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

911 Operator:  Previously, on Part 1–

Scott:  This all began April 3rd, 1996 with a 911 call.

911 Operator:  What is your emergency?

Mark:  My wife has been shot.

911 Operator:  Where is she shot?

Mark:  In the neck.

Dave:  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. His behavior was very peculiar and became the point of scrutiny from the very beginning. He is processing thoughts out loud. We told him very clearly, “Don’t go to the house. We have it by court authority for five days.”

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]

Yeardley:  Okay. So, now, you’ve got eyes on Mark.

Zibby:  On the balcony, in his green shirt. He only bought a shirt, right? I like the image, like, is he in his jail pants, a new T-shirt, and drinking wine on the balcony.

Scott:  Yeah, he’s still in the jail pants. And then what he does is our surveillance team monitors him, and he keeps going into the second story room, coming back out on the balcony, looking around. He looks like he’s waiting for somebody. He’s becoming frustrated. We see him pound his fist on the railing.

 And then shortly thereafter, a car arrives with a guy. It turns out it was some friend of his. They leave, and they go to his place of work. He worked as an administrative assistant at a medical facility where hospitals were his client. There was more than one hospital in the area. He had a prox card, and he proxed his way in.

Yeardley:  What’s that?

Scott:  Oh, it’s a proximity activated security card reader.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Scott:  And so, he accessed into the building. He wasn’t there very long, and he came out. He was wearing a sports coat, slacks. He had some loafers, and a T-shirt, same T-shirt that he bought. And then they made their way back over to the apartment, to the hotel.

Yeardley:  So, you have the house for five days. How long before you really start to close in on him?

Scott:  We have exhausted all of our standard investigative protocols, and we have come up really with nothing more than we had to begin with the exception of his indications to us through his assertion for an attorney and some of his self-talk, that something’s going on. We determined during the course of our search at the house that there was wet clothing in the washing machine, and it was an outfit that he may have been wearing, the thought being he had washed or laundered any evidence that way.

 And so, we looked at it as that after having exhausted all those leads, anything that we’re going to generate is really circumstantial, just contributes to more circumstantial evidence that implicates him, so to speak. But nobody’s ever gone to prison for murder on just circumstances alone.

Zibby:  At this point, were you going to give any merit to his account that somebody else must have killed her? Were you pursuing any other leads or looking for that, or just that felt like a dead end?

Scott:  You try, as an investigator, always to keep that open that there may have been more than one player. It could be that he had an accomplice. We felt pretty certain that he was our guy. But I think you have to step back and at least avail yourself to the possibility that there might be somebody else involved. So, you do that.

 But we felt like we had noticed that what we know about this guy is he doesn’t respond very well under stress. This crime scene is grisly. We had gone in, and we had done a reenactment at the scene, because when we did the autopsy, we noticed that Rebecca had been shot from her right, that it was what we call a medial proximity gunshot. So, it wasn’t a close contact gunshot. It was from at least arm’s length.

 When a firearm is discharged at a person from that distance, the velocity of the gunpowder that comes out with the bullet is such that it will actually tattoo the skin. And so, she had, what we call, stippling from that in her skin. Based on the diameter, the cone that’s created when a weapon is fired under those circumstances, you can intuit how far away the shooter was.

 And so, we had done that reenactment, and we took one of our records specialists, that was about similar stature, put her in a paper suit that we’ve talked about before.

Yeardley:  Yes, the paper suit.

Scott:  And she laid in the bathtub. We had used a dowel at autopsy to identify the wound tract and try to intuit what we could from that. And then we duplicated that in the scene. And so, we had a pretty good understanding about where he was, whoever it was when they shot Rebecca.

Yeardley:  Based on that information, the trajectory, and how close that person was, would you consider that, like a good shoot? Like, this person was a good shot and knew what they were doing or it was haphazard?

Scott:  You really can’t tell, other than I think you can intuit from where she was struck, how her body was probably positioned, that she was facing her assailant. I think what’s remarkable about that is that there is a lack of apparent evidence of surprise. And so, again, more evidence to indicate that there was some familiarity with the person, right?

