Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Officer Down

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

A police lieutenant goes into his kitchen to get a snack, then his wife hears shattering glass and finds her husband has been killed. He was shot in the back of the head. Lt. Joe Clark was a beloved member and protector of the community. So who would want him dead? Was it related to the drug rings he relentlessly pursued? What could police learn from the shotgun shell recovered at the scene? And what does it all have to do with a blue Ford Pinto?

Hey, Cold Case fans, we have something special for you. We're bringing you double the episodes every week. We know you dedicated fans need your fix in between new episodes. So every Thursday, we are back bringing some of our best episodes from previous seasons. Let us know which classic episodes you'd like to hear again in the comments. And don't worry, we'll see you back here every Tuesday for all new episodes of Cold Case Files 2. Now, on to the episode. There aren't too many places in my life that I felt unsafe. I like to think of myself as small

but mighty. Either way, in my life, I've been privileged enough to only have positive interactions with law enforcement. I especially feel safe in my home in small-town America, where the police aren't only our protectors, but they're also our friends. I think Lieutenant Joe Clark from the Washington County Sheriff's Department would agree with me. Well, he might have, but not anymore. On February 7th, 1981, Lieutenant Clark was watching basketball with his wife. He got up to go to the kitchen and was killed. The fact that he was a police officer doesn't make his death any more or less tragic. It doesn't make his life any more or less valuable. But the fact that he was

the town protector and he wasn't able to protect himself was devastating. Having no similar experience, I have to imagine it's the same kind of powerlessness that you feel when parents are unable to take care of themselves. Helpless and scared. You did not commit murder on a police officer. It's happened, but to have it happen in your hometown, in your county, at his own house, yeah, you feel like nobody's safe. There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America.

Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. You're listening to Cold Case Files, the podcast. Before we go any further, I need to make a confession. Okay, well, first a disclaimer and then a confession. When I watch true crime shows, frequently I'm able to figure out who did it right away. So my confession is this. This one got me. I didn't see it coming.

Not until the voice on the screen told me. And even then, I struggled to process it. It's because I had a case of confirmation bias. Don't worry, it's not contagious by earbuds. But everyone does get it, sometimes. Confirmation bias is basically when you form an opinion early into the case or story because you think it's true. It's like wishful thinking. I mean, you might be good at something.

Or in some cases, you know a lot about something, but your confirmation bias can twist each piece of evidence, and your lens of false certainty bends it to favor your theory. Some of the characters in this story appear to have confirmation bias, but it seemingly goes undetected. I think that's probably because it's easier for us to see the bias in others rather than ourselves. I mean, that's why we take our friends shopping with us, because they'll tell us that the dress that we love does make us look bad. haven't seen it yet, you should go watch Cold Case Files on AETV.com. This episode is called Officer Down. Make note of when you think someone is showing this type of bias. Let's see if by the end you were as surprised as I was, or if noticing the bias helped you out. Don't forget about me. See if you can guess the idea that I zoned in on causing my confirmation bias. Send me a tweet, and I'll tell you if you're right. Okay, now is the time to press pause if you haven't seen the TV episode

because we're moving on to the story. Joe Clark and his wife Patricia were having a regular evening at home. Joe got up to go to the kitchen. There was a loud shatter and Patricia thought a light bulb had blown. When she went to look in on the situation, instead of finding a broken light bulb,

she found Joe unresponsive on the floor. An ambulance was called, and Joe was rushed to the hospital. His wife, knowing that he had some pre-existing heart issues, suspected that maybe Joe had a heart attack. Tim Clark, Joe's son, tells us about his last minutes. I was sitting out there and waiting and waiting. I remember going in to check on him. Of course, there was a couple doctors, and I pretty much could tell by the

looks on their faces that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't good. That's when they pronounced him dead. It turns out Joe's death was not a heart attack or any other natural cause. It was a bullet wound to the back of his head. I don't want to sound cynical, but I know that there are those of you who are wondering this too. How did Mrs. Clark not notice a bleeding head wound? My guess would be she was so traumatized that her brain made her twist the facts because it made her feel safer and helped her cope with the situation. I have another question.

Maybe it's not so important, but it was mentioned by Ron Reese, Lieutenant Joe Clark's son-in-law, that Tim, Joe's son, was asked to identify the body. They had Tim identify Joe. And I was angry that they had Tim, as a kid, have to see his father lying there dead. I did some research on the need to identify the body of a person who was brought to the hospital by family under any kind of fatal circumstances. I couldn't find anything to support that practice. I only question because I think it goes to show the experience level

this particular community has in murder investigations. Of all the questions, though, I think the most troubling is how did someone manage to shoot an officer of the law in his own home, undetected? The police started looking for answers. Jack Taylor, a police officer at the time, tells us about their first step. At that point, they said that Joe had been shot. He'd been ambushed in his own home. You just don't believe it.

