Crime Junkie - WANTED: Monsters of Ohio Part 1

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

In the 1980s something strange was going on in Ohio. Almost a dozen young girls were kidnapped and murdered, many of the killers still unknown to this day. And it all started in June of 1980 with the case of Asenath Dukat.****All ad-sales profits from this episode are being donated to the NAACPTo learn more check out these podcasts:1619 (New York Times)About RaceCode Switch (NPR)Intersectionality Matters! hosted by Kimberlé CrenshawMomentum: A Race Forward PodcastPod For The Cause (from The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights)Pod Save the People (Crooked Media)Seeing WhiteFor 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/wanted-monsters-ohio-part-1/ 

We started Crime Junkie to tell the stories of people whose voices were tragically taken away from them. We also tell the stories of people whose cases have gone cold and are often left behind by the media because they are people of color. No voice should be silenced as long as you are alive on this planet. And we stand in solidarity with the black community. Black lives matter. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever.

Crime Junkie will be donating all ad sales profits from the next two episodes to the NAACP as part of our continued work to make sure black voices are heard. For information and resources on where to donate and to learn more, visit our show notes. As storytellers with the platform, we will continue to shine a light on injustice and give a voice to the voiceless. We are taking the next few moments of silence to honor George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the countless other black lives, including black trans individuals, that have been senselessly murdered due to their race and their orientation.

For those of you that have seen our live show, you'll know that I covered an Arizona case that prior to my research, I had never heard of. I figured, you know, this will be a nice little mini-episode, and then it spiraled into one of the twistiest, turniest cases that we have ever covered. This is that all over again. It's a case that I'd never heard of until it was suggested to me. The deeper I dug, the more I realized that I had stepped into something much, much bigger. So I guess I'll start the story for you the same way it started for me, by telling you

about the case of a Zenith Ducat. In 1980, a Zenith Ducat was a spunky little third grader. Her friends and family all called her Sine, and according to the profile of her done by Steve Berry in the Columbus Dispatch back in 81, Sine was one of five kids and a true tomboy. Now, Steve gives little facts about her sprinkled throughout the piece, but the one that stood out to me the most was a line that said, you know, she wasn't perfect, that she had trouble with spelling and sometimes could be a little bit too boisterous, and I immediately could

see myself in this little girl. And it could have been her boisterousness that contributed to her entire third grade class getting so rowdy and talkative that the entire class got held 10 minutes after the dismissal bell on June 3, 1980. But I mean, who can blame them? They were in their next to last week of school before summer break, and on that sunny day, as an eight year old, it would be painful to sit in a classroom. So when her class finally gets let out at 3.10 that afternoon, Sine said goodbye to her

teacher and her classmates. And she made the trek home with some school papers and an umbrella in tow. So was she walking or did you take the bus? So Sine walked home. A lot of kids walked home back then. I mean, she only lived like 0.9 miles away from school. And this was a small town, middle America, Ohio, and more specifically, this was Upper Arlington, which is a suburb outside of Columbus.

It's a like small, happy, affluent little area, and it was part of kids normal routine to just walk home. And depending on how much Sine hustled or how much she got distracted talking to friends along the way, the walk would only take her like 20 or 30 minutes max. So at 3.20, when she isn't home, it's normal. By 3.30, it's a little weird, but not the end of the world. However, when 3.45 hits, her mom, Martha knew something was terribly wrong. And that's how much of a routine they had.

And despite how outgoing Sine might have been, she was reliable. So reliable that when she was 15 minutes past due, Martha knew in her gut, something was up. Now she worried in silence for a little while, probably peeking out of the front window waiting for Sine to walk down Malvern Road any second. But as 4 o'clock came, she couldn't wait anymore. She called her husband, Sine's dad, Alex, at work to tell him that she never made it home and that he needed to come home and help look for her.

But all she got was his voicemail machine. She left a worried message for Alex and then wasted no time getting in her car and driving to the elementary school just up the street to see if maybe by some miracle she had just gotten held up there. But when she gets to the school, her worst fears are confirmed. Her teacher hadn't seen her since she was dismissed at 310. And her teacher told NBC4 reporters that even she knew something was wrong in that moment. And when she went home, she spent the rest of the night waiting by the phone, hoping

that someone would call about her student Sine saying that she had been found. But that call never came for her teacher. Now if Sine were around, Martha would have seen her when she made the drive to and from school. Even their house on Malvern Road, it's just a right turn onto Waltham Road and then a left onto Barrington Road to get to the school. But there was no sign of her daughter on the trip to the school or back home. But that's not to say that the roads and sidewalks were desolate.

