Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Pamela Milam // Vickie Lynn Harrell

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

In 1972, two young women with their whole lives ahead of them vanish from public places, leaving behind only a tiny handful of clues.For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit��https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here to due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-pamela-milam-vickie-lynn-harrell 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers and I'm Brett and today I want to tell you two stories that actually happened here in our own backyard of Indiana. Two women with their whole lives ahead of them that vanished from public places leaving behind only a tiny handful of clues. These are the stories of Pamela Milam and Vicki Lynn Harrell. September 15, 1972 is a big Friday night for the women of Sigma Kappa sorority at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Rush festivities are in full swing and they've got some tough choices to make about who's

going to make the cut this year. So the sorority sisters all meet up in their suite in Homestead Hall near Lincoln Quad to talk over what's going to happen, how it's going to go, maybe some decorating, the place a little bit. The meeting wraps around 11pm and the girls decide to grab a quick bite before going their separate ways for the night. One of the sisters, a young woman named Pamela Milam says that she's actually going to run out super quick and move her car closer to the building.

Pamela is a sophomore and since she's from Terre Haute she actually lives at home instead of staying on campus all the time, but since it's Rush she's actually staying at the Sigma Kappa Suite for the weekend just to help out. On her way out of the house she grabs a box of decorating stuff to put in her trunk to kind of get it out of the way and help clean up the suite. And she tells her sisters that she's going to be back in just a few minutes and then they can all eat. The sorority sisters wait and wait and wait.

Eventually they start kind of looking at each other and getting a little worried, like it should have only been a few minutes. But because she isn't back they eventually just decide to eat and call it a night without her. I mean how long are we talking? Were they like after two minutes like well let's just eat or was it like a considerable amount of time? So because this is an old case and pretty local to Terre Haute there's not a whole lot

of information out there in terms of like a precise timeline of what happened on that Friday night. Totally speculating here but remember she lives off campus so I wonder if maybe her friends thought she just made a last minute decision to just head back to her parents house or just decided to bail last minute on this dinner. I mean right there was no need for her to come back that night. Yeah I mean again this it's pretty late and this is back in the days before cell phones so someone changing their plan and just kind of being no shows I think is something that

was just kind of more accepted back then. So no one was worried about Pam that night to her sorority sisters maybe she just went home to her parents and to her parents they knew that that night she was going to be staying at the sorority house so they weren't worried about her not coming home either. But when Pamela doesn't show up for her shift at work the next morning that's when alarm bells start going off for the people who knew her. Right away her friends and family start looking for her and they report her missing on September 16th.

Finally at seven o'clock on that Saturday night two of Pamela's sorority sisters actually spot her car in the back end of a parking lot across from the Lincoln Quad and it is definitely Pamela's car no question she drives this big boat of a thing this old red Pontiac from the 1960s with a big license plate on the front that says Jesus in all caps like you can't miss it or really mistake it for someone else's. This time of year is already pretty dark out so the girls actually go back to the suite and get a flashlight so they can take a closer look at the car and what might be inside. They're going around the car shining light in the windows and nothing really jumps out

at them until someone catches a flash of reflection on the rear window and sitting there are Pamela's glasses. Right away this is troubling because her friends know Pamela's vision isn't great without her glasses she wouldn't just leave them I mean she was always wearing them so they know now that they had to call Pamela's family and tell them what they had found Pamela's dad Charles and her younger sister Sheila get to the parking lot as quickly as they can with the spare keys to the car heart pounding Sheila helps her dad search inside of Pamela's car looking for any clue of where she might be and the first thing that they spot is the

last thing they want to see they find Pamela's purse according to Crystal Bonvillian's piece in the Springfield News Sun it had been completely emptied out keys wallet everything it becomes obvious pretty early on that there's nothing else inside the car that's going to actually lead them to Pamela or tell them where she may have gone but before they give up on the car entirely Charles heads back to check one more area of the car that they haven't looked at yet the trunk he puts the can the lock takes a deep breath and as soon as he pops the trunk and sees what's inside Charles just screams because inside the trunk is his daughter's lifeless body now Pamela's sister Sheila is next to her dad seeing this too and she wants

more than anything to look away but she can't she just can't through her whore she sees Pamela's hands have been tied behind her back her face is all cut up there's a ligature around her neck and there's a piece of white tape over her mouth Pamela's dad manages to pull himself together long enough to call the ISU campus police who according to the Terre Haute Tribune call the city police in right away as soon as they arrive the investigation kicks into high gear when they first see Pamela they think that she may have been beaten or there was some kind of severe struggle because of those scratch marks and cuts all over her face it's also clear to them from the onset that whoever killed Pamela used the very items

from the decorating box that she had brought out to her car to bind and gag her so though it didn't tell them much about their killer it did kind of tell them that he didn't come prepared with his own items he used what was already around the only other real piece of evidence found in or around the car itself were a few partial fingerprints that they collected and sent off for testing Pamela's body is then taken off by the coroner for an autopsy and what they learn at the actual autopsy kind of changes some of their assumptions so the autopsy shows that all of those cuts and scratches on her face weren't made from like fingernails and a struggle they were actually made by the tail lights from inside

