The Perverted Professor - Sharon, Massachusetts

This week, in Sharon, Massachusetts, a mild-mannered, respected middle-aged professor is the main suspect when a young woman turns up missing after detectives uncover his debauchers and criminal nightlife while everyone thought he was a pillar of the community. Welcome to Small Town Murder! Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder! Yay! Yay indeed, Jimmy! Yay indeed! My name is James Petrogallo, I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another absolutely crazy edition of Small Town Murder, just some hidden lives and I love that. I love when someone's got a whole other life hidden and that's the most interesting thing and we have that today. We will get to all of that and more. First though, head over to shutupandgivememurder.com, tickets for live shows, next live show with tickets available. I don't know if there's any left actually, is Royal Oak, Michigan on May 30th. 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It's up to you guys, either internet salad, which is we go all over the internet and find everything that's going on currently except politics because you hear enough of that, or the new FLDS documentary that's out there, the False Prophet one. So is it called Trust Me, the False Prophet or something? Trust Me, False Prophet. Yeah. Either that or that. So those are your options. Either way, we'll do the next one on the next time. So no worries. And then we have a prisoner dating game coming up pretty soon too. A lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. And then you have a lot of stuff going on there. People are going to die. The show's called Small Town Murder. It would be weird if they didn't. So that's going to happen. And we're going to make jokes. And you say, well, how do you do that? How do those two things go together and not make it weird? Well, we think it actually makes it a little kind of smoother. To us, it's a little more weird to be really with like ominous music. And then her arms were removed. And that's almost creepy to me. I'd rather let's, oh, we're uncomfortable. Let's make a little joke about it. That means it's a little more human as the way we like to do it here. But one thing we don't do is we never make one of the victims or the victims' families. Why, James? Because we're assholes. But we're not scumbags. That's just how it works here. We try to try to walk the line on that one. So if you think that true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, maybe this isn't the show for you, but maybe it is. That's the thing. Either way, though, no complaining later. What do you say, everybody? That said, I think it's time. Let's do it. I think it's time to clear the lungs. Here we go. Arms to the sky. Let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Boke. Hey. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Here we go. We are going to Sharon, Massachusetts this week. Sharon, just like a lady's name. Like a lady's name. That's right. Sharon, it's in Eastern Massachusetts. Only about a half hour outside Boston. South and north? It's kind of, I think it's west. It's like southwest of Boston, if I want to say that correctly. You know, 30 minutes outside of Boston, so it could be a mile and a half. We don't know. No, it's like 17 miles, I think. It's about 35 minutes to Providence, the other direction, too. So if you live here, you kind of have two cities to pick where you want to work and stuff like that. That's not bad. And a lot more than that, really, because there's everything close. Oh, there's a lot close. I mean, like two pretty good Boston and then Providence is the state capital. A lot of stuff going on there. It's about an hour and five minutes to Groton, Massachusetts. It's our last Massachusetts episode, episode 656. That was the killer prodigy. That was the jazz drummer. Remember that guy? My, yeah. He was like the prodigy jazz drummer, and it didn't quite work out that well for him. This is in Norfolk County, just like in Virginia there. Area code 339 and 781 got two area codes here. Now, a little bit of history, and you know, this, anytime you're talking about like Massachusetts, if you wanted to talk about history, the whole three hour show could be about the history of a town because they go back hundreds of years. It's the first one. Yeah, it was first settled as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. So the Unitarian and Congressional, or Congregational churches in the center of Sharon both have church bells that were made by Paul Revere. He was a bell maker? What he was doing apparently is popping out bells. That's right. Yeah. Gee, it seems like he could have figured out something better than shouting. Right? Yeah, he should have rung a bell. One bell for this and two bells for that. Yeah. What are we talking about here? Guy had bells. I mean, five. I don't know. He had more bells than he knew what to do with here. Reviews of this town. Here is five stars. Okay. I enjoy the people I work with in Sharon. It is a nice scenic commute as well. I enjoy driving by the lake on my way home every day. This person just lives to work. He just loves to work there. Loves it. Works their ass off. Here's five stars. Again, I've lived here most of my life. I've lived here most of my life. It is one of the best towns in Massachusetts. Peaceful, quiet and safe. I think everything is great there. All right. Hence five stars. Then three stars. Most issues involve drugs or burglary. Crime is not a major issue here. We have stats. We'll let you know that it is or not. You come down. Yeah. Chill out. The largest issue is enforcing rules and parking violations, especially around the high school. Yeah. If your town's biggest problem is parking violations around a high school, you're doing fine. That's not bad. Then finally, one star. There really is not much to do in the local area. However, we are located close to Boston, Providence and the Rhode Island beaches. What are you complaining about? Too many nice life. Two major cities and a million beaches with a half hour of you. You're a jackass. Also Cape Cod is about an hour away and it attracts many tourists and vacationers. Oh, does it? Cape Cod is a really that's a vacation destination. Is that what you're saying? That's what I am. Really? What about the Bahamas? Anybody go there? Down the Cape is really. Wow. Okay. People in this town, population 18,477. So good size, pretty decent size town, but not that big because it's and being so close to Boston, it's definitely a little quiet suburb. The men and women breakdown here, 52.8% women. So a lot more women than men here. Median age, 42.6 slightly above the national average. But how about it? When you get the suburbs like that, that's when people move out there is, you know, when they're 35 and they have a couple of kids and they're like, all right, fine. I'll move somewhere boring. And then that's the end up in Sharon. It's about normally marriage here. You know, people being married is about 50 50 here is 71% married. Wow. This is a have your kids, let them play in the yard suburb period. Very low divorce rate. Very low people, very low rate of single with children people. Like this is that right married with kids. Yeah. The racial breakdown here, racial breakdown is 75.5% white, 2.8% black, 15.5%. And then there's a lot of Asian people in Sharon, Massachusetts and 4.3% Hispanic. 65.5% of the people here are religious. Yeah. This is, this is when we say Catholics are the Baptist of the North. It's because if you get in the like Alabama, it's going to be 65% and they're all Baptist here. It's 65% and they're all Catholics. 54.2% of the people here are Catholic. Huge. We know Catholics are the Baptists of the North. That's right. 3% Jewish. Hey, 3% we get to sing. Oh my goodness. That's crazy high. That's 3% that's more than we usually get. Hava, Nagila, Nagila, Nagila, Nagila, I don't know the words. Hey, hey, all right. There we go. Unemployment here a little bit low. Median household income very high, more than double the national average. Really? Median, median household income here 157,928 bucks. Wow. I got that is killing it, crushing it. And you better be crushing it. Yeah. Because the cost of living is not low. No. No, usually a hundred is regular average here. It is 144. Got and the housing is the high one here. Median home cost here 703,200 dollars. Oh, that's why no one's getting divorced or like you're not. Yeah, I'm not selling this giant house. We're living here. It's expensive. We are so cash. House for where house? Yeah, cash. I don't we have a house and that's all and that's all we have. And we can't afford a divorce. That's not in the budget. Yeah. So if we've convinced you that I well, first of all, we must have convinced you to make a shitload of money and be able to buy afford $700,000 average houses. But if we have, then we have for you the Sharon, Massachusetts real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here. Twenty nine hundred twenty dollars. That is wild. That is almost three times the average. Now, Boston is a really expensive city. It's like it's, you know, New York, Boston, San Francisco are like the three most expensive cities in it. So it's and then throw Chicago in there, too. Yeah, it's not that bad, actually, Chicago compared to those. Really? Yeah, it's expensive compared to the rest of Illinois, which is cheap. But compared to New York and San Francisco, it's pretty low on the list. And the price gets affordable there, too, because the suburbs are incredibly affordable, whereas in the city of Chicago is out fucking rages. Yeah, some of the nicer parts. Yeah, they're real ridiculous and some of the nicer parts. So here's your first house. It is a two bedroom, one bath, six hundred forty square foot little like bungalow. It's very nice. It's not done nicely on the inside. It's not falling apart or anything like that. It looks like a very small nice house. Four hundred ninety nine thousand dollars for that. I mean, for me, six hundred forty square feet. Five hundred grand, half a million dollars. That's absurd. Here's a four bedroom, three bath, twenty seven hundred twenty square feet. It's nice. It's got it hasn't been redone in a while. You can tell on the inside, it's got those big kind of older tiles. Stare carpeting looks a little, you know, finished basement, though. I believe it does have a finished basement. It's not bad. Otherwise, it's your kind of, you know, vinyl siding. Yeah, regular looking house. One million one hundred fifty thousand dollars for that house on point nine two acres. So not even a whole acre. Sweet Christ. And then finally, this house, four bedroom, five bath, T-bowl for each and every B-hole. And then one left over four thousand three hundred twenty three square feet. Oh, shit. It looks like the home alone house. That's what it looks like. It's like one of those wide loads of windows. Really pretty on one point two two acres. One million seven hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred bucks. And that's after a fifty thousand dollar price cut, which just happened recently. So, oh my little pricey in this area here. That said, things to do. Not a whole lot, but you can go to Boston, you can go to Providence, you can go to the beach, so they don't really need a lot to do here. We have the Sharon Carnival is here. You have a whole carnival. Some of the fan favorite thrill rides that came back include, but we're not limited to the Top Gun, right? The Fireball, zero gravity and the freak out. OK, they're all just freak out. And yeah, I don't know what that means. Freak out, I assume they give you a bunch of acid, make you wait about a half hour and put you in a fun house and then send you into just one of those ones with the mirrors and you're just like, wow, man, freak out. Yeah, you just start losing it. You talk like Spicoli by the time you leave. So now, oh, by the way, the freak out is now known by warrior. That's what it's called. Oh, said whether you're into flipping upside down or flying through the air. There's some want something for everyone. There's no no carnival is complete without some greasy treats. This is under the food section. At least they're being honest. They're being honest. And this one is no exception. There were, of course, classics, hot dogs, burgers and fries. And for the more daring, there were even carnival treats almost guaranteed to give you a stomach ache before a ride. Cotton candy, fried dough and ice cream. Yeah, yeah. And then on top of that, OK, so there's that. And then there is the Selle or Sealy S E L E E satanic mill marker. The what? This is definitely going to get a bonus episode. This whole shit. OK, this is about five miles away in eastern Massachusetts, but it's right there. I don't know if that's where they make the bats or not. But I hope so. I hope so. Now, this is a sign marker. Marks the location of an 18th century saw mill owned by, quote, a wizard who employed satanic imps. OK, they had to put that in quotes. I don't want anyone thinking that's coming from me. Well, we'll find out here. The story begins around 1755, when eastern Massachusetts was growing at the time and John Sealy set up a sawmill to supply the town with lumber for construction. The business was successful and John intended to pass it to his son, Nathan. However, Nathan was a brooding young man who aspired for other things in life. There were rumors he had an interest in the dark arts. According to the legend, the devil visited Nathan one night and asked Nathan to follow him into a nearby swamp. And then it gets weirder. It gets weirder from there. So yeah, we're going to do in the swamp. We're going to do a bonus episode on that, because that's a goddamn mess right there. I mean, that implies his pants came off, right? Why? Why something? They're ever been invited to the swamp? No, never. Yeah, this is like the Ghostbusters blow job with Dan Akroyd, except afterwards he's led into a swamp. That's very weird. Fascinating. And it's just like a marble, like almost like a gravestone marker. But they they believe this shit happened. Somebody does. Yeah, they said in memory of Mr. Nathan Sealy, who died whenever erected this here. And there's all signs. So you'll go there and look at a sign and go a crazy person had a mill here once. Uh, that's a weird thing to do. Crime rate in this town, but we are interested in here. Property crime. Wow, this is really low is about one quarter of the national average. Not one quarter lower than deal anything. I've got it all three quarters low. Yeah, you got seven hundred thousand dollar average house here. You own everything. Violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is less than one third of the average. So wow, so extremely low. So this place is safe. I mean, very, very safe. That said, let's talk about some very horrible murder here that took place. It was unsafe. The day was very unsafe. Let's start in March of 1983. OK, March 6th, 1983. You got your flock of seagulls hairdo ready to go, Jimmy. Babe, I was two. I barely had any hair. I got about as much hair as I've got now. It was still styled in a very crazy way. Yeah, you're doing that. You're going to see E.T. or some shit in the theater. Yeah, 83 is E.T. Times, I know 82. It came out, I think. So yeah, you're still probably was a huge hit. It's probably still out in 83. Probably stuck around in the theater a while. The last Star Wars, I think, came out in 83 of the first three. So that's the time period we're dealing with here. Now, it's a Sunday morning. It's cold early March in the East Coast can be pretty cold. This is in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Yeah. OK. Now, a guy named Joseph is out collecting bottles at a highway rest stop. Oh, he's at a rest stop and he is. Yeah, he's he's going through garbage and garbages and dumpsters looking for cans to bring back. Yeah, with dimes on the nickels and dimes. It depends. Michigan's 10 cents. Is it really? Yeah. So he's looking for nickels, basically. And he's working the left side of the parking lot of the rest stop with a friend of his. Now, I guess at the time, I don't think they did the five cent. It was like 50 cents a pound back then. They did it like California or Arizona does where it's you have to bring giant bags of them in to get weighed and all that shit. So he's doing all this. This is shitty work on a Sunday morning in the cold, but the guy obviously needs the money. So he reaches in with trash barrel and pulls out a big brown garbage bag. And it's heavy. And he's like, fuck, yeah, because heavy means bottles and money. Well, yeah, there's bottles in there. That's going to be money. So he's excited. He's like, all right. So he tears the bag open, excitedly looking for bottles. Yeah, which if he'd ever listened to this show, he would have quit doing this a long fucking time ago. He sees something in there first that is not a bottle. Yeah, it's a tan corduroy blazer. Clearly a woman's cut. Yeah. Soaked in blood. Oh, boy. That's not good. OK. Then he notices while he's holding this blazer that the weird part of it, it's in the trash and it's soaked in blood and you'd expect it to smell like blood or trash. It smells like expensive perfume, which is strange. He's like, oh, that's gone away. Yeah. Yeah. This must be obviously pretty fresh because they haven't dumped it also out of these garbage cans. But, you know, this is a weird thing of a blood soaked jacket. So, you know, smelling of perfume. So at this point, if you're if you're this guy, if I'm this guy, I'm stopping at this. I found any first thing I find that's soaked in blood. It's the days over going home. Yeah, this is this is no longer mine. No, I'm not winning. We're done. He keeps digging into this bag. No. Past a fully blooded out. Soak corduroy blazer because, wow, I get that you're trying to fucking get cans, but that's not the bag to do it in, apparently. How broke you got to be to push past fresh blood? To shrug and be like, well, keep digging. Wow. So underneath the corduroy jacket is a man's blue work shirt. OK, so like a blue shirt there. It's also soaked in blood. Yeah. So at this point, you go, OK, I'm done. Yeah, that's two blood soaked items. I don't want to find out what's under this. An arm or some shit. I don't want to know about it. He says, let me keep digging. You never know. There might be a can in here still. There might be. It's still heavy. Yeah. At this point, there's more of a chance that you're going to find a hand than a can, probably in here or a head or some shit like that. So you're going from jacket to shirt now. And now, yeah, now other things. But it's a large, it's like a bigger man's work shirt. Doesn't go with the corduroy jacket. These are not from the same person. OK. So that's another thing I would think these are the two people. Shit soaked in blood, even scarier. But he persists this guy. Jesus, I want to, Joseph, I'll give you my address. You can come get all my cans. I'll just leave that side for you. This is crazy. Don't do this. They must have been name brand clothes, huh? Maybe. Maybe it's like, yeah, there must be some good booze in the bottom of this bag. And so under that, under the blue work shirt, he finds a small sledgehammer. A short handled two and a half pound sledgehammer with a dark stain on the top of it there, clearly from blood. And now he's touched that. Well, yeah, now he's grabbed the handle of it, probably with gloves on. I don't assume you're doing this barehanded searching through the garbage for fucking cans. This is you have work gloves on when you're doing that. Nobody's right. Yeah. Well, you don't know if there's glass in there. You can't be digging through. You're going to cut yourself. So and stuck to the stain in the blood is a single long strand of dark human hair. Oh, boy. So evidence is what that's called. Yeah. OK. So Joseph, the guy looking through the cans, he calls his buddy over, hey, come here, look at this. OK. The friend looks at the jacket, looks at the shirt, looks at the sledgehammer and says, you know what, let's just put this back. This is not our problem, which is the most. I mean, I could not relate to somebody more for saying that. Obviously, you can't do that, but that's what you'd want to say. Well, I don't know anything about this. I got to go on with my day. It's not our problem. Put it back. So he does. He puts everything back in the bag, you know, sledgehammer, shirt, jacket and puts it back where it was. And they take off and go home. They're done for this would definitely be the end of your morning, I would say, probably. It should be anyway. I don't think I'd ever do this again. No, it'd be like last time I went out there, I found. Yeah, bloody things. So now this guy, they get home. Joseph gets a sandwich and he sits down. He starts watching TV. Yeah. He's sitting there for about two hours and he just can't. He can't stop thinking about it. Can't shake it. So he said, damn it. What if there's a what if this is a problem? What if there's like, you know, somebody's hurt or something like that? So this guy actually has a just a bout of conscience and it feels terrible and he calls the state police. All right. So they send a cop over Trooper Paul Landry of the Massachusetts State Police. And, you know, they go out to the rest stop so he can show him where it is. And the trooper gets the bag, opens it and he's like, holy shit, this is bad. And it was fresh blood, still tacky. Yeah. It wasn't even dried yet. It's still. Jesus. You know, this is within the last 24 hours. This has been put here. So this is now, you know, someone could be actively bleeding. You know what I mean? This could be something like that. So he takes it, bags it up as evidence, obviously, of something. There's something going on here and sends it to the state crime lab just because he doesn't know what else to do with it. So yeah, he starts asking around. Anybody missing anybody? He literally is asking around, putting out to other the local departments of see if there's any assaults, homicides, missing persons, anywhere in Boston, Providence, South Shore, like anywhere in the area. If someone's missing a blazer, perhaps a blazer or a work shirt, one or two or both. Is there a couple missing? Like who knows? Right. Nothing happens for a week. Nothing. Really? Nothing at all happens. Nobody, there's nobody missing. They can't find anybody missing. There's just this bloody bag of clothes and a hammer with hair on it that obviously was bashed into somebody's fucking skull. Right. So this is an issue in a two and a half pound sledgehammer. That person's not doing well. Whoever got hit with that? No, that's a that's a. That's big. It's a lot of sledge. It's a lot of sledge, especially with that short handle. That is a vicious weapon. Then on March 11th, 1983, a call comes in. OK, this is a call comes in and then some they show up to to make a to fill out a missing persons report. John and Shirley Benedict are their names and they're from Matthew Matthew and they drive down to file an official missing persons report. And so the word had gotten around apparently around the area that there was someone found a bag of bloody clothes and a sledgehammer and all this had gotten around. Hey, everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you a better way to feed your dog with Oli. Oh, L L I E dot com. That's right. Absolutely. We love our dogs. I have three dogs. I love him. He's got two dogs, just got a puppy and a puppy here. But is he great? Don't you feel great? We just got home from the road. 