Undercover? | 6

A warning to our listeners. This series contains discussion of mental illness, suicide, and domestic abuse. My first inclination is I think she was an assassin. Sharp Shooter, Dutz, talk about her background in a part of the world that nobody comes. I can't even imagine living your whole life like that. Not being able to tell somebody who you really are. I'm leaving the country for a couple months. What happens if I get killed? I want to make sure my stuff's taken care of. Back in those days they used to get people out of college. Hi, come and work for the CIA. That evening is when we got the call from the CIA. My buddy that was dating her, they found serious phone records. And the guy from the CIA called him. Two days later, it's when I get a call from Scotland. I didn't know Steve that well, but I think he rattled him a little bit and it concerned him. He made reference at the time it was either the FBI or the CIA that called him, but he didn't know for sure. And they told him to not dig into this. Slick was an ex-Texas Ranger. He's just a door behind me. He says Steve, I can't tell you anything other than it's this high international stuff. Your phones are tapped. My suggestion to you is to get rid of everything you can and wash your hands of it. Walk away from it. And that's what I did. I really don't believe she killed herself. She's there one day and then I'm saying she didn't show up. Have we uncovered a conspiracy indirectly? Too many unenthusiastic questions. She was scared that she was alive after they said she was dead. I got involved with the CIA right after I graduated college. I just went to a career fair and just decided, why not? We didn't have the culture that surrounds it I think today. You guys have homeland, you have criminal minds, you have all of those amazing shows, right? That expose whether it's true or not, it exposes folks to these careers. So in the 90s we have absolutely none of that. My only like exposure really was James Bond and that was like Sean Connery who was, I mean no offense, was very ancient to me. My name is Tracy Walder. I am a former CIA officer and FBI special agent and now I am an adjunct faculty member of criminal justice. I worked on the operations side so my job was to spot, develop, assess and recruit human assets. How would you define a human asset? So a human asset is someone from a foreign country that is willing to basically turn on their own country to provide information to us that will help us stop future attacks. But sometimes we use them in an international way for like transnational issues like terrorism or you know those kinds of things. Would the CIA ever bring an international human asset to the US for any reason? I don't think I can answer that question. I'm sorry. Fair enough. What relationship would the CIA have to aspire for another country living in the US? That would be an FBI purview because when I worked, FBI worked counterintelligence so I worked for and spies who were here. So that's not CIA, that's actually FBI. Have you ever heard of a situation where the CIA asked for custody of a body? I have not heard of a situation even you know it's pretty widely publicized that when Osama bin Laden passed away, his body was actually given to the military and it was buried at sea. So I've never heard of a situation like that. Can you think of any reason why someone from the CIA would call the executor of an estate and ask for custody of a body? I cannot think of any reason let alone they wouldn't identify themselves as such. So that in your mind sounds completely out of the question. That sounds completely fabricated. I think you know, first of all the CIA's mission is to not operate within the United States. So that's actually illegal. And so that would probably be the last thing that they would be doing. It would be highly unusual for something like that to happen. Is it common for people to impersonate the CIA, CIA agents? It's incredibly common for people to impersonate. I've heard it you know so many times. I hear it also even with well-known figures. It can happen more often than what people think. What would be some red flags that someone was not in the CIA if they said that they were? Probably talking about working at the CIA. I think that would definitely be problematic. Obviously I'm out with my experience, but I did so in the right way. I wrote a book that I had cleared by the CIA and I submitted all of that stuff to them to clear. If you're just talking about it, to talk about it, typically that's a good indication that you didn't work there. Part of it is an allure, right? You never know exactly what they do and don't do. So then it can become very easy to lie. So if the CIA didn't call Steve, who did? I really wish I had an answer. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, let's look at it in the broadest way possible. One possibility is it was a prank call. But why? Like why? It doesn't make sense. Why do people throw eggs at cars, right? Another possibility is he's misremembering. And still another possibility is he's ghost story telling himself. I mean, I think all of those things need to be on the table as researchers, right? Yeah. I just, I really think at the very least he's telling us what he thinks is the truth. His story stays exactly the same every single time. He says that both Jamie and their son were there and took part in this event. Like it was a big event. It was a shocking traumatic scary event for all three of them. I just feel like he's telling us the truth, or at least the truth as he remembers it. Do you know? Okay. So if we think this call really happened, right? Then another avenue we also explored as did Steve miss here the three-letter acronym. Still would be strange, but maybe a little less strange. See, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. There are lots of people who use the expression three-letter agency to mean US spy agencies, whatever they might be. And so like it does make sense to me that somebody called him and his brain just left to the scariest thing he could think of the CIA. Well, that's really interesting to me too, because of what Tracy said about there not really being this prevalence of CIA and forensic and justice and intelligence TV shows and super spy movies that we're so used to seeing all the time now. Well, so Mission Impossible comes out in May of 96, which means you're probably hearing about it in April of 96. Uh-huh. So there are things in the zeitgeist. I think too, if we're going to go down the, is this a prank? Is someone prank calling