her trunk like the actual nuts and bolts that hold them in place and the coroner thought that those injuries were most likely caused by being kind of jostled against those sharp pieces so do we know if those cuts happened before or after she died so based on the evidence it looks like she went into the trunk after she died but here's the thing I didn't see anything about Pamela's body being transported in her car or what kind of assumptions police made about how exactly these scratches got there like I don't know if she got them as she was being placed in the trunk or if she was placed there and the assumption is he drove around a lot and it was the movement that actually caused those we don't know

that for sure ultimately Pamela's cause of death was determined to be strangulation from a thin white clothesline type rope that was still around her neck when her body was found and it was the same type of rope that the killer had used to tie up her hands as well now she did have some scratches and bruises elsewhere on her body in addition to the marks on her face showing that their assumption was kind of right at the beginning there had been a struggle with her attacker interestingly the corner actually puts her time of death kind of at like a specific moment he thinks it happened around midnight on Friday night and since Pam was last seen by her sorority sisters around 11 that gives police a pretty narrow

time frame to focus their investigation so did the corner find any evidence of sexual assault the corner actually said no there wasn't sexual assault but I did read in the indie star that there was like some sticks and some other naturey debris between Pamela's pants and her pantyhose so police think that the killer must have taken her into a wooded area at some point and at the very least at least pulled down her pants which kind of makes it seem to me at least like the killer planned to sexually assault Pamela and maybe he even started but he was maybe either spooked or interrupted or ran out of time or something now according to the Terre Haute Tribune's coverage on September 18 local police send

Pamela's clothes off to Indianapolis to be analyzed at the Indiana State Police lab since this is way before DNA the crime lab at this point is probably just looking for trace fibers hair anything unusual that might lead them to Pamela's killer that same day when Pamela's clothes are on their way to Indianapolis Terre Haute police get their first potential lead they find out that someone reported a break in at a building near the parking lot where Pamela's car and Pamela's body were found and they're wondering if maybe this break in might have something to do with Pamela or could somehow be connected to Pamela's murder I thought you said that the killer likely took her into like a wooded area what does

this have to do with it they actually don't know right but at this point the investigation is just super broad they're literally looking into kind of every call every complaint from around campus for the entire weekend looking for anything else that stands out as extraordinary that might have been loosely connected to Pamela's murder just basically anything to point them in a direction of a suspect but ultimately what they end up finding is that the break in ends up being a dead end and it turned out to just be some kids looking for a place to party and other than that initial little bit of a lead there's really nothing no witness reports no complaints nothing connected to Pamela and they really don't know where

to go but while they're not having a ton of luck in Terre Haute they do have a little bit better luck with the Indiana State Police lab sort of technicians at the lab find a strange stain on Pamela's blouse what do you mean by strange well they don't know what it is at the time but they think it might be semen however in 1972 police don't have the technology to even confirm that it is that and if they could they don't have the technology to prove who it belonged to but what they do have is the foresight to preserve it and the rest of Pamela's clothing did the crime lab find anything else honestly that's pretty much it at this point it feels like police are hitting a brick wall they have

talked to dozens of people in Terre Haute to guys who knew Pamela guys who were on campus that night according to the Springfield News Sun at least a handful of them even take polygraph tests but they couldn't lead police anywhere and there's really nothing out there to suggest how many people actually took it or how many people even passed or failed desperate to keep some momentum in the investigation and to reassure the public like hey we got this police take to the papers but there isn't a whole lot they can say they don't know who killed Pamela no one is in custody and they don't have any real suspects and without witnesses and very little physical evidence it's hard for law enforcement to even know where to

start to figure out what and who they're looking for it's kind of a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack at this point and police were just at a loss but then just four days after Pamela's body was found police get a call that changes everything the call comes in from the Indiana state police who tell officers in Terre Haute that they're actually investigating another woman's murder from just a month prior one that they think could be linked to Pamela's this victim's name is Vicki Lynn Harrell and she was killed just a little more than a month before Pamela and like Pamela Vicki was last seen in public at the Kmart store where she worked but this was not in Terre Haute she was actually in

Bloomington Bloomington is about an hour and a half like southeast ish of Terre Haute and it's another Indiana college town for listeners outside of Indiana Bloomington is home to Indiana University and the university itself really is the heart of the city was Vicki also a student so she wasn't at least not that I could find and I have to say there just isn't a ton out there about Vicki's personal life and not a ton of coverage on her case really so it's hard to say a lot about her before her death what we do know though is that she was 25 years old so a bit older than Pamela and we know that she had been divorced and it's interesting and a little disgusting and off-putting that the media

coverage on her case back in 72 made very sure to point out that she was divorced and also how she liked to go to bars and listen to rock music and the way they did this especially when you compare it to the coverage of Pamela you can see that they're almost making it seem like what happened to Vicki was her own fault like a divorced woman out on the town what do you expect kind of right like a total assassination of her character yeah and you know as I was trying to find out more about her I did find that she may have also been a single mom so one of the articles I found in the Terre Haute Tribune called her quote an unwed mother but that detail doesn't appear everywhere and there's just so little information

about Vicki in general that I don't I truly just don't know what's real and what's not but I do know how differently they were talked about so on Saturday August 12 1972 Vicki headed from her apartment to her job at the local Kmart according to the Indianapolis star her roommate waited for her to come home at her normal time but she just never showed up sunlight was fading and it was pouring down rain outside and with still no sign of Vicki her roommate started to worry she called around a few places looking for her thinking maybe Vicki had gone over to a friend's house to wait out the rain before heading home or maybe she decided to meet up with someone for a drink or something but no one had seen or heard from Vicki so

later that night her roommate called the police and reported her missing but the weekend came and went with no sign of her and then on Monday the 14th some highway workers were out on a country road near Spencer Indiana which is about a half hour from Bloomington when they spot a young woman's naked body laying face down in a ditch surrounded by water they call in police right away and when officers arrived they quickly realized just how disturbing this crime scene really was while the woman's cause of death wasn't overtly obvious there was no sign of a struggle no murder weapon or anything near her body but when they moved her body they were shocked to find something carved into her chest carved into the front of this woman's body were the initials K N

now police take the victim back to Bloomington for an autopsy and it was here that they finally identify her as Vicki Lynn Harrell based on what they found at the crime scene or maybe I guess what they didn't find like clothing or signs of a struggle police figured that it was probably a secondary crime scene where they found her that Vicki was probably killed somewhere else and then just dumped at that site but just like Pamela Vicki had died after being strangled with a rope but unlike Pamela Vicki's body showed clear signs of sexual assault according to coverage in the Lafayette Journal and Courier okay but back to these letters on the chest like what does K N stand for girl I wish I knew police couldn't find any significance to the letters and it's not that

they thought the letters were irrelevant it's just that nothing really fit or made sense now for a moment police are thinking this feels a little bit ritualistic not like satanic but almost like with serial killers how they have this pattern there's this secondary site the carvings in her chest the sexual assault and they're thinking maybe this is what's happening here maybe we have a serial killer on our hands and this is when the Indiana State police like once they learned about Pamela reach out to Tara Hote and say hey like we just had this happen in a college town you have a kind of similar case in yours maybe they're connected yeah I mean you have to make a contact like that but I guess I'm having trouble connecting them like the scenes

seemingly different the actual acts like one has a body carving one doesn't one was sexually assaulted one wasn't yeah I mean again I think you have two cases where there's just like no idea what could have happened and there are at least enough similarities that they're kind of wondering I mean obviously they recognize the differences but I think they were wondering if maybe Pamela's killer ran out of time before he could finish his whole plan because again I mean he had pulled out her pants there was some intent there I mean maybe he got interrupted who knows but that would explain why their bodies were found in such different ways so law enforcement in both Owen and Monroe counties kind of come together to investigate Vicki and Pamela's deaths together to try and

figure this thing out now you would think because this was such a brutal crime it would have gotten a lot of media attention but that would be wrong instead kind of the opposite happens like yeah Vicki's case got some press in the first few days after her body was discovered but then it was kind of like her murder just got shrugged off not by the police but by the public whereas they covered Pamela's murder extensively because Pamela she was the all-american college girl bright-eyed bright future and when her body was discovered just one month and one town away because she was getting so much attention it kind of renewed interest in Vicki's case just a little bit because of the potential connection but aside from that like initial like burst a couple of

articles maybe they're connected there was really just nothing else it was like no one seemed to care that Vicki had lived or that she had died such a brutal death and actually the apathy got so bad in her case that by early October of 1972 this is you know after two months of investigating her murder the Indiana State police detective who was working with law enforcement from Owen and Row counties actually went on record with Howard Stevens in the Terre Haute Tribune and said and this is a direct quote I've never seen a case marked by less sympathy for a murder victim than this one end quote so I know you mentioned that Vicki was divorced and may have had a child so I really wonder if the stigma of that time had anything to do with like why you know being a

divorced woman especially that young and a quote unwed mother who maybe wasn't sitting at home and dreaming of a husband it kind of feels like that's why people in that era just couldn't be bothered to care yeah and I mean that's kind of exactly what the media coverage reflects is that kind of stigma and like I said when I was doing this research for both of these stories I mean it was really a stark contrast in how the papers talked about Vicki compared to Pamela because I mean it was literally like Pamela loves Jesus Vicki loved to party and it's just really sad to see I mean because these are both they were always contrasted against each other even though they were potentially connected yeah so with no clues no clothes no murder weapons no witnesses in Vicki's case there

just wasn't anything for law enforcement to really go on when it came to solving her murder and though they look closely at both cases they basically end up finding that there really wasn't anything to connect Vicki to Pamela so without that connection and the attention that came with it law enforcement kind of ended their joint efforts and the cases got worked separately so while Pams was still getting picked up by the media Vicki's case started to fade away in the public's eye and though police had done something like 30 polygraph tests they cleared more than 20 people through interrogation none of those people were able to give any hints about the weirdest and most twisted part of this whole crime those mysterious initials carved into Vicki's chest