So June 3rd was a Tuesday and actually polls were open for primary elections. There were two voting spots along this very short, like literally less than a mile trip between Sine's school and home. So with two like voting areas, there are lots of people coming and going to vote. So do you think that that was bringing people from like outside of the neighborhoods to that area? Like it seems like it would pull a lot of people that might not usually be there. You know, I don't have any statistics on the radius that each polling location served.

So this is totally me making assumptions. But I don't think that you'd get a lot of strangers coming to the area for voting. I mean, for one, voting doesn't tend to draw a real shady crowd. And second, the fact that we have two polling locations within a mile of each other makes me think that there were plenty of places to vote. And even more than that, if voting in Ohio in 1980 works anywhere close to the way it does for me in Indiana present day, like I get assigned a specific location that I have to go to based on my address.

So I don't think that there would have been a lot of randoms from outside the immediate area there to vote. Yeah, I guess that's a good point. So without seeing her daughter anywhere on the ride to and from school, the first thing her mom does when she gets home is she phones 911 to report seeing missing. This is at 4.34 p.m. and an officer is dispatched to the home right away. Now right around the same time, Alex was getting Martha's message and he rushed home to the nightmare that was unfolding.

Word was spreading quickly around this small town and as police searched, so did family and friends. According to a homicide case summary report, even Sine's sister got on her bike and was driving up and down the main street, side streets, little service roads near their house. But no matter how many trees they look under, no matter how many roads were driven, no one saw any sign of a scenic until 7.26 p.m. when a patrolman and two other searchers found her. Almost two minutes later, before police had even had a chance to confirm that it was Sine

and to notify the family, Alex and Martha actually heard over their police scanner, which they had had for a long time, that a body had been found and they knew immediately that they would never see their baby again. Oh my God. As soon as Alex hears this, he ran from his home to the area called out on the police scanner and the scene he was faced with is something no parent should ever have to see. His daughter was found on her back in a small culvert in about four inches of water. It appeared as though the killer had tried to strangle her because she had what looked

almost like handprints on her neck, but ultimately they found that it was a 20 pound rock that had been taken from the very area that she was found in and that was used to crush her skull. And though she had been found fully clothed, it's believed that she had been raped. So where did they end up finding her? Well, this is where this case gets really complicated. They found her just a block from her own home, almost right on the route that she would have walked home from school and here, honestly, the best way to describe this to you so you

can understand how unbelievable this is is to show you a map and I'm going to put this on our blog post too for people, but I made this little like drawing like on Google Maps that shows you where her school was and where her home was. You can see those are each marked with a black X and then I marked the path that she would have taken home in black two and the red X is where her body was found. Okay, I'm looking at the map now and I guess just take me back a little bit. It seems so unlikely that they wouldn't have found her. Her family started looking for her around four.

She was found right before 7.30 and during that time, police and family and friends and the community were looking everywhere. That place had to have been covered, right? I mean, it's literally almost across the street from her house. Yeah. That's the thing, she was found in a culvert, which I don't know if that word is common for international listeners, but a culvert is literally like a little tunnel carrying a stream or an open drain that runs under a road or a railroad.

Now, this culvert was actually underneath a service road. So not like a main road that was accessible to everyone in their cars at the time. There's this group who runs a website called the Long Walk Home and this group is actually out of Upper Arlington and they're literally the only people who have kept seeing the story alive. They've requested so many records and published everything they know about what happened on that day on their website, which we'll link out to on ours, but on it, they actually have a picture of the area where her body was found back from 1980 and I want to show it this

to you as well because I think it's important so you can see from that picture that the tunnel opening is really wide. I think an adult and a child could both fit in there easily. And I say that because from the Homicide Summary Report, it says that her body was found right at the base of it, meaning that I don't think it was hidden at all. Right. So it'd just be like at the opening of the sort of tunnel under a bridge, right? Exactly.

Well, and you said that this was a service road that wasn't like super accessible. So maybe just no one passed by during those three hours that they were searching for her. Oh, but they did. So many people did. And when you piece together the timeline of exactly who was there and when and the evidence found nearby, this case turns into an even bigger mystery. So at the time of the Sinus murder in 1980, there's this culvert that runs under the service road where she's found.

And in the same direction that the culvert opened to, there was this big open field that led to a little like three foot stone wall. Now obviously as soon as they find Sine, they expand out to look for any other clues, maybe things that belong to her, things that belong to her killer, anything. And they actually found some interesting things near that stone wall. Now I don't know what you're picturing, but let me show you one of the crime scene photos reposted by the long walk home. I mean, I'm not sure what I expected when you said a stone wall, but that is exactly

what it is. But it's also completely kind of blocked off by a really gorgeous tree and a ton of like ground covering and shrubs and bushes and stuff like that. So it's not, you can't even really see the wall from this picture that much. Right. So you can see that maybe in an open field, like this might be an area that could give you some privacy. Well, according to some hand drawing diagrams by police, here's what they find.