Steve or trying to pull one over on him rabbit hole? The number of people that knew that Steve was the executor was kind of small. And also just like what a weird and specific prank. It's not like, is your refrigerator running better go catch it? Do you know what I mean? It's like someone would really have to have intimate knowledge of the goings on and a really bizarre motivation. I cannot think of what the motivation would be. So let me suggest another way we might look at this. So if I were writing a New York time story about this, this would be a single source fact. And I probably would just omit it from a story because there was no way to corroborate it. Even if I personally believe Steve thinks this happened as a sort of fact and a fact pattern, it no longer exists in the argument that I'm building. But like the potential plot point of the call is one of the things that keeps me from being firmly on the side of she was just a regular person. And that you've been considered, I feel like almost every time we talk, the call comes up for you, Jen. It really has bothered you for a long time. Because it's fucking weird. Yeah, no, I totally get that. It's such a tricky thing. It's completely unverifiable and also completely unexplainable. There's no easy way to explain it if it did happen. And that's stressful. And Steve barksdale, I think that's why it stuck with him too, because it's such a weird thing. I do feel fairly confident that if Steve got this call, it wasn't a person who worked for the CIA. I feel that way too. I mean, for me, it kind of begins and ends with Tracy and actual CIA operative saying this would never happen. So let me just say this to every conspiracy theory, begins and ends with a sentence like this. Well, you can't prove Sue wasn't a super spy. So that's where we've begun and that's where we're going to end, right? We can't prove this wasn't true. We can't prove the phone call didn't happen. The other thing that still doesn't make sense to me in terms of Sue potentially being a super spy is this idea that maybe her computers were wiped of all information after she was dead. Larry walks in and he sets to the computer and state. Hard drives are gone. They did this remotely. This is high end stuff. This is high sophisticated stuff. So I've been writing about technology and computer hacking and cybercrime for almost 30 years. One of the first people I ever interviewed was Mark Rache, who is a private lawyer now, but he actually created the Department of Justice computer crime unit way back in the 90s. He was deeply steeped into computer crime rate, basically at the origins of computer crime. So he'd be a great person to talk to about what might have happened to Sue's computers back then. My name is Mark Rache and I'm a lawyer in Bethesda, Maryland. What I do is a lot of cybersecurity and data privacy work for my clients, but also I teach law at the George Washington University School of Law, teach of course there in computer crime. 1996 is really the, I would say, the you've got mail error. I'd say about 30% of people had a personal computer. It was not something that was seen as something that was essential, but it was something that people were already using by 1996. I think my space is now about five or six years in the future, so you don't really have social media, but you have web pages, you have altavistins, search engines like that, and you've got email. So sort of this leads me to my next question, which is basically asking you about a BBSs or bulletin board systems. Sure, so long before there was the internet as we know it, the way people would communicate with each other about special interests is somebody would stand up a bulletin board service, and people would post to the bulletin board. And for BBSs, BBSs were frequently offline, meaning you had to dial directly into the BBS rather than dialing into the internet so you had to kind of know where you were going to get there. How was computer information stored in the 90s, like around 1996? So typically you'd have a small hard drive, and that hard drive was where the operating system would be stored. But most of the files that you would want would be on floppy's. Would it be possible to wipe that information remotely, remotely wipe someone's computer? Well, okay, to wipe a computer remotely, you have to remember they would have had to been dialed into the internet, and you would have had to establish a connection to them, both of which were possible, but not easy to do. Unlike today where you're constantly online, most people would only be online while they were actively doing something, because remember, going back to you, you've got now, Tom Hanks would run home, turn on the machine, boot it up, dial in to check his mail. That's a pretty decent frame of reference for the standard of the technology. I don't know what year that came out, but that's pretty much a frame of reference for what we're talking about. How effective would wiping a hard drive actually be to get rid of the data? So there's the saying in the forensics community that is, delete doesn't and restore won't. A mere delete probably won't forensically remove the data, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to restore it. When I used to teach at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, of course, in computer forensics, we would give people a floppy disk, and it was corrupted, and the data had been deleted, and wiped, and all that stuff, and on that disk would be their graduation certificate. And if they couldn't forensically recover it, they couldn't print out their certificate, and they couldn't graduate. Incredible. And so this is sort of a battle of tools. If you use the right tool to wipe the drive, it can't be recovered. If you use the wrong tool to wipe the drive, and the right tool to restore it, you can get it back. So if Sue, sort of in that vein, if Sue had been involved in some sort of secret or classified activities, is remotely a wipe-haired computer is something that actually would have destroyed that info? It depends on who was trying to delete it, who was trying to destroy it, and what tools they were using. The normal way of dealing with that is that the FBI would have painted search warrant, would search and seize and obtain the data that way. There are ways to electronically seize data from a computer. This would be a virtual search warrant, where you are virtually retrieving the data. But why? If the person has passed away, send three agents over there, kick in the door, and take the stuff. You use these electronic search