The Deck - Barbara Dreher (King of Hearts, Washington DC)

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Our card this week is Barbara Dreher, the King of Hearts from Washington D.C.  It was a warm Saturday evening in 1984 when 39-year-old Barbara disappeared from the streets of Washington, D.C. Almost 40 years later, the blatant missteps in the early days of the investigation still haunt her case… and may be what stands in the way of it being solved.  If you know anything about the disappearance or murder of Barbara Dreher in 1984, please call the Metropolitan Police Department at 202-727-9099 — you can request to remain anonymous. Or you can text 50411 to submit an anonymous tip.If you provide information leading to an arrest and conviction, you could be eligible for a reward of up to $25,000.  Barbara is described as 5’2”, 130 lbs., with black hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a green shirt and white slacks. She would be in her late 70s today. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting [phone] to stay up to date on what's new!

Our card this week is Barbara Dreyer, the King of Hearts from Washington, DC. It was a warm Sunday evening in 1984 when 39-year-old Barbara disappeared from the streets of Washington, DC. Almost 40 years later, the blatant missteps in the early days of the investigation still haunt her case. And those missteps are possibly what stands in the way of it being solved today. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was nearing the end of August 1984 and none of Barbara Dreyer's five children It was nearing the end of August 1984, and none of Barbara Dreyer's five children had seen or heard from her in more than a week. The last time they had heard from her was around 5pm on August 12th when she dropped off her six and nine-year-old sons to stay with one of her older kids, an adult daughter.

Barbara told her daughter that she'd be right back and that she just had to go pick up some money. From what I can tell, this wasn't anything out of the ordinary, a single mother with a full-time job and a lot on her plate. I'm sure it was nice to be able to drop her kids off and run some errands without her young children. But what was out of the ordinary is that she just never returned. At first, no one was overly concerned. They all assumed that maybe she was hanging out at her ex-husband's place. He lived right across the DC-Marrowland border in Hillcrest Heights, and the two had a good relationship, so she would often go visit him,

and it wasn't anything out of the ordinary for her to stay away for a few days at a time. Here's now retired detective Jim Traenum. for a few days at a time. Here's now retired detective Jim Traenum. But after nine days, they really became concerned. They didn't hear from her, no phone calls, nothing along that line. That's when Barbara's 23-year-old son, Anthony, called the ex-husband to check in,

confirmed that she was there and seeped when she was coming home. But he didn't get the answer he expected. He said, no, I haven't seen her whatsoever. Right away, Anthony contacted the Metropolitan Police Department to file an official missing person's report. You would think that after that, a full-blown investigation would ensue. That wasn't what happened.

Now, when missing person reports, especially back then, were filed basically all that would happen, is that they would take a report, a description, and they would put the missing person's information into a nationwide database so that if they were stopped somewhere, and their name was run through, then it would pop up that they were missing. Now, since she was an adult, and they really didn't have anything beyond the fact that she was missing. There was no other effort put forth at that time to do any investigation. You have a perfect right as an adult to go missing.

Detective Trainham was an on-barber's case back in 1984, but he said that police likely would have at least called nearby hospitals and jails to see if they had anyone who had her name or who matched her description. But like he said, beyond that, not much else was done. It seems like they just kind of waited things out, thinking maybe she'd left on her own and would come back soon. So that's what Barbara's family did, too. They waited for a whole other week.

And that's when Anthony was driving in Southwest DC with a friend and saw something unexpected. When he glanced over, he spotted a 1980 burgundy, old mobile cutlass supreme driving in a lane near him. That is the exact make model and year of his mom's car. The one she was driving when she disappeared. But here's the thing, it wasn't just the kind of car Barbara drove. Anthony was confident that this was her car because he had her license plate number memorized. Even more alarming was the fact that the person in the driver's seat wasn't Barbara.

It was a man Anthony didn't recognize. So he followed him and he saw the man park the car, get out and go into an apartment complex. He had a friend stand by and watch the car while he went. And I got the police who came back, they waited, and they confronted the man. Police confirmed the car was Barbara's and when they looked inside, they found her keys, which still had her little blue pepper spray that she carried with her everywhere on it. As if the fact that this man had a missing woman's car and keys wasn't suspicious enough, listen to what they found when they opened the trunk.

