The Perverted Professor - Sharon, Massachusetts

This week, in Sharon, Massachusetts, a mild-mannered, respected middle-aged professor is the main suspect when a young woman turns up missing after detectives uncover his debatuous and criminal might life while everyone thought he was a pillar of the community. Welcome to Small Town Murder! Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder! Yay! Hey, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wiseman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely crazy edition of Small Town Murder, just some hidden lives, and I love that. I love when someone's got a whole other life hidden, and that's the most interesting thing, and we have that today. We will get to all of that, and more. First, though, head over to shut up and give me murder.com tickets for live shows. Next live show with tickets available. I don't know if there's any left, actually, is Royal Oak Michigan on May 30th. 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How do those two things go together and not make it weird? Well, we think it actually makes it a little kind of smoother. To us, it's a little more weird to be really with like ominous music. And, you know, then her, you know, arms will removed. And that's that's almost creepy to me. I'd rather let's go. Well, we're uncomfortable. Let's make a little joke about it. That means it's a little more human as the way we like to do it here. But one thing we don't do is we never make one of the victims or the victim's families. Why James? He caused were assholes, but we're not scumbags. That's just how it works here. We try to try to walk the line on that one. So if you think that true crime and comedy should never ever go together, maybe this isn't the show for you, but maybe it is. That's the thing. Either way, though, no complaining later. What do you say, everybody? That said, I think it's time to do it. I think it's time to clear the lungs. Here we go. Arms to the sky. Let's all shout. Shout up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Let's go on a trip. Shall we? Here we go. We are going to Sharon, Massachusetts this week. Sharon, just like a lady's name. That's right. Sharon. It's an eastern Massachusetts. Only about a half hour outside Boston. South of North. It's the kind of West, like Southwest of Boston, I want to say that correctly. You know, 30 minutes outside of Boston. So it could be a mile and a half. We don't know. No, it's like it's like 17 miles, I think. It's all about 35 minutes to Providence, the other direction too. So if you live here, you kind of have two cities to pick where you want to work and stuff like that. That's not bad. And a lot more than that, really, because there's everything closed. There's a lot closed. I mean, like two, you know, pretty good, you know, Boston and then Providence is a state capital of stuff going on there. It's about an hour and five minutes to Groten, Massachusetts, our last Massachusetts episode, episode 656. That was the killer prodigy. That was the jazz drummer. Remember that guy? Yeah, he was like the prodigy jazz drummer and it didn't quite work out that well for him. This is in Norfolk County, just like in Virginia there. Area code three, three, nine and seven, eight, one, got two area codes here. Now a little bit of history and, you know, this any time you're talking about like Massachusetts, if you wanted to talk about history, the whole three hour show could be about history of a town, because they go back hundreds of years, the first one. Yeah, it was first settled as part of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1637. So the Unitarian and congressional congregational churches in the center of Sharon both have church bells that were made by Paul Revere. He was a bell maker, but he was doing apparently he's popping out bell out and right. Yeah. She seems like he could have figured out something better than shouting, right? Yeah, he should have run a bell for this and two bells for that. Yeah, what are we talking about here? I mean, I don't know. He had more bells. He knew what to do with here. Reviews this town. Here is five stars. Okay. I enjoy the people I work with in Sharon. It is a nice scenic commute as well. I enjoy driving by the lake on my way home every day. This person just lives to work. He just loves to work there loves it works the rest off. Here's five stars. Again, I've I've lived here most of my life. I've lived here most of my life. It is one of the best towns in Massachusetts. Peaceful quiet and safe. I think everything is great there. All right. Hence five stars. Then three stars. Most issues involve drugs or burglary. Crime is not a major issue here. We have stats. We'll let you know that is or not. Yeah, chill out. The largest issue is enforcing rules and parking violations, especially around the high school. If your town's biggest problem is parking violations around a high school. You're doing fine. That's not bad. Then finally one star. There really is not much to do in the local area. However, we are located close to Boston Providence and the Rhode Island beaches. What are you complaining about? Too many nice life. Two major cities and a million beaches. One and a half hour of you. You're a jackass. Also Cape Cod is about an hour away and it attracts many tourists and vacationers. Oh, does it? Cape Cod. That's a really. That's a vacation destination. Is that what you're saying? That's what I'm really. What about the Bahamas? Anybody go there? Down the Cape is really. Wow. Okay. People in this town population 18,477. So pretty decent sized town, but not that big because it's and being so close to Boston. It's definitely a little quiet suburb. The men and women break down here 52.8% women. So a lot more women than men here. A median age 42.6 slightly above the national average, but how about it? When you get the suburbs like that, that's when people move out there is, you know, 35 and they have a couple kids and they're like, all right, fine. I'll move somewhere boring and then it's end up in Sharon. It's about normally marriage here, you know, people being married is about 50, 50. Here it is 71% married. Wow. This is a have your kids. Let them play in the yard suburb period. Very low divorce rate. Very low people, very low rate of single with children. People like this is that right married with kids. Yeah. The racial breakdown here, racial breakdown is 75.5% white, 2.8% black, 15.3% Asian. A lot of Asian people and Sharon Massachusetts and 4.3% Hispanic, 65.5% of the people here are religious. This is, this is when we say Catholics are the Baptists of the North. It's because if you get in the like Alabama, it's going to be 65% and they're all Baptists here at 65% and they're all Catholics. 54.2% of the people here are Catholic. Huge. You know, Catholics are the Baptists of the North. that's right. Three percent Jewish. Hey, we get to sing. Oh, my goodness. That's crazy. Hi. That's awesome. That's more than we usually get Hava Nagila. Nagila. Nagila. Nagila. I don't know the words. Hey, all right. There we go. Unemployment here, a little bit low. Median household income, very high, more than double the national average. Really? Median median household income here, 157,928 bucks. Why, I got it. That is killing it. Crush it. And you better be crushing it. Yeah. Because the cost of living is not low. No. No, usually 100 is regular average here. It is 144. Got it. And the housing is the high one here. Median home cost here, $703,200. That's why no one's getting divorced. They're like, you're not, I'm not selling this giant house. We're living here. It's expensive. We are so cat. That was poor. We're house. Yeah. We have a house and that's all. And that's all we have. And we can't afford a divorce. That's not in the budget. So if we've convinced you that, well, first of all, we must have convinced you to make a shitload of money and be able to buy a afford $700,000 average houses. But if we have, then we have for you the Sharon, Massachusetts real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here, $2,920. That is wild. That is almost three times the average. Now, Boston is a really expensive city. It's like, it's, you know, New York, Boston, San Francisco are like the three most expensive cities and that's so it's. And then throw Chicago in there too. Yeah, it's not that bad actually. Chicago compared to those. Really? Yeah, it's expensive compared to the rest of Illinois, which is cheap. But compared to New York and San Francisco, it's pretty low on the list. And the price gets affordable there too, because the suburbs are incredibly affordable. Whereas in the city of Chicago is outfucking rages. Yeah, some of the nicer parts. Yeah, they're, they're real ridiculous and some of the nicer parts. So here's your first house. It is a two bedroom, one bath, 640 square foot little like bungalow. It's very nice. It's not done nicely on the inside. It's not fallen apart or anything like that. It looks like a very small nice house, $499,000 for that. I mean, 640 square feet, 500 grand, half a million dollars. That's absurd. Here's a four bedroom, three bath, 2720 square feet. It's nice. It's got, it hasn't been redone in a while. You can tell on the inside. It's got those big kind of older tiles. Stair carpeting looks a little, you know, finish basement though. I believe it does have a finish basement. It's not bad. Otherwise, it's kind of, you know, vinyl siding. Yeah. Regular looking house, $1,150,000 for that house on.92 acres, so not even a whole acre. Sweet Christ. And then finally, this house, four bedroom, five bath tea bowl for each and every beehull and then one left over 4,323 square feet. Oh, shit. It looks like the home alone house. That's what it looks like. It's like one of those wide with loads of windows. Really pretty. On 1.22 acres, 1,799,900 bucks. And that's after a $50,000 price cut, which just happened recently. So a little pricey in this area here. That said, things to do. Not a whole lot, but you can go to Boston. You can go to Providence. You can go to the beach. So they don't really need a lot to do here. We have the Sharon Carnival is here. You have a whole carnival. Some of the fan favorite thrill rides that came back include, but we're not limited to the top gun. Right. The fireball, zero gravity and the freak out. Okay. They're all just freak out. Yeah. I don't know what that means. Freak out. I assume they give you a bunch of acid, make your weight about a half hour and put you in a fun house. And then send you in. Oh, just one of those ones with the mirrors and you're just like, whoa, man, freak out. Yeah, you just start losing it. You talk like Spacoli by the time you leave. So now, oh, by the way, the freak out's now known by warrior. That's what it's called. Oh, said, whether you're into flipping upside down or flying through the air, there's some want something for everyone. There's no, no carnival is complete without some greasy treats. This is under the food section. At least they're being honest. They're being honest. And this one is no exception. There were, of course, classics, hot dogs, burgers and fries. And for the more daring, there were even carnival treats almost guaranteed to give you a stomach ache before a ride. Cotton candy, fried dough and ice cream. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, okay. So there's that. And then there is the cell E or C-L-E-E satanic mill marker. The what? This is definitely going to get a bonus episode. This whole shit. Okay. This is about five miles away in eastern Massachusetts, but it's right there. I don't know if that's where they make the bats or not, but I hope so. I hope so. Now this is a sign marker marks the location of an 18th century saw mill owned by quote a wizard who employed satanic imps. Okay. I had to put that in quotes. I don't want anyone thinking that's coming for me. Well, we'll find out here. The story begins around 1755 when eastern Massachusetts was growing at the time. And John Ceeley set up a saw mill to supply the town with lumber for construction. The business was successful. And John intended to pass it to his son Nathan. However, Nathan was a brooding young man who aspired for other things in life. There were rumors he had an interest in the dark arts. According to the legend, the devil visited Nathan one night and asked Nathan to follow him into a nearby swamp. And then it gets weirder. It gets weirder from there. So we're going to do a bonus episode on that because that's a goddamn mess right there. I mean, that implies his pants came off, right? Why? Why? Something. He never been invited to the swamp. No, never. Yeah, this is like the Ghostbusters blowjob with Dan Ackwright, except afterwards he's led into a swamp. It's very weird. Fascinating. And it's just like a marble, like almost like a gravestone marker. But they believe this should happen. Somebody does. Yeah, they said a memory of Mr. Nathan Ceeley who died whenever erected this here. And there's all signs. So you'll go there and look at a sign and go a crazy person had a mill here once. That's a weird thing to do. Crime rate in this town, but we are interested in here. Property crime. Wow, this is really low. Is about one quarter of the national average, not one quarter lower than three quarters low. Yeah, you've got the $700,000 average house here. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault the Mount Rushmore of crime is less than one third of the average. So wow, also extremely low. So this place is safe. I mean, very, very safe. That said, let's talk about some very horrible murder here that took place. Day was unsafe. A day was very unsafe. Let's start in March of 1983. Okay, March 6, 1983. You got your flakas Eagles hairdo ready to go, Jimmy. Oh, babe, I was too. I barely had any hair. I got about as much hair as I've gotten now. It was still styled in a very crazy way. Yeah, you're doing that. You're going to see ET or some shit in the theater. Yeah, 83 is ET times, I know. Well, you two, it came out, I think. So yeah, you're still probably was a huge hit. It's probably still out in '83. Probably stuck around the theater a while. The last Star Wars, I think, came out in '83 of the first three. So that's the time period we're dealing with here. Now, it's a Sunday morning. It's cold early March and these ghosts can be pretty cold. This is in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Okay. Now a guy named Joseph is out collecting bottles at a highway rest stop. He's at a rest stop and he says, yeah, he's he's going through garbage and garbage and dumpsters looking for cans. It's everything back. Yeah, with dimes on the, yeah, nickels and dimes. It depends. Michigan's 10 cents. Is it really? Yeah. So he's looking for nickels basically and he's working the left side of the parking lot of the rest stop with a friend of his. Now, I guess at the time, I don't think they did the five cents. It was like 50 cents a pound back then. They did it like California or Arizona does where it's you have to bring giant bags of them in to get weighed and all that shit. So he's doing all this. This is shitty work on a Sunday morning in the cold, but the guy obviously needs the money. So he reaches in with trash barrel and pulls out a big brown garbage bag and it's heavy. And he's like, fuck yeah, because heavy means bottles and money. Well, yeah, there's a bottle in there. That's going to be money. So he's excited. He's like, all right. So he tears the bag open excitedly looking for bottles. Yeah. Which I, if he'd ever listen to this show, he would quit doing this a long fucking time ago. He sees something in there first that is not a bottle. Yeah. It's a 10/4 a blazer. Clearly a woman's cut soaked in blood. Oh boy. That's not good. Okay. Then he noticed while he's holding this blazer that the weird part of it, it's in the trash and it's soaked in blood, and you'd expect it to smell like blood or trash. It smells like expensive perfume, which is strange. He's like, "Oh, that's gonna weigh you." Yeah, this must be obviously pretty fresh 'cause they haven't dumped it also out of these garbage cans, but this is a weird thing. I have a blood-soaked jacket smelling a perfume. So at this point, if you're this guy, if I'm this guy, I'm stopping at this. I found him, and the first thing I find that's soaked in blood, it's the day's over, going home. Yeah, this is no longer mine. No, not winning. We're done. He keeps digging into this bag. No. Past a fully-blood-elts. Quoteroid blazer 'cause, wow. I get that you're trying to fuck and get cans, but that's not the bag to do it in, apparently. How broke you gotta be to push past fresh blood? Just shrug and be like, "Well, keep digging." Wow, so underneath the Quoteroid jacket is a man's blue work shirt. So like a blue shirt there, it's also soaked in blood. So at this point, you go, "Okay, I'm done." That's two blood-soaked items. I don't want to find out what's under this arm or some shit. I don't want to know about it. He says, "Let me keep digging." You never know, there might be a can in here still. There might be, it's still heavy. Yeah, at this point, there's more of a chance that you're gonna find a hand than a can, probably in here, or a head or some shit like that. So we're going from jacket to shirt now. And now, now other things, but it's a large, it's like a bigger man's work shirt. It doesn't go with the Quoteroid jacket. These are not from the same person. Okay. So that's another thing I would think. These are the two people, shit soaked in blood, even scarier, but he persists this guy. Jesus, I want to, Joseph, I'll give you my address. You can come get all my cans. I'll just leave Matzide for you. This is crazy. Don't do this shit. They must have been named brand clothes, huh? Maybe, maybe. He's like, yeah, there must be some good booze in the bottom of this back. Yeah. And so under that, under the blue work shirt, he finds a small sledgehammer, a shorthandled, two and a half pound sledgehammer, with a dark stain on the top of there, clearly from one. And now he's touched that. Well, yeah, now he's grabbed the handle of it, probably with gloves on. I don't assume you're doing this bare-handed search into the garbage for fucking cans. This is, you have work gloves on when you're doing that. Nobody's-- - You should, right? - Yeah, well, you don't know if there's glass in there. He can't be digging through. So you're gonna cut yourself. So, and stuck to the stain in the blood is a single long strand of dark human hair. - Oh boy. - So evidence is what that's called. - Yeah. - Okay. So Joseph, guy looking through the cans, he calls his buddy over, hey, come here. Look at this. Okay, the friend looks at the jacket, looks at the shirt, looks at the sledgehammer, and says, you know what? Let's just put this back. This is not our problem, which is the most-- I mean, I could not relate to somebody more for saying that. Obviously, you can't do that, but that's what you'd want to say. Oh, I don't know anything about this. I got to go on with my day. - It's back. It's not our problem. - I'll put it back. So he does, he puts everything back in the bag. Sledgehammer, shirt, jacket, and puts it back where it was, and they take off and go home. They're done for that. This would definitely be the end of your morning, I would say, probably. It should be anyway. - I don't think I'd ever do this again. - No, it'd be like last time I went out there, I found bloody things. So, now this guy, they get home. Joseph gets a sandwich and he sits down, he starts watching TV, and he's sitting there for about two hours, and he just can't, he can't stop thinking about it. - He can't shake it. So he said, "Damn it, what if this is a problem? What if there's somebody's hurt or something like that?" So this guy actually has just a bout of conscience, and feels terrible, and he calls the state police. All right. So they send a cop over, Trooper Paul Landry of the Massachusetts state police, and they go out to the rest stop, so he can show him where it is. And the trooper gets the bag, opens it, and he's like, holy shit, this is bad. It was fresh blood, still tacky. It wasn't even dried yet. It's still, you know, within the last 24 hours, this has been put here. So this is now, you know, someone could be actively bleeding. You know what I mean? This could be something of like that. So he takes it, bags it up as evidence, obviously, of something, there's something going on here, and sends it to the state crime lab, just because he doesn't know what else to do with it. So, he starts asking around. Anybody missing anybody? He literally is asking around to put it out to other the local departments of, see if there's any assaults, homicides, missing