Amateur Sleuth

One of Ireland’s biggest unsolved mysteries is the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. She was a film producer from France who had bought a vacation house in Schull, County Cork, and was staying there when she was brutally attacked.

It happened on December 23, 1996. Sophie (39) was found that night beaten to death with a concrete block in the driveway of her house. Although she was wearing night clothes, police found two washed wine glasses inside the house, which made them theorize she’d had a guest.

Suspicion soon fell on Ian Bailey, a writer who lived in the area and happened to be the first reporter on the crime scene. He wrote several articles about the murder and sold them in the UK and France. A local boy told police that Bailey had said to him he “went up there with a rock and bashed her fucking brains out”. Another witness claimed to have seen Bailey close to Sophie’s house on the night of the murder, and he was later seen burning his clothes. He explained they’d got turkey blood on them.

Sophie’s cousin also revealed that, before Sophie traveled to Ireland, a writer from County Cork had called her trying to arrange a meeting, and Sophie was puzzled about how he’d got her number. The cousin couldn’t remember the name. This seems at odds with another statement from a french filmmaker who said that Sophie had told him about her “friend Ian Bailey” in Ireland. Bailey has said he didn’t know Sophie and obviously denies having killed her.

Bailey also has a pretty damming history of violence against women, especially against his partners, which he had himself detailed in his diaries. 

Bailey was arrested twice, once in 1997 and another in 1998, but released both times without charges. A pretty long history of legal battles between Bailey, the courts, the press and Sophie’s family started then. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you’re interested you can read a timeline here.

Since nothing was happening in Ireland, now Ian Bailey might have to face justice in France. On October 2016, a judge decided to indict him for voluntary murder and on February 2018 the appeals court in Paris stood by that decision. It’s unclear if a trial will ever happen, though. In 2017 the Ireland courts already refused to extradite him to France.

This is one frustrating case because it looks like it could have been easily solved if the people involved had done the right thing at the right time. Instead, we are left with guesses and questions.

The whole Thompson family disappeared during the weekend of the 4th July, 1996, it’s unclear what day exactly but the father, Everett (40) was last seen on July 5th. That day he was talking to his father on the phone when he got a panicked call from his wife Lydia (43), who told him her brother, Kenneth White, was chasing her around the house with an ax. Everett left in a rush and never came back to work. 

Now you’d think that if your son tells you he’s going home because his wife is being chased by a man with an ax, you’d call the police. But for some reason, Everett’s father didn’t do that. Instead, he and his wife reported their son missing on July 17th, 12 days after that last conversation. When police went to check the Thompson’s house, they found Everett, Lydia and their sons Everett Jr. (11) and Andrew (8) gone. Also gone was Lydia’s white van. At home was, however, Kenneth White. He said the family had gone on a trip. 

At first look police didn’t see any evidence that something was wrong in the house. But of course, 12 days had passed. Kenneth was an ex con, who was staying with the Thompsons after being released in February that year from a aggravated criminal sexual assault sentence. Not exactly the person you’d like to have in your home, but turns out that Kenneth owned part of the house where the Thompsons lived, because it was an inheritance from his and Lydia’s. After police left, Kenneth sold the house and also Lydia’s van, whom he had without the police’s knowledge. The house got renovated and the van crushed, so all potential evidence was lost.

Police’s actions are a little baffling, especially considering that two days before she went missing, Lydia had called 911 to tell them her brother was threatening with an ax (yes, it had happened before). At the time, the officer that responded to the call reported that everything seemed calm when he’d visited the house.

In early February 2013, Kelsie Schelling (21) learned she was pregnant. A few days later, she went missing.

The father of her baby was her on again, off again boyfriend since high school Donthe Lucas, who wasn’t as happy with the baby news as Kelsie was. On February 4th, after confirming her pregnancy at the doctor’s and sending Donthe a picture of her first sonogram, he asked her to meet him in Pueblo, Colorado, a two hour drive for Kelsie. He was very insistent, telling her he had a surprise for her.

Text messages between the couple show that Kelsie arrived at the Walmart parking lot where they had agreed to meet around 11 pm, but she waited over an hour without any sign of Donthe. Then he texted her to arrange a new meeting place, where she was left waiting again. What happened next is a mystery, but Kelsie was never seen again, and her phone was turned off soon after.

Well, there is one person that likely knows what happened to Kelsie. Donthe was questioned by police and his version is that he and Kelsie met up in a residential street, and that they had an argument. That he left and she decided to stay there and sleep in her car, and that the next morning she wasn’t feeling well, so she asked him to take her to the hospital. And that there, she told him she had a miscarriage. Donthe says they then parted ways at the Walmart. He also claimed that Kelsie had a troubled life and suggested she had committed suicide.