They found a ski mask, they found a rope, and they found gloves. When police spoke with the guy who was driving the car, who we've been asked to call RP, he denied knowing Barbara, and he even flat out denied ever driving the car. Local newspapers reported at the time that since the car had not been reported as stolen, police just kind of dropped it and decided not to arrest RP. In fact, it's not even clear if police impounded Barbara's car and searched it. Detective Trainham thinks it was probably just turned over to the family. I don't know why they didn't push it. I don't know why they didn't do at least a little bit of follow-up on this. What's so ever?

Since Detective Traum wasn't on the case back then in the early days, the best he can do is speculate about why police just kind of shrugged off this huge lead. I can kind of surmise that they kind of blew it off because of the fact that he knew or could potentially have known Barbara's ex-husband and I don't know what kind of dynamics went on there, but obviously they let the ball drop on this one. Basically, RP and Barbara's ex-husband work together. I have no idea why this made him no longer suspicious, but to them it must have. And if your blood is starting to simmer, get ready for a full-on boil. Because Barbara's family later learned that RP, the man seen driving Barbara's car, who was toting around a ski mask rope and gloves, was a convicted murderer.

In 1975, RP had been involved in a double homicide. He and three other guys went to the apartment of a 23-year-old man looking for someone named Slim, who they'd had a fight with earlier that day. The 23-year-olds that he didn't know where Slim was, but the four men's strong armed their way into his apartment anyway. They tried to torture the information out of the 23-year-old by tying him up and taking turns stabbing him. But the guy either didn't know where Slim was or wouldn't say, and they ended up stabbing him to death. Now, after that happened, a 16-year-old girl

came knocking on the door. So they brought her into the apartment. They showed her his dead body. I guess since she couldn't also provide any information about where this person is, they tied her up, threw the men raped her, and then they also stabbed her to death. The group of men then set fire to the apartment

in an attempt to cover up any evidence they left behind. But their plan didn't work all that well because the four men were soon arrested and charged for the double murder in Arsene. The court permitted RP to plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for his testimony against the other three men, which is how he was already out of prison less than 10 years later. Now, despite the fact that police had literally found a convicted murderer driving a missing woman's car,

Barbara's case quickly went cold. Over the following years, Barbara's family was left to mourn the loss of a woman they loved dearly, without even an ounce of closure. Every year on Barbara's birthday, her family gathered to celebrate hoping that one day she'd come home, with every passing year that hope faded, more and more. Her family remembered her fondly as a hard worker, and a strict but loving mother. Anthony told the Washington Post that she wants discipline him for his clothes being dirty by cutting off the bottoms of almost all of his pairs of pants making them into shorts, but she didn't hold on to the punishment for long, and she took him shopping for more

pants almost immediately. It was sweet memories like that that Barbara's family clung to, as the years faded into decades, still, with no answers. Sadly, the next movement in Barbara's case didn't come until 2007, more than 20 years later. That's when Anthony decided to call MPD and check on the status of the investigation. He spoke with Detective Traenum, who at the time was already deep in the trenches of bringing life back to the city's coldest of cold cases. I was actually running a program where we were going back and trying to identify as many unsolved cases as possible and we were putting cases into searchable databases. We were trying

to do link analysis. We were looking for cases that had DNA potential because a lot of these cases were only on paper and there was no way of trying to do any sort of computerized search for suspects or witnesses in common and things like that. And as part of that, I became kind of the clearing house for victims of homicides, their families. They would call me up, they would inquire what's going on with their case. I would take the case out of turn, research it,

do an analysis of it, sit down and talk with them. And if there was something there, then we would get it assigned out. After speaking with Anthony, Trinum's interest was peaked, and he began working on Barbara's case. A lot of co-cash units are there trying to close the easy ones just because of the raise of stats, that sort of thing.

This wasn't going to benefit anybody except the family. I mean, this wasn't going to lead to a stat, maybe down the road, but nothing quick. But I just knew that this was a murder and needed to get into the system. We needed to set it up so that if our body was out there, we had it, we could identify it, if not, it was found, and then we can go from there. And so I began, just to start doing research on this. The first thing I did was I attempted to find any paperwork on it. And this occurred back in 1984. And so that was, you know, a couple of decades.

