Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Barbara Nantais & Claire Hough

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

In the dreamy summers of southern California, two murders happen within yards of each other, but a decade apart. Questions echo throughout these cases. Are they connected? Can DNA help solve these cases? Or does it just muddle the facts even more? 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/murdered-barbara-nantais-claire-hough/    

Hi crime junkies, Britt here. Ashley's in Philadelphia, hanging out with Patrick and Jillian from True Crime of the Sest, and meeting our queen, Rabia Chaudhry. But we still have lined up an awesome episode for you guys. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank you all so much for listening to last week's episode and supporting our friends over at Swindled Podcast. We were thrilled to get to work with them, and they appreciated your listens. So with that, I think it's time to get on with our show. Today I'm going to tell you the story of Barbara Nantes and Claire Huff. And the story begins in 1978 when Barbara Nantes and her boyfriend Jim Alt are a young couple in love. Barbara

is a cheerleader, brown hair, brown eyes, she's popular, she's sassy, and Jim is a strong, funny, happy, like surfer dude. Like this takes place in Southern California, and he is the epitome of Southern California. He was even once featured in a wetsuit ad in a surfer magazine. So they were like this Ken and Barbie couple of Southern California, and a lot of girls really liked Jim, but Jim only had eyes for Barbara, who was 15 at the time of this story. On the weekend of August 12, 1978, Barbara's parents had planned a weekend getaway, and a family friend was to look after Barbara and her three siblings, and before leaving, Barbara's dad took Jim aside and said, listen, I'm going to be gone, you take care of my girl,

you make sure that she is safe. And he says to this day, that's the biggest mistake he ever made, and the biggest lie that he ever told. Almost as soon as her parents left, Jim and Barbara hopped into a station wagon with two of their friends, and they went down to Tory Pine's beach. The beach was packed that day, just absolutely filled with people, everyone's surfing, everyone's hanging out, and around 9.30, the crowd starts dwindling down. The friends decide that they're going to stay and actually sleep on the beach. Again, they're like young teenagers, their parents are out of town, like I get it. Yeah, totally. This is something that a younger stupider in me would try to do. Yeah, a younger stupider version of us that lived somewhere with a beach.

So they're two friends that picked them up in the station wagon. They decided they're going to sleep in the station wagon, and Jim and Barbara decided they're going to take their sleeping bags down to the beach and sleep on the beach. So they zip up their two sleeping bags together, get in one big bag, and the last thing that Jim remembers is that he has his arms around Barbara and they're falling asleep. The next vivid memory Jim has is of waking up cold, alone, wet, and covered in blood. What? He is blinded and so disoriented that he feels his way along the fence up the sandy hill to the parking lot, and he's literally crawling to his friend's car, and he's banging on his friend's car door, and when they get up and look out the window and they

see Jim, they don't even recognize him. He has blood all over his face, all over his hair. His face is literally swollen twice as big. He was unrecognizable. He had been savagely beaten with a rock and a log, and he can barely mutter words, but he just keeps saying, go find Barbara. They're friends run down to look for her, and there she was, nude and lifeless. Her friends start screaming for nearby people to call police, and when police arrive, they find that her body is covered in sand. She has severe head wounds, and they think that maybe she was beaten with a rock or a log a lot like Jim was, and she had also been strangled. Now she had sand in her mouth, and the killer had left some gruesome marks on her. He had taken a sharp

instrument and cut around her areola and her nipple to mutilate her breast. She had also, along with being sexually assaulted, had been sodomized, and I didn't get a ton of detail, probably for the best, but he had wounded her vaginal area with some kind of object. Barbara's parents get notified, and by the time they're notified, Jim is in a coma for days. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury, and when he awoke, he had no memory of the attack. So I don't know, I kind of always wonder if they would have asked him a lot of questions, like as he had crawled up the beach, if he would know more. I have to assume he was in such shock that he had no idea what was going on, but to this day, that whole period of time when he was

attacked is just a blank space for him. And I know we say this a lot that significant others and family members are the first to be considered suspects. Did they consider Jim ever? So they did. He was actually one of their first suspects, but they end up ruling him out because of how severe his injuries were. They said, you know, there is no way that he would have done this to himself or been a part of something because he almost died because of how bad his injuries were. Wow. Police could not find Barbara's killer. They investigated Jim, but beyond him, they really had nowhere to go. And this murder haunted Torrey Pines and the family for years. And in those years, no one was caught. There were hardly any suspects.

It seemed to be a random attack with no rhyme or reason. And like so many cases, even though the family is stuck in this every single day, the world keeps moving on and the people of Torrey Pines Beach kept moving on as well until they were confronted with violence again. Eight years later in 1984, a young 14 year old girl named Claire Hough is in Southern California visiting her grandparents. Now she had actually lived in Rhode Island with her family. But in the summer of 1984, Claire, her brother and her friend Kim all went to Claire's grandparents house who lived just blocks from Torrey Pines Beach. Kim was actually only going to spend a short time there with her friend. And on their last night there, Claire convinced her to sneak out of her grandparents

house and go down to the beach after dark. And when they get there almost immediately, Kim has a panic attack. She said the darkness was so deep and she was so terrified by the idea that it was so vast, so dark that you literally couldn't see somebody like walking alongside of you that it just scared her to her core and she freaked out so bad that they ended up having to go almost immediately back to Claire's grandparents house. And when they get back, Kim makes Claire promise her that she won't sneak out again that summer. On August 24th of 1984, Claire broke that promise and no one knows exactly why. Police say that it's believed that Claire had visited the beach earlier that day and that she perhaps met somebody that she planned to meet again that

night. But we don't know for sure. What detectives do know is that the young teen had snuck out of her grandmother's house late that night and headed down to the beach with her cassette stereo and a bag. The next thing we know is that the next day her body was found by a beachgoer near a bridge and she was laying half naked with her blue jeans pulled partly down. Now Claire had been found just a few hundred yards away from where Barbara was killed and the similarities don't just end there. Now pre-death, these girls actually looked very similar in appearance and they were only one year apart in age and as far as their murders and the way they were found, not only were they found in a similar location, they had both been beaten, then they had both been strangled, both were sexually

assaulted, and both had sand packed in their mouths and both had breasts that had been similarly mutilated. Now the one big difference is that after Claire's murder, her parents came out from Rhode Island to be in San Diego to help with the investigation and to help hopefully find their daughter's murderer. Now when they were there, a suspect comes to light almost immediately. When they were on the beach where their daughter was found, they get approached by a man. This man's name was Wallace Wheeler and he comes up to them on the beach and he says, I am a psychic and I'm also the one that found your daughter. So this guy is just maybe hanging around waiting to tell someone the story, waiting for her family, but he goes on and things continue to get weirder when

he talks to them for a half hour about how he has visions and he used to be this fighter pilot and the family thought this was super strange. Like everything about Wallace Wheeler made them uncomfortable, their interaction, how he found them, nothing sat right with them. Yeah. And so they go to police and the police actually encourage the family to keep communicating with him. They say, you know, he actually might know something. He might be the guy. He might, whether he found her because he put her there or he found her because he knows something more, like we need to keep this guy talking and he doesn't want to talk to us, but he's like willing to talk to you openly. So they say keep in contact with him and they do and this guy continues to write them letters for

a long time and he would say that Claire was constantly coming to him in these visions and he would have dreams about her and police eventually do formally question him, but he never confessed to anything and eventually the letters do stop and then they completely stop when he ends up killing himself by jumping off of a 13th floor balcony at a hotel or apartment complex sometime at night. And I have so many questions around this suicide. I don't know. I mean, he seems mentally unstable to me from what we know, but I don't know where that stems from or if he had been diagnosed with anything. I don't know if part of this was guilt or part of this was an unstable man who then found a dead girl and that just really messes you up. But as far as I can

