Transcript
Peyton Moreland (0:00)
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Over 5.2 million people have already used Noom to achieve their goals, so why aren't you stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your trial today@noom.com based on a three and a half year study of actively engaged Noom users with a minimum starting BMI of 25. Individual results may vary. Visit their website for more information. Work Management Platforms ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks admin requests but what if things were different? Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, beautiful reports in minutes, custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use prompt free AI hu. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use. You're listening to an Ono Media Podcast. Hey everyone, welcome back to the into the Dark podcast. I'm your host Peyton Moreland and I'm so happy you are here. If you are watching on YouTube and can subscribe, turn on notifications. Give this video a thumbs up. Leave a comment. Honestly just any interaction with the video helps so much and if you are listening on audio and can leave a review 5 stars please that would be great. If not I'm happy you're here. Today we are diving into a true crime case but before we get into that we need to do my 10 seconds. Well my husband Garrett and I have been going to the Utah Hockey games because we are big hockey fans and our boys have been doing so good. Except actually last game they did lose but the game before that they did so good and we've had a couple good fights and it's just been really fun to follow along and I'M really, really rooting for them to get into the playoffs. So I'm crossing my fingers. You know, I didn't really know much about hockey until I started dating and then married Garrett. But I did read those. These hockey romance books, not the ones everyone talks about. I actually read the Briar U series and the Off Campus series, if you know what those are. Those are hockey books that follow a hockey team and each player's, like, love story. It's like a whole. I think there's like, eight books or something. But, yeah, that was really the only thing I knew about hockey. But now I've been watching the real thing, and it's been good. All right, I think that's all we're gonna talk about in my 10 seconds. Hockey, hockey, hockey. Let's jump into today's case. So family can be complicated. Some people don't have good relationships with their relatives, and in some cases, they don't have any kind of relationship at all. Even when everyone gets along, there can be tensions, secrets and complicated dynamics between parents, siblings, and children. And that's a theme in today's episode, all the difficulty that can come from the way you get along or don't with your family. So our case begins with a man named Richard Hanchett. He was raised by his adoptive parents, a couple who had been living in Michigan and working in a factory when they had first welcomed welcomed him into their family. And he always had complicated feelings about his birth mother. For the record, Richard didn't know who she was, but he did know around the time that he was a teenager, he did not want to meet her. That just seemed too emotionally painful. So he was content to have nothing to do with his birth mother and to not even know her name. However, Richard was starting to feel differently as he grew up. Decades had passed. It was actually around the time he reached his 60th birthday. By then, Richard's adoptive parents had passed away, and their deaths had him thinking differently about family and about his priorities in life. So finally, he felt ready to learn about where he had come from and who had given birth to him. Now, sadly, with his adoptive parents gone, Richard couldn't just ask them about how he had come to join their family. If he wanted to learn who his birth mother was, he would have to start at square one with no information. Now, luckily, it was 2018 by this time, when Richard was in his 60s. This is a time when commercial DNA tests were available to just about everyone. So Richard's girlfriend gave him a gift, a kit from Ancestry.com. and he sent in a DNA sample to try and figure out a little more about his biological family. Well, when he got his results, Richard was shocked. Not only because of his mother's identity, but because of her ties to a decades old unsolved murder. I mean, I think we have all heard stories about what the advances in DNA has done for people when they send DNA in and realize that their dad isn't their dad. Or maybe they aren't even related to their family at all. But this one, to be 60, looking for your birth mother and then find out that she's somehow tied to murder, that's gotta be strange. So the homicide in question was famous in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in part because of how gruesome it was. Okay, so we're going to back up. July 26, 1974, a family was visiting the Race Points beach in Cape Cod. This was in Provincetown. It was also a popular vacation destination, known in part for the scenic sandy dunes along the beach. Unsurprisingly, these dunes were called the Race Points Dunes. So the family was visiting friends who were staying in a tiny shack right there on the beach so they could spend every day swimming and playing without having to drive or find parking. So that meant the parents, the two daughters, Elisa and Leslie, and their two dogs were all together at this shack. Except on this day, one of the dogs seemed especially agitated. It kept barking and whimpering and trying to run off to explore the tree line in the distance. So eventually, the 12 year old Leslie became curious about what had made one of their dogs so upset. So she followed it over to the