warrant, because you want to seriously take data without them knowing it. If they're dead, why would you go through that process? And if you want to get rid of it, you send three agents over with powerful electromagnets, and just walk past the thing, and just delete the data? Why? I just don't understand why. I'm not here to tell you why. I'm here to tell you how. Fair enough. Fair enough. Could that have been done through the wall? Like, could someone have been outside? In theory, you could do it from outside the wall. You'd have to have a much bigger electromagnet to have watched episodes of Breaking Bad. Right. So unlikely is what you're saying. It's unlikely, and why would your bother? If you can go in, there are easier ways to delete data than this. You would not rely solely on a software wipe if you had physical access to a machine. Do you know how her computers would have just turned on by themselves and started running without anyone in the room? I think the death description that is freaking weird. It's not going to turn itself on. Remember, at this point, the turn of computer on required a physical button. You would press the fees little button and power it up. If there is other behavior that can look like that, so for example, it's possible that the computer was never turned off at all and just the screen went blank, and then activity made the screen come on. Right. Would that suggest that she had been still connected to the internet? That's correct. But I can't imagine a situation where a powered down computer would be powered up remotely. Right. Yeah, and that's really, I mean, the person who is there when they explained what happened, they were in another room, and they heard a noise, like a giant, warring noise come up, and the lights dimmed in the house, like it was sucking all the power. Well, the warring noise is typically the sound that the computer makes as it boots up, but the lights dimming and all that stuff. The only other thing I can think of is that it was online, and the power went out. And then the power comes back on again, and it goes back online again. And that could be even a micro-power surge. You know, I'm just speculating at this point. That's the only thing I can think of that would describe that kind of behavior. That's really interesting, though, because if he noticed the lights dim, that is a very likely other explanation, is that there was some sort of power surge that turned the computers on. Power surge can also cause a hard disk failure. There is a fine difference between a hard drive that has crashed and a hard drive that has been wiped. So if you live in a rural area that is prone to power surges, electrical storms, things like that, that could explain both a hard disk failure, as well as the booting up. Let me put this way, okay? I have a lot of clients who come to me even today, and they complain to me that their spouses are monitoring their phone calls. Their spouses are monitoring their emails. The mouse is moving when they don't touch it and all this kind of stuff. And in a small number of cases, this is actually true. But there's a lot of observed behavior, which is actually not observed. A power surge. Like, why has that never occurred to us before? And I do remember Steve and Jamie saying that the lights dimmed. So maybe it was instead of a power surge, it was like a power dip. And it definitely makes sense to me that the computers would have looked like they were off, but really they would have just kind of been in sleep mode, because they hadn't been used in quite a while. Wouldn't a power surge be fairly typical for a place like Athens in the 1990s? Or a power dip anyway. I mean, it was where I lived 10 minutes outside Seattle in the 1990s. Honestly, a fluctuation in the power was common where I lived in Dallas in 2021. So I'm really curious to see what Steve and Jamie will think about this power surge idea. Yeah, me too. It's pretty clear from talking to them that this event was so frightening, that I can see it being kind of hard to accept that it might have been something so simple. Do you know what I mean? Like the fact that she had multiple computers in her house, they already found sort of suspicious and weird. And then the fact that they literally turned on by themselves with like a big scary sound in a strange house at night with the smell of death still in the air. I mean, they talk about it like it was some sort of possession, do you know? Like it was a scary horror movie event. So the idea that it might have just been a dip in power, I can see them not wanting to accept that. You know, one thing I keep hearing from you, which I am surprised I haven't heard, is this idea that the computers were scary. The computers themselves were scary, which sounds a little silly to our 20-23 years, but maybe not so back then. Yeah, I don't know about scary necessarily, but definitely unusual. I did think it was interesting and delightful that Mark kept bringing up, you've got mail. It's crazy to me to think that in 1996, Stephen Jamie would have been surprised by Sue having these personal computers. And then just a couple of years later in 1998, PC is what have been a plot point in a romantic comedy, you know? Like that's such a drastic and fast change to the culture surrounding computers. The fact that Sue had all of these computers is one of the big reasons Steve has said it before, she must have been brilliant to have all those computers in her house. Like it's one of the reasons that he thought she was something bigger than she maybe was. Yeah, and sort of like the guns that she had too. They were unfamiliar to Steve, and so he found them suspicious. Exactly. I actually did interview one of her friends from the gun club last week, and he had some interesting things to share about the guns that she had if you want me to talk about that. Yeah, that'd be great. He didn't want to be identified, so I'm just going to call him gun club friend. We met at a restaurant, and he told me that he met Sue in the mid 80s at a gun club. It sounds like they both shot at several gun clubs in the area, so they ran into each other fairly often. And he said that Sue was a pretty decent shot, and that they would both compete and reach an unknown. So she went to bat, you know, it starts out with, you start out as unclassified, and you go BA, AA, AA, AA, AA, and match the players. And I was a match the player. And she was shot good enough, where she had been a AA shooter mid 20s. And when I asked about death. He didn't remember exactly when Sue died, but he and a few of the other