Killer Was In and Out in 30 Minutes - Left Behind Disturbing Scene | Scherer Family

It's a Saturday evening in rural Missouri back in March of 1998. Darkness has almost fallen, a man named Tony and his 15-year-old son are on their way home. They arrive a little later than expected because of an accident blocking the road. Tony calls his wife Sherry and she agrees to go pick up some pizza for dinner, but when Tony and his son get back, they find it odd that Sherry's car is still in the garage. She would have been still out getting food, plus the car is cold to the touch. Maybe she just hadn't left yet, but something just doesn't feel right. And as Tony makes his way inside and stops to look at his mail in the hallway, his teenage son spots a scene in the living room so horrific that no one involved in this case will ever be able to forget it. [Music] Deadly deep dives. Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel and if you have never been here before, I'm Kimberlya. It's nice to finally meet you. Okay, I'm going to say this up front to you. Get ready because this is going to be an ultra deadly deep dive. It's a two-part series, so lock in now, bookmark it, put it in a playlist for yourself in your queue. So just be patient with me and just know it's going to be deep and convoluted. And it's going to span many years and sadly it's also going to include multiple victims. It's one of the most intense cases I've done in a while, so here we go. Let me take you back to that house. It's a little after 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 28th of 1998. And Tony's share is standing by his unopened mail, flipping through his catalogs, thinking about pizza. His 15-year-old son, Stephen, has gone ahead of him into the house and he's looking for his mom and his sister. The lights are on in the living room, the TV is going, it sounds exactly like it always does. But then, Stephen glances into the living room and that is when he sees them. But they're not in the couch, they're not walking around. His mother, Sherry, and his little sister, Megan, are on the floor. And I want you to understand what his first thought was because it tells you a little something about this family and about Stephen, and about being 15 years old. Stephen was the prankster in his household. He was the one who was always messing with his sister, so his first thought. In that half a second before his brain caught up, was that they'd finally gotten him back. The Megan and his mom had cooked up some elaborate prank and we're going to jump up and start laughing, but they didn't jump up. They weren't moving at all and as he stood there, it started to sink in. He was looking at blood, real blood on the living room floor. Stephen then walked over to his mom and he touched her and she was still warm. And then he touched his 12 year old sister and she was cold and that's when he ran. He got to his dad and the words came out. However, they come out in this frantic situation, what he said, they're dead. Mom and Megan are dead. Of course, Tony goes to see for himself and there's no version of that walk down that hallway that I can make sense of as a person, let alone as a father. He saw his wife and his baby girl on the floor of that room where they folded laundry and watched TV. Tony calls 911 at 709 pm. And seven minutes later, headlights came up, county road 419 to that house that Tony and Sherry built into a hole with one of them now lying on the living room floor. Before we go anywhere near what happened in that living room, I need you to know who this family is. So I'm going to start with Sherry. Sherry and Walker was born on August 18th of 1959, in Portageville, Missouri. Her parents, Earl and Frances Walker had married back in 1949. And by the time Sherry came along, they already had a house full of boys. She was the third of four children and the only daughter. Her brothers were Randy Steve and Rodney. And if you have ever been the only girl in a house full of brothers, you already know exactly what her childhood looked like. You learned to hold your own pretty early on. You know how deep I like to go as well into people's bios. But unfortunately, there is very little publicly known about Sherry's childhood and her young adulthood. She was not some kind of public figure, anything. She was just a girl growing up in a farm town of a few thousand people in the 1960s and 70s, which means most of what she was was held in the memories of the people who loved her most, rather than in a record that I could go find. Portageville was small enough that she almost certainly went to Portageville High School. It was the only high school in the area. And she met a girl named Tina there. And they quickly became best friends. And that friendship is going to last the rest of her life. But in November of 1973, when Sherry was 14 years old, her world fell apart. One of her older brothers, Steve, was killed in a car accident. He was only 20 years old. He had been driving along a US Route 61 about a mile north of Portageville when his car left the road in struck a bridge support. And that was it. That was all it took. A stretch of road, he had driven a hundred times on a night that was supposed to be like any other night. I don't think there's a way to understand exactly what that does to a family, especially to a 14-year-old girl when a tragedy like this happens. The walkers pulled together because there wasn't a choice. There wasn't another option, but to keep going. But Sherry grew up knowing what it felt like to lose someone suddenly for no reason on just an ordinary day. And then around 1981, he was a much happier milestone. 22-year-old Sherry was getting married to 25-year-old Anthony Scherer, who went by Tony. He was a local farmer who grew up in the same town. He knew all the same people and they were deeply in love. And what Tony fell for was her creativity and her absolute enormous love for animals. They set up their home on a farm just outside town where Sherry very quickly got as many pets as she could reasonably manage and probably a few extra ones. Sounds like someone that I would love to be friends with. But Sherry was also highly organized. She was the kind of person who kept the whole operation running and she loved being outdoors. She was a watersky or two, which did seem kind of random being a farm girl. But she was the happiest when she was out on the lake in the summer. Around 1982, Sherry and Tony welcomed their first child, a son that they named Stephen, which I assumed very strongly was in memory of Sherry's brother, who had passed away. And a few years after that on October 2nd 1985, their daughter arrived and they named her Megan Elizabeth Scherer. Megan was born across the state line in Arkansas because the Walker family had roots there going back generations. Sherry's grandparents lived there. So whether it was a bigger hospital or the family was nearby or simply where the doctor was, Megan Elizabeth Scherer came into the world in Arkansas and then came back home to Missouri. Then the Sherry settled into the life they built at 984 County Highway 419. It is truly in the middle of nowhere, which I'm mentioning for good reason. I do not give you details for nothing. I think most of you know that by now, but just look at where this is. I mean, the first thing I noticed was that it was right in front of a cemetery, but other than that, it was just farmland as far as the eye can see. And I'm looking at this in 2026. So I can only imagine this area being a lot more rural back in the 80s. It's isolated, but it is beautiful. They had a three bedroom home. It was a ranch-style home down a long driveway off Highway 419. It was one single story. It had an above ground pool because it definitely got hot and humid in the summer. And it had some smaller sheds on the property where they stored farming equipment and supplies. Now Sherry kept her house tidy. She loved decorating and she loved having all of their cats and dogs and they had a lot of them running through the house. Everyone in their small town knew them as a wholesome, loving, busy, heartland family. They looked out for the people nearest to them, their nearest neighbor, even though that would have been probably about a half a mile away. But they would still show up with a tractor if you needed one. Tony worked on the farm, Sherry ran the entire household and pulled both kids straight into the day-to-day farm life. Nobody was sitting on the sidelines. During the late 1980s, Sherry also worked for an aluminum manufacturer, keeping herself very busy, but her biggest joy were her kids and her husband. It was important to her to teach her children to value a hard day's work. And then turn around and volunteer. She did that all the time. She actually volunteered at their school. And Steven and Megan were very close as well. Steven, as the older brother, made his whole personality about getting a reaction out of his little sister. As I said, he was the family prankster. He loved to trick his sister. That was the dynamic in the house. Megan, meanwhile, was described by everyone who knew and loved her as one of the sweetest little girls. She loved basketball, and she was genuinely talented. And more than that, she was a really good teammate. She actually really loved the sport. And she almost equally loved to dance. And just like her mom, she was a- total water baby. She also was a straight A student and a very accomplished public speaker. I cannot say that about myself when I was growing up. Tell me if you have a fear of speaking a public, I know what is one of the biggest fears that people have above things that you would tend to think would be bigger fears. But at 12 years old, she was already standing up in front of rooms full of people with confidence. She worked hard at school. She had a big group of friends and she was the kind of kid who if she got a B on a report card, she would think of it as a personal tragedy. But at her age and her work ethic, your whole world revolves around school in your grade. So it makes sense. Plus making your family proud. And remember Tina, that was the girl that I told you sharing Matt when she was little in high school. They were still best friends. We should all be so lucky to have a best friend for life. That friendship that started way back then had never faded. Even their kids were close in age and the two families spent a lot of time together. They had super bowl parties, weekends at each other's homes, even vacations together. Decades on. From whatever hallway they met in, as girls, they were still in each other's lives every single day. They would talk on almost a daily basis. This was a good life. Two parents who loved each other, two kids who were thriving a farm in a town that knew them and people close enough that they had practically known you your whole life. Who would know your hopes and your dreams of the future. And I think it's important to understand where this happened as well. Portageville sits in the Booth Hills, Missouri, which is that little rectangle hanging off the bottom right corner of the state, poking down into Arkansas with Tennessee just across the river. About 3,300 people, a farm town, top to bottom. Soybeans, cotton rice, it's the kind of place where the biggest thing on the calendar is the high school football game. No joke. And I mean, everyone shows up everybody. There's only one elementary, middle, and high school area. That's why I made the assumption of where Sherry went to school. And every can in town moves through the same buildings in the same order as their parents once did. They had lived in this area long enough to even know everybody's car in the area. She would be out in the yard all the time and a truck or car would go by and she would wave because she knew who was driving it. And nobody, I mean nobody locked their doors. And this was not being careless. I would say things were different back then. There was just an assumption that whoever was coming up your driveway was someone that you knew or maybe someone that needed help and you helped them. That's not being naive. That's just how things were. The town itself was very compact. But the families lived out in the country roads with nothing but fields between them. And running right along the eastern edge of all of this was Interstate 55, which means you could be on a farm road in the middle of nowhere and be on the highway heading out to another state in about four minutes flat. That's going to matter. And then there's the year that this happened. I mean, this was the late 90s. It was 1998 to be exact. But it was basically being on a different planet compared to now cell phones. They had them. Yes, they existed, but they were not smart phones. But interestingly, I found this to be something that I just learned for the very first time. Farmers like Tony were actually early adopters of mobile phones because when you spend your whole day out on land miles from your house, you need a way to be reached. So Tony had a cell phone. But it definitely wasn't the kind of thing that you would see a 12 year old have in his pocket. But out in Southeast Missouri, if you did have a cell phone, the coverage was pretty much garbage. It was still a thing to have a landline in your kitchen and an answering machine sitting on your counter with those actual cassette tapes inside. If you wanted to know where somebody was, you called the house and you let it ring until they picked up. And if they didn't pick up, you left a message. But what you didn't do was panic. You expected them to just call back when they got in. You had more trust because you had to. There was no checking someone's location. You assumed they were just outside or in the shower or maybe they had run into town. And then you just got on with your day. No social media either. No Facebook. No next door app. Or even a group chat blowing up. Google didn't even exist yet. I found it six months later. If something happened in porchville, the way the word spread was from one person calling another. And then it just went house to house from there. Now here are a couple of things that I just want you to keep in mind. Though isolated, their home could be seen from interstate 55. Hundreds of vehicles go down that road. Any of them could have been just traveling through, never even been to this town and would never be back. Any of them could look out their window of their car and see a house sitting out in a field with a long driveway and no other house near it. You're visible to every single person driving down that highway. And not one of them is close enough to hear you scream either. By the spring of 1998, Steven was in high school. Megan was in sixth grade and Sherry was thrilled that they had recently updated their kitchen with a new flooring that was just installed throughout the house the previous fall. As a matter of fact, the family's two dogs that they love so much, including one that was a rot wilder named Bruno, they were no longer allowed in the house because of the new flooring in the kitchen. So they lived out in the back in a pen. And that's important because these were not little cute, tiny dogs. They were big, loyal, protective dogs. So keep that in mind. And just for context on where we are in time, five days before all of this, the movie Titanic swept the Oscars, dial up existed VHS tapes and a town where you left your door unlocked. It's late March, it's warm outside, and the light goes down by around seven. A small farmhouse, a little way outside town surrounded by open fields and an interstate a few minutes away. Two dogs in a pen out back, a woman doing laundry in a 12-year-old riding the high of winning a public speaking contest the day before. That's the world Sherry and Megan were living in when their lives came to an end in their own living room. So I want to go back to the morning of Saturday, March 28th of 1998. Now this wasn't a lazy weekend, it was a work day. Around 730 that morning, 42-year-old Tony Sherer and his 15-year-old son headed out. Tony dropped Steven off in Conran, just up the road to work on a tractor out in the field. And then he came back to the house briefly, before heading over to his dad's place to help him with something. Late morning, he picked Steven back up, and the two of them had lunch with Tony's parents, and then they went back to Conran to keep working. Early that afternoon, Tony was back at the house out in the farm, working on a wheat trill, and Sherry and Megan came out and helped him for a little while about an hour or so. And then he headed back out to Conran, where Steven was still working. The last time Tony Sherer saw his wife and daughter was around a quarter past one that afternoon. They were in the backyard cleaning the dog pens. Father and son spent the rest of the afternoon out on the tractor. At around 415, they took a break, and they went by the river to check their fishing nets. That afternoon, with their day and the fields almost done, Tony called his wife and suggested that they maybe get pizza for dinner, and Sherry had agreed. She was going to go to a restaurant called Gators into town and pick them up. By about 20 past six, they were done, and they were heading home, but they didn't get there. Because there was a fertilizer truck that was flipped over and it was stuck in the middle of the road, and it was completely blocking their way. Now out on a rural farm road, there is no going around. There's no side street, there's no detour. There's no alternate route for them to take, so they had to just wait it out, until it got figured out. So that's what they did. Tony at some point gets out of his car. He's standing there talking to another farmer, because what else are you going to do? And while his dad's doing that, Steven picks up his dad's cell phone and calls the house. Now this is just after 6 p.m. and his mom answers the phone. Steven told her that the police were out there right now closing the road down because of the accident, but he had another reason for calling. He wanted to go see his girl from McKayla that night, and they had made plans to hang out with her family at her house. And it was getting late. Now she had already called the house looking for him earlier, and Steven asked his mom, if she could take him into town and drop him off after he got home. She said sure, after they all got settled in and eaten dinner. She did not sound distressed. She did not sound rushed. She wasn't worried about anything. She sounded like his mom on a normal evening. Steven had no way of knowing that that would be the last conversation he ever had with his mother. About 30 minutes later at 6.50 p.m. Steven and Tony called Sherry to let her know they were going to be home soon. The road had just been cleared. But this time nobody answered. Tony just kept getting the answer machine. He thought, okay, that's a little odd. Since Steven had just spoken to her maybe a half hour ago, but Tony just figured maybe she was getting food. So he left a message. Just telling Sherry to call him back when she got back in. They pulled it to the driveway around 7.00 p.m. and it was already getting dark. They came through their garage, but Tony didn't expect to see Sherry's car inside. It just didn't fit the timeline because she was supposed to be in town picking up the food. She could not have been back that quickly. Tony puts his hand on the hood, expecting it to be warm. The way you would feel an an engine and know that it had just been driving. But it was cold. So then he figured, okay, she hasn't left yet. Maybe she decided to cook after all. Or maybe she had gotten caught up in something, one more chore or something like that before she got a chance to head out. I mean, running about 15 minutes late totally happens. They went through the interior door into the house. The lights were all on. They could hear the TV from the living room and Tony stopped at a pile of mail in the hallway and started flipping through the letters and the catalogs as his son Stephen kept walking and he was heading through the house trying to find his mom and sister. And that is when something on the floor caught his attention. His mom and sister were just lying there. I told you it took a minute for his mind to understand what he was really looking at. He thought it was a joke. They didn't move. So he gets closer and you saw that both of them were bleeding from their heads. And it still didn't register. He actually had to walk over to his mom, land down and touch her. Sherry was still warm. But then when he touched Megan, she was ice cold. I'm not even sure he knew what that difference even meant. But he came to the horrific realization that they were dead. And he is now in a panic and he runs to his father and he just burst out. After setting eyes on the unspeakable scene in the living room, Tony immediately dialed 911. This was 709 pm. And it only took seven minutes for help to arrive. At 716, Captain Fred Hill, an officer Mark Stockton of the Portageville Police Department came up that driveway and met with Tony and Stephen