persons, anywhere in Boston, Providence, South Shore, like anywhere in the area. If someone's missing, a blazer, or a work shirt, one of the two, or both, is there a couple missing? Like who knows? So, nothing happens for a week. Nothing, nothing at all happens. Nobody, there's nobody missing. They can't find anybody missing. There's just this bloody bag of clothes, and a hammer with hair on it that obviously was bashed into somebody's fucking skull. - Right. - So this is an issue, and a two and a half pound sledge hammer, that person's not doing well, whoever got it with that. - No, that's a, that's a, it's big. - It's a lot of sledge. - It's a lot of sledge, especially with that short handle, that is a vicious weapon. Then on March 11th, 1983, a call comes in. Okay, this is a call comes in, and then they show up, too, to fill out a missing person's report. John and Shirley Benedict are their names, and they're from Methune, and they drive down to file an official missing person's report. So the word had gotten around, apparently, around the area, that there was someone found a bag of bloody clothes, and a sledgehammer, and all this, it had gotten around. So John Benedict goes to the state police on his own, because somebody apparently told him about, basically he knows people, and it's not all these details have been released to the public of what they found, but he heard, he heard tell around the area there that there was a bloody tan corduroy jacket in there. Okay. And he says, my daughter wore a tan corduroy jacket, and I haven't seen her in a week. Yeah. So let me see the jacket, basically. Sam's blood. It's usually, yeah, free. So they show him the jacket, and he recognizes it. Uh-oh. And he said, that's my daughter's jacket. I know that for a fact, and I haven't seen her in almost two weeks. So this might be her jacket, and this scares me, because usually we talk to her now and then. He says her name is Robin, and last time I saw her, she was wearing that jacket. Oh. Okay. So now they at least have somebody to look for. I mean, if they can find this person, they can rule it out. But it's over. Yeah. Someone to look for, and they're looking for Robert, a Robin Nadine Benedict. She's born July 19th, 1961, so she's 21 years old at this point. Young lady. She's young. Yeah. Very, very young or 22. Yeah, 21, not even 22 yet. She grew up in Methune up there near Lawrence, up by the New Hampshire border. Kind of a shitty town she grew up in. Yeah. Kind of a rough and tumble kind of a joint. Everybody, by the way, that knows Robin said, she's a real sweet, tempered good kid. Not even a kid anymore. She's, you know, 21, a good daughter. They talk about how her mom surely is blonde and like, boosamy apparently, big food blonde here. She grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And her father, John Benedict apparently, is described in a book that we'll tell you the names of these books here. As they quote, "Hansom Hispanic Trinidadian with high cheekbones and deeply set eyes that make him look like sculptures of long ago." He's hot. He sounds hot from the book. Yeah. He sounds like he's smoking over here. So that was the deal. No, the weird part is her mother's blonde, her father's like Hispanic, but so they're, you know, some mixing going on there. Yeah. Yeah. She is not, her father will not allow her to ever date black men. That's not allowed in high school. Okay. We can mix, but you can't is what he's saying. Yeah, what is that? I don't know what that is. That's, I love people's funny, weird things like that. It's like, what are you talking about? What if her parents said that to you? Yeah. What would you be doing right now? Be banging big tiddy blonde chicks. Yeah, you can. Where's your Trinidadian wife? What if their parents banned her from ever dating Hispanic Trinidadians? What about that? Then what? You're screwed. Interesting. Now, in this area of Lawrence and Methune, there is a, some nice streets, but for the most part, it's described as dilapidated housing projects. And old Victorian houses that are crumbling, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Kind of like Baltimore was years ago. And kind of a crumbling society that once was, probably. Yeah, probably was a mill town or something at one point. And when the mill closes, things start to fall apart here. Just a lot of kind of shitty raised ranches on quarter acre lots with, you know, a lot of car parts. And the free Sham wow to be made there or something something. Yeah. So Robin grew up in this exact kind of a place a little house and Kind of cramped by the way because there's five kids. She's got four brothers and sisters So seven people in a relatively small, you know house and I Guess John the dad He managed a marching group Called the white Eagles drum and bugle core Okay, and the children would carry flags and have little sabers and all that kind of shit and they'd do holiday parades in all these towns Some very new England shit. This is yeah, there's a white eagle. I Don't know white Eagles drum and bugle core. I'm not sure if there's a white eagle or not. I've never seen one But I'm never I'm not in my entire picture when I don't I don't see one I don't see an albino eagle flying around there. It's as close as it gets right. Yeah, I would think The head anyway. I don't know if maybe white Eagles was a tribe that was around here Something about a tribe that was in the area. I'm not sure I guess all that they'd go on vacations during the summer and on holidays and You know, they would they would dress up to take pictures So this is not like a rough and tumble scattered family. No, you know when it's holiday time You're getting a little Chris you're getting a little pink fluffy dress and you're putting a fucking tie on and they're gonna put everybody in In front of the camera to go down to the olin mills and get a picture taken We're going to see everybody in the car Sit on one of those ranch fences and yeah smile motherfucker one of those Dad was a commercial photographer Employed by the Raytheon corporation in Lawrence Yeah, and surely worked as the manager of a jewelry store in a shopping mall in Lawrence as well So they have three boys and two girls robin is the fourth child and the first daughter So they had three boys and then they had two girls after that. So she Was I'm this was like a big deal for the family to have three boys and then a girl So she was dotted on like crazy when she was born They put her father put a jug put a sheet across the front of the house and had a projector project an image that said it's a girl on it That's how happy they were very nice finally no more boys pissing in our faces while our James diapers great He wanted a girl and Basically, he really dotted on her. I mean they was you know, my daughter daddy daughter relationship was yeah Was a big deal one time he said of robin and I hope he said this before their fifth and second fifth child and second daughter was born He said I have five kids, but I have just one little girl So that's a Yeah, thanks to the boys are like great. Thanks a lot imagine if you're the five kids one that matters One that matters imagine if you're like the third boy you matter nothing to these people That's like the four-year-old illustration boy. Yeah, yeah, the third boy that's born was like god damn it This pain in the ass and then the fourth one is born and she's the you know everything she's the light And now you're the one who wasn't a girl yet. Oh, it's there's four three boys or four boys three boys for one two three and then the fourth born Fourth born is a girl and then they have another girl after that So there's a lot of her dad took so many pictures of her growing up like just super into that She's very beautiful. Everybody says to robin. Yeah, like really pretty and I've seen pictures. She's pretty She's very pretty especially like that early 80s pretty like yeah, she's gorgeous She's not and not in like a fake type of way either like a yeah, she's just a naturally pretty girl just there. Yeah, that's it She's long dark hair, you know nice bone structure big eyes all that She also is a flute player she plays the flute and Everybody said any kind of Family argument. She's the peacemaker. She's the one that goes around and you know comes out the flute and broke her still Put it up. Yeah, but everybody goes oh, they turned it. Yeah. Hey look at her She's an aspiring illustrator. She wants to be she's an artist She wants to be an illustrator and She graduated from Greater Lawrence Regional Vocational School and got into the Rhode Island School of Design Which is actually yeah, it's actually a big deal. It's not a yeah, it's not like DeVry or anything This is like a really good art school and She is studied graphic design there So she's doing great, but she dropped out Oh, no couldn't afford it. It's very expensive school. Yes, and so couldn't afford it So that's that's the main problem here Her brother Richard who was in the Navy at the time. This was all going on Describes her as an artistic kid who used to sign her name with a tiny hand drawn bumblebee So she'd add that to anything she did like if she imagined a letter Imagine being in line behind somebody at the grocery store riding a check no no sign it and now the now the work starts Yeah, I think you know, it's not a check, but yeah, she's probably just really quick at it. Yeah, no No, if she writes a letter to her friend or something. This is the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Yeah, I'm behind that in line. You're like all right fucking it's scribble your name on there. Yeah. Yeah, why don't you put happy trees on it? I don't think anybody would do that so But she's very much into flute playing Her brother said she played so well that when she practiced in her room you couldn't tell if it was her or the radio Well, you probably could tell because what fucking radio station is all flute all the time No other instruments just Jethro tell I don't think there's a song on the radio that has a fucking flute in it's all flute No drums no anything no vocals just flute. Hey, is she is that the all flute stationers that our sister in there? Is that our sister did the almond brothers Put out an album of just flute. Yeah, is Jesus Andre 3000 is doing just flutes now All righty. Well, he must have enough money then that's what that means Because no one's buying that he's given up on making more that's what that is Whenever I hear those celebrities stars doing shit like that. I'm like, uh bored enough to not make any money Yeah, that's like when Steve Martin makes banjo albums. I'm like, oh You must be doing pretty well Steve. Yeah, I'll be right off over there. Sing a little joke, huh? All right, I could deal Just gonna dick around on there all right Now she's a in school. She had perfect attendance. Yeah great grades was a president's merit scholar I mean she is like dependable and on the ball here Huge she said she's also a free spirit Richard said her brother. Yeah said she would jump into the ocean when it was dark outside Fully cloth just because she felt like it. There's a free spirit. Yeah, I think so. It's fun. I think that is Ballsy really that is what did she not have any Where are you going? They're by the beach and everybody's hanging out. She feels like running in the water She's going in the water. Come back. Yeah, just having fun. Wow. Yeah, that's fun Amazing. She wants to open her own design business. That's her goal here Um, and she wanted to see her artwork in a in a gallery. That was her big deal Now a few days before she vanished her brother Richard was home on shore leave and she gave him a picture of herself to take back to the ship And so that's what he's got now is this picture of her and then she's gone here. Ooh, and um On the back he saw the handwriting on her picture. It said something to remember me by Oh, so like that's interesting So I mean she's got this whole life with her family as a you know, it was just this Perfect kid and she does all these things and she's a great artist and a great flute player and perfect grades and all this She also has a complete Double life that she leads. What do you mean? Um, she's also She's also a sex worker at night. She's a prostitute right yeah Which is strange um, that's what she's doing and she's making good money at it too for back then Uh, she's yeah, it's which is just not what you expect from this a family that's together and it's just yeah She's doing this it seems like as a conscious choice for money which is It's just strange you don't see this often from People who haven't had like a lot of abuse in the family and things like that It's just that it's just there's she doesn't have a lot of challenges apart from yeah lack of money Yeah, and she's just like this is easy to make money all right. Yeah, I guess so um, so that's the thing now one of the books that we talk about Is actually a Pulitzer prize winner here about this case called missing beauty by Teresa Carpenter So that is uh, that's one of the sources here that we'll talk about. There's another book to that we'll bring up later on here But um, this was around her late teens She started doing this. So this is before she couldn't So early it doesn't make sense Uh, apparently a guy at a party casually suggested to her that she could make a lot of money turn in tricks Which I mean, yeah, um Her then boyfriend who was a former New England Patriots linebacker So I know he was a much older than her at that point. Yeah name Ray Costick Uh, he told her no, you're not doing that. We talking about yeah, don't do that. Jesus Christ But she said she needed money for school and needed money to get out of this goddamn town She wanted out of Methune there. She was done with that place this place sucks I want to go someplace better like boss in her late teens She's dating a retired football player. Yeah, she's hot. Mm-hmm. That's that's what that tells you a smoke show. Yeah, smoke show And also smart too. So it's like, yeah, why not? Who wouldn't like her? You know, I mean, right pretty much She's every guy's type Yeah, you know, I mean, that's just what it is. I just hot and smart and and talented who the hell are like that I mean, who doesn't who wouldn't like that? So by 1982 She is working at a place called good-time Charlie's Okay, good-time Charlie's she's going under the name Nadine her middle name and She's working for a hundred bucks an hour. That's her rate What is good-time Charlie's it's a bar. Okay, it's a bar. I was gonna get into all that But she's making a hundred bucks an hour Yeah, which is in 1982 great head immensely huge money. That's huge money Now this good-time Charlie's is in a section of town known as the combat zone This does not exist today at all By no way, there's probably super expensive old fancy houses that used to be brothels basically That's that's where it is now. So it's basically. It was a red light district in Boston in Boston Yeah, it was an adult entertainment district in downtown Boston centered on Washington Street between Boyle, Stin and Nealand There's yeah, it's like it was like Times Square in the 70s basically. Yeah, I know exactly where it is It's a beautiful area. Yeah. Oh now. I'm sure back then it was peep shows strip clubs X-rated movie theaters You know adult bookstores all that kind of shit and good-time Charlie's obviously Okay, there's one place called the Liberty Bookstore bookshop and by the way all these bookshops had like Jack Booth's in the back Yeah, you know fucking guys would you know pound each other in the ass in there and it was like this is a These bookstores are filthy places Call it a bookstore all you want nobody's in there reading a book. No, they're going in the back where there's like Films playing and shit like that and it's all sorts of weird shit. I like when they call it an arcade the only joy stick Yeah, an arcade you wouldn't touch it. Yeah, I'm not touching any stick in here put it that way. Yeah Hi, where do you guys keep street fighter? I don't see is there asteroids in here. I don't know Bob's got hemorrhoids All right, we'll close enough. I guess there's a man back there getting that story. We're skin asteroids right now Now one writer writer described the Liberty Bookshop as quote Disney Land for perverts, which is very funny That's just good use of the language right there. That's all that is Disney Land for perverts Yeah, the name the combat zone Justi Land for perverts was coin was coined in the 60s by a reporter named Gene Cole It meant that it was crime and violent zone basically enter your own risk and it was also where service men on shore leave went Okay, so you'd see hordes of uniform service men going through here. So that's why it became combat zone with a with a pocket full of pocket full of Poggle full of offshore money from the last six months that they didn't spend a dime all saved up. Yeah, there you go So and then they said also, you know, in this area there was a lot of not only some violence, but there was street crime There was you know, there was hustlers and prostitutes that would pick pockets and shit like that too The Wall Street Journal this isn't as fun. They took the Disney Land name and made it a little more boring called it the whole thing a sexual Disney land Which that's not nearly as fun as pervert, you know, Disney Land for perverts. That's much better In 74 the Boston redevelopment authority officially zoned it as an adult entertainment district Real was officially zoned that well That was it. Here's where the porn is. It's all here. Here's where the theaters are and nowhere else in the city It's allowed though. You can't build a house here. This is zoned for You can build a house, but you got to have people sucking dick inside of it if you're gonna build a house You gotta put it on the bed. You gotta have a mini-mouse on on the lawn with their tits out. That would help a lot So but that that met nowhere else in the city only here Wow, so red light answer them vice and that's yeah, I feel like that's how it should be yeah It should have that you should you don't go to if you don't want to go do that kind of thing Yeah, you know, like kind of like me around a church. It's the same thing. Yeah, I'm not gonna I don't I don't need to Also, don't force a man with that vice to be running all over town looking for whatever he's looking for Well, then you're gonna mix that in with the good parts. That's the problem Yeah, keep that guy in the in the porn shop where he belongs if he gets rolled He knew what the fucking you know with the risks work. Come on So Robin is working in this environment, which is scary for a beautiful young lady here She's working as a full-time escort. I mean, this isn't a this isn't a you know night time One day a week. I pick up a few extra bucks for school. This is her job So she's working a good time Charlie's, which is a a bar in there, but it's gonna look a hustler bar It's at 25 LaGrain Street, so you can all look up what's there now. I guarantee you. It's not a hustler bar It's probably something very expensive where they sell like artisan You know artists and sandwiches with a Rougalah coming out of them or some shit. There's a lot of croissants and Off a lot. Yeah being prepped right now. No shit So I sure she's like I said hundred bucks an hours what she charges, which is equivalent to about 300 and change today three almost three fifty an hour. It's a pretty good one. Yeah, not bad She has Basically a couple hundred clients and an address book that she keeps with her She's been arrested on prostitution-related charges four times already too It doesn't make sense because I mean she has a place to go. She has a family She has people that love her. She has all this but this is her choice. She wants to do this So she can not live in that town basically. She dated in New England pay triad for Christ sake. It's very strange She also has a boyfriend a live-in boyfriend who also is called her Pimp from time to time as well So live-in boyfriend Pimp named Clarence Rogers who goes by JR Now we know that she had a baby silver. I guess it says a bluest silver that used to early 80s color Toyota starlet back in the day, which is a I don't know what that car is very tiny little fucking car Little tiny like hatchback little tiny fucker little thing Toyota Shavette kind of basically exactly like that I was gonna say like those old the old old Honda's look like that kind of like the old Honda Civic's kind of we're like those Tiny things that had a black racing stripe on it. Okay. She yet she has her own apartment with JR Rogers the boyfriend Everybody says he's also her Pimp Although you know Where do you? Between Pimp and boyfriend who helps her keep her