Detective Trainham knew that because of how old the case was, and because of the department's policies, the stuff he was looking for was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to find. Record storage, especially a hard record, you know, hard copy record storage costs money. And so what the agencies did, like mine, is they came up with a system where after a certain number of years, they would say you could recently expect that we would not need these documents anymore.

So they would authorize their destruction, thus opening up more space for other records to come in, and they wouldn't have to spend as much money. Trainham said that just in case someone over in another district had some vials tucked away in a back room, he began calling around to see if he could find something, anything, but it was a lost cause. So at that point I also sit down and had a meeting with the family where my philosophy was especially with these older cases, she just be honest

with them. I mean, if we screwed up, we screwed up. If we got rid of something, this was a policy back then. Yeah, it was wrong. Yeah, it's causing us problems now. We're sorry, but let's see what we can do to try to rectify this. I mean, I think people appreciate it when they don't get to run around. And you just tell them what the real deal is, and then at least try to rectify the problem.

And that's what we were doing. I sit down and interviewed them. I got as much detail as possible. I created reports documenting that information, put it into our searchable databases. I also did, you know, background checks on the guy who was found in the car, going back in the old newspaper archives, especially back, you know, during that time period. They put in a lot of information that you don't get today, like people's full names, ages, addresses, all kinds of stuff.

So I tried to reconstruct the case file as much as possible. As part of this, Traynum began doing some preliminary research on RP, and he learned that aside from the double murder, he allegedly committed another violent crime. This other crime RP was alleged to have committed cast a scary shadow over what could have happened to Barbara. He was actually arrested for kidnapping a woman at a bus stop and raping her. The charges were later dropped, but for Tranum, this was just piling on more suspicion to a man who was already suspect number one. Tranum told our reporting team that he would have loved to talk with RP all these years later.

You know, maybe a guilty conscience had been eating away at him and he was itching to get something off his chest. But due to very limited resources and all of the other cases, Tranum was working to revive, he hadn't been able to do that. In fact, he didn't even know if RP was still alive. With the time and resources he did have, though, Traynum kept working the case. As I found out more and more about the case, I became more and more convinced of the force that she was murdered and we actually had a suspect and we could potentially solve it With some of the evidence that was recovered during the follow-up investigation

But when I went to look for the evidence I went back and to the old logbooks that we used to keep for evidence and property that we put in or stuff in by hand back in a day And there was nothing there You heard that right. All of the evidence recovered from the scene, the rope, ski mask and gloves gone. As sad as it sounds, Traenam said that working with these old cases, it's something that he's seen far too often. The missing evidence was especially disheartening in Barbara's case because that was pretty much it.

There really wasn't much else to go on. Those were the items that I was trying to find. Because if we could find those items and you know, test them for DNA, if we got a striker's DNA on those items, especially with the suspects DNA on the items, that would be pretty good evidence that he was somehow involved. But those weren't the only items the department had lost. Barbara's diary and other personal items, which were taken as part of the initial investigation,

had also disappeared from police custody. Before moving on to other cases, Detective Trainham got a blood sample from Anthony, and he put it into Namus so it could be compared to any unidentified remains entered into the database. Obviously, Anthony was gutted to learn that everything from his mom's case, from the files to the evidence, were gone. I just remember him disbelief and anger on his part, which he still has today. I just remember, you know, the family being dissatisfied with the way the entire thing was handled and rightfully so.

The thing about it is, as I have one thing about working these older cases is it makes you realize you kind of think, okay, you know, it's been 20 or 30 years, you know, Tom heals everything, right? But when you talk to the next to Ken, a lot of times, it's like it just happened yesterday. And you just see all the old emotions come up

and it's just so raw. Even though the evidence and the original case file can never be recovered in Barbra's case, Detective Trainham did what he could to ensure another family would never have to go through the same thing. Part of what I was doing is identifying problems that we've had with our investigative process over the years that cause cases like this to happen and make recommendations so that they

don't happen again. So in that part, part is kind of satisfying, like one of the things that we did was we were part of the movement to pass laws that mandated that our files be maintained longer than they were. And so that was an outcome of stuff like this. So even though you want to say it was frustrating that this happened, we at least turned it around and also tried to make something positive out of it, by learning a lesson from what we had done wrong. After Detective Trainum revisited that this happened, we at least turned it around and also tried to make something positive out of it, by learning a lesson from what we had done wrong. After Detective Trainum revisited the case in 2007, things went cold again.