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I haven't seen her in a week. Yeah. So let me see the jacket basically. Sands of blood. She's usually free. So they show him the jacket and he recognizes it. Uh-oh. And he said, that's, that's my daughter's jacket. I know that for a fact and I haven't seen her in almost two weeks. So this might be her jacket and this scares me because usually we talk to her now and then, um, he says her name is Robin. And last time I saw her, she was wearing that jacket. Oh, okay. So now they at least have somebody to look for. I mean, if they can find this person, they can rule it out, but it's over. Yeah. It's someone to look for. And they're looking for Robert, a Robin Nadine Benedict. She's born July 19th, 1961. So she's 21 years old at this point. Young lady. She's young. Yeah. Very, very young or 22. Yeah. 21, not even 22 yet. She grew up in Methune up there near Lawrence, uh, up by the New Hampshire border. Kind of a shitty town she grew up in. Yeah. Kind of a rough and tumble kind of a joint. Um, everybody, by the way, that knows Robin said she's a real sweet, tempered, good kid. Not even a kid anymore. She's, you know, 21. A good daughter. Um, they talk about how, uh, her mom, Shirley is blonde and like, uh, bosomy apparently, big booed blonde here. She grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And, uh, her father, John Benedict apparently is described in a book that we'll tell you the names of these books here as a quote, handsome Hispanic Trinidadian with high cheekbones and deeply set eyes that make him look like sculptures of long ago. He's hot. He like sounds, sounds hot from the book. Yeah. He sounds like he's smoking over here. Um, so that was, that was the deal. Um, now the weird part is her mother's blonde, her father's like Hispanic, but so they're, you know, some mixing going on there. Yeah. Yeah. She is not, her father will not allow her to ever date black men. That's not allowed in high school. Okay. We can mix, but you can't is what he said. What is that? I don't know what that is. That's, I love people's funny, weird things like that. It's like, what are you talking about? What if her parents said that to you? Yeah. What would you be doing right now? Be banging big titty blonde chicks. Yeah, you can't have that. Yeah. Where's your Trinidadian wife? What if her parents banned her from ever dating Hispanic Trinidadians? What about that? Then what? You're screwed. Um, interesting. Now in this area of Lawrence and Matthew, there is a, some nice streets, but for the most part that's described as dilapidated housing projects and, uh, old Victorian houses that are crumbling, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Kind of like Baltimore was years ago and, uh, kind of a crumbling society that once was probably, huh? Yeah. Probably was a mill town or something at one point. And when the mill closes, things start to fall apart here. Just a lot of, uh, kind of shitty raised ranches on quarter acre lots with, you know, a lot of car parts in the, in the front yard. Sham wow to be made there or something. Something. Yeah. So Robin grew up in this exact kind of a place, little house, um, and, uh, kind of cramped by the way, because there's five kids. She's got four brothers and sisters. So seven people in a relatively small, you know, house. And, uh, I guess John, the dad, he managed a marching group called the white Eagles drum and bugle core. Okay. And the children would carry flags and have little sabers and all that kind of shit. And they'd do holiday parades in all these towns, some very new England shit. This is, this is some, I don't know, white Eagles, drum and bugle core. I'm not sure if there's a white eagle or not. I've never seen one, but I'm not a picture one. I don't, I don't see one. I don't see an albino eagle flying around. The ball as close as it gets, right? Yeah. I would think, um, the head anyway. Um, I don't know if maybe white Eagles was a tribe that was around here or something about a tribe that was in the area. I'm not sure. Um, I guess all that they'd go on vacations during the summer and on holidays and, um, you know, they would, they would dress up to take pictures. So this is not like a, a rough and tumble scattered family. No. You know, when it's holiday time, you're getting a little prist, you're getting a little pink fluffy dress and you're putting a fucking tie on and they're going to put everybody in front of the camera to go down to the Olin Mills and get a picture taken. We're going to Sears everybody in the car. Sitting on one of those ranch fences and smile motherfucker. One of those, um, dad was a commercial photographer employed by the Raytheon corporation in Lawrence. Yeah. And, uh, Shirley worked as the manager of a jewelry store in a shopping mall in Lawrence as well. So they have three boys and two girls. Robin is the fourth child and the first daughter. So they had three boys and then they had two girls after that. Nice. So she was, I'm, this was like a big deal for the family to have three boys and then a girl. So she was doded on like crazy. When she was born, they put her father put a, I put a sheet across the front of the house and had a projector project an image that said, it's a girl on it. That's how happy they were. Very nice. Finally, no more boys pissing in our faces while we're changing diapers. Great. Yeah. He wanted a girl and, um, basically he really doded on her. I mean, they was, you know, my daughter, daddy daughter relationship was, was a big deal. One time he said of Robin, and I hope he said this before their fifth and second child and second daughter was born. He said, I have five kids, but I have just one little girl. So that's a, yeah. Thanks to the boys are like, great. Thanks a lot. Imagine if you're the five kids, one that matters, one that matters. Imagine if you're like the third boy, you matter nothing to these people. It sounds like the fourth is the frustration boy. Yeah. Yeah. The third boy that's born was like, God damn it. This pain in the ass. And then the fourth one is born and she's the, you know, everything. She's the light and now you're the one who wasn't a girl yet. Oh, it's, there's four, three boys or four boys? Three boys for one, two, three. And then the fourth born is a girl and then they have another girl after that. So there's a lot of her dad took so many pictures of her growing up, like just super into that. She's very beautiful. Everybody says to Robin, like really pretty and I've seen pictures. She's pretty. She's very pretty, especially like that early 80s. Pretty like, yeah, she's gorgeous. She's not, and not in like a fake type of way either. Like a, just a naturally pretty girl. She's there. Yeah. That's it. She's long dark hair, you know, nice bone structure, big eyes, all that. She also is a flute player. She plays the flute and everybody said any kind of family argument. She's the peacemaker. She's the one that goes around and, you know, comes in with the flute and broke her. She says everybody put it up and everybody goes, oh, they turned. Hey, look at her. She's an aspiring illustrator. She wants to be, she's an artist. She wants to be an illustrator and she graduated from Greater Lawrence Regional Vocational School and got into the Rhode Island School of Design, which is actually, it's actually a big deal. It's not a, yeah, it's not like DeVry or anything. This is like a really good art school. And she studied graphic design there. So she's doing great, but she dropped out. Oh no. Couldn't afford it. It's a very expensive school. Yes. And so couldn't afford it. So that's, that's the main problem here. Her brother Richard, who was in the Navy at the time this was all going on, describes her as an artistic kid who used to sign her name with a tiny hand-drawn bumblebee. So she'd add that to anything she did. Like if she wrote a letter. Imagine being in line behind somebody at the grocery store writing a check. No, no, no. They sign it and now the work starts. Yeah. I think, you know, it's not a check, but yeah. She's probably just really quick at it too. Yeah. No, no, no. If she writes a letter to her friend or something, this is the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, behind that in line, you're like, all right, fucking scribble your name on there. It's enough, Bob Ross. Yeah. Why put happy trees on it? I don't think anybody would do that. So, but she's very much into flute playing. Her brother said she played so well that when she practiced in her room, you couldn't tell if it was her or the radio. Well, you probably could tell because what fucking radio station is all flute all the time? No other instruments, just Jethro tell cellos. I don't think there's a song on the radio that has a fucking flute in it. It's all flute. No drums, no anything, no vocals, just flute. Hey, is that the all flute station or is that our sister in there? Is that our sister or did the Almond Brothers put out an album of just flutes? Yeah. Andre 3000 is doing just flutes now. Alrighty. Well, he must have enough money then. That's what that means because no one's buying that. He's giving up on making more. That's what that is. Whenever I hear those celebrities stars doing shit like that, I'm like, oh, bored enough to not make any money. Good for him. Yeah. That's like when Steve Martin makes banjo albums. I'm like, oh, you must be doing pretty well, Steve. All the movies paid off over the years. Sing another joke. All right. All right, good deal. Just going to stick around on there. Now, she's in school. She had perfect attendance. Great grades was a president's merit scholar. I mean, she is like dependable and on the ball here. Huge. She said she's also a free spirit, Richard said, her brother. Said she would jump into the ocean when it was dark outside, fully clothed just because she felt like it. Just go running. Is that a free spirit? Yeah, I think so. It's fun. I think that is ballsy. Really? That is, does she not have any? Where are you going after that? If they're by the beach and everybody's hanging out, she feels like running in the water. She'll just go running in the water and come back. Fully clothed. Yeah, just having fun. Wow. Yeah, that's fun. Amazing. She wants to open her own design business. That's her goal here. And she wanted to see her artwork in a gallery. That was her big deal. Now, a few days before she vanished, her brother Richard was home on shore leave, and she gave him a picture of herself to take back to the ship. That's what he's got now is this picture of her. And then she's gone here. On the back, he saw the handwriting on her picture. It said something to remember me by. So like that's interesting. So, I mean, she's got this whole life with her family as a, you know, is just this perfect kid. And she does all of these things. And she's a great artist and a great flute player and perfect grades and all this. She also has a complete double life that she leads. What do you mean? She's also a sex worker at night. She's a prostitute. Yeah, right. Yeah. Which is strange. That's what she's doing. She's making good money at it too for back then. Yeah, which is just not what you expect from this. A family that's together and it's just, she's doing this, it seems like as a conscious choice for money. It's just strange. You don't see this often from people who have had like a lot of abuse in the family and things like that. It's not even just that. It's just there's, she doesn't have a lot of challenges apart from the lack of money. She's just like, this is easy to make money. All right. Yeah, I guess so. So that's the thing. Now, one of the books that we talk about is actually a Pulitzer Prize winner here about this case called Missing Beauty by Teresa Carpenter. So that is, that's one of the sources here that we'll talk about. There's another book too that we'll bring up later on here, but this was around her late teens. She started doing this. So this is before she couldn't afford school. So early. It doesn't make sense. Apparently a guy at a party casually suggested to her that she could make a lot of money turning tricks. Which I mean, yeah. Her then boyfriend who was a former New England Patriots linebacker, so I know he was a much older than her at that point. Name Ray Kostick. He told her, no, you're not doing that. We talking about, yeah, don't do that. Jesus Christ. But she said she needed money for school and needed money to get out of this goddamn town. She wanted out of Methune there. She was done with that place. This place sucks. I want to go someplace better like Boston. In her late teens, she's dating a retired football player? Yeah, she's hot. That's what that tells you. Smoke show. Yeah, smoke show. And also smart too. So it's like, yeah, why not? Who wouldn't like her? You know, I mean, pretty much she's every guy's type. Yeah. So you know what I mean? That's just what it is. Hot and smart and talented. Who the hell doesn't like that? I mean, who doesn't? Who wouldn't like that? So by 1982, she is working at a place called Good Time Charlie's. What is that? Good Time Charlie's. She's going under the name Nadine, her middle name. And she's working for a hundred bucks an hour. That's her rate. What is Good Time Charlie's? It's a bar. Okay. It's a bar. And I was going to get into all that. But she's making a hundred bucks an hour. Yeah. Which is in 1982. Great cash. Immensely huge money. That's huge money. Now this Good Time Charlie's is in a section of town known as the Combat Zone. This does not exist today at all. Okay. In no way. There's probably super expensive old fancy houses that used to be brothels, basically. That's where it is now. So it's basically, it was a red light district in Boston. In Boston. Yeah. It was an adult entertainment district in downtown Boston, centered on Washington Street between Boylston and Neeland. There was, it was like Times Square in the 70s, basically. Yeah, I know exactly where it is. It's a beautiful area. Yeah. Oh, now I'm sure. Back then it was peep shows, strip clubs, X-rated movie theaters, you know, adult bookstores, all that kind of shit. And Good Time Charlie's, obviously. Okay. There's one place called the Liberty Bookshop. And by the way, all these bookshops had like Jack Booth's in the back. Yeah. You know, fucking guys would, you know, pound each other in the ass in there. And it was like, this is a, these bookstores are filthy places. Call it a bookstore all you want. Nobody's in there reading a book. No, they're going in the back where there's like films playing and shit like that. And it's all sorts of weird shit. I like when they call it an arcade, the only joystick. Yeah, an arcade. You wouldn't touch it. Yeah, I'm not touching any stick in here. Put it that way. Yeah. Hi, where do you guys keep Street Fighter? I don't see. Is there asteroids in here? I don't know. Bob's got hemorrhoids. All right. Well, close enough. I guess there's a man back there getting asteroids. Getting asteroids right now. Now, one writer, a writer described the Liberty Bookshop as quote, Disneyland for perverts, which is very fun. That's just good use of the language right there. That's all that is Disneyland perverts. Yeah. The name, the combat zone, Disneyland for perverts, was coined in the 60s by a reporter named Gene Cole. It meant that it was crime and violent zone, basically, enter at your own risk. And it was also where service men on shore leave went. So you'd see hordes of uniformed service men going through here. So that's why it became combat zone. With a pocket full of pay. Yeah. Pocket full of offshore money from the last six months that they didn't spend a dime on. All saved up. Ready to go. So, and then they said also, in this area, there was a lot of, not only some violence, but there was street crime. There was hustlers and prostitutes that would pick pockets and shit like that too. The Wall Street Journal, this isn't as fun. They took the Disneyland name and made it a little more boring, called it the whole thing, a sexual Disneyland, which that's not nearly as fun as pervert, you know, Disneyland for perverts. That's much better. In 74, the Boston Redevelopment Authority officially zoned it as an adult entertainment district. Really? It was officially zoned that well. That was it. Here's where the porn is. It's all here. Here's where the theaters are. Nowhere else in the city it's allowed though. You can't build a house here. This is zoned for dirty shit. You can build a house, but you got to have people sucking dick inside of it if you're going to build a house. You got to put a diamond down. Yeah, you got to have a mini mouse on the lawn with their tits out. That would help a lot. So, but that meant nowhere else in the city, only here. Wow. It's a red light district. Amsterdam. Vice and that's, yeah, I feel like that's how it should be. Yeah. They should have that. I mean, yeah, you should. Districts that you don't go to if you don't want to go do that kind of thing. You know, like kind of like me around a church. It's the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to, I don't, I don't need to. Also don't force a man with that vice to be running all over town looking for whatever he's looking for. Well, then you're going to mix that in with the good parts. That's the problem. Yeah. Keep that guy in the, in the, in the porn shop where he belongs. If he gets rolled, he knew what the fucking, you know, what the risks were. Come on. Yeah. So Robin is working in this environment, which is scary for a beautifully young lady here. She's working as a full-time escort. I mean, this isn't a, this isn't a, you know, nighttime one day a week. I pick up a few extra bucks from school. This is her job. So she's working at good time. Charlie's, which is a, a bar in there, but it's going to look a hustler bar. It's at 25 LaGrange street. So you can all look up what's there now. I guarantee you it's not a hustler bar. It's probably something very expensive where they sell like artisan, you know, artisan sandwiches with a Rugal coming out of them or some shit. There's a lot of croissants and being. Awful lot. Yeah. Being prepped right now. No shit. So she's like I said, a hundred bucks an hour is what she charges, which is equivalent to about 300 and change today. Three, almost 350 an hour. It's a pretty good one. Not bad. She has basically a couple hundred clients in an address book that she keeps with her. She's been arrested on prostitution related charges four times already. And it's just, it doesn't make sense because I mean, she has a place to go. She has a family. She has people that love her. She has all this, but this is her choice. She wants to do this so she can not live in that town basically. She dated a New England patriot for Christ's sake. It's very strange. She also has a boyfriend, a live in boyfriend who also is called her pimp from time to time as well. So live in boyfriend pimp named Clarence Rogers, who goes by JR. Now we know that she had a baby silver, I guess that's a bluish silver that used to early 80s color. Toyota Starlet back in the day, which is a, I don't even know what that car is. Very tiny little fucking car. Little tiny like hatchback, little tiny fucker little thing. Toyota Chvette. Kind of basically exactly like that. I was going to say like those old, the old, old Hondas look like that kind of like the little Honda Civics kind of were like those tiny things. It had a black racing stripe on it. She has her own apartment with JR Rogers, the boyfriend. Everybody says he's also her pimp. Although, you know, where do you, between pimp and boyfriend who helps her keep her business straight? What's the difference at that point? You know what I mean? Honestly, if they're her business is that, what are we talking about? So JR has a record as well. Nothing violent, nothing violent. He's unarmed robbery, which is better than armed robbery, I suppose. Receiving stolen credit cards. And he also owned a, co-owned a hair salon in Boston that was basically rumored to be a, just a front for human trafficking. That was the rumor that was around. Girls are brought in and shit like that and they're taking, it's a meeting place. By the way, he's a black guy too, which our father is just about to ask that. It's clear it's a black guy. How happy is her dad about this? Yeah. Her dad, her dad had to have fucked something. And I don't mean that I'm not trying to disparage the family, but if you have a young lady who's going against everything her family wanted for, she's not 16. It's not a little rebellion. She's 21. She's an adult, all this type of thing. Something, and I'm not saying the dad, somebody must have done something to her to make her do that and then be like, what don't you like me to date black guys? Great. I'm going to find one that'll pit me. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like there's some, there's some like, and I don't know if that's exercising independence. I don't know what that is exactly. It's like a lot. Yeah. I'm, or maybe it's just that one thing that she's just like, well, I'm doing that then. Maybe that's the other thing we don't know. But she's doing a lot of things. She's doing that and this and. Oh, I'm sure. Quite a bit of this and that going on here. I'm sure the dating of the black guy is the least of his worries if he knew about this. Yeah. Absolutely. So the day, the day that they found the cans and looking for cans and bottles and found the hammer and the sweater and or the jacket and the, and the work shirt, this same day Robin is supposed to be at JR's son's birthday party. Okay. Okay. So Robin is supposed to pick up JR and his son to go to this birthday party, but she's not answering the phone at her apartment and her car isn't outside. So the answering machine has messages on it. So apparently JR's ex and Robin were friends. Oh. So Robin was supposed to pick up JR's ex and JR's son and take them to the birthday party. Okay. So when JR's ex can't get a hold of Robin and her car's not outside, she calls Robin's parents to see if she knows where they know where she is and Robin's parents hadn't heard from her either. So Robin's mother, Shirley had called Robin the night before to invite her over to see their new puppy, but she never answered the phone or called back or came over. Yeah. So now JR is alarmed a bit, but not too much because. Yeah. Yeah. In this profession, shit happens, things come up. She might have got a late night call and had to do something that she overslept because of that. It may be a thing that ran into today at $100 an hour. We do whatever that guy says until time's up. Yeah. I mean, if Julia Roberts had plans at any point during that week in Pretty Woman, she would have broke them. I mean, and there was no cell phone. She would have not showed up and people would have thought she'd disappeared too. So, I mean, that happens. So now by the afternoon though, nobody's heard from her and that's weird. That's different. She's not someone who would not show up at a kid's birthday party who wants her there. You know what I mean? It's a strange thing. So. And she's the ride. Yeah. Oh, that's the other she's the ride. Now JR's ex there, she is actually the first person to formally report Robin missing that afternoon. Really? That's before even the family does. JR is not aware that she did that. JR doesn't call the police. He hires private investigators. Yeah, that's what you do when you're into. Because exactly. It's he's an underworld guy. So he's not going to be like, oh, police, please help me find her. Well, last time I talked to her, she was turning a trick. So, you don't want to tell the cops that. I dropped her off at her job. What's her job? Oh, don't worry about that. Good time, Charlie's. You know, in the combat zone. Oh, okay. So he does this, hires these PIs. Problem is though, if someone's legitimately missing and you think something might have happened to them, you call the police. Doesn't matter what your business is. Call the goddamn cops. But he knows for a fact that they're going to be looking at him. That's why he doesn't call the cops. He hires private investigators. And basically what the these books all say and what seems to make the most sense is he's a black guy with a record who owns a hair salon that might be a front for trafficking and has a sex worker girlfriend. So he's like, they probably aren't going to look at me as the most, you know, upstanding cat. Probably not going to help me. They're probably going to be more of investigating me. That's exactly what it is. He said later, he knew if he walks into a police station and says my girlfriend's missing, he's going to be treated as a suspect. He's going to be in an interrogation room in five minutes. They're not going to look for her. They're going to talk to him. Right. And that's the problem is that they're investigating me all you want. Yeah, I do bad shit, but they're still a missing girl at the end of this and I that I care about. Absolutely. So he hires these private investigators and they go, well, where do we start? Yeah. I mean, honestly, this is a girl who has, you know, a young woman who has hundreds of clients in a phone book. Where do we even start with this? We can't go to every one of these guys and that would take years to do this shit. And all those guys, there was a first time, you know what I mean? Yeah. So who even knows if this guy's even in the book? And most of the guys, probably a lot of them, I'm sure are fucking married. They don't really want to get a phone call about that. You know what I mean? You're going to run into some people going, I don't know what you're talking about when it comes to this type of not everyone's going to openly admit, oh, yeah, she's I see her twice a week. She's great. She's the best. Yeah. Yeah. But don't tell my wife. But JR has his own idea. He says, never mind all those fucking other people. There's one guy you need to look at. Oh. One. His name is Bill Douglas, which sounds boring as shit. That, you know, expect that. There's one guy you need to look at and you expect it to be some crazy name and it's Bill Douglas. Todd Franklin. Yeah, Todd Franklin. Sounds dangerous. He's a professor at Tufts University, which is a very good school, by the way, Tufts. Huge, big school. This JR says he's been obsessed with her. Um, she, he said also she went to like tell him that she's not seeing him anymore on March 5th and I haven't seen her since. So that's the guy to look at first. Obviously it could be anybody. That's the problem too is after she talked to him, she could have went and saw somebody else and that guy could have decided who knows. So the private investigator said, he said he spent a thousand hours looking for her. Andrew Palmero. He said the father was very close to her and she kept in close touch with her family. So this, I mean, the family that she's still keeping in close touch. So this is doesn't seem like it stems from the family. I don't know what's going on with her. So they said the family knew what she was doing, but they tried to do the best that they could. Sometimes you close your eyes to what's really going on, hoping it will go away. They knew. They knew, but they weren't like admitting it to themselves type of deal. Okay. They suspected. They knew. But their suspicions were right. They knew, yeah, they knew what was going on. So the PIs in all of this work, they track this Bill Douglas, they find him and they track him to a hotel in Washington, DC, where he's at an academic conference and they knock on his hotel room door and he lets them in. And the first thing they see is he's a dork, first of all. Of course. He's a fat guy. He's just a middle-aged. He's a professor. I mean, he's not a, you know, he's not a. He's got a specific thing he likes and she doesn't. He doesn't look like he ever played for the New England Patriots, but that. Got it. 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Now back to the show. The world moves fast. You work day? Even faster. Pitching products. Drafting reports. Analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash M365 Copilot. First thing they see on Bill is a large bandage on his forehead. Okay. So that's suspicious right there. Is this guy not like he plays hockey on the weekends or something? He's a middle-aged fat professor. So they said, Bill, what happened to your head? And he says that, oh, I hit my head on the cabinet door. Okay. A few hours later, and he says, I don't know where she is. The PIs leave. They come back a few hours later to the same hotel because they thought something was off. So they're going to go knock on his door and go, oh, we forgot to ask you one question type of thing. So they go back and in talking to him again, they go, so what happened to your forehead again? And he says, quote, I was mugged at an Amtrak station. Well, which is it, motherfucker? The robbers hit me in the head with my briefcase. Oh. Which if you were, they already had your briefcase, why bother hitting you with it? Entirely different story. Hit my head on a cabinet and mugged at an Amtrak station. Or you wouldn't forget a mugging. Assaulted with my own shit. Or I assaulted myself with the cabinet. Yup. And I would go, I would look around too. And if he still has a briefcase sitting there, I'd go, well, that's wrong. That's a new one. Yeah. So they said, that was an interesting thing in a few hours. It went from a cabinet to muggers. Yeah. And they, that was the other thing they thought, just what I just said is robbers don't hit you with your own briefcase. Once they have a briefcase in hand, they usually leave. They're gone. Yeah. They want to be away from this shit. No one's out there beating you with your own briefcase. Right. So, now a week later, the Massachusetts state police are going to talk to him as well, to Bill. And he said, I was mugged by two men who hit me in the head with a metal pipe. Okay. Now it's a metal pipe. He said in Washington, DC, and they stole my briefcase. So they stole his briefcase and hit him with a pipe. So it's either a cabinet, a briefcase or a pipe. One of the three. We don't know. But now it's two men, not just one. So now we've, the story has changed quite a bit in the course of just a few days. Then later on, he'll give a completely different version to police. Now it was, quote, two young black men in DC attacked me, hit me in the head, and took my briefcase. They weren't black before. Now he made them black. Okay. They were white before. Now they've turned black all of a sudden, which is, you know, I guess time went by. I don't know. And it's two young black men is what he said. So that's what he said. Now, no assault on Bill Douglas or robbery was ever reported to any police department in Boston, DC, or anywhere else. So whatever happened, he didn't call the cops about it. He didn't report it at all. So they were like, okay, that's interesting. Now March 11th, 1983, that's when all this was going on. That's when the, you know, this all started. Robin's parents also report her missing. Like we said, her dad drives down to file a missing persons report. They talk about the jacket and the one thing is they show him the jacket and he recognizes it. And he says it's Robbins, but they also, they have JR come in and bring a bottle of her perfume to see if it's the same scent as on the jacket, which is, you know, not really scientific, but it works. You know what I mean? You could tell if it's the same smell. Yeah, you're not checking the, if the molecular makeup of it are the same, but how it hits your nostrils. So they all open up the perfume. They all smell it. They all smell the jacket. They all say that's the same smell. That's her. That's her jacket. That's her perfume. So obviously dad, John Benedict is crushed. I mean, this guy, this is a little girl. I mean, we both have a little girl. That's not a little, not little anymore, but we both have daughters. It's always your little girl. And if this happens, you're half. This is the end, you know, it's the worst thing that could happen. So the cop sends dad home to grieve. You seem like you're, you know, you need to rest here. So they send him home to grieve, but they keep JR to have a little chit chat with him. Oh, they're going to spend the next four hours interrogating JR. Is that right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, other than what he says, he sure looks guilty other than, you know, but he, I mean, he really doesn't look that guilty, but not very. No, it's just who's the first one you'd go to. It's the living boyfriend who's also her pimp who also didn't call the cops. However, is spearheading his own investigation. Yeah. Which doesn't again look good though. That looks like you're trying to steer it. And at the same time too, they also look at it and go, well, I mean, it could not be him because in her profession, it could be anybody. It could be some, some guy who just came in from shore leave. We don't know. Right. I mean, it could be anything. So anyway, when they sit JR down, the opening question is, quote, what'd you do with the body? Oh boy. I mean, they are not even mints and I mean, it is right to it. So accusatory. Very interesting interrogation technique. Usually you try to build rapport. You try to, he just said, would you do with the body? Hey, murderer, man. Yeah. Hey, murderer, what'd you do with the body? Hello, killer. So JR is distraught and he says, quote, I did not hurt her. I loved her. We were planning to, which I loved. It doesn't sound good either. No. I didn't hurt her. And I did not hurt her. That is no contraction. And minimization. So that's two things. I didn't hurt her. I loved past tense her. We were planning to get married. Past tense. All of this sounds like he's a bad man. We never even fought. I have no idea where she is. That's what he said. Okay. We never fought. We did. There's, I have no reason to do this. We're going to get married, but all of the things he says in terms of tenses and everything else sound terrible. Yeah. He's got her in his head. She's gone. Apparently so. But he said the person you need to be looking at is Bill Douglas. That's another thing. If you're interrogating someone on their own and they're like, but look at this guy. That doesn't look good either. Redirection. Yeah. Redirect. Exactly. He said, quote, he's been obsessed with her. He's been stalking her. She went to his house on March 5th to end it. She never came home. Please for the love of God, look at Bill Douglas is what he says. So they go, that's great. And they keep talking to him for another three and a half hours. Yeah, that's awesome. Where's the body? Where's the body? But at the end of the four hours, the cop believes him. Really? He goes, I don't think he did it. He just, he sticks with his story. It's very consistent. He seems legitimately distraught. He doesn't seem like he's faking it or he's putting on a show. They just seems like he's legitimately distraught. So he believes him for now and lets him go and tells him, as far as I'm concerned, you're not a suspect right now. Basically, which, you know, who knows if they decide to change their mind later. But as far as right now, you're good. I don't know. Now the problem is, when the press gets a hold of this, they're going to spend the next several months insinuating that JR did this, no matter what happens. They absolutely have no evidence. They just know that he is a possible human trafficking, a sister who, quote, pimps his girlfriend. So I mean, why wouldn't he be a suspect forever? Absolutely. So he tells the cops that, yeah, this Bill Douglas, she drove down to Sharon, Massachusetts to see this guy at his house to tell him no more. Okay. Okay. Now Sharon is about five miles from the rest stop where the clothes were found in Mansfield. So very close by. Now a little bit about Sharon, by the way, we talked about the cost of living and all that. CNN's Money Magazine has named it one of the best places to live in America multiple times. Not just live or not just retire, but actually grow to retire. Yeah. Probably not retire because taxes are high. No, it's very expensive. But for, you know, to raise a family and shit when you want your taxes to go to like good schools and shit. Yeah. Sharon High School is consistently ranked in the top 10 public high schools in Massachusetts, which basically means that's almost top 10 in the country. Massachusetts has the best, by far the best schools in the country. Every time they do ratings, that's, it comes up. Back in, you know, 83, it was an up and coming suburb and still had, you know, still pretty good. There's a lot of doctors, lawyers, architects, things of that. And professional white collar people lived out here. So the investigator who's tasked with doing this is Trooper Paul Landry. This is, it's his case here. He's a veteran trooper. He, he's the guy who took, he's right from the guy who took the trash bag from Joseph there and looked through it and bagged it in evidence. And he's the guy doing interrogations. He's the guy in charge of everything. He is just a few short weeks from his retirement. He's too old for this shit. Getting too old for this shit. Yeah. Yep. Now we're in a lethal weapon movie. And this poor guy just took one of the hardest cases he's ever had. Oh, this is, this is a crazy hard case. Weeks from retirement. He literally has a retirement party scheduled. Like it's, it's happening. It's done. You can retire and this is the only one you're still working on, but you're going to keep on, you got to stay. That's it. And part of this is this guy's a very, he's a very rabid investigator. He goes after shit. He's, you know, bring him in, sit him down. I'll talk to him for four hours. Do they, he's, he's not a lazy guy at all. He's real into this and he actually wants to find Robin and actually want to help her family. Problem is, and this might be because he's been on the force for 25 years or whatever. And an older guy, and this is 1983. So he could have been on the force since like the late fifties. If he was on the force for 25 years, that would mean 1950, 80 came on. Police work was way different back then. Way different. And they say basically he's not real good at paperwork. This guy, that is not his specialty. Not his specialty. He's not good at keeping track of shit like that paperwork, filling things out. Not good at that. No, he's good at gathering things. He's good at talking to people. He's good at instincts, but he's not good at figuring hunches. Yeah. Not good at keeping paperwork straight, which as policing evolved became much more of an issue of you needed your paperwork straight. So they get the lab results back on the items that they had tested, the ones from the bag, the jacket, the shirt, the hammer. They say that it is type A human blood. Okay. It's fresh. It was less than 24 hours old and the hair on the hammer is also human. Okay. So now they have a bag with things in it with blood. Nobody, no victim, no location of where this could have possibly happened. No suspect, no motive, nothing. They have, oh, God's at this point. They have her pimp boyfriend saying, talk to one of her hundreds of clients, which that's not much. And nobody's seen her. That's all. Yeah. This could be a disappear job. That's what I mean. And that's the other thing too. Maybe she, maybe she met a guy that said, I'll take you away from all this. Yeah. She could have met some guy with, you know, $50 million that said, right now, let's go to my house in the South of France and we're going to fuck you. Who knows? You never know. She's a beautifully young lady. Trissants and cheese every day out there. We're goddamn doing it. So the prosecutor, John Kivlin, he is the assistant district attorney of the county here in Norfolk County. He's a veteran. He said to the newspaper years later, quote, generally speaking, most cases start with the recovery of a body. In this case, it was just the opposite. It was the result of a couple of men searching for bottles and cans around route 95 who found a bloody jacket, which turned out to be Robin Benedict's. And that's how this investigation started. This is, as you listen to small town murder episodes, you know, this is not how an investigation usually is built. Right. You know. So now