guys from the gun club went to her memorial together. And when he had asked one of these guys if he knew anything about how she had passed away, this guy said he didn't know that it was apparently all hush hush, and that Scotland Yard was somehow involved. And he also saw an article in the paper a few years ago, where Steve Barclayl talked about being Sue's executor, and how he thought she was an assassin because of the guns that she had had. That's a big reason. That's all crap. You know, damn assassin. You know, she was a shooter. Pistol shooter, need you scrap. Moment where Steve, who doesn't really know much about guns, thought they were really suspicious. And gun club friend did say they looked a little weird. They were kind of fancy competition pistols with special grips and special scopes attached. But he knew right away what they were and that they weren't weird at all for the type of shooting that she did. And then he threw me a curveball. She probably shot herself with one of the hands. I will say her, her death, she did not shoot herself. She took a bunch of medication and overdosed on medication. Oh, she didn't shoot herself. Oh, okay. She shot herself. Pardon me. Questions that she actually committed suicide. Seems very surprising to me. I'm sure they were the big investigation with fingerprints and all of that. But all that can be said. He's not out of breath. But he said that he had heard that Sue had been doing some bookkeeping for a couple out in Malikov that he knew were drug users. So he thought she might have gotten mixed up in that. He wasn't sure what kind of drugs she was doing. She might have gotten mixed up in that. He wasn't sure what kind of drugs they were using, but the idea that Sue may have gotten involved in drugs did at least cross his mind. Like maybe she was using drugs. I have no idea. I don't associate with them kind of people. I didn't see her being a dope hit though. But across your mind. Yeah, across my mind. She didn't have the look. She didn't have the person out yet. I bubbly had going to me. I thought he was a good person out. I just didn't think that would have. It's still hard to believe it. It's for me to suicide. But then again, I never know what's going on. Well, I'm glad she didn't shoot herself. But then now she said she OD. It makes me think she shouldn't have gotten involved with those two jokers in Malikov. So she could have something really bad. OD, though. I think it was prescription medication. Okay. I'm just speculating. You know, with Scotland, you're actually involved in all this. So this feels new. This drug theory. It's one we haven't really heard before. Did it seem like Gun Club friend was trying to imply that these people's Sue was keeping books for. Were dealing drugs? And maybe she got mixed up in that somehow? You know, I really don't think so. I think he was just talking about using drugs. Okay. Well, something that we haven't really talked about yet. But feels related to this and potentially important. Is that we know from some of the medical records we've tracked down. That some of the medications Sue was on for weight loss were amphetamines. And correct me if I'm wrong, Hayley. But it looks like she might have been taking some over the counter-diet pills on top of the ones she was being prescribed by her doctor. Yeah, that's correct. She was prescribed, fentanyl and dihydrex. Those were found in her house at the time of her death. And then she also had over the counter fat burners in her house. Yeah. So those are all amphetamines or stimulants of some kind. And I don't know that it's necessarily strange that she was prescribed more than one at the same time. But I do wonder if her doctor was aware that she was taking over the counter-diet pills on top of the ones she was being prescribed. That just seems potentially dangerous to me. And maybe like a red flag. But honestly, I just have all of the voices of the people we've talked to sort of ringing in my ears, saying that she never drank. She never did drugs. She didn't approve of drugs or medications even. Yeah. And just to break this down a little bit more, we've heard from a lot of people that Sue was a bookkeeper for a couple of small businesses and individuals. I think that's how she met Steve DeVille. So that makes sense to me that she might have been keeping books for someone's business or, you know, doing personal accounting for someone. Malikov is kind of the town over from Athens. It's not super far away. So she could easily drive there. To me personally, it seems unlikely that Sue was involved in using drugs outside of the prescriptions and over the counter medications she had in her house. But what's interesting to me about this gun club friends, thoughts about her potentially using drugs or drugs being involved in her death, it's another mark towards the confusion and turmoil around her death and the lack of information. That's the thing that's on my mind is this is yet another example of a different theory about how she died because there was so little clarity around her death. 100%. And what was wild to me is that we got to sort of see that happen in real time, right? Because I talked to this friend a little bit before you went to interview him. And I mentioned that her death had been ruled a suicide. And without any sort of information from me beyond that, he absolutely made the leap that she must have died via gunshot wound. The other thing that her gun club friend really confirmed for us, we've heard this before, but his interview pretty much confirms for me that there was nothing unusual about those guns. That they were exactly the type of gun that she would have used in this competition. And I do think the evidence that she is and for competitions is pretty strong based if only on the two metals that we have for her. The other thing I wanted to say on that is we've heard that she was this potentially sniper level shot. And this gun club friend seemed to kind of laugh at that a little bit and say she was a good shot. She was definitely above average, but she wasn't a master. She was just a good shooter who enjoyed doing this recreationally. So to me that feels like the guns being potential evidence of her being a secret assassin is pretty much off the table. The one thing that it doesn't explain to me is just this idea that we've heard of her being scared of something and her using them for protection instead of just competition. And she had a pistol that is kind of her personal self-defense thing that she went when I was in a round she was sleeping on the pillow. It was