Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom? - What to Listen to Next - Mind of a Monster: The Butcher Baker

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

If you enjoyed Why Can't We Talk About Amanda's Mom?, check out a new podcast from ID - Mind of a Monster: The Butcher Baker. Listen to episode 1, We Called Her Eklutna Annie here.1980s Alaska: a swirling, chaotic mix of oil workers, dancers, sex workers and old-school cops. On the seedy 4th Avenue strip in Anchorage, nicknamed the world's longest bar, women start to go missing, plucked from the street or the bars and never seen again. In this 7-part series, Dr. Michelle Ward investigates the case of one of the US's most prolific, but not widely known, serial killers. She'll talk to survivors, criminology experts and the police on the ground, uncovering audio tapes, police reports and old newspaper articles, all to reveal the killer's identity as it happened.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast explores themes of murder and rape. The SNR discretion is advised. It's a cool Alaskan summer day in 1980. Detective Maxine Farrell is at her desk in the Anchorage Police Department. Call came in from patrol that has alignment and called in that there was a body out there. Somebody said, oh, there's a body to dig up, but you know,

which you did a dirty job, said Maxine. So there I went. 30 miles from Anchorage, the small native village of Acutna is home to a huge power plant. Rows upon rows of power lines cut through the dense forest, giving the impression of waterways running for miles along the remote landscape. We get to the site and there, you know, you look at it and you see pieces of a body.

Here, they're all over the place. The bearers had been moving the body around. And the clothing and the stuff. The side of the clothing, you know, and the boots and whatever we saw, it was closed that we would see prostitutes wearing on 4th Avenue. She was buried in the woods. We figure somebody killed her. The remains of the young girl are taken to the coroner's office,

who determines she's been stabbed to death. Weeks and months pass by, and still there are no answers. The area we found her in was in a glutna. It's just outside of the Anchorage Line. And so we call her a glutna-anning. A glutna-anning's case lingers in the back of Maxine's mind during the subsequent months as she starts to get more reports of missing women on her desk. Now, over 40 years later, it's still there.

I think it's still open because they never did find out who she was. But we still don't know who she is. This is Mind of a Monster, the Butcher Baker. And I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Ward. In this seven-part series, we're going to be unraveling the case of one of the most prolific, but not so widely known serial killers in US history. And to do that, we're going to start right at the beginning.

We're going to follow the investigation through the eyes of the victims, the police officers, and Alaska State troopers who were there on the ground. We'll delve into police reports, old newspaper articles, and uncover audio tapes, all to reveal the identity of the killer as it happened. This is episode one. We called her a Clutna Annie. For me, the story starts with Maxine Farrell, the detective who responded to the call

about a Clutna Annie's body. I was hired on as a police officer with the Anchorage Police Department in March of 1973. Maxine is in her 80s now with beautiful street silver hair and dark pink lipstick. She has bright whip smart eyes and as we start to talk to her, her husband hands Maxine her glasses. You're welcome. Go to glasses on. There we go.

I'm a complete mixture. My father's Irish German, my mother's from Panama. My grandmother is from Jamaica, and then my great-grandmother is an arrow-acquinden. So that's my heritage. You're like the United Nations. Yes, I'm a United Nations. I always, when I say, what race are you,

I said anything. You name it. I'm looking at Nations. I always want to say, what race are you? I said anything. You name it. I'm looking at a picture of you right now at this crime scene and you look so intense. I can only see the back of you and you're in your jumpsuit getting ready to get your hand sturdy doing the actual work. Have you seen this photo? I haven't. The picture I show Maxine is from the Alaska State Troopers records. She's standing over a Clutna Annie's shallow grave. She has curly dark hair. Her male colleagues are still in suits looking stiff and formal. But Maxine is in this dark jumpsuit with her hands on her hips. Her legs astride. I used to dress up, let me give you an example.

I used to dress up to go to work in case I had to go to court about something or whatever to look decent. But I always, in my car, I had jumpsuits and things to put on and boots if I had to go to a dirty job because I expected it. But right at the start, when you begin at the Ingrid's police department, you aren't actually a cop then, right?

When I first hired on, I said, I'm working the counter and I'm taking police reports all the time. I'm doing police officers work. So can I apply to be a police officer? They said, no, we're not hiring women. Well, there was a federal law that came down that they had to have women. And this was actually part of the Civil Rights Act, right? Prevented women from being discriminated against in public agencies.