and then by October 1972 I read in the Terre Haute Tribune that police were saying they weren't even 100 sure anymore that it was even a K and an N on her chest at all wait what well you know after months of searching they couldn't find any link between Vicki and anything or one with K and initials so they started wondering if maybe it wasn't a K and after all maybe they were reading it wrong like from what I've read I guess depending on how you orient the markings vertically horizontally maybe they could mean something totally different though no one gives a specific example of like what like you know when we talked about the update in the Gilgo beach they released that belt that you know one way looks like yeah I was actually about to ask like is it

is it one of those things where like if it's upside down it looks like this or if it's actually right side up it looks like this yeah I can't even tell you that much because I don't even know what something different could be like I went all over trying to find pictures or recreations because I can't let this go but there's nothing out there that gives more information like some articles describe it as looking like it was a scratch on others say it was carved some say it was on her upper stomach others describe it on her lower chest like there's so many discrepancies like that so maybe it's a K and or maybe it isn't but just like the act of carving into someone like that feels way more distinctive than even the letters themselves like that seems so significant

it has to be a huge clue well I mean it is a clue definitely but just not enough of a clue to move the investigation along so a year after Vicki's death even with no concrete leads detectives were still working the case I mean they still wanted justice for Vicki so they started like kind of rethinking this you know she's not connected to Pam but they do think that she still could be a victim of a serial killer so here's the interesting thing according to the Indianapolis star and it's something that they put out in 1973 there were several murders between 1969 and 1971 that were eerily similar according to this article these victims were all women all from college towns all located within 40 miles of interstate 70 and get this all with initials carved into

their chest that seems like a lot with a very distinct similarity were the initials all K and or possibly even similar to K and if that makes sense so not all were K and apparently they were different initials but listen this is literally all I know I wish I could tell you more about these women or who they were when they were found where they were found how they would found I mean I have so many questions myself but there isn't I mean anything out there like literally nothing I did crazy internet deep dives looking for other cases from each year and in the specific states that were mentioned and I can't find anything and again I mean in this article they give a 69 to 71 they even give a states Maryland and Pennsylvania and I thought

that that would help narrow down like again you know girl found with carving in her chest college town it seems like so much information but every time I got nothing so if any of our listeners out there are from those areas and know of any cases way back then that match let us know because this is something that's literally keeping me up at night what I can tell you is that as far as I know none of those murders were solved and neither was Vicki's by November of 1972 any trail pointing to Vicki's killer was ice cold but Pamela's case was about to get red hot in November of 1972 two months after Pamela's murder two women two Indiana State University students report being abducted and sexually assaulted by a stranger on Friday November 10th Terra Hope police and ISU security

officers arrest a man named Robert Wayne Austin for both crimes according to the Terra Hope Tribune these assaults happened within just two blocks of where Pamela's body was found back in September now police won't say at the time if they think Robert's connected to Pamela's murder but that same Tribune article reported that the police took him to Indy for a polygraph after he was arrested I mean I feel like this guy is you know kidnapping women sexually assaulting them in the same area of the same campus like you have to explore that oh I mean I totally agree I mean Robert was literally attacking these two women one right after the other either Monday Tuesday or Tuesday Wednesday depending on which source you read but either way two kidnappings and sexual assaults on

two consecutive days Robert's thing was that he would snatch women take them into the woods assault them and then let them go and this brings me back to all of the stuff that was found between Pam's pants and her pantyhose like police thought that she had been taken into the woods right so Robert is arrested and charged with kidnapping and sexual assault related to those two victims that he attacked in November and according to Chris Essex article for WTI News Robert readily admits to the rapes and abductions but when they ask him point blank about Pamela's murder which they do many times he's adamant that he had nothing to do with it but police don't believe this for a second and neither does the media partly because I mean what are the odds of

having two different predators operating in the exact same small area in such a short period of time and in almost such a similar way at this point it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that he's responsible for Pamela's death to everyone in the media and the public but try as they might investigators aren't actually able to connect him to the crime scene or to Pamela with any kind of physical evidence but that doesn't stop the media and the public from wild speculation it gets so loud and out of hand that by the time Robert gets to trial in early 1973 his lawyer asked the judge to set some rules that the media members covering the case can't say that Robert's even a suspect in Pamela's murder because it could taint the jury pool against him and hurt

his chances of getting a fair and impartial trial has he officially been named a suspect in her murder though no not officially but we've seen this before where police are so sure that they have their guy even if there's no way to actually prove that it's 100 true that it kind of just continues to get reported as fact so when he was first charged Robert actually pled not guilty by reason of insanity but by the time he goes to trial he pulls back on the insanity piece and just pleads not guilty the jury doesn't buy it and in the end they find him guilty on all charges on april ninth 1973 he's sentenced to a life term in prison so now the police investigation into Pamela's murder goes into this odd state of limbo like they have this gut feeling that