something in her past. It shouldn't be going up on her doorstep. The idea of her maybe seeing something that she wasn't supposed to and trying to escape it feels a little bit more plausible. And I just want to know I want clarity on the possibility, the believability I guess of the IRA relationship. She never had the desire to go back to anyone and it wasn't that she didn't necessarily want to it so she couldn't. There has been words said that my father moved over to Ireland. Because that theory originally came from Steve Barkstale just sort of speculating on reasons Sue might have left the UK when she did and finding out that the mid-70s were sort of a high point in the troubles. And because he found those notebooks full of numbers with steak knife written on the back. And then we walked out of that room into the computer room. I noticed that stack of big stack of yellow legal sized pads. And I noticed their numbers were on them and I picked up a few and I was amazed and I showed Jamie I said, Jamie look at this, all the numbers. They were just columns and all of them in the same handwriting. But there were no errors in those numbers. I mean I can't write four columns of four numbers. Page after page after page after page they were just endless and no rhyme or reason for them. I remember just as vividly as anything somebody had drawn a steak knife and wrote STA KE, KNIFE and Doodle Durantik. And then another one I found was a switchblade. That to me gives me the most fear about this whole project. Have we uncovered unknowingly a conspiracy within my six and the Irish Republic Army? So I do want to point out that Stephen Jamie throughout those legal pads. So we haven't been able to verify them. But I still really wanted to look into this theory because the whole double agent angle just fascinated me. So I read as many articles as I could find about steak knife. And here's what I feel like is most important. Steak knife was a person who was pretty high up in the IRA. However, he was also a double agent working as a British informant passing information to the British forces throughout his time in the IRA. Steak knife's identity was revealed in 2003. He was identified as Freddy Scappitychi, although he did deny these allegations. And you're correct. That is not an Irish name. Freddy Scappitychi was an Italian who was born and bell fast and his father had previously immigrated to Ireland. He joined the IRA in the 1970s and worked with them all the way through the 1990s. And during that time, he was in charge of their interrogation unit. Anyone they thought was an informant, this unit would interrogate them in ways that often involved torture, and they've been linked to a lot of murders. The interesting thing here is that even the idea of there being a double agent named Steak knife wasn't something people knew about until after Sue's death. Except for the very small handful of people who were basically his handlers within British intelligence. So nobody would have really been aware of the term Steak knife, except for that small group of people working in British intelligence. That makes it a little less likely that Sue was referencing this person when she wrote Steak knife on a piece of paper in her house in Texas. But once Steak knife was outed, he was put in witness protection and the British government actually made it illegal to share any information about his whereabouts or any photos of him. They did a really good job of protecting him. And for the last several years, there's been an operation called Operation Canova that's been investigating the crimes of Steak knife. And specifically, there's a lot of concerns around people that were murdered to keep Steak knife's identity a secret and also the people that Steak knife himself murdered. Their families want justice and he's never been charged or tried for any of these crimes. And he won't know because he died. He just died in April of 2023. Wow. I mean, I do agree Sue would not have known about the code name Steak knife. Unless she knew because she was involved. I'm always going to put on the tinfoil hat just in case. Correct. If she was involved in this very specific group of the British forces that were gathering intelligence about the IRA, then she would have been aware of this code name. According to Ian Hurst, a K.A. Martin Ingram, who outed Steak knife, only a handful of people knew about this. But he was able to find out and he wasn't in that group. Although he did work for the FRU in a different department. So it's all sort of wild speculation, but it does sort of fit. And so I just want to know how tangible it is. That's what I feel like our next step is. Is figuring out how tangible those ties are or whether they're just sort of tenuous? My name is Aaron Edwards. I'm an author and academic and I specialize on intelligence and counter terrorism with a specific focus on Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland troubles. Northern Ireland troubles, they began in the 1960s, an outbreak of sporadic inter-communal violence between two divided communities, the Northern Ireland Ulster Protestants, who looked to Great Britain for political linkage and the Northern Irish Catholic nationalists who looked to Dublin and United Ireland. During the troubles, almost 4,000 people lost their lives. The conflict itself lasted for about 25 years. But what you've seen in the past 20 years is actually the emergence of a frozen conflict, the intimate nature of the conflict in terms of the proximity within which the two communities lived side by side. It was such that the intensity and the bitterness and recrimination that was stoked by violence continues to this day. In around October of 1979, the British government decides to appoint Sir Morris O'Fail to become the spymaster, whose number one mission is to defeat the IRA. But using intelligence as the main methodology where the most important single actor in all of this is the informer. He believed there were two ways you could gather information from behind enemy lines. The first was through informers, through turning members of the parallel to the organisation to give up information. And the other way was to infiltrate agents into the IRA to get the information. How would one get involved? Like how would you be plucked out of society and brought into this intelligence operation? British intelligence recruited people who could give them access to the innermost secrets of those terrorist groups. And usually those people were born there. They could not insert people in, they did, try it, but it was very difficult