the investigators talk to Robin's family and they all kind of, and they talk to the prosecutor and everything and they all figure out, they all agree that JR is not involved. We don't think JR is involved. He is genuinely just crushed. I mean, they said he's distraught. Yeah. Miserable. He's distraught. He's not doing well. He's a puddle at this point. So they go, that's, it'll be really odd for that to happen. And this guy keep up this front. So they said he also hired private investigators out of his own pocket within 48 hours of her going missing. So. Thousand hours of investigator. Yeah. That's not expensive. That's not cheap. No, it's not. Yeah. Your, your hair shop better be a fucking front for human trafficking because you're going to be able to afford this shit. So, and his ex, who is the mother of his young son, they looked at maybe that's who's pissed off at her, but they're really good friends. They're close to each other. Right. So, and she was the one who reported her missing and was scared about her. She was going to be her ride. Yeah. That's exactly right. So, but then they keep going back to JR saying, I even had my private investigators go look at this guy, Bill Douglas, Bill Douglas. He said, I've been telling Robin for months that this guy is off. He's a little screwy and it with him. So they go, okay, fine. We'll talk to Bill Douglas if this is so important to you. Bill Douglas is William Henry James Douglas. Goes by Bill and it's a lot shorter than William Henry James and a little bit. Yeah. He's 41 years old when they contact him here. He is a Brown University PhD. So that's Ivy League PhD at Brown and then he's a professor at Tufts right now. So Billy Hank Jim. He's a Billy Hank Jim is a smart guy here. He's also a 300 pound big fat fuck who lives in Sharon, Massachusetts with his wife and three kids. So he's a typical suburban dad type of guy and also a highly respected professor. So they're like, probably not. You know what I mean? This happens to be a fat slob. Yeah. They look at this guy and they're like, this doesn't match up. You know what I mean? So they finally bring him in for formal questioning on March 16th. So it took a while here. They said he sits down and he's condescending. And he's kind of a I'm better than you blue collar scumbag type of guy. He's one of those guys. I don't think he's used to talking to a lot of guys like that. Probably not. Yeah. So he thought I'm better than you bullshit. He admits right away that, oh yeah, I'm a client of Robbins. Yeah. I paid her. He said, yeah, of course I paid her. Everybody, you know, everybody knows that. And you want to go out with a lady like that? She's just going to, you have to pay her. He says, I didn't hurt her. He said, she did come to my house on the night of the fifth, but she left. She came, she was there for 10 minutes and she left and she went to a party. He said, I like it. Remember, she said she was going to Joe's party. I don't know who Joe is though, because I don't know her friends. That's what he said. So they said, okay, let's, let's go back to that head wound again that you had. Yeah. And he says, I told you last time, two guys in DC hit me with a pipe. Yeah. Landry does, or a cabinet at my own briefcase. And my cabinet and my briefcase. Yeah. He took my cabinet. I don't know where he got it from, but he beat me with it unmercifully. So Landry here, this cop doesn't buy it. Just thinks he's lying about shit. But there's really nothing you can do at this point. He's got no evidence. All he has is a bag of bloody clothes. He has no body. It's 1983. So it's not like he can go, let's get a cheek swab on you and see if you're DNA. There's none of that shit at all. So they're like, they don't really, yeah, that's all. I mean, you can, but at this point it's just a guy with a head wound and kind of a, you know, kind of a shitty story. That's all, that's all he is. Can't hold him. No. Can't arrest him. No. So they let him go. Then JR brings in letters that JR is trying to help at this point. And the cop said, I need anything that you have on this Bill Douglas, because I don't trust him. I talk to him too and I think he's shifty also. So JR says, oh, I got a ton of shit. Here's a stack of letters that Bill wrote to Robin. Letters, pages and pages and pages, pages. It's love letters and I'll do this and you help me with this and angry letters and apology letters and letters where Bill talks about his plan to quote rescue Robin from sex work by putting her on a payroll with Tufts and all this shit. Maybe she likes it. He doesn't see it that way. Okay. Letters where he apologizes for insulting her. Letters where he promises to be better. This is like a fuck up boyfriend, except they're not in a relationship like that. Except he's paying for the sweet opportunity. That's it. So when he reads the letters, this Landry guy, he goes, okay, this is starting to make a lot more sense here. This is an obsessive guy who's obsessed with her. And maybe that's what did it. So now a little bit about Bill Douglas here. Let's get a background on him. He came from lower class parents. He came from very blue collar ways here. His mother is an immigrant from Germany and she was a maid and his dad was a plumber. Oh, yeah. So I mean, yeah. He worked, he had to work all through high school and basically ended up at Platsburg State as the first college he went to because that's all he could afford. Chances for something? No, Platsburg's in New York, Western New York. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's every small town in Western New York has a college. That's why the town exists. Platsburg is one of them. And I think it's a SUNY school. And this is, it's a government subsidized teachers college. The SUNY schools are super cheap if you live in New York. They're affordable. So while he was in college, his father died in a construction accident. No money for graduate school, anything like that. He finished Platsburg and he married his high school sweetheart, who is a woman named Nancy. That's his wife until now. His dad died in a construction accident. He was a plumber therefore. I mean, that's just something K-10 is on you, right? That means some shit fell on you, I would assume, right? What the fuck else is it? Yeah, usually an incoming. Unclogged something and it's super unclogged? Fucking shot through your chest or some shit. Courts back at you, yeah. Hairball just went right through his brain. They fist wild. Wow. Wow. Now Nancy has described in this book as quote, a heavy set plain young woman. Yeah, so that's kind of what they both are, kind of heavy set plain people. Seems like they go together. It's Rex Hureman. Yeah, it's a Rex Hureman. This whole case is extremely Rex Hureman by the way. Really? And that's kind of why I picked it because I've been, both Jimmy and I, a little behind the scenes for everybody, we have been obsessed with this Gilgo Beach thing, though the new one that's on Peacock with the newest part with the psychologist. Yeah. Oh my god, it is fascinating. I want to ask him so many questions. Oh yeah. No cameras. I'm not going to record anything, man. I just want answers. How many do you think he killed? Over 30. My guess was 26. It's a lot, man. It's a lot. It's a shit. It's all over and it's a lot. He's been doing this for so long. There's no way that this guy killed eight women and they happen to just randomly find all eight. Found pieces. Pieces? Well, I mean, they found enough to know that there's eight different women and then they went to him and he goes, yep, you got all of them. You're lucky. Wow, you guys are good. Good job, guys. You even found the Asian man. That was my golden egg. Super weird. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. That was the Easter egg. You guys got a great job. So I'm telling you, it's fascinating. And he's like, sure, I'll plead guilty to those eight and it's like, listen, homie. You're too quick. Yeah. You have at least three times that many. He's too fast to jump onto the plea with a number. That tells me it's so many more. He's got two properties down south. Yeah. He's got two properties down south. It's all scary. So. He's got a place in Vegas. He's just, he's too much running. Absolutely. Now, at this point, he's married to Nancy. There are a couple of, quote, plain, heavy set people. And basically he's being a small town high school science teacher. That's as far as he could go academically because he didn't have any money. But after a couple of years of teaching, he applied for and managed to get a national science foundation fellowship for a year of postgraduate study at Yale. At Yale. Yes. He gets accepted. Now he jump, makes a huge jump from Plattsburgh State to Yale. That's where he's going to stay. Because he's going to go from Yale to Brown and he's going to be. He likes that. Then he thinks he's fancy. Yeah. He's academic. So they've been together since they were teenagers. He and his wife. This I'll read from this book. The intellectual atmosphere of New Haven, which is where Yale is, altered Douglas and made him more ambitious. Because people around him, it's Yale. They're all very ambitious people. Now we all of a sudden, he wants to be a researcher and a professor, not just some kind of science teacher. So he sought other grants after that year at Yale and continued his postgraduate studies at Brown. Which is another Ivy League school. By then his mom had died too. But Nancy had given birth to two of their kids at that point as well. So by 1970, he's a young guy still with his young wife with two little kids. And he's getting his PhD from Brown. And he gets his first college position, which is an associate professor of biology at Edinburgh State College in Pennsylvania. Awesome. Awesome wife. He's doing really well. He did well there too. His supervisors praised him, the head of the departments, all the students liked him. But he wanted to get out of there because this is, have you ever heard of that place? Never. Exactly. He wants. And that's embarrassing. That's embarrassing for him. I mean, I have a PhD from Brown. I've been to Yale. Yeah. He's essentially Glenn Howard on AP Bio. Where he's like. Everybody starts shutting up. Yeah, everybody starts shutting up. Like I don't belong here. You're lucky to have me in the room. Don't ask me questions. It'll ruin my wonderful brain. So waste of time. I'll be out of here shortly. Yep. Have a good one. So that's what he's doing. He wants out of this place. So after a year of being there, he found a research job at the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. It's a private institution. He would be director of the Center's Electro-Microscopy Facility. Oh. Yeah. So he's a big deal. Director. Director. As well as associate director of education. He's designing curriculum. Period. Yeah. Wow. So he really starts kind of getting a name for himself going in research circles when he's here. His field was tissue culture. Okay. That means if you blow your nose, he takes it and sees what's in there. Yeah. No. Petri dish. That's right. He picks it through with a fucking tweezer. He specializes in studies that involve isolating cells, then growing them outside of the body. Basically in vitro research is what they call it. He worked on a bunch of projects. At one point, his studies were of a waxy substance secreted in the lungs that permits them to inflate and deflate properly. But that is absent in lung tissue of infants born prematurely. So he's trying to figure that out. When do we develop it? I'm not sure. I don't know anything about that. But yeah, he's working all the time. He's really not a lazy guy when it comes to work and things like that. He begins to regularly publish in scientific journals. And after a while, he's serving on several editorial boards of different science and scientific journals. I mean, he's doing a lot. He began doing grant applications to private foundations in the National Institutes of Health and was soon serving on one of the National Institute of Health's review panels, overseeing and evaluating the work of his peers. So I mean, he's a big deal. He also taught at his alma mater in Plattsburgh and at a nearby North Country Community College as well. He became a consultant for the American Cancer Society. Really? And for the Department of Medicine at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. So he is in demand and clearly very good at his job. And they always want to pick his fucking brain. Everybody wants a piece of his opinion on this shit here. Now, family life, it seems like he'd be too busy, but he's not. He's also into his family. He is. Now, his wife Nancy had decided to go back to school to study nursing and had given birth to their third child. So I think they have two boys and a girl. He tried to be a father too, like a modern kind of guy, like a 70s guy, where, you know, if the wife was at school at night or whatever, he would do the household chores and cook and, you know, be a normal person. But back then that was considered a big deal. Your husband washed the dishes? My God, what a gentleman. Like, he would have been the star of any party, you know. This is the guy who washes the dishes, honey. Look at him. Look at him. Wow. Everybody's staring at him. Touching his hands. Where's that palm olive? Where's, oh, look at, oh, soft. You must be using the palm olive. He chaperoned the kids on camping trips. He chauffered them to their speed skating lessons. He was a Pee Wee hockey coach. Really? I mean, he's doing everything. He loved Nancy. She had a miscarriage at one point. And he took an entire week off work to be with her and just to make sure she's okay. So this doesn't sound like the type of guy who would, you know, kill a young prostitute at this Yeah. It's not minding. Displaying a lot of empathy. A lot of empathy. A lot of empathy here. So by 1978, she's working nights as a nurse at a local facility. They live on a cul-de-sac in Sharon, a nice single family home, three bedrooms with a finished basement, big deck out back in a yard, suburbia. Yeah. Suburbia. And it backs up to conservation land, which is awesome on the East Coast. If you have that, that's great because that's where our land backs up too. So they can't build behind us. Right. It's conservation land. So that's the best, best property to get. Because you're not going to have shit popping up around you. So their house was nice. They called it a new suburb basically, Sharon. It was getting, you know, more up and coming at this point. Yeah. Their house was on Sandy Ridge Circle, which is a very, which sounds awfully idyllic. It's a nice, well-landscaped street, street, that kind of thing. And they said, it's a type of street that you drive down and everybody's got a basketball hoop in the driveway and kids riding bicycles around the cul-de-sac and all kinds of shit like that. They move there in 1978 after he receives an appointment to Tufts as a professor. And that's when they move there. It's about a 30-minute drive and, you know, Bill was fine. So he was into this. And around this area, they have great schools, which he's happy for with the kids and he's ready to go. So Bill's job at this point is tenured anatomy and cellular biology professor, which we've both done that. I mean, that's not a big deal. Tenured, yeah. Easy. No problem. We quit that to do these shows, actually. Yeah. You know, got to be a lot. All the cellular biology. Yeah. Tenures very overrated. It really is. It means you've really just put in work and then you're, then you just have an expectation. No expectations. We didn't need. We were tenured in the cafeteria in high school. That's where we were tenured. We had no tenure. Tenured at the desk in the hallway. Yeah, the one where they kick you out too. This is at Tufts University. And this is the big time. Tufts is a big deal. It's a medical school and a big fucking deal to work here. An awfully big deal. So he was teaching as well as he's in the university's dental and veterinary schools, as well as other things too. And being the, you know, cellular biology anatomy professor as well. The students all thought he was a good teacher as well. He was consistently voted the best teacher in his department at the medical school. Yeah. One student said that he was enormously considerate, always willing to answer questions and go over material that was complex and difficult to understand. And another said that out of every teacher he had, that Bill was the most concise and easy to understand. And we were talking about medical shit that's complicated. So it helps if someone can synthesize that and when something that you can ingest and take in. Extreme line. Yeah. He loved research though. That is what he was into. And that's what he devoted himself to. And he published over the next couple of years more than 60 articles in scientific journals. Oh. That's a lot. And applied for and received shitloads of grant research. So much so that his lab became the busiest and most endowed by these grants in the department of cellular biology and anatomy. So he's doing great. He knows how to fill out those grant applications just right and get those. He's engaged in all sorts of projects. One is sponsored by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society. That's a society. Do we have to say we shouldn't vivisect people? Is that it's involved in developing an alternative to the Dres technique, which is a method of texting, testing the toxicity of cosmetics intended for human use by injecting their chemical components into the eyes of rabbits. Oh, she. Yeah. That's what we did. When you talk about animal testing, you picture like, okay, let they put that mascara on like a monkey's eyelash. And you go, yeah, she looks pretty and she didn't drop dead. No, they're injecting chemicals into these fucking things eyes, man. I see him shampooing a rabbit with head and shoulders. You know what I mean? It's like, ah, yeah, it looks like it's like an herbal essences commercial. Yeah. Just really loving it. How does a rabbit come? No. So he was also doing research for the US Navy as well, continuing his efforts to do all of this shit. And he traveled to scientific conferences all over the country. He went to Europe. One of his colleagues said his achievements were not obscure and unimportant. They were very serious and cogent projects, which made notable contributions to science. He's a big deal. And he's 41. He's got his real science years ahead of him here. I mean, the next 20 years. So, I mean, basically over the next 20 years, he is looking at being like a very well known, especially in scientific circles. Like we wouldn't know who the fuck he was, but anybody at the university levels would know who the guy was over the next 20 years. He brought in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant research grants as well. Most, they say most of his department colleagues would run one or two projects at a time. He ran eight at a time. So, and this is an addition of Pee Wee Hockey and all that kind of stuff. Now, to describe him personally, he's a bald guy who, a chubby 41 year old soft looking bald guy with glasses. That's who he is. He's described as nebish, as well as a lot of people describe him as. Just kind of, you know, harmless little guy. A schmuck. A schmuck, exactly. One book about the case said he seemed, quote, gentle as a cow. That's mean. Big and slow and easy going. He's a manatee. They said he also was a non-smoker. These are the people from work. Said he's a non-smoker, didn't drink anything stronger than ginger ale. He's a real, he's a real square. They said his hobby was his children. He's a dedicated family man. They said he won't even commit to coming to a barbecue before first calling his wife. I mean, he's very buttoned up. They said he's a loner, but he's also terrified of being left off social shit. But then he doesn't show up if invited to the get together. What? Which that makes perfect sense to me. Trying to big time him? No, not at all. You want people to want you to go places, but you don't want to actually go to those places. Is that what it is? Yeah. Yeah, you want to be invited and then you want to go, ah, okay, good. They don't hate me, good. But I can't go there. That's too much. I can't show up. I can't show up because then they won't like me. When you hate yourself, that's what you do. You go, well, if I show up, then they won't like me anymore. I should keep it to the point where they want me to come and then I don't come. I like the better ones. That's how they hated me. That's not how your brain works. That's how my brain works. If he did, no, yeah, they said he proposed you. I love showing up to places. I love the fucking party. Oh, okay. I mean, once I'm there, I'm fine. It's fine, but I don't want to go there. God damn, I love a party. Well, yeah, sometimes. It's weird. I don't mind it either. I, there's a line in clerks that holds it perfectly. Yeah. You hate people. He goes, yeah, but I love gatherings. Yeah. It's a weird thing. Fuck I love a party. But I don't mind a gathering. It's one of those deals. So now at Tufts, his colleagues call him quote the man. And this is kind of out of the fact that he's a bit of a bully around the campus. And really, he's kind of the big shot. So he feels he can