see too, there was no note that I could find to explain his suicide and police said that at the time they were convinced that this was their killer and the suicide just made them even more sure of their conclusion. So other than the weird run-ins and communication with Claire's family, was this guy connected to Barbara's case at all? He wasn't and not only was he not connected to Barbara's case, Barbara's family had never even heard about Wallace Wheeler and not only had they not heard about Wallace Wheeler, her family had never even heard about Claire's case. They had no idea that another murder had happened a few years later that matched their daughters, their sisters, so specifically. Oh my God. It wasn't until 2008 when Barbara's family finally realized

that there might be a connection. They were looking online and this is about the time that the police station had started to modernize and post their unsolved cases online and it was at this point when they posted online that the police for the first time said publicly that they believe the cases were linked. But linking them publicly doesn't bring them any closer to a killer. Four more years go by before advancements in DNA can help bring any kind of resolution to either one of these cases. In 2012 when advanced DNA technology becomes available, they reopen both cases and they find some usable DNA from Claire's crime scene but nothing in Barbara's case. But that's okay. So they're pretty sure that they're linked and so even if they have DNA from one,

they're pretty sure that could help them solve both homicides. When they analyze the DNA from Claire's crime scene, they realize that they actually have two distinct samples. One was from blood on Claire's genes and the other was a microscopic amount recovered from a vaginal swab. The blood on her genes was linked to a convicted rapist named Ronald Tatro. This seemed like a really good suspect. The fact that he was a convicted rapist shows that he was violent. This is the exact type of crime that he would have committed and it could have easily escalated. However, when they went to go find Ronald, they couldn't actually talk to him because by the time they get to him, by the time they found his DNA, Ronald was dead. He had drowned in what people

had called a boating accident in 2011 somewhere in Tennessee. But even though it was ruled an accident, there's a lot of suspicion around his death and a lot of people believe that it could have been a suicide because on the boat left on the driver's seat was his wallet with his glasses and so it looked very intentional and like he had gone into the water intentionally. Not only did the scene look like a suicide, but it was very strange that his death took place on the exact anniversary of Claire's murder. What? Yes. Oh my gosh, full body chills 100%. That's super suspicious. Yeah, so even though I mean it got ruled an accident, he obviously wasn't a suspect when it got ruled an accident. He hadn't been a suspect before the DNA came back,

so I wonder if they would have known that at the time if maybe it would have changed things. I feel like we've all seen Dexter and this is an episode. Such an episode. So they're pretty sure that Ronald had something to do with it, but because there is this second sample, the investigators are wondering if maybe he had an accomplice. They get that second sample tested and there is a hit to someone the officers know. What? The DNA found inside of her was linked to a man named Kevin Brown, who was a former criminalist in their own lab. In January 2014, when investigators go to visit him, his wife isn't super concerned at first. At first, she thinks they're meeting about an old case that maybe he worked on, but they start to ask tougher and tougher questions. Did you know

Ronald? He was this rapist. We have his DNA on this girl. We think he's connected to somebody. We think you were involved in the murder of this young girl. And of course, Kevin is like no way. I've never met this guy before in my life. And investigators say that they showed him a picture of Claire and he says, oh, sure, I remember her. Now, to be fair, investigators are saying like, see this guy whose DNA was found remembers this girl. And when asked about it later, he said, well, of course, I remember her. It was a really well known case in the area. And I worked in the crime lab like I wasn't on her case, but I knew the cases and you remember the case of a 14 year old girl. Now, as police continue to investigate, they have their sites set on Kevin. And according

to their account, they tell him that his DNA was found on her. And then he is the one who mentions the vaginal swab. What do you mean mentions the vaginal swab? So they basically say something to the effect of like, you know, we have your DNA. And he's the one that they don't say exactly where they have his DNA. And he's the one that's like, Oh, well, if you have my DNA off the vaginal swab or something like that effect where they're like, that's we never mentioned where we got it off of. He brings it up regardless. Yeah, that's what the police say. Then police also say that at some point during their investigation that Kevin admits to having met a girl named Claire and that he had had sex with her. And police say that this is him trying to explain away his DNA

that was found on her vaginal swab. But Kevin's lawyers later say no, he never said that it was like their Claire. He was telling police when he's being interrogated that yeah, I met someone named Claire in the 80s. But she was some 30 year old woman. She was never this teenage girl. He was never admitting to knowing the Claire that was murdered. It's just one of those things that he brought up while under interrogation because they were like, do you know any Claire's have you ever had sex with a woman named Claire? And that was him answering the question. But police feel that all of this is enough circumstantial evidence to get a warrant and they do they search his place from top to bottom looking for anything that could tie him to either case. And there's nothing found

in the home. But as investigators start to talk to his co workers, they find that Kevin has somewhat of a darker side. At the time of Claire's murder, he was a bachelor in his 30s working at the crime lab. And his nickname by his co workers in the crime lab was kinky Kevin. And they said that he loved going to strip clubs. He would love going to like dirty movies at like theaters. And he had like this weird photography hobby, where he would like go with photographers to take pictures of like scantily clad women. And they said some of them said that he would like offer these women private sessions. Okay. And he made some of his female colleagues really uncomfortable. And one example given by a female co worker was she said that he had taken a report of a violent rape and

started reading it out loud and asked her, isn't that funny? And after that, she said she never felt comfortable being alone with him again. So again, it's not like he made a weird advancement to her, but nothing about rape is funny. So that is super weird. And I would definitely be uncomfortable around that guy at work as well. Now at this point in the investigation, the police asked him to take a polygraph and he does. And it will be no surprise to any of our crime junkies that he 100% failed the polygraph. The other things that look bad for him that police point to as proof of guilt is one statement made when he was talking to an investigator and the investigator said, you know, I don't think for a second that you thought she was 14. And Kevin's reply instead of saying I

don't know her or what are you talking about? He said no, I had no idea she was 14. Now, yeah, it looks super sketch. Yeah. But again, when asked about it later, his lawyers are saying, no, he's saying, listen, they're talking about this case. Again, he knew about this case because it was one of the biggest cases while he worked in the crime lab. And anyone would say this is an awful thing to happen to a 14 year old like that's, you see a woman is raped and murdered on the beach. Everyone shocked that she's a little girl basically. So again, this is just more proof to investigators that they're on the right track. And to Kevin, he feels like he's getting railroaded. Now, another thing that police say happened is the police say a friend had come

forward saying that Kevin had called him shortly after the murder and said that a girl that he had photographed on the beach ended up dead and police are going to look at him as a suspect. And this is super incriminating. But it also can't be corroborated later on this friend who police point to who the police swear told them this says he never said such a thing. So I don't know if he lied the first time, I don't know if he's recanting now, or if all of this was totally made up to begin with. Now, Kevin's wife firmly defends him. She says that he does not have a mean bone in his body. And that everything he did was just anything a red blooded American male would do the strip clubs, the porn, she said none of it's illegal, none of it makes him a murderer. And even the

racy photos of girls, she describes as quote cutesy, which like I don't love. Yeah. But she's basically saying, listen, at the time, he was single, he's into sex. And she's like, I don't fault him for that. He wasn't even cheating on me. He was just taking pictures of naked girls. And she's like, you know, if you asked any 30 year old man who was single, if they wanted to take a picture of a naked girl, like, you're probably going to get a yes. So was he a little more like out there? Not everyone's called kinky Kevin at work. So he was a little more flamboyant about his preferences. But she's like, it doesn't make someone a killer. Now, even though police feel that they have all of this circumstantial evidence, there's no way for them to link Kevin to Ronald.