Robert's the one who killed her but they don't have the evidence to actually charge him with murder and i guess as long as he's sitting in jail people are just feeling like the dangerous man is off the street there's nothing necessarily to worry about so while Robert sits in jail Pamela's case sits on a cold case shelf all through the 70s the 80s even through the 90s nothing moves on her case at all until 2001 almost 30 years after her murder the terrajo police decide to give Pamela's case another look forensic technology in the early 2000s i mean is light years ahead of what they had back in 72 and dna in particular is huge the investigator working the case decides to see if there's anything they have in evidence that might

provide them with enough dna to test anything that they can compare specifically to robert wane austin to see once and for all if their gut was right and he was their guy this whole time please tell me that they come back to the stain yes so according to the springfield new son investigators go back to the shirt pamela was wearing that one with a small stain that they couldn't really place before and sure enough there is enough genetic material in that stain to test for dna but that's not all police are also able to grab a fingerprint off of Pamela's glasses using technology that wasn't around in the 70s so armed with this new dna profile for comparison police look robert up and find that he's actually out on parole they track him down

it's not super difficult thankfully and they get their dna sample from him they send it off to the lab they wait and i mean so much anticipation here right because if he's their guy that's a 30 year old murder solved in a high profile case off their books yeah but if he's not i mean they're back to square one but 30 years later when the results come back they are not the slam dunk that police had been hoping for robert was not their guy after all they're able to confirm that the dna on pamela's blouse did come from a man but it just wasn't robert and the fingerprint isn't his either so back to square one they run the dna through codis and get nothing they run the fingerprint and the two partials they pulled from her car through a fist which is basically

the fingerprint version of codis hoping that they'll find an answer there but once again they come up empty and once again pamela's case goes back on the shelf seven long years pass and in 2008 a man named shon keen becomes chief of detectives for the terra hope police and one of the first things he does is start passing out cold cases to his team since it doesn't seem fair to pass them out to others and not take one for himself shon decides to take on pamela's case because it is the oldest in their files according to the tribune star shon spends hours reviewing the case files in the office during his shift and even after hours at home and he's tracking down more than 50 men who were interviewed in connection with pamela's murder

back in 1972 which is a hard job i mean not only having to find these people which is probably a monumental undertaking all these years later but also having to try and get those people to remember something about a crime that happened at this point almost 40 years ago right so desperate for a break shon decides to try some out of the box methods to heat this case up according to the springfield new son one of the things shon does is he takes pamela's picture along with a little blurb on the case and his contact information and puts all of that on decks of cards that go out to prisoners all throughout indiana on the off chance that maybe an inmate with information would see it and come forward and as creative as that was i mean i know that's been done continuously

since then unfortunately nothing comes of it no one comes forward so he looks back to dna the last time pamela's murder case was investigated closely was 2001 and shon knows how far dna technology has come and even just those few years by 2008 touch dna is starting to emerge where dna can be tested from skin cells that the killer leaves behind on something that they've touched something like a murder weapon or the rope that police found around pamela's neck and listen like they already have a profile of the killer but if there's dna on that piece of rope that doesn't match what's on pam's blouse suddenly shon would be looking for more than one suspect like this is something that could change the course of the investigation so with nothing to lose shon decides to give it

a try and sure enough his hunch was spot on there is some dna on the rope but it's just a partial profile so it's another dead end yeah kind of because really what this partial profile tells us is it's not a hundred percent match to the stain but it also can't be ruled out as not a match so it doesn't really help in one way or another we're kind of like you said we're at a dead end we're right back to where we started after about a year on pamela's case shon starts to again try and think outside of the box and he's starting to hear about how in other states they're using familial testing to get to unknown killers and this isn't the genealogy testing that we have been talking so much about in the last couple of years this one is using genealogy but at the time

you could just test against other family members who were already in codus so he thinks like oh this could be great maybe the dna sample will match someone in like a distant family member who's in prison and then that will lead us to our perpetrator this could be the ticket but the thing was in 2009 when this is going on when he's having this idea it's actually illegal to do that in indiana you can't use like a family member who's had to submit dna because they've committed a crime to get to another family member who hasn't already so shon is back at square one again and it's starting to feel like this early work on this investigation is kind of like a roller coaster i mean really up and down he's two steps forward one step back but shon knows the answer to this

puzzle is somewhere in the case file he refuses to give up year after year after year until eight years later in 2017 the investigation gets a boost by yet another advance in dna technology this is when genetic phenotyping really starts now we've talked about this before how incredible phenotyping can be and it basically just uses a dna sample to predict what a person with this dna might look like i mean what color hair what color eyes what color skin tone i mean this is a big level up from your basic composite sketch yeah according to wthr news shon gets a phenotype composite made from the indiana state police lab based on the dna from pamela's file so what he learns is the person that they're looking for has dark hair dark eyes and like a medium skin tone

