and Dave:  Yeah.

Dave:  So, I noticed, also the dispatcher, I’m guessing she was fairly experienced, because you can tell with her poise and the way she’s wording her questions on that call that I’m recognizing, I’m like, “This is a veteran. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s calling him out when her what the hell meter is going off with his behavior,” that is absolutely bizarre, based on 911 calls we’ve all heard before. We’re like, “Where is he going? He’s already told us that she’s dead.”

Scott:  Right. Yeah. When he returns to the phone from these trips, you can hear him in the background muttering and murmuring as he comes to the phone. It almost makes you think that somebody else is there. It turns out there’s not. It’s just him talking to himself.

Dave:  The clanging in the background, I know nothing about what the scene looked like, but is he trying to set this up to look like a burglary? But I’m hearing cabinets opening and closing.

Zibby:  Also, I felt like in the one instance where she did tell him to put the phone down and go check to see if she had a pulse, it actually didn’t sound like he put the phone down. I heard him breathing that whole time, nearly into the phone or just off the phone. Whereas all the other times, you heard very distinctly when he went, put the phone down and went away from it, which I find strange.

Scott:  Right. Yeah.

Zibby:  And then he goes, “No, she’s dead. She has no pulse.” But that was the one time it actually didn’t sound like he fully put the phone down and went anywhere.

Dan:  He didn’t have to go check on her. He already knew.

Dave:  Am I the only one who picked up a female sounding intonation in the back, like there was another person present in that house?

Dan:  Yup. You’re the only one, Dave.

Dave:  Well–

Yeardley:  I don’t know.

Zibby:  No.

Yeardley:  Logan is nodding along with you.

Zibby:  Logan, our silent editor.

Dave:  But, you know, I’m a senior detective, so.

Zibby:  [laughs]

Dave:  No, you hear the clanging and bumping and the creep factor. I got tingles when he did the little mumbling part. I was like, “Oh, God.”

Scott:  Yeah, it gets better. It gets better, believe me.

Yeardley:  It sounds like he’s lifting heavy things when he goes away from the telephone.

Scott:  Of course, we don’t have the benefit of knowing where he was with the phone. This is back in 1996. So, the phone is attached. In this case, it’s attached to a long cord, and the cord goes everywhere in the house. He could have carried that phone all around throughout the house, but he deliberately didn’t.

 Now, the first time, the dispatcher directs him to set the phone down, and so you can see how he might do that just out of instruction and stress. But throughout the call, he continues to leave the phone and move away. Later, of course, we suspect that the reason he’s moving away is because he’s doing things within the crime scene. He’s probably already spent time at the crime scene, adjusting things and maneuvering things, maybe to fit his story. But he continues throughout, I think because he seems to be disorganized, right?

Dan:  He’s double checking his work.

Scott:  Right.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Scott:  Exactly. So, yeah, as Dave said, there’s a creep factor to his behavior. Just very, very strange and very callous, cold sounding.

Dave:  You contrast that with Season 1, where we have Eric, who’s just stabbed his girlfriend to death and left her at the bottom of the stairs, and his tone and intonation and the way he’s answering questions, the contrast between the two is pretty distinctive.

Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Now, there’s always that argument of, while everybody responds differently to traumatic events, but there is that thing that we’ve all talked about in all these cases where the hair on the back of your neck stands up and says, “Something is not right about this.” Can we talk about what we all think he said?

Dave:  Want to go around the room?

Zibby:  Yeah.

Dan:  What we think he said?

Scott:  Yeah, you guys go first. I’ll tell you what I thought.

Dave:  Oh, I get to go first?

Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  Honestly, I’d like to hear it three or four times, because I didn’t know to be looking for it.

Scott:  I played it over and over and over again. And of course, this is before digital media. So, it was rewind, play it, rewind, play it. Listen to it hundreds of times.

Zibby:  Can we just hear that one section one more time?

911 Operator:  When did you last see your wife? I need to know how long ago this happened. Why do you keep leaving the phone?

[call disconnects]

Dave:  I got the creepy tingles again. I was like, “Oh, ah, ah, ah, ah.”

Dan:  Did you hear it that time?

Dave:  I’m still, like, “Oh, my God.” Something, “Oh, my God.”

Dan:  Literally, what I thought he said is, “Oh, my God, I got to do something with a gun.”

Scott:  Yeah, I heard, “Oh, my God. I got to go hide the gun. I can see it,” is what I thought I heard him say. You know, “Oh, my God, I got to go hide the gun.”

Dave:  Right. Like, her questions prompt him to go, “Oh, this is the part of the crime scene I have fucked up on right now.”

Scott:  Uh-huh.

Zibby:  Did you hear that, Dave? Like, what did you hear in that?

Dave:  I heard, “Oh, my God.”

Scott:  See, the problem is, it’s that suggestive power. Once you say it, then you hear it, right?

Zibby:  I didn’t hear it.

Yeardley:  I thought he said, “Oh, my God, what have I done?”

Zibby:  I thought he said, “I can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe I did it.”

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Scott:  And this is how it was with our investigators too. We had the same go around– It was almost like you had to write your thought on a piece of paper, because as soon as you say what you heard, everybody else– [crosstalk]

Dave:  You’ve infected everybody else.

Scott:  Yeah, everybody else is impacted by it.

Zibby:  Holy shit.

Scott:  The bottom line is, he is processing thoughts out loud.

[Break 1]

Zibby:  How suspicious were you all of Mark, upon arriving to the scene? And if there was any modicum of suspicion when you got there, how did that grow or lessen once you were actually dealing with him?

Scott:  Patrol officers who responded and ended up detaining him, initially. When they sat him in their car, they noticed that he was behaving really bizarrely, depending on our level of experience. That includes not just law enforcement experience, but life experience. Having experienced or seen people when they’re grieving, when there’s a loss, there’s a broad spectrum of behaviors. But his behavior, by any measure, was really just inappropriate. It wasn’t appropriate for the circumstances.

Yeardley:  How do you mean?

Scott:  Well, not once did he really ask about his wife or lament in any significant way her death.

Yeardley:  Really?

Scott:  When we got there, when the detectives arrived, the patrol officers, of course, will give you an assessment, or they’ll brief you about what’s going on, because we want to know right off the bat, so what do we have here?

Zibby:  When they arrived on the scene, was she dead?

Scott:  She was dead. Mm-hmm. So, the officers, when they got there, he had been directed by the dispatcher to come out on the porch, and so he came out with his hands up, and he complied with their commands. They basically drew him off the porch and detained him.

 By detaining, I mean just by the environment. They didn’t handcuff him right away or anything like that. So, immediately, they are saying, “Something’s up here. This guy is behaving really bizarre.” I think at that time in the field, they didn’t necessarily know all of his behaviors that we hear on the 911 call. I think it’s probably safe to assume that our dispatcher was saying, “This guy keeps leaving the phone.” She’s probably relaying to the troops that are on their way there that, “Something is going on here. There’s a gunshot wound victim. We’re on the line with the husband, but he keeps leaving the phone. He’s acting really bizarre.”

Dave:  For her to even offer– When my police officers get there, I don’t want them having to go in there with their guns drawn. That is an exceptional circumstance. Obviously, the circumstances dictate how we would do that. But for her to even offer that, most dispatchers wouldn’t have been like, “Hey, I’m recognizing that you’re acting really hinked up right now, and I’m letting you know.”

Scott:  Right. And there’s a gun involved.

Dave:  And he claims not to have one.

Scott:  Exactly.

Dave:  So, patrol response, walk us through what they encountered when they get to the house.

Scott:  Yeah, they encounter him in the yard. He had been directed there by the dispatcher. They called inside. No answer. They go through the house, and the officers find Rebecca laying next to the bathtub. It was a really, grisly scene. There was a bathtub with seven or eight inches of water, and the water was clouded significantly with blood.

 You couldn’t tell on initial observation what had actually happened to her. She was covered in blood from her head to just above her belly button. There’s the blood stain, basically, stops right about where her navel is. Implying later, of course, when we evaluate that it looks like she’d been in the water when she was shot and bleeding.

Zibby:  Was she naked?

Scott:  She was naked.

Zibby:  Hmm.

Scott:  Yeah. The bullet penetrated through her body and exited just below her left shoulder in the scapula area, struck the bathtub. There was a significant dent in the metal tub. The porcelain was broken off. Ultimately, we found the slug in the bathtub. At some point, she gets out, and there’s blood transfer on the tub side where she had climbed out. She’s in a pool of blood on the floor. She laid there and bled to death.

Yeardley:  Oh, jeez.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Scott:  So, the officers see right away that this is what looks to be a homicide scene. They can’t tell where her injury is. In fact, we don’t actually discover the gunshot wound that Mark so vividly describes until we actually get to the autopsy, and we clean her off, and we see the gunshot wound of entry that we talk about above the collarbone in the throat.

Yeardley:  And you said that by the time the police arrived, the blood on Rebecca’s body was dry. So, that would indicate that there was a fair amount of time between when she died and when Mark found her. So, what was his story? “I was out, and I don’t know when she was shot. I just came home and I found her dead?”

Scott:  Yes. And so, one is left to intuit from that he discovered her, and then immediately called and it turns out that does not appear to have been the case.

Yeardley:  Hmm.

Dave:  Does it appear that she scrambles out of the bathtub, or as if she’s pulled out of the bathtub? Is there any water that goes out from the bathroom linoleum floor out onto the carpet?

Scott:  That’s a good question. It was really hard to determine that, because you know wet. So, there’s not that telltale smudging. Maybe a handprint. There was a handprint in blood that we later attributed to Mark. Not remarkable, however, his hand had been in blood at some point. But when we contact him, his hands are clean.

Dave:  Any sign of forced entry?

Scott:  No sign of forced entry.

Dave:  Any sign of burglary or some sort of property crime that happened inside?

Scott:  Nothing.

Zibby:  How about sign of a struggle within the house?

Scott:  No. The crime scene really is that bathroom. It’s a bloody scene, when you have blood and water. Blood on hard surfaces, it’s a linoleum floor and you spill a little bit of blood and it looks like a lot. Dan and Dave can talk about that too. It always looks like more than it is. But when you have water in the mix, it just spreads out. It was a really horrific, grisly looking scene.

Yeardley:  And when you get him to the station, what is his affect? Is he still doing the heavy breathing and seeming traumatized, or is his affect now completely dead, just no expression?

Scott:  My recollection is. There’s this underlying me theme about Mark. He seems to be concerned about himself.

Yeardley:  Narcissist?

Scott:  Exactly. He’s just got this, “I don’t know what I should do. What am I supposed to do, those kinds of things, about me?” Before we transported him over to the station, I was there with another detective, and we were introduced to him. My partner sat in the backseat of the car with him while I stood outside the door, and he asks, “What happened?” “I don’t know,” Mark says. We ask for his consent to search the house. “Why?” “Because we want to find who killed your wife.” “I don’t know if I should do that,” he says.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Scott:  “What do you mean, why?”

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Scott:  What do you mean, I can’t search your house?”

Yeardley:  “And you called us.”

Scott:  Yeah. “Your wife was just murdered.” So, obviously, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize at this scene that something is amiss and that he’s in the center of it somehow.

Dan:  Does he at any point suggest that she’s killed herself?

Scott:  No. No, he doesn’t.

Dave:  Do you, guys, Mirandize him at the scene, back at the station? When does that happen?

Scott:  Yeah, we. Mirandize him at the scene, right there during the introduction.

Yeardley:  Does he ask then for a lawyer? Are you required then to get a search warrant to search the house, because he hasn’t actually given consent. How do you navigate that?

Scott:  So, a couple things. If he’s not giving us consent, this is a high consequence case. We have to obtain a warrant to search. We want to go about it the right way. Obviously, Rebecca can’t give consent. Mark is there. He’s not giving us consent. Those are sending red flags off for us. But we have to apply for a search warrant.

 It’s a painstaking process. You have to establish cause for it. In other words, we do believe we have a murder scene. We describe the fact that she was apparently discovered by Mark. We would describe all those circumstances that we have there at the scene to get the warrant. And so, while that’s taking place, Mark agrees to go with us back to the station. Ultimately, he asks, “Do I need a lawyer?” And the investigator says, “I don’t know if you need a lawyer.” “Did you kill your wife?”

Yeardley:  Hmm.

Scott:  He doesn’t answer, just looks away. And then he says, “I think I should get a lawyer.”

Yeardley:  Wow.

Dave:  That question seems like an easy answer, if you didn’t kill your wife.

Scott:  Exactly.

[Break 2]

Scott:  He’s very careful. Clearly, he’s a man with a high IQ, but he’s also not very good under stress. We can all relate to that at one level or another. But he’s one of those guys who under stress. I think he even surprised himself. He thought he was prepared when he made the phone call, obviously, because he had time to prepare for it. But as soon as he started talking, he started going, “Shit show,” right away. It’s pretty clear on the phone. He acts like he’s not ready for it. Like, somebody handed him the phone and said, “It’s the police,” right?

Dave:  Right. Like, all the things that he had thought about, his mind turns into a soup sandwich, and now he’s going, “I forgot about the gun. Forgot about this, forgot about that. Hang on, I know we’re on the phone with 911, but I got a few things I got to handle before your people show up.”

Scott:  Right. After he invoked and asserted his desire for a lawyer, we left him in a holding cell. At our station at the time, we had a mesh steel grid door with an outer solid door. So, there were two doors. So, we left the outer solid door open, and we posted an investigator around the corner from him for 10 hours.

Yeardley:  Ten hours? That’s a long time.

Zibby:  Is that protocol for murder suspects to station an officer nearby in case anything is inadvertently revealed?

Scott:  Normally, you check him once in a while. But because we were intrigued by his aptitude to just start talking, we posted somebody out of his sight with a pad and pen and listening.

Zibby:  Why not a recorder? Just curious. Is it because it was 1996?

Scott:  Well, no, we had an 8-track. No.

[laughter]

Scott:  Yeah. Under those circumstances, you’d have to have consent.

Zibby:  I see. Okay.

Yeardley:  But it’s okay to have somebody sitting around the corner taking notes.

Scott:  Sure. Yeah.

Yeardley:  Interesting.

Scott:  Yeah. So, what the investigator noticed is that there was a lot of this self-talk going on, and he was just sort of saying things like, “Oh, God, what should I do?” And it was under his breath, this monotone, like you heard him when he would say on the floor during the 911 call. So, that theme kept presenting. And so, we noted that. We went back out, and we searched that house.

 We brought out a crew from the city, and we ran one of those trucks that they used to suck up leaves from the gutters during the fall. We adapted that thing, and we got it up into the attic and we sucked every bit of insulation out of that attic. We did end up finding a holster up there for a handgun. We found ammunition for a .357 revolver.

Zibby:  Which is funny stuff to have if you don’t have a gun.

Scott:  Exactly. But we never found the gun. We were up there for hours looking for that. Tore the house apart, tore down part of a false wall up in the attic in order to access more attic. We felt certain because of his behavior on the phone that it had to be within arm’s reach, and we were missing it. You guys know how that is. It’s like, “I know it’s here. Where in the hell could it be?” We used metal detectors on the walls, and ceiling and outside around the curtilage of the house.

Yeardley:  Was there anything strange inside the house that made you think that Mark was the guy?

Scott:  What we did find a lot of were bottles of wine, different bottles of wine everywhere.

Zibby:  Empty?

Scott:  Partially consumed, stashed around. We’re developing this character description of this guy. He’s an alcoholic. He’s got wine stashed everywhere. We found no guns, but if we were looking for wine bottles, it was a jackpot. They were everywhere, out in the shed, in a bag, hanging on the wall, inside the bag is a corked bottle, partially consumed.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Yeardley:  So strange.

Scott:  We exhausted our search, and then we started to gather information about the relationship. It was pretty clear that their relationship had been pretty rocky.

Zibby:  Where do you get that info?

Scott:  She had confided in friends. So, we had done a canvas for witnesses immediately around the scene, and then we started to expand it out to friends. As word got out, people started to come forward. Rebecca had worked at the university, and she was a relationship counselor. She had her master’s degree in family counseling.

Yeardley:  How ironic.

Scott:  Yeah. And so, she worked part time at the university, and then she had also started her own practice. But she had shared with friends that were close to her, both in person and even in writing. We were given access to a letter that she wrote to a friend describing an abusive relationship with Mark.

Zibby:  Physically abusive?

Scott:  Physically abusive, psychologically abusive. One woman described her coming to work with marks on her arm.

Yeardley:  Was she planning on leaving him or–

Scott:  She had, in fact, one night left and stayed with a friend, a male friend, overnight, somebody that she knew professionally. And that person thought that she was formulating an escape plan. I think she lost her nerve and went back. She was a very religious person. She quoted Bible scripture, and circumstances reminded her of certain scriptures. And so, she really felt like it was her purpose to save Mark.

 We learned from her friend that she had been a virgin until she was married to Mark. Mark, in contrast, had been married before. He was sexually experienced. He was rough with her. She reported that to friends, that he was very aggressive sexually, that he talked down to her, that he demeaned her.

Yeardley:  It’s so cowardly.

Scott:  I see Dan nodding his head and shaking his head, both Dan and Dave, “We’ve seen this. It’s classic.” It is ironic that she has this counseling background, but it’s like anything else, she’s so close to it. She doesn’t realize what she’s looking at in the mirror.

Yeardley:  What was the age difference between them?

Scott:  So he was 43 and she’s 41.

Yeardley:  Oh, so not so much. Not as though she was 20 something and he was twice her age.

Scott:  Right.

Dave:  How long were they married?

Scott:  I think they were married about four years. Yeah.

Zibby:  That was fairly new. When you canvassed the area and spoke to the neighbors, did you ask if anyone had heard gunshots?

Scott:  Nobody heard anything.

Zibby:  Really?

