Criminology - Clark Perry Baldwin

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

Clark Perry Baldwin is a man who has been linked to a number of murders in different states. In this episode, we are discussing a number of murders that are solved, but we have no idea who the victims are, while others remain unsolved. One common thread in these cases is DNA, forensic genealogy, and the potential for that technology to finally close out some of these cases and others. But there's another common thread connecting some of these cases, and that is a man named Clark Perry Baldwin. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss Clark Perry Baldwin. Baldwin was a long-haul trucker who, at times, also drove a taxi. He is currently awaiting trial on murder charges in Tennessee. But, he is believed to be linked to multiple Jane Does, including Bitter Creek Betty and the Sheridan County Jane Doe. We will have to wait to see how his trial progresses and also how technology may link him to other cases. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name-your-price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage matched limited by state law, not available in all states. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 215 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Morf, man. What is going on with you in the sunny state of Florida?

I just got done doing a little bit of swimming, doing my water aerobics and do that. It's part of my, it's part of my Thursday routine when we go to record this. Okay. Out of the water. Okay. I don't mean to laugh. But every time you say water aerobics, I am picturing you with like one of those hair swim caps. Now, I know you don't need that and neither do I, but I can't get that image out of my head, man. It's fun and it's not as bad as doing it out of the water.

So, you know, it refreshens you and then you get out and I'm ready to go for the day. Well, that's all that matters. Hey, let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts. We had Catherine Haynes, Kathy Ann Burns, Nikki Brennis, Whitney Lambert and Stephanie Hanson. So a lot of great new support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, and a lot of those names I recognize, too,

are big supporters on social media. So thank you for that. And anyone that would like to help support criminology on Patreon, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash criminology. All right, buddy, with all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into this week's episode. And basically, we're exploring a mixed bag in terms of case statuses in multiple states. Some of the murders that will touch on are solved, but we have no idea who the victims are,

while others remain unsolved. One common thread in these cases is DNA and forensic genealogy and the potential for that technology to finally close out some of these cases and others. But there's another common thread connecting some of these cases, and that is a man named Clark Perry Baldwin. In March of 1991, the body of 33,000. year old Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall was discovered in the woods in Spring Hill, Tennessee, just off Interstate 65.

She was seven months pregnant, and her unborn baby had also died. She had been strangled to death, and her neck had been injured during the attack. A sperm sample was taken from the panty hose she was wearing. She was still wearing a black miniskirt, but she didn't have on any socks or shoes. She wasn't identified for months until finally a fingerprint match came back, just eight days before her body was found, she had called home to Virginia and told her mom that she was in Tennessee and headed home. The police investigation led authorities to think that Pamela may have been traveling with a semi-truck driver in the days leading up to her death, but police were never able to idea a specific driver or truck connected to Pamela.

A year later, on March 1, 1992 miles away, the body of an unidentified woman was found in southwestern Wyoming, near the Interstate 80 Bitter Creek truck turnout in Sweetwater County, her body had been pushed out of a vehicle, parked on the hilltop. She was nude and had spent weeks lying face down in the snow before being discovered by a female truck driver, Barbara Leverton, who used her CB radio to alert another trucker who called the police. Barbara was sitting at a gas station, drinking coffee, looking out into the distance when she saw what she thought were garbage bags. As she sat and looked, she realized she just couldn't sit there without investigating. So she got closer and that's when she made the grisly discovery.

No more if you and I have talked about this before. To me, this is nightmarish type of stuff because it has an element of, you know, something that we kind of do. every day. You know, you're looking out the window. Maybe while you're in a passenger in a car, or you're walking through the woods, you're hiking. And you see something, okay, your natural inclination may be to want to go check that out. 99. Whatever percent of the time, it's harmless. You look at it, either pick it up and dispose of it or you leave it. But that small percentage where people end up finding, you know, a dead body. I just have no idea what that must be like.

Yeah, and I wonder if Barbara hadn't been curious and gone over to investigate how long those remains would have been there. And the longer they're there, the more chance that there's going to be evidence lost, that kind of stuff. So it was fortunate that she did go check it out. The snow and cold weather had preserved the woman's body. And despite her injuries, her face was in fair. fairly good condition and may have been recognizable to someone that knew her.

Photographs were taken of her face for possible circulation. A pair of pink panties and a pair of sweatpants were found nearby. The woman was believed to be between 24 and 32 years old. Initially, she was believed to be Native American, although now she's thought to be Hispanic. Her death was estimated to have occurred sometime between October 1991 and February 1992. She had been sexually assaulted and her body showed signs of head and neck trauma. Her death was cruel. Though she had been strangled, that didn't seem to kill her. Something sharp, possibly an ice pick, had been shoved up her nose. But ultimately, no cause of

death could be determined. But it was clear that she didn't go peacefully. Some online sources claim that she died from strangulation and others claim that it was from ice pick up her left nostril. Either way, she was put through unimaginable pain by her attacker, a golden ring or wedding band was still on her finger with two tear-shaped stones and she was also still wearing a gold necklace. She had a rose tattoo that investigators were able to trace back to a shop close to the triple T truck stop in Tucson, Arizona. The artist who gave the woman her tattoo recalled that she was a hitchhiker who had been traveling but didn't know anything else about her. He did help narrow down her date of death though.

since he remembered that she had been in his shop in June of 1991. She also had a scar that resembled the C-section scar, making it likely that she was a mother. She was most commonly called Bitter Creek Betty, but also known as Rose Doe. She was buried in Rest Haven Memorial Gardens. At the time when DNA used for law enforcement was in its infancy, all investigators could gather was that

whoever killed Bitter Creek Betty had typo blood. Apparently, her killer had somehow hurt himself while attacking her and left his blood at the crime scene. Early online news reports hinted that her murder had similarities to other crimes in the state of Utah, but which ones exactly are unclear. One thing that jumped out to me was how investigators were able to track this tattoo back to an artist who confirmed that he had done that artwork. So I think that's pretty amazing that they're able to take a tattoo and track that down to a location and a person.

Unfortunately, it didn't lead to her identity. Yeah, I think it's amazing. You know, you and I talk a lot about the technological side of police work. And obviously, we're going to talk about it a lot in this episode as well. But you can't forget about good old-fashioned police work. work. I mean, that still solves a lot of cases. And I think this is a great example of that, you know, circulating a picture of a tattoo, narrowing it down to a certain area and then to a certain shop. It's amazing, really, when you think about it. Yeah, as cool as technology is in

solving these crimes, good old-fashioned legwork and knocking on doors and asking questions still get to the job done a lot of times. Just six weeks later on April 13, 1992, a body was found by workers with the Wyoming Department of Transportation. The woman's body had been left in a ditch near Mile Post 5 in Sheridan County in northern Wyoming, just off Interstate 90. This was about five miles south of the Wyoming-Montana border. Her body was partially mummified and an autopsy revealed that she was 10 weeks pregnant. There were also signs of our previous pregnancy, meaning she could have already had children somewhere waiting for her to come home. Like with Bitter Creek Betty's case, no cause of death could be determined.

But also like Bitter Creek Betty, her body showed signs of head trauma. It wasn't until years later in 2014 that a team of investigators at the University of Wyoming who examined her skull and jawbone determined that she was between 17 and 23 years old. And that's another aspect of crime fighting that I find fascinating. Working with bones and determining by the length of this bone or that bone how old somebody might have been or what gender they might have been. Some of that stuff's really interesting as well. And I've often said more if I could go back to my 18, 19 year old self, what would I do

differently? It would probably be to go into one of these very interesting. type of forensic fields. It's definitely an interesting line of work doing that kind of stuff and helping solve mysteries. Investigators also had other clues to work with. She was also found to be Caucasian with sun bleached brown hair that indicated she'd spent a lot of time in some pretty strong sunshine, a pair of size 5, KO of California jeans with

the white plastic belt and a blue and white checkered saucy blouse. still on her body. She was not wearing any socks or shoes. She was dubbed the I-90 Jane Doe, or sometimes has been referred to as the Sheraton County Jane Doe. DNA from this crime was not able to be entered into the national or even the state database due to its poor quality until 2007 when new technology had come along. It wasn't until 2012 that Sheridan County Jane Doe's murder was linked by DNA to the murder of Bitter Creek Betty. Unfortunately, early on in both the Bitter Creek Betty case and the Sheridan County Jane Doe case, investigators had those old wax reconstructions made of the victims.

