Cold Case Files - Ticket to Nowhere / The Paper Route

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

A 13-year-old girl's mother is murdered and 20 years later she helps bring the killer to justice; and a dogged policeman gets to the bottom of the brutal murder of a 63-year-old newspaper del...ivery woman.Boll & Branch: Go to BollandBranch.com/coldcasefiles and use code coldcasefiles to get 15% off your first order, plus free shipping!Mint: To get the new customer offer and your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to Mintmobile.com/coldcaseProgressive: Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.Shopify - Sign up for your free trial today at Shopify.com/coldcase and take your retail business to the next level today!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This program contains subject matter that may be disturbing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. On May 24th, 1979 at 2.30 p.m. The Pine River School in Luther, Michigan is about to end for the day. 13-year-old Vicky Chorba gathers her books and heads outside to the school bus.
Starting point is 00:00:38 Half an hour later, the bus drops Vicky off at home, where she expects to find her mother, Diana Chorba, waiting. Instead, Vicky finds a different woman, family friend Judy Bean. I remember opening the front door and seeing Judy on the floor in front of the bookcase. Going through books, papers, it seemed that she was looking for something. And she had told me that my mother had gone to Grand Rapids to pick up truck parts. and that I would be coming and staying with her until she got home that evening. Judy Bean takes Vicki and her nine-month-old brother, Joshua, to the Bean home, with the children wait for their mother's return.
Starting point is 00:01:20 And figured that she would be back later that night, and she didn't come back. She wasn't back the next day. She never came back. The next day, at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, American Airlines Flight 191 bound for Los Angeles, is cleared for takeoff at 302 p.m. Minutes after the jet lifts off the runway, bolts supporting the left engine fail, and the engine separates from the wing. The plane gains 325 feet of altitude
Starting point is 00:01:51 before crashing, less than half a mile away. Everyone on board is killed. The next day, Judy Bean and her husband, Ollie, tell Vicky Chorba that her mother was on the doomed flight. And I cried, and I cried. And then for a couple of days I was really sick. I know I was in bed, sick to my stomach, and just felt totally lost. Vicky is also confused, unsure what to make of her mother's sudden decision to fly to California.
Starting point is 00:02:24 She would have told me if she was leaving town. That's what made everything not seem right when they said that she was gone. Because she always told me when she was leaving. 13-year-old Vicky is not the only person who finds her mother's behavior strange. Mae Rasmussen is Diane Chorba's landlord and friend. I was sure she was not on the plane. I just couldn't believe that she went on that plane without saying something on a trip like that, you know, because she didn't travel around that much.
Starting point is 00:02:59 Rasmussen conveys her concern to Michigan State Police Detective George Pratt, who can find only one person who knew about Chorba's decision to fly out of state, Ollie Bean. Mr. Bean claimed that he'd taken her to the Big Rapids, Michigan area, met a person who he did not know, a female, driving an undescribable vehicle, and they left to go to board the airplane in Chicago. If Ollie Bean is telling the truth, some evidence must exist,
Starting point is 00:03:32 a ticket, a boarding. Pass or the Passenger Manifest. Diane Chorba's family hires attorney Mike Mars to make inquiries in Chicago. And they came to me because they had been told that Diane had
Starting point is 00:03:47 taken this flight and was either flying on someone else's ticket or on standby or something like that. And so they asked me to see if I could find out if she was on the flight. Two months after the crash of Flight
Starting point is 00:04:03 191, Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Robert Kirchner and his team are still working to identify the 273 people killed. All of the bodies were badly charred. And identification was going to be a long and arduous process. In July of 1979, Dr. Kirchner receives a letter from Mike Mars, inquiring about the fate of 30-year-old Diane Chorba. First of all, her name was not on the passenger man. So the question was whether there was anyone on the plane who was traveling under an alias.
Starting point is 00:04:39 We first made the determination that there was no one who was flying on the plane under an alias, that we could account for all the names on the passenger manifest. Next, the medical examiner begins comparing Chorba's medical and dental records against unidentified remains. Of those bodies that we were unable to identify, none of them fit the physical characteristics of Diane Chorba. They were mostly men of the few women who were in that group. They were all older. Also, she was pregnant at the time, and we found the evidence of any pregnant women on board. So we could basically exclude the fact that Diane Chorba had been on that flight. Mike Mars shares Dr. Kirshner's findings with Diane Chorba's family, as well as his own
Starting point is 00:05:27 suspicions. I directly informed them that I believed that she was a victim of foul play and that I believed at least at that point in time that she was dead and that someone had killed her. Mars sends the case back to Detective Pratt and the Michigan State Police with a single question. If Diane Chorba was not on that plane, then where is she? Now police turned their attention to the man who claimed she got on the flight in the first place, a local man with a sketchy past by the name of Clarence Oliver Bean. He was known to drink heavily. He was known to be a rounder.
Starting point is 00:06:09 He could handle himself in many of the bar fights that he would become involved in. As police dig into Ollie Bean's life, they learn that he's also a philanderer, maintaining sexual relationships with women while his wife Judy looks the other way. I was the stay-at-home wife that took care of the kids, the cooking, the cleaning, and his girlfriends were the ones that would go out with him, drinking or whatever. In December 1977, Judy Bean first discovered that she was sharing her husband with a woman named Diane Chorba. Nine months later, Diane bore a son, Joshua, by Ollie Bean. Then, in February of 1979, Judy learned that Diane was pregnant again.
Starting point is 00:06:54 And I said, I don't know how much you expect me to take. Why don't you just divorce me? Go ahead and marry her and take these, you know, care of the kids. And he said the same thing. I'll never divorce you. Three months after announcing her pregnancy, Diane Chorba disappeared, leaving Detective George Pratt with at least two people who had opportunity and motive. Judy is being spurned as sort of speak.
Starting point is 00:07:23 her husband is running around with another woman, burying children. Then, of course, you have to look at Mr. Bean, Ollie Bean, the size of him, the contact with her on a continuing basis. So I would have to say that they probably both were suspect of possibly causing harm to die in trouble. Did Ollie Bean kill his pregnant girlfriend?
Starting point is 00:07:49 Was it his jealous wife? Or did the two act together? There are many theories but no body, no physical evidence, and no witnesses. Police are at a loss. In time, the case goes cold, and Diane Chorba is largely forgotten by everybody except one. In September 1985, six years after her mother disappeared, Vicky Chorba has grown up into a life of her own. At 18 years old, Vicky gives birth to her first child, an experience that sharpens her perspective on her mother's disappearance. That was the first time I thought to myself,
Starting point is 00:08:29 nobody would ever leave their children. You know, after you give birth to your children, it's kind of hard, I mean, you fall in love. You fall in love. Vicki makes a promise to herself to unravel her mother's fate, regardless of the pain it might bring. I knew that she did not just up and leave and that something bad had happened.
Starting point is 00:08:50 And I set out to find her, over the years. And I knew that she wouldn't be alive when I found her. Vicki Chorba begins with a phone call to the Michigan State Police. Detective Gary Schaefer takes the call and pulls up Diane Chorba's cold file. It was a more missing person's investigation
Starting point is 00:09:10 in the beginning. You don't have a body. You don't have any evidence. We had absolutely no evidence. All we had was what people were telling us. Vicki Chorba asks Schaefer to take a look at Judy and Ollie Bean. Schaefer tracks the couple to Oregon, where they had been living since 1980. Judy Bean probably was the key to the case if we could get her to tell us the truth
Starting point is 00:09:37 because I felt that she knew what was going on and if anybody would tell us it would have to be her. Schaefer asks and Vicki Chorba agrees to help detectives get Judy Bean talking. With a tape recorder rolling, Vicky places a series of phone calls to Judy to talk about motherhood. I'd call her on Mother's Day. I'd call her on a holiday. Man, I'm really missing my mom, and we'd talk a little bit, and she would describe, I'd ask her to describe the last time she's seen her. When you come home, we didn't stay where she was at? Remember now that she was gone on a bad effect, And each phone call over a period of time, her story changed. And I knew that she knew something.
Starting point is 00:10:40 For nine years, the phone calls continue with Vicky recording each one, hoping for a hint about her mother's fate. You know, everyone's saying that Ali did something to mom. Vicki, I honestly couldn't tell you. I really don't know. Judy Bean, however, never slips, even as the... the world around her begins to crumble. In July 1994, Judy and Ollie Bean have been married for nearly three decades.
Starting point is 00:11:07 During all of those years, according to Judy, she and her children have endured regular beatings at the hands of Ollie Bean. He could see something on TV in the middle of the night, like a wife cheating on a husband, and he could drag me out of bed and beat up on me and say I was cheating on him, or just take it out on all the kids, you know. He didn't have to have a reason for it, whatever the mood struck him. More than once, Judy Bean has tried to leave her husband,
Starting point is 00:11:39 but each time he has stopped her. Like if I would ever try to leave or get near the door, he'd drag me back and start beating on me. He said, if I ever took the kids and left, he would hunt me down and kill me. He said, nobody was ever going to take him. his kids from him. One summer evening, in 1994,
Starting point is 00:12:00 the Bean family sits down to eat dinner and watch a movie. Afterwards, Ollie Bean starts in on his 15-year-old son, Joshua. Then he's punching Josh and hitting him and beating up on him and saying all kinds of things. And I ask him, please don't do that. And he started beating on me. The Bean's 22-year-old daughter, Teddy Beth, begs her father to stop, but he doesn't. Then she decides to put an end to the abuse for good. Teddy handed me the baby and he'd come back up onto the porch.
Starting point is 00:12:34 She opened the door and shot him seven times. And he ended up in a wheelchair. After 26 years of fearing for her life, Judy Bean is about to emerge from the shadow of fear cast by her husband. But will she talk about the day Diane Chorba disappeared? As summer winds down and we move in to fall, leaves aren't the only things changing. Kids head back to school, the holidays start inching closer, and it can feel like the last moment you'd choose to start a business. But if you
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Starting point is 00:15:12 I'm the king of the world. And so much more. For showtimes, press nothing. They're free 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. On July 12th, 1999, in the small town of Condon, Oregon, cold case detectives sit down with Judy Bean and ask her about the disappearance of Diane Chorba 20 years earlier.
Starting point is 00:15:39 And they started questioning me. It was Gary Schaefer that was questioning me. And I think he questioned me for a couple hours. And I kept saying the same story over and over and over again. Judy's story is the same one told by her husband, Ollie, since 19. The last time Judy saw Diane Chorba alive, she was headed for O'Hare Airport and the doomed American Airlines flight, 191. I kept telling her I didn't believe her about the aircraft.
Starting point is 00:16:11 The aircraft crashed true enough. A lot of people died true enough, but Diane Chorba was not on that aircraft. After three hours of questioning and a lifetime of abuse at the hands of her husband, Judy reaches her limit and decides to tell. the truth. Right out of the blue, she says, he told me he shattered. And once I said those words, I couldn't take them back. I said, I guess I'm in a lot of trouble now. And I knew I just had to go on and tell the whole story. Judy Bean's story begins on the morning of May 24th, 1979, 20 years earlier. At 8.30 a.m. Ollie Bean and his mistress, Diane Chorba drive up to the Bean home.
Starting point is 00:16:56 And she was out in the car and they left and then he came back a couple hours later and he'd come in the house and he was upset and he said he'd killed Diane. According to Judy, her husband grabs his chainsaw and tells her to get in the car.
Starting point is 00:17:12 She does as she's told. During their drive, Judy asks what happened. She was walking in front of him and he called her name because he didn't want to shoot her in the back of the head and she turned around and he said this one's for Judy
Starting point is 00:17:27 and he shot her in the head. At a dead end dirt road in the forest Ollie Bean pulls the car over. According to Judy, Diane Chorba's body lies face down in the hole. As his wife watches, Ollie Bean buries Chorba in the Michigan woods. He cut the tree down on her body
Starting point is 00:17:47 and we went home and he got her purse out of the car and he gave me her earrings and her rings and her necklace. And he told me to put those away. And then he cut up all of her identification, everything in her purse and burned it. Cold case detectives are now convinced
Starting point is 00:18:07 they know what happened to Diane Chorba. Their next step is a walk across town to have a conversation with Ollie Bean. He told us again that Diane Chorba was on that aircraft. And obviously, she was not. And he terminated the interview, basically wouldn't go any farther. Gary Schaefer returns to Michigan with Judy Beans' sworn statement.
Starting point is 00:18:32 His first order of business is sharing the news with Diane's daughter, Vicki. He went on to tell me what had happened, what she had said. I excused myself and went in the bathroom and had it broke down in there, cried for about half hour, I'd say. And I come back out and it's like, okay, now what do we do? What's next? Next is a search for the body. Cold case detectives fly Judy Bean back to Michigan
Starting point is 00:19:01 and ask her to lead them to Diane Chorba's grave. But after 20 years, the landscape has changed, and Judy's memory has faded. Police are unable to find any trace of Diane Chorba's remains. They will have to build their case for murder without a body. In August 2001, 22 years after Diane Chorba went missing, Ollie Bean faces trial for her murder in the Lake County, Michigan Courthouse.
Starting point is 00:19:30 The state's star witness is Judy Bean, the woman who has lived her own version of hell, sharing her bed with a man she knows to be a killer and convinced she would be next. Assistant Attorney General Mark Bloomer prosecutes the case. She was so terrified of her husband, and he had so cowed her and controlled her all of their married life, that that was the explanation for why she didn't come forward. And I had to be able to develop that in front of the jury.
Starting point is 00:20:05 For the record, I'm looking at you right now, Mrs. Bean, am I accurate if I describe that you were physically shaking? Yes. Why is that so? Because I'm scared. Scared of what? Of everything that's going on, and I'm scared of Lolly. What would happen? With her ex-husband sitting a few feet away,
Starting point is 00:20:27 Judy Bean begins to describe what she saw in the woods over two decades earlier. Now, what of her could you see? Her legs, one foot, because her shoe was up, probably about the waist down, and I asked him where her shoe was. He said, it was not beside her. I'm sorry, you asked her, what?
Starting point is 00:20:50 You asked him what? 10 to a second. Clarence Bean thought she was getting on that plane. In his defense, Ollie Bean claims his wife is mistaken. Bean says he drove Diane Chorba to meet a friend who was taking her to the airport to board flight 191, which later crashed. With no ticket for Chorba, no boarding path, and virtually every bit of human remains identified from the wreckage,
Starting point is 00:21:20 there is little left to consider in Bean's story. the last 20 years, Oliver Bean has been telling everybody who would listen that she got on that plane and she was among the victims. We proved she wasn't there and he still kept telling that story. You were telling us when we took our recess. The trial lasts three days. After deliberating for 10 and a half hours, the jury reaches a verdict. Ollie Bean is convicted of murder in the second degree. At his sentencing hearing, Vicki Chorba McAllister reads a statement to the court. I have have no closure. He took from her everything that she had or ever could have. And I would like him to tell us where her remains could be found. Ollie Bean admits nothing. He is sentenced to 30 to 60 years.
Starting point is 00:22:12 Vicki McAllister's investigation, however, is far from over. We're over here, right? Is that where we're at? Yeah, this might be a good day. And this road dead ends about a quarter of a mile back or so. Check it out. Okay. We're going to walk back there and look, then. On an autumn Sunday afternoon, Vicky returns to the woods outside Luther, Michigan, to answer a question that has haunted her since the age of 13. Where's my mother's body?
Starting point is 00:22:38 What did you do with her? That's all I want to know from him. Vicki and a group of friends comb the woods looking for any trace of a grave. They have only Judy Bean's memories as their guide. Well, they all look alike, Robin. The team searches for more than three hours, but turns up nothing. Bicki McAllister vows to return to the woods and search again for as long as it takes. Maybe next time I come up here, I can take my boys fishing and camping and relax and not have to, you know, to look anymore.
Starting point is 00:23:11 Just to put it all the rest. Next time we come up, maybe we can go visit the cemetery and put some flowers there on Grandma's grave and talk to her. and just have a place to go. In April of 1988, a van makes its way southwest from Hilton Head, South Carolina, across the state line into Georgia. Bertha Neiman is starting her night shift, picking up a load of newspapers in Savannah, and working her way back to the island. Along the way, she fills up vending machines and drops off bundles of papers for local deliveries. Just past 3 a.m., the 63-year-old grandmother pulls. into a truck stop for her break.
Starting point is 00:24:00 She orders a coffee and walks into the pre-dawn darkness of an empty parking lot. It is the last time Bertha Neiman is ever seen alive. Joe Pitts runs the news delivery trucks for Hilton Head. By 9 a.m. begins to worry. No one in the office has heard from Bertha all morning. We had radios in our trucks and telephones. And if she needed to call us, we usually expected that. And we couldn't find her.
Starting point is 00:24:30 Pitts tracks down Bertha's van abandoned in a parking lot on the other side of the island. She had two little puppies and they were still in the van. It was just like the van had been stopped there and it was quite unusual that she would leave those dogs. Pitts calls the sheriff's office. As they begin to respond, they get a second call about a body found behind a church off Spanish Wells Road. Captain David Randall takes the call. I was met out at the road or in the drive. driveway by Sergeant Casti. And at that time, he told me, said, David said, I want to prepare you for
Starting point is 00:25:05 something that you're fixing to see because you are very close friends with this victim. Of course, I inquired who it was, and he told me it was Bertha Neiman. David Randall has known Bertha Neiman for more than 30 years. He finds her face down under a tree, shot three times in the back of the head. As Randall works the sea, he's a seat. he gets word of Bertha's van abandoned just a few miles away. You know, at this point in investigation, we're trying to figure out how Bertha's van got to where it was. And we were pretty much sure that the person or person's responsible for her death were most likely the ones who put the van there. Inside the van, detectives find no signs of a struggle.
Starting point is 00:25:53 Money found lying on the dashboard seems to eliminate robbery as a motive. A week later, the coroner returns his autopsy report. Included in it is the second possible motive. Bertha Neiman was a widow with no known boyfriend, yet the coroner discovered semen inside her body. So most likely the person or persons that had murdered her had most likely sexually assaulted. David Randall has a theory for murder,
Starting point is 00:26:22 but no suspects and her family wants some answers. I can't really say how well their investigation was going. The feedback we were getting was not very good. I mean, we weren't surprised of everything that was going on. Lonnie Neiman is Bertha's son, and Donna Creel is her daughter. Both looked a family friend David Randall to catch their mother's killer. They can't tell you what you really want to know. And that's what was hard, because David Randall was a friend of ours when we first moved to Hill to Me.
Starting point is 00:26:55 And I just felt like, you know, being a personal friend that he would have really said more, but he kept on the professional level. They had numerous questions, and I had to be very firm and frank with him that we were at a point that I was, today I was the cop. Tomorrow I'll be the friend. Randall works the case the best way he knows how. He develops a list of six names, individuals who lived in the community who had a history of violence. One name on that list is a convicted felon named AJ. Old AJ, and I go a long way back.
Starting point is 00:27:34 AJ had a prior history of violence, violence toward older ladies and robbing older ladies. AJ tells Randall he was home on the night Bertha Neiman was shot, but that he did receive a visit in the early morning hours from a friend and convicted rapist, named Echran Frazier. He says that around 4.30 in the morning, Echran had come to his house, and Echran had admitted that he had killed the lady. Frazier told A.J., he had dumped the murder weapon in Jarvis Creek,
Starting point is 00:28:11 less than half a mile from where Bertha's body was discovered. Randall, however, is unable to come up with a gun. Unsure of his source and with no other leads, Randall decides to confront Frazier at his home, in the hopes of catching him off guard. He was cool, calm, and collected. If you had the facts on him and if you thought that you were good,
Starting point is 00:28:34 he was just a little bit better. Frazier's story is simple. He went to a club the night Bertha Neiman was shot dead and then straight home. Randall is unable to find any holes in the story and can develop no physical evidence linking Frazier, AJ, or anyone else to the crime scene. In time, the case goes cold.
Starting point is 00:28:56 Eleven years later, in the spring of 1999, David Randall has advanced to the rank of captain with the Beaufort County Sheriff's Office. One morning, a young lieutenant approaches him with a question. Bob Bromwich came to me. He's always called me soup. He said, soup, we need to talk about these cold cases. Said, which one do we want to start with?
Starting point is 00:29:21 And I think you know which one untold. Randall hands over the Bertha Neiman case to Bromage. And it meant something to him for this one to be looked into. There was somewhere to go with it. There's a lot of cases there's not a lot of head start, you might say. Bromage believes his head start lies with the semen sample recovered from Bertha Neiman's body and sends it to the state crime lab for DNA profiling. The degraded sample, however, only yields a partial profile, enough to exclude. suspects, but not enough by itself for a conclusive match.
Starting point is 00:29:57 He was able to give me an idea that, hey, if you get a suspect, we can exclude him, but we can't say beyond any doubt that it was him. Bromage takes the report and makes preparations to begin DNA testing to exclude suspects. First on the list is Eckeren Frazier. Bromich finds Frazier at the Evansville Correctional Institution in Benettsville, South Carolina. He is 11 years into a sentence for offenses unrelated to the Neiman murder. Prior to meeting with Frazier, Bromage and jail personnel search Frazier's cell. And in searching under the bed, the contraband officer pulled out a piece of cardboard,
Starting point is 00:30:36 which I then looked at and had the name Berth on it. And it also had a location of Spanish Wells, which is the vicinity of where her body was found, and she was murdered and had the years 88, 89. The piece of cardboard also looked at the same. list the first names of several other women, along with street names and dates. Bromage isn't sure if the list is an uncomfortable coincidence, or perhaps, a shorthand diary of murder. He sits down with Frazier and asks him for a sample of his saliva. I told him I'd like a saliva sample for DNA or a blood sample that a medical person would extract from, and he said he would not give me
Starting point is 00:31:19 that sample. So that made me, it made me very suspicious of them at that point. Bob Bromage files a motion to compel Frazier to provide the DNA sample. Two weeks later, a judge orders Frazier to comply. Imagine one of those hot, sticky summer nights. The sheets are glued to your legs, your hair is stuck to the back of your neck, and you're turning the AC down to 65 just to feel remotely comfortable. It's exhausting. Last week, it hit 100 degrees here, and I slept terribly. Here's the thing. It may not be your thermostat, mattress, or even the person next to you. It could be your sheets, and the wrong sheets trap heat. Bowlin Branch feels like the cool side of the pillow, but across your entire bed. Their summer bedding is breathable, lightweight,
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Starting point is 00:34:18 Dr. Amick examined it and called me within actually about 36 hours and said it did not match him at that point. which was put a new twist on things, you might say. Eckeren Frazier is positively excluded as a possible source of the seaman, and Bob Bromage is left wondering what happened. That's exactly what I thought. Am I missing something here? I'm missing another subject. Could this have been one or more person?
Starting point is 00:34:46 And at that point, I consulted with a colleague of mine, David Caldwell, who was a captain at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. In investigations, as in a lot of instances, in life, two heads are regularly better than what. Caldwell gives Bromage two likely scenarios. Either Eckeren Fraser had an accomplice who actually raped Bertha Neiman, or the presence of semen is entirely unrelated to the murder. The semen would have been the result of consensual sex. Even though most people that knew Ms. Neiman's would say that she didn't have a boy,
Starting point is 00:35:24 boyfriend, not everybody talks about their boyfriend or girlfriend. And so in my mind, it was a possibility that that was the case. With a rape that is perhaps not a rape and a suspect who refuses to provide DNA and then seems to be exonerated once that sample is taken, Bob Bromage's investigation is at a crossroads. Well, I was like, okay, where do I go from here? Maybe it wasn't a sexual assault, but it's the same type of predator. What's the motive here? why kill her? Well, somebody she probably knows, somebody she's probably seen in the area.
Starting point is 00:35:59 In November of 1999, Echeren Frazier is released from prison. A month later, he provides Bob Bromidge with the break he needs. In December 1999, Echran Frazier is captured on surveillance video holding a knife while robbing a hotel reception desk. Frazier had been released just four weeks prior. Due to his past convictions, Frazier is looking at a possible 30 years if convicted, on the robbery charge and is willing to give information on Bertha Neiman to make a deal. He wants a deal for the armed robbery, of course. He's thinking, okay, well, first I've got to make it credible enough so the police believe my story, but then get myself out of it at the last minute before anything really bad happens to Bertha Neiman.
Starting point is 00:36:44 Echeren says he and a friend saw Bertha's van in a parking lot. According to Frazier, he He stayed behind as a lookout while his friend jumped in the van and began to hit Bertha with his pistol. Then the friend drove away in Neiman's van. At that point, Akron takes himself out of his saying he didn't go. And the other subject brought the woman behind the church and murdered. Bromage tells Frazier he'll look into his story. Bromage also asks Frazier to submit to a polygraph test. He agrees.
Starting point is 00:37:15 In Beaufort, South Carolina, investigator Matt Averill searches for the truth. Before you were 26 years of age, did you ever commit a serious crime and not get caught? On February 22nd, 2000, he straps Echran Frazier into his polygraph machine. Averill asks Frazier a series of 20 to 30 questions, only three of which will tell him if the suspect is lying. The first question that he was hitting on, the first relevant question was, did you shoot Bertha Neiman? Second question was in 1988, did you shoot Bertha Neiman? And the third question was, were you there when Bertha Neiman was shot? On all three questions, Frazier's breathing and cardio rates spike.
Starting point is 00:38:02 It may increase in everything. I mean, he reacted pretty hard in all three components that we measure. And to get the kind of reactions that I interpreted, I was pretty convinced that he was there and was more than likely. of the shooter. According to Matt Averill's machine, Echran Frazier is a liar, as well as a killer.
Starting point is 00:38:22 Just a few minutes after his polygraph, Frazier sits down for another talk with police. And while he is still trying to make a deal on the pending robbery charges, cold case detectives are building a case for murder. Our strategy was, one, to get a confession from. Two, if we can't get a confession, let's get a little bit more detail out of the crime scene.
Starting point is 00:38:42 Let's try to trip him over his own words and knowing he's lying. it's hard to remember a lie verbatim. In his second interview with investigators, Frazier makes several critical mistakes, most significantly concerning Ms. Neiman's dogs. He also mentioned that there was two dogs in the van, and that's something he had never mentioned before.
Starting point is 00:39:01 And I think we posed the question, something like, you had mentioned she had some animals in the van. Yes, she had two dogs. So that walked him further into being involved directly with the crime. In his earlier statements to police, Frazier claimed he never went near the victim's van. Now, however, he's providing details that could only come from someone who had actually been inside the van. I think on the ride back when he was saying, I really, I told you the truth, I told you truth, I don't care what that polygraph says, I think he realized he went too
Starting point is 00:39:33 far. Bromage believes he has enough to file the case. In April of 2000, a grant jury agrees and returns an indictment for murder. A year later, Echeren Frazier, pleads guilty and is sentenced to 25 years in a South Carolina prison. For Bertha Neiman's family, it's a conviction that helps but will never completely heal. Realize she's not going to drive with drive. We realize you can't call her. But the emotional void that is left is just really hard to feel. You're used to your mama being there and when she's not and she's taken from you. Like my mother was taken, it just makes it hard to feel. For cold case detectives, the conviction is satisfying, but not without its loose ends.
Starting point is 00:40:20 Most significantly, the semen recovered from the victim's body. Whose is it? Does it have anything to do with Bertha Neiman's death? Nobody knows where that seaman came from at this point. That is still being explored to this day. And if I get information or find information that will lead us in that direction, I certainly would like to at least put a name on that. and why it's there.
Starting point is 00:40:46 Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the seaman might belong to an accomplice in the killing and hopes someday to identify its source. Pluto foe, if you knew the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgundy.
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