outside. With a small police department, these were the men who worked it. And when the call went out, it had also hit a local EMT's pager. And it went out as a gunshot wound. That's all anyone knew that was going on. Two EMTs responded with an ambulance. But nothing about a gunshot call repairs you for what was inside that living room. For Officer Stockton, it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his career. Not that year, but his entire career. We're talking about officers who had been on this force for 40 years. And they said they never saw anything alike it. And you'll know what I mean soon enough. Sherry was faced down on her stomach in front of the couch, still wearing what she had put on that morning, a pink shirt, a pair of jeans and work boots. Her left arm was twisted behind her back. And Megan was near the brick fireplace a few feet from her mother. And nothing could be done for either of them. They were beyond help. It was clear that they had both been shot. And then the county authorities started arriving because a double homicide is instantly far bigger than anything this town or this police department would have expected or been built to carry. Terry Stevens came out. He had worked death investigations for 24 years by then. And he would later say that he had seen things most people can only imagine seeing, but this is something he took home with him. This was the one that he could not get out of his head. Outside, police vehicles kept coming down County Road 419. And in a town like this, that does not go unnoticed. Word started getting out one call at a time until Sherry's best friend Tina's husband called her and told her something was happening out of the Sherry's place. Now Tina was so worried that she jumped in her car immediately and raced over there. And when she got closer, she realized there was already a blockade. Nobody was going up that driveway. So standing at the end of that road, not allowed to get any closer, she knew that whatever happened, it was very bad. I can't imagine not being able to know what is happening at your closest friend's house. She's dreading the worst and she's kept in the state of fear. And the officers kept coming. Next was highway patrol sergeant Don Wyndham. He was assigned to manage the crime scene and to gather the evidence. And one of the first things he noticed was that every door and every window in that house was either unlocked or open. All of them except for a single screen door. There was no fourth entry, no broken glass, no pride window frame, and no damage anywhere. But I guess, you know, if they're open and unlocked, you wouldn't need to force your way in. Unless, of course, someone let them in. And nothing was gone either. Tony walked through the house with officers. And as far as he could tell, nothing was gone, nothing was missing. There was actually a safe in their house. It was still there. And it was open. But oddly, nothing had been taken out of it. Then there was the living room itself, which was one of the strangest things about the scene because it was so normal looking. It was still just a living room. But at the entrance, there was a white ceramic vase full of artificial flowers that was laying on the floor, and it was knocked over. But everything else in that room was normal. A pile of neatly folded clothes were on the couch, an ironing board was set up nearby because Sherry had been doing laundry. A bowl of popcorn, a gameboy, a pack of Uno cards, and a golf putter. That's a mom and a daughter who were planning to spend an evening with their family, having snacks, playing a card game, and watching whatever was on TV while eating their pizza. Wind 'em, and the officers around him, came to a conclusion pretty quickly, and it was not a comfortable one. This didn't see him random. It looked as though Megan had been the target. And the reason was in the way that Megan had been left. Megan was also facedown, but her hands were bound behind her back, with orange electrical cord tied in very complex knots. Unlike her mother, she wasn't fully clothed. Her white t-shirt had been pulled up, her bra was out of place, and her left waist was exposed. Her red sweatpants and her underwear had been pulled down, and they were now around her right ankle and off of the left foot. She had been posed in a sexual manner with her legs spread apart. She had been gagged with a bald-up sock, that was shoved in her mouth. And underneath the cushion was a blood-stained blanket, a Walmart bag, and some newspapers, and a large pool of blood on the carpet. And they saw what appeared to be feces on her butt and on the floor, and it appeared to have come from her body, most likely in fear, or because of a violent sexual assault. Most likely, unfortunately both. It was obvious to detectives that this was a sexually motivated crime, and that she had been raped. And now I think you know why some of these officers said that this was the worst scene that they had witnessed in their entire careers. Other things that were noted were that both Sherry and Megan had been shot. However, there were no shell casings found at the scene, which could mean what. Well, someone could have picked them up, or the killer used a revolver, which does not expel the casings. They began to take swabs from the scene, and they gathered blood spatter on the brick fireplace, and soaked sections of the carpet, and even the underlay beneath both of them were cut out and taken in for evidence. And then across that living room floor, investigators recovered a significant number of hairs. And they were not the kind that you find on someone's head. They were from the pubic region. And no ordinary reason to be there, the way that they were, but the rest of the house was almost entirely undisturbed. No sign of a struggle anywhere else. In the kitchen, a drawer was open, and a plate of rib bones were sitting on the stove. Megan's bedroom was messy. Her bed was unmade. There were clothes on the floor, which is simply what a 12 year old bedroom usually looks like on a Saturday. In a hallway bathroom, there was a crumpled up hand towel that had been left in the sink. No investigators did take two 22 caliber handguns from the sharers closet. These belonged to the household, and they were in the closet in the main bedroom. They also took a knife from Steven's room, and they also found a bottle of lubricant, but unfortunately the records that I had to not indicate whether it belonged to someone in the house, or if it belonged to the perpetrator and was brought there. They took the answering machine as well with Tony's message on it that was asking his wife to call him back. They also took what looked like some wet dirt from the driveway. And out on the road leading up to the house, there was an empty can of Miller lights. A lot of work on this case was being done right away, and there were more officers coming there. By 835 that night, Gary Hill arrived, along with the coroner Tim Clayton, and the assistant coroner Ralph Barwell. The coroner was there to formally pronounce Sherry and Megan deceased. This was for their death certificates, and that's the coroner's job. And before the bodies were removed, Don Windham did something that I just need to mention, because I want you to remember it for later. He saw something a substance on Megan's body, and he wasn't sure what it was. It was just clear, and it was on her left chest area. It was on her left breast, and as he was swabbing areas for touched DNA on the chance that maybe the killer left behind some skin cells, he took the time to swab this additional area with that substance, and he labeled it for testing. And he noticed a mark that was also on the left side of her chest, and that is where the substance was. It was right next to this mark, and honestly, what it looked like to him was a bite mark, but there was no protocol demanding it be swabbed. There wasn't a supervisor asking for it, nothing. But in that moment, moment. It was important for him to do so, and it's going to be important later, because in 1998, DNA testing was a fraction of what it is now. And the odds that a swab like that would ever produce anything usable were very slim, but he swabbed it anyway. It's not like today when we know that every little thing that we take in for evidence could possibly bring back a DNA profile, not back then. So it was unusual for someone to decide to go ahead and swab that. Multiple hairs were also found on Megan's body, and one of them was in her left hand. Both Sherry and Megan's hands were also bagged to preserve any further evidence for collection. At this point, highway patrol corporal Bud Cooper was assigned as a lead investigator on this case, and it was very personal to him, because he knew this family. He knew that time was of the essence, and he knew he would do whatever it took to find the monster who did this. And thankfully, Corporal Cooper didn't have to worry about resources, because about a hundred officers ended up coming into a system. Meanwhile, Sherry and Megan's autopsy were performed the very next day on March 29th by pathologist Dr. Michael Zarakor. And while this is being conducted, Sergeant Wynton was there and took both of their fingerprints to roll them out from the scene. And this doesn't always make sense, but we have known samples of fingerprints from all family members, because what they're going to do is going to go around the house, around the scene, and they're going to rule out anything that matches this family. Those are going to be relevant, because you're going to touch basically every surface of your house, because you've been living there. More injuries and evidence became apparent during the examination. A rape kit was performed, although no seminal fluid was found. However, what was found in those valves did contain traces of a chemical called isopropyl maristate, which is an ingredient in a topical medicated cream, which was odd, because Megan had not been prescribed a medication like that. And this was significant because of where it was found. It meant that maybe the killer could have possibly had an active infection. Additional hairs were also taken from Megan's body, from her leg, her neck, her buttocks, and her jettles. In addition to the one that I told you about in her left hand, Megan had a gunshot wound to the left side of her jaw and to her forehead. And while the shot to Megan's jaw had exited the other side of her face, the bullet was not found at the scene. But the other projectile was recovered from inside her