But evidence suggests a different story. First, there’s no record that Kelsie was ever at the hospital. On February 5th, Donthe was caught on a surveillance camera withdrawing $400 from Kelsie’s account with her card, and also leaving her car at the Walmart’s parking lot where it stayed for almost a whole day before an unidentified man picked it up next morning. The car was found on February 7th, parked at the hospital.

Despite all these extremely suspicious moves, to say the least, Donthe has never been arrested. He remains a person of interest. Kelsie’s family are obviously outraged by the poor investigation into her disappearance and ended up suing both Donthe and the cops. 

To make it worse, Kelsie’s mother was contacted by someone saying they her daughter was alive and captured by human traffickers, after Donthe had paid a friend to kill her. They were asking for money to return her, but it ended up being a callous scam. 

Recently, a tall white man was seen stealing Kelsie’s missing posters, but he hasn’t been identified.

UPDATE

Finally, on March 8th, 2021, after a very long awaited trial that had to be postponed several times, Donthe Lucas was found guilty of the murder of Kelsie and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The prosecution presented a strong circumstantial case, while the defense didn’t call any witnesses, choosing instead to argue that because there was no DNA evidence and Kelsie’s body has never been found, they hadn’t proved their case. The jury obviously disagreed, because they only delivered a few hours before coming back with a verdict.

I wish there was a simple answer to that question, Anon. I have a lot of opinions about Woody Allen, and none of them are good. But to be fair, I can understand why he has defenders. His is one complex case.

I know he’s supposed to be this genius director and screenwriter, but I don’t see it. I see a director that keeps copying himself and can rarely tell a story that’s not about him. He’s also one of the most misogynistic filmmakers I’ve seen; pretty much all his female characters are either young ingenues with little depth, sexual objects or neurotic messes on the brink of meltdown. Curiously, the latter category is always reserved to older women (or women his age), because as Richard Morgan from the Washington Post noticed while going through Woody’s archives, he has a creepy obsession with teenage girls.

But I assume you’re asking about the allegations he molested his adoptive daughter Dylan in 1992. This is where things get a little muddy, because there’s so many biased arguments. It’s come down to who you believe, because the evidence can go either way.

I could talk endlessly about that case, but this post would get even longer than it already is. I would suggest to anyone interested in learning all the details about this case:

- To first read Dylan Farrow’s testimony that when she was 7 years old, Woody Allen took her to the attic and molested her.

- Then, here is Woody’s response to that letter. 

-You’ll find thorough defenses for Woody here (written by documentalist Robert Weide) and in this column by Cathy Young in Forward, which is a website aimed at the American jewish community, and as you know, Allen is a prominent member of it.

- On the other hand, I would recommend this and this article. Also, Vanity Fair did a “these are the undeniable facts” of the case list, if you want something more straightforward.

Here’s what I think. I believe Dylan Farrow. I choose to believe a victim over a guy who started a sexual relationship with the barely adult daughter of his longtime girlfriend (not a crime, but beyond immoral and creepy). I can’t imagine what it’s been like for her to have such a story to tell, and everyone ignoring her so they can keep kissing the ground Woody walks on. That, of course, is over now thanks to the #MeToo movement, but for more than two decades Dylan was dismissed by pretty much everyone except her mother and brother Ronan, who is Allen’s only biological child and one of the people who revealed the Harvey Weinstein’s abuses.

That’s not to say I don’t think there are a lot of unanswered questions. If this was a case being tried in court, there is some reasonable doubt. There are two main arguments in support of Woody, for me. One is that it’s very rare that a pedophile would only molest one child and then never again, at least that we know. The second is the report that The Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sex Abuse Clinic did in 1993 saying that Dylan had not been sexually abused and suggested she was being coached by her mother, Mia Farrow (a theory Woody Allen has always put forward, that Mia invented this as a revenge for him leaving her for her daughter Soon-Yi). The New York State Department of Social Services also closed the investigation for not finding credible evidence of molestation.

But I put more weight on the decision of Judge Wilk not to give custody of Dylan to Allen. He wisely noted that the above mentioned report done by the Yale-New Haven team was signed by a doctor who never even saw Dylan, and she was only examined by social workers, not psychologists. Not to mention, they only agreed to testify in the court case by deposition and not to answer questions, and all their notes on the case had been destroyed so what real evidence did they have to support their conclusion? Seems super fishy to me. Allen’s defenders always mention the fact he was never charged with a crime, but prosecutor Frank Maco has always stated that, while he had probably cause, in the end they chose to protect Dylan’s fragile state at the time. 