Right. I think what they did was they went around and looked for the two quietest women in the department and that was Jan and I. We were very strong people, but they didn't realize that they thought we were real team and quiet women. We figured they hired us so we could fail. And so we got on there with the attitude that we're not going to fail. We showed up.

Because you guys are warriors. Can I just stop for a moment to say what a badass this woman is? It's 1973. Not a single woman has ever been hired as a police officer in the Anchorage Police Department. She's finally getting hired because they have to employ women, but she knows exactly what they're doing. They don't want her to succeed, and she's having none of it. So we ran in with an attitude that we're going to do whatever, they sent us we would go to a bike stolen record and write up a fantastic report and we just did it. The two of us did that.

How was the reaction of your male colleagues? Some of them are right out I remember Sergeant standing with me as I was ex-us in one day to go home and he says you shouldn't be here and I said well where should I be? He said you should be home taking care of your kids and I said, you shouldn't be here. And I said, well, where should I be? He said, you should be home, taking care of your kids. And I said, you're wrong. I'm here, and I'm going to stay. And then I walked off. So for a number of years, you're a patrol cop. When did you become a detective?

I think they realized because my sergeants usually put me up to be officer of the month. The lieutenant, he was always on my side. He was always a supportive person. We just called me in his office and said, would you like to go into homicide? Well, it was called death investigation at that time. And I said, sure.

I would say yes to anything that was like a promotion. And I walked in there. Two years later, Maxine is working the desk when a guy walks into the station to report his girlfriend missing. Her boyfriend is just a general guy. Just missing his girlfriend. And he's saying she would not leave me. We're going to get married and that and that. And what was his girlfriend's name? It was Sherry Marrow. And she was a dancer?

Yeah, he was adamant that she would not have gone off and not told him where she was going or not come back to him. And at first I thought, well, you know, these girls do that. And then I thought, no, no, he's too convinced that she wouldn't and how committed she was to him

and sticking to buy it, you know, he wanted her back. Maxine takes down Sherry's details. Her boyfriend describes the clothing she was wearing and a gold arrowhead necklace Sherry always wears. And he would bug me. Every week or every day if he could, he'd call me or he'd come in to see if I found out anything. And I say sorry, I haven't found out anything.

Sherry, my roommate, she's, she didn't have any family up here. And we kind of hit it off. You're hearing the voice of Susan Bradford. As she says, she lived with Sherry at the time she went missing. Susan was 18, Sherry was 24. They'd both come to Anchorage to escape from difficult paths. I was running away from a very abusive situation. So we tried not to dwell on it. We're just trying to make a new living for ourselves and get away from the bad.

Susan is sadly now deceased, but she spoke to the mind of a monster documentary team in 2020. We actually physically looked a lot alike. She was blonde, haired, very sweet, very curvy girl. 36, 24, 36. I mean, just a lovely lovely soft-spoken lady. I mean, we even used to share costumes. That's how much alike we were. Very quiet, very shy. We both had day shifts. We're considered good girls. If you want to put it that way, sweet polite, not nighttime. One day on shift at the Good Times Club in 1981,

a guy has Susan sit down next to him with a bottle of champagne. He's not the type person that would ever stand out. He just looked like the average Joe. He kept telling me I have an airplane, I have an airplane, I'm like yeah, I was one of those girls that just wasn't impressed with material things, but he'd ask me, do you have family? If you're where'd you come from?

And his big drill, do you have sisters and brothers? Where are you from? What you're doing? He got someone tense. He even asked me, do you want to go on a date? I went, nah, nah, I prefer not to. You know what I mean? The next thing I know, the next day, you know, Sherry goes, hey, I got a date.

This guy's the airplane. I said, yeah, I got a date this guy's airplane. I said, yeah, I remember him talking to me, he gave me the creeps. I said, why do you want to meet him? And she goes, well, I think he's kind of nice. Well, you walk me to the appointment. And I said, absolutely, I'll walk you down. He had Sherry meet him downtown in this quaint little place that served. I mean, there's just like a little food stop.

And I remember going, hey, have a nice trip, you guys. I'll see you later on today. And he just gave me this cold, weird stare. And I went home. You know, a couple of days went by. I remember going and looking in a room to see if she'd been back. Nothing had been touched, nothing had changed, nothing. She just disappeared. Sherry's disappearance hits Susan hard.

She's absolutely sure that something bad has happened to her. And now she's also worried for her own safety. I was just too terrified. After she'd come back, I scared of this guy, and then you're scared of me. What are you gonna do? I had to think something around, just instinct, get the hell out of there.

Make us a good, very easily. Hock me down. I moved out of that apartment and stayed with another friend for a couple of days until I could get a flight and a ticket out. Susan doesn't call the police and I want you to remember that as we're going to come back to why she doesn't later. Instead, she calls the office of the club where they both

work and reports Sherry missing, then requests permission to quit her job. I mean, I remember asking them, hey, can I leave the business? And they, you know, they allowed me to leave. I sold my car. I got my ticket and when we took it, and I flew, it was out of there. It's several weeks later that Sherry's boyfriend makes the Missing Persons report to Maxine.

But by that time, Susan is already out of the state. And Maxine never gets the crucial information about Sherry's date with the average Joe. But Maxine Sherry wasn't the only one, right? That time they say that time period, I'd look at my desk and I had at least seven women. And I'm saying, I brought these prostitutes. So I said there must be something going on. So you have this growing theory? Yes.

Actually, like Sherry and Susan, not all the women were sex workers. But if they didn't work the streets, they worked in topless and bottomless clubs. For Maxine, it was too much of a coincidence. Did you talk to your superiors about this? All right, well, I made the remark that was talking about a clutin' and I need to some journalist. I think it was from the

Anchorage Times. And I said, we've had a lot of missing girls and I've got a feeling that maybe there's a serial killer. There may be a serial killer out there. Well, that got in the news right away. My superiors went crazy. They did. So they came down on me and they said, what are you doing? And you're going to upset the entire community blah, blah, blah. I was getting balled out for it. And I said, you know, I think there is a serial killer. And I'm telling them all the things I have and what's going on. And they're saying, no, no, no, nothing like that. And so they made me go to the newspaper,

called them in so I could tell them, I don't think it's that, I think it's just, you know, we have missing girls all the time and they might come back and talk it down because he said I was going to upset the community. How did that make you feel? I was so angry. Before we go any further, I want to do some scene setting because Anchorage at this time is not like anywhere else in the world. What were your impressions of Anchorage when you first got there?

As you're coming in on the airplane, you're flying over the Chewgatch mountains and they go on and on and on snow captains. And I'm going, I can't like this. This is Leland Hale. He's the charming, affable author of the book Butcher Baker and a rigorous researcher. He first came to Anchorage in the early 80s on the invitation of the state troopers. Do you see the massage parlors first?

Because they're closer to the airport. So you don't even have to go into Anchorage, right to get services. Is that like Vegas where they leave the slot machine right at the very end before you get on the airplane? So you come back for more? Yeah, right. Sort of like that, yeah, and then I'm driving.

What do I see but a moose in a neighborhood showing on a tree? I am definitely in Alaska. I'm not at home. I am not at home anymore. And what's going on in Anchorage and Alaska at this time in the 1970s and 80s. Alaska is sort of an extractive economy. It's a boom in bust economy. So you've got oil, before that you had gold. You've always got fish, and you've always got temper.

Those are the main sources of wealth. And each of those industries attracts transient people. And at this particular time, it's the black gold of oil, and it's attracting men, mostly men from the oil patch. So that's Texas and Oklahoma, places where they're already experiencing how to extract and drill for oil. From October until the end of August, we had moved approximately 34,000 passengers. It's tough, tough work.

Just so you have an idea of exactly how many men, it's estimated that 70,000 traveled to Alaska to work on the 800-mile long Transalaska Pipeline. So those men work up on the North Slope for weeks at a time and then they get a paycheck and they get some days off and they come to Anchorage and they want to spend it. So in a very short amount of time, secondary industries pop up to serve these guys in their downtime. Bars, eateries, strip clubs, and an explosion of sex workers, most of whom reside along the Strip, 4th Avenue in downtown Anchorage. So, Leland, tell me what was your first reaction

when you saw Fourth Avenue? What was that like? So, I was lucky because I got a guided tour of Fourth Avenue by a cop. It was famously described by comedian Bob Hope. Fourth Avenue is the longest bar in the world. It's like the sex workers start off on the East end and then they gradually make their way closer to the fancier hotels because there's more money and there's more tourists and there's more opportunity and as they get really sort of

dangerously close to hotel Captain Cook, they start busting them. They start arresting them. And then it starts all over again at the other end of Fourth Avenue. And there were a lot of police calls. I mean, one club had hundreds of cops in a year. It's like the Wild Wild West. Yes.