skull, and collected its evidence from matching to a potential murder weapon. It was a 22 caliber, and so were the three that were present inside Sherry's skull. Her wounds were to the back of her head at close range. Now this was the same caliber as both of the weapons that were retrieved from the home, but this was one of the most popular calibers. And what I found interesting is that when it came to the firearm, the gun powder residue mattered. They did residue testing on both of the victims clothing, and it told the investigators something about the ammunition that was used. Because different manufacturers used different powder formulations, so residue can be compared against known samples. And this residue is consistent with either a windchester or a Hodgden product. Now that doesn't identify a gun, it just narrows down the ammunition. I also want to be clear, this wasn't suspicion of Tony. The guns from the home were tested, and they were not the murder weapon. That gun had walked out the door with the killer. They were looking for a revolver that could specifically use that type of gunpowder that was found in the ammunition from the victims. I mentioned that they found three bullets in Sherry's skull. They all entered through the back of her head, and she was fully clothed, and there were no signs of assault. Neither of them had a single defensive wound, not a scratch, not a bruise, nothing. They either didn't or couldn't fight back. Most likely because they were both attacked at gunpoint, and kept a gunpoint probably the entire time. But there were Sherry's wrists. And what I mean by that was that when they found her, her hands were not bound. They were free. But at the autopsy, there were marks on both of her wrists. So this meant that she was restrained at some point. She was tied up the same way that her daughter was, and there were no other restraints found anywhere in that house. So either she had been tied up first, and then the same cord was used to tie a Megan, or whatever was used on Sherry didn't stay behind at the scene. Now from the evidence at the scene, and from the autopsy's, this did not look like a rage killing. It didn't look like something that escalated like a robbery gone wrong. It's like this monster targeted this house. Came in equipped with everything he needed, and then left. Now this led the investigators to believe this wasn't his first time, and it probably wouldn't be his last. So they had to act quickly. At nine in the next morning, coordinated teams of officers began grid searching the house and the farm. Fearing out in three quarters of a mile in every direction, fields, ditches, outbuildings, the whole property, and beyond. And they found nothing. But by then, corporal bud Cooper believed that he had already worked out the problem. While Wyndon was processing that living room, Cooper had been thinking about something else entirely. He thought that whoever did this wasn't even from here, and they weren't here any longer. He was not going to be a name that popped up on a neighbor's list, or somebody that worked in her body. No, to Cooper, it was more likely that this was someone passing through. Someone who came down that highway saw this house in particular, and possibly saw these two women alone. I mean, one was 12 years old. She's not into young women if that. Maybe they were outside getting ready to get into the car to get pizza. Maybe the garage door opened at the very minute that this man drove by, and they were walking out that interior door. He saw them, and he stopped. Maybe when he drove up that driveway, Sherry just thought it was someone in need of assistance. Or he could have randomly chose that house for no other reason, but that it had a light on, and he had an urge. Cooper was just very sure of it. It's like he had this gut feeling or this intuition as an officer. But he knew that every hour that passed regardless, this killer was further away. You can stand in the shares driveway and be on the interstate in about four minutes. And from there, it's under an hour to Tennessee, under an hour to Arkansas. If he had driven all night, he could be an Illinois or Texas or anywhere at all. So Cooper set up a command post at the state highway patrol armory and started making calls. All to this rounding states, resources were not a problem as I say hundreds of officers came out there to help. The problem was they had no idea who they were looking for. Now the first thing the investigators had to do was look at Tony and Steven. And I know how that could sound. This man had just found his wife and his 12 year old daughter on their living room floor. And his 15 year old son had touched their bodies. And now police are pulling them apart and they're asking them questions. That's exactly what has to happen. And here's why. Statistically, most of you know this, when a woman and their child are killed inside their own home, the person who did it is almost always someone in that house is orbit, right? And the people who find the bodies and call it in, they're going to get looked at very hard because sometimes the person who calls 911 is the person that made the call necessary. So they have to clear them. Because until you have eliminated them, every single thing you build sits on that suspicion. And a defense attorney is going to use it as a reasonable doubt, right? In every homicide, it's exactly a pattern of evidence gathering, not much changes. They start from the inside and they work their way out. Meaning that the husband is going to be the potential suspect until he either gets moved up that list to the primary suspect or he gets moved down the list until he's crossed out completely. So the first thing he needs to do is prove that he wasn't there when the murders occurred. If there's sufficient proof, whether that's eyewitnesses, digital evidence, CCTV footage, they move to the next potential suspect or the next theory. And this process continues. They will not go back to a potential suspect if another suspect goes higher on the list until the full process is done again, or the theory of the case becomes clearer. If there's overwhelming evidence, they're going to go in that direction and away from their potential suspect. There's no point in wasting resources and time on a potential suspect if there's less evidence to say that they're involved. So if you're wondering, every investigation pretty much starts the same way. In this case, it's not take long to rule both Stephen and his father out. They were interviewed separately by themselves and their accounts of that entire day matched up. And it wasn't like in a rehearsed way. It was just in a way where the two people who had spent the whole day together remember that day. Out to work in the morning, lunch with Tony's parents, the wheat drill in the early afternoon, back out to the tractor, the fishing nets around 415, and then the truck that fell down in the middle of the road, which turned out to be the best alibi a person could ask for, because Tony knew that farmer and he spoke to him and that farmer had no reason on earth to lie and cover for him if he wasn't actually there. And he confirmed exactly with Tony and Stephen said they were stuck on that road. They stood there talking to him. They could not have been anywhere else at that moment because there was nowhere else to be. And that was when the murders occurred. And then Tony's phone records did the rest. The calls placed them away from the house. Father and son were eliminated, which meant investigators could now focus the resources somewhere else. They started asking people in the town. And this is where you find out what it actually means to live in a place where everyone knows you because Portageville handed police one of the most thoroughly witnesses taste that I've probably seen in homicide case. I'm not going to go to the whole thing. Obviously, not going to go through 50 different people in town that said they saw something. But it turned out that Tony and Stephen were not the last people to have seen or spoken to Sherry and Megan that day, not at all. And what helps is when you have a very active social life. 38-year-olds Sherry, Sherer, had been outside the house almost that whole day. That was who she was. If she was in the yard, I told you, someone drives by, she would wave. And a lot of people saw her on March 28th. Here's the timeline. I'm not going to give you, like I said, a reperson, but around 11 that morning, a friend had driven by. They saw her outside and they actually pulled over. And I just want to repeat something I already told you. She could clearly see them from the road. So if you're driving by, you can see someone if they're in that driveway or if they're right up near the house. The friend said they stood and talked for about 10 minutes or so and that Sherry was upbeat and happy completely herself. About an hour later, Sherry drove into town and stopped at the Garden Center on West Highway 162. That story was owned by her best friend Tina and Tina's husband. Sherry bought some seed scoops and Tina said that there was a nothing unusual about that visit at all. Sherry was her normal bubbly self. Around three in the afternoon, a neighbor saw Sherry out in the yard with one of the dogs. And then somewhere between three and four, Sherry's mother Francis called and talked to her daughter and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Around four p.m., Steven's girlfriend, Michaela called the house and Sherry answered the phone and let her know that Steven wasn't home yet. Michaela said there was nothing off about Sherry and nothing sounded strange. This takes us up to about six o'clock that evening. At least five separate people saw Sherry outside in the yard. Think about that. We are closing in on the time of the murders and five different people on this rural country road said they saw her outside in the last hour of her life. Now let's go over Megan. She's 12. Megan had spent her Saturday exactly like you would figure a 12-year-old wood. There was no internet, no phone in her pocket, and her parents had her doing chores around the house. But she did have her landmine. Tony said that the last time he saw his wife and daughter was around one 15 when he stopped by the house while Steven was still working on the tractor. Tony was working on that wheat row and Sherry was out busy doing the doll cleaning of the pens in the backyard with Megan. At around two 15, Megan got on the phone with a boy from school and they stayed on that call for about half an hour. And