Yeardley:  Right.

Scott:  Not dealing necessarily with an intruder, or it may have been a surprise intruder, but regardless, just at arm’s length, probably.

Zibby:  So, you’ve got nothing but circumstance and observations about Mark and his odd behaviors. How do you get to the truth?

Scott:  Well, we consulted with a mental health specialist and talked about our observations about Mark. This consultant told us, “Somebody who talks to themselves during stress is likely to repeat that behavior during stress.” And so, we were talking about the scene, and asking for that opinion from that professional about our observations and trying to get a little bit deeper into it and just make sure that we’re properly grounded in our opinion. And then, of course, we cited that aspect of our investigation when we applied for the intercept under theory that we wanted to put a microphone in the house when we had to release the house back to Mark.

Yeardley:  Can you define intercept?

Scott:  Yeah. So, this is a higher degree of privacy invasion, I guess, from law enforcement. And so, a search warrant is one thing. Applying to intercept, verbal communication and recording that, is a more significant intervention or intrusion.

Yeardley:  So, it refers to a certain kind of warrant.

Scott:  Yeah. It’s called a wire intercept.

Zibby:  You old school style wanted to bug his house.

Yeardley:  That’s a spy novel.

Scott:  Yeah. We felt like we had one chance to capture Mark’s response when he encountered that grisly scene for the first time.

Yeardley:  So, it wouldn’t have been cleaned up in the time that he was staying at the hotel and you guys had the house for five days?

Scott:  Normally, we would. Normally, we would clean that scene, or we would have it cleaned out of respect for the surviving family. In this case, we deliberately didn’t clean it. We left it the way it was. We wanted to capture that moment. So, we applied for an intercept to be able to put a microphone in the house.

Zibby:  Genius. Do you tell him, “Hey, by the way, the cleanups on you?”

Scott:  No. What we told him is that we would let him know when the house was available back to him. And so, we were dealing with a timeline too. At this point, we had put about 450-man hours into this investigation. 150 of that was overtime. Dave and Dan know, you run your ass off, you work without sleep, because we’re hot on the trail. But we were coming to an end of our five-day period, and so we separately applied for the ability to put this microphone into the house, adjacent directly to the bathroom, where the crime scene was was a utility room. And so, we identified that as where we were going to put the microphone.

Yeardley:  And how did you go about installing this intercept?

Scott:  We had authorization at night to go in, drill a hole, run this hard cable microphone. So, this is before wireless microphones. So, we had a hard mic. So, we put the mic in behind the washer and dryer, and we staple trailed it up like any other cable utility up to the roof of the house. And then we obtained a city utility truck, donned our hard hats and we ran this wire, by way of zip tie on the cable service down the block, by way of this utility truck to a utility station that happened to be on that block. So, the public utility allowed us access into the concrete building where all these transformers were. And that night, it was literally a lightning storm.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Zibby:  Come on.

Scott:  Yeah. So, this case was spooky enough with his behaviors and listening repeatedly to this 911 tape over and over and over again trying to figure out what he’s saying, and what little sleep you got, you were hearing that in your sleep. So, we were up on the roof during this lightning storm. I remember I was up in the utility bucket of this truck. And so, I got this investigator who is driving the truck, and I’m out on this boom in a bucket with a guy who’s not experienced driving a utility truck.

Zibby:  As you say,are any of you experienced [Yeardley laughs] doing this sort of thing?

Scott:  No. Yeah, we are not.

Zibby:  It’s your first time in a utility bucket?

[laughter]

Scott:  Yeah, exactly, it really was. I remember one of the neighbors came out, because we had our flashers on and stuff, and she said, “You guys better be careful. Somebody is going to get struck by lightning. I can’t believe you guys are doing this at night.” “Well, we got an emergency,” or whatever. Hands are freezing. It is coming down rain and hail and literal lightning. And so, we’re zip tying this line because we want to conceal it. When Mark shows up, we don’t want him to see anything about this. We want to make a show for the neighbors as well and don’t want them to see what we’re up to. They had seen us as investigators coming in and out, so we put on our own little disguises.