My name is John Daly. I'm a senior officer with the English Police Department. I'm still working there. Yes. My name is John Daly. I'm a senior officer with the English Police Department. I'm still working there. Wow. So you've been there a long time with that particular department? A little over 42 years now. In the early 1980s, John is a rookie.

He's just finished his training and started on patrol, right in the thick of the 4th Avenue chaos. How green were you or how season were you? Pretty green. Barbrake would come around and they would open up and literally just shove all these crowds. Everybody completely drunk while all on the street. A lot of times you'd just go to, you'd go to one fight, break them up, throw them off of each other, throw them against the wall, stop this, and then, okay, this one is calmed down.

The next one, go to that, and you were just going up and down the street. It was a hard time keeping a cap on it. We were right up there with some of the busiest cities, like Chicago, we could, per capita, we could match Chicago with our crimes. Because people came to Alaska, this is the last frontier, they can do whatever they want. So we've looked into this, and in fact, crime rates in 1980 were higher in Anchorage,

7.7% to Chicago's 5.8%. And when it comes to rapes, the number in Anchorage was almost double not of Chicago. So violence against women is part of the fabric of Anchorage life at this time. It's something that police encounter a lot. And men and women are coming and going from Anchorage all the time. So I asked John Dele what happens when a girl goes missing in this kind of environment? With that large number of people, the number of dancers and prostitutes and workers and everybody coming through the transiency of the time, I haven't seen Susan in a while. Well, Susan could be anywhere.

She could be back down to low 48. She could be working up in another town. You just don't know. But there's another layer to this when that Maxine Farrow was more than aware of at the time. At that time, and I think it's still to some degree still that way, you know, and it's just a prostitute, a dirty prostitute who cares. They go away all the time and they, you know, they take jobs. There was a big turnover. And you felt differently.

Oh, yeah. You know, I realized that a lot of them were just girls. Their stories were so different as to what and why they were there. It's September 1982, nearly a year after Sherry went missing, and there's still no formal case open at the APD looking into her disappearance. But I want to take you out of Anchorage for a moment, 35 miles north to be precise, to the scenic banks of the Kinnick River and the beautiful Alaskan wilds. Police officer John Daly just bought land out there

with the hopes of building a house. We were just like a lot of people chasing the Alaska dream. I mean, I loved to fish, hot, fly, boat. I love to get out and explore. I mean, one of the big sayings is the good thing about Anchorage is it's really close to Alaska. Take us back to September 12th, 1982.

Where were you and what were you doing? Well, myself and my friend and coworker, Audi Holloway, we both went through the academy together. So we made a plan on a go that we were gonna go take the boat to the river, put it in, and float down the river, and hunt for moose. The sky is dull and cloudy, and there's a distinct chill in the air as the two young cops start to head downstream. First two young guys didn't check the weather very much and there was a storm blowing in. They're a pretty heavy wind and even just for the river there,

it was rocking pretty good. We realized pretty quickly that we didn't get our tails off the river. It's a good chance that we're gonna swap. You decided to cut your losses? Yes. So we dragged the boat off, got into the trees, found a good place, set up our camp or tent. It was getting late later in the evenings. We still had light. There was enough to go hunting. So we started doing a hunt and going along the sand dunes towards the major part of the trees and Otty ended up coming first on this area as a

depression. It looked unusual because you see things out there, you know, the way the wind blows and creates the effect there and it's pretty consistent and this depression was kind of circular. And Adi ends up seeing, it's called a moonboot and that wasn't that unusual. Could have been just somebody camping that dropped it off there and our got buried somehow. And so we looked at it and we're basically almost ready to just go on our way. And then we noticed there was some fabric. If I remember, it was a denim type fabric.

And you could tell it'd been there for a little while, and then we started manipulating it to look and kind of the hair started sticking up and there was a kneecap under it. It's a body. there was a body under this. You know, this isn't just like an accidental. Somebody just stumbled around and fell off. I mean, it was, this was done on purpose.

It's a chilly September 9 to 1982, infating light on the banks of the Kinnick River. Off-Duty police officer John Daly and his buddy stand over what they are pretty sure is a shallow grave. What was going through your mind when you saw that piece of skin. Your new cop here, see something like this, and you're, you go on, this is something. And on the other hand, too, it's a little bit, I don't want to see frightening, but what have I got myself into, what's what's going on here with this? Who at the time dealt with bodies in that part of Kinnick? Well, that was the State Troopers.