for those people to get any kind of access. And simply because they were not trustworthy, they were not part of the tribe. So there were a number of different people chosen, a number of different levels. So there were members of the paramilitary organisation, who could give them direct access. There were those around those paramilitary, including family members, friends, acquaintances, who could give them information on those individuals. Sometimes they choose people in the outer ring of that, and then they used them over a long period of time to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the IRA. So that suspicions would not have been raised. Some of those who were deemed the very best, who could be resilient to that kind of cross-examination on a day-to-day basis. We're former soldiers, former British soldiers, who had connections in the Republican community. So in terms of Sue specifically, who we've talked to you a little bit about, what feels in the realm of possibility? It's a very interesting story from a number of different angles. It's difficult to speculate because within the Northern Ireland conflict, within the dirty war, there were so many shades of grey. There were so many different, complex scenarios involving people who then had to run for their lives. They could easily have wandered into a situation involving terrorists or the security forces. They could easily have been involved, even in a very fleeting way, with an intelligence operation without fully knowing what it was they were involved in. Or they could have been directly involved. The average conflict has been around for centuries. There are very, very long memories. And these memories may not be measured in terms of the age profile of those people, but in terms of a community memory, and that can linger long into the future. And it can be passed down through generations. If you become involved in a conflict 30 years ago, that past can come back to haunt you. There are sacred agents who I personally know who have been running for 25 years. They've been running for 30 years. Been running for all their lives. They've been running from that inevitable knock on the door. So I think that it's entirely plausible that someone who has more than a passing brush with the Northern Ireland troubles in a security sense, indeed even in an intelligent sense, lives a life of lies, lives a life of betrayal, and those lies and not betrayal persists for the rest of their lives. And might even be passed on to another generation. And crucially, in one point I didn't mention, which I think is fundamental to understanding this 30 little war, the anonymity of those who participated in it. Say you betray someone in your own family, in your own community. You always will be constantly thinking about whether they know something. Because informer sources are meant to be anonymous. The information is not meant to be released to the public ever. So the intelligence officers carry that to their graves and they give a commitment. And they sign all sorts of official secrets acts and non-disclosure acts. And they vow to never ever give that information up. You talked about that inevitable knock on the door. What happens to someone if they are found, if their cover is blown? Death. Okay, before I say what I'm about to say, I just want to make sure I have my timeline right. The troubles started in the 60s, right? So I think a lot of people would say the troubles with the capital, he began in 1969 when the British government ordered, quote unquote, peacekeeping troops into Northern Ireland. Got it. And then it sounds like it sort of reached a fever pitch in the 70s. I believe Aaron said that 1972 was the deadliest year of the conflict. Yeah, that's when bloody Sunday happened in 1972. And so that was really the spark that shocked Ireland, shocked the whole world in terms of the number of casualties. And really I think turn the troubles into what we think of it as today. And then it continued through the 90s, right? Yeah, there were fits and starts attempts to calm the conflict down to gain ceasefires. None of them held until the Good Friday Accord in 1998, which I do think would rightly be identified as the end of the troubles, at least with a capital T. Okay, well, Sue didn't come to the States until 1976. So she would have at least been in the UK for more of the conflict than I initially realized. And to put this in a little more context of Sue as well, she was not Irish, she was British, and we don't have any evidence of her living in Northern Ireland or Ireland. Stuart mentioned maybe she visited there, maybe their dad was there for a time, but we haven't been able to find anything to confirm that. And Northern Ireland and the surrounding area is where the majority of the fighting and the violence was happening. So if she was never in that area, it's pretty unlikely that she witnessed anything or was involved in any way. There's one other point I would really like to make that specific to Sue, which I didn't. After the Republic gained independence, there was still a lot of infighting among the rest of the Irish about, but first of all, who would rule? But then also what to do about the North. And so there isn't just one IRA, there are actually multiple IRAs. And a lot of the fighting and the independence war was between the Irish. So that backdrop, once the troubles began, led to an awful lot of suspicion on all sides, because there's spies on both sides, there's double agents. The IRA was infamous for trying to root out potential spies in its own ranks, and sometimes violent ways. And it really became a dangerous tinderbox, but also a box of intrigue on all sides. And I think this is how we land in the idea that maybe Sue was some sort of spy. And why, if someone with a British accent would show up in Texas in the 1990s, why it might be in the air that she would have some connection to this conflict? Something Aaron talked about that I really latched on to is just this spectrum of potential involvement being a quote unquote informer. Like it could be anything from steak knife, right, who was actively working both sides, heavily involved in both the IRA and British intelligence. It could also be someone on the street who overheard a conversation and decided it was worth sharing with one side or the other. So in my mind, the feet on the ground theory that could make sense is that she heard something that she became privy to some sort of information and then shared it with somebody. And then she herself felt like it was necessary to hide from whoever she ratted