business straight? What's the difference at that point? Honestly If they're her businesses that what are we talking about? So JR has a record as well nothing violent nothing violent. Um, he's unarmed robbery Which is better than armed robbery I suppose receiving stolen credit cards and He also owned a or co-owned a hair salon in Boston That was basically rumored to be a just a front for human trafficking That was the rumor that was around girls are brought in and shit like that and they're taken it's a meeting place By the way, he's a black guy, too, which I was just about to ask that is Clant's a black guy happy is her dad about this. Yeah, her dad Her dad had to have fucked something and I don't mean that I'm not trying to power his family But if you have a young lady who's going against everything her family wanted for she and that's and she's not 16 It's not a little rebellion. She's 21. She's an adult. She's all this type of thing Something and I'm not saying the dad I'm somebody must have done something to her to make her do that and then be like What don't you like me to date black guys great? I'm gonna find one that'll pit me Yeah, you know what I mean? Like there's some there's some like and I don't know if that's exercising independence I don't know what that is exactly it's like a lot. Yeah, or maybe it's just that one thing that she's just like well I'm doing that then Maybe that's the other thing we don't know But she's doing a lot of things she's doing that and this and oh, I'm sure quite a bit of this and that going on here I'm sure the dating of the black guy is the least of his worries if he knew about this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so the day The day that they found the cans and looking for cans and bottles and found the the hammer and the sweater and are they jacket and the and the work shirt This same day Robin is supposed to be at JR's son's birthday party Okay, okay so robin is supposed to pick up JR and his son to go to this birthday party, but she's not answering the phone and her apartment and her car is an outside Yeah, so The answering machine has messages on it so Apparently jr's ex and robin were friends Oh, so robin was supposed to pick up jr's ex and jr's son and take them to the birthday party Okay, so when jr's ex can't get a hold of robin and her car is not outside, she calls Robin's parents to see if she knows where, if they know where she is. And Robin's parents hadn't heard from her either. So Robin's mother Shirley had called Robin the night before to invite her over to see their new puppy, but she never answered the phone or called back or came over. So now JR is alarmed a bit, but not too much. Because in this profession, shit happens, things come up. She might have got a late night call and had to do something as she overslept because of that. It may be a thing that ran into today at $100 an hour. We do whatever that guy says until time's up. Yeah. I mean, if Julia Roberts had plans at any point during that week and pretty woman, she would have broke them. I mean, there was no cell phone. She would have not showed up and people would have thought she'd disappeared too. So I mean, that happens. So now by the afternoon though, nobody's heard from her and that's weird. That's different. She's not someone who would not show up at a kid's birthday party who wants her there. It's a strange thing. So and she's the ride. Yeah. Oh, that's the other. She's the ride. Yeah. Now JR's ex there. She is actually the first person to formally report Robin missing that afternoon. Really? That's before even the family does. How about that? JR is not aware that she did that. JR doesn't call the police. He hires private investigators. Yeah, that's what you do when you're into. Because exactly. Yeah. He's an underworld guy. So he's not going to be like, "Oh, police, please help me find her." Well, last time I talked to her, she was turning a trick. So you don't want to tell the cops that. I dropped her off at her job. What's her job? Don't worry about that. I'm Charlie's, you know, in the combat zone. Oh, okay. So he does this. Hires these PIs. Problem is though, if someone's legitimately missing and you think something might have happened to them, you call the police. Yeah. Doesn't matter what your business is. Call the goddamn cops. But he knows for a fact that they're going to be looking at him. That's why he doesn't call the cops. I think basically what these books all say and what seems to make the most sense is he's a black guy with a record who owns a hair salon that might be a front for trafficking and has a sex worker girlfriend. So he's like, they probably aren't going to look at me as the most, you know, upstanding cat. Probably not going to help me. They're probably going to be more of investigating me. That's exactly what it is. He said later, he knew if he walks into a police station and says my girlfriend's missing, he's going to be treated as a suspect. He's going to be in an interrogation room in five minutes. They're not going to look for her. They're going to talk to him. Right. And that's the problem. Yeah. Investigate me all you want. Yeah. I do bad shit. But they're still a missing girl at the end of this and I that I care about. Absolutely. So he hires these private investigators and they go, well, where do we start? Yeah. I mean, honestly, this is a girl who has, you know, young woman who has hundreds of clients in a phone book. Where do we even start with this? We can't go to every one of these guys and, you know, that would take years to do this shit. So. And all those guys, there, there was a first time, you know what I mean? Yeah. So who even knows if this guy's even in the book? And most of the guys, probably a lot of them, I'm sure, are fucking married. They don't really want to get a phone call about that, you know what I mean? You're going to run into some people going, I don't know what you're talking about when it comes to this type of not everyone's going to openly admit, oh, yeah, she's all I see her twice a week. She's great. She's the best. Yeah. Yeah. But JR has his own idea. He says, never mind all those fucking other people. There's one guy you need to look at. Oh, one. His name is Bill Douglas, which sounds boring as shit. That, you know, expect that there's one guy you need to look at. You expect it to be some crazy name and it's Bill Douglas. Todd Franklin. Yeah. Todd Frank. Sounds dangerous. He's a professor at Tufts University, which is a very good school, by the way, Tufts, huge big school. He's been obsessed with her. He said also she went to like tell him that she's not seeing him anymore on March 5th and I haven't seen her since. So that's the guy to look at first, obviously, it could be anybody. That's the problem too is after she talked to him, she could have went and saw somebody else and that guy could have decided who knows. So the private investigator said he said he spent a thousand hours looking for her. Andrew Palmero. He said the father was very close to her and she kept in close touch with her family. So this, I mean, the family that she's still keeping in close touch. So this is doesn't seem like it stems from the family. I don't know what's going on with her. So they said the family knew what she was doing, but they tried to do the best that they could. Sometimes you close your eyes to what's really going on, hoping it will go away. They knew. They knew, but they weren't like admitting it to themselves type of deal. Okay. They suspect it. They knew. Yeah. But their suspicions were right. Yeah. They knew it was going on. So the PIs in all of this work, they track this Bill Douglas. They find him and they track him to a hotel in Washington, DC where he's at an academic conference and they knock on his hotel room door and he lets them in. And the first thing they see is he's a dork, first of all, of course. He's a fat guy. He's just a middle aged. Yeah. He's a professor. I mean, he's not a, you know, he's got a specific thing he likes and she doesn't. He doesn't look like he ever played for the New England Patriots, but that one. Got it. First thing they see on Bill is a large bandage on his forehead. Okay. So that's suspicious right there is this guy, not like he, you know, plays hockey on the weekends or something. He's a middle aged fat professor. So they said, Bill, what happened to your head? And he says that, oh, I hit my head on the cabinet door. Yeah. Okay. A few hours later, and he says, I don't know where she is. The PIs leave. They come back a few hours later to the same hotel because they thought something was off. So they're going to go knock on his door and go, oh, we forgot to ask you one question, type of thing. So they go back and in talking to him again, they go, so what happened here for right again. Yeah. And he says, quote, I was mugged at an Amtrak station, whoa, which is it, motherfucker? The robbers hit me in the head with my briefcase, oh, which if you're already, they already had your briefcase. Why bother hitting you with it? Entirely different. Run away. Story. Hit my head on a cabinet and mugged an Amtrak station or you wouldn't forget a mugging. Assaulted with my own shit or I assaulted myself with the cabinet. Yep, and I would go, I would look around too. And if he still has a briefcase sitting there, I'd go, well, that's raw new one. So they said, that was an interesting thing in a few hours. It went from a cabinet to muggers. Yeah. And that was the other thing they thought, just what I just said is robbers don't hit you with your own briefcase. Once they have a briefcase in hand, they usually leave. They want to be away from this shit. No one's out there beating you with your own briefcase. Right. Now, a week later, the Massachusetts state police are going to talk to him as well to Bill. And he said, I was mugged by two men who hit me in the head with a metal pipe. Okay. Now it's a metal pipe. He said in Washington, DC and they stole my briefcase and they stole his briefcase and hit him with a pipe. So it's either a cabinet, a briefcase or a pipe, one of the three. We don't know. But now it's two men, not just one. So now the story has changed quite a bit in the course of just a few days. Then later on, he'll give a completely different version to police. Now it was quote, two young black men in DC attacked me hit me in the head and took my briefcase. They weren't black before. Now he made him black. Okay. They were white before. Now, they've turned black all of a sudden, which is, you know, I guess time went by. I don't know. And it's two young black men is what he said. So that's what he said. Now, no assault on Bill Douglas or robbery was ever reported to any police department in Boston, DC or anywhere else. So whatever happened, he didn't call the cops about it. He didn't report it at all. So they were like, okay, that's interesting. Now March 11, 1983, that's when all this was going on. That's when the, you know, this all started. Robyn's parents also report her missing, like we said, her dad drives down to file a missing Persons report. They talk about the jacket and this, the one thing is they show him the jacket and he recognizes it. When he says it's Robyn's, but they also, JR, they have JR come in and bring a bottle of her perfume to see if it's the same scent as on the jacket, which is, you know, not really scientific, but it works, you know what I mean? You could tell if it's the same smell. So you're not checking the, if the molecular makeup of it are the same, but how it hits your nostrils. So they all open up the perfume. They all smell it. They all smell the jacket. They all say, that's the same smell. That's her. That's her jacket. That's her perfume. So obviously dad, John Benedict is crushed. I mean, this guy, this is a little girl. I mean, we will have a little girl that's not a little, not little anymore, but we both have daughters. It's always your little girl. And if this happens, you're hard. This is the end. You know, it's the worst thing that could happen. So the cop sends dad home to grieve. You seem like you're, you know, you need to rest here. So they send him home to grieve, but they keep JR to have a little chitchat with him. there. the next four hours interrogating J.R. Is that right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, other than what he says, he sure looks guilty other than, you know, but he, he, I mean, he really doesn't look that guilty. But not very. No. It's just who's the first one you'd go to? It's the live-in boyfriend who's also our Pimp, who also didn't call the cops. However, is spearheading his own investigation? Yeah. Which doesn't, again, look good though. That looks like you're trying to steer it. And at the same time too, they also look at it and go, well, I mean, it could not be him because in her profession, it could be anybody. It could be some, some guy who just came in for unsure leave. We don't know. I mean, it could be anything. So anyway, when they sit J.R. down, the opening question is, quote, would you do with the body? Oh, boy. I mean, they are not even mints and, I mean, it is right to it. So accusatory. Very interesting interrogation technique, usually you try to build rapport or you try to, he just said, would you do with the body? Hey murderer, man. Yeah. Hey murderer. Would you do with the body? Hello, killer. So J.R. is distraught and he says, quote, I did not hurt her. I loved her. We were planning to, which I loved, it doesn't sound good either. No. I didn't hurt her. I did not hurt her. There is no contraction and minimization. So that's two things. I didn't hurt her. I loved past tense. We were planning to get married past tense. All of this sounds like he's a bad man. We never even fought. I have no idea where she is. That's what he said. We never fought. I have no reason to do this. We're going to get married. All the things he says in terms of tenses and everything else sound terrible. He's got her in his head. She's gone. Apparently so. But he said, the person you need to be looking at is Bill Douglas. That's another thing. If you're interrogating someone on their own and they're like, look at this guy, that doesn't look good either. Redirection. Yeah. Redirex, exactly. He said, quote, he's been obsessed with her. He's been stalking her. She went to his house on March 5th to end it. He never came home, please, for the love of God, look at Bill Douglas is what he says. So they go, that's great. They keep talking to him for another three and a half hours. Where's the body? Where's the body? But at the end of the four hours, the cop believes him. Really? He doesn't think he did it. He just, he sticks with his story. It's very consistent. He seems legitimately distraught. He doesn't seem like he's faking it or he's putting on a show. He seems like he's legitimately distraught. So he believes him for now and lets him go and tells him, as far as I'm concerned, you're not a suspect right now, basically, which, you know, who knows if they will decide to change your mind later. But as far as right now, you're good. Now the problem is, when the press gets ahold of this, they're going to spend the next several months insinuating that JR did this no matter what. They absolutely have no evidence. They just know that he is a possible human trafficking, a sister who, quote, pimps his girlfriend. So I mean, why wouldn't he be a suspect forever? Absolutely. So he tells the cops that, yeah, this Bill Douglas, she drove down to Sharon, Massachusetts to see this guy at his house to tell him no more, okay? Now Sharon is about five miles from the rest stop where the clothes were found in Mansfield. Yeah. So very close by. Now, a little bit about Sharon, by the way, we talked about the, you know, cost of living and all that. CNN's Money magazine has named it one of the best places to live in America multiple times. Not just live. Or not just retire, but actually live. Grow to retire. Yeah. Probably not retire, because the taxes are high, but for, you know, to raise a family and shit when you want your taxes to go to like good schools and shit. Yeah. Sharon high school is consistently ranked in the top 10 public high schools in Massachusetts, which basically means that's almost top 10 in the country. Massachusetts has the best, by far the best schools in the country every time they do ratings. That's, it comes up back in, you know, 83. It was an up and coming suburb and still had, you know, still pretty good. There's a lot of doctors, lawyers, architects, things of that and professional white collar people lived out here. So the investigator who's tasked with doing this is Trooper Paul Landry. This is, it's his case here. He's a veteran trooper. He's the guy who took, he's right from the guy who took the trash bag from Joseph there and looked through it and bagged it in evidence and he's the guy doing interrogations. Okay. He's the guy in charge of everything. He is just a few short weeks from his retirement. He's too old for this shit. Getting too old for this shit. Yeah. Yeah. Now we're in Elite the Leppin movie and this poor guy just took one of the hardest cases he's ever had. Oh, this is, this is a crazy hard case, weeks from retirement. He literally has a retirement party scheduled like it's, it's, it's, it's done. You can retire and this is the only one you're still working on, but you're going to keep off. You got to stay. And part of this is this guy's a very, he's a very rabid investigator. He goes after shit. He's, you know, bring him in, sit him down, I'll talk to him for four hours, do they? He's not a lazy guy at all. He's real into this and he actually wants to find Robin and actually want to help her family. Problem is, and this might be because he's been on the force for 25 years or whatever and an older guy and this is 1983. So he could have been on the force since like the late 50s. If he was on the force for 25 years, that would mean 1950, 80 came on. Police work was way different back then. Way different. And they say basically he's not real good at paperwork. This guy was not his specialty, not his specialty. He's not good at keeping track of shit like that paperwork, filling things out. Not good at that. No. He's good at gathering things. He's good at talking to people. He's good at instincts, but he's not good at keeping people. Good at figuring punches. Yeah. Paperwork straight, which as policing evolved became much more of an issue of any of your paperwork straight. So they get the lab results back on the items that they had tested. The ones from the bag, the jacket, the shirt, the hammer. They say that it is type A human blood. Okay. It's fresh. It was less than 24 hours old. And the hair on the hammer is also human. Okay. So now they have a bag with things in it with blood, nobody, no victim, no location of where this could have possibly happened, no suspect, no motive, nothing. They have, who gots at this point. They have her pit boyfriend saying talk to one of her hundreds of clients, which that's not much. And I've, and nobody's seen her. That's all. Yeah. This appeared job. That's what I mean. And that's the other thing too. Maybe she, maybe she met a guy that said, I'll take you away from all this. Yeah. She could have met some guy with, you know, $50 million and said, right now, let's go to my, my house in the South of France and we're going to fuck him. Who knows? You never know. She's a beautifully young lady. Wisconsin cheese every day. All right. We're goddamn doing it. So the prosecutor, John Kivlin, he is the assistant district attorney of the county here in Norfolk County. He's a veteran. He said to the newspaper years later, quote, generally speaking, most cases start with the recovery of a body. In this case, it was just the opposite. It was the result of a couple of men searching for bottles and cans around Route 95 who found a bloody jacket, which turned out to be Ron and Robin Benedict's. And that's how this investigation started. This is, as you listen to Small Town Murder episode, you know, this is not how investigation usually is built. Right. So now the, the investigators talk to Robyn's family and they all kind of, and they talk to the prosecutor and everything and they all figure out they all agree that J.R. is not involved. Okay. We don't think J.R. is involved. He is genuinely just crushed. I mean, they said, yeah, miserable. He's distraught. He's not doing well. He's a puddle at this point. So they go, that's, they'll be really odd for that to happen. And this guy keep up this front. So they said he also hired private investigators out of his own pocket within 48 hours of her going missing. So 1000 hours of investigator, that's not expensive. That's not cheap. No, it's not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your hair shot better be a fucking front for human trafficking because you're going to be able to afford this shit. So in his ex who is the mother of his young son, they looked to maybe that soup who's pissed off at her, but they're really good friends. They're close to each other. Right. And she was the one who reported her missing and was scared about her. She was going to be her ride. Yeah. That's exactly right. So then they keep going back to J.R. saying, I even had my private investigators go look at this guy. Bill Douglas. Bill Douglas. He said, I've been telling Robin for months that this guy is off. He's a little screwy and it with him. So they go, okay, fine. We'll talk to Bill Douglas if this is so important to you. Bill Douglas is William Henry James Douglas goes by Bill and it's a lot shorter than William Henry James and a little bit. Yeah. He's 41 years old when they contact him here. He is a Brown University PhD. So it's Ivy League PhD at Brown and then he's a professor. at Tufts right now. So Billy Hank Jim. He's a Billy Hank Jim is a smart guy here. He's also a 300 pound big fat fuck who lives in Sharon, Massachusetts with his wife and three kids. So he's a typical suburban dad type of guy and also a highly respected professor. So they're like probably not, you know what I mean? Life happens to be a fast love. Yeah, they look at this guy and they're like, eh, it doesn't quite, this doesn't match up, you know what I mean? So they finally bring him in for formal questioning on March 16th. So it took a while here. They said he sits down and he's condescending. And he's kind of a, I'm better than you. Blue collar scumbag type of guy. He's one of those guys. I don't think he's used to talking to a lot of guys like that. Probably not. So he thought I'm better than you, bullshit. Um, he admits right away that, oh yeah, I'm a client of Robbins. Yeah, I paid her. Um, he said, yeah, of course I paid her. Everybody, you know, everybody knows that. And you want to go out with a lady like that. She's going to, you have to pay her. Um, he says, I didn't hurt her. Um, he said she did come to my house on the night of the fifth, but she left she came. She was there for 10 minutes and she left and she went to a party. He said, I like it remember is she said she was going to Joe's party. I don't know Joe is though because I don't know her friends. Yeah. That's what he said. Um, so they said, okay, let's, let's go back to that head wound again that you had. Yeah. And he says, I told you last time two guys in DC hit me with a pipe. Yeah. Landry doesn't or a cabinet at my own briefcase and my cabinet and my briefcase. Yeah, he took my cabinet. I don't know where he got it from, but he beat me with it unmercifully. So Landry here, this cop doesn't buy it. Just thinks he's lying about shit. Um, but there's really nothing you can do at this point. He's got no evidence. All he has is a bag of bloody clothes. He has no body. It's 1983. So it's not like he can go, let's get a cheek swab on you and see if you're DNA. There's none of that shit at all. So they're like, they don't really. Yeah, that's, I mean, you can, but at this point, it's just a guy with a head wound and kind of a, you know, kind of a shitty story. That's all that's all he is. Can't hold him. No, can't rest him. No. Um, so they let him go. Um, then J.R. brings in letters. Oh, that J.R. is trying to help at this point. Yeah. And the cop said, I need anything that you have on this bill, Douglas, because I don't trust him. I talked to him too. And I think he's shifty also. So J.R. says, oh, I got a ton of shit. Here's a stack of letters that Bill wrote to Robin letters, pages and pages and pages and pages. It's love letters and I'll do this and you help me with this and angry letters and apology letters and letters where Bill talks about his plan to quote rescue Robin from sex work by putting her on a payroll of tuffs and all this shit. Maybe she likes it. Well, that's, he doesn't see it that way. Okay. Letters where he apologizes for insulting her. Letters where he promises to be better. This is like a fuck up boyfriend, except they're not in a relationship like that, except he's paying for the, the, the sweet opportunity. That's it. So when he reads the letters, this Landry guy, he goes, okay, this is much starting to make a lot more sense here. This is an obsessive guy who's obsessed with her. And maybe that's what did it. Um, so now a little bit about Bill Douglas here. Let's get a background on him. He came from lower class parents. He came from very blue collar ways here. His mother is an immigrant from Germany and she was a maid and his dad was a plumber. So I mean, yeah. He worked, he had to work all through high school and basically ended up at Platsburg State as the first college he went to because that's all he could afford. No, Platsburg's in New York, Western New York. Yeah. It's every small town in Western New York as a college. That's why the town exists. Platsburg is one of them. And I think it's a SUNY school. And this is, it's a government subsidized teachers college. The SUNY schools are super cheap if you live in New York. They're affordable. So while he was at in college, his father died in a construction accident. No money for graduate school, anything like that. Um, he finished Platsburg and he married his high school sweetheart who is a woman named Nancy. That's his wife till now. And uh, his dad died in a construction accident. He was a plumber. Therefore, I mean, that's just something caveman. You know, she fell on you ever assume, right? What the fuck else is it? Yeah. Usually I mean, unclogged something and it's super unclogged. Fucking shot through your chest or some short back at you. Yeah. Hairball just went right to his brain. They fused wild. Um, wow. Wow. Uh, now Nancy is described in this book as quote, a heavy set plane young woman. Uh, huh. Yeah. So that's kind of what they both are. Kind of heavy set plane people seems like they go together. It's, you know, Rex human. Yeah. Yeah. It's a Rex human. This whole case is extremely Rexie or man, by the way. Really? And that's kind of why I picked it because I've been both Jimmy and I little behind the scenes for everybody. We have been obsessed with this Gilgo beach thing, though, the one that's on peacock, what the, what the newest part of the psychologist. Yeah. Oh my god. It is fascinating. I want to sit, I want to ask him so many questions. Oh, yeah. No cameras. You know, I'm not going to record anything, man. I just want answers. How many do you think he killed my guess? My guess was 26. It's a lot, man. It's a lot. It's a shit. It's all over and it's a lot. He's been doing this for so long. There's no way that this guy killed eight women and they happen to just randomly find all eight. Found pieces, pieces. Well, they mean they found enough to know that there's eight different women and then they went to him and he goes, yep, you got all of them. You're lucky. Wow. You guys are good. Good job, guys. You found the Asian man. That was my golden egg. Super weird. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. That was the Easter egg. You guys got a great job. So I'm telling you, like it's, it's like, it's fascinating. Yeah. And he's like, sure, I'll plead guilty to those eight and it's like, listen, homie. You're too quick. Yeah. You, you have at least three times that many. He's too fast to jump onto the plane with a number. That tells me it's so many. He's got two properties down south. Yeah. Yeah. It's all scary. So a place in Vegas. He's just, he's too much running. Absolutely. Now at this point, he's married to Nancy. There are a couple of, quote, plain, heavy set people. Yeah. And basically, he's being a small town high school science teacher. That's as far as he could go academically, because he didn't have any money. But after a couple of years of teaching, he applied for and managed to get a national science foundation fellowship for a year of postgraduate study at Yale. At Yale. Yeah. So he gets accepted. Now he makes a huge jump from Plattsburg state to Yale. Yeah. And that's, that's where he's going to stay, because he's going to go from Yale to Brown, and he's going to be like that. Anything. Anything's he's fancy. Yeah. He's academic. So they've been together since they were teenagers. He and his wife. This I'll read from this book. The intellectual atmosphere of New Haven, which is where Yale is, altered Douglas and made him more ambitious, because people around him, it's Yale. They're all very ambitious people. Now we all of a sudden, he wants to be a researcher and a professor, not just some kind of science teacher. Yeah. So he sought other grants after that year at Yale and continued his postgraduate studies at Brown, which is another Ivy League school. By then his mom had died too, but Nancy had given birth to two other kids at that point as well. So by 1970, he's a young guy still with his young wife with two little kids, and he's getting his PhD from Brown and he gets his first college position, which is an associate professor of biology at Edinburgh State College in Pennsylvania. Awesome. Awesome life. He's doing really well. He did well there too. His supervisors praised him, the head of the departments, all the students liked him. But he wanted to get out of there because this is, have you ever heard of that place? Never. Exactly. He wants. That's embarrassing. That's embarrassing for him. I have a PhD from Brown. I've been to Yale. Yeah. He's essentially Glenn Howerton on AP bio. Where he's like shutting off. Yeah. Everybody starts shutting up. Like I don't belong here. This is you're lucky to have me in the room. Don't ask me questions. It'll ruin my wonderful brain. So waste the time. I'll be out of here shortly. Yep. Have a good one. So that's what he's doing. He wants out of this place. So after a year of being there, he found a research job at the W. Allton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. It's a private institution. Okay. He would be director of the Center's electro-microscopy facility. Oh. Yeah. So he's a big director, director, as well as associate director of education. He's designed a curriculum. Period. Yeah. Wow. So he really starts kind of getting a name for himself going in research circles when he's here. His field was tissue culture. Okay. That means if you blow your nose, he takes it and sees what's in there. No, that's a Petri dish. That's right. He picks it up with a a fucking tweezer. He specializes in studies that involve isolating cells then growing them outside of the body, basically in vitro researchers, what they call it. He worked on a bunch of projects. At one point, his studies were of a waxy substance secreted in the lungs that permits them to inflate and deflate properly, but that is absent in lung tissue of infants born prematurely. She's trying to figure that out. And do we just want to develop it? - I'm not sure. I don't know anything about that. But yeah, he's working all the time. - Yeah. - He's really not a lazy guy when it comes to work and things like that. He begins to regularly publish in scientific journals. And after a while, he's serving on several editorial boards of different scientific journals. I mean, he's doing a lot. He began doing grant applications to private foundations in the National Institutes of Health and was soon serving on one of the National Institute of Health's review panels, overseeing and evaluating the work of his peers. So I mean, he's a big deal. He also taught at his alma mater in Plattsburg and at a nearby North Country Community College as well. He became a consultant for the American Cancer Society really. - And for the Department of Medicine at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. So he is in demand and clearly very good at his job. And then always want to pick his fucking brain. - Everybody wants a piece of his opinion on this ship here. Now family life seems like he'd be too busy, but he's not. He's also into his family. He is. Now his wife Nancy had decided to go back to school to study nursing and had given birth to their third child. So I think they have two boys and a girl. He tried to be a father to like a modern kind of guy, like a 70s guy where he would, if the wife was at school at night or whatever, he would do the household chores and cook and be a normal person. But back then that was considered a big deal. Your husband washed the dishes, my god. What a gentleman like, he would have been the star of any party. This is the guy who washes the dishes. Honey, look at him, look at him, everybody staring at him. - What's in his hands? Where's that palm oil? - Where's that? Look at how soft he must be using the palm oil. He shaperoned the kids on camping trips. He chauffered them to their speed skating lessons. He was a pee-wee hockey coach. - Really? - I mean, he's doing everything. He loved Nancy. She had a miscarriage at one point. And he took an entire week off work to be with her and just to make sure she's okay. So this doesn't sound like the type of guy who would kill a young prostitute at this point. - Yeah, just playing a lot of empathy. - A lot of empathy. A lot of empathy here. So by 1978, she's working nights as a nurse at a local facility. They live on a cul-de-sac in Sharon, a nice single family home. Three bedrooms with a finished basement, big deck out back in a yard. Suburbia, suburbia, and it backs up to conservation land, which is awesome on the East Coast. If you have that, that's great. 'Cause that's where our land backs up too. So they can't build behind us. It's conservation land. So that's the best property to get. 'Cause you're not gonna have shit popping up around you. So their house was nice. They called it a new suburb basically, Sharon. It was getting more up and coming at this point. Yeah, their house was on Sandy Ridge Circle, which is a very, which sounds awfully idyllic. It's nice well-landscape streets. A street, that kind of thing. And they said, it's a type of street that you drive down and everybody's got a basketball hoop in the driveway and kids riding bicycles around the cul-de-sac and all kinds of shit like that. They move there in 1978 after he receives an appointment to Tufts as a professor. And that's when they moved there. It's about a 30-minute drive and Bill was fine. So he's into this. And around this area, they have great schools, which he's happy for with the kids and he's ready to go. So Bill's job at this point is tenured anatomy and cellular biology professor, which we've both done that. I mean, that's not a big deal. Tenured, yeah. Easy, no problem. We quit that to do these shows, actually. Yeah, you know, got to be a lot. All the cellular biology. Yeah, tenures are very overrated. And it really is, we didn't do that. It means you really just put in work and then you just have an expectation. No expectation. We didn't need. We were tenured in the cafeteria in high school. That's where we were tenured. We had no tenure. Tenured at the desk in the hallway. Yeah, the one where they kick you out too. This is at Tufts University and this is the big time. Tufts is a big deal. It's a medical school and a big fucking deal to work here. An awfully big deal. So he was teaching, as well as he's in the university's dental and veterinary schools, as well as other things too, and being the cellular biology anatomy professor as well. The students all thought he was a good teacher as well. He was consistently voted the best teacher in his department at the medical school. Yeah. One student said that he was enormously considerate, always willing to answer questions and go over material that was complex and difficult to understand. And another said that out of every teacher he had, that Bill was the most concise and easy to understand. And we were talking about medical shit. That's complicated. So it helps if someone can synthesize that and someone something that you can ingest and take in. That's the same one. Yeah. He loved research, though. That is what he was into. And that's what he devoted himself to. And he published over the next couple of years more than 60 articles in scientific journals. Oh. That's a lot. And applied for and received shitloads of grant research. So much so that his lab became the busiest and most endowed by these grants in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy. So he's doing great. He knows how to fill out those grant applications. Just right. And get those. He's engaged in all sorts of projects. One is sponsored by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society. That's a society. Do we have to say we shouldn't vivisect people? It's involved in developing an alternative to the Drey's technique, which is a method of testing the toxicity of cosmetics intended for human use by injecting their chemical components into the eyes of rabbits. Oh, shit. Yeah. That's what we did. When you talk about animal testing, you picture like, okay, let they put that mascara on like a monkey's eyelash. And you go, yeah, it looks pretty and she didn't drop dead. Another injecting chemicals into these fucking things eyes, man. I see him shampooing a rabbit with head shoulders. Yeah, it looks like it's like an herbal essences commercial. Yeah. This is really loving. How does a rabbit come? No. So he was also doing research for the US Navy as well, continuing his efforts to do all of this shit. And he traveled to scientific conferences all over the country. He went to Europe. One of his colleagues said his achievements were not obscure and unimportant. They were very serious and cogent projects which made notable contributions to science. He's a big deal. And he's 41. He's got his real science years ahead of him here. I mean, the next 20 years. So I mean, basically over the next 20 years, he is looking at being like a very well-known, especially in scientific circles. Like we wouldn't know who the fuck he was, but anybody at the university levels would know who the guy was over the next 20 years. He brought in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and grant research grants as well. Most of his department colleagues would run one or two projects at a time. He ran eight at a time. So, and this is an addition to Pewy Hockey and all that kind of shit. Now, to describe him personally, he's a bald guy who a chubby 41-year-old soft-looking bald guy with glasses. That's who he is. He's described as nebush. There's a lot of people describe him as. Just kind of, you know, harmless little guy, a schmuck, a schmuck, exactly. One book about the case said he seemed, quote, "Gental as a cow." - That's mean. - Big and slow and easygoing. - He's a man of tea. - Yeah, yeah, no. They said he also was a non-smoker. These are the people from work. Said he's a non-smoker. Didn't drink anything stronger than ginger ale. He's a real, he's a real square. They said his hobby was his children. He's a dedicated family man. They said he won't even commit to coming to a barbecue before first calling his wife. I mean, he's very buttoned up. They said he's a loner, but he's also terrified of being left off social shit. But then he doesn't show up if invited to the get together. - What? - Which, that makes perfect sense to me. - Trying to big time him? - No, not at all. You want people to want you to go places, but you don't actually go to those places. What is this? Yeah, you want to be invited and then you want to go, oh, okay, good. They don't hate me good But I can't go there. That's too much. I can't show up. I can't show up because then they won't like me That's when you hate yourself. That's what you do You go if I show up then they won't like me anymore. I should keep it to the point where they want me to come and then I don't come That's not how your brain works. That's a my brain work If he did No, yeah, they said he I love showing up to places. I love the fucking party. Oh, okay, I mean once I'm there I'm fine. It's fine. I don't want to go there goddamn. I love a party. No. Yeah, sometimes it's weird. I It's I don't mind it either I there's a line in clerks that calls it perfectly Yeah, you hate people he goes. Yeah, but I love gatherings. Yeah It's a weird thing. I love a party. I don't mind a gathering. It's one of those deals so now at tuffs his colleagues call him quote the man And this is kind of out of the fact that he's a bit of a bully around the campus and Really, he's kind of the big shot. So he feels he can bully a little bit here, which is again very wrecks your menish because wrecks your men if you if you say if anybody watches those old Interview videos with him. He is a loud mouth. No, it all asshole. That's what he was not one word That one