Cold Case Files - The Clock Strikes Murder

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

23-year-old Tonya McKinley is found brutally murdered on New Years Day in 1985, forcing her boy to grow up without her. It takes 35 long years for familial DNA to pinpoint the killer. Check out our great sponsors! ZocDoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/ccf and download the Zocdoc app for FREE! SimpliSafe: Get 50% off any new SimpliSafe system at simplisafe.com/coldcase 

An A&E original podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. It's been a rough 35 years. Tanya will never rest in peace. She was always the protector, and then when she was gone, I didn't have my protector anymore. Even in the bad days, she would always have a way to make everybody laugh when they really wasn't a whole lot to laugh about, you know. She was just always like that. You've got to just keep on fighting for

them because they're not around to fight for themselves. There are 120,000 unsolved murders in America. Each one is a cold case. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's 3 a.m. on January 1st, 1985, in Pensacola, Florida, and a family is rushing to get its dog to an emergency vet clinic. As they pull out of their driveway, the daughter notices something on the curb. Childhood naivety tells her that it's a mannequin from some New Year's celebration, but her mother knows better. Officers from the Pensacola Police Department arrive on

the scene within minutes. They find the body of a woman on the roadside by a vacant lot on Peacock Drive and Creighton Road. She's wearing a blue dress, and there are obvious signs of battery and possibly a sexual assault. The woman's shoes are missing, and her clothes are dirty. Next to her body lies a bloody blue towel. It starts to rain, so investigators are forced to cover the woman's remains with a tarp to preserve the crime scene. The victim has been disposed of like a bag of trash on the side of the road. Her hair is littered with leaves, and her wounds indicate a violent death. When the body is transported to the medical examiner's office, the police determine that the

victim is 23-year-old Tanya McKinley. Tanya's fingerprints are on file for a drug arrest in 1981. The Pensacola officers contact Tanya's local law enforcement, the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Department, and have them notify her family and friends. Tanya was born and raised in Milton, Florida. Her older sister Renee and her mother Laverne recall what Tanya was like growing up. We grew up in Milton, Florida. It was a nice little community, and we had a lot of friends. And we would go bowling. Bowling was our big thing we liked to do. And we'd go to the movies on the weekends or go skating.

And Tonya had a real big personality. I mean, it wouldn't fit in this room, her personality was so big. Oh, Lord, mercy. She was a tomboy. She weren't scared of nothing. She was a good girl when she weren't getting in so much trouble. Tanya was close to her cousin Vanita, and they made plans to move to Pensacola together after high school. Tanya was absolutely a firecracker. She was the center of attention. She was the jokester. She's the one that, you know, would start the conversation with, you know,

in a party, a lot of people around. She's never met a stranger. I remember we were driving over to Pensacola one day. We got pulled over. She was driving her mom's car, and she somehow totally talked her way out of it. And then, you know, the police officer just said, well, just go home. And she's like, yes, that's exactly where we're headed. She starts the car back up, and I'm telling her, this is not toward home. She's like, I know. We're going to Pensacola like we planned. After dropping out of high school at the age of 17, Tanya and Vanita moved to Pensacola. Tanya enjoyed the faster-paced lifestyle,

and she was considering starting a career in the medical field as a transcriber for doctors. In the late 1970s, Tanya met Tim Davidson. I introduced her to Tim, and they immediately started living together next door to my husband and myself in a duplex, and they lived together for a couple of years. I thought that they were not good together. They were both strong-willed, hard-headed people.

They fought a lot. They had a lot of arguments. She would move out a lot. They seemed to love each other part of the time, and part of the time, it's almost like a love-hate relationship. I think she really wanted it to last, but deep down I think she knew that it wouldn't. Despite the issues in their relationship, something good came from it. A baby boy. Tanya's son, Tim Jr., was born in 1983, and he immediately became his mother's entire world. Everybody told me the same thing.

They were like, your mom was great, worked hard, and loved you like nothing else. Like, you were the light of her life, you were her heart and soul. The holidays brought heartache, though. The relationship between Tanya and Tim's father broke down, and Tanya moved in with Vanita on the day after Christmas in 1984. It was a big change for the young mother,

but she was excited for the next chapter in her life, starting school and work. But having a toddler at home left her with very little time for herself. Her son at the time was 17 months old. We didn't do a whole lot at that time because having the kids and the work and the school and so there wasn't a lot of time left to do much of anything. It's 9 p.m. on New Year's Eve 1984. Tanya gets the chance to have a rare night out with Vanita and her husband after they drop their kids off with a babysitter, they head to Daryl's, a local bar. Tanya is hoping her friend Kurt Lisk is bartending that night. Tanya saw a lot of people there that she knew, people that we had gone to school with,

the bartender, of course. And we were sitting at a table and she did her walking around saying her hellos. Right after midnight, when we had the champagne, my husband said, you know, we need to go. The daycare closed at 1 a.m. I asked Tanya to go. I said, you know, daycare's closing. We need to go. And she said, just go ahead. Pick up, you know, my son for me. So I told her, I said, well, who are you going to go home?

You know, who's going to bring you home? And she says, you know, I've got friends everywhere here. She's like, of course I have a ride. She kissed Larry on the cheek, and she hugged me and said, Happy New Year, and I will see you in the morning. The following morning, Vanita notices that Tanya hasn't arrived home. When we woke up the next morning and getting the kids up and for breakfast, Larry asked me, you know, is Tanya home yet?

I said, no, she's not here yet, but she'll be here soon. And then that's when my husband's mother knocked on our door and she said to Larry, I need to tell you something. And she said, they found Tanya's body. Within hours of separating from her cousin on a rare night out, Tanya is found dead. Investigators believe that she'd been involved in a confrontation with her killer.

She had suffered a blow to the head and was subsequently strangled. During the autopsy, the medical examiner did a rape kit, including vaginal swabs. Pensacola Police Captain Chuck Mallett recalls the evidence that was collected. It was later determined that semen was present on those swabs. The semen in 1985 could only be classified by blood type, and it was determined to be blood type A. They located brown head hair and brown pubic hair on the towel and on her body. And then on the towel, there was also black, what was later determined to be animal hair. Despite no clear suspect at this point, Tanya's loved ones believe they know who the killer is.

I thought that it was Tim. We all thought that because of the relationship that they had. I just always thought it was him. I'd asked him several times if he had killed her, but I never really thought he would give me

a straight answer. But I always had it in the back of my mind that Tim was the one that killed her. Reporter Tony Adami remembers the rumors that swirled around Tim following Tanya's murder.

He's had a reputation for following Tanya to places she was at. If she were dating another guy, he might show up outside the guy's house. If she was at a bar with friends, he might show up outside the bar. So there definitely was a suspicion that he maybe lashed out. The investigators know that bad boyfriends make good suspects. By all accounts, Tim was not ready to move on, but he's cooperative and a hair sample he provides to be compared to the sample found at the scene is not a match. A new man becomes the focus of the investigation. The bartender Tanya had been looking forward to seeing as she rang in the new year. Kurt Lisk was someone that Tanya's friend said she was in a relationship with around the time of her death. And on the night of her murder, she was seen inside of Daryl's Bar and Grill,

you know, past midnight, talking to Kurt Lisk at the bar. So if the last time that we see Tanya on that night is around 115 to 130 a.m., he's within an hour of that talking to her and telling her friends before they left that she was going to try to see him or go home with him that night. But Kurt has an alibi.

He tells detectives that he and his roommate had gone to a small party with two women, and they back up his story. The investigators aren't convinced though, so they take a closer look at Kurt Lisk in case there's something that they missed. Something about Kurt Lisk's interview did not feel right. They decided that Kurt Lisk may still be a viable suspect.

It's now three months after Tanya's murder. The investigators need to rule Kurt out of the investigation, so they compare his blood sample with the evidence collected from the murder scene. They re-interview Kurt's friends and discover that they didn't know where he was for a couple of hours on the night of Tanya's murder. They also confess that he had asked them to provide the alibi so he wouldn't be considered a suspect. They found out that he'd actually left for quite some time and that his whereabouts

weren't necessarily direct from Daryl's to that little party. So that obviously puts him back at the top of the list. Kurt agrees to take a polygraph, and the results are inconclusive as to whether he had any knowledge of Tanya's murder. But the blood test results leave no doubt. They were able to determine Kurt Listis' blood type was O positive, which did not match the blood type of the evidence left at the scene from the possible suspect.

There isn't enough evidence to arrest the only suspect, and suspicion alone won't do, so the case starts to go cold. We were told that it was probably a transient that was going through town and that they may never catch who did this. So, you know, as the years go by and life goes on, we never forgot, you know, about Tanya, never forgot about what happened. But I never believed that they would actually find who did this to her. Tim isn't told about his mother's murder, and he grows up believing she was killed in an accident.

My father and none of my family ever talked about what happened with my mom. I could tell they got really flustered and really upset, and I didn't, as a child, want to feel that uncomfortableness. I didn't want to make anybody upset either feel that uncomfortableness I didn't want to make anybody upset either so I just left it alone I was raised by my father who taught me hard work and made me very mechanically inclined but it was kind of rough I moved around a lot anytime I asked about my mom I was told from the very beginning that she died in a car accident I knew she passed away when I was 17 months old but she died in a car accident. I knew she passed away when I was 17 months old,

but she died in a car accident, and I left it at that. A chance discovery when he was a young teenager leads Tim towards the truth. He had been searching through his father's closet for Christmas presents and came across a letter addressed to a talk show host. The letter was a plea for help in solving Tanya's unsolved murder.

Tim wanted answers, and so did the rest of the family. It was one of those things where you read this letter and you bring it, and I'm like, hey, you know, what is this all about? They're just kind of like dumbfounded. You know, what do they say? You know, they're looking at each other. They're looking at me. You know, do we tell them that this is the truth?

But I don't blame them. You're going to try to protect your children as much as possible. I know as a child, and even into my teen years, I buried a lot. I kind of felt helpless, so I just blocked it out. It made me angry. It just hurt. It hurt bad.

I wish I could have been there. I wish I could have protected her. I wish I could have protected her. In the early 2000s, it's been over 15 years since Tanya was killed, and a new crime scene analyst, Nicole Heinzelman, joins the investigation. Very quickly after I started there, the primary crime scene analyst on the McKinley case told me about the case,

and it became an important case for me. It always seemed like the oneinley case, told me about the case, and it became an important case for me. It always seemed like the one that got away, the one that everybody wanted to solve because she was a young mother. She could have been anybody's mother, anybody's sister, anybody's daughter. I empathize with that. When I started at the police department,

I had young children at home. Nicole believes that the DNA sample collected from the crime scene 16 years earlier could be the key to solving the case. She opens the evidence bag that contained the blue towel found besides Tanya's body on New Year's Day, 1985. It had been tested by the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In

1985, there was no DNA analysis, and all the FBI could determine was which blood group the suspect belonged to. Areas on the towel that had tested positive for blood or semen are cut out and sent to the crime lab. The DNA is then extracted to create a genetic profile. That profile is then entered into CODIS. There is no match on the system. But Tanya's sister continues to contact the investigators and urge them to look into the case. Hello, my name is Renee McCall. I am the sister of Tanya Etheridge McKinley. I don't want to bother you because you have a horrific job, but when you know something, let me know and drop me a line. There are no new developments, and the years pass by with no updates or justice for Tanya and her family. But finally, in 2015, after three decades,

there just might be a break in the case. In July of 2015, I found a letter from our state attorney and one of our police captains requesting that the biological material from the McKinley case be put into the familial searching of the CODA system. The familial searching is you are looking for somebody who is related to the person who committed the crime. That's not a direct match.

It's a match to somebody who is potentially a relative of the person who committed the crime. And in August of 2015, we received a potential match based on this familial DNA searching to Donald Farmer. It's like new life was being put into this case. When Donald Farmer is identified as a possible relative of Tanya's killer, investigators head to Jacksonville

to collect DNA from his family. One of the male members of this family had passed away, but the family was very cooperative and actually provided a glass eye that that family member had used over the years. FDLE was able to recover DNA from that and compare it to the case. Familial DNA technology isn't foolproof.

It can send investigators straight into a dead end. The samples were sent to the FDLE for comparison, and sadly, none of them matched. It's a devastating blow to investigators and to Tanya's family. Well, it was a lot of frustration, because we was all wanting Tanya's case to be solved as long as I can remember. Very quickly, I thought they had closed the door on it, that it was just somebody else that was murdered. The case is cold again.

Three more years pass, and in the fall of 2018, reporter Tony Adami comes to town. When I first heard about the Tanya McKinley case, I was working a weekend shift as a news editor at the Pensacola News Journal. I'd been a sports reporter for about 15 years, and, you know, sports are great, but I think I was just looking for a little more.

I started to dig around the cold case files for the FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Once I started to do research, I went online and saw Renee Tanya's sister created a Facebook page that had been going for, you know, at that point, I think six or seven years. And you could just tell from there the pain that it had caused. I had pulled all the old newspaper articles, so I poured over those. I reached out to Renee, started reaching out to family members, figuring out who Tanya was, what was important to her, who she loved, you know,

her relationships, her life. There's only so much Tony can do with old newspaper articles and interviews with family members, so he files a public records request for the entire Tanya McKinley file. Captain Mallett is apprehensive to show a reporter the access to the files, but he believes Tony has a genuine personal interest in the case,

and he allows him to join the team. I couldn't tell anyone that he was working on it or that I was working with him, and I couldn't write about it until he saw the case, and he allows him to join the team. I couldn't tell anyone that he was working on it or that I was working with him, and I couldn't write about it until he solved the case. But what we agreed on, we shook on that day, was a year, one year from that day, if it wasn't solved, I was going to maybe start writing stuff about it. The alliance between the detective and the reporter comes at a crucial time in the 34-year-long investigation. It's early 2019, and Nicole Heinzelman still believes that the DNA evidence can solve the case. She tells Captain Mallett about a new technique, genetic genealogy.

They submit the evidence to the FDLE once more for evaluation, and soon after, they receive a report that states the case is suitable for the genetic genealogy process. I'm Lola. And I'm Megan. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, cults, extreme belief, and manipulation.

We both have childhood cult experiences. And we're here to debunk the myths about people who join them and show that anyone can be manipulated. Our past interviews include survivors and former members of the Manson family, NXIVM, MS-13, Teal Swan, Heaven's Gate, Children of God, and the Branch Davidians. Join us every week as we help you spot the red flags. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One or wherever you get your podcasts. Genetic genealogy offers the investigators a wider pool to compare the samples with. In the past, they had to rely on offender databases.

But now they can compare the sample with anyone who uploads their DNA into genetic genealogy websites. I thought it was a great idea. Pensacola Police Department, we're always in favor of trying new things. We embrace technology, and so having a new way of approaching this case was exciting to me, and the hope of being able to bring closure to a family after all these years would be very satisfying. This case was different than a lot of normal investigations. This case had been investigated through the

normal channels for 34 years. We were doing something different and I really wanted to focus on the genetic genealogy, where those leads would take us. A special task force is set up with the analysts, genealogists, detectives, and the determined reporter. We would meet periodically, the gene team, and would try to talk out what the best targets would be for genetic testing. I mean, we learned from each other. I learned a lot from them. Just being in those meetings and seeing how they operated was fascinating as well.

The so-called gene team explores sites like GED Match, looking for relatives of the killer with similar or familial DNA. They narrow the search down to third or fourth cousins, which gives them a direction to go in, but they need to look deeper into the DNA pool to find a match. The family tree for this case included 4,000 plus people. Had three computers in the room with different databases and was researching on different computers and cross-checking and just whiteboarding this entire family tree. It's March 2020, 35 years since Tanya's murder, and they finally land on a suspect.

His name is Daniel Wells. Tony searches public databases for information about Wells from the time right after Tanya was killed, and what he finds leads investigators to begin round-the-clock surveillance on the now 57-year-old woodworker and father. He was a very good possible suspect in this case. We found that he did live in Pensacola during the time period of the murder, that in the late 1990s, mid-1990s, he had moved to Missouri.

He had been arrested in Missouri for exposure of sexual organs and eludance of his conduct. One day, on his way into work, he was smoking a cigarette, and as he drove down the road, he flicked the cigarette butt out the window. Officers that were directly behind him notified another surveillance vehicle a few cars back. That officer stopped traffic, went out into the street,

and was able to recover that cigarette butt. And lucky for them, the attention to detail paid off. The DNA on Wells' cigarette is a 100% match to the killer's DNA. It was time to move in on an arrest. One day, the detective set up a traffic stop on the route Wells takes home from work. We wanted him to think initially it was a regular traffic stop until we showed up, and we wanted it in his head pretty quick that it was bigger than anything

that he might have been thinking of that day. Wells is taken to the station for questioning on March 18, 2020. He's shown a photograph of Tanya, and he denies knowing her at all. Captain Mallet wastes no time before letting Wells know that they know he killed her. All right, let's cut to chase.

So that young lady I just showed you a picture of. Right. New Year's Eve, 1984, going 1985. January 1st, early morning, 1985. Okay. Was found dead on the side of a road. And I have the evidence that you're the one that's there. Oh. After 45 minutes in the interrogation room, Wells begins to crack, and he admits that he had met Tanya that night at Daryl's.

I remember that she, her friends had left her, and she wanted a ride home. And we went by my house, and we had a few drinks and stuff, and it just escalated from that. I hit her in the head, and it knocked her out. And it was a traumatic blow, and it killed her. Wells hit Tanya in the head with a butcher block cutting board when she rejected him. We were going to have sex again, and we just, we didn't, and we kind of got into it a little bit.

You take her out, you put her in the truck, you drive around. Yeah. And push her out, and you dump her on the side of the road. Yeah, like... Like a bag of trash. Yeah. Well's roommate had a black dog, which explained the animal hairs found on the bloody towel 35 years earlier.

Wells is arrested and charged with murder, and Captain Mallett has the privilege of telling Tanya's son that they have finally caught her killer. Hey, is this Tim? Yeah. Hey, this is Captain Mallett. I'm with Pensacola Police Department. Hi, boss. How are you doing? I'm great. So you don't know me. We've never met.

But I want to let you know that I just made an arrest on your mother's murder. I'm sorry. What did I say? Tim is stunned and relieved. But Captain Mallet has one more call to make. Hello? Hey, Renee. Hey. Hey, this is Captain Mallet, Pensacola Police Department.

I want to let you know that I've been working on Tanya's case for about the last year, and today we made an arrest on it. We arrested him today at Brompton Station and just got a confession. Oh, my God, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I know it's taken a long time,

but one of those cases we never gave up on. She can rest, baby. She can rest. Wells is held in a Scamga County jail and is facing the rest of his life in prison. But just two weeks after his arrest, the case takes a stunning turn. Welles takes his own life. When I found out that he committed suicide, I felt very, very cheated. I wanted him to go to trial. I wanted the jury or the people or the judge to say,

yes, based on the evidence we have, testimony and all the information, yes, you are guilty without a shadow of a doubt. There's a lot of what ifs. What if it never happened and my mother raised me? How would my life be so different? What would my life have been like? How dare you take my mother away from me? How dare you deny me the opportunity to have a different childhood or a better childhood?

How dare you deny that my mother from me? How different would my life be if she was never taken from me? She's going to always be there in my heart, like she's always in Renee's heart. I want it out there. I want people to know that she wasn't forgotten, that her family and friends think about her all the time. She should be here raising her child and having, you know, her grandchildren and, you know, having a life like the rest of us have. Cold Case Files is hosted by Paula Barrows. It's produced by the Law and Crime Network and written by Eileen McFarlane and Emily G. Thompson.

Our composer is Blake Maples. For A&E, our senior producer is John Thrasher and our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Maite Cueva, and our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Maite Cueva, and Peter Tarshis. This podcast is based on

A&E's Emmy-winning TV series, Cold Case Files. For more Cold Case Files, visit aetv.com. Thank you.