trees and stumbled on something truly shocking. A dead body was lying in the sand. It was badly decomposed. In fact, the deceased had been out on the beach undiscovered for weeks at this point. So this meant that Leslie, at 12, wasn't entirely sure what she had found. Her initial thought was maybe it was a dead deer. So she ran to her parents to ask for help. And they could tell just from her tone of voice that she was very shaken. Even if she didn't realize it was a dead person's body, she still understood that this was something serious and upsetting. So Leslie's parents only needed to take one look at the body to realize the truth. This was not a dead deer. Someone, a human being, had died on the beach. But the family had a problem. This is the 70s. There was no phone at the shack that their friends were renting and they didn't have a car parked nearby. So the quickest way they had of getting to the police was to walk toward town. Along the way, they waved at passing cars, shouting, we found a body. Finally, they got in touch with the locals, who passed the word along to detectives. So soon the investigators had swarmed the beach and they were able to tell a little bit about the person whose remains they'd found. She was a woman, but it was hard to get a sense of her age. Initially, the detectives could only say with certainty that she was between 25 and 45. She had Auburn colored hair which was still in a ponytail when she was found. Her nails were painted pink. The woman was naked, but the police did find her clothes very quickly. They were actually neatly folded underneath her as though like she was laying on them as a pillow. So it was clear that she hadn't died in an accident or of natural causes. First, the way she was lying on her stomach looked posed, like someone had left her that way on purpose. And there was also the fact that someone had smashed her head in. And the attack was vicious enough that this woman, this unknown woman, was almost decapitated. And the woman's killer had also cut off her hands. So this is very, very gruesome murder in what's supposed to be this beautiful, picture perfect place. So the police assumed that the victim had known her murderer, and they based this in part on the way the woman was lying when she was found. She was on one side of a beach towel, and the other half of the towel was empty, as though initially, at some point, someone had been sitting beside her. There were also no signs of a struggle. This told the police that her murderer had been able to get very close to her without alarming her. So perhaps she had been enjoying a day at the beach with a trusted companion who had suddenly flown into a rage and then killed her. Since the woman had no hands, there was no way to try to use fingerprints to identify her. It was also impossible to pull her dental records because the killer had knocked out several of her teeth while beating her. So the next step was to question people who lived or worked near the dunes and anyone who had visited recently. The police also reviewed all of their open missing persons cases to see if any women who matched this Jane's Doe description had disappeared recently. Now, unfortunately, none of these efforts went anywhere. Nobody recognized her, and she didn't match any recent missing persons cases. This told the investigators that the dead woman was probably not a local, which was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was that the people of Provincetown didn't need to feel distrustful of their friends and neighbors. If the victim was a tourist from out of town, that suggested her killer was also not from around there. The community had a reputation for being safe and tight knit, and people could keep feeling safe. They didn't need to fear that there was a murderer among them. But the bad news was that the culprit could have been just about anyone. There were so many tourists stopping through Cape Cod for visits, and the possibilities were endless. Still, the police did what they could to investigate the crime. Since they still hadn't identified the victim, they classified her as a Jane Doe. But the locals actually came up with a much more poetic name for her. This mysterious woman who had been murdered, almost decapitated, hands missing. They called her the lady of the Dunes. Obviously they called her that because of where she was found at the race points Dunes. Well, sadly, with no ID for the body and no clear suspects, the lady of the Dunes case went cold pretty fast. Years went by, and the investigators used every trick in the book to try and generate leads. They regularly put out calls to the public for tips and updates. And while they did get the occasional tip here and there, none of them panned out. As time went on, forensic technology got better. Crime scene investigators were able to create digital models of what the lady of the Dunes may have looked like, and they actually released the images all across the country. Officials also exhumed the Jane doe's body on three separate occasions. Once in 1980, another time in 2000, and then finally in 2003, when DNA technology became better. Some investigators even sent her skull to a lab to see if they could find a genetic match. But ultimately, none of these efforts went anywhere. Nobody recognized the lady's digitally reconstructed face. And all of those DNA tests and medical examinations hit dead ends. Which is honestly kind of crazy when you consider how much police were doing in this area to try and solve this case years after it had happened. But they finally do have a big break in 2018, when Richard, in his 60s, looking for his mother, submitted his DNA sample to Ancestry.com because he and the unknown lady of the Dunes were a match. This homicide victim was Richard's birth mother.