where they do the thing at the in his office. Yeah, with the glasses and shit. He's trying to be so cool. It's like Dude ski look in the mirror. Nobody you are not cool And then whenever any the interviewer says something. He's always like black. No, no, no, but let me tell let me really give you a real skinny because you don't know Shit, but I do it's one of those things like amazing. He's a dipshit But this guy they said he doesn't tolerate being questioned or contradicted very well Lab assistants would tiptoe around him basically. Oh, so he does all of this seems to have a pretty goddamn busy life going on Yeah, and after all of that he also hangs out at the combat zone. Yeah hangs out in the combat zone area I guess in this area Emerson College is very close to this and Tufts medical school is basically around the corner From Bill's lab at Tufts to good time Charlie's. It's in less than a 10 minute walk Walk walk, so I mean, he could use the exercise, but that's beside the point By 1982 This is the combat zone is it fallen even into a further state of disrepair because now nobody wants to whack off in public when you can do it at home Yeah, there's a there's VCRs now. Yeah, you can go rent a movie and do it in the privacy area your own house You don't have to bump into other bump elbows Driving right now. Yeah, you don't have to bump elbows with the guy jerking off next to it Are you right here lefty? Okay, well, and I'll sit on this side. I don't want us to bump elbows Yeah, we got it. Yeah, we got to switch So yeah, the theaters were kind of closed and the clubs were struggling a bit But the only thing that was doing well was the prostitution business. Yeah, that was still going on So good time Charlie's was a huge dive Street prostitutes would gather in front of it and then upstairs they had a few small rooms and Basically, you could you know if you're a schmuck that wants to pay a young woman for their time This is the place to do it apparently all right His work colleague one of them said he was intense a workaholic who had a strange biological clock not given to nine to five work He could work from 10 to 10 one day then come in in the next and work from noon to three so Okay, make sense. I mean, yeah, but I never in the least thought he might be frequent Frequenting the combat zone after hours There are four bachelors in the lab who are always discussing it But when the subject came up he never participated in any of the comments He wouldn't join in and be like oh, yeah, that place is great. Yeah, they have hot girls or any of that shit This is from that book about good time Charlie's This is there the author saying this the one we mentioned earlier. Yeah Quote when I visited Charlie's I was struck by the fact that despite its cheerful backslaping name it was extremely dreary The customers chiefly young sailors or CD down on down at the heels foreigners Looked more loansome than libidness to look sadder more than horny basically Downcast they drooped for lawnly over their drinks sipping steadily and eyeing with a minimum of interest the topless and bottomless dancers bumping and grinding mechanically To the sounds of a distant jukebox Even when a tune ended and the dancers in whatever state of undress they found themselves climbed down from the overhead runway and Paramulated through the smokey bar to put 50 cents in the jukebox They and the nearness of their naked flesh did not seem to arouse the lethargic lonely drunks Yeah, if a naked chick doesn't get your attention you're you're down and the dumps a little bit Spore girl out danced she's my cherry pie and she used to pick another song She needs to pick another song a motley crew is coming out here. She's like more smoking in the boys room They seem to like that one. This is a time that the strip club DJ Needed to be around and there just wasn't one no, he had to be like hey the rather game of girls give it up to the guy Oh, that's candy candy candy They needed one so that yeah those guys are the worst They also say quote of course the dancers weren't much to look at they were for the most part bony or flabby or haggard Yeah, wow. Yeah, especially in a dump like this Nor were most of the prostitutes who frequented the bar particularly appealing they were getting on in years Their expressions were obscured beneath heavy coats of makeup their clothes were garish But oddly here and there there was some young prostitutes who were fresh-faced beautifully built and handsomely dressed Wow This person said the author goes on to say I'd come to Charlie's with a friend a prosperous Proper Bostonian who'd never been in a zone bar before but had agreed to accompany me for safety sake And also out of curiosity all evening. I interviewed the bartender and several prostitutes who had known Robin Benedict My friend kept saying how could a man like Douglas an academic be attracted to women like this sex yes, but attracted involved Um, they go on to say he was disdainful and uncomprehending yet before the night was out he would alter his views One of the handful of beautiful well-groom prostitutes approached him and soon he was buying her drinks and listening to the story of her life She was young dressed in an ultra suede suit wore her hair in a librarians twist and spoke impeccable Boston English That's fun accent. I'm apparently. Oh, yeah Once when she got up for a moment my friend whispered to me. I'm getting a bit of insight into your professor now Um, the woman who'd picked up my friend was called uh, she told him Sabrina And when he asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like Charlie's she said And he liked believing her that she was just here temporarily. I'm just here to work my way through college As soon as she got a bit of a nest egg together she'd be going back to her studies finishing her M.A. and anthropology at Boston University My friend was fascinated and talked with her animatedly only to be bitterly disappointed when the manager of good time Charlie suddenly arrived Worried that we might be detectives should Sabrina out of the bar Okay So here we go um, this is kind of the first deal here. This is Bill's first outing. Uh, it was March of 82 Bill uh meanders his way into the uh into the combat zone One of those deals. Uh, I have a drink do something like that Um, he could have gone home and done that but no he wanted to get out into the seediness a little bit here Have a little company while I drink this a little something something, you know what I mean? So You know, that's kind of what's going on. So he did that now he first meets Robin in April of 82 Mm-hmm. He's 41. She's 20 at the time. Oh boy She'd been working at a good time Charlie's for not too too long only a few months She still didn't have a ton of regular still a small client list and a few dozen people Later on she'll have over 250 clients in her book. Oh, wait um, he saw her and liked her Yeah, um, according to uh The book Boston tabloid by Don Stradley. He quote smiled like an idiot at her As when people said Which is what you do when you're a schlubby middle-aged man and a 20-year-old attractive woman is talking to you Smile like an idiot. That's like you can do at that point if you're that guy It's what you do when any girl or guy talks to you when you're out of your league when they're when they're out of your league You just go This is wow ridiculous if I say anything. She's gonna stop talking to me. Yeah. I'm just gonna smile on my talk. I'm trying not to fuck this up So, um, this is from the book again robin benedict Benedict must have been a lot like Sabrina. That's the one that they got chewed away from Certainly she was beautiful slim and willowy with wide dark eyes luxuriant raven colored hair and smooth pale skin with an under girl Under glow of topaz. Oh, she dressed conservatively wearing slacks or skirts with matching blazers And she had a lively outgoing manner a high-spirited way of putting shy men at ease. Douglass, a diffident man and always something of an observer from the sidelines, may have noticed these appealing traits about Robin and attracted by them, put down his drink and tried to strike up a conversation. Or maybe she came up to him. Who knows? Either way we do know within minutes of their conversation, Robin took him, took Bill to her trick pad that she had rented in Boston. She's got a trick pad. Okay. Apparently she had looked him over and decided he was safe because he's a pudgy middle-aged guy with a family and a professor and he doesn't look real hardened. He doesn't look like a guy who came and off the high seas is going to murder you and dump you off into the harbor. So he's a nervous smiling professor. Her rate's $100 an hour, which is a little bit expensive for the combat zone girls, but she's as good as the combat zone girls get. So they do this. Now here, one of the people at the bar, one of the other ladies said, "I remember seeing him in here a few times. He was pretty hard to miss because he was so big, but he stopped coming in after he met her. What was really neat about her was she was so fresh looking, the clean cut type. That's what this woman goes on to say." Now, Bill, rather than being like, "Okay, I have my, my, you know, teaching and I have my wife and I have my kids and I have all this stuff going on. Maybe he wants in a blue. I'm going to go hook up with some hot young girl or something. How often is he doing it?" Well, no, he falls in love with her. He's in love with her. So this is, I mean, he's looking at her. She's 21 and glamorous and beautiful. And also, he's been with the same woman, a quote, plain, heavy set woman since high school. What do you think they're fucking is like? Pretty vanilla and existent as a word. Yeah. And if it's happened and it's probably pretty lights off, probably pretty up and get it over with. This girl knows what she's doing. This young lady knows how to fuck and he is blown away by this. Absolutely. Just mesmerized by it. Very impressed. Yes. He wanted to be his, her boyfriend. He wanted to like, you know, I want to walk around with her and, you know, go canoeing and have candle lit dinners and sure you do. Yeah. He was in love with her. He wants to pretty woman this, for sure. Well, that's the thing. He totally wants a pretty womaner and he said one day he confessed to her and he told her he said, you know, this is what I want. He's like, I want you to be with me. And, so, and pretty soon they started going to the movies together, going to concerts and plays together. They took drives in the country. They'd stroll on the common feeding ducks with bread, you know, just like a, like a young couple. And then at the end of it, you give her a lot of cash. You got to disregard everything that happened. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, too. She, this isn't free. No. She said, no matter what we're doing, it's a hundred dollars an hour. And then go out to dinner. It's a hundred dollars an hour. It's all a hundred bucks an hour. So, she gives him no freebies. Yeah. She said literally whether it's oral sex or slice of pizza, it's a hundred bucks. Doesn't matter. Fuck the pizza. Yeah. Exactly. But it doesn't, it's always a hundred. So one night she took him to her apartment and cooked dinner for him. She charged him for the time she spent with him. She also charged him for the time she spent shopping and preparing the food and the ingredients. You bet. And the grocery bill, even the groceries that evening cost him 700 dollars to have dinner at her apartment worth it. Wow. But Bill was into it. He loved it. He felt like he was a, you know, young guy again. He felt great. He's doing all these writing him all these letters, dearest rob and stuff like that. One, he writes in the in the very edge of the note paper, knowing you has made my life brighter and happier. You are a remarkable, wonderful woman and being with you makes me a very fortunate man. You are a beautiful person and deserve only the best in life. One time at midnight they went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight showings, which is a new thing at that point. That night cost him $800. That's either Rocky Horror Picture Show. So he's a guy which means he hated the Rocky Horror Picture Show and he spent $800 for her to like it and for him to be like, what the fuck are we doing? He saw him suck. Yeah. Which is how I felt about. And that guy's got a big mouth with a lot of teeth and he's in fishnets and a huge fucking head. The hell is going on here. So summer of 82, he starts seeing her pretty much every single day. Oh my god. Paying her $100 an hour. Spending three to $500 a day on her every day of the week. He can't be making that kind of money. Oh, he's not at all making that kind of no way. So we'll talk about next thing is how does he afford it? That's right. Literally next word is how does he afford it? Well, let's see here. He has a lot of leeway at Tuffs when it comes to these research grants. No, fucking way. He's the top grant generator in his department and he has eight active projects. So he's got a lot of plates spinning. He signed off on his own labs petty cash requirements. Oh my god. The university's policy at the time was that a $25 petty cash request didn't even require a second signature. You just wrote it down and pocketed the cash. So that's what he did over and over again in $25 increments for months. Signed them over to his lab assistants who would then hand the cash back to him. So it didn't look like him. And then he would take the cash and go to the combat zone and give it to her. That's how this went. So she can't have a fashion show to pay this back. This is crazy. Yeah, this is insane. She would flatter him. She called him her favorite professor. She would also because ladies of the night are good at listening. Yeah, they're good at it. They'll make they'll seem interested in what you have to say because that's their job. So she showed interest in his research and he began to see her as not just some young hot chick, but he's got like she's a great artist and a good musician and she's very smart too. And he said he wanted to meet her friends and you know, help her get an education and do all this. I want to be a part of your life. Yeah, I want to meet your friends. Yeah, he also started patting the invoices at work. Oh no, basically what he did is he put Robin on the Tufts payroll as a research assistant. This is what talk about crossing the streams, man. You are. My God. Supposedly she was doing scientific illustrations for the lab, but she was never didn't have to do that. He even started processing her time sheets personally. So he started submitting receipts for work that Robin never actually did. Oh, Jesus Christ. No one at the lab ever remembered seeing her there because they didn't. She wasn't. Now she thought this was a legitimate position at first. So when he told her what he was going to do, she was like, awesome. She thought this was a job. She told her brother that she was super excited about a legitimate freelance illustration gig and that she could do some, you know, drawings and work and stuff like that, but the paychecks, you know, she get paid for it. And this is a real gig. This is her first like freelance illustration gig and it's a for a place like Tufts that'll get around, you know, I'm going to do great. So Bill, also, this is even fucking crazier. In addition to Robin, he put JR's ex-girlfriend on the payroll as well. Her best friend. Yeah, her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. Yeah. So now he has her and her Pimp Boyfriend's ex-girlfriend, both on the, on the payroll. Which is crazy. A legend Pimp. I don't know if you, but that's what everybody says. So the ex would cash the Tufts check and give the money to Robin and everybody got paid. So she didn't get paid, but that was, she had her on the payroll so she could just give that money to Robin so she could, he could give Robin more without making her salary be a record flat. He ends up embezzling about $67,000 in 1982 money, which is, you know, about 200 grand today. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a shitload. And he's always writing her letters. He went on a trip to Saskatoon and wrote her a letter that he missed her and his children. Basically, I miss you and the kids real bad. Yeah. It's only a strange thing. 650 hours with her though, really. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that much. It's still a lot. Yeah. It's a lot of money. Yeah. A lot of time. He said, she said, my lab group at Tufts had a cookout for one of my postdoctoral fellows. I wanted to ask you if you could go with me to this party, but Nancy would not tell me until the last minute if she was going or not. She did not, and I didn't want to ask you at the last minute. Next lab party, I'm just going to ask you and not tell her about the party. Jean. great um he described an accolade he'd received at the cookout um saying that um a quote one of my graduate students he said uh showed up in a sweatshirt on the front of the shirt was the skyline of Boston with many skyscrapers across the buildings written in capital letters was w-h-j-d and she said that everybody should get that what is that i don't know what that a William Henry James Douglas oh yeah okay yeah so she's like they're all getting shirts on me that's how cool I am now throughout the early spring and summer of 1982 he's getting more and more into her and nothing one of the things that they're doing this is about a month and a half into start and seeing her is they're doing cocaine together like you can have another extremely expensive fucking habit into this he can't afford either of these habits no she was a steady user at the time she was sure yeah going into that which i mean the nightlife and all that um and from the beginning of him being on on board he would pay for it for now he's paying for his too because he gets into it so they'd meet up late at night they'd snort some coke um and you know all of that um she said later she said to somebody that she was very strict about her habit and would always check her nose very thoroughly because she didn't want to go back to the bar and have any traces of it around her she didn't want to look like a a coax game basically yeah so um he found himself super into her um he met two other young prostitutes with whom she shared the trick pad with and got to know them and talked to them about her live about their lives and about why they went into this business and uh he was studying the culture and everything else and you know he was using all the street lingo and he's like yeah yeah i know these working girls and all that kind of shit he's america undercover now yeah that's what he's super interested yeah he's HBO films here he's very interested uh in the summer of 82 he started to lose weight what happens when you're doing a shitload of coke that's what it does to you so to wander diet it does it wonders for that um one of the colleague one of his colleague said he went on eating all the stuff he liked hot dogs cheese and crackers ice cream cookies and even drank beer but he lost a lot of weight i figured he was taking benzidrine either way um robin told him in an effort to encourage him to lose weight he called she called him gross apparently oh and so that he was like i gotta get look better for my young lady here so he's got to hook it up and get she means you got a drip you're yeah you're doing coke you're gross um he didn't know robin had a pim at during this time as well he thought she was just freelance huh yeah um he just wanted to spend time with her and all that kind of shit uh here um he also changed his schedule at tuffs arranging to do research in the like middle of the night yeah so he could stay in his lab until she finished her work and then go over there and meet her um he didn't this was often 230 in the morning god damn when she finished he would go to go and stay with her until four or five a.m. and he wanted to be the last man she saw every night that's what he said he called her his treasure and her his quote precious lady yeah um he gave her gifts too money records clothing whatever the fuck it was um one night he invented a game of grab bag he filled an envelope with slips of paper on which he named various treats and let her pull out a slip before they had sex something she can get yeah uh she had uh also one of the slips uh the slips because she has nails that she keeps up nails by Dorothy as often as you want them as one of the things he said he'd get her what another said a permanent a hair permanent at the salon of your choice as often as you wish as often often as you wish another slip said one complete set of super expensive cosmetics of your choice that's often as you want he doesn't even know a super expensive cosmetics I don't know if he's sick but I'll never let it to this uh on one he wrote uh one bike of your choice weird in bicycle in his letters here um he ends everything with qh which means quick hugs and tells robin how much he longed for vellumint transfers which I guess means that that's the little mint candies and we're gonna kiss and a cast mince back and forth he draw cartoons on the bottom is his notes uh which aren't quite as uh you know good as the ones that he's does here um but they were like they were basically like 13-year-olds he acted like a 13-year-old that was in love with someone puppy love and writing them letters and all this type of shit here now the faculty starts to take notice of some shit oh they start whispering about him and oh god and gossiping and they're like yeah yeah this is he's just acting weird um said with Douglas they said one thing is he lost so much weight that his clothes were hanging off him he was he looks different he has no new wardrobe because he can't afford that he's spending it on coke and fucking perms for his girlfriend and and nails as much as you want that much as you want um he lost all that weight he's behaving uncharacteristically he almost never comes into the lab while the sun is up ever anymore she's us he keeps missing appointments with students he wouldn't turn up for departmental meetings in laboratory supervisory sessions and um basically they said when someone would find him there he was jumpy and weird and you know on coke yeah real jumpy um at first they thought that he was basically was probably having an affair and they would joke around like all of this he's like the dorkiest nerdyest of all of us he's probably getting some on the side that's what's going on here uh yeah he mentioned to one of them a while back that if a robin benedict telephone that he would be called to the phone no matter what he was doing uh even if they were in the middle of a crucial experiment you come get me all right he said that she's a graduate student working with him on a research project at MIT they were like sure she is yeah that sounds right um october of 82 the school questions him about the money expensive you know padding expense accounts and they said what kind of work did these two people you've hired as research assistant oh shit at first he was calm uh but he said that at one point after a while he admitted that some of his vouchers were problems and false but he insisted that some of the others being questioned were valid and he maintained that the vouchers for money paid to the two young ladies were on the up and up um so they didn't know they were talking about doing a full scale investigation they demanded to speak with you know jr's x and robin and he drew very he got very agitated the vouchers were legitimate he repeated again and if they weren't uh you know and if it turns out i owe the university money i'll pay it back so i don't even fucking worry about it that's it um so that's it so they kind of leave it at that and he continues to spend money oh my god yeah some of the scams and things were ridiculous hiring her as a researcher site assignment by the way uh want to know what he put in the paperwork he thinks he's clever for why he hired her um what she was a consultant on a project to develop a computer program for analyzing prostate tissue he requisitioned a medical supply house used by tufts university or tufts medical school where he described on a voucher as quote fluid collection units gross which turned out to be condoms mm-hmm that's what it was uh and robin would sell them to the other ladies at the combat zone to make a profit that's what he was doing he called it fluid collection units gross yeah um he uh added the x-girlfriend there at one point tufts issued the jr's x-girlfriend a check for nine thousand dollars which she cashed and gave to robin um he gave robin herself about 20,000 directly and uh submitted all sorts of false shit like that and they're just spending he's just spending money and it's it's crazy um at one point uh she talked about continuing her art education but according to a lady who knew her that also worked at good time charlie's robin frequently mentioned that she hoped one day to make a living by drawing but by the fall she no longer took that seriously um she told her quote there's a lot of reasons the cut and pay for one she tells one girl fall of 82 stalking starts oh oh yeah now he wants her all to himself that's it um and she's like listen you're fine when you pay me and all that but then when you leave I go on to the next person and that's what I do um but here's a list of what he did through the fall of 82 from the fall of 82 on through the time she disappears call her up to a dozen times a day yeah every day wrote her dozens of letters long letters pages long apologies love letters that's the ones J.R. gave and showed up at her apartment uninvited parked outside watch her come and go broke into her apartment twice to steal her answering machine so he could listen to the messages other clients It's relieving. Oh my god. a new answering machine as a gift quote unquote but kept the little remote control that lets you call in from a pay phone and retrieve your messages. It's a beeper and there's a certain tone you have to do back then that's it would go beep and they knew that was the right thing. And didn't tell her that it existed. Exactly. Wow. So she was getting messages on a machine that he was remotely listening to. He bought her the silver 82 Toyota Starlit with the black racing stripe as a gift there. He paid for part of the down payment on a house for her. We don't know if that's sure or not. That's an alleged he stole her mail. He called her family members trying to get information about where she was called a massage parlor. She used to work for and got her fired from a legitimate side job that she ends up getting made recordings of himself making harassing calls for some odd fucking reason. Um, copied Robin and JR's phone bills and annotated them in the margins and pen with notes about who Robin had been calling who she'd seen where she'd been seen. A kept a pair of robins underwear as we'll talk about and also her flute disappears and should know where that is. Okay. This is a man that does research for a living. Yeah. He's going to be good at this. You think? Fuck yeah. This is also from the missing beauty book. Apparently he met Robin's parents at one point and told them that if anybody bothered them or bothered Robin, I'll take care of it. Quote because he said he had access to chemicals at the toughs lab that could dissolve a human body. He said that over dinner. Just chilling. And they were like, okay, like uncomfortably laughing. I'm going to help take care of your daughter and watch over your daughter as I am in possession of chemicals that dissolve bodies. I might have to completely disappear a human to do that. But I'll do that. Don't you worry. I'll definitely do it to somebody not your daughter. Get not hurt. No, no, we'll take care of her. January of '83, she called the Boston police anonymously or he called the Boston police, excuse me, anonymously to report that Robin had solicited him for sex. He was mad at her. So he called the cops on her to say that this happened. That's really gross. I'm sorry. That's disgusting. Wow, that's gross. The cops showed up and she got arrested for it. One of the four because of him. She also got fired from her legitimate job, which was at a health spot in Saugas, which was a very normal legitimate job. Her employer found out about the prostitution arrest and fired her. So he gets her fired. So he will, she'll be more dependent on him and his money, apparently. He called the police repeatedly at strategic moments to get her arrested when she was with other clients as well. Wow. Then she starts noticing this and she tells JR about it and she says that she's needs to break it off with him. January 31st '83, he is suspended from Tufts. Oh, yeah. Apparently during a routine check of the financial records, they discovered their lab had him had been submitting expensive vouchers for large amounts of money against university grants that everybody shared. And he expenses he claimed to have incur made little sense. He submitted trips for vouchers abroad when they knew he hadn't been anywhere. Vouchers for entertainment and lodging of visiting scientists that they'd never seen and vouchers for work performed by Benedict the graduate student who'd never even put an appearance in. So anyway, the auditors noticed the discrepancies. They launched an investigation and they suspend him with pay while the investigation is ongoing. He refuses to sign anything admitting any wrongdoing. So until they can come up with a full enough to fire him, he's still technically employed at this point. February of '83, he flies to upstate New York for a job interview. Really? Yeah, his university's auditors are up his ass, so he's got to go find another one. So he gets an offer, it's a 10-year track professorship. So he comes out to the interview and he brings Robin with him. Really? Which must have cost him a fortune because this is an overnight trip and everything else. Yeah, this is a girlfriend experience. This is 2400 a day right here. She's not given breaks for like, all right, we're going to be together for eight hours. I'll do it for 300 or something. She's not doing that at all. I mean, Julia Roberts gave Richard Gear a deal. Yeah. Remember what it was like, you know, I don't know, it was $300 for the night, but for a whole week, it's like, you know, fucking, I think she was $1,100. I think she was a 1200. It was some ridiculous discount. Yeah, it may have been through my brain. And she may have said it was like a joke. Ha, ha, three grand. And he goes, yeah, she's like, and she's like stunned. Yeah. Oh my god, that's more than what happened because a woman needed three grand or would have $3,000. It was desperate for it. Yeah. So she goes with him, stays with him in the hotel room, gets introduced to faculty members. He told them that she's a graduate student who is considering the school. So he'd be a nice guy. Take her up there. But obviously we know that isn't true. But she said that she was a grad student looking at the school and they ate salmon and made conversation about school type of shit. And this is his job interview. He just brings his, wow, they give him an offer. He comes back home to Massachusetts with the job in, you know, in his hand here. By this time, Bill and Nancy are barely speaking, which I don't know how he would have any time to speak to her. He has notes. Where's the time? They're not speaking. They're basically one of the authors described it as the passing notes on the kitchen counter stage of marriage where they don't either need to exist. It's not even going to exist. Yeah. No, yeah, it's all logistical. She knows she's been cheating that he or I'm sorry. She knows he's been cheating. Uh-huh. And there's a reason why she knows he's been cheating because he told her nope. On March 2nd, 1983, Robin called her. Oh boy. Called his house to talk to Nancy. Oh boy. And said your husband needs to stop calling me. He needs to stop coming around. I don't want to see him anymore. And Nancy just said, okay, and that was the whole exchange. Yeah, it's embarrassing. So she's embarrassed exactly. Later that evening, he stops payment on a $200 check he'd written to Robin on the same day. Robin had deposited the check on March 4th. Uh-oh. The thing is Nancy called the bank, not Bill, to stop payment on it. Yeah. Later on, the police get bank records and the stop payment request is a Nancy's name. Huh. So somehow she's involved enough in this whole thing within hours of this phone call to cancel the $200 check. Maybe she saw the check in the check balance book. I'm not sure. It's not like she could see it online. Right. I have to be in the balance book. Yeah. So March 5th, 1983, this is the day that Robin kind of disappears here. Bill calls Robin's answering service and apartment 12 times. Oh, he spoke to her four times in that single day. Then between the evening of March 5th and the morning of March 6th, Bill made six calls from locations spanning Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Boston, Connecticut. This is overnight. Yeah. From the fifth into the sixth, many of the calls were to his own house. Several were to add Robin's answering service. One was to make a reservation on Amtrak. All of the calls were paid for with his credit card. Now, so now his there's a distinct paper trail of these calls. Otherwise, he could have just put a bunch of quarters in and made the calls and no one would have known what the fuck was going on. But he used to credit card. Yeah. Now Robin's day on the fifth here. Let's see here. 3 p.m. Robin leaves her apartment to go shopping. She's going to buy a birthday gift for JR's young son whose party is the next day. So there's that. She's thinking about the gift. She makes the drive. She's doing all that shit. 7.45 p.m. She stops in at the combat zone bar of good time Charlie's here, meets up briefly with JR's ex-girlfriend to confirm the plans for the next morning. That's it. They have a quick drink and they're planning for the weekend. 8.40. Robin shows up at a client's apartment in a Boston high rise. This is a regular client and the appointment lasts under an hour. And then by 9.30 p.m. just before leaving the high rise, Robin calls her answering service to check her messages. Now the operator who takes the calls, this is so long ago that operators are still working an answering service tells her this. She said she said someone claiming to be JR called earlier and asked to pick up your messages. So Robin calls JR and says you tried to pick up my messages. He says, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I didn't call anybody. So now she knows someone posing as JR is calling her answering service trying to get her message log. So she knows who it is. It's fucking Bill. Yeah. And so God damn it. He's pissed off. He's spending his days now. He doesn't work anymore. So he's just obsessing over Robin the whole time. 9.45. She leaves the high rise on her way out. She tells the client and the dormant that she's quote rushing to meet another client between the wife and kids. Between the wife and kids she said, which is interesting. So Russian getting to him before he gets has to go back home to the wife and kids. Yeah. So Robin calls had called Nancy three days earlier and told her she was done, but she also told Bill this day over the course of these phone calls that she would come over one more time to settle out their accounts because she owes her money because she's done. So she gets in her silver Toyota drive south on the I 95 and goes to his house. She arrived at 10 30 p.m. at the house. Nancy is not home. She came home from work at seven, found a note from Bill saying he was, quote, out for a walk and that Robin was coming by at seven 30 and Nancy, quote, didn't want to be home when Robin was around jumped in the car and left. So she went to the mall, then picked up two of the kids, then drove back. Now here's what she says, though, she drove around, she drove home around 11 30 and saw Robin's car still in the driveway. So then she drove her own car around the neighborhood for 45 minutes waiting for Robin to leave. Wow. She is meek. What a coward. I'm just thinking my, imagine Sarah would have fucking kicked the door off the hinges with like a fucking machete. If you hold it in her hand, if you already know that he's cheating though and she could have killed me before that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. I mean, I probably do the same thing to any woman. Yeah. I kicked the, what the fucking ability to live it? Yeah. So Nancy said she came home around 215 a.m. 215 went inside, saw Bill asleep in their bed and went to sleep in the living room. She's not going to the same bed with him. Your own house. You wouldn't even come home. Now, yeah. Now that's her story and people are shaky on her story. By the way, the cops don't know how much they believe this 10 0 7 p.m. Okay. Robin is allegedly, at this point arriving at Bill's house, a man calls Robin's answering service, identifies himself as Joe tells the operator he's throwing a party in Charlestown and he wants Robin to come. They take the message. Yeah. It doesn't sound weird. Yeah. Joe who needs a party girl. Yeah, that's what we do here except who we sell to. Yeah. She does have clients named Joe but he didn't call her that night. He was at home and never called the service didn't invite her out. Okay. It was Bill calling pretending to be Joe. Oh god. So then when Robin turned up missing here, he could say, oh, she left that my house to go to Joe's party. Right. Think about it. So 10 0 7 p.m. This is the, that's the big one there. Calling this saying the Joe's party because he's the only one who could have done it. Right. So then she disappears. Obviously. Now at about 1142 p.m. Robin called the answering service. Well, okay. Someone saying they're Robin saying she's on her way to Joe's party. The operator takes a service but she flags it because she tells her colleague something is wrong about the call. The voice doesn't sound right. It's higher than Robin's usual voice. They said it sounded like that. This person sounded like a man disguising his voice to sound like a one. Oh, I don't know. What are you doing? Like Mrs. Doubtfire style. Oh, hi. So ridiculous. Now Bill has a high pitched voice for a big fat guy by the way. So they're looking at that. Oh, man. And then also he, this is crazy. So he's trying to get that past everybody. Yeah. At one point he'd been breaking into Robin's apartment when she wasn't there and singing in her apartment in a high pitched voice and playing her flute. So the neighbors thought it was her. Oh my god. That's wild. Shortly after midnight, Bill drives from Sharon to just outside Mansfield. There's a payphone across the street from a highway rest stop. That's right where the, all the stuff was found by the way. He called his house and spoke to Nancy and says is there anyone there? Were there any calls? Nancy said she just got home around 1130 said nobody called. Bill says I have a problem and I'll tell you about it later and then hangs up. Okay. Calls back five minutes later tells her to lock all the doors and then hangs up again. Both calls are on its credit card. Bill, let's see, the rest stop was full of trucks at the time and they thought that maybe Bill didn't feel comfortable dumping evidence there because people might see him. So they think he made a U turn and drove north and found a further rest stop away that was less crowded, a little more empty. So they think that they pulled out the brown paper bag stuff with the bloody clothes and towel and because it also had a bloody hand towel from cleaning himself, the jacket, the shirt and the sledgehammer and throws in the trash barrel gets back in his car, drives I, I 95 north here. By the way, he's driving Robin's car with we believe must have been Robin's body in the trunk. Has to be, right? Has to be. He said he hasn't there's no plan at this point. 2 12 a.m. A call is placed from Boston to the Douglas home. Bill is driving north calling home again. He drove from the rest stop north into Boston. So they're tracking what route he could have made when they look at all this. They said he was possibly trying to drive Robin's car back to the high rise where she'd seen her client at 840. Maybe try to frame him because that's where he was in that area, but he doesn't do it and he calls Nancy again and hangs up. 5 29 a.m. He's now in Rhode Island. Good Lord. So he's driven all the way around credit card call. He doesn't tell Nancy what he's doing. 651 a.m. he calls again from one island or Rhode Island. He calls home and it's Nancy. One p.m. the next day, he calls Robin's answering service pretending to be a man named John setting up an appointment with Robin. 