bully a little bit here, which is again very Rex Eurman-ish because Rex Eurman, if you, if anybody watches those old interview videos with him, he is a loud mouth, know it all asshole. That's what he is. That one, that one where they do the thing at the. In his office. Yeah. With the glasses and shit. He's trying to be so cool. It's like dude skiing, look in the mirror. Nobody, you are not cool. And then whenever any of the interviewer says something, he's always like, well, no, no, no, no, let me tell, let me really give you the real skinny because you don't know shit, but I do. It's one of those things. It's amazing. He's a dipshit. But this guy, they said he doesn't tolerate being questioned or contradicted very well. Lab assistants would tiptoe around him basically. So he does all of this, seems to have a pretty goddamn busy life going on. And after all of that, he also hangs out at the combat zone. Hangs out in the combat zone area. I guess in this area, Emerson College is very close to this and Tufts Medical School is basically around the corner. From Bill's lab at Tufts to Good Time Charlie's, it's a less than a 10 minute walk. Walk. Walk. So, I mean, he could use the exercise, but that's beside the point. By 1982, this is the combat zone has fallen even into a further state of disrepair because now nobody wants to whack off in public when you can do it at home. There's VCRs now. Yeah. You can go rent a movie and do it in the privacy of your own house. You don't have to bump into other hunters. Bump elbows. He's thriving right now. Yeah, you don't have to bump elbows with the guy jerking off next to you. Are you right or lefty? Okay, well, then I'll sit on this side. You don't want us to bump elbows while we're going at it. Yeah, we got to switch. So, yeah, the theaters were kind of closed and the clubs were struggling a bit, but the only thing that was doing well was the prostitution business. That was still going on. So, Good Time Charlie's was a huge dive. Street prostitutes would gather in front of it, and then upstairs they had a few small rooms. And basically, you could, you know, if you're a schmuck that wants to pay a young woman for their time, this is the place to do it, apparently. All right. His work colleague, one of them said he was intense, a workaholic who had a strange biological clock not given to nine to five work. He could work from 10 to 10 one day, then come in in the next and work from noon to three. So, okay, makes sense. I mean, yeah, but I never in the least thought he might be frequenting the combat zone after hours. There are four bachelors in the lab who are always discussing it, but when the subject came up, he never participated in any of the comments. He wouldn't join in and be like, oh, yeah, that place is great. Yeah, they have hot girls or any of that shit. This is from that book about Good Time Charlie's. This is the author saying this, the one we mentioned earlier. Quote, when I visited Charlie's, I was struck by the fact that despite its cheerful back slapping name, it was extremely dreary. The customers, chiefly young sailors or seedy down on down at the heels, foreigners, looked more lonesome than libidinous. So it looks sadder more than horny, basically. Downcast, they drooped forlornly over their drinks, sipping steadily and eyeing with a minimum of interest, the topless and bottomless dancers bumping and grinding mechanically to the sounds of a distant jukebox. Even when a tune ended and the dancers in whatever state of undress they found themselves climbed down from the overhead runway and perambulated through the smoky bar to put 50 cents in the jukebox, they and the nearness of their naked flesh did not seem to arouse the lethargic lonely drunks. Yeah, if a naked chick doesn't get your attention, you're down in the dumps a little bit. Support girl outdanced, she's my cherry pie and she needs to pick another song. She needs to pick another song. Well, Motley Crue is coming out here. She's like more smoking in the boys room. They seem to like that one. This is a time that the strip club DJ needed to be around and there just wasn't one? He had to be like, hey, a rather good girl's giving up for the girls. Oh, that's candy, candy, candy. That asshole. They needed one so bad. Those guys are the worst. Um, they also say, quote, of course, the dancers weren't much to look at. They were, for the most part, bony or flabby or haggard. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, especially in a dump like this, nor were most of the prostitutes who frequented the bar, particularly appealing. They were getting on in years. Their expressions were obscured beneath heavy coats of makeup. Their clothes were garish, but oddly here and there, there was some young prostitutes who were fresh faced, beautifully built and handsomely dressed. Wow. This person said, the author goes on to say, I'd come to Charlize with a friend, a prosperous and proper Bostonian who'd never been in a zone bar before, but had agreed to accompany me for safety's sake and also out of curiosity. All evening, I interviewed the bartender and several prostitutes who had known Robin Benedict. My friend kept saying, how could a man like Douglas, an academic, be attracted to women like this? Sex, yes, but attracted, involved? They go on to say he was disdainful and uncomprehending. Yet before the night was out, he would alter his views. One of the handful of beautiful, well-groomed prostitutes approached him, and soon he was buying her drinks and listening to the story of her life. She was young, dressed in an ultra suede suit, wore her hair in a librarian's twist, and spoke impeccable Boston English. That's a fun accent, apparently. Oh, yeah. Once when she got up for a moment, my friend whispered to me, I'm getting a bit of insight into your professor now. The woman who'd picked up my friend was called, she told him Sabrina, and when he asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like Charlie's, she said, and he liked believing her, that she was just here temporarily. I'm just here to work my way through college. As soon as she got a bit of a nest egg together, she'd be going back to her studies, finishing her MA in anthropology at Boston University. My friend was fascinated and talked with her animatedly, only to be bitterly disappointed when the manager of Good Time Charlie suddenly arrived, worried that we might be detectives shooed Sabrina out of the bar. Okay. So here we go. This is kind of the first deal here. This is Bill's first outing. It was March of 82. Bill meanders his way into the combat zone. One of those deals, I have a drink, do something like that. He could have gone home and done that, but no, he wanted to get out into the seediness a little bit. Have a little company while I drink this. A little something, something, you know what I mean? So, you know, that's kind of what's going on. So he did that. Now he first meets Robin in April of 82. He's 41, she's 20 at the time. Oh boy. She'd been working at a Good Time Charlie's for not too, too long, only a few months. She still didn't have a ton of regular, still a small client list and a few dozen people. Later on, she'll have over 250 clients in her book. He saw her and liked her. According to the book, Boston Tabloid by Don Stradley, he quote, smiled like an idiot at her, is what people said, which is what you do when you're a shlubby middle-aged man and a 20-year-old attractive woman is talking to you. You smile like an idiot. That's all you can do at that point if you're that guy. It's what you do when any girl or guy talks to you when they're out of your league. You just go, this is ridiculous. If I say anything, she's going to stop talking to me. Yeah, I'm just going to smile and let her talk. Try not to fuck this up. So this is from the book again. Robin Benedict must have been a lot like Sabrina. That's the one that they got shooed away from. Certainly, she was beautiful, slim, and willowy with wide dark eyes, luxuriant, raven-colored hair, and smooth pale skin with an underglow of topaz. She dressed conservatively, wearing slacks or skirts with matching blazers, and she had a lively, outgoing manner, a high-spirited way of putting shy men at ease. Douglas, a diffident man and always something of an observer from the sidelines, may have noticed these appealing traits about Robin and attracted by them, put down his drink, and tried to strike up a conversation. Or maybe she came up to him. Who knows? Either way, we do know within minutes of their conversation, Robin took him, took Bill to her trick pad that she had rented in Boston. She's got a trick pad. Apparently, she had looked him over and decided he was safe because he's a pudgy middle-aged guy with a family and a professor, and he doesn't look real hardened. He doesn't look like a guy who came in off the high seas, is going to murder you and dump you off into the harbor. So he's a nervous smiling professor. Her rates $100 an hour, which is a little bit expensive for the combat zone girls, but she's as good as the combat zone girls get. So they do this. Now, here, one of the people at the bar, one of the other ladies said, I remember seeing him in here a few times. He was pretty hard to miss because he was so big, but he stopped coming in after he met her. Uh-huh. What was really neat about her was she was so fresh looking, the clean cut type. That's what this woman goes on to say. Now, Bill, rather than being like, okay, I have my teaching and I have my wife and I have my kids and I have all this stuff going on, maybe once in a blue, I'm going to go hook up with some hot young girl or something. How often is he doing it? Well, no, he falls in love with her. He's in love with her. Oh, my God. Sorry. Wait, this is, I mean, he's looking at her, she's 21 and glamorous and beautiful and also, he's been with the same woman, a, quote, plain heavy set woman since high school. What do you think they're fucking is like? Pretty vanilla. Non-existent is a word? Yeah, and if it's happening, it's probably pretty lights off. Probably pretty hurry up and get it over with. This girl knows what she's doing. This young lady knows how to fuck and he is blown away by this. Absolutely just mesmerized by it. Very impressed. Yes. He wanted to be his, her boyfriend. He wanted to like, you know, I want to walk around with her and, you know, go canoeing and have candlelit dinners and sure you do. Yeah. He was in love with her, period. He wants to pretty woman this for sure. Well, that's the thing. He totally wants to pretty woman her and he said one day he confessed to her and he told her. He said, you know, this is what I want. He's like, I want you to be with me. And so, and pretty soon they started going to the movies together, going to concerts and plays together. They took drives in the country. They'd stroll on the common feeding ducks with bread, you know, just like a, like a young couple. Do that. And then at the end of it, you give her a wad of cash. Well, that's the thing. You got to disregard everything that happened. Yeah. Well, that's the thing too. She, this isn't free. No. She said, no matter what we're doing, it's $100 an hour. I'm going to go out to dinner. It's $100 an hour. Yeah. It's all $100 an hour. So she gives him no freebies. Yeah. She said literally whether it's oral sex or a slice of pizza, it's $100. It doesn't matter. Fuck the pizza. Yeah, exactly. But doesn't matter. It's always a hundred. So one night she took him to her apartment and cooked dinner for him. She charged him for the time she spent with him. She also charged him for the time she spent shopping and preparing the food and the ingredients. You bet. Come on. And the grocery bill. Even the groceries. That evening cost him $700 to have dinner at her apartment. Worth it. Wow. But Bill was into it. He loved it. He felt like he was a young guy again. He felt great. He's doing all these, writing him all these letters, dearest Robin, stuff like that. One, he writes in the very edge of the note paper, knowing you has made my life brighter and happier. You are a remarkable, wonderful woman and being with you makes me a very fortunate man. You are a beautiful person and deserve only the best in life. One time at midnight they went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight showings, which was a new thing at that point. That night cost him $800 to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So he's a guy which means he hated the Rocky Horror Picture Show and he spent $800 for her to like it and for him to be like, what the fuck are we doing? These songs suck. Which is how I felt about Rocky Horror Picture Show. And that guy's got a big mouth with a lot of teeth and he's in fishnets and a huge fucking head. What the hell is going on here? So summer of 82, he starts seeing her pretty much every single day. Paying her $100 an hour. Spending $300 to $500 a day on her every day of the week. He can't be making that kind of money. Oh, he's not at all making that kind of money. No way. That's what we'll talk about. Next thing is, how does he afford it? That's literally, next word is, how does he afford it? Well, let's see here. He has a lot of leeway at Tufts when it comes to these research grants and shit. No fucking way. He's the top grant generator in his department and he has eight active projects. So he's got a lot of plates spinning. He signed off on his own lab's petty cash requirements. Oh my god. The university's policy at the time was that a $25 petty cash request didn't even require a second signature. You just wrote it down and pocketed the cash. So that's what he did. Over and over again in $25 increments for months. Signed them over to his lab assistants who would then hand the cash back to him so it didn't look like him. Yeah. And then he would take the cash and go to the combat zone and give it to her. That's how this went. So she flattered him. He can't have a fashion show to pay this back. This is crazy. Yeah, this is insane. This is insane. She would flatter him. She called him her favorite professor. She would also because ladies of the night are good at listening. Yeah. They're good at it. They'll make, they'll seem interested in what you have to say because that's their job. So she showed interest in his research and he began to see her as not just some young hot chick, but he's got like, she's a great artist and a good music. And she's very smart too. And he wanted to, he said he wanted to meet her friends and, you know, help her get an education and do all this. I want to be a part of your life. Yeah, I want to meet your friends. Yeah. He also started padding the invoices at work. Oh no. Basically what he did is he put Robin on the Tufts payroll as a research assistant. This is, talk about crossing the streams, man. You are fucking up. My God. Supposedly she was doing scientific illustrations for the lab, but she was never, didn't have to do that. He even started processing her time sheets personally. Oh boy. So he started submitting receipts for work that Robin never actually did. Oh Jesus Christ. No one at the lab ever remembered seeing her there. Because they didn't. She wasn't. Now she thought this was a legitimate position at first. So when he told her what he was going to do, she was like, awesome. She thought this was a job. She told her brother that she was super excited about a legitimate freelance illustration gig, and that she could do some drawings and work and stuff like that. But the paychecks, she'd get paid for it, and this was a real gig. This is her first freelance illustration gig, and it's a place like Tufts that'll get around. I'm going to do great. So Bill also, this is even fucking crazier. In addition to Robin, he put JR's ex-girlfriend on the payroll as well. Her best friend? Yeah, her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. So now he has her and her pimp boyfriend's ex-girlfriend both on the payroll, which is crazy. A legend pimp. I don't know if that's what everybody says. So the ex would cash the Tufts check and give the money to Robin, and everybody got paid. So she didn't get paid, but she had her on the payroll, so she could just give that money to Robin, so he could give Robin more without making her salary be a regular flat. He ends up embezzling about $67,000 in 1982 money, which is about 200 grand today. That's a lot. That's a shitload. And he's always writing her letters. He went on a trip to Saskatoon and wrote her a letter that he missed her and his children. Basically, I miss you and the kids real bad. It's only like 650 hours with her though, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not that much. It's still a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of money. It's a lot. Yeah, it's not a lot of time. He said, she said, my lab group at Tufts had a cookout for one of my postdoctoral fellows. I wanted to ask you if you could go with me to this party, but Nancy would not tell me until the last minute if she was going or not. She did not, and I didn't want to ask you at the last minute. Next lab party, I'm just going to ask you and not tell her about the party. Gee, great. He described an accolade he'd received at the cookout saying that, quote, one of my graduate students, he said, showed up in a sweatshirt. On the front of the shirt was the skyline of Boston with many skyscrapers. Across the buildings written in capital letters was W.H.J.D. And she said that everybody should get that. I don't know what that, William Henry James Douglas. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so she's like, they're all getting shirts on me. That's how cool I am. Now throughout the early spring and summer of 1982, he's getting more and more into her and one of the things that they're doing, this is about a month and a half into starting seeing her, is they're doing cocaine together. If you could add another extremely expensive fucking habit into this. He can't afford either of these habits. No, she was a steady user at the time. She was going into that, which I mean the nightlife and all that. And from the beginning of him being on board, he would pay for it for. Now he's paying for his too because he gets into it. So they'd meet up late at night. They'd snort some Coke and all of that. She said later, she said to somebody that she was very strict about her habit and would always check her nose very thoroughly because she didn't want to go back to the bar and have any traces of it around her. She didn't want to look like a Coke skank basically. Yeah. So he found himself super into her. He met two other young prostitutes with whom she shared the trick pad with and got to know them and talk to them about her live, about their lives and about why they went into this business. And he was studying the culture and everything else. And he was using all the street lingo and he's like, yeah, I know these working girls and all that kind of shit. He's America undercover now. Yeah. That's what he's super interested. Yeah, he's HBO films here. He's very interested. And in the summer of 82, he started to lose weight. What happens when you're doing a shitload of Coke? That's what it does to you. So it's a wonder diet. It does a wonders for that. One of the colleague, one of his colleagues said he went on eating all the stuff he liked, hot dogs, cheese and crackers, ice cream, cookies and even drank beer. But he lost a lot of weight. I figured he was taking Benzadrine. Either way, Robin told him in an effort to encourage him to lose weight, she called him gross apparently. Oh. And so then he was like, I got to get look better for my young lady here. So he's got to hook it up and get. She means you've got a drip. You're doing Coke. You're gross. He didn't know Robin had a pimp during this time as well. He thought she was just freelance, huh? Yeah. He just wanted to spend time with her and all that kind of shit here. He also changed his schedule at Tufts arranging to do research in the middle of the night so he could stay in his lab until she finished her work and then go over there and meet her. Right. He didn't, this was often 2 30 in the morning. God damn. When she finished, he would go to go and stay with her until four or five AM. And he wanted to be the last man she saw every night. That's what he said. He called her his treasure and her, his quote, precious lady. Yeah. He gave her gifts to money, records, clothing, whatever the fuck it was. One night he invented a game of grab bag. He filled an envelope with slips of paper on which he named various treats and let her pull out a slip before they had sex. Something she can get. She had also one of the slips because she has nails that she keeps up. Nails by Dorothy as often as you want them is one of the things he said to get her. What? Another said a permanent, a hair permanent at the salon of your choice as often as you wish. As often. Often as you wish. Another slip said one complete set of super expensive cosmetics of your choice. That's often as you want. He doesn't even know a super expensive cosmetics. I don't know what these chicks put on. Whatever that's to this. On one, he wrote one bike of your choice. Weird bicycle. In his letters here, he ends everything with Q H, which means quick hugs and tells Rob and how much he longed for vellament