Crime Junkie - MISSING: Patti Adkins

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Patti Adkins had been having a secret relationship with a man from her work. When she went missing in July of 2001, troubling details emerge about their affair and the days leading up to her disappearance. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-patti-adkins/    

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm Britt. Today, I want to tell you about a missing person's case out of the Midwest, a case that the community thinks should be solved by now due to the overwhelming circumstantial evidence. And this is the case of Patty Atkins. Patty was a 29-year-old single mother to her pride and joy little daughter named McKaylee. In 2001, they lived in a small Midwest town of Maryville, Ohio, where Patty worked at the Honda factory. And this is a really large factory that employed about 4,000 people at that time. She'd been working there since she was just 19 years old and she had worked her way up through the ranks because Patty was a really hard worker. So when she told her family that she was going to be going on a week-long

vacation with her boyfriend to unwind, like just the two of them in this remote part of Canada, totally unplugged during this week that like apparently Honda just shut down their plant completely. Her family thought like, you deserve this. So the plan was for Patty to drop off McKaylee at her ex's house and she'd stay with him for a couple of days, then go stay with Patty's sister, and then Patty would pick her up on Sunday after her long trip. So the week before on a Friday, now this is June 29, 2001, everything seems to be going as planned. Patty drops off her daughter and she takes her animals to be boarded. Then she catches a ride with a friend into work for her 330 shift at the plant. And you see, normally she would drive herself, but she actually worked

with her boyfriend and they were going to leave together straight from work and she didn't want her car sitting in the parking lot all week. So at some point in the afternoon before her shift had begun, Patty left a voicemail for her sister, Marcia, the one that would be watching her daughter. And it was like nothing important, just kind of reiterating. She'd be back to get McKaylee on Sunday. She reminded her sister that she was going to like kind of a remote area up in Canada, and she wasn't sure if she was going to have an access to a phone or like any way to contact her, but she was going to try and call from the road. As far as her sister, Marcia knew everything went as planned, but that next call never came from Patty. Marcia just assumed she wasn't able to

find a phone on the road and maybe there wasn't one where they were staying. So she really didn't worry about it all week. When she did start to worry was Sunday. By noon, she started to wonder where Patty might be. Was she just running late to pick up her daughter? Like, did they get an accident? So at 1230, she tried calling her house and left a message there just in case maybe she went home first. A half hour goes by and she calls again. And then she keeps calling each time in shorter and shorter increments until she was just hitting redial over and over and over again. Every time, the sinking feeling in her stomach getting heavier, because with every redial, she recalls the details her sister told her about the trip. Details that felt wrong at the time,

but feel even worse now. I mean, what were those details? Well, like the fact that Patty said her boyfriend told her not to bring any clothes for the trip. What? Yeah. He said, don't bring any luggage. We're just going to buy all new stuff in Canada, which listen, at first glance, this might not seem entirely sinister. It's like very pretty woman and who doesn't want like all new outfits. The idea of your husband or boyfriend buying you a new wardrobe is amazing. Yeah, it's like a backstory episode. Yeah, but what I hear when I hear that is I'm like, okay, you're telling me wherever you're going has enough shopping for us to get everything we could ever need there, but it's also so remote that there are no phones. Definitely sketchy. Yeah,

not adding up. And even the whole arrangement about how she was going to ride with him is super weird. Apparently, Patty told her sister that what she was going to do is she needed to get out early. She was a supervisor and normally she'd be the last one to leave the last one to clock out at midnight when her shift was over. But she said that she had to get out right away when her shift ended before people saw her. So that way she could get into his car without being seen and not only get to his car, actually it was a truck, not only get to his truck without being seen, but she wasn't even going to go into the cab of the truck. Apparently he had this like cover on his truck and she was supposed to go into the bed of the truck, lay under the cover,

close it behind her and hide in the bed of the truck so she couldn't be seen. Yeah, that seems totally legit. Yeah, and she said that she had to do this because her boyfriend carpooled with someone else at work. So he had to drive this coworker home at the end of their shift and he didn't want this other guy to know that they were going on vacation together and they didn't want anyone to know, which is why they were being so weird and sneaking around like this. Wait, so why all secrecy? Was she like his direct boss or something? Well, she was a supervisor, but that's not why they had to be so undercover about this relationship. They didn't want anyone to know that they were seeing each other or dating or going on vacation