It changed everybody's outlook and responsibilities. First thing you want to do immediately is secure the crime scene. Police went back to Joe's home and they noticed that a window had been blown out and they found pellets on the floor. These particular types of pellets were from a shotgun. I didn't know very much about shotguns, so I did some research. I'll explain in a bit what I learned about different bullets and the guns they come from. From the broken window and pellets, the officers deduced that someone must have crept behind Joe's house and shot him through the window. They started the search for witnesses, and they found 10 who all stated that they saw a blue Pinto near the crime scene. They said it was idling. You know, just sitting there running, but not going anywhere.

Most of the witnesses also said that as they passed the car, the driver tried to hide his face with his hand. One witness said that after he had driven a short distance, he heard what could have been the sound of a shotgun. We knew that there was no way the guy could have shot and ran into the vehicle in that amount of time. We believed that there was two people involved, one in the vehicle and one that did the shooting. Wow. Two people from this safe, small town conspired to kill a police officer in his home, an act that not only robbed a family of their loved one, but also a community of its sense of security. Of course, the police were going to put their most experienced and highly trained detectives on this case, right? This is what the members of the force had to say.

At that time, there was no higher profile case. And I can't tell you why the sheriff would assign a rookie to it. There were certainly other officers that would have had more experience than Deputy Taylor. I mean, good God, whoever gets this case is going to have it pretty hard. I didn't know it was going to be me. Jack Taylor became the detective in the case of Joe Clark. Joe Clark, a police lieutenant, was the first murder case to be assigned to Officer Taylor. Personally, I think a lot of good can come from having someone new, well-trained, and ambitious on your team.

That's exactly it, though, as part of a team, paired with someone perhaps a bit more skeptical, but with more experience. I'm not in law enforcement, though, and Jack Taylor started his investigation alone. The physical evidence he had to work with was the broken window, pellets, and a four-buck shotgun shell that was found at the scene. He also had the description of the blue car and the sound of the shot heard by the witnesses. His next step was to look for motives. It seems that Joe Clark was passionate about fighting drug crimes in Washington County. The investigation turned towards it being a drug-related murder.

Jack found out that Joe had just given an interview where he said he'd be making several drug-related arrests in the coming days. The article was released the day Joe was murdered. The statement you hear next from Jack may or may not be a hint about confirmation bias. When Joe was killed, we just added two and two and we said this has got to be drug-related. A few days after Joe's murder, Jack was called to the scene of another murder. He found drugs and a body lying on the floor. The victim had been shot in the head.

We get a police officer shot that just talked about narcotics. Three days later, a drug trafficker is shot. These two shootings have to be related. We might have a war in the community. I try to imagine the atmosphere at Joe's funeral. Sure, people were sad in the way that people are at funerals, but this was different. A rumor, actually, a theory by law enforcement hypothesized that there was a war between the illegal drug community and the police. When a police officer is killed, the entire force comes to pay their respects. So, when I imagine the funeral, I see grieving family and friends intermingled with police officers in uniform. They're united in their loss, but also in their fear. If Joe Clark was killed in his own home, which one of them could be next?

Joe was buried in his uniform, and he got military honors. Jack was even one of his pallbearers. When the funeral was over, Jack went back to work. I'm looking for a blue Ford Pinto. The first thing I did was I contacted the DMV. How many 1974 blue Ford Pinto hatchbacks or station wagons do you have? I think it was some ungodly number, like 4,000, blah, blah, blah. So I got nothing.

So there's a hard stop on the blue Pinto. Jack considered other avenues to take this investigation. So he started to question what he referred to as members of the drug community, the users, dealers, and informants for the police. That didn't work out so well for Jack. And that's when the threats came in. Things like you're going to get the same thing that other cop got. You tell that so-and-so, knock it off or he's dead.

I felt legitimately afraid for my life so much that I moved my family and stayed in Washington County alone. Despite the upheaval that it caused in Jack's life, his interactions with the drug community did bring him a lead. An informant told him that he knows who shot the man, the drug trafficker, three days after Joe Clark. He gave two names, Washington and Jones. Two people, just like Jack suspected. Of course, these had to be the same men that killed Joe. It fit, right? Jack found out that the men were currently incarcerated in a different county, so he went to question them. Washington and Jones told Jack that the trailer park shooting wasn't a planned murder. It was just supposed to be a robbery.