Trainum retired in 2010, heartbroken that Barbara's case remained unsolved, and that few seemed to care. The radio silence continued for years, until 2018, in the spring, when Anthony and his family received some news that had them hopeful for the very first time in a long time. According to the Washington Post, a construction crew working at an apartment building on the southeast side of DC unearthed skeletal human remains in a crawl space. When police conducted a search of the property, they located even more human remains

buried behind the building. They determined that the remains were those of three women between the ages of 35 and 45. One of them had been beaten to death and the other two fatally shot. After this discovery, police started sifting through old unresolved missing persons reports to see which of them could be consistent with the bodies that were found.

And one of the eight missing persons cases they zeroed in on was Barbara's. Not only did she match the age range provided, but the remains were discovered less than a mile from the complex that her car was found at in 1984. For Anthony, the news came with mixed feelings. He told the Washington Post, quote, I want closure, but I don't want her body to be one of those bodies under that damn ground. I'm just saying, I don't want her to have died like that, under some damn building." End quote.

Anthony was notified that they would be testing his DNA against the remains to determine if they were, in fact his mother's. And just a couple of months later, the results came back. None of the remains were barbarous. I can only imagine what her family felt after receiving the news. Disappointment that they didn't get closure, but possibly relief, too, that they could still cling to the hope that their Barbara was still out there somewhere, maybe alive and well.

As far as Traynum knows, that was the last movement in Barbara's case. The Metropolitan Police Department denied our request for an interview, so we don't know where exactly the case stands now. We hope things are still going on behind the scenes, and that MPD is fighting for justice for Barbara. But there hasn't been any public movement in her case since the discovery of those remains in 2018. Now that Traynum is retired, he's left wrestling with the reality of a botched investigation

that could have gone so differently. If police had taken things more seriously from the get-go, and if they had actually taken the time to consider RP a suspect, who knows, maybe this case would be closed. I think that the primary focus would have and should have been on this RP guy simply because of the facts of the case and his background. That's something Traynum still can't wrap his mind around. How officers back in 1984 just let him go.

But as good of a suspect, as RP seems, Traenham said there are plenty of other scenarios where he wasn't involved in Barbara's murder. Maybe somebody else killed her and he just came across her car. That's an alternative theory. I mean, we're thinking that he's a killer because, of course, his background, but maybe he's got the car from somebody else. Trainham knows that Barbara's case was far from a priority for MPD when he was there, and he suspects nothing has changed.

But he's hopeful that one day the right tip will come in. The stars will align, and finally, after all these years, Barbara's family will know what happened to her. I shoot a lot of detectives get really possessive of their cases and they kind of feel like they don't want anybody to solve it but them so they kind of are secretive about their case thought. I would love for anybody to come across any of these cases, any of my old cases. Shoot, I don't have any ego there, solve that thing. A lot of cases that you have you look back on and you realize, man, if I had just done this or if I had just known that, I could have probably solved this thing. I have a lot of cases like that. So I would be happy even though it would highlight

something I didn't do or a mistake that I made, I would be very happy for somebody to come back and to resolve it because it's not about me, it's about them. It's been nearly 40 years since Barbara disappeared and not only is her family still waiting for justice, they're still waiting for the closure of knowing what happened to her. No one should have to live with that weight on their shoulders. So if you know anything, call the Metropolitan Police Department at 202-727-9099. You can request to remain anonymous, or you can text 504-11 to submit an anonymous tip. If you provide information leading to an arrest and conviction, you could be eligible for a reward of up to $25,000. Barbara is described as 5'2, 130 pounds, black female with black hair and brown eyes.

She was last seen wearing a green shirt and white slacks. She would be in her late 70s today. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve?