Episode 160: Cold Cases With Special Guest Kathleen Chenery

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Paige: You're listening to “Coffee with Gringos.” I’m Paige Sutherland.

Ian: And I’m Ian Kennedy.

Paige: And today we are going to talk about a pretty interesting topic, one that I think most people are fascinated by. I guess, it's probably like a love-hate situation, but it's cold cases. So, we're going to talk about murders that have not been solved. All these cases will, more or less, involve people from the US. They're pretty popular except we will hear one that maybe isn't so mainstream for our listeners. But we have a special guest that will join us today who is quite an expert, she's a fanatic of the podcast that feature murders. I don't know what that says about her but Kathleen Chenery is here today. She's one of my best friends from high school, more like childhood. So, Kathleen, thanks for joining us.

Kathleen: Hello. So happy to be here.

Paige: So, Kathleen, since you are new to the CWG pod, just introduce yourself briefly—where you're from, what you do for work, why you like murder so much.

Kathleen: Sure. So again, me and Paige have been friends for a long time. I'm most famous probably known for my girls’ rec league softball career that we had together and yeah, I don't know if I would call myself an expert but definitely myself, like millions and probably billions of others, just really enjoy murder stories, in general. For some weird reason, everybody finds it so fascinating nowadays and everyone is allowed to be led out of that proverbial closet, loving the macabre.

Paige: So, we're going to talk about a few cases today. As always, listeners, if you get lost, check out that audio guide and transcript online. So, Ian—just have to ask: are you like me and Kathleen? Are you obsessed with cold cases, with murders, with solving these pretty terrible cases?

Ian: I am, yeah. You can describe it almost like you said earlier, it's almost like I would put it as a guilty interest or a guilty pleasure almost and that the circumstances are dark. They are, very unfortunate for the victims but at the same time, it's just so damn entertaining. God, trying to figure out what happened, all the details, all the twists and turns and, a lot of times, truth is stranger than fiction as they say. So, a lot of these things are hard to believe even though they're true. So, it'll be interesting for us to talk about these today and I'm actually really obsessed with a certain cold case right now because it actually comes from my hometown in Springfield, Missouri. This is the cold case that's called the “Springfield Three.” And basically, what happened was back in June of 1992, in my hometown, which was quite a bit smaller at the time, and relatively safe and innocent and not a lot went on, there were three women who went missing on the night of graduation—high school graduation—actually from the high school I graduated from.

Paige: Did you do it? Just kidding.

Ian: I would have been one year old. I was one year old at the time, so it would have been the most amazing pull-off ever.

Kathleen: So I’m hearing that you don't have an alibi.

Ian: I need to talk to my lawyer I think before we go any further. I don't want to put myself in any position but the Springfield three, basically, there were three women who it was one mother and two girls who had just graduated from high school, and that night they were going around town and going to different high school graduation parties. And they decided to go back to one of the girl’s houses to stay the night where her mother was staying so, they went to the house and the next day, everyone was gone. So, all three of the women had disappeared. It was really strange because all their personal belongings like their cars, their purses, all their other things were in a normal place in the house. They were all set up next to each other like you would if you're preparing for your next day. You lay out your clothes and things like that. There were no signs of struggle except for a broken porch light. Again, this was before cell phones and a lot of the DNA evidence and forensic evidence we have now and so a lot of things have just been a mystery since then. So, for example, the broken porch light was swept up by neighbors. They just thought that the light broke, so we're going to sweep it up. Well, they swept up evidence. And, people at first weren't that worried about it. They thought, in the time 1992, you couldn't get a hold of everyone. There weren't cell phones so, they just thought, maybe they went out for breakfast, maybe they did something and as time passed, they realize they were gone. They hadn't come back. And there are a bunch of different theories as to what happened to them. Like I said, they've never been found—the remains have never been found. No one's ever been able to figure out what happened. So, it's a really, really strange case and in 1997, a guy named Robert Craig Cox was interviewed. He's a convicted kidnapper, robber, murderer and he said in an interview, “I know the three women are dead. I know where their bodies are. You're never going to find them.” But he didn't admit to the actual murder himself and so, they were never really able to pin anything on him. And he said that once his mother died, that he would say what happened. His mother’s still alive and so, people are waiting on pins and needles to see if he dies first in prison or if he's ever going to actually reveal what happened because here we are thirty years later, and still, no one knows what happened.

Paige: So, he's in jail and he said, basically, “I killed these women, but I'm not going to tell you.”?

Ian: Well, he didn't say he killed them. He just said, “I know that they're dead and I know and you're not going to ever find the bodies.”  

Paige: Which, why would he know that?

Ian: Seems pretty innocent. So, definitely, something fishy going on there but thirty years ago, the city I grew up in was quite a bit smaller, it was safer. Like I said, people would know your neighbors, you knew a lot of people around town, and people were just so scared when it happened. I talked to my family members and they just talk about how they were just terrified because something like that had never happened before where people just disappeared out of thin air. And it's just so eerie because even now when I go home and visit, you can go into some stores and you'll still see the “missing” posters up in certain stores. The family still holding out for an answer. So, still a really sad case of course due to the circumstances, but it's just been just a huge headline and story in my neck of the woods, at least for the last thirty years.

Paige: Fair. I mean, obviously, you grew up there. Do you feel like they're dead or do you think they really are missing and maybe kidnapped?

Ian: If I was a betting man, I would say they were dead. But who knows? Maybe they're on some island somewhere having drinks. I doubt it. But yeah, unfortunately, I think that they’re probably not around anymore. And actually, it's not some time back in the 1990s, they were officially announced dead. I really hope there's some closure that comes about, at least for the families. That has got to be so difficult. I can't imagine going day by day and not knowing.

Paige: Hey, Ian. Did you know besides the podcast, Dynamic English offers one-on-one classes with native teachers from all over the world?

Ian: Really? But isn't it just a bunch of grammar lessons?

Paige: Nope, it's completely discussion-based and focuses on topics the student is interested in.

Ian: That's amazing. But what if I'm not living in Chile?

Paige: No problem. Dynamic does online classes. You can be living anywhere.

Ian: Great, but I'm a little intimidated to take the class alone. Can I join with a friend?

Paige: Of course. Dynamic offers group classes of up to four. Plus, for the next month, Coffee with Gringos listeners get 10% off individual or group classes. So go online to www.dynamicenglish.cl and mention that you are a listener and get your discount.

Ian: Well, I'm sold. Sign me up.

Paige: Well, thanks for sharing that, Ian. It's very interesting. I'm going to Google that after this. So, onto our next one.

Kathleen: I’m going to really pin it on Ian.

Paige: With his baby rattle he broke the light on the porch. Okay, so our next one Kathleen's going to be the lead on this. It's very famous.

Kathleen: Yeah, very different than the local story, but I always really liked and it's really sad to call it this but the Amanda Knox story. And it's one of those classic cold cases where the actual death of the person is completely overshadowed by the acquittal of Amanda Knox, essentially. I originally became interested in it. This is one of my awakening moments of how much I loved true crime. But most people are very familiar with the case but to boil it down, Amanda Knox had moved to Italy, short term, she had rented out the fourth bedroom of an apartment in Italy. Even in her own in her autobiography, she's an odd duck girl. Not really one of the mainstreams, so she had befriended all the roommates, and then they kind of had tapered off their friendship. She had started seeing another guy, this guy Raphael, and became become very heavily involved with him and had not really become friends with the roommates so much. And then one day, it was a holiday so she was trying to get in touch with Meredith, the woman who got killed. She couldn't reach her and Raphael had gone to the apartment, they were trying to get in. They ended up causing some property damage which later caused a lot of controversy and when she called her mom, which really resonated with me, because it would have been my first thing, “Mom, what should I do?” Her mother said, “You need to call the police.” They called the police and they eventually found Meredith had been stabbed and essentially had bled to death in her apartment. The Italian police had almost immediately looked at Amanda for the murder, even though there was very minimal evidence against her and they had held her for two days. She's held in a different country; she's interrogated by people whose English is not their first language. One of her most controversial was that she ended up confessing to the murder, which I just always found that the most interesting thing. They interrogated her for hours and hours on end and they're like, “Just tell us that you did it, it's going to be so much easier. Don't worry about it. We'll let you go. Just tell it.” People across the country were infuriated by this. You have somebody that confessed to it and a police interrogation and then recanted immediately, “No, I actually didn't mean that.” So, it's very damning. So, she was really publicly damned for this murder, and eventually, they found this other guy Rudy, guilty of raping her—raping Meredith—essentially that night, the same night and his blood was found there, had a whole slew of evidence against him, but they just basically just damned Amanda Knox. She was eventually acquitted and ended up she had been over two years, I think in jail. So, she eventually gets sent back to America. Italy doesn't have double jeopardy so, when they tried, they tried to get more evidence and tried to extradite her, and Amanda Knox was just like, “Nah. I'll be staying right here.” And she's eventually off, she's not charged with anything anymore. But as far as cold cases go, it's still basically like a lot of cold cases like, “ya know who done it” but you can't prove it and he was never actually convicted of the murder.