You know, those are tough. More if when you look at them, everyone in a lot of those looks very similar. They're almost unsettling to look at. I think a lot of times these kind of wax reconstructions didn't always accurately depict what the victim really looked like, which could have prevented possible matches or caused the reconstruct to be overlooked by people searching for their loved ones. Around 20 missing women have been ruled out as matches for Sheraton County Jane Doe over the years using DNA and dental charts. In April 2019, Tennessee authorities reopened the investigation into Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall's murder. They used new technology to create a DNA profile of Pamela's killer using the sample taken from her stockings in 1991.

This allowed the profile to be entered in the CODIS, the National DNA Database, and it revealed a match. Whoever had killed Pamela McCall had also killed Bitter Creek Betty and Sheridan County Jane Doe, the two unidentified victims from Wyoming. It was a big moment for investigators. They knew they had a serial killer on their hands who had killed at least three different women in two different states, 1,500 miles apart. What the authorities didn't have was the name of the killer. All they knew for sure, based on his DNA, was that he was a white male. And you're not really narrowing it down at that point, right?

There are a lot of white males in the U.S. And it's something that you and I have talked about before. You know, DNA is great. but there are limitations, most of which center around, okay, you have this DNA, you have a sample, you have a profile, but you have to have something to match it to. And until you get that, I don't want to say it's worthless, but, you know, what good is it doing you until you get something to match it up to? And although it doesn't narrow it down a whole lot, it does help in some ways because if there

were, you know, Hispanic suspects or African-American suspects, at least they could cross some of them off the list as being the killer. But investigators used forensic genealogy and a public database to track down a relative of the killer who had uploaded their DNA profile to the database. From there, a family tree led authorities to one specific suspect, a man named Clark Perry Baldwin. They just needed definitive proof that it was. his DNA found at three crime scenes and not a close relative of his. Investigators tracked Baldwin to Waterloo, Iowa, where they followed him while he shopped

in a Walmart. They collected DNA from his shopping cart and covertly from his residential trash that he put out at the curb. Once an examination of his DNA was done, investigators had their match. There was no doubt that it was Clark Perry Baldwin's DNA that was, that was was found at three different murder scenes. So more of I just got done talking about the fact that, you know, what good is the DNA if you don't have a match? I think, you know, a lot of that changed with the development of forensic genealogy. Because it seemed like from that point forward,

authorities didn't have to wait around for a match. Now they were, they were seeking it. They were, you know, trying to, to find, family members, other matches that would lead them to the killer. It's amazing stuff.

You and I have talked about it at length. Yeah, and it's another example of the good old fashioned police work because the technology provided them with the name, but they still had to go out and covertly find this guy's DNA and collect it without him being aware of it and bring it back to compare it to make sure they got the right guy and that police work paid off. You know, another thing that jumped out at me is, you know, how many cases have we done where Walmart comes into play? This time, they're pulling DNA off of a Walmart shopping cart.

And I would have thought that would have been very difficult given the amount of people that, you know, would touch that during a day. But I guess if they were following him and they knew that he was the last one to touch it, that would make some sense. And one thing I just thought of where you were saying that is I imagine there must be a lot of killers out there that are seeing all these cases crack that are probably looking over their shoulders and saying, oh, I can't even go to the local Walmart because they're going to be after my DNA. So I wonder if, you know, they just take these extra precautions to try and not go any place to not put their trash out to the curb. You know, they must be looking over their shoulder constantly. Well, first of all, if you're a killer, don't go to Walmart. because a lot of cases are seen to be solved at Walmart. And I think if you see, you know,

some guy walking around pushing his cart with gloves. Okay. I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong, but that might be a red flag. I had one neighbor who never put his trash out. My wife and I used to constantly joke that he, we wouldn't be surprised if one day we found out he was a killer. We always put his recycling out,

but never his actual trash. So we always thought that was weird. Well, maybe there was something in there. he didn't want other people to get a gander at. I guess when you're doing this much true crime, your mind always goes to that kind of stuff. Oh, it does. There's no doubt about it.

58-year-old Clark Perry Baldwin was arrested on May 6, 2020. At the time, he was living in the historic Hotel Russell Lampson, a 90-unit multi-story building built in 1914. He was charged with the first-degree murder of Bitter Creek Betty, Sheridan County Jane Doe, Pamela McCall, and Pamela's unborn child, a baby girl. The father of that child, a long-haul trucker who was married, had also been suspected by some, including Marsha Ray Lyle,

Pamela McCall's mother. She told the daily press, I thought for years that he was the killer. But the father of Pamela's unborn baby told police early on that he had let Pamela out of his truck after they had argued, despite it being around midnight when he pulled over, and Pamela climbed out of his truck. That was the last time he saw her.