transfers, which I guess means that it's the little mint candies and we're going to kiss and cast mints back and forth. He'd draw cartoons on the bottom of his notes, which aren't quite as good as the ones that she does here. But they were like, they were basically like 13 year olds. He acted like a 13 year old that was in love with someone with puppy love and writing them letters and all this type of shit here. The faculty starts to take notice of some shit. They start whispering about him and gossiping. Yeah, he's just acting weird. Said with Douglas, he lost so much weight that his clothes were hanging off him. He looks different. He has no new wardrobe because he can't afford that. He's spending it on coke and fucking perms for his girlfriend. And nails as much as you want them. He lost all that weight. He's behaving uncharacteristically. He almost never comes into the lab while the sun is up ever anymore. Jesus. He keeps missing appointments with students. He wouldn't turn up for departmental meetings and laboratory supervisory sessions. And basically they said when someone would find him there, he was jumpy and weird and you know, on coke. Yeah. Real jumpy. At first they thought that he was basically, he was probably having an affair with an affair and they would joke around like, oh, this, he's like the dorkiest, nerdiest of all of us. He's probably getting some on the side. That's what's going on here. Yeah. He mentioned to one of them a while back that if a Robin Benedict telephoned that he would be called to the phone no matter what he was doing, even if they were in the middle of a crucial experiment, you come get me. All right. So he said that she's a graduate student working with him on a research project at MIT. They were like, sure she is. Yeah, that sounds right. October of 82, the school questions him about the money. Expensive, you know, padding expense accounts and they said, what kind of work did these two people you've hired as research assistants? Oh, shit. At first he was calm, but he said that at one point after a while he admitted that some of his vouchers were problems and false, but he insisted that some of the others being questioned were valid and he maintained that the vouchers for money paid to the two young ladies were on the up and up. So they didn't know they were talking about doing a full-scale investigation. They demanded to speak with, you know, JR's ex and Robin and he drew very, he got very agitated. The vouchers were legitimate. He repeated again and if they weren't, you know, and if it turns out I owe the university money, I'll pay it back. So don't even fucking worry about it. That's it. So that's it. So they kind of leave it at that and he continues to spend money. Oh my God. Yeah, some of the scams and things were ridiculous hiring her as a researcher. By the way, want to know what he put in the paperwork? He thinks he's clever for why he hired her. She was a consultant on a project to develop a computer program for analyzing prostate tissue. He requisitioned a medical supply house used by Tufts University or Tufts Medical School where he described on a voucher as quote, fluid collection units. Which turned out to be condoms. That's what it was. And Robin would sell them to the other ladies at the combat zone to make a profit. That's what he was doing. He called it fluid collection units. He was. Yeah. He added the ex-girlfriend there. At one point Tufts issued the JR's ex-girlfriend a check for $9,000 which she cashed and gave to Robin. He gave Robin herself about 20,000 directly and submitted all sorts of false shit like that. And they're just spending. He's just spending money and it's crazy. At one point she talked about continuing her art education. But according to a lady who knew her that also worked at Good Time Charlies, Robin frequently mentioned that she hoped one day to make a living by drawing. But by the fall she no longer took that seriously. She told her quote, there's a lot of reasons the cut and pay for one. She tells one girl. Fall of 82 stalking starts. Oh yeah. Now he wants her all to himself. That's it. And she's like, listen, you're fine when you pay me and all that, but then when you leave, I go on to the next person and that's what I do. But here's a list of what he did through the fall of 82. From the fall of 82 on through the time she disappears. Called her up to a dozen times a day every day. Wrote her dozens of letters, long letters, pages long, apologies, love letters. That's the ones JR gave in. Showed up at her apartment uninvited, parked outside, watched her come and go. Broke into her apartment twice to steal her answering machine so he could listen to the messages other clients were leaving. Oh my God. Bought her a new answering machine as a gift, quote unquote, but kept the little remote control that lets you call in from a pay phone and retrieve your messages. It's a beeper and there's a certain tone you have to do back there and that's it. It would go beep and they knew that was the right. And didn't tell her that it existed? Exactly. Wow. So she was getting messages on a machine that he was remotely listening to. He bought her the silver 82 Toyota Starlet with the black racing stripe as a gift there. He paid for part of the down payment on a house for her. We don't know if that's true or not. That's an alleging. He stole her mail. He called her family members trying to get information about what she was doing. She called a massage parlor she used to work for and got her fired from a legitimate side job that she ends up getting. Made recordings of himself making harassing calls for some odd fucking reason. Copied Robin and JR's phone bills and annotated them in the margins in pen with notes about who Robin had been calling, who she'd seen, where she'd been seen. It kept a pair of Robins underwear, as we'll talk about, and also her flute disappears. And she doesn't know where that is. This is a man that does research for a living. He's going to be good at this. You think? Fuck yeah. This is also from the missing beauty book. Apparently he met Robin's parents at one point and told them that if anybody bothered them or bothered Robin, I'll take care of it. Because he said he had access to chemicals at the Tufts lab that could dissolve a human body. He said that over dinner, just chilling. And they were like, okay, like uncomfortably laughing. I'm going to help take care of your daughter and watch over your daughter as I am in possession of chemicals that dissolve bodies. I might have to completely disappear a human to do that, but I'll do that, don't you worry. I'll definitely do it to somebody not your daughter. Get not hurt. No, no, take care of her. January of 83, she called the Boston police anonymously, or he called the Boston police, excuse me, anonymously to report that Robin had solicited him for sex. He was mad at her, so he called the cops on her to say that this happened. That's really gross. I'm sorry. That's disgusting. Wow, that's gross. The cop showed up and she got arrested for it. One of the four because of him. She also got fired from her legitimate job, which was at a health spa in Saugus, which was a very normal legitimate job. And her employer found out about the prostitution arrest and fired her. So he gets her fired, so she'll be more dependent on him and his money, apparently. He called the police repeatedly at strategic moments to get her arrested when she was with other clients as well. Wow. Wow. Then she starts noticing this and she tells JR about it and she says that she needs to break it off with him. January 31st, 83, he is suspended from Tufts. Oh. Yeah, apparently during a routine check of the financial records, they discovered their lab had him had been submitting expensive vouchers for large amounts of money against university grants that everybody shared. And the expenses he claimed to have incurred made little sense. He submitted trips for vouchers abroad when they knew he hadn't been anywhere, vouchers for entertainment and lodging of visiting scientists that they'd never seen, and vouchers for work performed by Benedict, the graduate student who'd never even put an appearance in. So anyway, the auditors noticed the discrepancies. They launched an investigation and they suspend him with pay while the investigation is ongoing. He refuses to sign anything admitting any wrongdoing. So until they can come up with a full enough to fire him, he's still technically employed at this point. February of 83, he flies to upstate New York for a job interview. Really? Yeah, his, the university's auditors are up his ass, so he's got to go find another one. So he gets an offer. It's a tenure track professorship. So he comes out to the interview and he brings Robin with him. Really? Which must have cost him a fortune because this is an overnight trip and Yeah, this is a girlfriend experience. This is 2400 a day right here. She's not giving breaks for like, all right, we're gonna be together for eight hours, I'll do it for 300 or something. She's not doing that at all. I mean, Julia Roberts gave Richard Gere a deal. Remember when it was like, you know, I don't know, it was $300 for the night, but for a whole week, it's like, you know, fucking $1100 or something. I think she did 1200. It was some ridiculous discount. Yeah, it may have been three grand bulk. And she may have said it as like a joke, ha ha, three grand and he goes deal. She's like, and then she's like stunned. Yeah, oh my God, that's more than that. That whole movie happened because a woman needed three grand or whatever. $3,000. It was desperate for it. Yeah. So she goes with him, stays with him in the hotel room, gets introduced to faculty members. He told them that she's a graduate student who is considering the school. So he figured he'd be a nice guy, take her up there. But obviously we know that isn't true. But she said that she was a grad student looking at the school and they ate salmon and made conversation about school type of shit. And this is his job interview. He just brings his, wow, they give him an offer. He comes back home to Massachusetts with the job in, you know, in his hand here. By this time, Bill and Nancy are barely speaking, which I don't know how he would have any time to speak to her. Where's the time? They're not speaking. They're basically, one of the authors described it as the passing notes on the kitchen counter stage of marriage where- They don't, neither exists. It's not even co-existing. I'll pick up the kid. No, yeah, it's all logistical. She knows she's been cheating. That he, I'm sorry, she knows he's been cheating. And there's a reason why she knows he's been cheating. Because he told her? Nope. On March 2nd, 1983, Robin called her. Oh boy. Called his house to talk to Nancy. Oh boy. And said, your husband needs to stop calling me. He needs to stop coming around. I don't want to see him anymore. And Nancy just said, okay. And that was the whole exchange. Yeah, it's embarrassing. So she's embarrassed. Exactly. Later that evening, he stops payment on a $200 check he'd written to Robin on the same day. Robin had deposited the check on March 4th. Uh-oh. The thing is, Nancy called the bank, not Bill, to stop payment on it. Yeah. Later on, the police get bank records and the stop payment request is in Nancy's name. So somehow she's involved enough in this whole thing within hours of this phone call to cancel the $200 check. Maybe she saw the check in the check balance book. I'm not sure. It's not like she could see it online. Right. Maybe in his own ledger. You have to be in the balance book. Yeah. So March 5th, 1983, this is the day that Robin kind of disappears here. Bill calls Robin's answering service and department 12 times. He spoke to her four times in that single day. Then between the evening of March 5th and the morning of March 6th, Bill made six calls from locations spanning Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Boston, Connecticut. This is overnight from the 5th into the 6th. Many of the calls were to his own house. Several were to Robin's answering service. One was to make a reservation on Amtrak. All of the calls were paid for with his credit card. Now, there's a distinct paper trail of these calls. Otherwise, he could have just put a bunch of quarters in and made the calls and no one would have known what the fuck was going on. But he used his credit card. Yeah. Now, Robin's day on the 5th here, let's see here, 3pm, Robin leaves her apartment. To go shopping. She's going to buy a birthday gift for JR's young son, who's party is the next day. So there's that. She's thinking about the gift she makes to drive. She's doing all that shit. 7.45pm, she stops in at the Combat Zone bar of Good Time Charlie's here. Meets up briefly with JR's ex-girlfriend to confirm the plans for the next morning. That's it. They have a quick drink and they're planning for the weekend. 8.40pm, Robin shows up at a client's apartment in a Boston high-rise. This is a regular client and the appointment lasts under an hour. And then by 9.30pm, just before leaving the high-rise, Robin calls her answering service to check her messages. Now, the operator who takes the calls, this is so long ago that operators are still working at an answering service, tells her this. She said, someone claiming to be JR called earlier and asked to pick up your messages. So Robin calls JR and says, you tried to pick up my messages? He says, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I didn't call anybody. So now she knows someone posing as JR is calling her answering service, trying to get her message log. So she knows who it is. It's fucking Bill. And so, god damn it, he's pissed off. He's spending his days now. He doesn't work anymore, so he's just obsessing over Robin the whole time. 9.45pm, she leaves the high-rise. On her way out, she tells the client and the doorman that she's, quote, rushing to meet another client between the wife and kids. Between the wife and kids, she said, which is interesting. So, Yeah, I remember getting to him before he has to go back home to the wife and kids. Yeah. So Robin calls, had called Nancy three days earlier and told her she was done. But she also told Bill this day over the course of these phone calls that she would come over one more time to settle out their accounts because he owes her money, basically. Because she's done. So she gets in her silver Toyota, drives south on the I-95 and goes to his house. She arrived at 10.30pm at the house. Nancy is not home. She came home from work at seven, found a note from Bill saying he was, quote, out for a walk and that Robin was coming by at 7.30pm. And Nancy, quote, didn't want to be home when Robin was around. Jumped in the car and left. So she went to the mall, then picked up two of the kids, then drove back. Now, here's what she says though. She drove around, she drove home around 11.30pm and saw Robin's car still in the driveway. So then she drove her own car around the neighborhood for 45 minutes waiting for Robin to leave. Wow, she is meek. What a coward. I'm just thinking my, imagine Sarah would have fucking kicked the door off the hinges with like a fucking machete the whole night in her hand. If you already know that he's cheating though and... She would have killed me before that. Yeah, yeah. Probably. Yeah. And I mean, I'd probably do the same thing to any woman. Yeah, what the fucking... I'd be livid. Yeah. So Nancy said she came home around 2.15am. 2.15am, went inside, saw Bill asleep in their bed and went to sleep in the living room. She's not going in the same bed with him. Your own house. You wouldn't even come home. Now, yeah. Now that's her story and people are shaky on her story, by the way. Cops don't know how much they believe this. 10.07pm, okay. Robin is allegedly at this point arriving at Bill's house. A man calls Robin's answering service, identifies himself as Joe, tells the operator he's throwing a party in Charlestown and he wants Robin to come. They take the message. You know, it doesn't sound weird. Joe who needs a party girl. Yeah, that's what we do here. That's our... So we accept... That's who we sell to. Yeah, she does have clients named Joe. But he didn't call her that night. He was at home and never called the service, didn't invite her out. It was Bill calling, pretending to be Joe. So then when Robin turned up missing here, he could say, oh, she left that my house to go to Joe's party. Right? Think about it. So 10.07pm, that's the big one there, calling this saying the Joe's party, because he's the only one who could have done it. Right. So then she disappears, obviously. Now at about 11.42pm, Robin called the answering service. Well, okay. Someone saying they're Robin, saying she's on her way to Joe's party. The operator takes the service, but she flags it because she tells her colleagues something is wrong about the call. The voice doesn't sound right. It's higher than Robin's usual voice. They said it sounded like... This person sounded like a man disguising his voice to sound like a woman. Oh, I don't know. What are you doing? Mrs. Doubtfire style. Oh, hello. Hi. What about the two, dear? Yeah. Ridiculous. Now, Bill has a high-pitched voice for a big fat guy by the way. They're looking at that. Oh, man. And then also, this is crazy. So he's trying to get that passed, everybody. At one point, he had been breaking into Robin's apartment when she wasn't there and singing in her apartment in a high-pitched voice and playing her flute. So the neighbors thought it was her. Oh, my God. That's wild. Shortly after midnight, Bill drives from Sharon to just outside Mansfield. There's a pay phone across the street from a highway rest stop. That's right where all the stuff was found, by the way. He called his house and spoke to Nancy. And says, is there anyone there? Were there any calls? Nancy said she just got home around 11.30, said nobody called. Bill says, I have a problem and I'll tell you about it later and then hangs up. Okay. Calls back five minutes later, tells her to lock all the doors and then hangs up again. Both calls are on its credit card. Bill, let's see. The rest stop was full of trucks at the time. And they thought that maybe Bill didn't feel comfortable dumping evidence there because people might see him. So they think he made a U-turn and drove north and found a further rest stop away that was less crowded, a little more empty. So they think that he pulled out the brown paper bag stuff with the bloody clothes and towel. And because it also had a bloody hand towel from cleaning himself, the jacket, the shirt, and the sledgehammer and throws it in the trash barrel. Gets back in his car, drives I-95 north here. By the way, he's driving Robin's car with, we believe, must have been Robin's body in the truck. Has to be, right? Has to be. He said he has, there's no plan at this point. To 12 a.m., a call is placed from Boston to the Douglas home. Bill is driving north, calling home again. He drove from the rest stop north into Boston. So they're tracking what route he could have made when they look at all this. They said he was possibly trying to drive Robin's car back to the high rise where she'd seen her client at 840. Maybe try to frame him, because that's where he was in that area. But he doesn't do it. And he calls Nancy again and hangs up. 5.29 a.m., he's now in Rhode Island. Good Lord. So he's driven all the way around. Credit card call. He doesn't tell Nancy what he's doing. 6.51 a.m., he calls again from Rhode Island. He calls home. And it's Nancy. 1.00 p.m. the next day, he calls Robin's answering service, pretending to be a man named John, setting up an appointment with Robin. 