Cold Case Files - Sweethearts, Silenced
Episode Date: June 4, 2020A teenage couple disappears from a wedding in rural Wisconsin. Did they simply run off or was it something more sinister? When their bodies surface two months later, the town is turned upside down by ...the shocking brutality of the crime. Investigators struggle to piece together scraps of evidence and sparse leads to bring justice to the victims' families. In their decades-long search for the killer, officers will uncover more than one monster before finally answering the question: who killed Tim Hack and Kelly Drew? Find affordable online therapy with TALKSPACE. Match with your perfect therapist at www.Talkspace.com or download the app. Use promo code COLDCASE to get $100 off your first month. Got hair color needs? Use MADISON REED! Get 10% off plus FREE SHIPPING on your first Color Kit with code "COLDCASE" at www.madison-reed.com Get a quote online at www.Progressive.com in as little as 5 minutes and see how much you could be saving!
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Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One.
There are 120,000 unsolved murder cases in America, and each one is called a cold case.
Only 1% of cold cases are ever solved.
This is one of those stories.
This is Cold Case Files, the podcast
from A&E. I'm Brooke, a social worker turned podcaster. Cold cases fascinate me because after
all these years, often decades, terms like justice, evil, victim, they all get warped.
How does the element of time change the way we see such brutal crimes?
And what happens when we find the answers we've been seeking?
In Galveston, Texas, 1979, the body of a young woman was found on Halloween.
She'd been raped, then strangled to death.
She was a Jane Doe. Nobody recognized her.
She had no identification. The only thing on her body at all was a Jane Doe. Nobody recognized her. She had no identification.
The only thing on her body at all was a pair of orange socks. Try and picture her killer.
Is he a face she passed by every day, or a serial killer who came out of the shadows?
Where did her monster come from?
While the case of the orange socks drifter would remain unsolved for four years,
that's not the case I'm talking about today.
Not really.
Though it will become relevant.
What I want to talk about is a couple.
Tim Hack and Kelly Drew.
She was a city girl.
He was a country boy.
Like, real country.
This was rural Wisconsin, about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison.
Tim lived and worked on his family's farm.
He owned his own tractor,
which he rode in competitive tractor pulling events at the county fair.
Here's Tim's sister, Mary.
Tim and Kelly started dating in high school.
His brother, Patrick.
Some of us are lucky enough to meet
our high school sweetheart and get married.
And his father, Dave.
I really do believe that the two of them
would eventually be married,
that they would be a couple for life.
They were young. Tim was just 18 and Kelly a year older, but they were well-known and well-liked.
When they'd drive around town in Tim's 78 Cutlass Supreme, everybody knew who they were.
On August 9, 1980, Tim and Kelly went to the Concord House. It was an old turkey barn that had been converted into an event space,
best known for hosting the Wisconsin State Polka Festival until 2010.
Tim and Kelly were there for a friend's wedding reception.
They arrived around 10.30.
Tim had a beer. Kelly had a soda.
They stayed for around half an hour, then said their goodbyes.
They had plans to go to the carnival.
Here's how Patrick and Dave
remember the next morning. Get up and get work done, except when you got up in the morning and
Tim wasn't there, instantly there was a level of concern. If he wasn't going to come home, he's
going to stay with a friend, he'd call. We called Kelly's mom and said, did they stay there? She said, no. I drove up to the Concord house
to look. Tim's car was still there. The door wasn't quite shut, and his wallet was still in
the car. And that was not like him to do stuff like that. From there on, we finally realized
Tim and Kelly are gone. Tim's family was immediately ready to sound the alarm,
but police weren't jumping to any conclusions.
I mean, young lovers running off from their families?
Was it really that odd?
This is Detective Sergeant Lawrence Lee.
They were boyfriend and girlfriend.
There was some talk, I remember,
did they lope, did they take a bus someplace?
The Hacks and Drews didn't buy it.
They knew their kids, and this wasn't like them.
The families launched their own investigation.
They got a hold of the wedding reception guestbook.
They started making calls, looking for leads, organizing search parties.
Something has happened. We need to figure out what happened. They started making calls, looking for leads, organizing search parties.
Something has happened. We need to figure out what happened.
Our kitchen actually became a command post.
Through a family connection, a call was made to the governor's office. The families appealed to the state for help, and they get it.
Pretty quickly, the police, the state, and the families combined efforts
to launch what became the biggest manhunt in Wisconsin history.
The search is covering land and air.
Cops are stopping hundreds of cars to show photos of the missing couple.
The community gets involved.
The media gets involved.
To Tim's family, the outpouring was unbelievable.
The community stepped up. All the local farmers were there to help do some searches
around the Concord house. Didn't seem real. Nothing seemed real. You'd have two news helicopters
landing in the field next to the house. I mean, how real is that? In addition to the kids themselves,
searchers were on the lookout for a van, the one solid lead that had been discovered. This is Susan Happ. She'll be important later on.
For now, and by now I mean 1980, she was only 8 years old
and remembers the search being all over the news at the time.
One consistent thing that was reported was that there was this dark,
dirty van that had been in the parking lot.
One witness specifically recalled the van taking off,
you know, sort of in a suspicious fashion, in a quick way. Despite all the attention, though,
the search didn't turn up much. No van, no clues, no Tim or Kelly. Finally, after five days of
searching, a teenager driving his tractor down the road spotted something. A pair of pants,
just like Kelly had been wearing on the night that she disappeared.
Both the left and the right leg are completely cut from the ankle all the way up to the waist.
So in other words, the pants could have still been on her body, but they had been cut away.
Finding any evidence gives some cause for hope.
But this particular evidence was also disturbing, as it seemed to validate some of the family's worst fears.
It just magnified what I had thought all along, that someone had definitely raped her.
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Over the next several days,
more pieces of Kelly's clothing
are found along the road.
They also find bits of rope
with random knots tied in them,
all within just a few miles of the Concord House.
But as the days turn into weeks and the search dies down,
the case appears to be going cold.
And maybe it would have, if not for the squirrel hunters.
Yes, squirrel hunters.
Over two months after Tim and Kelly disappeared,
squirrel hunters out from Milwaukee,
just seven miles from the
Concord house, came across a body. It'd clearly been there for a while, badly decomposed. When
police arrived, they set up a grid and searched the area. They find a second body about 100 yards
away. The clothing matches the description of what Tim had been wearing when he disappeared.
I had the radio on, and they announced over the radio that they had indeed found both bodies.
And so, I'm going to tear up.
So I remember walking in the kitchen, and the detective is there with my parents,
telling them that they did indeed find Tim and Kelly.
It was clear from marks on Tim's shirt and ribs that he had been stabbed.
Kelly had been bound with rope, like the pieces found along the highway,
then most likely strangled with it.
I just want to pause here for a second.
It's difficult to think about what Kelly and Tim went through.
Kidnapped?
Bound?
Stabbed?
Strangled?
Raped?
These words are hard enough just to say, let alone to really imagine.
I don't know how long it was between when Tim and Kelly were taken and when they were killed,
but however long it was, easily qualifies as any person's worst nightmare.
What could this teenage couple possibly have done to deserve this?
Obviously, there's no justification.
What kind of motive would there be?
Had they wronged someone they knew?
Were they involved in some dark and sinister secret?
Or were they simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,
finding themselves by chance on the path of some evil aggression
moving unstoppably through the universe,
like a deer that steps in front of a semi?
We're told that in these cases,
the crime is usually committed by somebody the victim knows.
But would it almost be better, somehow preferable, for it to be a monster? It's okay for us to think about
a monster committing senseless crimes, but a person? That's harder to accept. At this point,
there were zero suspects. A rumor had surfaced that maybe Tim had angered some members of a
biker gang. Maybe he knew about something he shouldn't have. There were some members of the biker gang at the wedding reception, but they
left town pretty quickly afterwards. The rest of the gang wouldn't talk to police, so it was hard
to say for sure one way or another. Given what investigators knew about the timeline and a van
speeding away, though, there was a lot that didn't add up about the biker gang theory. Detectives began trying to put the pieces
together, but they didn't have a lot to go on. A dirty van, bits of clothing, the bodies, and the
rope. Looking closer at the rope, though, they noticed something about the knots. They weren't random at all.
They were specific and complex.
This is Chad Garcia.
He's going to come back around later, but for now he's just going to tell us about knots.
There's the regular square knot, but there's also half hitches, clove hitches, bowline knots.
This is somebody with knowledge of knot tying,
somebody that's been in the Navy or the military or in the trades, like a carpenter, maybe a painter.
It's not going to just be your everyday person that's going to tie these types of knots.
The first major break in the case comes from the police tip line.
A woman calls and says she thinks her husband might have been involved in the murders.
The husband, let's call him Mr. James, fit with a
lot of the police's theories. He lived near where the bodies were found. He was a roofer, so he knew
his way around ropes. He carried a knife on his belt, and he owned a van. Not only that, but shortly
after Tim and Kelly disappeared, Mr. James had his wife and stepdaughters completely clean out his
van. Investigators combed through Mr. James' house and find torn clothing that looks similar to Kelly's,
as well as bits of rope with knots.
They send the clothes and rope to the crime lab for testing.
Mr. James is questioned and denies any involvement or knowledge
in Tim and Kelly's murders.
The belongings brought in for testing seem to back that up.
There isn't enough to make a case against Mr. James.
His wife, however, reveals something else
during the course of the search. He drinks a lot, he gets violent, and he has sexually assaulted his
stepdaughters. Ultimately, Mr. James confesses too and is convicted of sexually assaulting his
stepdaughters. A monster? Yes, but not one that brings justice to Tim and Kelly or their families.
When Kelly and Tim's bodies are finally laid to rest,
the Drew and Hack families make a touching gesture and tribute to their daughter and son.
I know that my parents and Kelly's parents worked together on planning the funerals.
They died together. They wanted them to be together eternally.
They were buried side by side.
Their joint headstone cut into the shape of two
overlapping hearts reads, Timothy J. Hack, Kelly J. Drew, kidnapped and slain.
In June of 1983, three years after Tim and Kelly are killed, detectives are informed of a pair of
new suspects. This is Dr. Robert Shug, a forensic psychologist and an expert
in serial killers. Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were a pair of drifters who were arrested on a
number of very minor charges. After their apprehension, they started confessing to
dozens and dozens of murders. As a result, detectives from all over the country now have
to become involved in the investigation to see if any of their cold cases involved Lucas or Toole.
Lucas and Toole had spent years roaming the country, kidnapping both men and women,
sexually assaulting them, and sometimes killing them. Tim and Kelly certainly seemed to fit their
MO. There were four or five cases just in the state of Wisconsin that could have been easily
connected to them. When you catch a pair of serial killers who've been at it for that long,
you have new suspects for almost any unsolved murder, as long as the timeline fits. Here's audio of a jailhouse conversation between Lucas and Toole recorded
in 1983. Do you know where this girl's at? I want you to admit to it. They scattered here in about
48 different states. Well, I know, but who's going to do it if we don't? How many people did you kill, Hilton?
150.
Remember the case of the orange socks drifter from earlier?
The young woman who was raped and strangled near Galveston, Texas in 1979?
A case that bore a striking resemblance to what happened to Kelly Drew?
That was Lucas and Toole.
Ultimately, Lucas and Toole confessed to more than 200 rapes and homicides across the country, but they didn't confess to killing Kelly and Tim.
From the timeline investigators put together, they couldn't have been in Wisconsin in August of 1980.
Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were serial killers. They were monsters. But once again,
not the monsters that killed Tim and Kelly. For that monster, we'd have to wait another 23 years.
A big part of my love for the community is that it's where I grew up.
It's where I'm raising my daughter now.
Small towns are safe.
You know, you can let your kids out at night and they can play without fear.
That's Susan Happ.
We met her earlier when she was
just a kid in town in 1980. In 2008, she's elected Jefferson County District Attorney,
and nearly three decades after their murders, she still hasn't forgotten Tim and Kelly.
I was eight years old at the time Tim and Kelly went missing. So when I first was elected District
Attorney, I was well aware of this case, and I wanted to know what happened to Tim and Kelly.
Part of what the case needs is fresh eyes and fresh perspective.
Detective Chad Garcia, a young detective at the time, brings just that.
He's eager to solve the case that has haunted local investigators for decades,
so he hits the ground running.
He reexamines every shred of evidence.
I reviewed thousands of pages of reports, attachments, maps, and photos.
But in general, there's limited evidence I have to go with.
But what I do have was Kelly's clothes.
In the decades since Tim and Kelly's case went cold,
DNA testing has become key in this type of investigation.
Garcia is shocked to find that Kelly's pants have never been tested.
That's right.
The pants that were cut off her while she was still wearing them
have never been tested for DNA.
The clothing was submitted
to the Wisconsin State Crime Lab
and they told us that they did have DNA.
The DNA located on Kelly's pants and underwear
was from seminal fluid.
And just like that,
Garcia has discovered a huge break in the case. They have the killer's
DNA, but no match. For now, investigators return to the drawing board. Garcia needs to narrow a
search, so he starts looking at maps of the Concord area and the pertinent locations to the case.
First, there's the Concord house, where Kelly and Tim were last seen leaving the wedding.
Next, he marks the location where most of the rope and Kelly's clothing were discovered.
Third, there's the wooded area where Tim and Kelly's bodies were found. He also determines
that the killer must have used three main roads to dump the bodies and the evidence.
The Concord House, the rope and clothing, and the bodies, they all form a triangle on the map, and the three roads connect them.
It's not a perfect science, and it could be the killer is intentionally trying to throw investigators off track,
but Garcia has a hunch the killer is a local, living somewhere within that triangle,
right next door, right under their noses.
That's when he turns to the press for help.
A local news station puts out a
story about Tim and Kelly's case being reopened and asks that anyone with information come forward.
Media is a valuable tool for law enforcement to use. They have a huge audience and they can get
people to say something they normally wouldn't say or maybe get people to feel that what they
thought wasn't important is important. It had been a couple months since the news story ran, and one evening I received a phone call.
It was a female who identifies herself as April.
She explains to me that their family were basically drifters,
that they lived in a lot of locations.
In the summer of 1980,
they lived in the Concord area within that triangle.
She said, I think my dad could be responsible for Tim and Kelly.
I think he killed them.
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Will L'Oreal Ed Edwards please stand up?
Oh! Ed Edwards, please stand up.
That's a clip from a 1972 episode of The Game Show, To Tell the Truth, featuring guest star Edward Wayne Edwards.
Edwards committed a laundry list of crimes throughout his life, even landing himself on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list in the late 1960s. He gained a bit of fame in the early 1970s when he appeared on numerous talk and game shows to promote his book, The Metamorphosis of a Criminal,
The True Life Story of Ed Edwards. The book is all about how a corrections officer he met in prison
allegedly helped him turn his life around. And he goes on the circuit talking to people
about what a horrible person he had been, but what a great person he had become.
After his daughter April calls Detective Garcia, that image comes into question.
Investigators take a closer look at Edwards and pieces start falling into place.
Edwards was dishonorably discharged from the Marines, so he knows how to tie knots. In fact,
the landlord at Edwards' home in Concord finds rope in the garage, and it's eerily similar to the rope found near Kelly's pants.
And guess where that home was?
Right smack in the middle of Garcia's triangle on the map.
He was even a janitor at the Concord house.
You heard right.
He worked at the Concord house when Tim and Kelly went missing.
He was at the scene of the crime.
I start going back through the reports and seeing if there's a mention of
Edward Wayne Edwards. And I had him on my suspect list. Edwards was interviewed in early September
of 1980. He really didn't have a lot of information to offer. He did not know anything about Tim
Ruckelly's disappearance. The one thing that stuck out to me was that he had a broken nose.
He said it was a deer hunting incident that caused the rifle to kick back and caused the broken nose that seemed odd to me.
Gun deer hunting in Wisconsin is November, not in August.
So, Ed Edwards is a prime suspect.
He lived in the area. He knew how to tie knots.
He worked at the Concord House.
He sustained an injury right around the time of the murders, and his own daughter thought he was
guilty. Detective Garcia begins to develop a theory of what happened that night. Edwards was waiting
in the parking lot. Kelly fit the profile he was looking for. Tim, being a strong farm boy,
got a good swing in on Edwards, causing the broken nose, and that's when Tim was stabbed.
There's no telling what happened in the van, but we know that Kelly was raped and strangled to death.
I need to go to Louisville, Kentucky. I need to talk to Edwards, and I need to get his DNA.
So investigators go looking for Edwards, which is no easy task, given that he and his family were drifters for most of their lives.
Garcia manages to track him down in Louisville and sets up an interview.
But he's nervous.
If Edwards is guilty of what he's accused of, Garcia is walking into the home of a real monster.
I was nervous.
I realized what kind of person I was dealing with.
There was a high probability that Edwards committed these crimes.
He is a very,
very dangerous person. Garcia is shocked by what he finds. Edward's health is failing. He's obese,
confined to a motorized wheelchair. He wears oxygen at all times. And it's not only his change in physical appearance that's jarring. He's calm, casual. He's even charming.
So one of the traits of a psychopath
is this superficial charm
that they can turn on and off at will
in order to do their bidding.
Edwards definitely checks that box.
He hardly bats an eye
when detectives show up at his door
wanting to discuss the brutal murder
of two teenagers.
He even voluntarily gives up his DNA.
When I asked him to provide a sample of his DNA
so that we could test it,
he said that he had no problem doing that.
He thinks he's smarter than us.
After 29 years, he's thinking, what DNA are we going to have?
He's wrong.
Garcia submits Edwards' DNA for testing.
The DNA is a match.
Ed Edwards' DNA is on the pants that were cut from Kelly's body.
With Garcia's theory all but proven, investigators arrest Edwards and bring him in for questioning.
All the while, he's just as charming as ever.
He laughs at the police officers, asking about their wives and their preferred nicknames.
He acts like it's no big deal.
That's Edwards in the interrogation room at the police station.
He sounds like he's chatting with a neighbor, not being questioned about his involvement in a double homicide.
During the interview, which lasted more than eight hours,
investigators began to get frustrated with Edwards.
He's being invasive.
He keeps changing the subject.
Then Garcia drops a bomb.
He reveals to Edwards that his DNA was found on Kelly's pants.
You can continue.
No, I know.
I think this is just a game for you.
And he's right.
Your DNA was there.
And that's the bottom line.
You can explain it.
You're just a cold blooded...
Wait, you're not in charge.
You talk to him.
Edwards is scrambling.
He's caught and he's desperate.
So he makes up a wild story.
He admits to being at the Concord house that night.
Even admits to having sex with Kelly.
But he claims the sex was consensual. Yeah, he claims that Kelly chose to sneak away from the wedding during the
45 minutes she was there and have consensual sex with the janitor at the event hall, a complete
stranger. Investigators had a hard time swallowing this. Tim and Kelly were joined at the hip. Kelly
Drew's not going to go off and willingly have sex with Ed Edwards in a cornfield.
At this point, they're confident they have the killer.
He was at the Concord house that night.
He admits to seeing Kelly and Tim at the wedding.
And his DNA was found on Kelly's pants.
Garcia watches video recordings of the interrogation,
just to make sure there's nothing that he's missed as they prepare the case for trial.
As he's combing through the interview, he hears something. I'll let Detective Garcia explain.
I went back to see if maybe there was something he said that I didn't pick up on,
or maybe there were certain movements he made to tell me when he was lying. As I'm watching the
video, something struck me. There was a comment that he made when nobody was speaking with him, and it was myself
and Detective Sergeant Brian Nunn in the room. He said something sort of under his breath.
We probably rewound it, you know, a thousand times trying to make sure that we heard what we heard.
He thought it was under his breath, or maybe it was subconsciously that he said it,
but he clearly wasn't saying it out loud. It was quietly said.
And after listening to it repeatedly, and having many others listen to it repeatedly,
everyone agreed that what he said is...
Catch that? Damn it, I killed her.
One more time.
Damn it, I killed her.
Damn it, I killed her.
To hear him say damn it, I killed her.
It's a goosebump moment.
Now this is where I have to take a step back. Given the DNA evidence, I don't doubt that
Ed Edwards committed this crime, but I'm just not quite sure that's what he said. The first time I
heard it, I thought he said, they think I killed him. If I were being interrogated, I might aside
that to myself. Wow, they think I killed him? Sound is interpreted by the brain. Human brains
have bias. Still, investigators have enough evidence to bring Edwards to trial. And in a
move that shocks everyone, Edwards pleads guilty. He admits to killing Tim and Kelly.
But that's not all he admits to. See, Edwards wants the death penalty.
His health is failing.
His quality of life is diminishing.
He wants to go out on his own terms.
But there's one problem.
The death penalty doesn't apply in this case.
Edwards wants to maintain control over his life, over his trajectory.
And he will say anything and do anything when the opportunity presents itself to maintain that control.
Desperate to seize control of his fate, Edwards reveals a 33-year-old secret. anything and do anything when the opportunity presents itself to maintain that control.
Desperate to seize control of his fate, Edwards reveals a 33-year-old secret.
Tim and Kelly aren't the only people he's killed. Edwards admits to murdering another young couple in Ohio, Billy Lavaco and Judy Straub, just a few years before he killed Tim
and Kelly. His goal is to stand trial in Ohio and get the death penalty.
He's again trying to manipulate the system and control, you know, his future. But he doesn't
know that there was a chunk of time that went over the Lavaco and Straub homicides where the
death penalty did not apply. So once he realizes that, Edwards confesses to killing his foster son,
Danny. He murdered his own foster son and honestly doesn't feel too bad about it.
I'm not speculating.
Listen to Edwards talk about killing Danny.
I felt bad, but apparently not bad enough that I kept from doing it.
Prosecutors aren't often in the business of giving a killer what he wants.
But the death toll around Edwards is stacking. He's now admitted to murdering five people, and investigators can only guess how
many more there might be. Edwards was an over-the-road truck driver that traveled to California
in the late 60s. Because of this, some people believe Edward Wayne Edwards is the Zodiac Killer.
Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in 1968-1969.
The actual number of his victims may never be known.
On April 7, 2011, Edwards dies of natural causes while on death row in Columbus, Ohio.
According to FBI statistics, 79% of murders are committed by someone the victim knows.
But not this one. This case ends with a drifter who traveled from town
to town, leaving bodies in his wake. This case ends with a serial killer. This case ends with
a monster. We don't get the benefit of monsters that only exist in fantasy. They do exist in our
world, and that means we have to face them, even if it's hard. I can't help but wonder whether monsters are born that way, or if they're created by other monsters.
While Detective Garcia may have cracked this case, the real hero of this story is April Edwards.
For Tim and Kelly's families, Ed Edwards was the embodiment of unknown evil.
But April knew him. He lived right down the hall.
To her, he was both a man and a monster.
But maybe that's the scariest thing.
Maybe there's no difference.
If you'd like to see more about the case of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew,
check out Cold Case Files at AETV.com.
And you can catch brand new episodes of Cold Case Files Thursday at 10 on A&E.