They could never say for certain when or even if they would have met. And them having any kind of partnership or friendship or even interaction didn't seem to fit. Again, there were maybe some kinky things like looking in from the outside about Kevin, but he was not the same person that Ronald was. Ronald was a known rapist. He had gone to prison. And Kevin was a squeaky clean lab tech who had never gotten into legal trouble before. But everyone keeps going back to that DNA. What about the DNA? You can't explain it away. But Kevin's lawyers say they can explain it away. Several swabs were taken from Claire's body when she died. And actually one of them was tested way back in 1984. And they actually found nothing on it. There wasn't like they didn't have a ton of

advanced DNAs back then, but they didn't find a trace of semen. They didn't find anything. And then it was that second swab that was sent to San Diego that they tested years later that again had a microscopic sample that tested positively for Kevin. Now the problem with this microscopic sample is that it was not kept in a way that would ensure the integrity of this evidence. Procedures that are used now to prevent cross contamination were not in place back then. So when they had this sample in the same lab where Kevin worked, Kevin is working right near the sample. And even though he didn't actually work that case and he's not the one that processed the evidence, he was in the same area as the person who did. Now the swabs, it was standard procedure back then that the swabs

were put face up out in the air to dry and not covered by anything. Just open air on the table right near where Kevin worked. So anything airborne could have touched that swab. Now the problem with that is it wasn't anything that touched that swab. They know that it was semen on that swab. I mean it's kinky Kevin we're talking about. It's kinky Kevin. Well and so they even said that we can explain that away because apparently lab techs would bring in their own semen to test the equipment. So I guess it feels weird. It's audio. You can't see my face but I am in complete shock. Yeah it seems very weird protocol. I agree but even the other lab techs who like obviously weren't a huge fan of Kevin said that this was kind of standard practice. They would use their

semen samples to basically calibrate equipment and make sure that the equipment was testing properly like to register semen. So it's very possible that he could have had a semen sample in the lab. Now obviously these samples that they brought in weren't tracked by any means so they can't say for sure he did but it's one of those things that definitely kind of brings up reasonable doubt. And another problem was that they didn't switch gloves back then. They were basically just protecting their hands from the samples but they weren't protecting the samples from each other. So what the lawyers are suggesting could have happened is that if these techs were using Kevin's DNA his sperm which by the way would be like so weird to use someone else's

like giz to like someone you knew. Yeah like it not even like worked with. I don't love it like can you imagine how you do that with people you work with. I don't like this at all that's very personal for co-workers. Right so they're saying what could have happened is their co-worker could have used Kevin's sample to test something handling it with the gloves on. Then moved on to test Claire's sample and not have changed their gloves and that's how such a tiny microscopic sample had gotten on the swab. Which kind of again if like all the the dice fall right if everything is in place like it can kind of be a logical explanation. It definitely is enough in my opinion to cause reasonable doubt. For sure and I think like part of what I get caught up on

too is that for it to be such a microscopic amount in her and knowing that the first time they did the swab nothing came back. I don't know if somebody were raped and there was no protection used you would think that you would find more than that. Right and this isn't the first time that we've heard of this. This has actually happened before it's been documented in other states and at least four other countries. So Kevin Brown was sure that this case was weak as hell and there was no way it was going to go to trial. Even though there seems to be an explanation for everything Kevin sure that everything is circumstantial like the police are just on a witch hunt. The police don't care. They say we still fully believe that Kevin is our killer. We still have him in our sights

and the pressure began mounting on Kevin in 2014. On a day in October of that same year his wife came home to find the Bible open to a psalm about being wrongfully accused and next to that Bible was his cell phone and his watch and they lived with her mother at the time and she asked her mom you know where's Kevin and her mom said I don't know he said he had to go somewhere he was showered shaved he looked nice and just said that he had things to do. That night Kevin never comes home and the following day his wife got the news she feared the most. She got a knock on her door from a detective to say that we found your husband and he's gone. A ranger at a state park had found Kevin hanging from a tree and his wife said that his suicide is not an admission of guilt. She said

that he felt at this point he had no future and if it went to court it would tarnish his reputation forever and she said it's these investigators who drove him to do this. Now I think it's a little bit hard to believe like looking from the outside in I can understand the mounting pressure I can understand police not giving up on you and I can understand not wanting to go to prison but for the reason of not wanting it to tarnish your reputation I almost feel like committing suicide is just kind of giving into that because that's going to stay with you and you aren't even there to fight back. I was going to say you think that you'd want to fight harder than ever to clear your name and to be fair we don't know if that there weren't other issues that he was dealing with other mental