Paige: Yeah, but it wasn't even just Amanda herself. Her boyfriend also went to Brazil.

Kathleen: And there was the issue of the knife. The knife had been missing and she's like, “Well, we had taken it to cook this meal…” and so they said it was missing, but it really wasn't.

Paige: It also felt like the evidence that they had was there were fingerprints in the apartment that she lives in, which obviously her DNA is everywhere, she lives there. So, the evidence they had against her was not really good evidence for committing that murder, just being in that area.

Kathleen: I apologize ahead of time for the details that I got wrong. I'm sure there are millions of people shaking their fists.

Paige: Yeah, we're armchair experts here on the pod. But yeah, it is , honestly, I don't know if you have ever felt this, Ian, but we both have lived abroad and it's something that has crossed my mind when I've lived abroad of never wanting to be caught up in a legal system that I don't understand, in a language that I don’t understand because it seemed like she was just screwed and really just in a wrong place at the wrong time and I could see if that happened in Chile, I'd be screwed. I don't know the legal system.

Kathleen: Get into mischief myself in these other countries. You know, these fun, harmless things.

Ian: I think you bring up a good point and I think it's easy for us too to say I wouldn't make the mistakes that she made in that situation, or how could she confess to the crimes? But come on, you're twenty years old, you're living in another country, you are in shock probably that your roommate—your friend—is dead. That's probably enough of a shock and now you're being bombarded in a foreign language, they're telling you to confess. And so, I think it's easy for people to write her off as sort of a silly young girl, but I think it's more complicated than that and you have to put yourself in her shoes. At the same time, it was one of the situations that we see a lot in cold cases, or just cases in general, with prosecution just doubling down on what they want to be the outcome. They might have this story made up in their mind or they might think, okay, it's Amanda Knox, and instead of looking at the evidence and going that way, it's vice versa. They already have their outcome and they want to try to manipulate things to make them look successful, make that outcome happen. That was the case here with Amanda Knox. There was almost no evidence putting her to the crime or her boyfriend. It was pretty clear that this perpetrator—the guy who raped the roommate—there were a lot of red flags and they just overlooked them. This is something that, like we said, we see a lot happen, but it's not so black and white. I don't think we can just say oh, what a silly little girl for making those choices. But yeah, for me, I've definitely thought about being locked up abroad and I think for me, I would just, I'd probably just keep my mouth shut. I would just have a one-word vocabulary. It would just be “lawyer.” I would just say “lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer” until I had a lawyer.

Paige: That brings us to our final case, which actually involves a similar situation of, I guess for our listeners, coercion, which means agreeing to do something from peer pressure basically, from someone forcing you to do something. And this is a very popular case that was made into a popular Netflix series called “Making a Murderer” involving Steven Avery, who's from Wisconsin, which is a state in the Midwest. And he has quite an interesting story because he was convicted of rape, spent eighteen years in jail for that rape and they found out through DNA testing that he didn't do it. And he always said he didn't do it. So, he got out and then two years later, he was charged with murdering a woman who was taking photos of his cars. He owned a salvage, basically, he owned a place where you would store crappy cars. The woman went to his house and never returned and so, then he got convicted of murder. And his case became so popular because, wait a minute…. he went to jail for eighteen years for something he didn't do? Did he really do this? What is the evidence? So he's in jail so, he was convicted of murdering this young woman. There are so many theories because he was in a small town after being convicted of a crime he didn't commit. He sued the town so, he won millions of dollars in this town and basically made the police force look bad. So, there's the theory that the police framed evidence to put him back in jail and punish him. There's also a theory that there are other people who did it and know Steven Avery is an easy person to pin the crime on. He already went to prison, everyone thinks he's a criminal, they just went right for him—him and his nephew actually—and his nephew has some learning disabilities. He was very young; he was in high school and they basically used the techniques that Kathleen was talking about with Amanda Knox where it seemed like the interrogation wasn't by the books and they convinced a kid whose IQ isn't very high, “Hey, you did this. Just admit it.” and he was like, “okay” and none of his story made sense. It was just something that police fed him and he said back and so now it's like, who did it?

Ian: Right and also the Avery’s they're low income as well. They're known for their junkyard but low-income, seen as sort of hillbillies, kind of rednecks, and so they're also not going to get that treatment that maybe someone more upper-class from a more squeaky-clean family.

Paige: You get so wrapped into the story and you want to solve it, and it probably will never be solved. We'll probably never know who killed those girls in Missouri or who actually killed this roommate. I mean, probably it’s that guy that raped her but he wasn't convicted, and then I don't know who killed this woman in Steven Avery's case. Yeah, who knows.

Kathleen: Or that guy who says he knows where the bodies are, but won't tell anybody. That is the whole appeal. Nobody knows and everybody wants to.

Ian: The toughest part of it is that old legal saying that we have, “it's not what you know, it's what you can prove.” So, it's that proof part that's always that missing element in these cases to say, look, we have almost everything except for that smoking gun, maybe or that one thing that can close the case on this and like you said, it's frustrating and hard for people to know that a lot of these, they're going to be cold forever. We'll just never know.

Paige: Well, speaking of that, on the next episode of CWG, me and Ian are going to solve a cold case so stay tuned. Well, thank you, Kathleen, for joining us. I think we could talk about cold cases all day. They're so fascinating and sadly there are so many of them. Too many people murder people so, let's stop doing that.

Kathleen: You heard it here first, folks.

Paige: But again, thanks for joining us and listeners, as always, check out that audio guide and transcript online www.dynamicenglish.cl. Thanks for listening.

Ian: We'll see you next time.

Paige: Coffee with Gringos was brought to you by Dynamic English, where you can learn English simply by using it. If you're interested in taking classes or just want to learn more, go to our website at Dynamic english.cl. Thanks for listening.

Key Vocabulary, Phrases & Slang:

 1.     mainstream (adjective): belonging to ideas and attitudes that are popular in society.

a.     Cold cases have become a big part of the mainstream media.

2.     macabre (adjective): disturbing; horrifying.

a.     She enjoys talking about macabre topics.

3.     alibi (noun): a claim or evidence that someone was elsewhere when a criminal act took place.

a.     The man had an alibi for the night of the crime and is no longer a suspect.

4.     to pin (verb): to place responsibility or guilt.

a.     The police want to pin the crime on an innocent person.

5.     to wait on pins and needles (idiom): to nervously and anxiously wait for something.

a.     The family is waiting on pins and needles to hear about what happened.

6.     fishy (adjective): suspicious.

a.     The details of the crime are very fishy and more investigations are needed.

7.     eerie (adjective): strange and frightening.

a.     The town has an eerie feel to it since the murders happened.

8.     to hold out (phrasal verb): to have a feeling of hope or optimism.

a.     The family has been holding out for years for the return of their daughter.

9.     neck of the woods (idiom): a particular area or place.

a.     The murders happened in my neck of the woods.

10.  to overshadow (adjective): to appear more important than something else.

a.     The national news seemed to overshadow the small-town story that was developing.

11.  to boil something down (idiom): to simplify or reduce something to the most simple or basic parts.

a.     We are going to boil the story down for everyone since we don’t have much time.

12.  odd duck (noun): someone considered socially awkward or different.

a.     Amanda Knox described herself as an odd duck among her friends.

13.  to taper off (phrasal verb): to reduce or become less or smaller.

a.     The number of crimes has tapered off in the city in recent months.

14.  to resonate (verb): to connect or agree with someone’s perspective or ideas.

a.     The message that they communicated really resonated with me and my life.

15.  to infuriate (verb): to make someone extremely angry.

a.     She infuriated the police by refusing to tell them the details.

16.  damning (adjective): strongly suggesting guilt or error.

a.     The evidence that the police found could be damning for the suspect.

17.  double jeopardy (noun): the prosecution of a person twice for the same crime.

a.     Double jeopardy still exists in a number of counties.

18.  to extradite (verb): to hand over a person accused or convicted of a crime to the foreign place where the crime was committed.

a.     El Chapo has been extradited to the US for drug trafficking.

19.  armchair expert (noun): someone who asserts their knowledge of something without having a true understanding of it.

a.     There are so many armchair experts on the internet giving advice that they shouldn’t.

20.  to bombard (verb): to attack someone with questions, criticisms, or information.

a.     The police bombarded the suspect for hours.

21.  to write someone off (idiom): to judge someone and decide they are wrong.

a.      A lot of people wrote off Amanda Knox due to her actions.

22.  to double down (phrasal verb): to strengthen one’s commitment to a particular idea, strategy, or idea.

a.     The police doubled down on proving the suspect guilty even with a lack of evidence.

23.  by the books (idiom): according to the rules.  

a.     The trial was done by the books and nothing was out of the ordinary.

24.  IQ (noun, acronym): Intelligence quotient; a total score designed to assess one’s level of intelligence.

a.     The criminal has a very high IQ and has been known to manipulate the police.