Zibby:  That is so badass.

Scott:  Yeah, it was pretty cool. What was exciting about it is that you think you know who the guy is, you know who he is. But being able to prove it–

Dave:  That’s what I’m thinking about while you’re telling this story, is the anticipation of you guys sitting in that room waiting for him to walk in and get to the bathroom and have that, oh, shit moment,-

Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  -where you guys are waiting to hear it. That’s why I’m like, “God, I wish I would have been in that room.”

Dan:  Because he’s not prepared to encounter that.

Scott:  No, he’s not. The scene is set right. He’s already created a bloody crime scene as far as we are concerned. And so, that’s our opportunity. So, we run the line down to this utility station. And it’s pitch black. It’s surrounded by cyclone razor wire, because it’s a utility hazard. It’s a central point for power transformers.

 This concrete building has got floor to almost ceiling aisles with electronic transformers. There’s this eerie, loud electronic buzz that’s going on all the time in there, and little lights flashing here and there. It’s so spooky. So, we get it all set up. We get our recorders all set up. We have two or three duplicate players and recorders. And so, we’re set. And Mark is given access to the house. So, we’re there and waiting when he encounters that crime scene for the first time.

[Break 1]

Zibby:  So you’re sitting, waiting, listening. He comes home. What do you hear?

Scott:  He goes in, and you hear him running water, you hear buckets.

Zibby:  So, he starts cleaning?

Scott:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  When he sees it, does he go, “Oh, shit,” or “Oh, God,” or is there any utterance?

Scott:  Initially, he doesn’t really say much of anything. He’s walking around, and he does do the, “Oh, my God.” He’s preparing to work. You can tell he’s overwhelmed by what he’s seeing. So, yeah, buckets. He can hear him in the cabinet, pulling out. Sounds like he’s moving, sticks around. So, he’s got mops and stuff, and he’s gathering brushes, and you can hear the scrubbing sounds, but he starts making statements while he’s doing this. What’s most creepy is that early on, he starts playing this Gregorian chant music.

Zibby:  On a CD player or something?

Scott:  Yeah, he’s got a recording. I don’t know if he’s got a cassette tape or what, but you can hear this. It just starts. At first, I think it’s coming from inside my room where I’m at, monitoring– [crosstalk] [laughter]

Scott:  And I remember the hair raising up on the back of my neck and looking around. I remember actually getting up and walking through this concrete building and looking down each aisle. [laughs]

Dave:  Which one of my detective friends is fucking with me right now?

Scott:  Exactly. Yeah. Just to make sure I’m alone. I don’t even know what in the hell Gregorian chants are. I just know that whatever this is, it’s scaring me. And later, one of my partners tells me what I’m hearing, but he does. He starts making these comments while he’s cleaning.

[Gregorian chants]

Mark:  Send me away for a long time. I hope. So, be it. So, be it. So, be it. That’s not what’s important. What’s important is that I learn to know God. [unintelligible ] put up a soul so much, so much. So much more.

 Lord, I will tell the truth, and I will take my punishment. Lord, I don’t know what’s in Your plan. I know if it is on Your plan, they ask him, “Lord, please let me stay here. Please let me stay in this house and [unintelligible ] Eugene, people that are close to me, the godly people who support me. Lord, I don’t know how. I know You will provide. If You want to send me somewhere else, You provide. [unintelligible  not bad. I’m being selfish. I’m telling You what I want.”

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Scott:  So, again, interestingly, it’s more of that me side of him. And that plays out later during the trial.

Zibby:  Once you were hearing Mark actually utter words of confirmation that, in fact, he had done it, what was that like for you? Your plan was working live and in real time.

Scott:  Yeah, because it’s like he fell right into the trap. And so, it was like, “Fuck, yeah.” I just remember just going fist bump, like-

Dan:  Got him.

Scott:  -got him. Right.

Zibby:  Were you alone in this building? You didn’t have your partner with you?

Scott:  No, I had another partner with me and we’re just looking at each other, going-

Zibby:  Okay. Great.