on for lack of a better term. Like the idea of it being potentially accidental, I guess, or something self-imposed feels more possible than her being somehow deeply involved in this infiltration of the IRA. So I don't think that we can overstate the culture of secrecy around all of this. I don't know that I've ever spoken to anyone in Northern Ireland at the time who speaks completely freely about everything that happened. All the conversations, even if someone had no direct involvement in anything are a little bit backhanded, a little bit junior, GM Annie. There's just a culture of why say things that might get you in trouble, even if you don't know why they might get you in trouble. So this whole spectrum of everything from being a full-time spy to just being an innocent bystander who's afraid to speak, that makes sense to me. So speaking of seeing things you're not supposed to, can we talk about the Witness Security Program thing? I would love to because this has been buggy for so long. Ever since Steve DeVille, I said it, but also since then, we've heard from one of Sue's close friends who told us a very similar story that she literally told them that she was in witness protection. Right. So I've been researching and there are a couple things that I thought might be interesting to talk to you all about. So one thing I learned is that Witnesses were apparently provided with just enough new records to start a new life, and that looked like sort of the big three Social Security Card Birth Certificate Drivers license. Another thing I thought was interesting is that they apparently gave Witnesses the same first names or at least initials within their new identities for a very practical reason that if you were writing your name on something and forgot about your new identity, you could catch yourself. And they also talk about how that even that sort of subtle name change has a lot of positive psychological benefits for people who feel like they have a new start. Another thing is that apparently folks in Whitseck were required to keep the identity secret from friends and family. That makes sense. And of course, reminds me of Lee Sin Stewart. And finally, apparently some witnesses say that those documents that they needed could be acquired on the street faster than Whitseck could provide them back in the day. And that reminds me of the theory that maybe she put herself in some sort of unofficial Whitseck program. But I really think we should talk with you as Marshall about all of this. They're the ones that are in charge of this program. They also track down fugitives. So I think they would have a lot to say about Sue potentially being on the run from something herself. My name is Scott Samuels. I'm a retired deputy assistant director from the United States Marshall Service. Worked for them for 30 years. I never worked in the Whitness Security program, but I can just give you the 50,000-foot view of it, which is to say that for the judicial system to work effectively and for the government to be able to prosecute offenders, you need to build the trust of people that will potentially be able to give you insight into that organization. And the only way that you can encourage those people to do the right thing in Testifying Court is to protect them if they are willing to testify on behalf of the government. And so the Whitness Protection program was born out of that intent. The Whitness Security program is very, very tightly held. It's not widely discussed, but I know that to my understanding they have never lost a witness in their history. They're very precise in what they do, and there are rules to being accepted into the program. And there are rules that have to be maintained to stay in the program. So we've told you a little bit about Sue and the story we're looking into. We've heard that she told people close to her that she was in Whitsack. And I was wondering if that aligns with what you know about how the Whitsack program works. It sounds to me very much like someone who created their own ad hoc, witness security, and decided to get far away from an island nation. Great Britain, and go to a place that would probably be as foreign and obscure as you could imagine going to a small town in Texas. And depending on what kind of folks or what organization might have been interested in her, it's unlikely that anybody would say, well, I bet you know what, which you left England, I bet you she went to Texas. What I found hunting fugitives for a career because that's primarily what the Marshall Service Investigative Mission is. It's to look for people who are running from the law is that people have a very difficult time severing all ties with their established life. It might seem simple at first blush, but it's very hard to be that disciplined and committed to totally cut yourself off from your organic original life and go to something else. So officially sued died in 1996 she was found in her home. But one of her friends that we've talked to is pretty convinced that someone he knows received a call from her a few weeks after she would have died. So his theory there is that potentially her death was faked he speculated a cadaver was used and that her death was faked. And so I'm wondering how reasonable or far fetched that sounds to you. Well, I mean, I mean, think about that just the logistics of that. Where would you come up with a body that if you took that body, the body matched the basic physical characteristics of her and had died of something that was banal enough that didn't have a gunshot wound to her step. Where would you find that body and then if you found it, how could you get your hands on it, move it without the people that are normally in custody of bodies like that. There would have to be so many other mechanisms and folks involved. You know, the other thing is is that with recall of events, one of the things that they have found to be less than compelling is eyewitness testimony. What they found is you can have five people or ten people or however many witness something and their recall of that event is completely different. And it doesn't mean that anybody's lying. It's the way your brain processes information. If there was a terrible accident or a large potentially upsetting event, people are rattled by that. And the other thing is is people want to be helpful. And they mean well, but they confuse it. It's very hard to get reliable eyewitness or ear witness testimony unless someone has training that would lead you to believe that they're credible. Have you ever heard of the CIA calling and asking for