This judge also said he found no credible evidence Dylan had been coached (and honestly, Mia would have to be a mind whisperer to coach so many details into her 7 year old daughter that have remained so consistent in time). He described Allen’s behavior in regards to Dylan “grossly inappropriate” and in this article from 1992, several sources mention Allen had an unnatural obsession with Dylan.

It All Starts with Two Missing Kids

I’ve been following this rather crazy story for a few days now and I thought I’d share it with you. Just be warned before you read that this is all ongoing, so there’s a lot we don’t know. I’ll do my best to make it less confusing than it really is for you, and to set aside rumors from known facts.

We’ll start in November of 2019, when Kay and Larry Woodcock called police in Rexburg, Idaho, and asked them to do a welfare check on Joshua “JJ” Vallow, whom they hadn’t heard from since late September. JJ is a 7 year old boy with special needs and although he was Kay and Larry’s biological grandson, he had been adopted by Kay’s brother Charles Vallow and his wife Lori. Charles had died in July 2019, so JJ was living with Lori and her new husband, Chad Daybell (more on that later, because it’s one big piece of this puzzle).

When police arrived to Chad (51) and Lori’s (46) house on November 26, JJ wasn’t there. They claimed that he was staying with a family friend in Arizona, but police soon found out that wasn’t true. They went back the next day with a search warrant, only to find that Lori and Chad had abruptly left town with an unknown destination.

If that wasn’t suspicious enough, authorities realized that JJ wasn’t the only kid missing. His older sister Tylee Ryan, who was Lori’s 17 year old daughter, had also vanished and no one had seen or heard from her since September. Neither of the kids had been reported missing by anyone, not even JJ’s school, which should have at least been alarmed that he had one day stopped showing up in class.

JJ and Tylee’s whereabouts remain unknown, and we don’t even know if they’re alive. Rexburg police has openly said they “strongly” believe they are in danger. In a press release from December 30, they said that witnesses claimed Lori and Chad had told them Tylee had died in 2018, which wasn’t true, and that Chad had told someone else that Lori had “no minor children”. Meanwhile, Lori and Chad, wherever they are, have lawyered up. 

While the missing children is undoubtedly the more pressing matter, it’s only the tip of the iceberg in this case. Turns out that both Chad and Lori have quite a shady past, especially in relation to their previous spouses. 

Chad was married to a woman called Tammy (49), who was found dead in her home on October 19, 2019 (so a month after the kids went missing). At the time, her death was considered from natural causes, but now police consider it suspicious and have exhumed her body to perform an autopsy and testing. The results, if they have them, haven’t been released yet. Chad married Lori only two weeks after his wife’s death.

Lori, who’d been married four times before finding her fifth husband in Chad, was also a recent widow, but her husband’s death was way more violent than Tammy’s. Charles Vallow and her had separated in early 2019 and their divorce was getting nasty. On July 11, 2019, Charles was shot to death by Lori’s brother, Alex Cox, in Arizona (where Lori lived before moving to Rexburg). Alex’s story was that Charles had showed up at the house, an argument had ensued and Charles had hit him with a baseball bat, so he’d shot him in self defense. Alex (51) himself died of unknown causes on December 12, 2019, and his death is currently under investigation as well.

So here is where things get a bit muddier, since some people believe that all this is related to an alleged cult. Both Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow were very religious. Chad owns a publishing company called Spring Creek Book where he had self-published many of his books that talk about the end of times and near death experiences. He and Lori used to appear in podcasts from a media company called Preparing A People, which claims to help prepare people on Earth for the second coming of Christ, and it’s connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The owners of said company issued a statement in December in which they distanced themselves from the couple.

According to the Woodcocks, Lori was a nice woman until she started getting more involved with this religious group in 2018, where she supposedly met Chad. When Charles Vallow filed the divorce papers, he made some very shocking claims about Lori, saying that she was “obsessive about near death experiences and spiritual visions”, that she claimed to be “eternally married to the prophet Moroni” from the Book of Mormon and that she had lived “numerous lives on numerous planets”. The document from February 2019 says: “(Lori) informed (Charles) that she is a translated being who cannot taste death sent by God to lead the 144,000 into the Millennium. She is receiving spiritual revelations and visions to help her gather and prepare those chosen to live in the New Jerusalem after the Great War as prophesied in the book of Revelations”. Charles also claimed that Lori said she had been assigned by God to “carry out the work of the 144,000 at Christ’s second coming in July 2020″ and that if he got in her way she would kill him, and that had an angel who would help her dispose of his body. And as we know, Charles was dead only 5 months later.