the thing she told him was that she was super bored and she was watching TV, completely ordinary. Around three p.m., Megan called and talked to another one of her friends and then at four thirty she talked to a third. And every single one of those kids told police the same thing. Megan sounded completely normal. There was nothing wrong. She wasn't scared of anybody. She wasn't upset about anything. She hadn't mentioned anyone strange. She was just hanging around her house on a Saturday. And there was one more thing about Megan's weekend that came out. Day before on Friday, Megan had won a public speaking contest. She loved it. She was very confident. She could stand up in a room full of people and she won. And she had been riding that high all weekend long, celebrating, telling every person she talked to how excited she was. So there you go. Investigators have somewhat of a timeline up until Steven spoke to his mother at six 24 that evening. And she was fine. She was making plans. She was going to drive into town to pick up a pizza from Gators and then drive her son over to his girlfriend's house. So really that was the last time anyone spoke to her. And from that time to 20 minutes later, something happened because when Tony calls back, no one answers the phone. We know they got home a little after seven p.m. So everything that happened in that house happened inside that gap of time. Roughly 40 minutes. That's it. In under 40 minutes, a man came up that driveway, got inside the house, controlled two people with a gun, restrained them both, forced himself on Megan, killed both of them, staged a scene, and left with pretty much everything he brought there, except for maybe that orange electrical cord we will get into it later. And then the phone records confirmed something else. Sherry had never even called the restaurant to put in the order for the pizza. She told her son at six 24 that she was going to get pizza. That order was never placed, which means whatever happened started immediately after she hung up the phone with her son. So what were investigators actually looking at here? A robbery was thrown out. So did Sherry open the door or did this man slide in through an unlock door or window? Sherry was kind, but she wasn't naive. The people who knew her were clear about this. She was generous. She would help anybody out, even a stranger. Maybe even allow someone to quickly use her telephone if they said they needed to, but she would not have let someone into her house who raised any red flags. They believed whoever came up that driveway was good at pretending. They were not threatening. They put on an act. But since they have no real leads, they do what I told you they do. They turned back to the husband Tony, still potentially a suspect because as we know, people can be at one place while they've got a hitman killing their spouse. So part of clearing him further was going through their life. And that means going through the parts and nobody would choose to have examined, right? Investigators have to start looking at the shares finances. They weren't in any financial trouble. They didn't have debt. Tony was owed some money from four different people, but nothing was significant. Nothing close to be worth killing someone over. And then they looked closer at their marriage. And Tony had told detectives himself, which I think says something about this man, that about a decade earlier, Sherry had struggled with a cold dependency. She went to a treatment facility in Kentucky and she came home and she had been doing very well managing her recovery ever since. Friends even told investigators that things had always been easy between Tony and Sherry around the same time that she was battling her addiction. There had been a brief stretch of infidelity between Sherry and one of her co-workers. Detectives tracked this man down and he had proof that he had not been in contact with her in at least a decade. So that potential lead went nowhere. And before that makes you feel differently about Sherry, no, of course, tuning is not okay. It can ruin lives. It can tear families apart. It's serious. And it can even lead to murder, but this is also real life and these things do happen. Even to the people we've at least expected from. This was a couple who went through something genuinely hard and they came out on the other side still together because they loved each other and they loved their kids and they wanted to work on their marriage and they did. By 1998, everyone who knew Tony and Sherry said the same exact thing. They had worked through it and they were stronger because of it and many of us know that story all too well. Nobody had any concerns about this couple at all. Now what that section of the investigation actually proves is that detectives went looking for a reason inside this family and there wasn't one there. On April 8th, investigators sit back down with Tony and Steven for a second interview, a follow-up. They wanted to know whether anyone could have known that Sherry and Megan were going to be home alone that afternoon. And the answer was no because this family didn't have a set schedule. There was no pattern that someone could have studied or known about and then came the dogs. Neither Tony nor Steven could remember whether they had heard dogs barking when they pulled in that evening, but Tony was absolutely certain about one thing and it was sad. He said if those dogs had not been in that pen, they would have gone after anyone that tried to lay a hand on his wife or his daughter, but as we know, unfortunately they were not out. They were in the pen because of the new floors. Sometimes it's just those tiny details that just hit me differently and make it so much more heartbreaking because if only the dogs had been in the house and as you might expect, it wasn't just the brutal nature of this double murder that lit a fire under this investigation. Corporal Cooper and Captain Hill lived in this community themselves. This could have easily been one of their wives, their daughters, the randomness of this crime. It made it fear for everyone in this community and the surrounding communities. Everyone in this town was now terrified. They were in this deep state of grieving and fear. Nothing like this had ever happened there. So now residents were starting to lock their doors, close their winners at night wondering if they could even trust their neighbor. Was someone covering for somebody else that had left town? Nobody knew. But that suspicion began to creep into the way that these residents went about their daily lives. And some people might say, well, you know, it's a good thing that Tony and Steven still had each other, but to them it didn't make this easier. They were in the middle of a nightmare that they were never going to wake up from. It was just so random and so senseless. Something that confounded authorities was that no one in the family had any enemies. Megan, she appeared to be the target. But everyone liked her. I mean, there was nothing in her desk at school or what her friends and her basketball teammates could think of. It would make them think anyone would want to hurt her. She had no access to a computer, which, you know, would have allowed her to communicate with someone sinister. No. Tony couldn't think of anyone that would have a problem with his family. And Tony himself treated his employees very well. And he was generous. He had a reputation for being a very nice and kind boss. So everyone was stumped. And this was even after the investigators went and talked to other farming families and took their farm line into account as well. Because substances find their ways into small towns like this. And people would go out in these towns, along dirt roads, Jews, crack, and the party, thinking they would remain inconspicuous. But even after looking into that, there were no links found. There was nobody engaging in that kind of activity or drug use or alcohol near this property. One tip did come in that Tony had once reported a man to police for apparently trying to manufacture substances on his property on Tony's land without his knowledge. And the word got out that maybe that guy wanted revenge on Tony. And Tony agreed the guy was definitely up to no good. But that had been years earlier and that lead went nowhere. Now somewhere in those first couple of weeks, Sherry and Megan were laid to rest. They were buried together at Portage Field Cemetery. And I can only imagine the sorrow and the anguish felt by not only their family members, but their close friends and even the wider community because they were still in the state of shock. But the investigation was still in full swing. The tips started coming and every single one had to be run down. People had seen vehicles that was an ex lead. All kinds of vehicles, pickup trucks, vans, four wheelers, some of them were speeding. Some of them were apparently not ones the people usually saw. We know the drill. A red Buick was spotted around 645 that evening heading down County Road 421. There was a tan pickup truck near the shares home. And that was reported by a pizza delivery driver. And then a dark colored older model pickup truck seeing around sunset moving very slowly around County Road 420. So these roads were right near County Road 419. The witness said that the driver was a white man wearing a baseball cap somewhere between 40 and maybe 60 years old. I mean, that's quite a range. And then there was the Simmons service station, because something unusual happened there. A man had come in wanting to charge his car battery. Now he was described as dirty, heavily built around 40 years old in jeans and a t-shirt with long dark hair pulled back. And he was driving an older model gray Chrysler sedan. Now while the battery was being charged and worked out, he went to the pay phone and made a collect call. And whoever was listening overheard him say that he had just been released from prison in Texas and get this. He left without paying. Now that man's description was consistent with the vehicle that somebody had seen around 620 pm pulled over on interstate 55 north of Portageville. And I'm thinking, okay, well, for cars battery was nearly dead. That car might have pulled over, but the prison thing made this tip go to the top. But even Captain Fred Hill had his own siding. Around 530 on the evening of the murders, he had seen a suspicious vehicle at a gas and go amaco station. When the driver got out to pump his gas, he was wearing a holstered knife. The van had an out-of-state plate and not just stuck in the officer's mind. Every one of these tips had to be chased. And every one of them took time and manpower and phone calls and hours that a hundred officers could only spend once. And sadly, every one of them went nowhere. Are you waiting for me to say it? Because I'm about to. There was going to be a major break in this case, sort of. It turned out there was a shooting. The exact same night the Megan and Sherry had been killed. And it wasn't on police radar right away because it happened in another state. But it was just 40 miles away in Tennessee right past the border in Dyersburg. That's under a 45-minute drive right down the 55 to the 155. The investigators thought it was worth checking out, especially because the victim was a woman. While police cars were still sitting outside the sheriff's home on the night of March 28th, a 25-year-old woman, she was a mother of three. Her name was Stephanie. She was pulling into her driveway. It was around 930 at night. She had just gotten back from the girl she saw with her kids. The weather was nice at night, so she left the door of the family's home wide open. This was on Lennox Road. The two kids were outside playing and just imagine this. All of a sudden, a maroon van holds up to their house, a man gets out and starts walking toward their home. Now Stephanie's daughter, who was just five years old, she looks at this man. She says, "My daddy's not home," which is understandable coming from someone that young, probably thinking that it's whatever dad's friends. Stephanie comes outside. She's trying to see what's going on. And the man explains to her. He's from Nashville. He's looking for his friend named Jeremy Taylor. Stephanie says, "I don't know anyone by that name." And immediately, she becomes suspicious when the man can't tell her Jeremy's address. So here you are looking for your so-called friend, but you don't even know where you're supposed to be looking. So then the man, he seems kind of flustered and he says, "Okay, wait. I'm going to quickly go get my map from my van." Yeah, they didn't have GPS on their cell phones. They need to go grab an actual map. But Stephanie just knew something was not right. It was just a gut feeling and it was terrifying. So she instinctively took her 12-year-old daughter into the house for safety, just in case. And her five-year-old was already inside, and she tried calling her brother-in-law who lived close by. But for some reason, the phone wouldn't connect. Okay, remember that. Please remember that for later. There's going to be a part two of this. You might have to actually watch this one twice right before the second one comes out. And then Stephanie had an idea. She went outside to tell the man to drive, just go drive. Drive to my brother-in-law's place. He can help you out. The man responded, that now you couldn't find his map, but he found something else. And when Stephanie looked down, he was holding a gun, winning it at her. And his finger was already on the trigger. She almost screamed. She gasped. She immediately grabbed the barrel of this gun, and she was struggling with the stranger. And Stephanie screamed at her kids to stay inside. Well, this man demanded that she also get into the house. Can you imagine? And Stephanie pushed as hard as she could. And finally, somehow, he loses his footing and he falls backwards. But they both still held on to the gun. And this man kept saying, he just wanted Stephanie's car. So she said, take it. The keys were still inside the vehicle. You could just have the car, but the man wouldn't let go of the gun. So Stephanie backed into her house. She slammed the door shut. And it actually caught one of the man's arms because he was still determined to get inside that house. And somehow, the man fired the gun through the door. And he shot Stephanie in the arm. And she screamed at her kids. She said, get the shot gun, which was on their wall of the house and call 911. And suddenly the man ran back to his van and sped away. And he headed towards the 55. Now Stephanie was injured. She was bloody. She didn't know what to do. The phone's not working. She throws her kids into her car. And she speeds over to her brother-in-law's house where she ends up calling the police. And she tells him, I have just been shot. Now that bullet was later removed from Stephanie's arm at the hospital. And she made a full physical recovery. But it had been a terrifying ordeal as you can imagine. It wasn't even until April 7 that Missouri investigators even found out about this Tennessee shooting when they did. Bud Cooper's reaction was immediate. He certainly thought that there were similarities. I mean, look at the two side by side. A man arrives at a rural home in the evening. A woman is there with her children. He talks to her at the door. He wants to come inside. He uses a gun to control her. And in both cases, he leaves in a vehicle. The only real difference is that Stephanie fought and somehow got the door shut. And perhaps in Megan and Sherry's situation, it was more of an ambush. Or possibly, this is one theory, the man came to the door, talked Sherry or Megan into opening it enough for him to work his foot or his leg or his arm or something inside of it, and was able to push his way through. An immediately grabbed Megan, held her at gunpoint, and threatened Sherry to do as he said or else. So Sherry complied against her will, most likely tying her up until he was finished hurting Megan, which is just so sickening if she watched what happened without a way to help her poor daughter. Remember, her body was warmer than her daughters, but he killed both of them. Presumably Megan first and then her mother and then he left. The Dyer County Sheriff's Department released the bullet that they had taken on a Stephanie's arm and they gave it to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. It was a 22 caliber and it was sent for ballistics testing against the ones found in Megan and Sherry's case. Now this took months, but finally on July 21 of 1998, the report comes back. They had been fired by the same gun. Wow, so now they knew three things for sure. He was traveling. He was picking people at random because Stephanie had never seen this man before in her entire life and he had a method. He came to the door, he talked. He had a reason, you know, he would make one up for being there, a story, a request, and he got close and the gun came out. Stephanie lived to give a detailed description of this man and she worked with the investigators on getting a composite sketch made out. He was white, he was over 30, about five foot six, he was slender, he had dark hair and it looked like it might have been going gray a bit. He was about medium length and straight and he had a thin graying mustache. He also wore glasses, had on a pair of work boots and had what she described as a northern accent, meaning he didn't sound like he was from the south. It was flat, hard, voweled. The sound the people associated with maybe places like Chicago, for instance. The only other lead they had was the name he gave, that he was looking for a man named Jeremy Taylor. So the Tennessee investigators went looking for a Jeremy Taylor, they found every Jeremy Taylor that they could and they checked them all and every one of them had an alibi that held up. It probably just been a name that this guy just pulled out of nowhere. So after four months and more than a thousand hours, this is what law enforcement in two states actually had. Four bullets, a sketch of a man who was average height with graying hair and glasses, who could have been almost anybody and who was probably already long gone. But you might be asking, what could the forensics tell the investigators? At first, it wasn't encouraging. Only one latent fingerprint was found in a share's home and it didn't belong to any of the family members. Now this was found on a newspaper that was underneath Megan's body, but it also didn't match anyone known to the police. They would need to actually fingerprint a suspect and compare it to it, right? The print could belong to whoever handled that paper at one point, I'm talking about at a store, maybe a neighbor, anybody. So investigators had a fingerprint that might be the killers or it might be completely meaningless and there was no way to tell the difference. There were also no usable tire tracks and this was due to the vehicles that had come up and down that dirt driveway. So there was no way to tell the difference. They were run over, they didn't know to look there, but there was still a lot of items being tested. And here is what I hate about this case because they had this man. If this happened right now, things would be different. Think about it. From the very beginning, they had him because they had his DNA. It was in that house, it was on Megan's body. It was on the floor of that living room, but in 1998, it was worth almost nothing. Let's go through what actually came back after it was tested. Remember the clear substance I told you about that Wyndham had just swabbed off a Megan's chest without a reason to be taking that kind of swab? Well, it was saliva, which meant the mark on her chest. It already suspected it was by Mark, but this confirmed it. The hairs from the living room floor were dark brown, head and pubic hairs, and they did not belong to Tony or Stephen or share your Megan, including the one that was in Megan's left hand when they found her. The pubic hairs were analyzed and a DNA profile was developed off of them. And that profile matched the saliva. So now they knew one man had left the hairs and had also left the saliva in the bite mark, one offender. They ran that profile against Tony and Stephen and both of them were excluded again, and this time by DNA. So that was the last word on whether they were involved permanently, they were not involved. So here's the investigators. They have the killer's genetic profile in their hands in 1998, and they couldn't do a single thing with it. 