3.33 a.m. on March 7th. Now, so this is the, she disappeared the night of the 5th. This is now the morning of the 7th. He gets on an Amtrak train from New York to Washington, D.C. where he has an academic conference to attend. During this time, this is when the, when the, his, his, the bag of evidence is being discovered. So based on all of these calls, they put together everything and they're like, oh, he absolutely fucking did this. What the hell, man? Absolutely drove around all night looking for a place to dump her body. And this is crazy. Just goes to show people from Yale aren't that fucking smart. Apparently not. He's more of a Platsburg, you know, state college kind of guy. March 11th, I know people who went there. They weren't that bright. March 11th, 83, Robin's parents' reporter missing. March 13th is the first interview with Bill. By the way, once Robin's disappearance hits the newspapers, it's a big deal. There's a, the New York, well, yeah. And the New York school that hired him saw a photo of her and they were like, that's the chick that came with our new guy. Oh my God, she's a suspected murdered prostitute. Okay. And they rescind the job offer to him. No, thank you. He lost the job because they have a newspaper subscription. Yep. That's it. Shit. Second police interview, they bring him in again. He begins by telling a long irrelevant story about his car was, how his car was stolen from outside Robin's apartment the Tuesday before she disappeared. Stolen. Stolen. Then he says the next day after meeting Robin at a hotel, he was pulled into a van and beaten up by three black men who warned him to stay away from Robin. There's a lot of black guys assaulting him. Now it's not even a mugging. Now it's a van and they pull up and they just beat him up as a warning. This is a, this is a fourth story, by the way. A completely separate thing about his wound here. It's ridiculous. They let him talk, just let him dig a hole for himself here. Every new story is another contradiction. Yeah. That looks bad for him. They ask about the night of March 5th and Bill says, Robin came over around 1030, delivered some artwork she'd been doing for his tough slab, which is bullshit, and left around midnight to go meet Joe, quote unquote. So that's, he's not even working for Tufts right now. He's suspended. So that's crazy. They ask him about the $200 check that Nancy stopped payment on. And Bill says, quote, oh, that check. Yeah, I paid Robin in cash instead when she was at my house on the 5th. So I just canceled the check. Just didn't want him to go through, which is a dumb thing. And Nancy's the one who stopped the check. So they ask him about the, they ask him about the head wound again. And he says that I'll am track and I got beat with a pipe and a briefcase. And this time his briefcase was stolen by the two of salons. So at one point he says, Bill, what did Robin do to make you kill her? Yeah. And Bill says, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't do anything. And he says, I think he did. And he goes, I didn't. Now at this point, they don't have enough to keep. They don't have enough for an arrest warrant at this point. They don't even have a body. They have nothing, but they do have enough for a search warrant. Oh, yeah. So March 20th, 83, 15 days after she disappeared, they come in and search his house. Okay. By the way, the house is disgusting. It is mutt. That's what I mean. It's so much like Rex Hewerman. That house is a shit fucking hole. Crazy gross, right? Same exact thing. Same exact thing with this house. Why is that? Because Rex was meticulous. Yes. But the house. With what he did. It was like a bomb. What the fuck is that? Don't know. Cockroaches, they said. Rotting food on the couch. They have three kids. What's going on? Oh my God. Trash everywhere. They were like, this is, what the fuck is happening in here? Like they, you don't expect to see this from like non-crack heads. This is crazy. One of the, a person from Tufts described Bill's personal habits as a scientist as compulsive. So he was a compulsive researcher, but not a compulsive dishwasher apparently. Because he's, none of this is good. Now Nancy is home during the search. The kids are not home. Nancy just sits there and watches the whole thing go down. Right. They go into Bill's closet and this is what they find in Bill's closet. Robin's pocket book. Her pocket book. The one she was carrying on the night of the fifth. Her credit cards. Her personal phone book, which is her lifeline to her business. Two of Robin's coded address books, which had been stolen from her apartment. A pair of Robin's pink underwear. Robin's flute is in his closet. Yeah. Yes. A blood stained man's blue windbreaker with a pocket that when tested with luminol showed signs of. Signs of blood. Yeah. In the pocket is a quarter size chunk of gray, gooey human tissue. What? He just has a chunk of brain in his pocket. He didn't know. I'll bet it just fell in there. Had to. Also cassette tapes that when played are recordings of Bill Douglas making harassing phone calls to a massage parlor that had previously employed Robin recordings he made of himself harassing the parlor trying to get her fired from the job, which she was fired from it. Eventually also a cassette recording of Bill Douglas telling the story of the murder as he wants it told to an unidentified co-conspirator, a voice that could be male, could be female, could be Nancy, could be somebody else. The investigators are never, never able to identify the other voice. In my opinion, it has to be Nancy. He's not telling anyone else about this shit. Yeah. But he, I think Nancy is in now. You know what I mean? She's got to know, right? My opinion, yeah. A long handwritten note from Bill drafting some kind of defense explanation for the missing Tufts money in which he blames the embezzlement on a mysterious woman who supposedly drugged him and took compromising photos of him and was blackmailing him. Oh. An audit report that shows Bill had stolen at least $67,000. Copies of Robin and JR's phone bills, not originals copies that he made indicating that he'd been obtaining them and also they, with annotations in the margins about, you know, who he called, who she called and when. A beeper, a beeper belonging to the answering machine that he'd given her as a gift, the one that gets the messages. A cops business card which turned out to be the card of the police officer Bill had been calling when he anonymously tipped off the cops to rob, to bust Robin. Trash bags, the same brand, color and style of bag as the one the bloody jacket and sledgehammer were found in. The flute, by the way, was found alongside her pocketbook and underwear. He had her pocketbook, flute, underwear all lined up there. That was just the closet. No. Oh yeah. He has more? Oh yeah. And the rest of the house, all of Bill's shirts were the same size as the bloody blue work shirt found at the rest stop, everyone. Okay. Now it's at this point that detectives pulled the bloody blue work shirt out of evidence and showed it to Nancy and said, does this look familiar? She picked it up and looked at it, looked under the arm. There was a tear that had been sewn, a small one, a little patch of sewing work and she said, that's my stitching. I fixed Bill's shirts. I did that. In other words, that's Bill's blood-soaked shirt that you found there. Wow. Then she walked to her sewing basket, pulled out a spool of thread and handed it to the detectives and said, I think this is the thread I used to make that repair. You should test it. They later confirmed the thread in the spool matched the thread in the armpit of the bloody work shirt conclusively. Okay. So she just handed that over. Is there stitching good or bad that she recognizes it? I bet it's good work. Three kids back then, yeah, probably. Now that was it. She refused to say anything else. She wouldn't say anything else. She goes, I gave you that, I'm not doing anything else. Won't do anything. They told her that Bill is the primary suspect in Robin's disappearance. She will not believe it, refuses. Even though she's holding a bloody shirt with a stitch she fucking made, who's that reminds you of? That's also fucking heroine. Couldn't be more. To a T that is the Gilgo Beach killer's wife. He told her he did it and she's like... And she was still like, I don't know. I won't do it. I won't believe it until I see it. Ma'am, he can't murder anymore. It's fucking wild. Wouldn't let the kids be interviewed either, wouldn't testify, wouldn't speak of it any further. Extremely Gilgo Beach. Nancy. Then they do a search of his offices and his professor's office and then they produced love letters from him to her. A stack of newspaper clippings about prostitutes, 55 pornographic books and magazines, and a box of Ramsey's condoms as well, just in case. Is the fantasy just to bang a woman that you paid to do it? Or is the fantasy finding a very hot woman that you're interested in and pull her out of this life and marry her? Is that the fantasy? That wasn't the fantasy at first. I think at first he was just out partying, but he met this one and she's hotter than your average bear too. She's fucking smart and she's talented and she's probably a good conversationalist. And she's everything that he could never get when he was 21. Right. And it feels like he's like, well, I'm important and if she likes me, which she pretends to because that's her job. She said she likes me. Then I should really, maybe she's in love with me, like I'm in love with her. And he's just, he's a fucking sucker. He's a moron. This is, you know, this is stupid. Around Easter, Robin's parents receive a Western Union telegram supposedly from Robin saying, Mom, Dad, I'm in Las Vegas. Don't look for me. Don't tell JR where I am. Any money? What? Any money wired or is it just a telegram? Telegram, Western Union. All right. So he, they said they didn't believe a word of this because she signed the note Robin. And they said she's never once signed a note to us Robin. She, we call her bin bin and that's how she signs it always. She would have said bin bin, not Robin. It's not her bullshit. So they turn the telegram over to the police. The police traced the origin and had been sent from a Western Union office, not far from Bill Douglas's location at the time, not Las Vegas. Idiot. June of 83, still not under arrest, but he resigns from Tufts. He was not fired. He resigns. So that's how that works. The university announces they would pursue embezzlement charges. Then during this period, he spotted back at the combat zone trying to hire more fucking sex workers. Really? He's still living at home and this is crazy. So anyway, June 6th or July 16th, 83, it has been months. Months. The Toyota is found. Where is it? It is a patrol officer in Manhattan finds it in New York. In a tow away zone near Penn Station. It's been sitting there for months, coated in dust. So he looks at it. The license plates are gone. Everything on the exterior that could identify the car has been scratched off, except because Bill, let's face it, he's not a mechanic. The VIN number is right. No, he didn't scratch out the VIN number. He didn't even know a VIN number exists probably sitting right there in the dashboard. Yeah. So that's not good. They run the VIN. The car belongs to a missing woman. He opens the driver's door and said the smell hit him like a punch in the face. She's still in the car? No. But it's the smell is of decomp. He said it's unmistakable. He said this car has had a corpse in it. And you can tell. And yeah, you have a corpse in something. It's going to smell like that till the end of time period. There's dried blood around the wheel well. There is tissue residue later will be confirmed as brain matter in the car as well. Oh my God. But there's no body in the car. This is the murder scene, this car. Well, at least the transportation of it. So they notify the cops in Massachusetts. They tow it to a forensic lab. Blood samples are taken. Samples from Robin's family. They use FBI uses newly developed techniques of genetic marker analysis, which is kind of a pre-DNA technique to determine that the blood in the toyota is type A and shares genetic specific genetic markers with Robin's family. They also determine the blood is not bills, but probably Robbins. Then they get the test results back for the sledgehammer and for the windbreaker pocket with the gray monitor in there. Okay. The quarter size chunk of tissue in the pocket here came back with a big answer. It's brain matter. It's fucking brain. It's a chunk of brain in his pocket. In his pocket. In his pocket. Now, DNA obviously is not going to work at this point, but they have protein analysis. And he had the thing that they're going to say is because he was an anatomy professor at a medical school, he had access to cadavers. Was it possible he'd been working with an animal sample in the lab, maybe a sheep brain and got some on his jacket. It was just an innocent residue from work, but they looked into it and they said, no. None of Bill's eight active research projects involved animal brains or human brains. He was working on cellular biology, not neurology. So this is human brain matter. So he's just wearing a windbreaker with brain in it for a while. Unbelievable. Just like nothing happened. Then the sledgehammer. Okay. They learned through Nancy's brother, this is Bill's wife, who happened to be a police officer in a neighboring jurisdiction that Nancy's father recently lent a sledgehammer to the Douglases. They said, what kind? He said a small two and a half pound sledgehammer with a short handle. He borrowed a baby sledge from his wife's parents. Yeah. From his in-laws. Now, wait until you hear what his story is. It's pretty wild about that. But anyway, they indict him. They have nobody. In 1983, nobody, no crime. That's what it is. It is nobody, no fucking crime as Bob Marley would sing. That's how it is. Nobody, no crime. He's here. So they're trying to figure it out. So they charge him though. Anyway, with first degree murder and embezzlement from Tufts. He pleads not guilty. The media goes crazy with this shit, as you can imagine. Huge fucking headline, the professor and the prostitute. Talk about simplification, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Worst over, this man has been, he's been robbing everybody. Yeah. Oh, all over. Yeah, that's why he's being charged with embezzlement too. Now, the legal questions, this is from a newspaper at the time, noting that Douglas had remained in the Boston area working at a succession of jobs after being forced to leave Tufts in May of 83. Kivlin told the judge, that's the prosecutor. I want to point out to you that although he did remain in the area, there's evidence in our possession that like many people in the public, Mr. Douglas apparently believed that you can't prosecute a case without a body. Yeah. Because it keeps coming up. He maintained, according to court records, that both police and JR were planting much of the evidence linking him to the murder. And he says that his large and rapid weight loss affected his mental state as well. So, is it nobody, no crime or what here? The thing is too, even with that, that's such a crazy thing because, has there ever been a person convicted and then the person walks into the court or into a jail anywhere and says, let that man out, I'm right here. He obviously didn't murder me. Not that I know of, but that's the fantasy they all keep talking about. Boy, do they sell that, right? They sell it hard. Well, that's their case here. I was getting to that here. They're talking about too, there is an Arkansas precedent. The prosecutor said a case was just prosecuted in Arkansas two months ago on much less evidence from this and without a body and a conviction was obtained. Yeah. So, they're saying that. Now, the defense attorney said, as Mr. Kivlin indicates in his statement on the seriousness of the offense with all of his scientific evidence and analysis and reports and whatever the like, there are going to be a number of novel questions to be decided by this case for the first time. So, they're saying, this is a new thing. This is not normal in Massachusetts. Nobody, no crime. So, Bill's offense is aggressive too. They're doing his defense. Thomas Troy is his attorney and they are just saying basically, she's a prostitute and it could have been anybody. Any body would kill her. He also says about this. He says the bottom, his entire strategy was there's nobody. Therefore, there is no crime. Nobody, no crime is literally this man's defense. I cannot emphasize it enough. Wow. He said that my client should be free to walk out of here. He said, Robin's probably still alive and well. She might even be in the courtroom any minute. So, keep an eye out. Any minute. Any minute. He said, this whole case is Mickey Mouse. That's all I can tell you because of the gag order. Don't be surprised if Ms. Benedict just happens to walk in here during the trial. Well, in the event that she does, we'll stop the proceedings. But until then, we're going forward. We will have a hearty apology for your client if that happens. Just a real heart. You know, we'll get him like a fruit basket and we'll send him on his way. If there's no car, there can be no car theft. Yeah. The guy, the defense attorney allegedly even at one point came up with an idea to hire an actress who looked like her, have her veiled and walk into the courtroom to raise reasonable doubts. So the jury would go, oh my God, and you'd go, you thought it was her, right? Well, if you knew she was dead, you wouldn't have thought it was her. She could be alive. That's a pretty good defense. That's not bad. It's not bad, but they were like, it's a stunt. Let's not do it. They didn't end up doing it. Now, the defense just smears Robin. She uses. They float that this is in the paper that Robin was somehow involved in a drug and black male ring that had drugged Bill and took compromising photos of him. Said that Bill was a known anatomy scholar who'd been embezzling from a medical school for a year as a victim of sex and dope and intrigue. Victim of sex and dope and intrigue sounds awesome. I think they sell movies to you with those three things. I think so. And also Thomas Troy here, the defense attorney described Bill Douglas as a gentle, sensitive, educated man left his Alice in Wonderland of the scientific world for the combat zones world of sin and sex. And there, Samson met his Delilah, Bill met his downfall, a paramour for pay. His childlike infatuation made Bill Douglas a prisoner of sex and dope and intrigue. Wow. Let's see if we can get him as a prisoner of the state. Yeah. I don't want to jerk off to it, but I'm about to. No shit. Robin's mom said this about the case. We go to an empty grave. You know it's empty, but what can you do? That, yeah, that's fucked. Terrified. That sucks a lot. So pre-trial, they figure out that Nancy, nor the kids, don't want to testify. So you can't really force children to testify. And if they want to get Nancy, they're going to force her and she's probably not going to be that cooperative. So that's not going to help much either. The prosecution's case, very simple. Nobody's still a crime. That's it. That's all. Her car is in New York where she doesn't live with D-hop. Yeah. But still, nobody cases just didn't happen back then. So they were really worried that the jury would go, well, how do we know she's dead? We've got to coat soaked in blood. We've got a piece of, we've got to assume it's her brain, right? You think you want, yeah, but still they go, who knows? It could be anybody. And that car was in New York. Maybe somebody stole it, murdered somebody, drove him around. We have no idea. And they don't know if she's alive. Usually it's you want a body, you want the murder weapon, you want evidence that this is, nowadays it's common, but back in 83 it was not. I don't have the jury stand up and empty their pockets and the first one with the brain in it. Yeah. Anybody got brain in your pocket? Yeah. Let's let them go. But you know they could muddy those waters with the science-y shit. That's what I mean. That's not enough. And they have 157 witnesses, the prosecution. 