There are reports that Lori left Charles because he was cheating on her during his business trips. One police report seems to believe that Charles was the most suspicious of the two, and you can read about it here. So I guess we need to keep our minds open regarding this part of the story.

To add a little to the weirdness, a man called Brandon Boudreaux was married to Lori’s niece and claims she abruptly asked for divorce after she started spending time with Lori’s religious group. Then, in October 2, 2019, Brandon was shot at by some unknown assailant while he was driving a car registered in Lori’s name. The bullet missed him, but Brandon is convinced that it’s connected to this alleged cult (which, to be fair, hasn’t been officially confirmed by anyone).

Tylee’s dad, Joseph Ryan, who was Lori’s third husband, died in 2018 from a heart attack.

So far no charges have been pressed against Chad and Lori, who remain uncooperative with the investigation and refusing to reveal where her kids are. Their lawer issued a statement saying: “Chad Daybell was a loving husband and has the support of his children in this matter. Lori (Vallow) Daybell is a devoted mother and resents assertions to the contrary. We look forward to addressing the allegations once they have moved beyond speculation and rumor”.

Sources:

- Article Two Children are Missing from the Washington Post.

- A Timeline and Key Players from the Case (note that Charles Vallow’s date of death is wrong here)

- Charles allegations against Lori.

- Police comment on Tammy Daybell’s death and Lori’s older son begs her to come home.

The deadline passed, Tylee and JJ’s whereabouts are still unknown. We’ve learned a few things, though:

- In August 2019, about a month after Charles Vallow was murdered and shortly before Lori and her new husband moved from Arizona, where she lived with her kids, to Idaho, she gave away JJ’s service dog, even though he was vital for her son’s treatment. She tried to sell the dog, Bailey, first for 2.500, but ended up telling Bailey’s trainer to take him (x). 

- Tylee’s cellphone was found in her mother’s possession in Hawaii. According to several sources, the phone has been used since Tylee was last seen in September, but a text sent to a friend didn’t sound like her (x). Her older brother Colby also got texts from Tylee until October, but would never be able to talk on the phone with him when he tried. Colby also found Tylee’s texting style back then different from usual (x).

- Between October and November 2019, Lori put all her kids’ belongings in a storing unit in Idaho (x).

- When Charles Vallow was murdered by her own brother, Lori told the news to his adult sons from a previous relationship by text, telling them only that their father had died and kept avoiding explaining how exactly he died (x).

UPDATE FEB 21, 2020

It’s been almost a year since I updated this post (sorry about that!), but here are the main developments that have happened in the past 12 months, in case you’ve not been following this truly sad and bizarre case.

- On June 9, 2020, police found human remains in Chad Daybell’s property in Salem, Ohio. Four days later, authorities confirmed they belonged to J.J. and Tylee. Daybell was arrested and charged with conspiracy to conceal and destroy of evidence.

- Lori Vallow is also charged with the conspiracy charges, plus contempt, resisting and obstructing and criminal solicitation to commit a crime. Neither she nor Daybell have been charged (yet) with murder.

- J.J.’s remains were found wrapped in plastic and bound with duct tape, while Tylee was dismembered and burned. Their cause of death is unknown (or hasn’t been released).

- According to Melanie Gibb, a former friend of Lori, she had started saying that Tylee was a “zombie”, a word she used for people she believed were “dark” because their souls had left their bodies. This does seem connected to Tylee acting like a typical teenager. She would later say the same about JJ, who according to Lori would say he “loved Satan” and “sit still and watched TV”.

- It seems like police suspect that the actual murders were committed by Lori’s brother Alex Cox (who, as you remember, died shortly after of unknown causes). His phone was tracked to the Daybell’s property on the dates around the kids are believed to have gone missing (September 8, 2019 in Tylee’s case and September 22, 2019 in J.J.’s).

- An autopsy was performed on Tammy Daybell’s, Chad’s former wife who died shortly before he married Lori, but police haven’t released the results yet.

Who Killed Jaclyn Dowaliby?

The morning of September 10, 1988, Jaclyn Dowaliby (7) was reported missing. Her parents, Cynthia and David (who had adopted her when he’d married Cynthia), said they had woken up that day to find her gone, along with her bedspread. David reported finding the front door open that morning, even though he was sure he had locked it the night before. Police also found a broken window, that was unlocked too, in the basement.

Four days later, Jaclyn’s body was found among some brushes in an empty site behind an apartment complex, only three miles away from the Dowaliby home in Midlothian, Illinois. Her body was wrapped in a quilt, and she had a clothes line rope wrapped twice around her neck. Because of decomposition, the medical examiner was unable to determine if she had been sexually assaulted, but stated the cause of death as ligature strangulation. There were no signs of bruising nor marks to show she had been bound or gagged in any way. It was impossible to determine if she’d died in that location. There were also some white cotton panties close to her body that were clean except for one pubic hair they couldn’t determine where it came from.

The investigation soon focused on the parents. Jaclyn’s biological father, Jim Guess, was in prison at the time so he was cleared. But investigators were suspicious of Cynthia and David. How come they hadn’t heard an intruder breaking in and taken their daughter? They also decided that the basement window had been broken from the inside (a fact that was later disputed). And there was a witness in the apartment complex where Jaclyn’s body was found that testified he’d seen a man in a car outside in the early hours of September 10. He said the man had a prominent nose, and when showed pictures he identified the man as David. The witness later said he only chose David’s picture because it was the one with the biggest nose of the bunch, and that the man he’d seen might have been the apartment’s handyman.

Cynthia and David were arrested and charged in November 1988, and were tried together. However, before the jury decided on their guilt, the judge acquitted Cynthia for insufficient evidence. David was found guilty and sentenced to 45 years in prison, but after 18 months behind bars, his sentence was overturned for lack of evidence and he went free.

When I was a kid, in the early 90s, I loved watching Unsolved Mysteries. Never missed an episode, even though it terrified me and gave me nightmares more often than not.

One case I remember vividly is the kidnapping of Michaela Garecht. She was only 9 years old in November 19, 1988, when she and her friend Katrina Hogue left Michaela’s house in South Hayward, California, and rode their scooters to the Rainbow Market, a store only a couple of blocks away to buy some treats. When they finished and went to fetch their scooters, Michaela’s wasn’t where she initially left it. Instead, they spotted it next to a car in the parking lot. When she went to get it, a man jumped out of a parked car, grabbed Michaela and drove away with her. It was barely after 10 am.

Katrina, who was only a child herself and the only witness to the crime, went inside the store to ask for help. A store clerk called the police to report the kidnapping, but unfortunately she gave them the wrong description of the perpetrator, because she thought it was a man she had seen earlier. For the first 48 hours of the investigation, a time we know it’s crucial in any abduction, police and the public were looking for a man in his 30s, with a mustache and driving a burgundy car, when in reality the suspect looked very different.

Once they realized their mistake and talked to Katrina, they corrected the description. The man who took Michaela, the girl said, was in his 20s with shoulder length dirty blonde hair and bad complexion, possibly pockmarked or with acne. His car was an old beat up model, tan or gold. Here’s the sketch that was released to the public:

The case attracted a lot of interest and was extensively covered by media, including segments in America’s Most Wanted and the aforementioned Unsolved Mysteries. Police claim that they received and followed over 15,000 leads, with no positive results: Michaela has never been seen again, and to this day, the man responsible for her disappearance hasn’t been identified. The case is still open and every once in a while a new plea for information will come up.

At one point, a man called Timothy Bindner was considered a person of interest in this and other disappearances of little girls. He had some questionable habits, such as sending letters and money to several little girls and according to Michaela’s mom, he would interfere with the investigation and taunt them with the pretense of wanting to help. However, he was never arrested or charged with anything.

Another person who was looked at was James Daveggio, who is currently on death row for the kidnapping, rape and murder of 22 year old Vanessa Lei Samson in 1997, a crime he committed with his then lover Michelle Michaud.

In 2012, Wesley Shermantine, one half of the serial killer duo dubbed as the Speed Freak Killers, suggested that his partner in crime, Loren Herzog, could be the culprit because of his resemblance to the police sketch. Unfortunately, Herzog had just committed suicide so it was pretty much a dead end for the police.

Michaela’s mother, Sharon Murch, keeps the hope that she will find out what happened to her daughter. She posts often in this Facebook page and her blog. She has said she believes she could have been a victim of human trafficking and was taken out of the country.

Guys, this is huge news! A 59 year old man called David Misch has been charged with the murder of Michaela. He has been behind bars since 1989, when he was convicted of stabbing to death Margaret Bell (36). In 2018 he was also found guilty in the murders of best friends Michelle Xavier (18) and Jennifer Duey (20), whose bodies were found on February 1986. That case was solved decades later thanks to DNA Misch left at the scene.

Although police hasn’t given many details yet, they said that the connection between Michaela’s case came from the detectives working on Michelle and Jennifer’s case. A partial palm print left by Michaela’s kidnapper was matched to Misch.