custody of a body after someone passes away? I can 100% say no. Even at the time where her death took place, if illegitimate government agency for some reason had a need to have access to that body for whatever reason, I can't quite imagine what that would be unless she died under some kind of exceptionally unique circumstances. They have the ability to reach out for a counterpart within the federal law enforcement community, which probably would have been an entity like the FBI. To say we need to take custody of that body, they would have gone to a judge they would have gotten a warrant to take possession of the body. There are ways to do it legally, quietly and efficiently. And it would defeat the purpose of how the CIA conducts its business, which is never to announce that you're from the CIA, never to announce that the CIA had interest in a particular area. But if someone called me and said I'm calling from the CIA, even though I have six years within an intelligence community, I would say bullshit. And pardon my language, I would just it would be ludicrous. I would think that from everything I've heard, the last thing she was involved with was the witness security program. And if you are living an obscure life in a small town and you want to feel important, you tell stories potentially. And it makes you interesting, it makes people go, oh my goodness, you're kidding me. Oh wow. The last thing if you were living under real fear and under real, a real threat is you would tell people anything about that part of yourself. And you would certainly never utter those words that you were in any kind of security program or witness security program. That would be an anthem up to everything that you're instructed to do. What did you think about the idea of her putting herself into some kind of program based on what Scott said? I think that makes a ton of sense to me. It's something that we've talked about a little bit before is like maybe she was just using the term Whitsack or witness protection as shorthand for some sort of self-imposed hiding. I think that makes a lot of sense. I don't think it makes sense. Really? Yeah, I mean, there's just no clear point where she suffers all ties. From what I found so far, it seems like her two big moves were from England to New York and then New York to Athens. And I've been able to find at least one connecting thread through all those moves. So while she did move around and she changed her name at certain points, I just, it doesn't feel like there's a full reset of her life. But that to me suggests that maybe she was just bad at it. The thing that makes me convinced that she put herself under some sort of self-imposed witness protection is just that she talked about it to people in her life. I agree that I felt like she was very good at it. Do you know what I mean? I just don't know how to otherwise categorize her telling Steve DeVille or some of her friends that she was in the witness protection program. I think it's a great question of why would she tell someone she was in this program if she wasn't. But we also know from talking with some of her friends and people that were close to her that she told them a lot of things that weren't necessarily true. Like she told someone she stowed away on a plane to get here, which we don't have evidence of. According to Steve DeVille, she told her boyfriend Mike that she had cancer, which we don't have evidence of. She told someone she saw her stepfather kill her mother, which her mother died of cancer. Do you know? So like that's also interesting to me is was she a person who wanted to paint her life in a certain way? Yeah, I was actually thinking about that when we asked Scott about what Pat Herndt told us. I just wonder if that air of mystery she cultivated might have also played into his theory that she was still alive and a cadaver was used to cover a disappearance. Yeah, hearing Scott lay out how complicated a cover up like that would be to me just made it really clear how unlikely that is. And I want to point out to you that we were finally able to track down the person that supposedly received that call from Sue after her death. And they never remember getting any call like that. Which is just crazy to me because Pat remembers it so vividly. Yeah. I'd be interested to see what Pat says when you tell him that the other person doesn't remember this call. I think we should follow up with him about this for sure. Okay, so after talking to our experts, I feel like she probably wasn't an IRA member or a British informant. And she probably wasn't in witness protection and her computers probably weren't intentionally wiped. So what the hell are we supposed to do now? I feel like our story is kind of falling out from under as a bit. I know this is going to be super annoying, but I actually think this is very good news. I think that now what we do is we cross it off the list and we go on to the next thing and we go back to what we know. And for me, that means we go back to the briefcase and we dig into the paperwork. I feel like we need to look at the records we do have and check back in with Sue. Next time on Undercover of Night. So this is a briefcase that Steve found under Sue's bed. It's a sturdy briefcase. I mean, it's very thick and leather-bound and everything. Why have I kept this all this time? The first thing that I looked at was the birth certificate. When and where born, 13th September, 1952? Based on what we're learning from Stuart, I'm wondering if that was when she was having this first child. Enter your parent. Your first one. He was 18 and she was 19. 19. She leaves for America in 1976. Got it. So just to recap, not name truck, not from Virginia, not from West Virginia, no farm. Sue's employment history is sticky as everything else is. Shit. So do we trust the records or do we trust the people? Ha-ha. Undercover of Night is an Apple original podcast produced by spoke media and castle view productions. Special thanks to Tracy Walder, Mark Rache, Aaron Edwards, and Scott Samuels for sharing their expertise. To learn more about the troubles and informants, you can read Aaron Edwards' book, Agents of Influence, Britain's Secret Intelligence War against the IRA. And you can read Tracy Walder's book, The Unexpected Spy, to learn more about her experiences in the world of intelligence. If you have any information on Sue Knight, you can email us at info-sue-night at gmail.com. If you or someone you know needs support, go to apple.com slash here to help for resources. Follow on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.