157, which is a lot. They never, I guess apparently spousal privilege does not apply to acts against third party, so they can force Nancy to testify. The teenage children were never forced to testify. They have all of Robin's escort associates, private investigators, JR hired, the cops who found shit, the operators who took the fake messages on her answering service, the bottle picker guy, Joseph, Nancy's father who testified about lending the sledgehammer, FBI genetics and markers, Tufts auditors, numerous employees from an upstate New York hotel who met the quote graduate student. They have physical evidence. They have blood of the right type and genetic markers in Bill's shirt, sewn by Bill's wife, brain tissue in a windbreaker pocket, blood in the victim's car, genetic markers matching her family. They have what they believe is the murder weapon. They have her personal effects, phone book, credit cards, pocket book, underwear, flute all in his closet. It's a lot here. So they also figured out where the $67,000 went. $45,000 went directly to Robin for hourly rate payments. God damn. That is some serious shit. The car was between $5,000 and $7,000 and a bunch more shit here. Cocaine, Robin charged him $1,000 for a trip to pick up Cocaine in Charlestown, where he had previously bought drugs from her. It's a lot. April 23rd, 1984, jury selection comes in. The original pool is going to be as many as 500 jurors, which is a lot. Oh, shit. They have to find out who hasn't read about this in detail. Then April 27th, 1984, everything changes. It's completely. Bill decides after 14 months of saying how innocent he is and saying he's been publicly framed and he's been manipulated and all this, he decides he's going to change his plea and plead guilty. Doesn't look good. Now, they're not going to make him plead guilty to first degree murder, though, or anything close to it, because again, nobody. So everybody's positions are tenuous here. The prosecutors, even though there's all that evidence, they feel scared. And he knows there's no body, but there's all this evidence. So he's scared. Now they confer with the Benedict family and everybody confers and they agree to let him plead guilty to manslaughter, which is ridiculous, ridiculous. And this is also if he agrees to help locate the body, that's part of it. And Robin's parents said it's worth it to get her body back so we can bury her. That's a lot here. Now, first degree murder is life without parole. Manslaughter is not, as we'll find out here. So the deal conditions are tell us where the body is and do all of that shit. The judge says in open court, did you kill her? Bill said, yes, I did. Said, did you strike her with a hammer and did that cause her death? And he said, yes, sir. And yes, sir, both times. Okay. At one point, JR, who was seated between her parents, stood up and screamed, shut up. Oh boy. Shut up. And then he shouted obscenities at Bill. The bailiffs restrained him. Her mom wept on JR's shoulder. It's a mess. Bill said, I'm sorry to the Benedict family because I've caused their family grief. I would also like to apologize to my own family because I caused them a great deal of grief and anguish and JR continued to scream obscenities with Adam and then they, you know, whatever. It's a mess. Then they go right from the court into the prosecutor's office to get his confession because part of it is say what you did. Okay. He's taken in there. It's four hours long. Confession. A confession. He smokes Kent cigarettes throughout the whole confession bill does. In his, in his version, obviously he's not that bad of a guy. Okay. Around 11pm, they were inside the house, 42 Sandy Ridge Circle. There, between 10, 30 and 11pm on March 5th. He says his version is Robin arrived with a two and a half pound sledgehammer concealed under her jacket. The sledgehammer he borrowed from his in-laws. Right. Somehow she's got it. She showed up with that. She followed him upstairs to the bedroom and demanded $5,000 for posing as his grad student on the New York trip. Okay. He said he offered her whatever cash she had, not five grand, but whatever he had. She got angry and pulled out the sledgehammer and swung it at him. Now he said she grazed him in the forehead. Oh. Which is the mark. Which is where the mark came from. They struggled on the bed. She bit him on the leg and he wrestled the sledgehammer away from her, which wouldn't be too hard. She's weighs like 110 pounds. Hit her in the head two or three times and killed her. Yeah. Now he's six foot tall, 300 pounds. She's five, four, one, 15. So you don't need the hammer for that. The investigators looked at his head wound and said it looked more like a cut that you'd get from a shark object or a struggle at close range. Not deep tissue damage like a sledgehammer, but he said it grazed me. That's it. My finger. But obviously this is all bullshit. Also, Bill claimed Robin brought the sledgehammer, which we know isn't true. It's Bill's fucking sledgehammer or is in law sledgehammer. Now he claimed the struggle happened on the bed. When police searched the house, they spray luminol, which makes blood glow. The only hit they get was a spot on the pocket of the windbreaker jacket. No glowing on the bed. Now the reason is while the police searched the house, Bill was lying on the bed the whole time. They never searched it. They never pulled the bedding back and tested the mattress because he was on it. They just forgot. Really? Yeah. That's wild. So they think that the mattress was probably soaked in Robin's blood and he was lying on it to keep them from testing it. Yeah. Yeah. Now what mostly probably happened is Bill got Robin into the bedroom, swung the sledgehammer that he had waiting for her in there, hit her in the head, killed her and cleaned up, then struggled to figure out how to put this together, how to lie about this, which is pretty crazy. Midnight, this is from Linda Wolfe's book, The Professor and the Prostitute. This is the most detailed reconstruction here based on Bill's own statements. There was blood all over, blood on the comforter on which Robin lay dead, blood on the floor, blood on the radiator behind the bed. It wasn't a lot of blood, but it was splattered and there throughout the room. Most of it was his own from the wounds Robin had inflicted on him. She seemed hardly to be bleeding at all, which is, that's what Bill said, which is physically impossible. That's true. She said her fucking brain is out. Right. You know what I mean? Then this is from his account. He ran back to the bathroom, grabbed the hand towels he had used to clean himself and began wiping up the gore with them and stuffing them into a brown paper bag. He then got dressed, put on a warm ski jacket with huge deep pockets and managed to cram the brown bag full of towels into one of the pockets. Bill dragged her body down the stairs, pulled the bedding off the bed with Robin still wrapped in it, made kind of a cradle that way and holding the four corners like a hammock, dragged her down the stairs into the kitchen. Then went outside to the Toyota, but couldn't find the keys, so he had to go in and search her pockets. And eventually he had to open the paper bag full of bloody towels and reach into the pocket of her jacket to fish out the car keys. Yeah. Went back outside, backed her Toyota up to the deck, dragged her body, still wrapped in the comforter out onto the deck. Wow. James, he just said something that I don't know if the cops even picked up on. He said, grabbed the four corners like a hammock. That takes two people. No, it doesn't. If you're small, you can grab the two like this and pick them up. Oh, I guess it, yeah. And he carried downstairs a hundred and... Well, he dragged down the stairs. This was just to get her in the car, I think just to get her on the thing, but he's a 300 pound guy. I'm sure he can... That sounded to me like he held to, somebody back there held to. Nancy's guilty as shit. I mean, that's possible, allegedly. Yeah, yeah. That's how it feels to me. Yeah. Hey, Nancy's story is full of a lot of shit. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. Bill, yeah, Bill said that he didn't have a plan at that point. He just started, got behind the wheel and started driving. And he just didn't think about it. So, he just kept calling home. After the rest stop, 2.12 a.m. is the Boston call, where he tried to frame a client, remember that one? Yeah. He tried to say she was there still. Then there's the dumpster here. He remembered, this is what he remembers. He said he drove to Brookline, a neighborhood in Boston, pulled out onto a quiet residential street, saw a dumpster and decided this is where I'll put the body. Went back around to the Toyota, started to pull Robin's body out. And then he said, Robin made a noise. Huh? Which, no. Yeah. Not a breath. Jay said the residual air in her lungs being expelled, his body sometimes due when moved after death. He said it was a sound he would never forget. And at that moment, he said a porch light came on in the house next to the dumpster. So, he panicked, slammed the hatchback shut, got back in the driver's seat and peeled out. So, more noise, yeah. So, now he said there was nobody, no porch light witness they could find or anything like that. At 529, he makes the Rhode Island call, then he makes another one at 641. Pre-dawn, he says that he ended up at a large housing complex and shopping center in Providence, Rhode Island, where he had once studied at Brown, so it was familiar. Had a big supermarket, a radio shack, the Rhode Island blood bank, shitloads of dumpsters. So, he removed several bags of garbage from one of the dumpsters to make room. Took Robin's body, wrapped in the comforter, along with the blankets she'd been on, and shoved them into the trash on top of whatever, and then put the other shit back on top. He described it as, quote, I disposed of the material. Robin's body is the material. That's disturbing. Got back in the truck car and drove south, made more fake phone calls, took his Amtrak down there. Then, he says, at the end of his confession, quote, when you find her, she'll be wearing her clothes. There was no monkey business. Okay. Okay, gee, that's what we were worried about. We didn't have sex, it was straight up murder. Straight murder for money. He described the Providence dumpster in a lot of detail, the parking lot, the shopping center, the layout. They went to the location he described, there was no dumpster there. Hmm. No dumpster in the location he described, match with the dumpster he described. He described the standard commercial dumpster with a serial number and they couldn't find it. He volunteered to be hypnotized in order to, quote, remember better. Yeah. That didn't work. Under hypnosis, he recited a serial number that sort of matched the type of dumpster used by a specific waste management company. They tracked down a dumpster with a similar serial number, which had been dumped, emptied many, many times. They said, if she was in there, she had been taken to the central landfill and a landfill in Johnston, Rhode Island, which is a gigantic facility that handles thousands of tons of trash a day. Every day. Yep. He muttered three times during hypnosis. It's not me by the dumpster. It's not me by the dumpster. It's not me by the dumpster. The state considered searching the landfill. It would cost around $150,000 in 1984, and the state declined. So that was that. So we never, ever, ever find Robin. Never? God, her body. Ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever. By the way, the media really did this awfully shitty. They did Robin wrong, the media. They really fucked her over good and made her sound like just a filthy street walker. I mean, they made her sound like she had no family and friends and she's just a bum. The prostitute, that's all she was. It was pretty sleazy. During sentencing, Shirley Benedict's mom here, Shirley Benedict, Robin's mom, told reporters that basically, quote, it's a very empty feeling. It's going to be over, but we still can't have her. The prosecution here, sentencing runs for two days, by the way, because there's a lot of leeway and manslaughter sentencing. So you gotta sway that judge. Yeah. So they argue for the maximum sentence. He said that, you know, it's obvious here. He said, no matter that Robin was a prostitute, she had a family that she was devoted to and a family that was devoted to her. He hit her two or three times by his own account, crushed her skull and dislodged brain tissue. He placed her body in a dumpster like a piece of trash. Then he exploited it for nearly a year. They said on Easter of 83, Douglas caused a telegram to be sent to the family allegedly from Robin that she was working in Vegas and was alive and well. Right. Then said, yeah, basically, this man got away with murder. He would have gotten away with it entirely, except that we did this massive investigation. And he's a dangerous, manipulative man. Give him the maximum. Okay. The other one, though, the defense attorney said that, called him the Alice Wonderland of the scientific world, traded that for the world of sin and sex. Zampson met his Delilah. Bill Douglas met his downfall. A paramour for pay, all that shit. Hot. Then he said, a world of sex and pimps reached out and consumed him. Reached out. They came right to his house. Yeah. They've reached out. Yeah. Plucked him right from his lab and put him in a bar. In effect, this court has been his confessional. The judge says, you son, may fuck off 18 to 20 years in state prison for manslaughter, the maximum available. That's the max. And a concurrent five-year sentence for the embezzlement as well. Okay. Okay. In prison, he transferred to a medium security prison that was closer to his house. Nancy visited him up to three times a week, including once a week with the kids. What? Oh, yeah. 1986, there's a TV movie made, The High Price of Passion, starring Richard Crenna, who's the guy from the Rambo movies. That's, you know, dudes, lieutenant or whatever. The general? Rambo is whatever the fuck he was. It's over, Johnny. It's over. That guy? In Rambo. He's the guy that, you know, he's with the beret on. Oh, yeah. You think that's him? Stallone's guy. So that movie's there. It's got 6.8 stars on IMDb. It adopted Bill's framing that he'd been seduced, ruined, and destroyed by a manipulative young woman. Oh, my. She's the best. She's the criminal almost in this. Robin's family hated this fucking movie. In 87, he was disciplined in prison for engaging in a sexual act with a female visitor who wasn't Nancy. What? A wife that forgave him for prostitution, murder, embezzlement, still came to see him three times a week. And he said, I still got to fuck around with a chicken prison. How did he do that? I don't know. But Bill and Nancy divorced. By the way, that's mind hunter. Bill tension, his wife's name's Nancy. Yeah, Bill and Nancy. Bill and Nancy. Yeah. Bill and Nancy divorced in 87. Later on in 87, he remarries while still in prison to a 43-year-old woman named Bonnie Jean Smith, who he met as a pen pal. Unbelievable. My God. That's crazy. He taught college courses to civilians from prison for the correspondence courses. In 88, they grant his request to be transferred to a Connecticut facility to be closer to his new wife. He tried to write a book while he was in there. Unbelievable. Didn't really come out. In 89, Teresa Carpenter's book, Missing Beauty, which is what a lot of this is based on, won the Pulitzer for its reporting. June 3, 1993, after serving less than nine years, he is out. He is released from the Enfield, Connecticut facility, a free man at 51 fucking years old. Sledgehammered a woman to death. Yep. That is crazy. Her mother, Robin's mother, Shirley, said, we didn't realize he was just going to walk free and nothing else was going to be done about it. Less than 10 years. Yeah. He said the main thing we wanted was her body, and we're still not getting it. We go to an empty grave every year. Bill meets with John and Shirley Benedict. I don't know how John Benedict and Shirley just jump across the table and rip this guy's fucking face off. They requested the meeting, though. They wanted to ask him, where is Robin? Is she in the landfill? Where is he? He stuck to his story. Nothing else. The Benedict's filed a $29.5 million civil suit against Bill Douglas. That was dismissed. They filed a petition to have Robin's court records released so they could pursue further legal action. That petition was denied. Don't know why. The rest of Bill's life here, he went on to live with his second wife, Betty Jean, and he divorced her eventually, too. Never regained academic employment, obviously. Then in 2015, Bill dies at an assisted living memory care facility. He had dementia. Good. If anybody fucking deserves that, it's this cunt. Fuck that guy. 2022, there was a new book, by the way, called The Killing of Robin Benedict that looked critically at how the press covered this case. They said there was a retrospective. They'd basically teach this case in law school in Massachusetts. They do. To how you do a no-body case in Massachusetts. So there you go, everybody. There is Sharon, Massachusetts. So much information. Sorry we ran a little long, but I'm beside myself, Jen. He got out. This is crazy. Yeah, at three o'clock in the morning, I'm in my living room going, what the fuck is I'm putting this together? So anyway, if you like the show, go to whatever app you're on and give us five stars. Give a thumbs up on Netflix, please. Do all the shit that you do that can help out the show. Please head over to shutupandgivememurder.com. Tickets for live shows here. Next one with tickets. It might still have tickets. It's May 30th in Royal Oak. Otherwise, it is in September in Milwaukee in Minneapolis. So come get your tickets there. Shut up and give me murder.com. Follow on social media at Small Town Murder on Instagram, Small Town Pot on Facebook. Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all the bonus material. Anybody, $5 a month or above, you get every damn thing we put out. Soon as you subscribe, you get almost 400 back bonus episodes. You never heard before. New ones every other week when crime and sports, one Small Town Murder this week, crime and sports, personal ads are back. How did people find people 30 years ago, 40 years ago? We'll find out. Just a little bit, yeah. Small Town Murder, it's up to you. The poll is up. Either the FLDS documentary, the false profit one, or Internet Salad. You guys pick here, do that. And you also get ad free. All the shows we put out. And you get a shout out, which is right now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the best goddamn people on this earth who would never, ever, ever leave our bodies in dumpsters and then claim you had no idea where they were. Hit me with them right now. So executive producer, Gary Howard, chicken and a Ford Smith from Arkansas. What up Gary? Jen and Charlie, happy birthday you two. Happy birthday to people. The best gals, they're terrific. Ron Bennington from the Ron and Fez show. Do you know that show? It was in Tampa, I think. Fez died a few years ago. I've heard of the show. Ron's now sick. Really? He's a terrific guy. That sucks. Very funny. That's terrible. Hang in there Ron. Pickets ass. Hang in there. But I don't know. It's tough stuff. And Aaron Zinsley, thank you all so much for participating in this shit. And thank you people, you're wonderful. Other producers this week. Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Ryan Bender, Janice Hill, Tashel Franklin, Laura Turner, Lisa Arnold, Dave Hogg, Courtney Ann, Tiffany Nolt, Keezy, Bullock, Jessica Lindsay, Carliton, laughing, Carliton maybe? It might be Carliton. Carliton? I don't know, how do you spell Carliton? Maybe it's Carliton. Carliton. Like Charliton, but Carliton. Perhaps. But they're laughing after Chris ruined their life, thanks to us. So, keep hanging in there. Carliton. Carliton. Thank you Carliton. Sorry, Brown. Freak 902-84. That's Peloton, biggest competitor by the way. Carliton. That's Peloton's biggest competitor, Carliton. Carliton, yeah. You just drive, it's a lot easier. You don't lose as much weight, but it's easier. Catch up, fuckers. Sorry, I didn't mean to cross you. Pedal faster, pussies. That's the most ridiculous thing I could think of. Jessica would know last name, Amy Hardy. Brenz would know last name, Stephanie Blank, Brandon Dunn, TVM, TMV, 782. Nikki Lynch, Z would know last name, Melissa Durand, Renee Kennedy, Brianna Wallam, Kevin Craddock, Hailey Levy, or Levy. Maria would know last name, Riley K. KDL, Victoria Bean, Teresa Kloppotec, Colapa Kloppotaka. Rachel would know last name, Elliott Mori, Diane Schanzenbach. Schanzenbach, yeah, that's it. Some tough names this week. Amanda would know last name, Jason Dylan Cole would know last name, somebody named Just Listening, that's not their name. Deanne Mather, or Deena, yeah, it's Deanne, right? Nikki Mendoza, Brittany would know last name, Aaron D. Ryan B., Alicia Pendergrass, Courtney Dobbs, Natasha Parks, Nettie would know last name, Maria Louisa Dowling, Marie Louisa. Yeah, T. Sardine, Sardin, Stacy Pulver, Kallie Lawson, D. N. K. Klyme, Kym, yeah, there's no L there. Delaney would know last name, Gwen Knudson, she donated twice. So she has two of these goddamn things, thank you Gwen. The Knudder, thank you. Patrick Lobb, Joanne Craig, Mike Asher, Sarah Wells, Karen Hall, Chris would know last name, Rossi Houston, maybe Rosie with two S's, Don Hammond, Natasha Prada, Ashley would know last name, Jay Day, Lottie Grimes, Cameron Schaack, Carly Watson, Cherise Maxwell, Gregory Busby, Eleanor Juergens, K and J, the letters K and J, or just KJ. Brianna De Niu, Bobby Sparrow, Tyler Grezell, Leslie Ariza, Walter Turner, holy fuck, KDC, April B, Brian Lavinch, like adventure, so Lavinshire, triple E, Leeson. It's French adventure, la venture. La adventure. Lysandra Thart, Bob Coate, or Coat, piece up, toes down, Christian Zommerchok, Luke Garosco, Carly Bernstein-Feld, Jake Turner, Rebecca Levlight, Melissa Billings, Heidi Arneson, Kevin Adams, Fabio Alcantor, Michael Castillo, Sarah Lambert, CPR Fax, Emily Cazetto, weirdo, five of seven, that means there's seven of them, but the fifth one, James, that's the one that matters. That's the real weird one. Charlie K, Valerie Kelsey, WW, Xavier Smith, and Natalie Friesen, Karen Buswell, MST, Jippo, Justine Dioje, D-U-G, ACG, Groundhog for Breakfast, Special, Paula Blott, Don Schleisser, P'Yang, with no last name, Melissa Gottfrizen, Tanya K, Ely Belly, Ellie Belly Bean, Megan Williams, Tracy Nolan, Dale Ava, or Ava, John with no last name, Robert with no last name, Coralie with no last name, Volkab with no last name, Collie Mom, H&M, Shanna Kibler, Kibler, Angela Otegaard, Sarah with no last name, Brian Wood, Whitney Legate, Bixels with no last name, Mindy Shaw, Brittany with no last name, Laura Kaiser-Anderson, Brandis with no last name, Cody Mitch, Terra Worlds, Brittany Seregigni, Cloud Gabriel, and Alexandria Roberts, Alicia Leslie, Brett McConaughey, Christine with no last name, Eric Turley, Shamariah Johnson, Crodd Blivius, Heather Mowger, oh that's Heath Mowger, Heath's been around for a long time, thanks Heath, Drew Swayze, Sean Shrickel, Audrey Pack, The Packer, Summerlin Ortiz, Kelsey Byerly, Hannah Harris, Adel Hansen, When Jesus Attacks, Cameron Smith, like Mars James, Benjamin Milly, Laura Young, ECB, Amity Anderson, EKG, 7-8, Debbie Richens, a lot of Richens lately, I hope it is not the fam, Page DePaola, Chase with no last name, Rita Murray, Mark Gonzo, Ashley Rogers, Laura Larson, Daniel Drewry, Marika with no last name, perhaps Marika, Pamela Smith, Curvin, Curvin Martin, Jack Miles, Blackistan, Blackistan, Blackistan, Blackistan, not Blackistan, that's not a place, Samantha, Papa, DNC, and all of our patrons, you guys are the best, thank you so much. 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