and so finally he's like okay i can actually narrow down my search and he starts going through the file and only focusing on people who match that description he starts pulling arrest records from the late 60s and the early 70s searching for suspects who had been arrested for violent sexual crimes that search yielded 106 potential suspects 106 this creates almost a full year of work for shon looking for suspects based on that phenotype composite but he ends up having no luck and he's starting to feel like he's running out of options and he's wondering if maybe this case actually isn't solvable after all because every year that passes is another year further from anyone who might have memories of pamela's murder but it's also another year of advances in dna

technology but here's the thing even as that potential like keeps growing so much of the dna sample from pam's blouse has already been used for that test that the state police lab actually did and the lab warned shon like listen you might only have one usable piece of dna left like one more chance to use this precious clue to try and figure out who killed pamela so knowing that he has one last chance this might be it this might be his only way to nail this guy responsible down for murder shon thinks long and hard about what to do next and where to play his very last card in 2018 shon decides to send the dna sample from pamela's blouse out of state to this lab down in virginia called paribon nanolabs and we've talked about paribon on this show we love them yes we

love paribon they are a dna technology company and they're huge in the field of forensic genealogy and they're best known for helping identify the golden state killer in california for cracking the april tinsley case right here in indiana i mean they have been involved in tons and tons of cases and one of the things in 2018 that paribon was doing i mean genealogy was still just brand new to them but they were deep into this process called snapshot which takes phenotyping like up like a couple of notches basically so this seems really promising but shon knows that he has to be so careful here the mylon family has waited so long for answers and this responsibility is weighing heavy on him again i mean this could be his last chance so at first he wants to split the difference

he tried just sending paribon half of the sample that he had left just in case it doesn't work like maybe he'll have a backup but paribon comes back in and tells him it's not enough like if you want us to do this we need the whole sample shon agonizes over what to do according to fox 23 news he turns it over and over and over in his head and then he decides to go for it this is his tail mary pass he sends the full sample the very last bit of dna to paribon and praise that he's made the right call when paribon gets it they do two things first they create a phenotype composite for shon their best guess at what the suspect is going to look like what his dna profile is and here's the totally crazy part their phenotype snapshot comes back completely different from the

one shon got from the indiana state police lab like how different so if you remember the guy that shon's been looking for for the last year has brown hair brown eyes and medium skin tone right well holly hayes reported for the indianapolis star that the paribon composite had blonde hair blue green eyes and light skin shon is just totally stunned like again he's been going through all of the case files by hand pulling arrest records by hand ruling out people who didn't fit this original phenotype only to learn that basically he can throw away all the work he's done for the last year how did they get it so wrong i don't know so from what i can tell it seems like the indiana state police lab used a smaller sample than the one shon sent to paribon and it seems like

maybe a bigger sample led to better results but truthfully i'm a little fuzzy on the details and more truthfully honestly i'm a little concerned because i think it proves something that we've kind of suggested before i think there is still so much about dna and especially these new technologies that we still don't fully understand but that new composite is actually only part of what paribon does so they actually run the dna through the jed match system which is a database that we've talked about before so they in 2018 making these snapshots was pretty well known but this is just when they were really starting to get into that genealogy familial matching and incredibly when they do that when they put it into the system and do some tracking they get a hit they don't find their

suspect exactly but they do find a distant relative of their suspect again not a slam dunk but it's enough to get the ball rolling again in shon's investigation according to paribon this distant relative a woman is actually still in indiana living in the town of washington about an hour due south of terrahote and this is finally the lead shon's been waiting for genealogists get to work plotting out this woman's family tree honing in on the men in the family who'd be you know the right age range they lived in the area and they start collecting more dna samples and getting more and more detailed with this whole huge family line as they go until 2019 when they get down to just one name jeffrey lin hand okay who is this guy so jeffrey was a traveling delivery man with roots

in indiana who was working out of chicago at the time he basically drove all around indiana and illinois delivering records to music stores he would have been 23 in 1972 when pamela died so really nothing about him would have stuck out on a college campus he would have looked possibly just like any other student right but he wasn't a student what he was shon found out was a violent sexual offender and murderer and you want to know what else he was what a dead ringer for the paragon composite right down to be part in his hair here i'm going to send you a picture of jeffrey and a picture of the composite oh my gosh yeah they're so similar like the face shape the nose like the eye shape and the eyebrows it's really really wild well according to fox 59 news jeffrey

had a violent criminal record for kidnapping and murder i mean this guy is a prime example why we have this don't hitchhike rule as a crime junkie life rule when police look more closely at him in his background they learned that he had a history with the legal system which on paper started in 1973 less than a year after pamela's murder that year he picked up carol and jeff thomas this young newlywed couple that were hitchhiking near terra hope they were trying to get back home to evansville which is about two hours away and jeffrey offered them a ride now they're driving along when jeffrey said hey i'm gonna make a quick stop over at my sister's house to get some cash except he actually took them to his house out in the country pulled a gun on them and then