So scatter kind of randomly in the field between the wall and the culvert where she's found are some of Sine's school papers. And right at the wall, like tucked up real close, they find her umbrella. Now as far as I can tell, that's everything she left school with that afternoon. Now they also find some other items which didn't belong to her, some beer bottles, some other random papers not to believe to belong to her, and even a golf ball and a rubber ball. I mean, it's great that they found those things, but this is a pretty open field. Like that could mean absolutely nothing and be completely random, right?

True, but I mean, you know as well as I do that in a murder investigation or at least like a halfway decent one, you collect everything because you have no idea what's going to be important later. So near that same wall where her umbrella was found, police also note some footprints in mud. According to the legend that police made on the side of the wall that's facing the culvert, there were footprints about one foot and seven inches from the wall. And there are footprints on the other side of the wall, like right up against it.

So like someone climbed over the wall? That's what I'm thinking because they find even more footprints leading away from the wall on that other side. Now it's interesting because at first you're like, boom, like this is our guy, let's get some mold of these prints, this is how he got away. But they also note on one of their maps, there was a set of bike tracks. Now they don't give any details about the tracks specifically, like how many, how long, what direction was it traveling in, but it was found between the wall and the culvert.

I guess I'm going to come back to like all the random items that they found between the culvert and the wall, like the bike tracks could be anything, just someone like cutting through as a shortcut. I understand that they have to, you know, look into everything, but I personally am way more interested to find out more about these footprints. Yeah. I mean, again, this is early stages. We're talking like within minutes and hours of a scene, it's being found and no one knows

what this all means yet. All they know is they have to secure the scene as best as they can and collect as much evidence as they can. Now, once police have secured the scene, their immediate concern is finding any and all witnesses. And remember, this is voting day. There was an abnormal amount of people out and about walking to and from the voting stations. And this is where things get really wonky. So the service road that runs over the culvert where Cini was found, that road leads right

to First Community Village, which is like a retirement home. Now, First Community Village was one of the two voting sites that we talked about along her route home. And many people had to walk that service road. They couldn't drive it at the time like it wasn't available to cars, but lots of people walked right over that service road, right over the culvert to get to and from the voting station. In fact, one witness came forward who used that exact path to vote that day.

And she says that sometime between 340 and 350, she was walking back from the polls, passing over the service road to get to the main road. And that main road is that Waltham Road. And this woman says she actually stopped, went down into the culvert to pick up a rock to take home as a paperweight or something. And at this time, she sees nothing. And I mean, she is right down in the area where Asina's body would later be found. So it's literally impossible that she would have missed this little girl's body.

But in case there's any doubt, there are more stories like this. So when Sini's dad was rushing home after he learned that she was missing, he too passed right over the culvert and didn't see anything. Now you would assume like he's on high alert. Like if I were walking home, like knowing my daughter's not there, I kind of be looking your eyes would be peeled. Yeah, I kind of be like looking every which way, hoping that she was hiding or playing or lost track of time.

Now her dad's coming home at like 440. So nothing's in the culvert at let's call it 345 when that voter got her rock. Nothing's in the culvert when dad passes over it at 440. And then remember when Sini's sister went out looking for her on her bike. Well, she's out looking around at 530 and she too went on that service road passed right over the culvert when she was specifically looking for her sister. So she had to have been placed there sometime between 530 and 726 when she was found. Well, you'll see the window actually gets even smaller than that.

As police work tirelessly to create a timeline of events for Sini's last movements, a clearer picture starts to emerge, though clear doesn't mean less complicated. So they know that Sini and her class were held back and didn't leave until 310 p.m. Now there's a small road that the school is off of and the majority of her walk would have been on Waltham Road, which runs southwest all the way to Melbourne Road, which is what she lives on. So at 315, a classmate of Sini sees her walking in the direction of her home, just a couple of blocks from the school.

Then within a few minutes, another classmate sees her one to two blocks farther down the road. So sometime between 315 and 320 was the last time that she was seen. And though Sini wasn't seen after that, the things that other witnesses saw are just as important to the timeline. So the next day on June 4th, police put out a crime bulletin to everyone in Upper Arlington looking for anyone who might have seen something. So Brett, I'll have you read the bulletin that they put out.

Okay, so the bulletin says, Dear motorist, thank you for accepting this form. We are providing you with this form, assuming that you may travel this street, Waltham, or area regularly to and from work or home. On Tuesday, June 3rd, 1980, between 3 and 4 p.m., an eight-year-old white female four feet four inches tall slim billed with long dark brown hair, wearing a white pullover short sleeve shirt, pink jeans, wearing white sandals and carrying a red and white umbrella was fatally beaten. The suspect may be a male, white, 20 years old, six feet tall slim billed wearing a white

short sleeve shirt, dark trousers with medium length brown hair. Suspect may have been riding a red bike. The crime probably occurred on or near Waltham between Cambridge and Riverside Drive. Perhaps you or some other motorist may have seen the victim and or the suspect as you were driving through. It is possible the suspect may have given the victim a ride on his bike. If you saw anything that would assist in our investigation, please call the upper Arlington Police Department 457-5080 extension 206 or 207 with your information.

All information will be handled confidentially. So following this bulletin, people actually do come forward with a few sightings of what kind of sounds like the same young man spotted all around this small area between senior school and where she was found during the day in question. Now from what we gather, he may be in his late teens or early twenties and most reports say that he had dark hair and was wearing a white shirt. Now there's a sighting of this person as early as 210 on that afternoon on Waltham Road. But according to the homicide summary, the sightings really start picking up around the

same time seen he was let out of school. So at 310, a woman saw this man walking into the field where all of that stuff was later found. When she looks again just five minutes later though, she doesn't see him. Then at 320, a man driving sees a white guy with dark glasses carrying what he believed to be a limp girl into someone's yard on Malvern Road. Remember, that's the street that her house was on and it was just across the street from where she was found.

Five minutes after this, another witness says that they see a guy carrying a child running on Tremont Road, which is actually five streets up from Malvern and back in the direction of the school. Now after this initial flurry, it seems that sightings of the man stop. But we do get more information about what was going on in the area near the culvert between this and when she was found. So between 430 and 510, multiple people see a guy in the field playing with his dog. Now I don't think anyone thought this guy had something to do with it, but it's important

to note because if somebody's in the field between where her belongings were found and where her body was found, you'd assume that if something was happening there, he would have seen it. Then at 620, another witness sees a local lady with her son who's riding his big wheel across the culvert. So now our window is just an hour and six minutes. But not even that because where there aren't necessarily witness accounts of anything weird being seen during that window, police told reporters back in the day that they created

a timeline that had someone in or around the area almost every five minutes and the fact that they didn't see anything is almost just as important as the accounts of what people did see. Yeah, and I mean, it means the window is super small and somehow our killer must have either been watching or known when exactly they could leave her there. So it had to have been like really intentional. They wanted her to be found there, you know, otherwise there had to have been like a thousand other places she could have been left that, you know, didn't have this high level of

traffic that we're seeing in these reports. Yeah, I mean, this guy either planned this and knew the area or he's like the luckiest SOB on the planet. Okay, so I might be reading into this too much or maybe I just missed it. But when I was reading the crime bulletin, like my first thought was, how did they get such a detailed description of a suspect like day one before this bulletin went out? They knew he was about 20, six feet tall, slim, the length and color of his hair. Like they knew the color of the clothes that he was wearing and the bike that he may have

been riding. Like how did they have that much to go off of before this call out for witnesses? So this is where a 40 year old cold case gets a little murky. So there is no specific information about exactly when each witness comes forward. The homicide summary report is very detailed about what they saw and when they saw it, but not like when they brought that to police. But there is a theory about where this description came from. And it wasn't actually even from Asinith's case.

So almost a month before Asinith was murdered, there was another attack on a young girl. Another elementary school student who went to a school just one and a half miles away from Sine's school. And on May 7th, 1980, she and a friend were walking home from their bus stop. And part of the girl's normal routine was to cut through someone's yard on her way home. So when she makes us to this cut off, this is where she separates from her friend. So on this particular day, she cuts through the yard and she nears some bushes where she is jumped from behind.

She tries to scream for help, but whoever had her begins to choke her until she goes unconscious. And when she wakes up a short time later, she found herself alone in a secluded area, having been severely beaten on her face and the zipper to her jeans pulled down. She gets home as quickly as she could and she calls her mom who's still at work, who I mean, I'm sure is a wreck over this. And when her mom gets home, she has her daughter laid down and she calls the police who were dispatched to her home with medics.

Now this incident report has the type of incident or offense listed as attempted rape. So I think it's safe to assume there was some kind of sexual motive behind the attack, though luckily this girl seems to have made it through. Now in her case, both the victim herself and other people were able to provide a description of her assailant and Bert, I'm going to send you what they came up with. Oh my gosh. This description says this guy is between, you know, five, nine and six foot. He's Caucasian.

He's young between like 18 and 20. And it even says he may have had a red bike just like the person described in the crime bulletin. Right. Now, what's super interesting is that all the sightings of this guy, including the one from our victim, put him on a red bike. Now apparently he had passed the girls walking multiple times, like when they were just going home, they just noticed this guy keep going.

So whether he was on the hunt for a victim then or just came across the girls and acted on impulse, we don't know, I mean, these sightings of this guy on a bike makes the tracks where Cini was found kind of credible, right? I mean, possibly, but then do the footprints mean nothing? I mean, it was a question no one really knew how to answer. A couple of witnesses do mention a red bike in Cini's case too, but the later and later the witness statements come in, the more you have to wonder if they were influenced by other reports.

You know what I mean? Yeah. So not a lot happened after this May 7th attack. And listen, there was barely any information out about the Cini Ducot case until the people at the Long Walk Home published some of the records, and that was a murder case. So I don't know if there was a thorough investigation into this attack and there probably isn't even much still around on it, but if I were Cini's parents, I kind of just be furious, like could someone have looked harder after May 7th, searched farther, done anything differently to find

that man who attacked the girl on May 7th, and maybe the June 3rd thing would have never happened. Now, obviously, the police took note of the similarities right away and they republished the sketch of this man made from the May 7th attack in connection with a Cini's case. And the public was taking notice too. I mean, both girls were within a year and age, same hair color. It happened when they were walking home from school, and that was within just a couple of miles of one another.

I mean, this was the same guy. It had to be. But even with the description, the sketches, the previous attack, days were turning into weeks, and the public was feeling a Cini's killer slip through their fingers. According to an archived article from United Press International, authorities had two profiles created for the perp. And here, Brett, I'm going to have you read an excerpt from UPI. Quote,

The reports agree that the suspect probably is a white male, a high school graduate with no criminal record, who is 22 to 27 years old at the time of the crime and whose employment requires little skill. The suspect is believed to be a casual drinker who has experienced failures with women, employment or finances, someone who lacks self-esteem and someone who seeks out younger women because of an inability to handle adult relationships. Both profiles say the man probably was not a drifter and most likely lived or worked in the area, though officials believe he may have left after the crime.

End quote. So everyone was on edge looking for somebody who fit this profile, somebody who fit the sketches. I mean, my God, anyone who rode a red bike at this point. And it was during this heightened state of fear that another person was attacked on June 28th, 1980. Now this victim was older, 24 at the time, and she was grabbed from behind in the parking lot of a supermarket.

Now she was much more of a match for this guy than an eight year old would have been. And so she puts up a fight and people take notice and run to help her. When they did, she said that her attacker took off on a bike. Now she noted that her attacker looked a lot like the sketch in Cini's case, but she said that the guy that attacked her was wearing glasses. But didn't a witness in Cini's case say that the guy they saw was wearing glasses too though? Yeah. So there was one witness who mentioned glasses.

And so at this point, police put out another sketch, which is exactly the same as the one before, but they slapped some like dark rimmed glasses on the figure in hopes that it might like help someone recognize him since clearly this guy isn't stopping. So after three seemingly related attacks in less than two months, no one thought the tear was going to end until the perpetrator was caught. But time started to pass and there were no more attacks in Upper Arlington. Residents of the small town might have started to breathe easier, but not Cini's family. They still had no idea who took their baby from them and they longed for justice and

they continued to long for justice for years. And over those years, it seemed at least to the public that nothing was really happening and police were completely at a dead end. I know this was back in 1980, but was there any like physical evidence that was found at the scene that could help? Nothing that was super useful at the time. Sergeant French, who was in charge of the investigation in the early years, gave a more detailed about the physical evidence in a letter that he wrote to another department

on March 24th of 1983. He said that there were no useful fingerprints on any of the items they found that they knew belonged to Cini and no prints were able to be recovered from the rock used to kill her. A forensic exam, though, of her body did provide a little more detail. They conclusively determined, based on vaginal trauma, that she had been raped, though there wasn't any sperm or semen that was actually present, which I find kind of interesting for the 80s. I mean, yeah, but it could mean that, you know, he used a foreign object or he used

a condom or something. Right. But it was interesting, though, because in this letter, the detective points out that they did find a small amount of urine that didn't belong to Cini that was like mixed in with her blood, though it doesn't specify where in or around her body the urine was found. And it's weird because obviously they didn't determine this through DNA testing. The letter just says, quote, this was determined by the fact that the urine was alkaline in

nature, which is not normal, end quote. But they did find a single brown Caucasian pubic hair in her groin. And this wasn't mentioned in the letter, but it was mentioned in that summary report I referenced earlier. They also found grass in her underwear, which might not mean anything to you, but to me, this is something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. So in the early days of the crime, the theory police had was that Cini was snatched during her walk home, moved off of the busy road into a more secluded area where she was likely

choked unconscious and sexually assaulted. Now this is very much in line with the previous attack on the little girl a month before. It fit with the perps MO. It made sense of why all of her stuff was found in that field and around that stone wall and the wall and the shrubbery around it would have provided like a great deal of privacy. Yeah, but they've confirmed that people were in or around that field, what, like every five minutes for the three hours before she was found. Exactly.

It doesn't work. So somewhere along the line, police revised their theory and by 1983, when Detective French is writing this letter, he says that now their working theory is that quote, she was abducted in a motor vehicle near the area where she was last seen walking and possibly by someone she knew. She was taken to an unknown location where she was raped. Subject then returned her to the area near her home where we think he killed her on impulse. This is all in speculation on our part as we cannot substantiate any of it with evidence.

End quote. I mean, he says it himself. It's just speculation. But honestly, I kind of get it. Like you had so many people around that day in that area. And if no one saw a thing again for hours while this girl was missing and being brutalized, you have to imagine she was taken somewhere else. Yeah, but I guess if that is the working theory, and I totally get it for all the reasons you

just said, but why risk taking her right back to the area where she went missing from that was so heavily trafficked and where police and family and friends are already like actively looking for her. I mean, right, but let's look at the MO of the other girl before back in May, you know, she was moved from where she was taken but still close enough to make her way home on her own. Maybe he was planning on letting Cine live. Like even the letter says that the detectives think that he killed her on impulse like the

rock was there. It's not like he brought it with him and planned to do this. I mean, maybe she was knocked out but coming to when he left her and, you know, this guy already knew that this other girl had identified him or had a great working description of him and he couldn't let it happen again. So I actually completely agree with you, but here's the thing that's been keeping me up at night. The grass in her underwear, or specifically the report says her undergarments.

Here, I'm just gonna have you read it directly because I do think this is super important, even though I'm harping on it a ton. So the report says, quote, she was fully clothed, although there were indications that her pants had been down at one time and then pulled back up. It was observed that the pants were unbuttoned and there was grass in her undergarments. End quote. So how does the grass get there? If you abduct a girl and take her somewhere else to do unspeakable things to her, I mean,

you don't choose to do that at an outdoor location. I mean, the thought process is right, like you're doing it somewhere private, a van, a house, whatever. Right. Right. My only thought would be, again, like we don't know how big this guy is. We don't know how strong he is. We don't know, you know, how able he is to maybe maneuver the quote unquote dead weight

of a little girl. Is there a chance that he could be dragging her through the field and that's how it got in there? To me, that only makes sense if he's dragging her through the field naked. Like again, it's not just like in her pants, it's like in her undergarments. And that was part of the whole reason they thought that the attack, I think, happened out in the open before. Like she was nude laying in the grass and then it got stuck there, but I'm not a hundred

percent sure. And I've never seen an explanation offered, but the more I ventured off the path of traditional media in this case, the more I started reading and seeing posts and comments and forums from people who actually knew Cini, who lived in the area. There was actually a place where her murder could have happened. That kind of makes all of this makes sense. And even more shocking, it seems that the locals believe they know exactly where. And it seems the locals believe they know exactly who killed her as well.

So when I was on the website for the long walk home, I saw police photographs of an area right near the crime scene. Now on the website, it's just titled Frankenstein's Cave with not much explanation as to why it's being featured so prominently in the pictures. So Brett, I'm going to have you pull up the map of the area again. So you can see the service road right near where Cini was found. The next road is Route 33, which is a pretty major street. Well, right before Route 33, there's this cave that passes underneath the road and kind

of dumps you out on the other side. So I was reading a tap talk forum and people who claim to have known Cini say that they would go there all the time and to play. Now this area was no secret to adults. And I would have to assume that it was searched, but maybe there's some significance. I mean, it is so close. Maybe whoever took Cini used it. If not to commit all their crimes in secret, maybe it could have just been used to get

her in and out of that area quickly and in a way that was unseen. Right, like a passageway. Exactly. So I couldn't figure out why this Frankenstein's Cave was so important until I read back through the Homicide Summary Report and through more of those online forums. Because apparently anyone who lives in town knows that there were two suspects. Suspects police had their eye on from day one of the investigation. And one of those suspects was known to go to Frankenstein's Cave to do drugs.

I'm sorry. What? We've been talking about this case that's 40 years old and you're telling me that they've had suspects since day one? I was just as surprised as you and apparently they were pretty good suspects. Now here's the thing, though both of these men's names became well known within the community for possibly being connected to Cini's death, neither of them have been officially charged or connected in any way.

So for that reason, I'm going to use alternate names for them. The first person I'm going to talk about, we're going to call Brad. So Brad actually raises eyebrows for police within the very early days of the investigation because of an anonymous tip. The tipster said that the very night Cini was murdered on June 3rd, he was out with friends at a bar and this guy was just like crying and kind of rambling on about how he was afraid to go home because they're going to be after him. When they started looking at this guy closely, this anonymous tip was looking promising because

the man fit the age range, kind of the general description, though comparing him to the sketch is a little iffy at best to me, but I mean, also it's a sketch, you know. So anyway, he also had a red bike, which people say that he stopped riding after that first attack in May and he lived very, very close to both abduction sites. Now shortly after Cini's murder, this guy Brad left the area and was later tracked down in Willoughby, Ohio. Now before I tell you the next part, I have to mention that this particular suspect had a history of mental illness.

He was unstable and said to be schizophrenic. So on June 6th, police in Willoughby noticed this stranded car, so they go to help, but when they get near the car, the guy inside starts freaking out, like won't open the doors, won't open the windows, won't talk to police. He keeps trying to drive away, even though his car is clearly stuck and not working. And when he feels like he's totally backed into a corner, he pulls out a hypodermic needle and starts stabbing himself in the groin, just over and over and over again. Oh my God, why?

No one knows. Was it something in his conscious or subconscious wanting to hurt the part of him that he thinks made him hurt someone else or was he truly just a very disturbed young man who took a local tragedy and latched on to it? I don't know. Police in Upper Arlington ended up talking to him and even getting warrants and searching his home. They ended up collecting like a decent amount of stuff, like took blood samples, sent that

off to the FBI, but that was legit back in June of 1980, again, days after Cini was found. He ended up serving time for charges unrelated to Cini and then ultimately ended up taking his own life in 1984. So is that why this case never went anywhere? Like the person who looked best for it died? So there's not enough to officially close it, but also no reason to really look at anybody else? Well, not exactly, because before he even died, they were already looking at a second

possible person of interest. Just in four months after Cini was murdered, there was a nearby attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl, and this story is bananas and a reminder that we need to always be looking out for ourselves, but to also stay alert and look out for those around you. So there's this 13-year-old girl who's riding her bike along the street, a car passes her and the guy inside kind of looks at her, but the car doesn't like stop right away. What this guy does is he drives further ahead to a point where the road kind of like turns so she can't see that he's stopping his car.

He gets the car in a position where the end is facing the direction of the girl, and he waits for her to come around the road on her bike. When she does, he rips her off her bike and tries to pull her into a wooded area. And three women actually see this and these heroes rush to this girl's rescue. No lie, I had chills when I was writing that, I had chills when I'm just saying it. These savvy women not only save her, but they also write down the license plate of this piece of scum so police are able to make an arrest. This guy is obviously caught, goes to trial, he's convicted of this and there wasn't much

of a defense. This girl ID'd him in court. But again, I'm going to use a fake name here because he hasn't been openly named by police in relation to Sinead's case, so I'm going to call him Carl. Carl was actually already on police's list of names in a Sinead's case before this abduction ever even happened. How? Well, there was a creepy incident where he was smiling strangely at a lady like in late

May and he passed her a couple of times on a bike. So this incident put him on the radar for the May 7th attack, which inevitably put him on the list for Sinead's case, though it's not like he was at the top yet. But by now, after this September attack and subsequent conviction, he looked bad and he too fit the profile, had a red bike and actually looked a lot more like the sketch than Brad did. Did he live nearby too? He did and are you ready for things to get even stranger?

Oh no. He actually lived just like a couple of houses away from Brad. They went to the same school, I mean they surely knew one another, which is just a little bit bizarre. Yeah. Now the police reports on their interview with Carl were put into the public record and his story is weird. So the day Sinead goes missing and is murdered, he has some bizarre story about just like

fishing all day and catching frogs, but the timeline is super loosey-goosey and all his parents can say is that he's home by 6 p.m. Now police get him to come take a polygraph, but his polygraph is weird, like the only way he'll agree to take it is if they only ask him things about his day and not anything about Sinead because he says, you know, he's just super upset by the whole event, like there's no way that the machine wouldn't go off because not because he did anything, he says, but because he's just so emotional about the whole thing. So I'm sorry.

What? I know. I'd never heard this before and the police actually agree, which to me seems like a huge waste of time because he's the only person ever polygraphed where police don't ask if he had something to do with the murder, like directly. And they say he passes, except 10 years later, some people from the Pennsylvania State Police come in to look at the case and when they see the polygraph, they're like, oh no, whoever told you that this guy passed had it all wrong, this guy failed for show.

And you know, the police are obviously like baffled, they've been operating for 10 years thinking this guy told them the truth. So they send the results off to the FBI for a second opinion or technically a third opinion and the FBI agrees. They're like, yeah, this guy is not telling you the truth about where he was that day. And again, those are like softball questions. Exactly. So do they go back to him?

I'm sure they tried, but I don't know what happened. He was only in prison for a little less than three years for that abduction attempt, which can we please just talk about how absurd that is for a second? I mean, don't get me started. To me, this is clear behavior of something more, an eventual escalation. It's not the first or last time we'll ever see behavior like that, like, yeah, I don't know why. Oh, I mean, I get, I get it.

Like you can't, you don't want to put people in jail forever for like attempting something people can change. It's like the whole idea. But when you have someone who's so clearly like abducting children, that's never going to lead to anything good. And I probably should never be out among young children in regular society. And coming back to escalation, like, why do we have to see children get murdered in order to take guys like this off the street?

Yeah, there's got to be like a better way, especially when it comes to crimes against children to be more preventative and to take these like acts of abduction, attempted abduction more seriously so they don't escalate into something bigger. Right. Okay. So it's 40 years later now. Where do things stand? Well, Carl is still alive.

And last I could find living in Columbus. But that's not the big shocker. I put off writing this episode for weeks because I've heard that there was a strange break in the case and I was trying to get confirmation from police. But every attempt I made to contact the department or the POI through the website and every call that I made to Lieutenant Patrick wasn't returned. So full disclosure, what I'm about to tell you has purportedly been substantiated by police to those who run the long walk at home website, but I didn't get it confirmed with

my own ears and therefore can't actually speak to the authenticity. But it's worth noting. So apparently there is a theory that both Brad and Carl could be involved. Wait, what? Because my mind is blown. You never mentioned the idea that not only could this be two suspects, but these guys could have been working together. No one has mentioned it up until this point.

But it's interesting because there were some small discrepancies in some of the witness sightings that this would actually explain. Like there were sightings that I didn't mention because it put the same guy wearing kind of the same thing in different areas at the same time. And sometimes the witnesses said the guy looked very white. And other times they said he had a slightly darker, maybe Mediterranean look. And sometimes there were even different heights and weights that would come up. And people said they wore their hair differently.

And if there were two guys, that would explain all of this. But more importantly than just the idea, it could explain a lot. The Long Walk Home website says that police told them they have scientific proof that puts Brad at Sine's crime scene and scientific proof that puts Carl at the May 7th attack. What? Why hadn't they been arrested? Well, so Brad is the one who can be linked to Sine and he is deceased. And the statute of limitations is actually up on the May 7th attack.

I guess I'm confused. Why wouldn't law enforcement come out with this information sooner? This seems like a huge win to be able to link these men to these open cases. I don't totally know. Again, the Long Walk Home site implies that they are still trying to work to link Carl to Sine's crime scene, maybe. But this seems like such a huge breakthrough. I mean, I don't know why you're staying so silent about it.

And it makes me think that we don't have all of the answers yet. And there's a piece of the puzzle still missing. And in my gut, I think perhaps the missing piece are the 12 other girls who were murdered in Ohio around the same time with eerie similarities to a Sine Ducott's case. I'm sorry. Did you just say 12? Yeah. So that's the thing about this case.

The more I looked into this one case, the more connections I found to other cases, not just the May attack or the September attack, but to almost a dozen cases in Ohio where girls close to Sine's age went missing and were murdered under eerily similar circumstances. And it makes you wonder how many of them are connected or possibly worse. How many predators were preying on young girls in Ohio? If you're in the fan club, you can hear that episode a week early right now. But if not, you'll have to wait until next week to hear about the absolute rabbit hole that I went in looking for multiple Ohio monsters.

If you want to hear the second part to this story, you can join our fan club right now by going to crimejunkiepodcast.com and clicking on the fan club tab for $5. You can hear it next week's episode early and ad free. You get all of our new episodes ad free and we put out an extra full length episode every month along with a ton of audio extras. You can also go to our website to check out photos and maps and sources for this week's episode. And if you're into this case as much as I am, check out the website longwalkhomeua.com

for even more details and pictures on the Sine Ducot case. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with the second part to this story. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?