Cold Case Files - The Cufflink

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

A woman is found murdered in a Michigan park, bound with police-grade, plastic handcuffs. Investigator’s prime suspect is found with identical cuffs in his possession, but without any additional clues detectives must get creative to link his cuffs to their evidence. Check out our great sponsors! ZocDoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/ccf and download the Zocdoc app for FREE! K12: Take charge of your child's education at K12.com/podcast  Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment. On June 10th, 1986, Jeanette Kirby followed her normal routine like she would have done on any other Tuesday. She got up, went to work, and after work, she went for a walk right around sunset. It was something she had done before, many times. But this time, something went terribly wrong. Jeanette went missing somewhere along her walking trail in the Michigan wilderness. No one heard or saw a thing, but she didn't come home that night.

And the next morning, Jeanette's mother Muriel waited for her daughter to arrive for breakfast, just like they had planned. Jeanette didn't show up, and Muriel would never see her daughter alive again. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. Muriel Kirby didn't let panic get the best of her. When Jeanette didn't show, she assumed there was a simple, logical explanation. I started calling Jeanette's office to talk to her supervisor. And she and I communicated all day long because Jeanette wasn't there. And she didn't answer her phone at home. And that afternoon, I realized something's wrong.

This is not Jeanette. Things were getting serious. It wasn't like Jeanette to skip work, especially without at least calling first. But still, Muriel held out hope that her daughter would walk through the door with an explanation. The next morning, two days after Jeanette was last seen, her cousin Nancy had a sudden thought. Jeanette loved to go walking in the woods, and she could have gotten lost up there in the dense forest. So, Nancy and Muriel head up to Jeanette's favorite trail, Riverbend Park, hoping there might still be a simple, harmless explanation for Jeanette's disappearance. What they found pointed to something much worse. Jeanette's car, with a parking ticket timestamped just hours after Jeanette was last seen.

She'd come to Riverbend Park, gone for a walk, and hadn't returned to her car in two days. Nancy remembers what that realization felt like. At one point there was hope. You know, there's a car, there's a car. But I knew, I knew there was something, I knew it didn't look good. I knew there was something drastically wrong. It was time to involve the police. Right away, a 30-person search team was assembled,

and they began to comb the woods in Riverbend Park. Jeanette's family held out hope that she might still be out there in the woods, turned around and trying to find her way to a trail. Until one searcher, a family friend named Jim Horniak, made a gruesome discovery. I was crisscrossing between a trail and the river. I came up to a fence line that had a gate on it and it was locked so I couldn't go beyond the fence line. I was going to turn around and then something told me to go beyond that fence. I followed the fence down to the river and found an opening there where I could go around the fence. As I was walking, I was looking to my right and I saw something that was standing out with all the ferns there that was kind of yellowish. The color that caught Jim's eye was in fact

the yellow and blue sweatpants Jeanette had been wearing that day. But when Jim went to investigate, he found it wasn't just sweatpants lying on the riverbank. And when I got about four feet from it, I realized it was a body. I was just totally shocked. I was in Vietnam and saw a lot of dead bodies, but this really did something to me. And all the time running back, I felt like somebody was watching me. He was very upset. He came running up to me, and one of the other officers that was present indicated that he had found Jeanette Kirby. That was Officer Larry Harrison.

He was the first to arrive at the riverbank where Jeanette's body was lying face up, covered in multiple stab wounds. When the detectives moved her body, they noticed something different about this particular crime scene. When we initially located Jeanette Kirby, her hands were behind her back, and then once they rolled her over, you could see that she had been bound with police-style flex cuffs. Flex cuffs look a lot like zip ties,

but they're a thicker, heavier grade of plastic. Police use them in situations where they need to restrain multiple people, because officers only carry one set of metal handcuffs. In those situations, a person's hand can be tied together with these large zip ties, and they work just like handcuffs, only there's no key. As unique as the Flex Cuffs were, they were just about the only piece of evidence present at the crime scene. Detectives scoured the area, but found no weapon, no prints, and essentially no physical evidence.

Investigators were hopeful that Jeanette's body might yield more evidence than the riverbank. The medical examiner performed an autopsy. And again, nothing. No bodily fluids, skin, or hair samples were recovered from the body. Despite the lack of evidence, detectives didn't have to wait long for another break in their case. Just three days after Jeanette went missing, a couple canoeing in Riverbend Park noticed a strange figure in the underbrush along the shore. Tangled in the weeds, they found the body of another woman.

This was the body of Cynthia Miller. She was located a couple of hundred yards, two to three hundred yards from where the body of Jeanette Kirby was found. Two bodies had appeared in the same location, just days apart. Police feared they were looking for a serial killer, but the prosecutor on both cases, Sam Smith, thought otherwise. It didn't appear that these two crimes were necessarily related.

For one thing, a body in the river obviously is going to move down that river for a while, and it was clear that that body had moved down the river. His instincts were supported by the medical examiner's report. Cynthia Miller's autopsy revealed that her body had been in the water for at least a month when it was recovered. So the cases went to separate detectives and were worked independently. Not long after the discovery of the bodies, a man named Robert Jones implicated himself and a friend, Earl Cox, in the murder of Cynthia Miller. Prosecutor Smith was not surprised to hear that both Jones and Cox had an alibi for the day Jeanette Kirby went missing. What happened in the Kirby case was not their M.O.

Jeanette Kirby was not a woman that hung out with, I guess you could call them lowlifes. With Cynthia Miller's case all but closed, Jeanette Kirby's murder taunted the detectives. What they thought was a probable link to a second murder had turned out to be a false lead. And more than five months after her body was discovered, Jeanette's case was no closer to being solved. Soon, detectives were forced to label the murder of Jeanette Kirby a cold case and move on.

But her mother Muriel hadn't given up the hope of finding her daughter's killer. I talked to the sheriff's department several times, enough so that they got tired of me. And they said, you know, this is an old case. You can't expect something every day. I did. I expected something every time I called. For years, Muriel Kirby lived with the fact that her daughter's killer, the man who had assaulted and stabbed Jeanette multiple times before dumping her body on a riverbank, was still out there. The Michigan police were still hoping a new lead might surface, and the detail of the police-flexed cuffs nagged at the back of their minds. Until March of 1990, when a seemingly unrelated case included one small, notable detail.

A woman had been driving home alone one night when what she believed to be a police vehicle appeared in her rear view. The truck behind her flashed red and blue lights and signaled for her to pull over, which she did. So I pulled over when I saw the light in the back mirror and I sat there and waited for him to come to me. So far, everything seemed normal. The man stepped out of the vehicle, and the woman, who asked not to be identified, waited for him to approach her driver's side door.

But the man didn't approach. Instead, he ordered her to come here. So, thinking he was a police officer, she followed orders. The woman got out of her car. That's when it became clear this wasn't a traffic stop, and she wasn't dealing with a police officer. All of a sudden, he took out a revolver or a gun and said, come here. Then he shot a warning shot into the woods and said again, come here. On a completely empty highway, with no help in sight, the woman faced

two options, run or fight. She didn't stand a great chance at running. He was big and could easily gun her down the moment she ran. So this woman fought like hell. I thought, wait a minute, you are not getting me into this truck. He was dragging her inch by inch toward his truck. But she was dragging out precious time while she fought. Plenty of times for cars to pass and for someone to maybe call the police. Finally, her attacker must have decided it was too risky. Maybe there were too many potential witnesses, or she was putting up too much of a fight.

Maybe both. So he threw her to the ground, jumped in his truck, and sped off. The woman picked herself up off the ground, drove home, and immediately called the real police. Sergeant Burt Mead answered the call and took down a lengthy description of the attacker. She told us he was wearing a baseball cap with a star on it that she thought was affiliated somehow with a law enforcement agency. He was armed with a 9mm handgun.

She indicated that he drew this gun on her, and she knew immediately that he meant business. Not only did this woman provide police with a detailed description of the man himself, but she also provided them with a location for potential evidence. Police investigated the roadside crime scene and found the ejected shell casings from the round fired during the attack. They also made castings of the tire prints left by the attacker's pickup truck. Then, they released a description of the truck and its driver to the public, hoping for a viable tip.

This particular vehicle was outfitted with some overhead lights, which are unusual for a civilian vehicle. It had distinctive tires on it. It had a distinctive framework. They didn't have to wait long. Several tips came in about a truck matching that description seen refilling at a local gas station. Detective Meade paid the station a visit. They went through the records at the station

and found a credit card receipt for purchase of gasoline that this truck and the defendant had used, and we were able to identify him through his credit card receipt. Investigators then began the work of finding the man who matched that receipt, a man named David Dram. They tracked him to his parents' cabin, where Dram appeared to be hiding out, along with his trusty and distinctive truck. The tires matched the marks found at the scene, and Dram himself matched the victim's description. But that wasn't his only link to the crime scene. He was in the home, and they asked him

if he owned a 9mm handgun, and he acknowledged that he did, and he told them it was hidden under a cushion on the couch, and it was later determined to be the one used and matched with the cartridge that was found at the scene. Investigators also searched Dram's home and truck and found a police cap similar to what the victim had described. Then they found a knife and a pair of police-style flex cuffs. Detective Meade placed Dram under arrest for attempted kidnapping, based on the rape kit, as the police called it, discovered in his possession. We're under the impression that these items were to be used to bind and secure this woman after she was kidnapped from that scene.

While Duran was being processed, police ran a check on his name and discovered that he was also a volunteer fireman in a county 200 miles away. The same county where Jeanette Kirby was murdered in 1986. So they called it in. Detective Larry Stacey took the call. The advice is that they've arrested a Holt fireman, that he attempted to make a traffic stop on this lady he tried to abduct. Normally, an attempted kidnapping in one county doesn't make much of a splash in the neighboring police departments.

I imagine the local officers only called it in to Ingram County because the suspect was a fireman, and they needed to notify the Ingram fire station. But luckily, one small detail in the case set off alarm bells in Stacy's mind. At the time, the only ones that carried flexicuffs were usually police officers. And we found it very significant

that he would have these flexicuffs. Detective Stacy began to wonder how likely it could be that two assailants, within just a few miles of each other, could have gotten their hands on police-grade flux cuffs. And just what would Drim have done with his most recent victim if he had been able to get her into the car?

Would she have ended up like Jeanette Kirby, whose case was sitting on a shelf somewhere? Stacey decided it was worth investigating, despite a lack of evidence linking the cases to each other. But while Stacey was investigating the cold case murder, Dram's name popped up once again, in yet another investigation. This time, he was under investigation

for an attack in nearby Holt, Michigan. Just a year earlier, a server at Sammy's Lounge was heading home after a long shift. She left around 2.30 a.m. and made her way across an empty parking lot to her car. When she went out to her car, she got in it, started driving it, and she had the thump, thump, thump of a flat tire. That was prosecutor Sam Smith, who remembered the details of the Holt, Michigan case. Much to her surprise, there was somebody there to help her. This guy that had been in the bar earlier named David Drayhan.

Drayhan offered the woman a ride to his house so she could use the phone to call for help. But the Good Samaritan routine didn't last long. The moment she stepped into his house, the woman said something changed in him. He appeared with a gun and a knife in his hand, put the gun and knife to her head and said, you're in trouble now. She was forced back into the bedroom,

had her get on the bed, took off her clothes, and raped her several times. Terrified, injured, and fearing for her life, that woman went home and didn't report the crime. She believed, he told her, if she talked to the police, he would kill her. And she absolutely believed it. And if you see David, it's somewhere around 6'6", 6'7", he's a big, and at that time he was a big, rangy boy,

you'd believe him. However, seven months after her attack, Dram was safely in custody, facing charges for the roadside assault. So, the woman from Sammy's Lounge decided to come forward, and rape was added to Dram's growing list of pending charges. With a mountain of evidence stacked against him, Dram was found guilty in both cases

and received the maximum sentence of 80 years in prison. Meanwhile, Detective Stacy was still trying to tie him to the murder of Jeanette Kirby, but Prosecutor Sam Smith needed more evidence before they could file charges. From the hour, I guess you would say, that the Leelanau County Sheriff's Office called, we thought David Dray is probably the killer of Jeanette Kirby. But what we could do to do that, other than he had flex cuffs over here and there's flex

cuffs in our case, that's not very much proof. That proof they needed would take another eight years together. In 1991, a man named David Dram was sentenced to 80 years in prison for assaulting one woman and raping another. Unfortunately, he wasn't a special case. Criminals like Dram and crimes of sexual violence are, sadly, pretty common statistically speaking. But there was one uncommon piece of evidence that surfaced during the rape investigation, which linked David Dram to a murder five years earlier. A pair of police-grade flex cuffs. The tricky part now was for detectives to link the cuffs they found in Dram's truck to the pair that bound Jeanette Kirby. I know of no other cases in the United States where flex cuffs were used.

That in and of itself was extremely probative, I thought. By 1998, though, the detectives were still stumped about how to make that connection. Muriel Kirby had not given up on the search for her daughter, and she kept calling the sheriff's office until they pulled Jeanette's file off the cold case shelf. Larry Harrison, who worked Jeanette's case as a street cop, had graduated detective by this time, and he picked up Jeanette's file along with his partner, Pete Ackerley. Both

detectives agreed that Dramm deserved a more thorough investigation. So they started at the very beginning, looking at Dramm's past and leaving no stone unturned. This is Detective Harrison. We began interviewing a number of old friends, acquaintances of David Ram's, a number of people that were never interviewed originally back in 1986. I tried to run down everybody that went to high school with the guy, ever went drinking beer, smoked pot with him, worked with him, was on the fire department with him, knew him socially. That was Detective Ackerley. Both he and Harrison were determined to find something, or someone,

in Dram's past that might offer some new information or evidence. And they found just that in Dram's old friend, Mark Greco. 15 years earlier, in 1983, Greco was living in Holt, Michigan. Around that time, he bought a car. But it wasn't your average car. He bought an old police car. But this particular cruiser didn't have an FM radio, so Greco decided to install one. I actually had to physically get into the trunk to work underneath the back deck to wire it.

And then I saw the plastic bag that was stuck between the inner fender and the outer fender. And I pulled it out and it was a bag of flex cuffs, plastic handcuffs. Greco then decided to give several of those flex cuffs to his roommate, David Dram, and held on to a few for himself. I worked for a security guard company at that time, and right in the back window of the car was my uniform hat. And I just pulled a couple out, stuck in my hat, and I gave him the rest. Now, that part feels a little bizarre to me.

Maybe it's just me, but if I found police restraints in my car, my first instinct would probably be to get rid of them, or maybe use them in some sort of home improvement project. I wouldn't give them to my friend, but maybe Greco thought that Dram had some home improvements of his own. In any case, Greco went searching for those two cuffs he kept for himself. Up in the top of my closet in a plastic bag was that uniform hat, and inside that uniform hat was that flex cuff. Detective Larry Harrison couldn't believe his luck.

I couldn't believe that after 12 years that he still had this one flex cuff in the brim of his old security hat. I knew immediately this could be the link that we were looking for to finally put the nail in the coffin for David Dram. The detectives needed to make a connection between the cuff and Graco's hat and the cuff found on Jeanette Kirby's body. Their first discovery was that both cuffs were the same brand, made by the same manufacturer. However, that breakthrough wasn't exactly a smoking gun, because that particular brand and that particular manufacturer sold thousands of

other cuffs in the United States. Still, it was one step towards proving the detective's theory that the cuff in Greco's hat and the cuff on Jeanette's body came from the same package. So they next set out to find some unique signature on the cuffs that set them apart from the thousands of others on the market. To do that, they brought in an expert, a forensic tool mark examiner named Scott Marrier. Tool marks can be unique. What happens is during the manufacturing process, when tools are made, no two objects, it doesn't matter what you're making, are completely identical in every way.

And so what I do is I look for the microscopic imperfections that are left on various objects to see if these were cut by the same tool. The marks Marrier was looking for weren't apparent on the plastic cuffs themselves, but instead he found something interesting on the small metal tabs that lock the cuffs in place. He found scratches that were created when the tab was machine cut at the manufacturing plant. These were wonderful tool marks, both in quantity and quality. It was actually a very easy identification to make between the metal tab that was removed from the flex cup that was found on Jeanette Kirby and the one that could be associated to Mr. Dre. the metal tab that was removed from the flex cuff that was found on Jeanette Kirby and

the one that could be associated to Mr. Dre. The marks Merritt discovered were proof that the cuffs had been created in the same plant on the same machine. But Assistant Attorney General Mark Bloomer still wasn't quite convinced the evidence was enough. It's very analogous to using forensic DNA. It's not enough to simply say there's a match, because then you have to know how many others also match.

Detectives needed to take their investigation a step further. They didn't just need to prove that the cuffs were unique to a single factory or even a single machine. They needed to place the cuffs Greco found and the cuffs that restrained Jeanette on the same assembly line, close enough together that they reasonably could have been packaged together.

To prove that, Detective Pete Ackerley took a field trip to the manufacturing plant. With the help of the plant officials, Ackerley was able to identify the exact cutting machine used to cut the cuffs. Looking at the machine, he wanted to know how many cuffs one blade could cut before it needed to be replaced. Ackerley had a theory that each blade left a unique pattern on the tabs it cut. So, if he could prove that his two sample cuffs were cut by the exact same blade,

he could place them within a pool of just a few dozen others that were cut by the same blade. That all depended on exactly how many cuffs a single blade could cut in its lifespan. So they ran a test. Then I took one sample which consisted of five flex cuffs every 100 through the first 1,000. After that, I took a sample, which again consisted of five flex cups, every 1,000 through a total production run, I believe, of 32,000 or 34,000. Ackerley brought those samples back to tool mart expert Scott Marrier to see if his theory paid off.

What I found during my examination was that there was significant change between one and a thousand. Based on that and all other things being equal in the manufacturing process, I was able to say that the two flex cuffs in question, the one that can be associated with Mr. Drayham and the one from Jeanette Kirby, were in fact cut by the same machine and cut within a thousand of each other. What Ackerley and Mary were able to determine was that of the millions of flex cuffs produced by that manufacturer prior to Jeanette Kirby's murder in 1986, no more than a thousand cuffs shared the distinctive tool marks that were

found on both sample cuffs. Now, if you listen to this podcast a lot, you know that I'm usually not easily convinced by circumstantial evidence. That's evidence that depends on interpretation and inference to draw a conclusion, rather than fact. For example, eyewitness testimony is known as direct evidence, while an accused bank robber being found with a stash of cash is circumstantial. You have to assume that the suspect stole that money from the bank, rather than winning the lottery or inheriting a pile of cash. In this case, narrowing the two sample cuffs to a pool of just a thousand among millions on the market is circumstantial. But when you pair that information with Dram's previous roadside assault, which also included flux cuffs,

and Greco's statement that he had given Dram the cuffs, it gets pretty hard not to connect the dots. And that's exactly what Assistant Attorney General Bloomer thought as well. Use your common sense, because these were used all over the world. What was the likelihoodbend Park, David Dram was charged with her murder. Prosecutor Sam Smith tried the case and presented the jury with Ackerley's findings. Like a fingerprint, you can see the pattern. You can show a jury a fingerprint here and a fingerprint there,

and they can see with their own eyes that, gee whiz, those are exactly alike. The same with the tabs. The defense attorney, Gene Turnwald, focused his case on the flex cuff match and the other 999 cuffs on the market with identical markings. If someone drives a car off the assembly line in General Motors and does a crime with that car, what does that have to do with the very next person who drives a vehicle off the assembly line? Nothing. And that's essentially the argument being made with these flex cuffs being cut with the same tool,

you know, from the same manufacturer. Big deal. But the cuff link was just half of the prosecution's case. The other half was Dram's criminal past, and Assistant AG Bloomer was deliberate in illustrating just how important police flex cuffs were to Dram's M.O. to the success of the case that the jury understand that what we had here was a combination of him having access to Flexcoffs and him being the type of person who had done this in the past and sure looked like he did it again. On April 21st, both sides offered their final statements and the case went to the jury.

It took three long days for them to return with a verdict. Guilty of murder in the second degree. On the day of Dram's sentencing, Jeanette Kirby's mother, Muriel, was finally given the chance to address the man who took her daughter's life. She's had her day in court. Justice has been served. And that's what we've been fighting for for 16 years. At that hearing, David Dram was sentenced to 60 to 90 years in prison, on top of the 80 years he was already serving for assault and rape. His earliest possible release date is January 27, 2050, at which point Dram will be 93 years old. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater.

Our associate producer is Julie Magruder. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at AETv.com slash real crime.