That might sound like a story that someone would make up just to cover their tracks when they were guilty. But in this case, it turned out to be true. Baldwin's arrest was a relief to Marcia. She told the press, it scared me that I would go to my grave without knowing who killed her way back in 1991 when Pamela's body was found. And Marcia didn't have a name or a face to put to her killer. She told the Daily Press, I hope the state of Tennessee burns him. At first, when the Lawrence County prosecutor's office called Marsha to tell her they were planning to make an arrest, she thought she was being pranked. After Baldwin's arrest, Marcia repeated her sentiment from almost 30 years ago telling pilotonline.com, I don't want to hear him breathing.

I want to see him stopped. I want him to get a lethal injection so he will never kill again. And we've talked about, you know, the tremendous. journey that a victim's family member takes over the years. You know, it's highlighted in a lot of the cases that we do. Looking at what Marsha went through, that's a nightmare for parents. We know that. What I thought was worth pointing out about her story was that she was so convinced that she knew who her daughter's killer was for years, many years.

and then all of a sudden she found out that she was wrong. And I just wonder, you know, what that's like for a mother because you know the hatred towards this person is all consuming. And then all of a sudden you find out that that hatred was misplaced. And you've got to deal with that. Well, at the same time, probably transferring the hatred onto this new person who police say was the actual killer. Yeah, it seems like it would be.

sort of a roller coaster for her because she spent all this time waiting for answers and then all of a sudden she gets news there's going to be an arrest and she's thinking she's being pranked because the day is finally here when there's an arrest it it turns out not to be the person she thought it was but I'm sure she was relieved nonetheless that someone was going to be held accountable. Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, that's the main thing, right? She wanted whoever was actually responsible to pay the price. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget

and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage matched limited by state law, not available in all states. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman failed. to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency. We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible.

A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Just as Marcia was shocked that her daughter's killer had been identified, A 32-year-old woman named Jazz Baldwin of New Hampton, Iowa was equally shocked by the news of Clark Baldwin's arrest, but it was for a different reason. In 2018, Jazz took a commercial DNA test and had informed her that she had a familial match. Clark Baldwin was her biological father. Following the DNA match, Jazz had communicated via Facebook with Clark Baldwin.

While Jazz apparently knew that her biological father didn't have a squeaky queen background, she had no clue it was a killer. She wrote on her Facebook page after Clark Baldwin's arrest, murder was not on the list of things we thought he had done and gotten away with. When asked for comment by the Des Moines Register, Jazz said, The only thing I have to say is, he may be my father by DNA, but he is not my dad, and he did not raise me. I don't know him.

I think that has to be a very strange situation for Jazz to sort of connect with her biological father and correspond with him, only for him to suddenly be arrested as a serial killer. Police didn't just rest with the three murders connected to Baldwin by DNA. Investigators also thought that he could be responsible for more murders, especially because he had worked as a truck driver. So he could have victims spread out over multiple states. They immediately combed through their records to see if there were any cases that stood out as having a similar MO to these three murders or any connected to truckers.

And they found one. On August 23rd, 1992, 21-year-old college student Tammy Joe Zewiki was driving from Evanston, Illinois, to Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, where she was starting her senior year there. She had dropped off her little brother, Darren, who was studying civil engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston,

before heading off herself. On the way to Northwestern, Tammy's car overheated. Darren had filled the radio with water. and there were no check engine lights, so they kept driving thinking the problem had been fixed. That night, Tammy spent the night with a friend in Evanston, and they watched the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, which she probably rented from Blockbuster where she worked during the summers. The next morning, Tammy left for Grinnell College. Her plan was to arrive back to school early to be able to take photos of the football team for Grinnell's newspaper

and then head to her photography internship in Chicago. She was on Interstate 80 in Illinois when her car, a white, 1985 Pontiac T-1000 Hatchback broke down again, leaving her stranded on the side of the road. Witnesses passing Tammy and her car saw a man near her on the side of the road, near Mile Marker 83 in central Illinois, five miles east of LaSalle. It was between 3 and 4 p.m. When witnesses, it was said there was over 60 of them remember seeing her with the hood of her car propped up. And some remembered seeing the man with her. her. He was tall, around six feet, and white. Unfortunately, not all of them remembered the same

vehicle near Tammy's. Some remembered a green dots in pickup. Others remembered a semi-truck. The semi-truck described was white with diagonal brownish orange stripes, which had a rust-colored logo of some sort in the center of each stripe. Later that day, an Illinois state trooper wrote a ticket for Tammy's abandoned car after he found it and the car was towed from the scene the following day after it had not been moved. At the time, troopers found the car and towed it, they had nothing alerting them to the fact that, you know, really anything was wrong. It simply looked like an abandoned car. On the evening the car was towed, Tammy's mother reported her missing to the Illinois State Police after she didn't make it to Granel.

college. Apparently, though, after Tammy was reported missing, police brushed it off as her being irresponsible and just taking off, and they thought she'd be back soon. But this meant that she had been missing for an entire three days before the Illinois State Police officially started their investigation of her as a missing person. Sadly, Tammy's body was found on September 1st, 1992, just over a week after she went missing. She was found 500 miles away in Missouri between Joplin and Springfield. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed the death before being wrapped in a red blanket and dumped on Interstate Highway 44 in Lawrence County. The blanket was wrapped shut with duct tape. She had seven total stab wounds, six around her heart, one on her right arm, and she also had some

defensive wounds. She was wearing underwear that her mother didn't think she would have picked out. What was not found with Tammy was her new Canon camera, which took 35 millimeter film, and that she definitely had with her since she was planning to take pictures for the school newspaper. Also missing were her Loris brand wristwatch, which played the song, Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head, and a St. Giles soccer club patch from Greenville, South Carolina. All of these things were not found with her body or in her abandoned car. And to this day, they've never been found. Some of the wounds around her heart have been called strange.

Something small and sharp had caused her to bleed internally. Illinois State Police Special Agent Martin McCarthy, now retired, told People magazine, it was a strange way to kill somebody. Tammy was buried back in Pennsylvania, where she was born near her grandmother and one of her cousins. Though investigators initially thought that Baldwin may have been Tammy's killer, when they arrested him on May 6, 2020. By May 8th, the Illinois State Police had announced that Baldwin was not a suspect in the murder of Tammy Zawiki. Investigators stated, as reported by NBC Chicago, that Baldwin does not appear to have been involved in Tammy Zawiki's death. Almost as quickly as it was announced that he was a suspect, he was ruled out publicly.

A spokesman for the state police told the Chicago Tribune, there have been and continued to be several persons of interest. One of these early persons of interest was an army veteran named Lonnie Stephen Beerbrot of Orlando, Florida. He was taken into custody in question. He had been released on parole after serving time for multiple armed robberies. He also lived extremely close to the rural area where Tammy's body was found. In January of 1993, a woman called police for the second time and again identified Beerbrook as the man who had been talking to Tammy after her car broke down. The woman was a nurse and her husband was a judge.

Beer Brat was on a break from his job as a truck driver at the time of Tammy's death. I think even more damning was that the blanket that Tammy was wrapped in had the logo of the type of truck he drove. It was a Kenworth logo. He also owned a green dots in truck like the one some witnesses claimed they saw near Tammy's car. Beer Brot cooperated and even gave hair samples and fingerprints. He was never officially named a suspect and he was let go. Apparently, there was just no physical evidence connecting Lonnie Beer Brot to Tammy's murder. If Beer Brat had anything to do with Tammy's murder, he took his secrets with him to the grave.

He died of cancer at the age of 41 on June 17, 2002 in Peru. Florida. Beer Brot seems like a good suspect. He owned or had access to the right vehicles, whether it was a Green Dotson or a semi-truck, both of which were reportedly seen by witnesses near Tammy's car. His only alibi was his wife who said he was in Missouri, which is of course where Tammy's body was found. While on vacation, he also visited family in LaSalle, near where Tammy was last seen. So where do things stand now with Tammy Zewki's case? We don't know because police are being tight-lipped about it. If they had a usable DNA profile from the killer, you'd think that they would be performing forensic genealogy. There's a mention on Iowa cold cases that a woman

who worked at a medical facility while administering a routine blood test was told by another woman about a musical watch, much like the one missing from Tammy Zawiki, that she had been gifted by her husband, a truck driver. Based on this information, it seems possible that investigators were so quick to rule out Baldwin and Tammy's murder because they may have a better suspect. It also seems like Tammy's family may have felt that the investigators knew more than they were letting on, even as far back as 2015, when Julie Estlick, a friend of Tammy's from college, created a petition for the state police to release all their information to the Zewiki family, which never happened. Tammy's family is hopeful that her killer will be conclusively named someday. Her mom, Joanne, told People magazine, when you see 40-year-old cases that are being solved, I still think there's a chance.