So the Anchorage Police Department deals with things actually in the City of Anchorage, the more of a central location, and it's the State Troopers who deal with everything else? Correct. Because John and his friend are on a hunting trip, they have no vehicle, no radios, and they're out of Anchorage Police Department jurisdiction. Back then, nobody had, there was nothing like cell phones or anything like that. We had nothing, anything, any communication. So we made a decision to go back to our camp, sleep out through the night. Did across your mind that there might still be a killer there nearby?

It did. I mean, we were kind of thinking, you know, who knows. It's kind of a wild, wild west out there. I mean, it could have been anybody. Talk us through the next morning. We walked our way back up to our friends, Kevin got to use their phone and called up the troopers. The troopers arrived and they head down the trail with John to the site in a 4x4, 4-Bronco. Once we got them out there, they did a good job of doing an approach, making their observations and slowly, meticulously, and then deciding that, yeah, we definitely

have a homicide here. I mean, we're, you know, workies kind of gawking at it and seeing how they're doing it. And once they were able to unearth the body, what did they see? I think there's a, once we got to the head, there was an ace bandage that was wrapped around the victim's head. What did it mean to you that there was an ace bandage around her head? It's a sign of Ida me that Namoan was against her will, probably kidnapped. So that hit me fairly quickly.

This was somebody who was doing something that they had to have planned this out. Later, the coroner's report would confirm that this young woman had been shot through the heart. I mean, I had young kids and wife and everything, and it kind of hits home that, you know, something like this, we're out here. This is where I chose to live in this area.

I just bought like 24 acres right on the river, probably, within a quarter mile of where this occurred, and so all of a sudden, thinking, well, my little Alaska dream isn't an effect on me with that. The state troopers take on the case and the local media have a field day. The police are looking into the death of an unidentified body found in what appears to be a shadow grave. Remains are of a young girl aged between 18 and 25.

The death is being treated as suspicious. Alaska State Troopers report that the remains of a young woman died. Within a couple of weeks, the body is identified through dental records. It's missing dancer Sherry Moro. But there's one thing that nobody notices at the time. The golden arrowhead necklace Sherry always wears isn't on her body. Sherry's roommate Susan Bradford. I'm never seen the newspaper and it floored me when it all came to reality to see Sherry's picture in there and then to realize that all of that together I felt bad because I felt

like you know I walked her to her. Very last date. How would you feel? Not knowing, you know, did I do enough? For Detective Maxine Farrell, the discovery of Sherry's body was confirmation of what she's feared all along. It must have been kind of shocking for you to realize, oh gosh, this is the girl whose boyfriend's been looking for her, and she's dead.

That was the first one, and I said, I knew it. I knew it. All of them would turn up dead. Because that's what I was saying all along. This is a serial killer. But Maxine's alone in her conviction that there could be a link to the missing girls. In this article I'm looking at here, printed a few weeks after Sherry's body was found, a state trooper says, quote, there's nothing now to indicate that the disappearances are anything other than a coincidence. How do they make you feel at the time?

other than a coincidence. How did that make you feel at the time? The saying to me, you don't have the brains to say that there's a serial killer out there. And yet I was an expert on my cases in homicide. I had a clear 90, I think I was about 95% good on all my cases. They were so well done. Did they allow you to investigate it?

Well, I went ahead and investigated it anyway. That was my attitude. And this is why I love Maxine. She starts to compile all of the information she can about the other missing girls. That's no easy task when most of them dance under pseudonyms like angel or enchantment. We didn't have any names.

We had names that they gave us, but we didn't have any real names. So part of my job during that time was going down there, and checking with all the girls, anybody who knew the girl missing, did they know what they know about her. So where did you start? How did you approach the girls? I had a good relationship with Edna Cox, one of the Bush Company, and this was a strip club in town.

That's right. So when the girls were being missing, I went to her and I said, this is going on. Need to talk to your girls, and I need to get your records with real names and real social security numbers. And she was helping me in every way she could. She let me come in one evening and sit down with the girls and talk to them and say, you go out, try and get a license number. Try and take another person with you. Don't go out alone. The chances

are you could be killed. I want to take a sidebar here. In the 1980s, a lot of the clubs in Anchorage, including the Bush Company, were run by a Seattle-based talent company called Talents West, whose job it was to bring girls to the town from the lower 48. Now, Talents West didn't form a big part of the original investigation. It was like a backdrop to the scene, but everyone we spoke to knew they existed and knew what they did. Author Leland Hale has looked into their history extensively.

Tell me about how Talents West operated. Talents West is run by an Italian mafia guy. He's not affiliated with, into the other families, he's runs it independently. His name is Frank Callacuccio. He came up with this idea, what if we took over clubs that are failing? So I've got a bar, let's say, and I'm just not making any money. Well, what if we bring in topless dancers? So he sets up talent's west, and they advertise in the classified ads, dancers wanted, and women answer, and they come.

So they fill a whole load of bars with dancing girls, but how are they making their money from this operation? So there's a further benefit because they're buying a struggling bar. So what's good about a struggling bar? They're not paying a lot of taxes. They're not making a lot of money. And once you get the dancers in there and you're really making money, you can start skimming to profits. It's a perfect front. Right.

Now, there's something else I want you to understand. Originally, Kolokhruchyo was paying the girls as employees, but in May 1982, he got busted for not paying workers comp. So, he devised a legal workaround. The dancers were classified as, quote, entertainers. And this is the part that blows my mind. As entertainers, the girls had to pay talents west to dance at the bars, rather than the other way around. And this is exactly the arrangement

that Sherry Moro and Susan Bradford were under. They added in the newspapers what I answered and it was they were looking for dancing girls and they'd pay your flight up here, they'd put you up in a hotel, you'd make really good money. I mean, perfect for a scared girl trying to get away. Look like a heck of a deal. But when Susan got up to Anchorage, the reality was very different. But when Susan got up to Anchorage, the reality was very different. You had to dance every day in their clubs, you had to live in their housing and every day that you were living in their housing and in their clubs. You had to care debt. And so you had to work until the debt was paid before you could leave. The girls had to pay back their airfares, they had to pay to dance, and they had to pay rent for their accommodations. For the mind of a monster documentary, Susan returned to the building she lived in with Sherry.

We were brought over to this building here. I said, this is your apartment, and you walked in and there was literally just two mattresses. It was like a cold, empty room with no life, not even a pillow to put your head on. There was a couple girls that ran away. They were brought back. They were brought back. Yeah, they were made to pay their debt. It was terrifying.

So, Lealand, how may understand this? Because there are some women we've talked to who worked for these clubs, and they had a great time. They earned thousands of dollars a week, sometimes even in a day. They are the stars, and so it's like, you know, maybe you're not doing something right, because these women are just bankin' the box. Susan Bradford says the same thing. Thousands of dollars I saw those girls make.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. There was so much money, there was so much cocaine. It was ridiculous. And I guess you have to be into that. I was an enter, the drugs and nor did I care to earn the money the way that we're making their money. I've barely made a hundred bucks a day compared to the other girls to give you an idea.

It took Susan nine months to pay off her debts and leave her position at Talents West for good. It's almost like a little prison. It's almost like nowadays, what would you just... It's almost like trafficking, but in a different way. You know what I mean? You belong to them until your debts are paid. You know, that's how we looked at it. I really want to get a sense of how much

a mafia organization like Talents West can contribute to potential violent crime against women. So I call up Dr. Brent Turby. Hi, Brent, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? It's good to hear from you. Brent lived in Alaska for nearly 20 years, and he's a criminal profiler who works on violent

crime cases. Right now, he mostly lives in Mexico, which is while you'll hear the odd street horn outside his windows. You have a very specific specialty. Your focus is on Femicide and crimes against women in general. How is this and why is this important to you? When I was younger, I had a girlfriend who was sexually abused by her brother and when she reported it, her family made her keep quiet about it. They found out the brother had been doing this for years, but they said he's getting married, he's got kids, you're gonna destroy his life,

so you're really the problem. And so she wound up trying to kill herself. Oh my gosh. And I watched everyone sort of descend on that and just ripped that apart and destroy her. It was very awful to watch. That is horrible. When you talk to Brent,

you can tell within a few minutes that he's a guy on a mission. He talks a million miles an hour and you kind of get the sense that every fiber of his existence is there for the express purpose of pointing out injustices. His opinion on talent's West is very clear. So the mo of talent's West was they would pray, they would solicit and pray upon young, vulnerable girls who they viewed as disposable.