They also gave him another name, Matt Bonner, and they said he had set the whole thing up. Matt Bonner wasn't an unfamiliar name to police. He was known as a leading drug trafficker in the county and had a lot of involvement with Joe Clark, who had been investigating him for years. Jack talked to Bonner, but Bonner had nothing to say. He denied knowing about the drug shooting. He denied knowing Mr. Washington and Mr. Jones. He denied it all, and there was not one piece of solid evidence connecting him. Jack had nothing. Jack Taylor, he relied heavily that it

was drug-related, but those leads, they didn't go nowhere. When you get tunnel vision on an investigation, it makes it hard to go back. That was Jeff, an officer who worked on the case many years later. And he's not wrong. Well, his statement isn't incorrect. Tunnel vision is another name for confirmation bias. The thing is, I wonder if maybe there should have been a friend there with Jack telling him the dress made him look bad. It turns out hindsight is more accurate than tunnel vision. Desperate to solve this case, Jack went back to the Pinto. There was a list of 4,000 license plates, but nothing to compare it to,

until a call came in. The caller informed officers that someone at a local bar confessed. His name is Jimmy Kiston, and he owned a blue Pinto. Jimmy Kiston was described as liking to drink, a lot, at local bars. Witnesses described Jimmy as tanked

when he made the confession. They said he had around 55 beers and then blurted out that he had been the killer. So to put it bluntly, Jimmy was drunk and his confession wasn't valid. Plus, there was no evidence to back his story. The case was cold. Jack, a rookie, had been assigned

to investigate the homicide of a lieutenant. I cannot imagine how much pressure that had made him feel. But even further, not making any progress, not finding any viable leads. That had to be crushing. I had doubts and thoughts running in my mind. I followed up every lead I could. I wasn't getting anywhere. I can't do it. I

talked to my wife at the time and she told me she was tired of living like this. So I quit and I went on. I was young. I was inexperienced. I was ashamed of actually, I felt like I was running. It was my first homicide and I didn't solve it. That's not right. And that's what's haunted me. We'll be back right after this. 31 years later, we meet Jeff Seavers, who started a cold case unit in Washington County. They made Joe Clark's case a priority, a file of 18,000 pages. They thought the chance was slim that they would be able to determine who killed Joe, but they were hopeful.

Where does one start with a 31-year-old murder case with little physical evidence? In this case, they started by adding a member or two to the team. They added Bruce Shuck. One might picture Bruce as a good old-fashioned detective. They also added John Jenkins, who had a different type of background. Due to my crime scene investigator background, I knew the newer advancements in forensics and what our lab is capable of. The shotgun shell casing stuck out most to me.

That was a huge clue left by the killer. When you load a shotgun shell into a shotgun, you've got to apply a certain amount of force with your fingers. With the new advancements that our lab had, the residue left over from the fingerprint can be tested for DNA. I was very hopeful that a shotgun shell would give us the first potential suspect in 33 years. I want to make a disclaimer that touch DNA is disputed among the experts in the scientific community.

But either way, they didn't find any. Another dead end. The next step was to go back to Joe Clark's former residence, which in 31 years had been inhabited by several different families. Luckily, the structure of the house had remained the same because they were able to scan the home to create a 3D model. Bruce shares what that model determined. Based on the imaging done at the house, it was believed that the shooter stood behind a tree within 31 feet of the house, below the window where Joe was standing. The murder weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun, which basically meant nothing to me before I did some research.

Let me share a little of what I found. 12-gauge shotguns are long, like you see in military movies. They have little curves so the person using the gun can support it with their shoulder. This is the part I found most interesting. There are two types of ammo that can be used, a slug, which is one solid bullet, or a shot, which are pellets, like the one found in Joe Clark's kitchen. I felt extremely smart when I connected that the shell found outside the window had previously been the housing to the pellets. The shot they found was said to be a four buck, which, surprisingly, is not the price. I learned that buck shots have larger pellets in them than other types of shots, causing greater

damage. The four talks about the size of the pellets, and as the number gets smaller, so do the pellets. A number four buckshot would have 27 pellets, making it ideal for distance shooting. That's 27 pellets that tore through the Clark's kitchen and killed Lieutenant Clark. So we've talked about the gun, we've talked about the ammo, but what about the shooter? I imagine it took some discipline and restraint to sneak behind a police officer's house with a gun, line up the shot, and then just wait for Joe to need a snack. That just wasn't typical, a drug dealer type thing.