demanded 500 before tying them up in a grain silo jeffrey ended up leaving with the husband and while they were gone carol was able to make a run for it when police finally caught up to jeffrey he led them straight to jeff the husband's dead body jeffrey was arrested and tried for murder but ended up in the indiana state reformatory after being found not guilty by reason of insanity he spent three years there before his lawyer got him out in 1976 on a technicality i guess the lawyer claimed jeffrey should have been found not guilty for the kidnapping too even though according to the terra hope tribune star jeffrey was never actually tried for the kidnapping i'm sorry what i guess there was some jurisdictional issues that really got in the way here i think

it was because he kidnapped jeff and carol in one county then committed the murder in another because as i was researching i found some legal back and forth about okay you know where exactly do we prosecute him for this do we combine the charges do we split them do we do is he fit to stand a second trial do we even do a second trial if he's not fit like i mean there was all of this stuff and eventually i think it kind of all contributed to him getting out of custody just three years after such a violent crime so where is jeff now jeffrey has actually been dead since 1978 he was shot by police in kokomo after he tried to kidnap yet another woman and he left behind a wife and two young sons they actually give shawn samples of their dna to do a reverse

paternity test of sorts and when they do those tests the results come back positive 99.9 percent probability that yes their father jeffrelyn han was the person who murdered pamela all those years ago in 1972 pamela's older sister charlene thought that she would die before she ever learned who killed her sister it took 46 years seven months and 20 days but pamela's family finally had the answers that they waited a lifetime for is there any chance that jeffrey could have been vicki's murderer as well so i haven't seen anything that connects jeffrey and vicki or even mentions like hey there might be a connection because truthfully no one has written about vicki or spoken her name in a long time i mean really she's been forgotten all over again the way she

was back in 1972 but i truly believe if pamela and her family can get justice so many years later there is still hope for vicki if you have any information that could help lead to solving her case please call the indiana state police at 1-800-423-1286 if you want to see the pictures or source material for this episode you can find all that information on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com and be sure to follow us on instagram at crimejunkiepodcast we'll be back next week with a special episode but stick around for profit of the month crime junkie is an audio check production so what do you think chuck do you approve

okay ashley i have made an official decision regarding the profit of the month segments you're not going to make me cry anymore well here's the thing i feel like we need a tier scale like okay as i put these segments together i'm going to give it a tier scale rating from one to ten to prepare i like that yeah like one you're going to be fine at a one like it's literally literally puppies and rainbows okay out of ten you will be crying so much that your tears will have shorted out your computer where you're recording and i possibly may have killed you with sorrow and now crime junkie is no more so based on that rating system i'm going to try really really hard to stay under an eight like consistently okay but what's today so today i have and we'll

probably have to revisit this at the end just to see if we're on the same page yeah wavelength but i'm giving it like a six point five maybe a seven but i personally think it ends closer to a six okay all right let's hear it so yeah so i'm telling you this and so all of our proper loving listeners can also be prepared just a little bit i know last month we had like a surprise cry fest in the middle of the segment which couldn't have been accounted for even if i had rated it but yeah just wanted to give you guys the heads up we're looking at six and a half i think so today i want to tell you about our listener sydney and how she came to know her best friend the truly incredible cali so sydney was in college which i feel like is how so many

of these segments start yeah it's like the worst time to get a dog but also has worked out so well for so many people right but sydney wasn't doing great she had opted to get her degree in three years instead of four which i don't think i know any overachievers but it certainly sounds one to be like one to me oh my goodness and the pressure was really taking a toll on her mental health and she was just kind of floundering and really struggling to feel like her life had purpose or like she even had anything to live for so she decided that she needed something to distract her from where she was mentally something to take care of and give her life some sort of meeting so she went out and got a bunch of plants oh i've totally been there and her outcome was

just as successful as mine every single plant suffered a tragic ruling down so r.i.p plants i'm all about fake plants i cannot keep one alive exactly and sydney figured like what was the next logical step a dog and obviously like we all do she started poking around the local shelter website and bugging her boyfriend about all the cute dogs that were available but she was never really able to take the leap like in the back of her mind she was like what if you know i'm already not doing great what if the responsibility of a dog was just going to be too much and make her feel even worse if she was not only feeling herself but she was also feeling this helpless dog that she kind of forced into the situation but one day they were driving around

town together and her boyfriend basically was tired of hearing about all these dogs like greet breaks turns around and takes sydney to the shelter you're kidding no i love this so much and they go down you know all the aisles and looking at all these adorable dogs and obviously like sydney like us loves all of them but she wasn't really connecting with them and her boyfriend would even like suggest like oh look at this one i think this would be a really good fit and she was just never really like this is the one until she looked into the eyes of this beautiful mutt yes the mutt was sick and underweight and looked sad but she was staring into sydney's soul with the kindest eyes sydney had ever seen and it was at that moment she knew her life was

about to completely change and that sad mutt which sydney didn't really define her breeds or like what she thinks she is i based on the pictures think she's probably like an american bulldog mix or what what embark calls super mutt like when you do your testing right like definitely super mutt like she's she's gorgeous i'm gonna send you pictures here in a little bit yeah and she was then known as michelle but from that day forward was sydney's best friend callie callie and five years after that day callie and sydney have had a wild ride together the day after sydney graduated from college she and callie drove for eight days straight from kansas to seward alaska because oh my gosh sydney was like i need something completely different than the life i've always known let's go

