3 Screams, 2 Men, And The Town That COVERED It Up - The Unsolved Case of Kristin O'Connell

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Live your authentic truth because you never know who may come to your funeral and turn that bitch out. Risk. The show where people tell true stories, they never thought they dared to share, wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. In general, compared to big cities, small towns are much much safer. It makes sense that in a place where everybody knows everybody, nothing can really hide. So by its nature it sort of keeps people honest. It sounds good on paper, but after covering so many cases, well, I've come to realize something else entirely. Sometimes a small town isn't the reason a killer gets caught. It's the exact reason they don't. Because in places like this, silence can be the price you pay in order to stay close to your neighbors, your family, your whole way of life. And so the same mechanism that keeps people honest is the same one that keeps them quiet too. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to another episode of Every Town, What a Night. We're heading out to a small village in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where an outsider, a young woman, was found brutally murdered in a cornfield. And to this day, no killer has ever been caught. This one was suggested by one of our listeners, so hope you all enjoy it. This is the unsolved case of the girl in the cornfield. Odds are you've never heard of Ovid, New York, and that's fine, you're not alone. It's a tiny village up in Seneca County, tucked between Seneca and Cayuga Lake, right in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. In 1985, the whole village added up to just about 600 people, and since then, it hasn't grown a single bit, and if anything, Ovid's actually shrunk in the most recent census, puts it at a little over 500 residents. A town that small only needs one bar, and Ovid had exactly one. It was called the Golden Buck, it wasn't just where people drank, it was the entire social calendar, or whatever was happening in anyone's life that week. It happened at the Golden Buck, because there was nowhere else for it to happen, which also meant a stranger walking through that door didn't go unnoticed, and they got remembered. Ovid wasn't completely cut off from the outside world, though, and it was a small psychiatric hospital. Up in Willard, still running at the time, and the Seneca Army Depot, over in Romulus, was operating at full strain, so soldiers and hospital staff cycled through the area fairly regularly. But day-to-day, Ovid had stayed pretty quiet, and because it was quiet, the locals they felt safe, unfortunately, for one young woman, it turned out to be anything but that. What happened to Kristen O'Connell, that is the same question, loved ones of the Burnsville woman have been asking for decades now? Kristen O'Connell was born on January 12, 1965, the older of two kids with a younger brother named Kyle. She grew up just outside Minneapolis, in Burnsville, Minnesota, raised by both parents, Michael and Phyllis. By every account anyone's ever given, she was just a genuinely lovely kid. Everybody liked Kristen, she was a good soul, good-hearted. We were extremely close, as mother and daughter. She was beautiful, and she never knew what she always came in the door and said, "Hi, Mom, I know, so that memory is always there with me." And people who knew her called her an old soul. She loved horses and being outdoors. She rather sit down and actually get to know someone and waste any time on small talk. And by 1985, she was in college, working toward a future and hospitality management, and that March she decided she wanted to spend spring break down in Florida. Her parents weren't thrilled about it, but she was an adult, and they trusted her, so off she went. It was down on Captiva Island, that Kristen met a young man named Jim Vermersh, and he was from that little town in upstate New York, called Ovid, and the two of them hit it off pretty fast. And they spent most of that trip together. When it ended and everyone scattered back to their normal lives, well, Kristen and Jim kept in touch anyway. They sent letters, phone calls, the whole long distance thing, and if you've ever tried to keep one of those going, you know it takes real interest to survive it. And by August, they had done just that for five whole months, so Jim invited her out to Ovid and Kristen, hopeful that this might turn into something more happily said yes. She packed her bags and told her parents not to worry. According to Phyllis, Kristen kissed her on the way out the door and said everything would be fine. And then she laughed for what was supposed to be a week long visit out in the finger legs, which is beautiful that time of year. And she made her way to New York over the next couple days, arriving in the Ovid area around August 12th and almost immediately, all things felt off. See Kristen thought she'd be staying with Jim and his parents for the week and their house with air conditioning and running water, etc. Instead though, Jim told her there had been a change of plans. He'd rented a small trailer and that's where the two of them would be staying. And the station just outside the golden buck bar. A gym probably thought it was cool, but they'd be alone and close to a bar. But for Kristen, it wasn't exactly ideal. And from there, by multiple accounts from people around that week, Jim, he started acting distant. Instead of spending time with her, he picked up extra shifts at work, which left Kristen alone in that trailer for long stretches of the day. Locals later told investigators Jim actually had a girlfriend around Ovid at the time, maybe more than one. It's been suggested Kristen's visit, complicated things from socially and ways he hadn't quite thought through before he invited her out. Whatever the reason, the trip that was supposed to be a fun, maybe even romantic week at the Finger Lakes was turning into something a lot lonelier than Kristen it signed up for. On August 13th, the day after she arrived, Kristen walked down to a local convenience store for some band-aid for her ankles. Good evening, she went to a movie with Jim and some of his friends. The next day on August 14th, well that's when a shift beyond the weird living setup started. The group went out swimming at Laudie Point on Seneca Lake. While they were out there, Jim and his friends had a confrontation with a local kid and started messing with him pretty aggressively. Kristen was the one who stepped in and told everyone to knock it off and leave the kid alone. And seeing that side of Jim might have been the straw that broke the camel's back for her. Because that very afternoon around 3 o'clock, Kristen called her mom. from a pay phone, and she told Phyllis she was cutting her trip short and coming home the next day. She sounded upset on the phone, but she wouldn't say what was actually going on. Phyllis has said in interviews that she could just tell in her gut that something had happened that made her daughter want to leave early. That evening the group went over to play pool at a friend's place for about an hour before heading back to that trailer by the Golden Buck. At around 11.05 that night, Kristen pulled one of the girls at the trailer aside and asked her something that, looking back now, is genuinely heartbreaking. As she wanted to know why Jim had even invited her out in the first place, when he was basically ignoring her the entire visit. The girl told her plainly that Jim had a girlfriend now, and that probably explained it. About 25 minutes later, at 11.30pm, Kristen told the group she was going for a walk. She was likely pretty pissed off at the whole situation, which is understandable, and wanted to clear her mind amongst the tight quarters of chaos. As she went alone and barefoot, which was an out of character, friends and family say she liked taking these kinds of walks at night, sometimes just to look up and watch the stars. As she probably wasn't planning on going too far, but the reality is that when she walked out the door of that trailer, well she never walked back in. About 10 minutes after Kristen left, Jim headed out to go and grab some pizza for the party, giving his friends back to the trailer. There was the typical drinking and weed smoking going on, but it should be noted that Kristen herself wasn't partaking in any of that. Jim got back with the pizza around 11.45, and that's when he learned that Kristen had gone out for her walk without her shoes or her purse. And while all this domestic low-key drama was playing out at the trailer, well multiple witnesses out on County Route 139 were watching something creepy unfold in real time. Sometime between 11.50 pm and just after midnight, witnesses say they saw a young woman walking west along the north shoulder of County Route 139. A green or blue sedan, an older model from the late 70s, pulled up a cider, a driver leaned out the window and started talking to her, and a second car was seen pulling off the road behind her too. Nobody knows exactly what the driver said to Kristen, but investigators have believed for years that whoever was in that first car may have been trying to get her inside. She refused though, and she just kept walking. And then sometime between midnight and around 12.15, witnesses driving by saw her moving in the reverse direction entirely. So instead of continuing west, she had turned around and started walking east back the way she had come, now on the opposite shoulder of the road. About 50 yards behind her, walking the same direction, were two young white men. A witness described the mislender, its shoulder-length hair, one in a jean jacket, and one was around six feet tall and the other a bit shorter. Obviously, Kristen sent something was wrong and that's what made her double back toward the village, likely trying to get back to the trailer, but it appears like those two men, whoever they were, likely caught up to her right around them. Because somewhere between 12.15 and 12.25 that morning, multiple people in the area heard a scream, a really, really loud one. Back at the trailer, two kids who noticed Kristen still wasn't back had already gone out looking for her, walking down and nearby street, and they heard the scream too. They couldn't tell which direction it came from, so they figured it was just noise carrying over from the bar next door. A separate family, living further out, near a macarager road, then reported something even more specific. A woman there said she heard three screams, coming from the direction of a farm lane locals called Lover's Lane, just a few hundred feet from her house. Right after that came an engine, somebody revving hard and low gear, and then a vehicle pulling away with no headlights on, only flickering into view through the trees once it had put some distance behind it. About an hour later, around 1.15am, two men matching the earlier description were seen walking east back toward the village. A 15 minutes after that, they were seen again, and this time walking west along County Route 139, right around the stretch where Kristen's body would eventually turn up. And nobody who saw any of this called the police that night, not the kids of the trailer, not the family near a macarager road, and nobody driving by who saw these things, was only after the fact that this was all pieced together. The gyms trailer didn't have a phone, so the next morning on August 15th, he tried to reach the state police and couldn't get through until about one in the afternoon, which was something like 13 hours after Kristen had walked out the door. A trooper finally took the missing person's report around 4pm, pulling her ID out of her purse she left behind. By then, I let it started raining hard, and search for Kristen couldn't really get going until the next morning. Back in Minnesota, as soon as Phyllis and Mike heard their daughter was missing, well Mike got on a plane and flew straight to New York to help search for her own self. And Phyllis and Kristen, younger brother Kyle, they stayed home by the phone waiting. On the morning of August 16th, police started taking statements from everyone who had been at that trailer, and they went through Kristen's belongings. A local search expanded out from the trailer and the golden buck, and just after five that afternoon, a search party found her. She was lying in a cornfield and stalks that had grown to about six feet tall, less than a quarter a mile from the trailer where she'd been staying. She was naked, and she'd been stabbed multiple times in the chest, and her throat had been slashed. Investigators noted her clothes had been left near the body, not torn or scattered, but laid out close by. The toxicology screen would later confirm there was no alcohol in her system, consistent with what everyone had said about her not drinking that night, in the corner, Michael McLaughlin found no physical evidence that she had been assayed. And police would later say that, based on the scene, Kristen had fought hard for her life. The rain that soaked her body and her clothes had wiped out most of the physical evidence of the scene, the footprints, tire tracks, all of it was mostly gone. Everyone who'd been at the party at the trailer, Jim included, was interviewed and ultimately they were cleared as a suspect. That left investigators leaning hard on witnesses. The best lead they had was the description of the two unidentified young men seen walking behind Kristen that night, but nobody could put a name to either of them. And on August 23rd, just over a week after the murder, well somebody called in a tit to state police that decades later still hasn't been fully explained. The caller told the trooper who picked up a man named DC Rire to go check a green Chevy parked on Main Street in Waterloo, popped the trunk the caller said, and you'll find what you need. He said something even stranger. According to the transcript, the caller told the trooper he was leaving town because he'd warned somebody not to do this. Presumably, he was talking about the murder. He told them not to do it, and they'd done it anyway, so now he was getting out. The trooper tried to keep him talking, but the line it went dead. They were recording set unreleased for ten full years before the public even ever heard it. Until this day, nobody knows who that caller was, nobody knows if there ever really was a green Chevy with something incriminating in the trunk. Now here's where this case gets even more frustrating, because it's not just that police couldn't find the killer right away. Once that for decades afterward, the case kept getting actively sabotaged. A bad luck, a bureaucracy, and at least one case by outright misconduct. Not having proper, you know, uh, investigating going on and over the years, we didn't have that. Back in '85, a trace fiber evidence from Kristen's case was handled by a New York state police forensic investigator named Gary Veter. And for years, nobody thought twice about his work. He was just one of the state's own experts who's finding some people to prison. But then in 2007, the New York state inspector general's office released a report on him. An investigation found serious problems and roughly a third of all the cases he'd ever handled. Problems serious enough to call into question evidence used in court rooms across the state for years. In Kristen's mother Phyllis eventually learned Veter had been the one who processed the original evidence in her daughter's case. And to this day, she doesn't know whether his misconduct touched anything connected to Kristen. Nobody's ever been able to tell her one way or the other. By the late 2000s, investigators working the case had a new tool they were desperate to use, DNA testing. In 2009, Seneca County's then DA, Barry Porsche, and lead investigator Jeff Arnold, partnered with a husband and wife team of Dutch forensic scientists named Richard and Selma Eiklinboong. They developed a technique for pulling tiny traces of skin cells left behind on old evidence that traditional testing and never been able to use. Arnold and another investigator flew out to meet with the Eiklinboongs themselves, walked them through the crime scene photos in the case file. The two of them came away believing they had a real shot at pulling something usable. The Seneca County Board of Supervisors signed off on paying somewhere between 25 and 40 thousand dollars just to make it happen. All they needed after that was a sign off from the New York State Police's own forensic unit in Albany. And after a three-hour meeting, investigators were told the Dutch lab couldn't do the testing. They didn't have the right permit from the State's Department of Health. There was, however, they were told one-time exemption process for situations exactly like this and requests for it basically never get denied. So they applied for the exemption and in May of 2009, they got their answer and they were denied. US Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, an Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota, both personally got involved trying to push the request through but it didn't do anything. The New York State Commissioner of Health at the time upheld that denial. Years later a different DNA lab and this one certified within New York State made a new offer to test the old evidence. I'm sure they'd say yes now but that one it was turned down too. Ever Christians family watching opportunity after opportunity get blocked by paperwork while their daughters killer walked free? Well that was one of the most agonizing parts of this entire 40-year-old deal. In early 2014, about 30 years after the murder, the case suddenly got active again. And two local men, Doug Zammett and his longtime friend, Michael Swank, found themselves squarely in the middle of it. Around that time, Doug's step-sister went to investigators to tell them she remembered seeing him with blood on his clothes back when Kristen was killed. His explanation was that he and some friends had killed a pig for a roast that weekend. It was two days after the murder and that's where the blood came from. We tried being nice for lack of a better term, tried cooperating. You get told if you don't want to talk to us you're hiding something. You talk to us, you're lying to us. How can you win here? A both men were questioned repeatedly that year by investigators and sessions that ran as long as 11 hours at a time. They got my DNA, they have access to it and everything. I offered to but they hadn't ever been back in touch with me. Doug voluntarily gave a DNA sample and took a polygraph which he passed. Answering no to both whether he'd killed Kristen and whether he knew who did. A Doug also told a local reporter he called police back in 1990 about a separate tip. A coworker who claimed to know a man who'd hidden in a basement for several days after the murder would scratch his body. He says the officer he spoke to laughed him off then nothing ever came of it. As to why his step-sister came forward now. Well they had an intimate relationship then when he broke it off. She got mad and this was her revenge. It seems like they're lost in this case because I feel that you're investigating me and you're all over me. You really don't know where to go. Frustrated by what they felt was harassment nearly three decades later. Well Doug and Michael painted a message to police on the fence outside Doug's county route 139 home. It was addressed directly to the investigator running the task force telling him to knock off the cop games. Underneath and a dark little joke about their pig roast alibi it read we had a pig roast should have had chicken. When a reporter asked Zammett about it he said plainly he didn't care what the public thought. That sign it was for the cops. Both men have maintained on the record that they had nothing to do with Kristen's death and neither has ever been charged with anything. In August of 2010 on the 25th anniversary of the murder the Sennaka County District Attorney's Office put up a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. In the years that followed the O'Connell family brought in a lawyer with a background as a prosecutor to work directly with state police on finally getting Martin DNA testing done. As of right now to this day the DNA still hasn't been tested. Now if that seems crazy it's because it is but for one reason or another despite public pressure campaigns and change.org petitions there appears to be a brick wall between the tests and that DNA which makes you wonder if someone on the inside is protecting those who did it. Maybe a friend, a son or even a brother. This recently is August of 2025 on what would have marked 40 years since Kristen disappeared. Our family and the Ovid community gathered from Memorial Walk retracing her steps. Same call for DNA testing. Same answer they've been getting since 2009. Nothing. You know why I'm I really love you and I love you so much she said and I said well I love you too and that was the last time I heard that. I'm not going anywhere. I will not rest. I will not give up. And currently the investigation remains open. The reality is that somebody in that small town of Ovid and it really might be more than one somebody. I spent the last four decades knowing exactly what happened to Kristen O'Connell. Maybe it's the two men seem walking behind to that night. Maybe it's whoever called in that anonymous tip back in 85 and then vanished from the story completely. Maybe it's someone who's never said a word to anyone not even their own family. If you know anything about what happened at Kristen O'Connell back in August to 85 the New York state police are still actively working this case and they want to hear from you. It was your family member or friend who was murdered out in upstate New York. You'd want answers too so it's time to step forward and tell the truth because the reckoning has come in one way or another either in this life or the next. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed it well then have a look around because we have a lot of cases for you to dig through and if you want to support us a simple subscribe we'll do or go by a cool shirt links are down in the description. Remember to come back next week for another scary strange and mysterious story because you never know. Maybe your town will be next. [BLANK_AUDIO]