333 a.m. on March 7th now. So this is the she disappeared the night of the fifth. This is now the morning of the seventh. He gets on an Amtrak train from New York to Washington DC where he has an academic conference to attend. During this time, this is when the when the is the bag of evidence is being discovered. So based on all of these calls, they put together everything and they're like, oh, he absolutely fucking did this. What the hell, man? Absolutely drove around all might looking for a place to dump her body. And this is crazy. Just goes to show people from Yale. Aren't that fucking smart? Apparently not. He's more of a Plattsburg, you know, state college kind of guy. March 11th. I know people who went there. They weren't that bright. March 11th, 83 Robbins parents reporter missing. March 13th is the first interview with Bill. By the way, once Robbins disappearance hits the newspapers, it's a big deal. There's a New York. Well, yeah, in the New York school that hired him saw a photo of her and they were like, that's the check that came with our new guy. Oh my God. She's a suspected murdered prostitute. Okay. And they rescind the job offered him. No, thank you. He lost the job because they have a newspaper subscription. Yep. That's it. Shit. Second police interview. They bring him in again. He begins by telling a long, a relevant story about his car was how his car was stolen from outside Robbins apartment the Tuesday before she disappeared stolen stolen. Then he says the next day after meeting Robbins at a hotel. He was pulled into a van and beaten up by three black men who warned him to stay away from Robin. There's a lot of black guys assaulting him. No, it's not even a mugging. Now it's a van and they pull up and they just beat him up as a warning. This is a, this is a fourth story. By the way, a completely separate thing about his wound here. It's ridiculous. They let him talk. Just let him dig a hole for himself here. Every new story is another contradiction. That looks bad for him. They ask about the night of March 5th and Bill says Robin came over around 1030 delivered some artwork she'd been doing for his tough slab, which is bullshit and left around midnight to go meet Joe, quote unquote. So that's he's not even working for toughs right now. He's suspended. So that's crazy. They ask him about the $200 check that Nancy stopped payment on and Bill says, quote, oh, that check. Yeah. I paid Robin in cash instead when she was at my house on the fifth. So I just canceled the check. I just didn't want to go through, which was a dumb thing. And Nancy's the one who stopped the check. So they ask him about the, they ask him about the head wound again. And he says that I'm track and they got beat with a pipe and a briefcase. And this time his briefcase was stolen by the two assailants. So at one point he says, Bill, what did Robin do to make you kill her? Yeah. And Bill says, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't do anything. And he says, think he did because I didn't know at this point, they don't have enough to keep, they don't have enough for an arrest warrant at this. No, they don't even have a body. They have nothing. But they do have enough for a search warrant. Oh, yeah. So March 20th, 83, 15 days after she disappeared, they come in and search his house. Okay. By the way, the house is disgusting. It is, that's why I mean, it's so much like Rex Heurman. That house is a shit-fucking-hole, crazy gross, right? Same exact thing. Same exact thing with this thing. Why is that? Because Rex was, meticulous. Yes, but the house he did. It's like a bomb. What the fuck is that? Don't know cockroaches. They said rotting food on the cat. They have three kids. What's going on? Oh my God. Trash everywhere. They're like, this is what the fuck is happening in here? Like they don't expect to see this from like non-crackheads. This is crazy. One of the person from Tufts described Bill's personal habits as a scientist as compulsive. So he was a compulsive researcher, but not a compulsive dishwasher apparently, because he's none of this is good. Now Nancy is home during the search. The kids are not home. Nancy just sits there and watches the whole thing go down. They go into Bill's closet and this is what they find in Bill's closet. Robyn's pocketbook. The one she was carrying on the night of the fifth, her credit cards, her personal phonebook, which is her lifeline nor business. Two of Robyn's coded address books, which had been stolen from her apartment, a pair of Robyn's pink underwear. Robyn's flute is in his closet. Yes, a bloodstained man's blue windbreaker with a pocket that when tested with Lumenol showed signs of blood. Yeah. In the pocket is a quarter size chunk of gray gooey human tissue. What? He just has a chunk of brain in his pocket. He didn't know. I'll bet I just fell in there. Had to also cassette tapes that when played are recordings of Bill Douglas making harassing phone calls to a massage parlor that had previously employed Robyn. Recordings he made of himself harassing the parlor trying to get her fired from the job, which she was fired from it eventually. Also a cassette recording of Bill Douglas telling the story of the murder as he wants it told to an unidentified co-conspirator, a voice that could be male, could be female, could be Nancy, could be somebody else. The investigators are never able to identify the other voice. In my opinion, it has to be Nancy. He's not telling anyone else about this shit, but I think Nancy is in now. She's got to know, right? My opinion, yeah. A long handwritten note from Bill drafting some kind of defense explanation for missing the missing Tufts money in which he blames the embezzlement on a mysterious woman who supposedly drugged him and took compromising photos of him and was blackmailing him. Oh, an audit report that shows Bill had stolen at least $67,000 copies of Robyn and J.R.'s phone bills, not originals copies that he made indicating that he'd been obtaining them and also they with annotations in the margins about who he called and when. A beeper belonging to the answering machine that he'd given her as a gift, the one that gets the messages. A cops business card which turned out to be the card of the police officer. Bill had been calling when he anonymously tipped off the cops to rob to bust Robyn trash bags. The same brand color and style of bag as the one the bloody jacket and sledgehammer were found in the flute. By the way, it was found alongside her pocketbook and underwear. He had her pocketbook flute underwear all lined up there. That was just the closet. No. Oh, yeah. They found. Oh, yeah. And the rest of the house, all of Bill shirts were the same size as the bloody blue work shirt found at the rest stop everyone. Okay. Now it's at this point that detectives pulled the pulled the bloody blue work shirt out of evidence and showed a tenancy and said, does this look familiar? She picked it up and looked at it, looked under the arm. There was a tear that had been sewn, a small one, a little patch of sewing work. And she said, that's my stitching. I fix Bill shirts. I did that. In other words, that's Bill's blood silk shirt that you found there. Wow. Then she walked to her sewing basket pulled out a spool of thread and handed it to the detectives and said, I think this is the thread I used to make that repair. So you should test it. Yeah. Yeah. They later confirmed the thread in the pool and the spool matched the thread in the armpit of the bloody work shirt conclusively. Yeah. Okay. So she just handed that over. Is there stitching good or bad that she? I think it's good. You know, I mean, I bet it's, but it's good work. Three kids back then. Yeah. Probably. Now that was it. She refused to say anything else. She wouldn't say anything else. She goes, I gave you that. I'm not doing anything else. Huh. Won't do anything. They told her that Bill is the primary suspect in Robbins disappearance. She will not believe it. Refuses. Even though she's holding a bloody shirt with a stitch she fucking made. She did. Won't believe. Who's that remind you of? Yeah. That's also fucking you. Couldn't do it to a T. That is the Gilgo Beach killer's wife. She told her he didn't. She's like, she was still like, I won't do it. I won't believe it until I see it. Ma'am, he can't murder anymore. It's fucking wild. Wouldn't let the kids be interviewed either. Wouldn't testify. Wouldn't speak of it any further. Extremely Gilgo Beach. Then they do a search of his offices and his professor's office and then they produce love letters from him to her. A stack of newspaper clippings about prostitutes. 55 pornographic books and magazines and a box of Ramsey's condoms as well, just in case. Is the fantasy just to bang a woman that you paid to do it or is it, is the fantasy finding a very hot woman that you're interested in and pull her out of this life and marry her? Is that the fantasy? That wasn't the fantasy at first. I think at first he was just out partying but he met this one and she's, she's smarter than your average bear too. She's fucking smart and she's talented and she's probably a good conversationalist and she's everything that he could never get when he was 21. And I feel like he's like, well, I'm important and if she likes me, what she pretends to because that's her job, she said she likes me. Then I should, you know, really, maybe she's in love with me like I'm in love with her and he's just, he's a fucking sucker. He's a moron. This is, you know, this is stupid. Around Easter, her parents, Robyn's parents receive a Western Union telegram supposedly from Robyn saying, "Mom, dad, I'm in Las Vegas. Don't look for me. Don't tell JR where I am." Any money? What? Any money? Money-wired or is it just just a telegram? No, just a telegram, Western Union. So he, they said they didn't believe a word of this because she signed the note, Robyn. They said she's never once signed a note to us, Robyn. We call her bin bin and that's how she signs it always. She would have said bin bin, not Robyn. It's not her bullshit. So they turn the telegram over to the police. The police trace the origin and have been sent from a Western Union office not far from Bill Douglas's location at the time. Not Las Vegas. It is. June of '83, still not under arrest, but he resigns from Tufts. He was not fired, he resigns. So that's how that works. The university announces they would pursue embezzlement charges. Then during this period, he spotted back at the combat zone trying to hire more fucking sex workers. Really? He's still living at home. And this is crazy. So anyway, June 6th or July 16th, '83, it has been months, months. The Toyota is found. Where is it? It is a patrol officer in Manhattan finds it in New York, in a towways zone near Penn station. It's been sitting there for months, coated in dust. So he looks at it. The license plates are gone. Everything on the exterior that could identify the car has been scratched off, except because Bill, let's face it, he's not a mechanic. The Venn number is right. No, he didn't scratch out the Venn number. He didn't even know a Venn number exists probably sitting right there in the dashboard. Yeah. So that's not good. They run the Venn, the car belongs to a missing woman. He opens the driver's door and said the smell hit him like a punch in the face. She's still in the car? No. Oh, but it's a smell is of decomp. He said it's unmistakable. He said this car has had a corpse in it and you can tell. And yeah, you have a corpse in something. It's going to smell like that till the end of time period. There's dried blood around the wheel well. There is tissue residue later will be confirmed as brain matter in the car as well. Oh my god. But there's no body in the car. This is the murder scene, this car. Well, at least the transportation. Yeah. So they notify the cops in Massachusetts. They tow it to a forensic lab, blood samples are taken samples from Robins family. They use FBI uses newly developed techniques of genetic marker genetic marker analysis, which is kind of a pre DNA technique to determine that the blood in the Toyota is type A and shares genetic specific genetic markers with Robins family. They also determine the blood is not bills, but probably Robins. Then they get the test results back for the sledgehammer and for the windbreaker pocket with the grave monitor in there. Okay. The quarter size chunk of tissue in the pocket here came back with a big answer. It's brain matter. It's fucking brain. It's a chunk of brain in his pocket in his pocket in his pocket. Now DNA obviously obviously is not going to work at this point, but they have protein analysis. And the thing that they're going to say is, because he was an anatomy professor at a medical school, he had access to cadavers, was it possible? He'd been working with an animal sample in the lab, maybe a sheet brain, and got some on his jacket, and it was just an innocent residue from work, but they looked into it and they said, no. None of Bill's eight active research projects involved animal brains or human brains. He was working on cellular biology, not neurology. So this is human brain matter. So he's just wearing a windbreaker with brain in it for a while, just like nothing happened. Then the sledgehammer, okay. They learn through Nancy's brother, this is his Bill's wife, who happened to be a police officer in a neighboring jurisdiction, that Nancy's father recently lent a sledgehammer to the Douglasses. They said, what kind? He said a small, two and a half pound sledgehammer with a shorthandle. He borrowed a baby sledge from his wife's parents? Yeah, from his in-laws. Now, Whaley, you hear what his story is, it's pretty wild about that, but anyway, they indict him. They have nobody in 1983. Nobody, no crime, that's what it is. It is nobody, no fucking crime, as Bob Marley would sing. That's how it is. Nobody, no crime. He's here, so they're trying to figure it out. So they charge him, though. Anyway, with first-degree murder and embezzlement from Tufts, he pleads not guilty. The media goes crazy with this shit, as you can imagine. Huge fucking headline, the professor and the prostitute. Talk about simplification, Jesus Christ. We're so over, this man has been, he's been robbing everybody. Yeah, all over the, that's why he's being charged with embezzlement, too. Now, the legal questions, this is from a newspaper at the time, noting that Douglas had remained in the Boston area, working at a succession of jobs, after being forced to leave Tufts in May of '83, Kivlin told the judge, that's the prosecutor. I want to point out to you that although he did remain in the area, there's evidence in our possession that like many people in the public, Mr. Douglas apparently believed that you can't prosecute a case without a body. Yeah, because it keeps coming up. He maintained, according to court records, that both police and J.R. were planting much of the evidence, linking him to the murder, and he says that his large and rapid weight loss affected his mental state as well. So is it nobody, no crime or what here? The thing is, too, even with that, that's such a crazy thing, because has there ever been a person convicted and then the person walks into the court or into jail anywhere and says, "Let that man out. I'm right here." He obviously didn't murder me. Not that I know of, but that's the fantasy they all keep talking about. Boy, do they sell that, right? They sell it hard. Well, that's their case here. I was getting to that here. They're talking about, too, there is an Arkansas precedent. The prosecutor said a case was just prosecuted in Arkansas two months ago on much less evidence from this, and without a body, and a conviction was obtained. Yeah. So they're saying that. Now, the defense attorney said, as Mr. Kivlin indicates in his statement on the seriousness of the offense with all of his scientific evidence and analysis and reports and whatever the like, they're going to be a number of novel questions to be decided by this case for the first time. So they're saying, this is a new thing. This is not normal in Massachusetts. Nobody, no crime. So Bill's offense is aggressive, too. There is a defense. Thomas Troy is his attorney, and they are just saying basically, you know, she's a prostitute and could have been anybody. Any body will kill her. He also says about this. He says the bottom, his entire strategy was, there's nobody. Therefore, there is no crime. Nobody, no crime is literally this man's defense. I cannot emphasize it enough. It's, wow. He said that my client should be free to walk out of here. He said, Robbins probably still alive and well. She might even be in the courtroom any minute. So give her a hand. Any minute. Any minute. He said, this whole case is Mickey Mouse. That's all I can tell you because of the gag order. Don't be surprised if Miss Benedict just happens to walk in here during the trial. Well, in the event that she does, we'll stop the proceedings, but until we're going forward, we will have a hearty apology for your client if that happens. Just a real heart. You know, we'll get him like a free basket. We'll send him on his way. If there's no car, there can be no car theft. Yeah. The guy, the defense attorney allegedly, even at one point came up with an idea to hire an actress who looked like her, have her veiled and walked into the courtroom to raise reasonable doubts. So the jury would go, my God, and you'd go, you thought it was her, right? Well, if you knew she was dead, you wouldn't have thought it was her. She could be alive, which is pretty good defense. That's not bad. It's not bad, but they were like, it's a stunt. Let's not do it. They didn't end up doing it. Now, the defense just smears Robin. Jesus. They float that this is in the paper that Robin was somehow involved in a drug and blackmail ring that had drugged Bill into compromising photos of him. Said that Bill was a known anatomy scholar who'd been embezzling from a medical school for a year as a victim of sex and dope and intrigue. Victim of sex and dope and intrigue sounds awesome. I think they sell movies to you with those three things. I think so. And also Thomas Troy here, the defense attorney described Bill Douglas as a gentle, sensitive, educated man, left his Alice in Wonderland of the scientific world for the combat zones world of sin and sex. And there Samson met his Delilah, Bill met his downfall, a paramour for pay. His childlike infatuation made Bill Douglas a prisoner of sex and dope and intrigue. Wow, let's see if we can get him as a prisoner of the state. Yeah. I don't want to jerk off to it, but I'm about to. Oh, no shit. Robin's mom said this about the case. We go to an empty grave. You know it's empty, but what can you do? That, yeah, that's fucked. Serifop, that sucks a lot. So pretrial, they figure out that Nancy nor the kids don't want to testify. So you can't really force children to testify. And if they want to get Nancy, they're going to force her and she's probably not going to be that cooperative. So that's not going to help much either. The prosecution's case, very simple. Nobody's still a crime. That's it. That's all her car is in New York, where she doesn't live. Uh, would do yeah, but still, nobody cases just didn't happen back then. Yeah. So they were really worried that the jury would go, well, how do we know she's dead? Oh, that's usually the first thing soaked in blood. We've got a piece of, we got to assume it's her brain, right? I think you want, yeah, but still they go, who knows? It could be anybody. The car was in New York. Maybe somebody stole it, murdered somebody, drove him around. We have no idea. And they don't know if she's alive. Usually it's you want a body, you want the murder weapon, you want evidence to go. This is nowadays, it's, it's common, but back in '83, it was not. I don't have the jury stand up and empty their pockets and the first one with the brain. Yeah. Anybody got brain in your pocket? Yeah. Let's let it go. But you, you know, they could muddy those waters for sciencey. Sure. That's what I mean. That's not enough. And they have 157 witnesses, the prosecution, 157, which is a lot. They never, uh, I guess apparently spousal privilege does not apply to acts against third party. So they can force Nancy to, uh, testify. The teenage children were never forced to testify. They have all of Robbins Escort Associates, private investigators, J.R. hired, you know, the cops who found shit, uh, the operators who took the fake messages on a answering service, uh, the bottle picker guy, Joseph, um, Nancy's father who testify about lending the sledgehammer, FBI genetics and markers, toughs auditors, numerous employees from an upstate New York hotel who met the quote graduate student. They have physical evidence. They have blood of the right type and genetic markers in Bill's shirt sewn by Bill's wife, brain tissue in a windbreaker pocket, blood in the victim's car, genetic markers matching her family. They have what they believe is the murder weapon. They have his, uh, they have her personal effects, phone book, credit cards, pocketbook, underwear, flute, all in his closet. Yeah. And it's a lot here, um, so they also figured out, um, where the $67,000 went, $45,000 went directly to Robin for hourly rate payments. God damn. That is some serious shit. The car was between five and $7,000, um, and a bunch more shit here, um, cocaine, Robin