They're more of a drive-by shooting. You're looking at a profile of somebody that has a military background, and you're not afraid to go out and conduct an ambush on somebody. Investigators were convinced that the shooter had a military background, and to test their theory, they looked closer at the window through which the shot was fired. Actually, they looked closer at the hole in the window to help them find the model of gun used in the shooting. The 4-buck round contains 27 separate pellets. When you pull the trigger, the further away they are from the target,

the more they're going to spread. And then the longer the length of a shotgun barrel, the tighter it held those pellets. So we gathered various lengths of barrels. We'd done some shooting of our own. Shooting 4 buck through a longer barrel at 30 feet was going to create a pretty tight pattern. And I'm talking a pattern was only about 5 by 5, to where as if we were shooting 4 buck through an 18-inch barrel, it allowed those pellets to

expand substantially to that 11 by 18 hole that was created in the window. The police found a match to the 18-inch barrel. It was consistent with a police-issued weapon. The original investigation didn't look at any police officers, but one name did stand out. Matt Bonner. Remember? Drug kingpin with memory issues? There was one thing that Bonner did remember about the police. A few months before Joe Clark was murdered, Bonner was arrested for breaking and entering. It's my guess that his memory might have been as fuzzy at that time as it was when he was questioned by Jack. I guess this because it was alleged by Bonner that the deputy who was transporting him took him to the nearby Ohio River.

The officer punched him a couple of times, but still no confession. So he took his gun out and put it against Bonner's head and threatened to pull the trigger if he didn't confess. Bonner filed a complaint for abuse against the deputy. Lieutenant Clark was involved in launching the investigation into a deputy named Mitch Rubel. Clark was investigating Mitch Rubel for misconduct, and Rubel was fired based on Joe Clark's recommendation. Actually, Mitch was fired by Joe Clark because his supervisor was away at the time.

Mitch Rubel had a military background. Mitch Rubel was an avid gun collector. Mitch Rubel drove a blue Pinto. Police questioned Mitch Rubel about that night, but he claimed he had an alibi, Todd Smith. So police questioned Todd Smith. Todd admitted the two were together. And at first first he said the two men hadn't done anything, but it felt like there was more to the story. So me and John went and interviewed him, and we talked to him in my unmarked patrol car. He admitted that Mitch had spent the night there, but they said they didn't go nowhere, but we didn't believe that. We interviewed him for about

four hours. He wanted to talk or else he would have shut it down. It was quite apparent that he was extremely afraid of Mitch Rubel. It just popped in the head, you know, maybe if we offered him witness protection. Todd started to open up. Mitch Rubel came to his house asking about a gun. He wanted to kill Joe Clark. He told them that he didn't think Mitch was serious when he got out of the car at Clark's house. Todd stayed in the car, alone and frightened. He said that Mitch had threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone. Todd Smith provided us enough information that our belief was that Mitch Rubel was likely the shooter.

We're going to do everything in our power to recover the murder weapon. We want that gun. We have to get that gun. This wasn't looking for a needle in haystack. This was looking for a needle in the ocean. In their search for the gun, out of what might be considered luck, investigators discovered that one of Mitch's old military buddies still had the weapon. There was soon to be a reunion of Ruble's Air Force buddies.

The investigators got the addresses of all of the members of the reunion and started knocking on doors, literally, hoping to find someone with information about the gun. The last door that they knocked on paid off because the man told investigators that he had gotten a gun from Mitch and he still had it in his possession. The gun was so unique and there were so few of them out there that we believed

we had the right gun. It was a needle in the ocean that we found. Mitch Rubel had been terminated by Lieutenant Clark, so he has the motive to kill him. Normally, I would walk you through what really happened that night, but I think we've covered that, so we're going to end with the story of the arrest. The police were afraid of Mitch's reaction and what weapons might be in his possession if they came to his home, so they played it smart. They called Mitch and his wife and asked them to come to the station to take care of some business related to a credit card scam against them.

The couple agreed and made the drive to the station, not knowing they were being surveilled in the air and police were on their way to search their home. They walked into the police station expecting good news about their credit. Instead, Mitch Rubel was immediately placed under arrest for the murder of Joe Clark. They asked him if police were going to find anything deadly at his home, and Mitch replied, I sure hope not. Guess what? They did. They found a lot. They found grenades, explosive powders, fuses.

It sounds like he was going to war. Maybe he was once. The police found enough munitions that they had to call the bomb squad. It was so dangerous that it had to be destroyed. And the only way to destroy these items were to countercharge them. We got permission from a local farmer to use a plot in his field. A large hole was dug with the backhoe. You could feel the ground shake when the explosion went off. Mitch Rubel was tried and found guilty of the murder of Joe Clark and was sentenced to life in prison.

He died on February 22nd of 2017. He maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. A veteran became a police officer and then killed another police officer. Earlier, I said a person's profession doesn't make their death any more or less tragic, that human lives are equal. However, is it the same for criminals? Does a police officer murdering someone make that crime more or less heinous? The officers in the case talked of closure and healing,

but this is what Tim, now grown, had to say about missing his father. My dad would have been 85 this year, and I'm sure he'd probably still be around and making jokes. What a big kick he would have got out of having grandkids. But there's probably a little bit of him in my kids. I miss him. I think about him. Cold Case Files, the podcast, was hosted by Brooke Giddings. Produced by Scott Brody and McKamey Lenn. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com.