Scott:  Yeah, nobody heard anything. It’s interesting how many times I’ve been on scenes where there’s been gunfire inside of a house, especially, and people don’t hear it. Or, they may hear it, and maybe in retrospect, they’ll look back at it and go, “You know what? I did hear something.” But the last thing most people are anticipating hearing in their neighborhood is gunfire, and so they put it off as something else.

Yeardley:  Sure.

Dave:  I went to a recent suicide a few months ago, that it’s a .357, the suicide was outside in the carport area. Someone, the neighboring property, 10ft away, just separated by the outer wall of the house, just thought it was a car backfiring about a block or two away.

Dan:  You find reasons to justify what you heard.

Yeardley:  So, you have him at the station, but now he’s asked for a lawyer, so you can’t keep questioning him. What do you do?

Zibby:  Yeah.

Scott:  He remains there with us, because we have to process him for trace evidence. So, we’re paying attention to his clothing, his hands. The officers noticed at the scene, trained police officers are going to look for evidence, right when they get there, and they look at him and they don’t see any blood. His hands are remarkably clean. He’s wearing some sort of slippers with white socks, sweats, T-shirt. He’s clean.

Dan:  And if my loved one’s on the ground covered in blood, I’m going to have blood all over me, because I’m going to be trying to save a life.

Scott:  Save her, hold her, something.

Dave:  It’s also interesting that he’s in attire like, “You would come home, take your work clothes off, go get comfortable.” And now he’s got his deer foam slippers on.

Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  He doesn’t have anything on him that would suggest that I was just in this blood covered bathroom.

Scott:  Right. And so, we’re taking fingernail scrapings, we’re processing him, but at the same time, we’re not in a big hurry to do this. This is a rapidly developing case, but at the same time, it’s in slow motion. We all know as investigators that this time period is critical, and so we don’t want to miss anything. He’s a captive audience. He wants a lawyer, great. But we still have him to process him.

 And so, we’re taking different samples of body hair. We are swabbing his hands. We’re looking for gunshot residue on his hands. We are swabbing his clothing. We’re seizing his clothing. So, yeah, we hang on to him. That process takes quite a while. We’re also establishing a plan because we know we got to let him go, but we’re not going to take our eyes off of him either. So, we set up a surveillance plan, and we have that in place when we have to let him go.

Zibby:  What’s that plan?

Scott:  That plan is, we know that the gun’s missing, and we suspect that he’s a shooter. We don’t know where he went and what he did, but he seems disorganized. So, we’re thinking, as soon as he gets an opportunity, he’s going to go and clean up, do something, fix whatever he has forgotten about, because he’s not very good stress responder.

 So, when we discharge him, he’s wearing our trademark green jumpsuit. He’s got a green sort of smock and matching green pants and sandals and out he goes. And so, of course, we’ve got a shadow for him waiting outside that being detectives, and we follow him.

Yeardley:  Where did he go, and how did he get there?

Scott:  He asked us on his way out to get a ride to a local hotel. So, we took him to the hotel and he booked himself in. That makes it pretty easy for us to watch him. So, he got situated in his room, and we watched him while we still have his house secured and we told him very clearly, “Don’t go to the house. We will tell you when you can get back in the house. But we are still processing it. We’re trying to find your wife’s killer. So, we have it by court authority for five days.”

Zibby:  Silly question. Did somebody grab him clothes, so that he could change out of the green jumpsuit, or he just went to a hotel and all he had to work with was that?

Scott:  That’s all he had. So, he went to a hotel.

Yeardley:  I’m just wondering if you work at the hotel and this dude shows up in his green prison overalls, do you go, “Oh, shit, the police took your clothes because they clearly have evidentiary value in some horrible case-

Zibby:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  -and then smoking or nonsmoking floor, sir?”

[laughter]

Zibby:  Really good point.

Dan:  It gave him a room.

Zibby:  Right. Okay, so then what?

Scott:  As soon as he got checked in, our surveillance team watched him go across the street to a store. He got a T-shirt and then he went to another store and came out with a bag. And then shortly thereafter appeared on the balcony drinking–

Yeardley and Scott:  Wine.

Scott:  Thank you.

[music]

Yeardley:  Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith, and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby:  This episode was edited by Soren Begin, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley:  Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby:  If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com. And become our pal on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from our Small Town Fam. So, hit us up.

Yeardley:  Yeah. And also, we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes. And we’re part of Stitcher Premium now.

Zibby:  That’s right. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll be supporting our podcast. That way, we can keep going to small towns across the country and bringing you the finest in rare true crime cases, told, as always, by the detectives who investigated them. Thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley:  Nobody’s better than.

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