because Patty's boyfriend was married. Oh, did her sister know about this? Yes, her whole family knew this and they didn't like it. They gave Patty the advice. I think any of us might give a little sister. You're getting played a little bit. If he's cheating on her, who's to say it won't happen to you? Yeah. And you shouldn't get in the middle of this family, but Patty insisted to her family, to her sisters, to her mother, to whoever would listen that the marriage was almost over when they started. She said, you know, he and his wife were already on their way to divorce. I don't feel like I'm breaking up a good thing. I'm just kind of coming into something that's broken and we're two people who had a rough go of it in the love department

and have finally found our soulmates. So all of these things, these like inconsistencies, these weird little things that are strange are running in the back of Marcia's head and she's calling over and over, spiraling. Something felt very wrong. And so she decides to call the married man. He had a side business. So she calls there and when the man's wife picks up, she pretended to be a customer and asked to speak with him. And to her almost immediate relief, the woman says he isn't there, but he's expected back later. So her initial thought is, oh, thank God, like they're just running late. Neither of them are back yet. Like I kind of spiraled. Everything is going to be fine. He's going to come back. She's going to come back.

And I was, I was just thinking like out of my mind. But by five, when there was still no sign of Patty, she called again. And this time, Patty's boyfriend answered the phone. But what he says to Marcia doesn't assuage her fears. It only makes her more frightened for her sister. The first words out of Marcia's mouth are, where is my sister? Uh, yeah, same. And the man replies, what do you mean? And Marcia's like, you guys went away, you know what I'm talking about? And he starts to get quiet and something in his energy or his tone just shifts. And Marcia can feel a change. And he says, um, oh, Patty, do you mean like Patty from Honda? Oh, this girl I

know, this girl that I've been dating, et cetera, et cetera. She's like, yeah, that's exactly who I mean. And in between his stuttering and stammering, he just says, well, I don't know what you're talking about. So he's pretending like he hardly even knew her. Like they didn't go away together. And like they weren't in any kind of relationship. What Marcia immediately calls her other sister, who's in Indiana, visiting with their mom. And she has to be the one to tell them that something is really wrong. Patty is missing. And she thinks something bad has happened to her. By seven PM that night, Marcia has filed a missing persons report, but by three AM, she's doing her own detective work. She called the man's wife and tells her everything, tells

her about the relationship that's been going on for a year about the gifts that Patty would buy for him when they traveled. And the wife seemed to be completely in the dark and didn't want to believe it. She kept like asking and probing, like having questions. And after about 15 minutes, she hands the phone over to her husband who kept asking more questions and more questions. And Marcia wanted to keep him on the phone to learn as much as she could, hoping he would admit to knowing where she was, but he never did. He denied everything. And in hindsight, she wishes she didn't stay on the phone with them. Maybe wishes she never called at all, because she realized they or at least he was probing her, trying to figure out

what Marcia did and did not know. When police start investigating, they want to track down Patty's last movements. Patty's house looked okay. They're able to conclude that whatever happened to her likely didn't happen there. She walked out of her home by her own free will and went to work the night of June 29th. They confirm with Patty's coworker that she caught a ride into work with her. She completed her shift, business as usual, and then she was one of the first ones to clock out at exactly 19 seconds past midnight. So it looks like she would have been in a hurry to get to her boyfriend's truck if that's what she did. After she clocked out, we don't know what happened to her. So police wanted to talk to the man at the center of all

of this, the man she was supposed to have gone away with, and the one who asked her to hide in the bed of his truck and not bring any luggage on their vacation. When they go meet with him, he denies any relationship. Yeah, he knew her at work, but he knew a lot of people at work. Go ahead. He says, you don't even need a warrant. Search my house. Search my business. I have nothing to hide. Now, while they have a team searching the house, they also want to talk to this man's wife, and they're surprised at what she tells them. She seems to have had no idea about any affair, just like when she was talking to Patty's sister. And in fact, she doesn't really believe police when they're confronting her with that idea.

She says, there's absolutely no way. Like when, when would he have had an affair? Because all he did was go to work and then come home. He wasn't on some like secluded, romantic getaway that week that the plant was down. The night after his shift ended, the day that Patty went missing, he was home by 2 30 in the morning and he was with her and the kids. And then all week when the plant was shut down, he was running errands, doing chores and maybe like one day or weekend he went fishing, but it wasn't even like far away. She says, it's just not possible. But didn't the shift end at midnight? Seems like two and a half hours is a long time to get home, even if you have to drive someone else. Yeah, I agree. Like pretty much everyone on the internet

agrees. And according to the Charlie projects website, the man's alibi is that after work, he and this coworker went to a Burger King and had to wait in the drive-thru for like 45 minutes. Absolutely not. In the middle of the night, there is no traffic. I worked in transportation. I know. Well, okay. So, and that's what the manager of the Burger King said to when he was questioned about it. He's like, in the middle of the night between like, you know, if they're coming at 12, 12, 30, 1, 1, 30, whenever it was like in that time period, he's like, there's nobody hardly anyone in line. You're even if there's a couple of people, you're certainly not waiting 45 minutes for anything. Okay, but did the coworker corroborate his story? So I haven't found a direct quote saying

that he backs up this Burger King thing, but I have found articles saying that he backs up that they at least drove home together. And so I'm thinking that he's on board with all of it, but I don't know 100% for sure. Okay, so I know this is straight up speculation, but I feel like he would have had to have backed him up. Otherwise, that seems like some pretty strong circumstantial evidence against the boyfriend, or am I misinterpreting this? Well, no, that's kind of like why I can't say for sure either way, because the circumstantial stuff in this case just keeps piling on. So the coworker might be vouching for him for a couple of hours. The wife is saying, even aside from this night, the last year, there's no time

for him to have an affair. But police knew this wasn't a time consuming affair. According to the one person at Patty's work, who she like told about the relationship, seemingly the only coworker who she confided in their affair was mostly emotional. In the year that they were together, they had only gotten together like two or three times outside of work from what I understand. But Patty would say that they had this incredible connection and they could just talk and talk, and she could tell him absolutely anything. Now, despite his wife's disbelief about the relationship, they found a couple of things in his home that made them believe there was at least more to the relationship between Patty and this man than he was letting on. So what they found

is first, a birthday card. And he tried to play this off, like it's just a birthday card. This isn't a love note or anything like that. But the police are saying, listen, you guys worked in a factory with like 4,000 employees. There's a good number of people just on your shift alone. I don't think she's making birthday cards for every individual employee. And it's not like this birthday card was signed by everybody on the department. So a little bit of a sign that maybe they're closer than just coworkers. Apparently from another article I found is they had found a phone which Patty's sister said Patty told her that she had bought for him. They also found a hard rock cafe t-shirt from Florida. And before they had ever gone to search this man's place, one of Patty's

sisters told police a story about how they had taken a trip to Florida and how she wanted like made this special stop because she wanted to buy her boyfriend a gift. So this was again another sign for them that the stories that Patty are relating to her sisters aren't fiction. They're not in her imagination. Like there's something real here. And at some point, I don't know if this was right away in the search or if this was later because it wasn't reported on until 2018. But someone from law enforcement was quoted as saying that they also found a letter that was written by Patty to him about the relationship and how much she wanted to be with him. Now, even though they're finding these little things, police can't find the one big thing

they're looking for. The thing that they believe would be motive to kill Patty. Over the course of the year leading up to Patty's disappearance, she had told her family that she had been loaning her boyfriend money. Wait, why? Well, if you remember, he was part owner of a business. And what she told her family was that he wanted to buy out his share and they couldn't be together until he did. But once he did, allegedly he made promises to her about starting a new life, having more kids together. It was just this standing in the way and he didn't know how long it would take to come up with the money. So Patty wanted to help to speed this along so they could be together. Now, her sister,

Marsha, hated this. The same way I would hate this if my little sister. I already hate this. She knew how hard Patty had worked to save her money and build her nest egg and she didn't like her just handing her money over to somebody. But Patty tried to reassure her everything is going to be fine. He's going to pay me back slowly. It won't be all at once. But just like I gave him the money, it's going to be over time. He's going to pay me back. So how much money are we talking about? Well, I'm sure it didn't start big overnight. It was probably money she had in her accounts at first. But when police looked at the financial records, they found out that through the last year before she went missing, she had taken out, in addition to like the money in her account,

$30,000 from her 401k. What? She took out a second mortgage on her home for $25,000. No. She took cash advances on credit card. She cashed in stock. All told, over that year, it looks like she liquidated about $90,000. Are we sure this isn't a white collar case? I mean, can you imagine $90,000? I don't even know how I would come up with that kind of money. Yeah. And to just give it to someone that's just this person that's attached to your life. And so new too. I mean, their whole relationship had been a year. I was going to say, I could come up with $90,000 to save the life of one of my children. What's really hard for me to wrap my head around is everything I read about them,

talks about them having this relationship over a one year period. Now, maybe it had been started longer. And that's just when she started giving him money. But the way I interpret it is they were dating for a year. So how long did she really know him before she started giving him money? Right. She's been funneling funds into this person for months upon months at a time in small increments. But I mean, obviously it had it up. So could law enforcement link any of the money to her boyfriend? From what I found, not a single dime could be linked to her. All her transactions had a very clear paper trail. And when they searched her place, they even found those paper

bands that are around money. And like, I've never seen a fat stack of cash in real life. So I'm going off of movies. But like, you know what I'm talking about, right? Those like money bands. 100%. Like it's like, this is $1,000. This is $100. So they know it came out of her accounts. They had this trail. They know it came out in cash. And it seemed that she just handed it over that way. But he, if he's the one that took it, never deposited it anywhere that they could find. They checked all of his financial records, and they could not find $90,000 or any kind of link. Like, I mean, not even if it's not the total, they couldn't be like, oh, she took out $10,000 here. And then a month later, a week later, he deposited $10,000 here. No one knows

where it went. There's no other side of this. It's out of her account and then just vanishes. Not to play the devil's advocate, but do we even know for sure that he received the money? We don't. So all of the news articles that I read state that she was giving money to her boyfriend. So this is kind of stated as fact. I assume they're getting that from law enforcement. So I don't know if there's something we don't know, but this is a big question mark. And this is why it doesn't come up a lot in this case. Again, there's so much circumstantial evidence. Everyone assumes that something sinister happened to her, but every once in a while you'll come across in forums like, well, what if Patty did run away? But police in the investigation, like law enforcement

isn't even entertaining that they said they've conclusively decided she would never leave her young daughter. Like obviously she was probably had some financial problems taking up $90,000, taking out a second mortgage, cashing out her 401k, but they do not think she was like hoarding the money to start a new life. They've said that over and over. Did she happen to keep any kind of record that she was loaning it to him or using the money for something else? Like even in a journal? No, her sister asked her to make like promissory notes or just something, some kind of paper trail to make sure that sort of receipt or something. Well, yeah, she wanted him to be accountable in some way. But Patty said that there couldn't be any

kind of paper trail because his wife could find out that way. I mean, okay, but it still seems so sketchy. I mean, it does. And again, like the police believe this is real. Patty's sister believes this is real. And I think one of the reasons that everyone is putting so much stock into what Patty told her sister is because Patty also told her sister that this boyfriend was supposed to start paying her back on July 1st, just two days after she was last seen. Oh my God. So police think that this is their motive and they continue searching his place. And when they search, they find two things that might be potential physical evidence. The first is when they bring in cadaver dogs, the dogs hit on a patch of freshly poured concrete on

his property. Concrete, he supposedly laid while he was off work for that shutdown week. So they get a warrant, they tear up the ground, but of course, there's nothing there. Now, it would have been a total game changer for the case if they would have found her body, but they weren't totally stalled without it because they found something else. So remember how she said she was going to be hiding in the truck bed under that thick cloth cover thing? Yeah. Well, when they see his truck, it has all the equipment for that cover, but no actual cover. They end up finding the cover in a storage loft on one of his properties. And when they talk to somebody who her boyfriend worked with, they learn that her boyfriend had

placed the order for that cover just a few days before Patty went missing. Then he actually picked it up on the 29th, had it installed that same day. And then a week later, he had taken it off and put it in storage. So totally normal, right? Yeah. When he says that, because again, if you remember, his wife says he was home that whole time, he went fishing for a little bit. He says he bought it for his fishing trip, but the same guy that he worked with who pointed out that he ordered it was like, it doesn't even really make sense that he got it in the first place. The way we work, this is a business truck, and the stuff that we work in, we need that truck to haul stuff. The last thing we would do is put a cover on it. Right. So the police take the cover to be

forensically tested, and it takes five weeks before they get anything back. And here's what we learned. There was a very tiny speck of blood and some cat hairs. Now Patty did have cats, and police were able to match the cat hairs to Patty's cat. Really? Yeah. Like to me, this fully places her in the back of that truck. Yeah. And if you can place her in the back of that truck, doesn't that basically say that everything she was telling her sister all along was real? I'm not a lawyer or a judge or part of a jury, but yeah, that's what I would say. But it's not enough to say anyone killed her, or that she didn't sneak in the back herself, at least not in a court of law. Otherwise, I assume we'd be in a court of law by now.

But what about the blood? Well, this was back in 2001. And remember, it was a teeny tiny speck, and it's so strange. Like science is ever evolving. Like on TV, it's so neat and tidy. And if you have a speck of blood, you can find your killer. But in real life, it's just so different. The way it works is when it's a small sample like this, the police will actually give it to the lab, and then the lab gives the investigator like their expert opinion before they even test it. So they'll say, listen, based on the technology we have, this was back in 2001, like this result is so tiny that we could test, we might get something, but it's also very possible that the results are going to come back inconclusive. And if we test with the technology we have in

2001, it's over. We have to use 100% of the sample, and you can never test again. So with this opinion, the investigators weighed their options, and they decided to wait until technology got better. And they could do testing with an even smaller sample and maybe not use the whole thing and have a better degree of certainty that they were going to get some accurate results. Okay, so it's been 18 years. And I know because we've covered it that DNA has become like incredibly advanced since then. Did they go back and test anything? As far as I can tell, in 2019, no. Oh, you're kidding me. I'm sure the family is pushing. If they haven't, I can't encourage them enough to push. I think now would be the time to get this

case re-looked at. Season of justice. Season of justice. It's a whole new world, and it would be a great to at least get the lab's opinion. Now, not even if it can be retested, but in 2019, is there enough to test? And can we get conclusive results without damaging the entire sample? And I think this case is overflowing in circumstantial evidence, but clearly, this is one of those cases where authorities won't take it to trial without a body or physical evidence. And who knows? I mean, maybe if they even had her DNA back there, there still might not be enough to take it to trial because it doesn't, acting as like a prosecutor or acting as a defense attorney, like one drop of blood doesn't prove she's dead. They already have her cat hair back

there. That drop of blood is less than a nosebleed. You know, this case reminds me so much of Alyssa Turney's case where you feel like you have all the pieces and anyone- You know exactly what happened, but no one can prove it. Well, yeah, you feel like anyone who looks at this critically is coming to the same conclusion, but there's something holding up the legal system, and I don't know what it is. And maybe it's something that we don't know. Maybe we'll never know, but I hope for McKaylee's sake that someday she gets answers and justice, and someday she is able to bring her mother home. Crime junkies, we have some good news for us, bad news for you. We are taking next Monday

off. It is Memorial Day, and we know you're going to be out and about spending time with your families, and we're going to do the same. It is our first week off of 2019. You absolutely cannot go a week without your crime fix. Consider joining the fan club. You can see all of the episodes waiting for you on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. Just click the fan club tab. And we'll still be posting a lot of fun things that we're doing over the weekend and on Memorial Day on social media. So follow us on Twitter at crimejunkiepod and on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. And we will be back on Monday, June 3rd with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production, so what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?