Scott:  “Can you fucking believe this?”

Yeardley:  [laughs]

Zibby:  Yeah.

Scott:  After all that time, it’s coming together and all that work, because it’s a significant undertaking. Being proud of the fact that we came up with this plan and stuck to it long enough to see it through, because I think as investigators, we think about these things. Sometimes we have a hard time coming together on him and agreeing this is what we’re going to do. And getting authority from our boss to do this, knowing it’s going to cost a lot of overtime, money, expense.

Dave:  And a judge.

Scott:  And a judge. Exactly. Getting a judge to go along with it, because again–

Yeardley:  It’s such an unusual request.

Scott:  It is. It’s a significant invasion of privacy.

Dave:  How long till you guys get your hands on him? You mentioned that he contacted his attorney.

Scott:  Right. So, right about that same time, I think it was the next day, we, as in the cops and investigators, had done our search. But Dan and Dave know, when you get cops together and you’re going to go search an area, you’re pretty efficient at searching and looking at the ground for evidence for about 15 yards, and then you start getting mission creep and you start talking or you start whatever you’re doing.

Zibby:  What’s mission creep?

Scott:  We, in law enforcement and in the military, I think we see a mission creep occur when you have a specified task and it is that human tendency to deviate from that task and chase squirrels. We’re not really good at focusing on the task at hand and really getting after it in a way that you can duplicate with explorer scouts. So, we use these search and rescue explorer scouts.

Yeardley:  They’re an actual group?

Scott:  Mm-hmm.

Yeardley:  Are they volunteers?

Scott:  Yeah, they’re volunteers.

Zibby:  Can I join them.

Scott:  It’s pretty cool. They’re kids, they’re usually 15 to 21.

Zibby:  Oh, cool. No, I’m good then.

[laughter]

Scott:  Right. So, we get these kids together, and they are experienced and trained at crime scene searching. And so, we tell them what we want. I’d only seen them work a couple times. So, across from Mark and Rebecca’s house, there’s a vacant field that’s bordered by a tree row and a creek. So, they start from the house and they work this field. Probably, an hour after they had been searching, I looked out there and I see these little red flags all over this field, because anything that’s foreign, they mark it.

 Eventually, they get across to the other side of the field, and in this muddy creek, they find the murder weapons. They find the .357 revolver, still loaded with the round that killed Rebecca, still under the hammer. They find an additional .22 pistol that belonged to Mark. See, we had determined through the course of our investigation that he had been given a .357 revolver about a year earlier during the liquidation of his father’s estate.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Scott:  So, he had lied about the gun. We knew he had a second gun that another witness told us that he actually safe kept for Mark for a period of time, and then Mark had asked him to give it back to him earlier in the year. So, we knew that he had those two guns. We knew from talking to his brother that Mark had pointed a gun at him during a dispute when they were younger, that this brother had seen Mark shoot a horse.

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Scott:  That his ex-wife said that she had been subjected to domestic violence, and psychological manipulation, and that he had pointed a gun at her during a dispute and threatened her. He had a proclivity to wear women’s clothing and-

Zibby:  What?

Scott:  -undergarments.

Yeardley:  So, he’s rather a dark person. Under that, I’m all about me and sort of Christian do-gooder dude.

Scott:  Exactly.

Yeardley:  Interesting.

Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Why would someone safekeep his gun for him? Because he said, I shouldn’t have this near me, or what is that? Is that like a common thing?

Scott:  For a period of time, I think he was transitory, and I think he just wanted a safe place to keep it.

Zibby:  Okay.

Scott:  And then one other interesting note. We talked to one of Rebecca’s friends, and she told us that she saw the news of Rebecca’s death in the paper and contacted us and said, “Was she found in the bathroom?” And of course, our investigator said, “Yeah, she was.” She said, “Oh, my God. I know that Mark killed her, because–

Zibby:  Shut up.

Scott:  Yeah, she said that, that was her sanctuary,-

Yeardley:  [gasps] Ah.