to alaska and holy cow she's so brave i love her oh i know i'm like uh i am fine right here oh i'm so i am so down i will go to alaska with you sydney and callie and sydney learned to hike and camp and fish together and this is like so cute to me that sydney even brought this up but she was like we saw our first whale and sea and sea lions and otters together and it's so real that's that's how you would talk like about a relationship with a significant other right like which is what a concert together or our first i'm just so cute and callie was the proudest dog in all of alaska she would always hold her head up high when they'd walk down the street and tourists which evidently are kind of weird in alaska i guess i would be weird in alaska too just like wanting

to soak it all in but tourists would ask to pet her and take pictures with her and callie was just like preening with pride and callie would even like wait dutifully outside like the grocery store or the post office while sydney was inside and sydney said a lot of times when she came back kids would be like hugging callie and hanging all over her and playing with her on the sidewalk and sydney made a point to say like callie sounds like the perfect dog but she also has angered a few moose and bear in her day and more than once has almost gotten them both like attacked and killed yeah no that's that sounds like charlie to me and i'm so get this so after over three years in alaska sydney actually started getting sick and was oh my gosh

they i thought they just like drove up there for a trip they like moved there oh no they were there for like a long time like she was like years literally alaska over for over three years wow okay i'm back i'm here i'm with you so sydney started getting sick and was actually diagnosed with early stages of cancer and with that diagnosis you know she kind of wanted to be closer to home for her treatment so she packed up and callie once again hopped in the front seat and took the eight-day road trip back to cancels with her and sydney said callie was so amazing through it all let her cry on her after every doctor's appointment and just callie was really a huge part of sydney's support system through all of this and back in january sydney actually got the all clear from

her cancer oh congratulations sydney and as amazing as that news was sydney also considers it to be the hardest day of her life because that was a day that it was also discovered that callie had cancer are you freaking kidding me right now and at that point in time the vets gave callie two months to live but sydney said they didn't know her callie and if we aren't at a seven yet this might be where we hit it because i want to quote directly from my conversation with sydney now and sydney said are you are you gonna be okay no your system is whack go on okay so sydney said quote you see i know that she took my cancer from me oh my god if the type of thing my callie allie would do she's pulled me out of the deepest depressions of my life she's pulled me up 10 000 foot mountains

in the snow because she knew i needed to get outside she's warned me of coyotes and moose and bear and made sure i never left the house alone she is the protector i didn't know i needed and now i get to be hers her last act is to save me from something i didn't even know i had lurking within me and she's doing a great job okay that's like our at least our seven i thought you said it got lighter at the end well that's a thing sydney said that callie is doing amazing to this day i just took the signal a couple days ago she's doing so well that vets are like in awe and amazed with how well she's you know living with this diagnosis and living with this treatment and like she's like defying all the odds sydney said you wouldn't even be able to tell that she was sick that's how like

spry and healthy and well she's doing and now that sydney is working from home recently she is thrilled that she gets a front row seat to see just how strong and resilient callie is and sydney said you know callie has never been one to give up easily and is just a living beautiful reminder of that every single day and you know like what i can't even talk what like a good blessing i know like there's there has been so much sadness and change and grief that i think has come along with coven i mean we've we've lost people people have lost jobs it has it has been hard on everyone but i do think like it's important to always try and find like the bright spot of where you are because you can't change where you are right like we're all going to be in this situation no matter

what but like looking at their situation i think this can apply to all of us is like how great that you know even though callie's doing great with her diagnosis you know even dogs dogs have no diagnosis like we only get them for so much time exactly and how great that that she can and not be at work you know what i mean like she gets to spend so much more time yeah bonding and reigniting they're like incredibly special bond like i truly believe their bond is incredible just like you know it's like you and charlie and just like so many other listeners and their dogs so i think you hate my rating system and it probably should have been rated worse but again i feel like we need to like you said like look at the bright side look at how this story is still unfolding

for callie and sydney and i think that brings it down to the six point five but i would be wrong and i'll just like i'll i'll take out of of our blessings and so even if even if everything feels a little terrible if if the one bright light in your life is that you get to be at home with your furry best friend for however long this is going to be um that that's truly a gift because we don't have forever with them yeah and as always we love featuring shelters and rescues at the end of these segments and this one that i'm going to feature today was actually sent to us as a recommendation completely randomly from a listener it's called shadows fund and they're located in lampo california and they have a focus on senior dogs so obviously i was like totally in it but they also have programs

for adoption and fostering even fostering leaders of puppies and one of their biggest like focuses is rescuing what they can serve vulnerable or at-risk dogs in shelters that have histories of you know bleak outcomes breeds like pitties which obviously you know have my heart um i did a little bit of reading on them they seem to be an awesome organization with a ton of ways to support and engage in all of their different programs that aren't just even just adopting and fostering so and they're located out of where they're located out of lampo california and we'll link to shadows fund on our website as always and obviously we're going to include some pictures of the strongest pup in kansas if you ask me cali