instabilities but it doesn't really feel like a good way to clear your name. Not at all and three days after his death the San Diego police kind of capitalize on this they publicly named Kevin as one of the two suspects which kind of enraged his wife and I don't blame her she said you know he was here for years you could have named him a suspect and now that he's gone you're gonna take advantage of it. Exactly you could have named him a suspect while he was here while he could have defended himself or at least stood up for himself and you're gonna wait until he's gone and can't fight back to do that and it's it it is pretty crappy. So Kevin's wife actually filed suit against the city of San Diego for misconduct and wrongful death. Their case has gone to court in 2017 it's

been a lot of back and forth and I still don't think to this day that anything's been fully resolved and Claire's parents say that they really have faith in the San Diego police and they trust them so if the San Diego police say that it's Kevin and Ronald then the family believes that that is Kevin and Ronald and they're both dead now. The family of Barbara though have more questions than ever about her murder. Police now say that the cases are not connected because there was no DNA in Barbara's case and at the time of Barbara's murder Ronald was actually in prison for rape during that whole time so there was no possible way for him to commit the crime and Kevin was actually attending college 500 miles away so there was no way for him to commit it either like they're still

trying to link Kevin and Ronald like some kind of team but they're saying both of our suspects both of the guys that we think committed Claire's murder could not have committed Barbara's so now we're saying they're no longer connected. So what do you think Brit like is this just an easy cop out or do you think they were never connected to begin with? I'm questioning if they were ever connected to begin with to be honest. There's so many similarities though I mean literally the way they were murdered the sand in their mouth the mutilated breast it did one person see what did Ronald see what happened to Barbara and just like copy it I don't think that's like I don't know does it to me it doesn't fit they see it's so hard for me though I had the same problem with the

April Tinsley case and the the girl Sarah that died a police have conclusively said there's they're not connected I find it so bizarre when two people are killed in such a similar fashion so close together yeah I mean even just sitting here talking it through my mind's going back and forth on like the mutilation and the sand in their mouth and the attacks in general are so similar but if they're connected it couldn't have been either these two guys right so if they are connected then Ronald and Kevin aren't the killer of Claire either and then you have to explain how Ronald's blood got on her pants so I mean I guess it really makes sense that they probably aren't it's just so so bizarre but they have officially closed Claire's case saying that both Ronald and

Kevin were responsible and Barbara's case is officially open there's no suspects and it probably will remain open for a long time and I guess the only like question left in this case is whether or not the sample from Kevin do you believe that it was cross-contamination or do you believe that he was this crazy secret killer who got away with it I feel like it has to be cross-contamination the logic in me which as you know I'm kind of the logical one says that it's so likely for cross-contamination to have happened and seemingly unlikely for him to have been involved that that's the only explanation for the microscopic sample found inside Claire yeah I just have to wonder why police have been so reluctant to accept that like if they know something we don't know but I also

think that they kind of behaved like in a shady manner the way that they accused him after death and even all the evidence that they're pointing to like again porn does not a murderer make well and I was gonna say at this point I feel like they're probably feeling like they're too far in on this theory to start backtracking now yeah but I mean they even but they have it like just say Ronald did it like you you still have a suspect it's not like your case is back open I'm not sure why you're trying to link these people too bad unless it is to save face and you know how I feel about that I can't stand it I think though we learned a valuable lesson from this no matter what your job is don't bring semen samples to work ever yeah good good call

so I would love to hear what everyone else thinks if you want to go on our facebook discussion group let us know if you think you might have something to do with it is a cross contamination and are Barbara and Clara's cases really connected or are the police right and they have nothing to do with one another you can also tweet at us at crimejunkiepod and follow us on instagram at crimejunkiepodcast we'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode crime junkie is written and hosted by me all of our sound production and editing comes from brit pray what and all of our music including our theme comes from justin daniel crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve