Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Gina Hall

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

A young college student never comes home after a night of dancing. All the evidence suggests she's been murdered, but if her body is never found, can her killer ever be brought to justice? To get some fun stuff with our new logo check out our website here! For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/.  Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations, for a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-gina-hall/ We’ll be taking some time off next week for the Holidays! Our next regular episode will be Monday, January 4th. See you in the New Year! 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I want to tell you today starts when a radiant young woman goes out to have a good time and is never seen or heard from again, posing one giant question. When the most crucial piece of evidence is missing, what does it take to pursue justice and prove a murder? This is the story of Gina Hall. In the summer of 1980, a young woman named Delana Hall is loving the college life at

Radford University. Instead of going home for the summer, she's decided to stay in Radford and take summer classes for her grad program. And best of all, she's sharing an apartment with her younger sister, Gina, who's 18 and a freshman nursing student. Delana and Gina are more than sisters, they were like best friends, they've always been super close. They're both excited to have this time together and live somewhere that's got a little bit

more of a city feel than they get back in their hometown of Coburn, Virginia. And to be there and be sisters, that doesn't make so much fun. I know. Now, on Saturday, June 28th, after both Delana and Gina finish up their summer midterms, Gina decides that she wants to go dancing to celebrate being done with exams. Gina loves dancing and like saying just like you, just try getting me off the dance floor, especially if like Band-Aid Nelly comes on or get low. It's over.

Oh, truly. I feel like you'd also probably be really good at the wobble. Not as much as you think, no. And listen, though this was well before the music stylings of Little Wayne or T-Pain, the packed floor of a nightclub is kind of Gina's happy place and she's really looking forward to letting off some steam at the Blacksburg Marriott about a half hour away. And basically it's like this club inside this hotel and it's in the city of Blacksburg where Virginia Tech is.

So it's like the best dancing spot around. Of course, Gina asked Delana to go, but Delana says no. She wants to just kind of have a quiet night at home. Delana watches Gina do her makeup and get dressed. But right before Gina leaves, she realizes she's missing her best accessory for dancing, her favorite ankle bracelet. I feel that. Yeah.

It's gold with like a pair of interlocking hearts and she never goes dancing without it. Since they're sharing a brown Chevy Monte Carlo, Delana gives Gina her keys and tells her to be careful before seeing her out at around 10 o'clock that night. After Gina leaves, Delana has her quiet night in and just goes to bed. Well then at around one o'clock in the morning on Sunday morning, she gets a strange phone call and it's Gina on the other end of the line and Gina just sounds off. Off how?

According to Ron Peterson Jr.'s book, Under the Trussell, Gina sounds like nervous and kind of uneasy. Something is wrong. Kind of frazzled. Yeah. And she tells Delana that she's out at this lake with a guy named Steve. But she doesn't really give any more details about that or him or anything else. Or like why she's like feeling this way or maybe sounding this way.

Yeah. And then suddenly the call cuts off. Now somehow I don't know how, but Delana manages to fall back asleep after this crazy phone call, which again, like I don't know that I would have been, but it almost makes me think that maybe it wasn't as disturbing. Yes. In hindsight, she sounded off, but nothing like, oh my God, come get me. Something's wrong.

You know what I mean? Right. It wasn't a call that you were like, I have to leave my house right now and go find my sister. It was just like, oh, she's not having a good time. I'll talk to her about it in the morning or whatever. Exactly. When she wakes up on Sunday morning, the first thing she does is go to Gina's bedroom to

check on her, but Gina isn't there and the car is an outside either. And so now with that like call replaying in her head, Delana is starting to worry because it's super out of character for Gina to stay out at night, especially without calling somebody to let them know where she was. Like even in the days before cell phones, Gina was great about checking in with her family and friends, so they always knew where she was. And one of Gina's friends, this guy named Greg, who she's kind of got this long distance relationship with, actually comes over to the apartment while Delana is trying to figure

out what to do next. But once Delana tells him what's going on, he kind of agrees with her right away. Like this isn't like Gina. Something is up. I mean, okay, but she's 18. She's going dancing, which is like her favorite thing to do. Maybe she just went home with somebody or lost track of time or something. Like it doesn't seem totally out of the question for this just to be something that happens

once in a while, right? Yeah. I mean, it's possible, but everyone who knows her thinks that it's really unlikely because aside from, I mean, again, she has this like romantic thing with Greg, they're in a long distance relationship. Like it would be kind of weird if she went out with someone. But aside from that, Gina isn't known for like doing casual hookups because of how self-conscious she is about her body.

You see, when she was a toddler, Gina got really badly burned in an accident that left her with like a bunch of third degree burn scars and skin grafts like all over her body. She had multiple surgeries throughout her childhood. So she had a lot of scarring and it's nothing to be ashamed of. She was a beautiful girl, but it is something that her sister points out. She says she's always been worried about how a potential partner would react to seeing them. She was nervous at the thought of any kind of physical relationship and she didn't want

her scars to ever impact that. So she's like, yes, she had relationships. Yes, she was probably physical, but like not on the first night meeting somebody at a bar. So her sister thinks the odds of her putting herself out there like that with a stranger are slim to pretty much none. So at this point, Delana pretty much knows that something is up and she manages to round up a bunch of friends to start searching. They spend all morning and all afternoon going all over town looking for Gina, but there's

no trace of her anywhere. And Delana is getting more and more freaked out as the day goes on. She's terrified that Gina might have gotten into maybe an accident like driving on back country roads or something because the roads do get like really narrow and all twisty up in the mountains and it's even harder to navigate when it's dark outside. Now obviously Delana is trying so hard not to think of like the worst case scenarios, but she can't help it. Finally, after a full day of searching and finding nothing, Delana calls the Radford

police on Sunday night to report Gina missing, but the Radford police won't let her file the report. What? Why not? According to Under the Trestle, they say it's because Gina's been missing for less than 24 hours, which we've heard before, it's like the worst thing you can possibly say. So Delana tries the Virginia State Police and she's beyond frustrated when they tell her the same thing, you have to wait.

And to Delana, it feels like she's not being taken seriously, but she refuses to give up. Right, like you said before, the squeaky wheel, right? The squeaky wheel. Yes, like anyone who has a missing family member or knows somebody, like don't just like follow all the rules, you know what I mean, like don't do anything illegal, but like be annoying. Make the most noise. Be annoying.

Yes, be an advocate for the person who needs it. Now the next day on Monday morning, Delana and Gina's dad, John makes the three hour drive from their hometown in Coburn to Radford and he is actually able to file the report and have Gina officially listed as a missing person. Now, meanwhile, while this is going on, Delana was unwilling to just like sit back and wait for police. Like she wants the whole region to know Gina's missing so that they can keep an eye out for her and she thinks she knows just how to get the word out.

She calls up one of the area's biggest radio stations, K92 FM, and asked them to tell their listeners about Gina, but kind of unsurprisingly, the station tells her, no, they're like, listen, they're sorry for what you're going through, but we get requests like this all the time. And if we do one, we'll have to do all of them, which to a certain extent kind of makes sense. I mean, it totally does. But, and this is what I love about Delana, instead of taking no for an answer, she does what I think any of us big sisters would do in her shoes.

She borrows a car because remember, Gina took hers the night she vanished and she makes the hour long drive to Roanoke to go talk to the radio people in person. Oh my God, I love it. This is like probably the only let me see the manager move I would ever approve of. Absolutely. And get this, it works. K92 FM agrees to run a 30 second PSA twice an hour with a description of Gina asking for anyone with information about where she might be to please call the Radford Police

Department. I mean, go Delana. That is huge. It's massive. While Delana is in Roanoke, the volunteer search efforts are still going strong all over the Radford area. According to WFXR news, a bunch of people make the three hour drive from the hall's home to come help search for her.

And you know, they're going door to door with flyers. They're going all over the Radford University campus. A couple of them go back to the nightclub and they even go over the Virginia Tech campuses to see if anyone remembers seeing Gina. Like they put together basically this big grassroots operation within less than 48 hours of when she goes missing. That's incredible. But I kind of am wondering what are police doing during all this?

Like are they involved in the searches at all? So I wasn't able to find in my research if they're working directly with the volunteers but I do know that at a minimum they've got a bolo out for Gina and the car. And I also read that they talk to Greg that same day to rule him out as a person of interest. But it's not the police's efforts that actually turn up the first lead. It's Gina's friends. And lunchtime on that same day, Monday, two of Gina's friends make a shocking discovery. These two guys who know Gina from back home find the car she was driving Saturday night

parked under a railroad bridge on the side of Hazel Hollow Road across the county line in Pulaski County. Now when they find the car, the trunk is open. The door pull strap on the driver's side door somehow got torn off. And strangest of all, the driver's seat is pushed all the way back. According to court documents, Gina's only five feet tall and everyone knows that she always drives with the seat pulled like way up, like never pushed back like this. Yeah.

I was actually going to ask about that because you and I are only like five too. And if I ever have to drive my husband's car, I have to scoot the chair like all the way all the way to the front, and he gets really annoyed by it. So that's like the first thing that came to mind, like she could not have driven that car, right? Right. Like not only would it not have been comfortable, but I don't even know if she physically could have like reached the pedals.

Possibly done it. Right. Yeah. Now one of the friends stays with the car while the other one rushes to tell police as soon as law enforcement gets on the scene, officers look in the trunk and suddenly they're missing person's case just takes a much darker turn there. Police find blood, head hair and pubic hair in the trunk of Gina's car. Oh my God.

Even though they haven't actually found any trace of Gina herself, police are now dealing with the possibility that something terrible has happened to her. Okay. Going back to the call that Gina made to Delana, she said she was near a lake. Is the car found anywhere near by that lake? So it's about three miles away from Clader Lake and the road that the car was found on actually runs parallel to the new river and Clader Lake is like a reservoir of the new river and it's the only lake around.

So they're all kind of connected, but also different. Yeah. But basically like with the call and based on where her car is found, like the only inference police can like really make is they're thinking that that lake has to be the one that was her last known location. The rest of that day is spent processing the scene where the car is found while searches continue for Gina. But it wouldn't be until the next day that police would get another break.

They get a phone call from a man named Stephen Eperly and he tells them that he was with Gina the night she disappeared. According to Murderpedia, when he comes in for an interview, Steve tells police that he was at the Blacksburg Marriott nightclub on June 28th with his good friend Bill King and a handful of other buddies. He says he'd never met Gina before, but they kind of clicked pretty well that night. So they danced together for about like four or five songs. And as the night wore on, he invited Gina to come back to Bill's parents' house on

Clader Lake. According to Steve, he offered to drive since he knew how to get there. So he says he's the one who drove the Chevy, not Gina. He says he knows Gina called her sister and then after that, he did try to put the moves on her, but Gina said no. Steve tells police that they left the lake house about 3.30 or like four o'clock in the morning and that the last time he saw Gina was when she dropped him off at his parents' house where he lives, maybe like a half an hour later.

Now later on in the conversation, Steve also mentions that while he was out at the lake house, his friend Bill had come over with a woman too, sometime between like 3.45 or four that morning, so really shortly before he and Gina left. And he's very careful to say that Bill and his companion saw Gina and had a little conversation with her. When he left with Gina, according to Steve's story, Bill and his friend were still there. Nothing about Steve's story doesn't sit quite right with police and the more they learn about him, the stronger that feeling gets.

Steve's from Radford and since it's a small, close-knit community, there are actually people on the force who know him or his family and they all say the same thing. Steve's got a violent streak. There's gossip about him getting into bad bar fights, memories of the police having to intervene in domestic disputes that he'd have with his family, and allegations of him being really aggressive towards women, like we're talking about dating violence, you name it. Okay, but does he have any sort of criminal record? Well, he doesn't have a criminal record beyond traffic violations, but according to the news

leader newspaper, Steve's been charged with rape in the past, not once, but twice. And in both incidents, he's allegedly tricked the victims into being alone with him. So Steve is looking like a pretty strong person of interest to police at this point. The next day on July the 2nd, police are able to talk to Steve's friend Bill. Since Steve put Bill at the house the night Gina went missing, I mean, obviously they want to see what his version of events are. Bill tells them something very interesting. He corroborates Steve's story about meeting Gina at the club and he says that he did see

Gina's car parked out front when he got to the lake house with a girl named Robin. So so far, everything sounds pretty much the same, right? But Bill tells them a fascinating detail. He says that when he walked into the first floor den, he stepped in something wet on the carpet. Bill didn't think anything of it at the time. He figured Steve and Gina probably went for a little late night swim in the lake, maybe, and trailed some water into the house like no big deal, no reason for him to like turn

on the lights and check out what it was and risk interrupting whatever Steve and Gina might be getting up to. Can we take a second? I have a question. Is it weird that Steve is there at Bill's house, even though it's Bill's house and Bill isn't there? Not really. So Bill and Steve have actually been friends since they were like little kids.

So Steve's kind of got this open invitation to the house. It's like me having your simply safe codes. Basically is. Yeah. So he can come over anytime he wants. He can even use the house to like hook up after a night out. Now Bill goes on to tell police that he was there outside of the club when Steve and Gina were making plans to like head out to his lake house.

But as I read in some court records, Bill says Gina seemed confused about what was going on. I guess what do you mean confused? Was she drunk? No. More like she didn't know who else was going to go to the lake house and like who was taking what car there. Like she seemed to think that a group would be there.

Not that she'd be there alone with Steve. It was like I'll go if you'll go who else is going type thing. Yeah, I don't know the details, but basically like whatever Bill saw, it made him recognize that like Gina wasn't going there to like hook up with Steve. You know what I mean? Like she thought something else was going on and it felt more like she was expecting a like a multi person party and potentially he's at a hookup. Yeah.

And this is one of the biggest things of all. So Bill also tells police that he never saw or spoke to Gina when he was at the lake house, which is the exact opposite of what Steve told them. Right. So with everything they know so far about Steve and his past law enforcement's curiosity is super peaked about this lake house, about what might have happened there the night Gina went missing. The police ask Bill like, Hey, why don't you like take us over to the house so we can

just like have a look around? And Bill agrees. Sure. No problem. The law officers drive out there with him and as soon as they get inside, they see it on the carpet in the den is a bleached out pink stain matching like right about where Bill said that he stepped in something wet that night. And this stain is pretty big under the trestle describes it as being a bit bigger than a

basketball and it hasn't started to get that discoloration and like like weird look that an old stain would. You know what I mean? Like it's definitely fresh. Exactly. And police have a bad feeling that this might have been blood. I wasn't able to find in my research like what exactly they tell Bill at this point. I mean, I have to imagine he's probably trying to like stay out of the way a little bit.

But when he's in the house, he does make a stunning discovery there at the foot of the stairs, he finds a gold bracelet with two interlocking hearts, just like the ankle at Gina Hall was wearing and the clasp is broken. Police continue to go over every single inch of the house and as they search, they keep turning up more and more blood stains, not big ones like the one from the carpet, but little ones sort of scattered around both inside and outside a lot of places that an untrained eye would miss and they find hair, blood and fibers on the refrigerator door smudged like someone almost had tried to clean it up and there's also blood on the driveway

in the upstairs bathroom outside on the deck and scattered on some stuff in the utility room. Okay, so I have kids who get hurt all the time. So I'm sure there's blood in like random places in my house that I don't even know about, but this seems like kind of a lot. Well, it's more than that because they also found blood on a chair leg on a pitcher on a dustpan on a mattock, which is like a pickaxe basically. So something definitely happened here.

Yeah, this is way more than like a couple kids with a bloody noses over a decade or two. Right, it's obvious something terrible happened here, but police find something that makes the whole scene even worse because next to the fridge, there's a golf shoe with blood and pubic hair in the cleats. Now they have a lot of evidence, but despite all this evidence, there is still no sign of Gina Hall or her body anywhere in the house. Since this is before DNA, all the labs can do is test for blood type, and everything police have is found to be type O, just like Gina was.

Days go by with more searches and more evidence collected, all pointing right at Steve Eberly. But without a body, this is still all 100% circumstantial. Bill's parents get back to their lake house on July 5th. This is a week after Gina first disappeared. And here's the thing, they've been on vacation this whole time with no idea about what's been going on. Oh my God. Yeah, so instead of coming home to like their normal home, they come back to a crime scene.

They're horrified, but they're instantly cooperative, and according to court records, they're able to point out six distinct things that are missing from their house. A quilt, a blue towel, a striped towel, a roll of paper towels, a bath mat, and a can of bathroom cleaner. A volunteer searcher actually finds a bloody blue towel along the new river the next day that matches the one missing from the lake house, but nothing else, no bath mat, no quilt, and still no Gina. To try and shake something loose, the police decide to start thinking a little outside

the box, and so on July 11th, 1980, they bring in a surprising new helper. Just two weeks after Gina went missing, police decide to call in a so-called super dog and his handler. I love the idea of a super dog just in general. I do too. No, this dog is a big German shepherd named Horace II, which might be my favorite working dog name ever, and he's known for having an incredible sense of smell. His handler, a guy named John Preston, is pretty well known in law enforcement circles, and

he's confident that they can find Gina. According to Murderpedia, after John comes to Virginia with Horace II and agrees to help, the dog tracks back to Steve three times, two times with a pair of his dirty underwear to scent from, and another time from the bloody towel. Wait, can you kind of walk me through that? Yeah, so I was a little confused too. Unfortunately, police got a pair of Steve's underwear to give Horace II the scent, and then Horace traces that scent back to about 50 yards away from where Gina's car was found.

And he doesn't stop there, though. He tracks then Stephen's scent from near where Gina's car was all the way back to the Upperley House. I officially love Horace II. Yeah, and so those were the first two scents, like from the underwear. And for that third one, police go to the Radford High School building, like right across from their station, where they basically make a lineup of towels with the blue towel that was found by the river in there.

And kind of like mixed in there just to see if he would find it. Exactly. So they ask Horace to pick out if one has Steve's scent on it, and he goes right to that bloody one. Oh my God. And then this is the bananas part. The dog keeps following the scent from that bloody towel into the auditorium, over to the police station, where Steve is being interviewed right that very moment.

I swear I'm not being dramatic. I have full body chills, but also I'm almost in tears. I love Horace. Horace II is 1,000% a super dog. Yes. Horace II actually goes into the interview room and right then Steve does, he signals, well no, Steve does something no one expects. As soon as Steve sees Horace II and hears about what he's trapped to and like why this

dog is here, he says, quote, that's a damn good dog. Steve actually says that same thing three times, that's a damn good dog. According to witness recollections and under the trestle, he's not even being sarcastic. His tone is like a little flat and almost shocked. Like that's a damn good dog. Like how did he do that? Like oh my God. It's wild.

Now all through his meetings with police though and even after Horace II does his thing, Steve keeps denying that he had anything to do with Gina's disappearance and he won't say if he knows where she is. So all law enforcement can do is keep searching. As July wears on, searchers keep turning up more and more that tells police Gina isn't coming home. Gina's bloody clothes turn up out in the woods under the bridge near where her car was along with the other missing towel, also bloody, a shovel and another mattock about 20 feet

away. And get this, Steve's mom takes one look at both the mattock and the shovel and confirms that they're the ones that just happened to be missing from the Everly family garage. Now still, police don't think any of this is enough to arrest Steve and nail him for Gina's murder. What? Yeah, so they kind of just have to watch as he moves out of Radford, first to Roanoke and then out of state altogether to Columbus, Ohio.

And in a strange turn of events, while Steve is in Columbus, a woman named Vicki goes missing and is found murdered. And the circumstances around Vicki's case are kind of similar to Gina Hall. According to ABC News 6, her murder is still unsolved and though police didn't find any connection to Steve Everly at the time in Vicki's case, it is strange and something that you'll see brought up when you dig into Gina's case. Like we actually have a little audio extra in the fan club about Vicki's case if you want to get more details on that and kind of compare it to Gina's.

Now Steve only stays in Ohio for a couple of months before coming back to Virginia that fall. While all this is happening, the local prosecutor, and since Virginia is a Commonwealth, his official title is Commonwealth Attorney of Pulaski County, but the job functions are pretty much the same as a DA does. Right, right. This man named Everett Shockley is starting to realize that his worst case scenario might be coming true.

Like what if they can't find Gina? All the evidence keeps going right to Steve, to no one else, and Everett knows in his gut like this is their guy, but he's all too aware that he's only got one shot at taking Steve to trial for Gina's murder. At this point, is there any precedent for nobody homicide trials? So according to Under the Trestle, that's the biggest thing the prosecutor's office is researching at this point. I mean, the current DA's team knows that they've never tried a nobody case, but they have

no idea if it's ever been done before and actually gotten a conviction anywhere else in the US. Like been successful, right? Yeah. So their research turns up only four nobody cases in American history that actually got a conviction with no confession, no eyewitnesses, and of course, nobody and none of those four were in Virginia. I mean, I know that plea deals are like kind of TBD, but is that an option like as opposed

to turning this over to a jury? Well, they actually try. So in August of 1980, the prosecution goes to Steve and his attorney and they offer him a deal that basically if he pleads guilty to second degree murder and tells them where Gina's body is, he'll get 20 years, which is the maximum for second degree murder. But if they go to trial and Steve's found guilty of first degree murder, he'll get 20 as the minimum. Right, right.

But Steve and his lawyer like shut this down. They just turned the deal down flat. Oh, wow. Now, imagine your effort, Shockley, like you have been on the job as a Commonwealth attorney for only six months and already you're looking at a case that will not only make or break your career, but also has the potential to shape Virginia legal precedent for years. Right. It's going to define not only your career, but your legacy almost.

Yes. This case is a huge deal. And the burden of proof on the prosecution is so much different from a normal trial. Right. Again, when you don't have that body, like, because again, you're not just trying to prove the murder. Like you first have to prove that Gina's actually dead and then prove that she's dead because Steve killed her.

And see basically you have to prove that he intended to kill her all because what, like she wouldn't have sex with him. Right. Like it's, I hate to say it, but kind of a flimsy case. It's hard. And if the jury finds reasonable doubt on any one of those three things, he will get to walk. So what do you do?

Do you wait until the body is found or do you take the gamble and move forward without it? After talking to experts and doing some serious soul searching, Everett decides to risk it all. And on September 9th, 1980, Steve Eperly is arrested and charged with the murder of Gina Hall. According to an article I read in the news reader, the search for her body doesn't stop after Steve's in custody.

He's got a new legal team at this point, a pair of court appointed lawyers who start jumping through all of the hoops they can to keep this case out of court, but it's no use. And finally, the trial starts in December of 1980 in Pulaski County. Right from the start, this is a super emotional trial in no small part because the very first person called to the stand is Delana Hall, Gina's older sister. She takes the jury through Gina's life, how beloved she was, how deep their bond as sisters ran even now, and most tellingly, she confirms how self-conscious Gina was about her scars.

According to Delana, Gina got embarrassed even wearing a bathing suit. She also identifies Gina's ankle bracelet as the one that Bill King found at the lake house, but her most damning testimony isn't about Gina herself, it's about the car. You see, Delana tells the jury that she always had to fix the car seat after Gina drove because the seat would be like super close up to the steering wheel, so right like we were talking about earlier. Exactly. So how tall was Steve?

About six feet tall, definitely tall enough that he'd be squashed if he was trying to drive where Gina kept the seat, he would have to push the seat back, just like it was when it was found. And this is just one of the circumstances that the prosecution wants the jury to think long and hard about, but it's far from the last because on the third day of trial, Steve's friend Bill King takes the stand and this dude drops a bombshell. Bill testifies that Steve never denied killing Gina Hall. Wait, what?

Yeah, according to another article I read in the newsletter paper, Bill tells the court that when he straight up asked Steve if he killed Gina, all Steve said is quote, I don't know anything about it, we'll have to wait and see, end quote. Okay, Ashley, like we've done how many episodes of this show and if you're accused of being involved or connected to a murder, almost everyone says absolutely not, no, no way, there's no way I could have done this. A hard no, yeah, this wasn't even a soft no. And he's just like, uh, who knows?

Yeah, well, this isn't even like the only thing Bill says, he also tells the jury that when Steve came back over to the lake house the Sunday after for a barbecue with some other friends, this is after Gina went missing, he goes inside to get a drink. And according to Bill, Steve was in the house for kind of a long, like too long to be just grabbing more ice or something. And when Bill asked him about it, he claimed to have been looking for a bottle opener, which struck Bill as being kind of odd because remember, like their childhood friends, Steve comes over there like again, he doesn't like home is like very familiar to Steve.

Yeah. So for somebody who knows where everything is, like Steve does, why is he spending so much time in the house? Again, he didn't see what he was doing in there. There's nothing he can prove, but it is just this additional piece of circumstantial evidence that he's providing the jury. And Bill goes on to say that when he called him out on it, Steve got pretty evasive about what took him so long, which again, begs the question.

If he wasn't looking for a bottle opener, what was he doing? What was he doing? Bill also testified that Steve asked him to keep the news about Gina's disappearance on the down low, like with their friends. I mean, totally normal, right? But I guess devil's advocate is like him spending maybe too much time inside looking for quote, a bottle opener. It doesn't really prove anything though, right?

No. I mean, right? None of this. That's why it's all circumstantial, but it's part of the groundwork that the prosecution is laying here. Without Gina's body, I mean, they've got so much to prove. So along with calling Bill, the prosecution also calls Bill's friend Robin, a girl that was at the lake house with Bill that night.

And Robin tells a very similar story to Bill that despite what Steve told police, she never saw or heard Gina while she was there. But Robin says she did see Steve walk by the bottom of the stairs when he was talking to them. And he was shirtless and wiping himself off with a blue towel. Like maybe the blue towel that had his scent on it that had blood on it. Yeah. Now, just like with a lot of Bill's testimony, Robbins isn't particularly shocking, but

it keeps raising more questions. Like if Steve has nothing to hide, why would he lie to police about things that happened that night? Why say your friend and the girl he brought over had a conversation with her? Why leave out this weird part about you wiping something off with a blue towel? One by one, volunteer searchers, police officers, and many others take the stand steadily hammering away at Steve's credibility. John Preston is allowed to testify about his search with harass the second, that beautiful

German shepherd. And this actually sets another legal precedent in Virginia for allowing dog evidence to be presented in court. I love it. And honestly, like we know that in reality, trials are nothing like what we see on TV, but the longer this trial goes on, the more intense it gets all the way up to the very last day of testimony. The prosecution calls their forensic expert to take the stand and walk the court through

the physical evidence like the blood and the hair. According to the trial transcripts, their witness explains that blood stains from multiple places match Gina's blood type. The blood in the trunk of the car, on the mattock, at the lake house, on the golf cleat, it's all type O. They also confirm that the head hairs are similar to Gina's, similar being as clear as they can get in 1980. And even though they don't have any of Gina's pubic hair, because again, they don't have her body, they do have Steve's as a sample, and his pubic hair is not similar to the one

on the golf cleat. Finally, the prosecution calls their last witness. His name is Bill Cranwell, and he's a pretty upstanding figure in the area who commands a lot of respect. And right away, the whole courtroom is on tender hooks, trying to figure out what the heck this guy could possibly have anything to do with this case. Why is he here? Right, that's when you stand to attention at that point, right?

So Bill takes the stand, and the prosecution asks a critical question. When you saw Steve two days after Gina Hall vanished, what did Steve ask you to ask your brother? Now, again, this is a small community, so the jury already knows that Bill Cranwell's brother is an attorney. And Bill answers, quote, he asked me, when you see your brother, ask him if there's anything they can do to me if they don't find her body. End quote.

What? Yes. So I just want to point out that he says body, and she's only been missing for, what, two days at this point? Two days, yeah. The defense presses Bill on that very thing, and he holds firm. Even before Gina Hall was believed to be dead, just two days into her being a missing person. Steve referenced her body, not her.

Yeah, he's talking about her like she was already dead. Her remains 100%. The whole courtroom is blown away, and this part will blow your mind. Even Steve's own lawyers are freaking out, because according to Under the Trestle, he never told his own lawyers about any of this during trial prep. So they were totally blindsided by this. On December 16, 1980, the jury goes into deliberation. It takes them two hours to reach a verdict.

They find Stephen Eprely guilty of the first degree murder of Gina Hall, and the next day he's sentenced to life in prison. To this day, over 40 years after she disappeared on a warm summer night, Gina Hall's body has never been found. Steve is in his late 60s, still in prison despite numerous appeals and parole applications, and he continues to maintain his innocence. On the other side, Gina's older sister, Delana, remains a fierce advocate for Gina's memory. She's undertaken her own investigation and reached her own conclusions about what she

really thinks happened to Gina. Delana believes that Gina did not leave the Blacksburg Marriott with Steve Eprely on her own free will. Instead, she believes that Gina was abducted. According to Marty Gordon's reporting in the Radford News Journal, Delana got access to what sounds like the police's case files, and she found statements from two women who say that they were at the Marriott nightclub on the night that Gina disappeared. And the women claim that they saw her being bothered to the point that Gina actually came

over to their table to get away. So Delana believes that these women's accounts and the broken door poll that I told you about earlier, she thinks that those together tell a much different story than what's been officially reported. Earlier this year, in the summer of 2020, there actually may have been a breakthrough because Delana also believes that she found some of Gina's remains with the help of a research scientist named Arpod Voss and his special invention. But wait, is this the guy from the Brandy Hall case, like the fingernail guy?

Yes, it's the exact same guy. So if you're new to the show, go back and listen to the Brandy Hall case because I have a feeling, I don't know, this guy's popping up in more and more of these true crime cases. He basically has this invention called the Inquisitor, which he claims can supposedly pick out a specific person's DNA, even if they've been buried for ages. So like we touched on in the other episode, Arpod's got a ton of credentials in research and forensic science. So he's not just some random dude walking off the street with something he made in his

garage. With a gizmo or something. Yeah, and he did manage to get his machine patented. But there's a ton of controversy online around whether or not this thing is legit. Blog posts I read touch on the lack of peer-reviewed testing, among other things. And Arpod himself is pretty cagey about how exactly it works. So using this invention thing, he and Delana supposedly found part of one of Gina's bones out at a place where Stephen Eberly liked to hunt.

As far as I could tell in my research, though, Delana hasn't yet taken the material to a lab to actually get tested for a DNA match. So confirm that it was Gina. Exactly. So until there's confirmation from law enforcement and or like independent testing from a reputable facility, all I can say is I don't know what they found. I do, however, share in Delana's hope that one day the full truth will come out. And that finally, Gina might be laid to rest.

We've gone by the official records from newspapers and police reports and court transcripts to tell you Gina's story. But if you want to know Delana's side, she's actually written a book about it called The Miraculous Journey A Day Made in Heaven, and you can find it on her website, themiraculousjourney.com. If you want to see pictures and our source material for this episode, you can find all of that on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with another episode.

Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production, so what do you think Chuck, do you approve?