charged him $1,000 for a trip to pick up cocaine and Charles town where he had previously bought drugs from her. It's a lot. April 23rd, uh, 1984 jury selection comes in. The original pool is going to be as many as 500 jurors, whole shit, they have to find out who hasn't read about this in detail. Then April 27th, 1984, everything changes, um, Bill, yeah, Bill decides after 14 months of saying how innocent he is and saying he's been publicly framed and, you know, he's been manipulated and all this. decides he's going to change his plea and plead guilty. Doesn't look good. Now, they're not going to make complete guilty to first degree murder though, or anything close to it, because again, no body. So everybody's positions are tenuous here. The prosecutors, even though there's all that evidence, they feel scared, and he knows there's no body, but there's all this evidence, so he's scared. Now, they confer with the Benedict family, and everybody confers, and they agree to let him plead guilty to manslaughter, which is ridiculous. Ridiculous, and this is also, if he agrees to help locate the body, that's part of it. And Robin's parents said it's worth it to get her body back, so we can bury her. That's a lot here. Now, first degree murder is life without parole, manslaughter is not, as we'll find out here. So the deal conditions are, tell us where the body is, and do all of that shit. The judge says in open court, "Did you kill her?" Bill said, "Yes, I did." Said, "Did you strike her with a hammer?" And that caused her death, and he said, "Yes, sir." And, yes, sir, both times. Okay, at one point, JR, who was seated between her parents, stood up and screamed, "Shut up!" Shut up, and then he shouted up, "Senates at Bill." The bailiffs restrained him, her mom, wept on JR's shoulder, it's a mess. Bill said, "I'm sorry to the Benedict family 'cause I've caused their family grief. I would also like to apologize to my own family because I caused them a great deal of grief and anguish." And JR continued to scream obscenities with Adam, and then they, you know, whatever, it's a mess. Then they go right from the court into the prosecutor's office to get his confession, 'cause part of it is, say what you did. Okay, he's taken in there, it's four hours long. Confession? Confession, he smokes Kent cigarettes throughout the whole confession, Bill does. In his version, obviously he's not that bad of a guy. Okay, around 11 PM, they were inside the house, 42 Sandy Ridge Circle, there, between 10, 30 and 11 PM on March 5th. He says, "His version is Robin arrived with a two and a half pound sledgehammer concealed under her jacket." The sledgehammer, he borrowed from his in-laws. Right, somehow she's got it. She followed him upstairs to the bedroom and demanded $5,000 for posing as his grad student on the New York trip. Okay. He said he offered her whatever cash he had, not five grand, but whatever he had, she got angry and pulled out the sledgehammer and swung it at him. Oh. Now he said she grazed him in the forehead. Oh, grazed him in the forehead, which is where the mark came from. They struggled on the bed. She bit him on the leg, and he wrestled the sledgehammer away from her, which wouldn't be too hard. She's weighs like 110 pounds. Hit her in the head two or three times and killed her. Yeah. Now he's six foot tall, three hundred pounds. She's five, four, one, 15. So you don't need the hammer for that. The investigators looked at his head wound and said it looked more like a cut that you get from a shark object or a struggle at close range, not deep tissue damage like a sledgehammer, but he said it grazed me. That's it. But obviously this is all bullshit. Also, Bill claimed Rob and brought the sledgehammer, which we know isn't true. It's Bill's fucking sledgehammer or is in the sledgehammer. Now he claimed the struggle happened on the bed. When police searched the house, they spray lumen all, which makes blood glow. The only hit they get was a spot on the pocket of the windbreaker jacket, no glowing on the bed. Now the reason is, while the police searched the house, Bill was lying on the bed the whole time. They never searched it. They never pulled the bedding back and tested the mattress 'cause he was on it. They just forgot. - Really? - Yeah. That's wild. So they think that the blood, the mattress was probably soaked in Rob and his blood and he was lying on it to keep them from testing it. Yeah. Now what mostly probably happened is Bill got Rob and into the bedroom, swung the sledgehammer that he had waiting for her in there, hit her in the head, killed her and cleaned up. Then struggled to figure out how to put this together, how to fly about this, which is pretty crazy. Then midnight from this is from Linda Wolf's book, The Professor and the Prostitute. This is the most detailed reconstruction here based on Bill's own statements. Quote, there was blood all over, blood on the comforter on which Rob and lay dead, blood on the floor, blood on the radiator behind the bed. It wasn't a lot of blood, but it was splattered and there throughout the room. Most of it was his own from the wounds Rob had inflicted on him. She seemed hardly to be bleeding at all, which is, that's what Bill said, which is physically impossible 'cause she said her fucking brain is out, you know what I mean? Then this is from his account. He ran back to the bathroom, grabbed the hand towels. He had used to clean himself and began wiping up the gore with them and stuffing them into a brown paper bag. He then got dressed, put on a warm ski jacket with huge deep pockets and managed to cram the brown bag full of towels into one of the pockets. Bill dragged her body down the stairs, pulled the bedding off the bed with Rob and still wrapped in it, made kind of a cradle that way and holding the four corners like a hammock dragged her down the stairs into the kitchen. Then went outside to the Toyota, but couldn't find the keys so he had to go in and search her pockets and eventually he had to open the paper bag full of bloody towels and reach into the pocket over jacket to fish out the car keys. Yeah. Went back outside, backed her Toyota up to the deck, dragged her body, still wrapped in the comforter out onto the deck. Wow. That's interesting. James, he just said something that I don't know if the cops even picked up on. He said, "Grabbed the four corners like a hammock." That takes two people. No, it doesn't. If you're small, you can grab the two like this and pick them up. Oh, I guess it, yeah. And he carried downstairs a hundred and. Well, he dragged down the stairs. This was just to get in the car. I think just to get her on the thing, but he's a three hundred pound guy. I'm sure he can. That sounded to me like he held two, somebody back there held two. Nancy's guilty as shit. I mean, that's possible, allegedly. He's taking a suit. That's how it feels to me. Yeah. Hey, Nancy's story is full of bullshit. So, I mean, I don't know, Bill said that he didn't have a plan at that point and just started got behind the wheel and started driving. And he just didn't think about it. So he just kept calling home. After the rest stop, 2.12 AM is the Boston call where he tried to frame a client. Remember that one? He tried to say she was there still. Then there's the dumpster here. He remembered, this is what he remembers. He said he drove to Brookline, a neighborhood in Boston, pulled out on a quiet residential street, saw a dumpster and decided this is where I'll put the body. Went back around to the Toyota, started to pull Robin's body out. And then he said, Robin made a noise, which, no, not a breath. They said the residual air in her lungs being expelled as bodies sometimes do when moved after death. He said it was a sound he would never forget. And at that moment, he set a porch light came on in the house next to the dumpster. So he panicked, slammed the hatchback shut, got back in the driver's seat and peeled out. Okay, so now he said there's nobody, no porch light witness, they could find or anything like that. At 529, he makes the Rhode Island call, then he makes another one at 641. Predawnee says that he ended up at a large housing complex and shopping center in Providence, Rhode Island where he had one studied at Brown, so it was familiar. Had a big supermarket or radio shack, the Rhode Island blood bank, chitloads of dumpsters. So he removed several bags of garbage from one of the dumpsters to make room, took Robyn's body, wrapped in the comfort or along with the blanket she'd been on and shoved them into the trash on top of whatever and then put the other shit back on top. He described that as quote, "I disposed of the material." Robyn's body is the material. That's disturbing. Got back in the truck car and drove south, made more fake phone calls, took his Amtrak down there. Then he says, at the end of his confession quote, "When you find her, she'll be wearing her clothes." There was no monkey business. Okay, okay. Gee, that's what we were worried about. We didn't have sex, it was straight up murder. Straight murder for money. He described the Providence dumpster in a lot of detail, the parking lot, the shopping center, the layout. They went to the location, he described. There was no dumpster there. No dumpster in the location, he described, matched with the dumpster he described. He described a standard commercial dumpster with a serial number and they couldn't find it. He volunteered to be hypnotized in order to quote, "remember better." Yeah. That didn't work. Under hypnosis, he recited a serial number that sort of matched the type of dumpster used by a specific waste management company. They tracked down a dumpster with a similar serial number, which had been emptied many, many times. They said if she was in there, she had been taken to the central landfill in Johnston, Rhode Island, which is a gigantic facility that handles thousands of tons of trash a day. Every day. Yeah. He murdered three times during hypnosis. It's not me by the dumpster. The state considered searching the landfill. It would cost around $150,000 in 1984 in the state declined. So that was the thing. that. So we never, ever, never ride Robin. God, her body, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And by the way, the media really did this awfully shitty. They, they, they did Robin wrong. The meeting, they really fucked her over good and made her sound like just a filthy street walker. I mean, they made her sound like she had no family and friends. And she's just a bum, the prostitute. That's all she was. It was pretty sleazy during sentencing. Yeah. Only Benedict's mom here, surely Benedict Robbins mom told reporters that, basically, quote, it's a very empty feeling. It's going to be over, but we still can't have her. Right. The prosecution here sentencing runs for two days, by the way, because there's a lot of leeway in manslaughter sets. Oh, so you got to sway that judge. Yeah. So they argue for the maximum sentence. He said that, you know, it's obvious here. You know, he said, no matter that, no matter that Robin was a prostitute, she had a family that she was devoted to and a family that was devoted to her. Yeah. He hit her two or three times by his own account, crushed her skull and dislodged brain tissue. He placed her body in a dumpster like a piece of trash. Then he exploited it for nearly a year. They said on Easter of 83, Douglas caused a telegram to be sent to the family, allegedly from Robin that she was working in Vegas and was alive and went and said, yeah, basically this man got away with murder. He would have gotten away with it entirely except that we did this massive investigation. And he's a dangerous manipulative man. Give him the maximum. Okay. The other one though, he, the, the defense attorney said that called him the Alice Wonderland of the scientific world, traded that for the world of sin and sex. Samson met his Delilah, Bill met Douglas met his downfall, a paramour for pay, all that shit. Then he, then he said, a world of sex and pimps reached out and consumed him reached out. They came right to his house. Yeah, they've reached out. Yeah, plucked him right from his lab and put him in a bar. In effect, this court has been his, his confessional. The judge says you, sir, may fuck off 18 to 20 years in state prison for manslaughter, the maximum available. Uh-huh. That's the max and a concurrent five-year sentence for the embezzlement as well. Okay. In prison, he transferred to a medium security prison that was closer to his house. Nancy visited him up to three times a week, including once a week with the kids. What? Oh, yeah. 1986. There's a TV movie made, the high price of passion starring Richard Krenna, who's the guy from the Rambo movies. That's, that's a, you know, dude's lieutenant or whatever Rambo's whatever the fuck it's over. It's over. It's over. That guy. In Rambo. I don't know. He's the guy that, you know, he's with the beret on his, that's the loans guy. So that movie's there. It's got 6.8 stars on IMDB. It adopted Bill's framing that he'd been seduced, ruined and destroyed by a manipulative young woman. She's the, she's the criminal almost in this Robbins family hated this fucking movie. In 87, he was disciplined in prison for engaging in a sexual act with a female visitor who wasn't Nancy. Why? A wife that forgave him for prostitution, murder, embezzlement still came to see him three times a week. He said, I still got a fuck around with a chicken prison. How did he do that? I don't know, but Bill and Nancy divorced. By the way, that's mindhunter. Bill tension is wife's name's Nancy. Yeah, Bill and Nancy. Bill and Nancy divorced in 87. Later on in 87, he remarried while still in prison to a 43 year old woman named Bonnie Jean Smith. We met as a pen pal. Unbelievable. Oh my God. That's crazy. Then he caught, he taught college courses to civilians from prison for the correspondence courses. In 88, they grant his request to be transferred to a Connecticut facility to be closer to his new wife. He tried to write a book while he was in there. Unbelievable. Didn't really come out. In 89, Teresa Carpenter's book, Missing Beauty, which is what a lot of this is based on one the pure Pulitzer for its reporting. June 3rd, 1993, after serving less than nine years, he is out. He is released from the Enfield Connecticut facility, a free man at 51 fucking years old. Sledgehammered a woman to death. Yep. That is crazy. Her mother, Robyn's mother, Shirley said, we didn't realize he was just going to walk free and nothing else was going to be done about it. Well, that's 10 years. Yeah. She said the main thing we wanted was her body and we're still not getting it. We go to an empty grave every year. Bill meets with John and Shirley Benedict. I don't know how John Benedict and Shirley was jump across the table and rip this guy's fucking face off. They requested the meeting though. They wanted to ask him, where is Robyn? Is she in the landfill? Where is he? He stuck to a story. Nothing else. The Benedict's filed a $29.5 million civil suit against Bill Dodgless. That was dismissed and they filed a petition to have Robyn's court records released so they could pursue further legal action. That petition was denied. Don't know why. The rest of Bill's life here, he went on to live with his second wife, Betty Jean, and he divorced her eventually too. Never regained academic employment, obviously. Then in 2015, Bill dies at an assisted living memory care facility. He had dementia. Good. Anybody fucking deserves that. It's this can't fuck that guy. Yeah. 2022, there was a new book, by the way, called The Killing of Robyn Benedict that looked critically at how the press covered this case. They said there was a retrospective. They basically teach this case in law school in Massachusetts. How you do a nobody case in Massachusetts. There you go, everybody. There is Sharon Massachusetts. It's so much information. Sorry, we ran a little long, but I'm beside. He got out. Yeah, three o'clock in the morning. I'm in my living room. 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Small town murder. It's up to you. The poll is up either the FLDS documentary that falls profit one or internet salad. You guys pick here. Do that. And you also get ad free. All the shows we put out and you get a shout out, which is right now Jimmy. Hit me with the names of the best goddamn people on this earth who would never, ever, ever leave our bodies and dumpsters and then claim we didn't you had no idea where they were. Hit me with him right now. This week's executive person are Gary Howard, chicken and and forth Smith and Arkansas. Jen and Charlie. Happy birthday, you two. Happy birthday, best gals. They're terrific. Ron Bennington from the Ron and Fez showed. Do you know that show? It was in Tampa, I think. Fez died a few years ago. I've heard of the show. Ron's now sick. It's awful. He's a terrific guy. Yeah, that's terrible. Oh shit. Hang in there, Ron. I don't know. It's tough stuff. And Aaron Sinsley, thank you all so much for participating in this shit. And thank you people. You're wonderful. Other producers this week. Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Ryan Bender, Janice Hill, to Shell Franklin, Laura Turner, Lisa Arnold, Dave Hogg, Courtney Ann, Tiffany Nolt, Keezy, Bullock, Jessica Lindsay, Carliton laughing, Carlton, maybe, it might be Carlton, Carliton. I don't know. How do you spell Carliton? Maybe it's Carliton. Carliton, like Charloton, but Carliton. Perhaps, but they're laughing after Chris ruined their life. Thanks to us. So, well, keep Chris and we don't know what you're talking about, but Carliton Carliton. Carliton. Thank you, Carliton. Sorry, brown, freak, 902 and four competitor by the way. Carliton. Yeah. That's Carliton's biggest competitor, Carliton. Carliton. Yeah. They just drive. It's a lot easier. You all lose as much weight, but it's easier. Catch up, fuckers. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry, didn't mean a faster pussies. That's most ridiculous thing I could think of. Jessica would know last name. Amy Hardy, Brents would know last name. Stephanie Blank, Brandon Dunn, TVM, TMV, 782. Nikki Lentz, Zee would know last name. Melissa Durand, Renee Kennedy, Brianna Wallam, Kevin Cratic, Hayley Levy, or Levy. Maria would know last name. Riley K. Kate L. Katie L. Victoria, Bean Teresa, Kloppetek, Kloppetek, Kloppetek. Kloppetek. Rachel would know last name. Elliott Mori, Diane Shanzenbach. Shanzenbach. - Yep, that's it. - Some tough names this week. - Amanda would know last name. Annie and Jason Dylan, Cole would know last name. Somebody named Just Listening. That's not the name, Dianne, Mather. Or Dina? - Yes, Dianne, right? D, yeah. Nicki Mendoza, Brittany would know last name. Aaron D. Ryan B. Alicia Pendergrass, Nick Courtney Dobbs, Natasha Parks. Nettie would know last name. Maria Luisa Dowling. Marie Luisa, yeah, T. Sardine. Sardin, Stacey Polver, Cali Lawson, D&K Climb. - Climb, yeah. - There's no L there. - Dylan, Delaney, Oh, in the last name. Gwen Kanutsen, she donated twice. So she has two of these goddamn things. Thank you, the Kanuter. Patrick Lobb, Joanne Craig, Mike Asher, Sarah Wells, Karen Hall, Chris with in the last name, Rossi Houston. Maybe Rosie with two S's. - Don Hammond, Natasha Prada, Ashley with in the last name. J. Day, Lottie Grimes, Cameron Shaq, Carly Watson, Cherice Maxwell, Gregory Busby, Eleanor Jurgens, Kay and Jay, the letters Kay and Jay, or just Kay, Jay. Brianna DeNue, Bobby Sparrow, Tyler Grizzell, Leslie Ariza, Walter Turner, holy fuck, Katie C, April B, Brian Lavanchor, like adventure, so Lavanchor. Yeah, triple E, Lee's adventure. - It's French adventure. - Lavancher. 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Heath better off for a long time. Thanks, Heath. Drew Swayze, Sean Shrickel, Audrey Pack, the Packer, Summerlin Ortiz, Kelsey Byerley, Hannah Harris, Adel Hanson, when Jesus attacks Cameron Smith, like Mars James, Ben Jamilli, Laura Young, ECB, Amity Anderson, EKG, 78 Debbie Richens, a lot of Richens lately. - Yeah, from Corey, I hope it is not the fam. - No, no, no. - Page de Paula, Chase Wooden-O-Lesson, Rita Murray, Mark Gonzo, Ashley Rogers, Laura Larson, Daniel Drewry, Marika Wooden-O-Lesson, perhaps America, Pamela Smith, Kervin Martin, Jack Miles, Blackestan, Blackestan. Blackestan, not Blackestan, that's not a point. - Blackestan. Samantha Papa, D&EC, and all of our patrons. You guys are the best. Thank you so much. - Thank you so much, everybody. You're a wonderful, fantastic, beautiful bastards. We appreciate every goddamn thing you do for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep coming back and hanging out with us. 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