They, you know, it's just like any other pimped, any other, any other trafficker, sex trafficker. They bring in somebody, they consume them until they're no longer a viable product and then they discard them. I mean, it looked like sex trafficking to me. Yeah, it is. So people will play all these girls that a choice, right? Man, this is the problem. They're targeting vulnerable girls, vulnerable young women who don't have a lot of other options or

opportunities available to them. It's like being being impoverished and having crises is like being on fire. You'll do anything to make it stop. Yeah, I mean, in the case of Susan, she just needed to get out of a bad situation any way she could. That's exactly right. There's one, you know, how they function as a business and what they do, and how they acquire talent, talents west. And then the other part is how it never gets seems to get eradicated, even though it's going on right in front of everyone. Well, that's because you have a huge military base there, and you have a huge population

of migrant workers on the pipeline in the oil fields that were discovered in 67. And their goal was not to protect these women, their goal was to service these men to keep them working and happy. That was their goal. Now, this isn't just your opinion, right? Well, it's happening today. Right. There's this one study of a man camp in the oil region of Montana done in 2019. And to be clear, this is where a large number of unaccompanied male workers moved to an area to work in oil, or timber, or gold, and they live there in a camp. The study showed that violent crime in those areas shot up. Reported, violent, reported crime.

She had 70 percent. up. Reported, violent, reported crime. So, it's 70%. Rape, murder, and manslaughter alone reported was up 30%. And then the regions directly outside of the oil areas, violent crime rates, fell. The issue is that men who are committing those crimes are moving into the man camps. This moves the crime to those locations. It also moves some of the vulnerable victim populations to those locations. So, to put it another way, in order to service the man working out in the oil fields of Alaska,

Talents West facilitates the move of vulnerable girls into a high crime area. And the type of crime that explodes in these very male dominated places tends to be violent crime against women. But there's another impact talents West has on these investigation in particular. Earlier I told you that Susan didn't go to the police when Sherry went missing. Well now I want you to understand why. We were told police are not your friends. That's not a place

where you ever called the police. Help me. You didn't ask questions. You were told don't even ask questions. You always reported everything to junior or one of his staff. Never to the police. Junior, Susan's boss. That's Frank Kooler Kirchio's son, 20-year-old, Frank Kooler Kirchio, Jr. I remember calling the office and going, and I took a sherry to meet the sky, and she never came back, and I think it was wrong. And it was like, eh, these girls disappear all the time.

They act like they didn't care. No big deal. That happens all the time. They acted like they didn't care. No big deal. It happens all the time. Wish I'd have the courage back then to go to the police. Instead of being scared and running. That's funny. It falls on the terrified 18-year-old Susan to make an impossible decision. 18-year-old Susan to make an impossible decision. Risk herself further or get the hell out. I'm not surprised that she chose her own safety. No one else was looking out for her or girls like her. It's now spring of 1983.

I'm intense on doing a good job. I'm intense of finding evidence. After months of work, Detective Maxine Farrell has tracked down dental records, taking notes of the jewelry the missing girls were wearing, and contacted as many family members as she can. When she is finished, she has a list of no less than 12 missing girls. Yeah, I found out much of their background as I could, and I had it up on a list on my wall. Now her attention turns to suspects. One is a transient worker who fled to Hawaii.

The second guy was this guy that was taking pictures around town. Maxine remembers that there had been complaints from parents that this guy was approaching teenage girls and asking to take their pictures in supermarkets. The last suspect on my list was Robert Hanson. Hanson was a guy who frequented the topless and bottomless clubs in town. He was not that tall.

He had glasses and was soft-spoken. That talk to the girls down at the Bush Company. and a couple of them had told me they only wanted to offer them money, but he's so innocent and he's an okay guy, he wouldn't hurt them. Next time on Mind of a Monster, a missing girl makes it back to the police. I take my dad's hands. And I take my hand, my hand, my hand, my hand. And it was fish. There was wolf skins. There were stuffed animals everywhere. Mind of a monster but your baker is produced by Aero Media for ID.

The executive producer for ID is Jessica Louder. Aero Media's producer is Jess Lindevere. Editor is Millie Tachner, audio engineering by Mahoney Audio Post. Our line producer is Philippa Widow. Our production manager is Alexandra Kelly. Our junior production manager is Jody Tanner Wilde. Our production coordinator is Shannon Tunecliffe. Our archive producer is

Katya Lomb, and our assistant producer is Isabel Wilson. Arrow Media's series producer is Gabrielle Nash, and executive producer is Stuart Pender. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Ward. you