'Cause they just didn't have the technology to do it. And if you're wondering, well, couldn't they have run it through codeus? The national DNA database? Well, that was brand new. The national index only went live on October of 1998. So this was just months after Sherry and Megan were killed. And even then, it was nowhere close of where it is today. You have to actually have profiles in it. So that wasn't available. And there was another problem anyway. They were only able to construct a partial DNA profile, which meant it didn't even meet the threshold to be entered into codeus. So they had his DNA and they had nowhere to search with it. Think about what that actually means for an investigator. You're holding the answer. It's physically in the evidence room. And the only thing you can do is compare it to one other human being at a time. Two men that you think are suspects. But you have to get their sample first, which is exactly what they did. They ran it against contractors and delivery drivers who had been on that property in the previous months. They ran it against men known to police with histories of breaking and entering. They ran it against registered offenders living in that area and none of them matched. And then there was the question of what he hadn't left behind, which told its own story. There was nothing on the orange electrical cord that had been used to bind Megan Sands, nothing under either victims' fingernails, and one partial fingerprint on a newspaper. Everything else was clean. Dornobs, light switches, the safe, the surfaces that he must have touched even just moving through that house and that meant something. It meant that he had worn gloves. He couldn't have wiped all those services down. He came prepared. And then there was the cord itself. That wasn't something from this household. He brought it there and he left it there. Missouri State Highway Patrol officer Bill Clayton went to work tracing it. And this was a pain stakingly, but deeply important task, tedious, but if you could find out where that cord was sold, you might be able to find out who bought it. Now, we had not been sold at any hardware store around in Portageville. And eventually, officer Clayton traced the manufacturing back to a company based in Indiana. And they used components from Mexico. And then he hit a wall. Because this specific cord that was used in the murders had purposely been cut presumably by the killer. And what I mean by this is the plug end of this cord. That's where the product information, the identification tag, would live. And that tag is how you narrow down the batch, the shipment, the retailer, and on this cord, that end was cut off with a pair of scissors they could tell. Investigators concluded that the killer most likely hadn't cut the tag off to somehow like stay hidden or defeat the investigators, he'd probably just cut it off to make it a better weapon. He came there with something like a kill kit. Everything about that night says preparation. He brought a gun. He brought restraints. He brought gloves. And he took most of what he brought back out with him, except for the cord, which I told you had been tied in so many complex knots that maybe he didn't have time to get it off. A killer like this who prepares his materials would know that a cord with a plug cut off of it would simply be easier to hold. Better to restrain someone. No bulky molded end to work with when you're tying a knot. So that would work to his benefit. It wasn't herbously to push them in another direction. But the effect of that portion of the cord being cut was the same. There was no way to find out where it had been sold. That is a man who had done this before and who knew what he was doing. And it was probably not going to be found by just knocking on doors in their county, but they still checked everyone, especially anyone that had been at the funeral. Every single person that signed the funeral condolence book, every motel guest that was there that weekend and the surrounding counties with a registered 22 caliber firearm. And they even pulled sales records for all 22 handguns that they could find in the surrounding states. I had to look into every one of those people. By May of 1908, the investigation went national. The case was featured on America's most one. And now if you're my age or maybe even in your 30s, you probably woke up to the sound of this theme song in the middle of the night after falling asleep on the couch. But for anyone who isn't familiar with this show, if you don't know what this show was about and how big it was in the 90s, it was big. When you have no internet, no Reddit, no true crime podcasts, no Facebook groups, if you wanted the entire country to know about a case at the same time, there was essentially only one way to do it. And that was John Walsh on a Saturday night. And to me, I kind of compare it to the equivalent of watching a live stream today because everyone was watching at the same time. TV had a schedule. You knew when a certain show was going to come on. And if you missed it, there was no rewind. And there was no watching it later. It was just gone. You lost your chance. So you can just imagine millions of people watched. And they watched because of John Walsh. He was a very powerful voice. He's the father of Adam Walsh. You probably sadly recognize Adam's face. He was kidnapped from a Sears department store in the Hollywood mall in Hollywood, Florida on July 27, of 1981. And I am not going to be going into any detail about what was done to a seven-year-old, but his body was later found two weeks afterward in a drainage canal. Now Otis O'Toole confessed, but he was known to make false confessions any later recanted. And he was never actually convicted because there just wasn't enough evidence. And he died in 1996. So essentially this case is still somewhat unsolved, even though his father, John, accepted that Otis was Adam's killer. After Adam's murder, John Walsh became an advocate for victims of violent crimes and was the host of America's most wanted. And when this went on TV, with Megan and Sherry's case, tips came in by the thousands. And the team investigating this case was growing, which almost never happens in cases like this. County Deputy Chris Hensley joined Missouri State Highway Patrol Lieutenant Phil Gregory came on the scene in October. And investigators were increasingly convinced that the man who did this had simply been passing through, which meant no lead could be dismissed for being too far away. They chased them from Texas to Michigan to Alabama. In November, the composite sketch built from Stephanie's description, along with the description of the Maroon van, was released to multiple jurisdictions. And the Sharers' case ran again on America's most wanted for a second time. And the tips came flooding in again, which probably sound a lot like progress. And in a way, it was the opposite of progress. Because every single tip is someone's time. Someone's got to read it, run the name, make the calls, drive out there, knock on a door, and there was criticism of that sketch. And that turned out to be fair, because it was so generic. It could have been anyone I've been showing it, but a white man in his 40s with graying hair and glasses and a mustache. I mean, that was half of the men in America, 1998. And then in the middle of all this, the family lost somebody else. On November 14, 1998, Sherry's mother Frances Walker died. She was 73. She had already lost a son and now a daughter and a granddaughter. And she had just spoken to her daughter on the phone the day that she died. She was one of the last people who ever did. And then Frances died eight months later. Without ever knowing who had come into that house and snatched away the lives of her daughter and her granddaughter or why. And then a year passed, but the investigation had not slowed down. One way cases get solved is sadly when another one happens, like we saw in Stephanie's altercation on the same night as Sherry and Megan's, and no one wants a killer to strike again. No, but in this case, the likelihood that he would was high. They were hoping that if he did, he would mess up. And now think about this. There's 50 states, and not all those jurisdictions are going to be talking to each other on a regular basis, not at all. If you're lucky, maybe the surrounding states would have some form of communication between them. But in order for Missouri investigators to find out if there were any other similar cases that popped up with the same motive or methods, they had to use some creative ways, because they didn't have a system like we do today that's digital. And news did not travel as fast as it does now. The FBI did have ViCAP, and that is the violent criminal apprehension program that launched 1985. And it was designed for exactly this. An agency would fill out a form. They would describe and unsolved violent crime. They would send it in. And the system would look for patterns across multiple jurisdictions. But there was a problem. And that was the form that you had to fill out. It was somewhere around 180 questions. And it took hours that a detective did not have. Plus, this submission was voluntary. You do not have to do this. So most departments never even bothered. And the ones that did get filed, it was inconsistently, right? And a good database is only as good as what is in the database. And this database had a fraction, a small fraction of the country's unsolved violent crimes in it. So it was a good idea, but it didn't have the right method to participate. What actually worked back then was regional teletype bulletins. You would blast the description of your offender and your M.O. to surrounding agencies in hope that someone recognized it. And another method to solving crimes was going to homicide investigator conferences. I kid you not. And this is when investigators would stand around. They were all from different states. And they would be in a hotel ballroom. And they would describe their unsolved cases to each other. They would bring out a notebook and say, does anyone have a case of, and then they would make the list. And if it sounded familiar, another officer would say, wow, here's one. And they would, you know, use pen and paper to write them down. It sounds almost quaint. It genuinely though was one of the most effective methods available back then, believe it or not. But aside from that, the thing that carried the most weight was a detective in one county, knowing a detective in another county, picking up the phone to alert them, hey, a case just like yours just broke, which is exactly what happened here, especially because something big broke in December of 1999. And it wasn't far away. It was just one state away and hours drive out in Arkansas. A 54 year old woman, Gloria Bond's, and her 16 year old niece, Rachel McNair, were both shot and killed in Gloria's home while her husband was away working. The pair had been tied up and Rachel had been assaulted. And then the killer took off to Illinois in Gloria's vehicle. And the very next day, he broke into the home of Richard and Lulu Silvis. He assaulted this elderly couple before shooting their 42 year old daughter Mary in the side with a sawed off shotgun and fleeing the scene. But this time, the cops were on his trail immediately and they pursued him to Indiana, but unfortunately before they could effectuate and arrest, he took his own life. The killer was 34 year old Troy Akerman Jr. He hadn't known any of his victims, same as Portageville, random, mobile, extreme violence against women in their own homes. His DNA was compared to the evidence from the sheriff's case immediately, but I think you can guess it wasn't a match. So more of these monsters exist. And actually another one was about to come across these investigators' deaths as a possible suspect. And this is when the case really heats up. Imagine you have a checklist and you're looking for specific things that line up with your case. Health and man in question, I'm about to tell you about, was not only a transient person, he was sadistic and he was cruel, but he was also a self-confessed serial killer. He was 35 year old Tommy Lynn Cells, you might have heard of him before. He had been arrested in Del Rio, Texas for murder and attempted murder. In his record of violent offending span 30 years and across the entire country, so nowhere was off limits for this man, this monster, everywhere was his hunting ground. And his 22 victims included 12 children. He even gave himself his own serial killer nickname, the coast to coast killer. Tommy stole cars. He rode trains to get around. He killed his victims using multiple methods, anything from his bare hands to knives to guns to blunt instruments. And his MO was eerily similar to the man who they thought had killed Sherry and Megan, and allegedly attacked Stephanie. Tommy was a smooth talker. He could easily get people to trust him and he was calculated. He only struck if he was sure he could get away with it, and he often tied his victims up and got them. He violated his victims both prior to and even after death, which is also important. He was careful not to leave fingerprints because he would wear gloves. He checked off almost every box they had. So they had to speak with this man. And when they did, it was chilling. Right away, Tommy started dropping hints that he was the killer. First of all, he told the investigators that Sherry and Megan looked familiar to him. If you have to remember, this kind of killer probably doesn't even really get a good look at his victims because he's randomly going out and killing them like this. But he said he couldn't really remember exactly where he had been in March of 1998 because he was heavily under the influence of substances at that time, but he could tell them about the general time period. Now, he also grew up in Missouri, not far from where Sherry grew up, almost exactly at the same time as well. So he had local roots. He was a boy from that same town who knew the roads, someone who would have known how the rural property sit, who might plausibly have known that the sheriff's place could be seen from the interstate. And that's why this interview mattered so much. Tommy explained that around March of 1998, he killed a man in West Memphis. He was driving a black van at that time and carrying a small caliber handgun. Even his driver's license picture matched the composite sketch when asked about Stephanie and whether he might have shot a woman through a door in Dyersburg. He said he could have and then as if reasoning in his head by himself, he said that if he did it, then he must have killed Sherry and Megan. So there he is going like, huh, did I shoot a woman through a door? Yeah, maybe. And if I did that, then I did the other crime because we already know they're connected. Can you imagine hearing that? It's like it doesn't even phase him. It's like he's discussing whether he'd been to a certain restaurant in town. Yeah, I might have, but there's more. He hypothesized if he had attacked Sherry and Megan, he wouldn't have been scared by their family dogs. Okay, so now they're thinking his memory is returning. And that's when he said something that shocked them. Tommy somehow seemed to know about a grease spot that was left on the right hand side of the Sherry's driveway. And this was left there by the killer's vehicle. It was fresh. And that was something that only the police had knowledge of. And it was a very important part. And then Tommy asked a very specific question about a unique detail of the Sherry's home, which gave police real hope that they had just found the killer. Tommy asked the investigators if the Sherry's kitchen decor featured wallpaper with watermelons on it. I mean, the dogs were a known thing. But this, no, this was never made public. And it stopped investigators in their tracks. Tommy was looking more and more like the man that they had been hunting. So investigators went to work on his movements. They confirmed he had been in Missouri in late 1997 working at carnivals. And that is where he met Nora, a woman that he would later marry. So they go and interview Nora and other friends of his who placed him in Missouri in April of 1998. So two weeks after the murders, right state, right window of time, right method. And then Tommy begins to change his entire story. He said Nora told him that the two of them were out in Texas at the time the murders occurred. He couldn't remember himself, but he said he's sure of her memory. Despite everything, nobody who knew him could definitively say that he was anywhere near Portardville in March of 1998. But Tommy agrees to give them a DNA sample. And that's when they thought, okay, we can crack the case without his faulty memory or anyone's account, but I want to tell you something important. In a case without a swap of DNA from the scene like we have here, Tommy Lynn cells would have gotten charged automatically and probably even convicted of this murder, these two murders. He was in the right place at the right time and he had the right history and he said the right things. And there was no physical evidence pointing anywhere else. The only reason that didn't happen in this case is because the DNA doesn't match. Tommy was a monster. That was true. But when they tested the DNA from the scene, they concluded he was not Sherry and Megan's killer. And I don't think people appreciate what that does to a team of investigators. You have been working this case for two years. You have a suspect who literally fits better than anything you could have even invented in your mind. And he's telling you, I probably did it. But then the science says no, he didn't. I mean, what's one more crime to add to a list that he's already accomplished? At that point, it was just bragging rights. But as for the creed stain and the watermelons, nobody has ever been able to answer why he knew those details. Was he fed that info? Could have been, I don't know, however, it could be way more ordinary than it sounds because a man with family and a history in the next county over has a hundred ways to pick up on a detail about a crime scene that's 25 miles away. Got to hurt it at jail, a bar, a cousin, someone who knew a cop, or maybe even another criminal. He was a career manipulator who has sat through dozens of these interviews and also learned how to ask questions instead of making statements. And remember, he was watching the investigators just as much as they were watching him. And he was the one that asked them about the watermelons. And they just said yes. Their biggest break went nowhere. And by 2006, this case was eight years old. Bud Cooper was still on it, along with Terry Stevens and Chris Hensley. They had cleared more than a thousand leads. They had run their partial profiles against every man they could think to suspect in every database in neighboring state. They had chased three zero killers and eliminated all of them. And Missouri State Highway Patrol Sergeant Jeff Heath decided it was time to try something different. The evidence from that living room had been sitting in storage since 1998. And in eight years time, DNA testing had actually changed a lot. The techniques were more sensitive and you needed less material. They could pull more information out of samples that were useless back in 1998. So Heath sent everything back to the lab. Analyst Ruth Montgomery started working through all of it right away. The socks, the hairs, the cuttings from the victims clothing, the saliva swab. And this time, there was enough genetic material to develop a full DNA profile. Not a partial one, it was complete. Which meant for the very first time since March of 1998, they had something that actually met the standard to now go into Codis and it was much more built out. So now they had all of the monster. They entered the profile into the national database. And they get a hit. There was a connection to another murder in South Carolina. That one happened in 1990. So eight years before Sherry and Megan's murder and 600 miles away. So everything investigators had believed about him was now confirmed in writing by a computer as well. He was transient. He was a serial offender. He had been doing this for years before he ever came up the sharers driveway exactly as the scene had suggested on the very first night. The man who arrived there was equipped and he left equipment. This wasn't a man that was learning on the job as he went along. But then they read the rest of the file. South Carolina case was unsolved. And there was no name attached to this DNA. Nobody had been identified. It was the same situation, but in a different state, they had the DNA from the scene. There's just no one to match it with. But that database had done exactly what it was meant to do. It had found a match. But the match was just another question. So what happened in that case? Was it similar? What kind of evidence did they find? They wanted to know. Two unsolved cases had just become one unsolved case. All they knew right now was that the victim was in South Carolina. And it was a 28 year old woman who was found dead in her apartment in Greenville in April of 1990. Her name was Genevieve. But I told you, this is deep. And I'm not going to rush it. I have to let this story unfold. And in order to understand what happened to Sherian Megan and the man who did it, we have to go back eight more years before their murders to an apartment complex in South Carolina. And to a woman who's story deserves every bit as much time as theirs. So that's where I'm going to pick up in part two.