Scott:  – that he had removed her door from her bedroom. They slept in separate bedrooms, but that Mark had removed her door as part of his process of eliminating her ability to do things. She said that Rebecca had confided that the bathroom was her sanctuary. That was the only place where she could go and be at peace. And so, she had talked to her friend about bathing and ability to just escape. So, that’s a pretty shocking revelation that Rebecca was forthcoming enough, at least with her friends, that it gave us a real picture of what had been happening in her life.

Yeardley:  That’s so sad.

Zibby:  Yeah.

[Break 2]

Yeardley:  So, during this time, after you arrest him and he’s under observation, what’s his stance? Is he still in denial? Does his story start to change? Does he try to skip town?

Scott:  Shortly before his arrest, he gathered at the home of Rebecca’s parents. Her sister had been abroad. When she returned, they had a dinner, and they invited Mark and they asked him to tell us what happened. The family contacted us and told us, “This is the story that he’s now giving:” which was, he said that, “That night,” the night of her murder, that “Mark had ordered pizza, and that pizza had been delivered a couple of hours prior to when he called 911. The pizza delivery guy said that Mark answered the door, that he seemed in good spirits, that he was jovial, that he remarked about the pizza being late, but in a joking way. He didn’t see or hear anybody else in the house.

Mark said that Rebecca had gone and rented a copy of the movie Grease and that their plan had been to watch Grease and that during the time that they had watched this movie, Mark had made a remark about Olivia Newton-John that she was appealing and why couldn’t Rebecca be more appealing to him that way.

Yeardley:  I hate him.

Zibby:  Horrible.

Scott:  Yeah. She got upset about that remark. He said that she had gone back to the bathroom to her sanctuary.

[music]

Mark:  She went to take a bath, and I was sitting there feeling kind of rejected, like, shut out. Like I said, I had been drinking. Sometimes weird things come into your head, you know? So, I got this idea, “Well, I really would like her attention. What can I do to get her attention?” That’s when I came up with this really stupid idea. The gun was in the bed stand. This is a point that I’m glad that I was able to take a polygraph yesterday, because I know it’s not admissible, but in a way, I’m glad I did that before I did this, because it’s helped to clarify some things that have been bothering me the last couple of weeks.

 One of the things that had been bothering me was, “Are you sure that you thought that gun was empty?” Because that was what I would then have been saying to myself, because I hadn’t been fired in over a year. So, I had convinced myself it was empty. But it was like part of my mind was going, “Are you sure you didn’t leave a bullet in there?” That’s why I was glad I took that polygraph yesterday, because that helped me to understand that, “Yeah, I wasn’t quite sure to tell you the truth. I got to be perfectly honest with you.” I wasn’t quite sure. But it was in the haze in my mind, it was got shoved in the back. It was like, I didn’t really want to believe that, but I came into the bathroom quickly.

Interrogator:  You got the gun from the nightstand?

Mark:  Yeah.

Interrogator:  Okay.

Mark:  I came in quickly, because I wanted to surprise her. My intention at the time was to do something like dry fire at the back wall or something, and do something to startle her — My intention was to startle her, and get her attention and make her– We had this thing, where I’m always playing jokes on people. I do it a lot. She’s always telling me when I do one that’s stupid, that she gets that look and says, “That’s really stupid. Don’t you do that. Don’t you pull jokes like that anymore.” Then I’m very contrite, “You’re right. So, give me a kiss, like makeup and I won’t do it anymore.”

So, I came in, and I pulled the hammer back. As I came in, and at that last instant, it was like I felt horrified that I was even pulling such a stun. It suddenly came to me that, “This is not funny. This is really dangerous what you’re doing,” because in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “There might still be a round in there.” So, as I came in and I realized that the hammer was back and cocked.

 All of a sudden, at that moment where this horror struck me, I tried to put the hammer back down. But in my haste, several things happened at once. First of all, my hand– I only used one hand, which I shouldn’t have done. I was under the influence of alcohol. My hand wasn’t working the way that it should have.

 As I came in, my foot caught on the rug. There’s a rubber back rug right in front of the shower. All these things happen simultaneously. So, I’m quickly trying to put the hammer back down, because I realized that this is really stupid. So, what happens is I have to pull it back and pull back on the trigger to let the hammer back down. So, as I did that, I’m doing it with one hand, so it’s going like this. I pull the hammer back, I pull the trigger back, and then I start to let the hammer back down and it slipped from my thumb.

 I didn’t think it was really happening. I thought it was a joke. I thought she was pulling joke on me. I don’t remember much about what happened after that. I remember that I just felt like there was a freight train going through my head, and I just felt really scared and my heart was just going like a trip hammer.

 I remember running out of the house and throwing the gun away. I think I threw it in a ditch behind the house or something. It was a ditch I remember, creep back there. And then I had to go in again to see if this was really real or if it was a dream. I went in and saw it was really real, then I went and called 911.

Zibby:  Okay. So, that was a recording of his suspect interview at the station. But before that, you’re saying this is the same story he was telling her family?

Scott:  He’s telling him this story.

Yeardley:  And are they baiting him? Because they don’t believe him. They believe you, guys?

Scott:  They are very suspicious of him. I think that Rebecca had confided in her sister that things weren’t well, and that their marriage was in jeopardy, and it was rocky and tumultuous, and that he had been abusive and that he controlled her. He was isolating her and he emotionally was messing with her. So, he said that he went back and he decided, “I’m just going to get her attention.” He alternated between, “I’m going to get her attention and I’m going to maybe play a trick on her.”

Zibby:  Play a trick on her.

Yeardley:  With a gun.

Zibby:  That is ridiculous.

Scott:  Yeah, exactly. And so, his plan is to take the gun back there. He says he thinks to himself, while he’s walking back to the bathroom carrying the gun and planning on scaring her with it or goofing around with her, he says to himself, “Are you sure that this gun’s unloaded?” And then, he describes how he just dismisses it. As he is stepping into the bathroom, he trips over a rug and the gun discharges and shoots her.

Yeardley:  I call bullshit.

Dan:  Well, the interesting thing about that statement is, it’s a revolver. If you’re holding it up, you can literally see if it’s loaded or not. It’s not like a semi-automatic handgun where you have to pull the magazine out and rack the slide to see if there’s a round in the chamber.

Scott:  Exactly. He says, “By her reaction, he sees a red spot and he thinks she’s playing a joke on me. She brought a packet of ketchup in there, and I think she’s trying to play that joke back on me.”

Yeardley:  Oh, for God’s sake.

Zibby:  What is he, 11? So childish.

Yeardley:  It’s ridiculous.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Scott:  Yeah. He describes this level of disbelief that this is actually happening.

Dan:  I’m struck by the fact that he said that he thought she was playing a joke on him. Like, she would have the forethought, “Hey, I bet he shows up with the gun,” which makes me think that’s not the first time that he had gone into that room and pointed a gun at her, that this was his thing. Another classic domestic violence tactic that these assholes use-

Scott:  You bet.

Dan:  -to control people.

Scott:  Exactly. So, this is the story that he repeated again at trial. The same story that he told the family, the same story that he later regurgitated to us during an interview and then the same story that he told the jury in court.

Zibby:  How did that go over in court?

Scott:  Not well.

Yeardley:  A lot of eyerolling I’m thinking.

Scott:  Yeah. I think he’s somebody who, anybody in the population who has any life experience and comes in and sits on a jury and hears the facts of the case and listens to the lengths at which the investigators went to discover the truth and listens to this quirk that follows him throughout this stressful ordeal. They see straight through the bullshit, and they returned a guilty verdict in short order. I don’t remember the timing, but it didn’t take long.

Yeardley and Zibby:  Good.

Yeardley:  Well, at least that.

Zibby:  Yeah. What was he sentenced?

Scott:  He was given a life, the minimum of 25 years, plus 3 years on top of that for a felon in possession of a firearm. He was a convicted felon. He had been involved in an incident earlier before this incident where he had smashed somebody’s car in a fit of rage.

Yeardley:  With his own car?

Scott:  No, with an object. He had smashed it with a blunt object, and just smashed the hood and the windshield, and done a bunch of damage to the car over some kind of a benign dispute.

Dave:  It takes a lot of damage to get you to the felony level.

Yeardley:  I was going to say.

Zibby:  So, he still sits in jail today?

Scott:  He’s still. Yeah, he’s still.

Zibby:  Okay.

Scott:  One thing I was going to mention is that what we discovered at autopsy was that the medical examiner said that Rebecca’s injury was survivable, that the gunshot wound track missed her carotid artery,-

Yeardley:  Oh.

Scott:  -and that had she been given immediate first aid, and had the medics been responded immediately, she probably would have survived. When we were processing the scene, we found a pair of muddy boots at the back of the house and a pair of gloves. They were muddy, because he ran across that field or walked across that field or strolled across that field and found a hiding spot, put the guns there and then walked back. During that time, she was laying there bleeding to death.

Dan:  And it’s not a head injury either. So, she’s conscious while she’s bleeding out.

Scott:  Yeah.

Dave:  Fighting for her life.

Zibby:  That’s horrifying.

Scott:  Yeah. I remember that her eyes were open when she died. You could see this sort of frantic pattern of blood smear and splotches. As you can imagine, you’re laying there, you’re seeing yourself bleed to death, you’re trying desperately to do something. Just a cold aspect of that.

 One of the things that he did to isolate her is that they had a car, but she had to ride a bicycle. She never got to drive the car.

Zibby:  Come on.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Scott:  Rain or shine, she was riding the bicycle to the university.

Dan:  He managed her finances, things like that.

Scott:  Exactly.

Zibby:  Were they middle class, upper class? I’m trying to get a snapshot of the type of life they lived.

Scott:  They were middle class. They both worked. Mark was disparaging with Rebecca. He remarked to her, and we discovered in her writings, that he would say, “You’re never going to amount to anything. I don’t know why you’re going to work on your masters. You’re never going to be anybody of any worth.”

Zibby:  That’s horrible.

Yeardley:  Horrible.

Scott:  And so, the way that that manifested with her, and yet the strength that she had to still try and fix this guy and her inability to get away from him, we look upon it when we’re outsiders and think, “It’s absurd. Why didn’t she just leave?”

Zibby:  You see it so often.

Scott:  Yeah, it’s troubling.

Yeardley:  Perhaps, he’s one of those men who presented himself as really charming and attentive in order to hook her in the first place. And then once he has her, he starts to denigrate her and tell her that she’ll amount to nothing.

Scott:  Yeah, you bet. Because she had saved her virginity for the right guy, and she felt like he was the one. We look at him and think he’s a master at manipulation, like most of these guys are in these circumstances, and just was able to get himself close to her. And then once he got ahold of her, he manipulated her into a corner and just beat her down, both by word and power and she ended up, in the end, dying at his hand.

Dan:  He’s going to use her religious beliefs and the fact that she saved herself for her marriage, as, “That’s insurance that she’s not going to leave me. She’s going to do everything she can, because she takes those vows so seriously.”

Scott:  Yeah. And then how he goes to God immediately.

Yeardley:  Yeah. Listening to the Gregorian chants, and that that is some sort of background for him saying, “God, if You see it in Your wisdom to keep me in this house, that would be awesome.”

Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  I was going to ask, did you get to the bottom of the Gregorian chant thing at all? Is there more to it?

Scott:  I remember discovering in the wastebasket under the sink in the kitchen, a seductive lingerie and a, I don’t know, a soft porn pamphlet that I remember thinking, “I wonder if that was, what, one of those things he was trying to get rid of right at the very end, like, ah, that might speak to motive.”

Zibby:  Like, it was his lingerie, because he liked to dress up in women’s clothing. What would that reflect?

Scott:  I guess I was, in speaking to your question, thinking about that dark component of the music and his backstory. I just felt like that’s part of him that she didn’t know about.

Yeardley:  It seems like there’s a lot she didn’t know.

Scott:  Yeah.

Zibby:  What a tragedy.

[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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