And man, more how many times have we said that exactly? You know, the hopefulness that I think comes from, you know, what we've been seeing over the last two, three, four years, cases solved that are very, very, very old that probably most people thought would never be solved. I feel the exact same way that Joanne does. Now, I'm not the parent of a murdered child, but I echo those sentiments. I don't think you can give up hope. There's always a chance because this new technology and technology that we don't even know about gives us that chance. Yeah, I think that these families that have been waiting for justice and waiting for answers for so many years. Hopefully this gives them some kind of sense that,

hey, maybe if I'm patient, our loved one's case will be next. So it's got to be encouraging to see all these cases. It seems like it's almost weekly now. These cases are being solved. So that's got to be something that's good for the families. Tammy Zewicki's case wasn't the only case. Police dug into when looking for crimes, possibly connected to Clark Perry, Baldwin, 22-year-old Rhonda Annette Knudsen was working as a store clerk at the Phillip 66 convenience store on Highway 63 in Williamstown in northeastern Iowa, just six miles south of New Hampton. At the time, she was living with her boyfriend of three years, about 16 miles southeast in Tripoli, a rural town. On September 7, 1992, she was killed on the job while she was working the

overnight shift alone from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Ronda was found in the store's back room by a coworker. There were no signs of sexual assault revealed at her autopsy, but robbery was not believed to be the motive for her murder. On September 11th, the day of Ronda's memorial services, authorities released via the Cedar Rapids Gazette two sketches of potential suspects who were seen in the store that morning. They were both thought to be truck drivers. The store saw a ton of truck drivers come in regularly because it was close to where highways 1863 and 346 intersect. Rhonda's sister, Renee Engle, told the New Hampton Tribune, she was just a great person. She would do anything for anybody.

At the time of Rhonda's murder, Clark Perry Baldwin was living in Nashua, not too far away from her store when she was killed. In fact, he lived only about 20 minutes away. New Hampton, Iowa, where Baldwin's 32-year-old daughter, Jazz lives, is where 22-year-old Rhonda Annette Knutzen was born and attended school. Baldwin didn't flee the area after Rhonda was killed. He stayed there for some time, eventually fathering his daughter, Jazz. In 1992, Baldwin's ex-wife, Rochelle Bobin Moyer, said something that should have brought consequences for him earlier.

She told police that he claimed and bragged about something to her that was chilling. as reported in the Des Moines Register, he freely admitted to killing a girl out west by strangulation and throwing her out of his truck. And we've talked about Baldwin's job as a long-haul truck driver. He worked for Martin Transport. We've also talked many times on this podcast in the past about the possibility of serial killers who are employed as truck drivers. And Baldwin is certainly not the only serial killer to have driven a truck. Serial killers, Keith Hunter, Jasperson, Edward Sherat, Robert Ben Rhodes, also known as the truck stop killer, and Bruce Mindenhall are just a few who were all employed as truck drivers at one time. And speaking of Bruce Mendenhall, in fact, Tammy Zewicki has not been ruled out as a

victim of Bruce Mendenhall, who was dubbed the rest stop killer. A search of his truck found a nightstick and handcuffs. It is possible that he pretended to be law enforcement to get women out of their vehicles or into his. Baldwin has a documented criminal record, at least as far back as 1991 when he was 29 years old. He was in Wheeler County, Texas when he attacked a 21-year-old hitchhiker. He had threatened her with a gun before hitting her in the head to knock her off balance so that he could tie her up. He tied her hands and also gagged her mouth. He then sexually assaulted her and attempted to strangle her to death. She was somehow able to escape and survive to report the attack.

When authorities found Baldwin, he didn't even deny what he had done. A grand jury was going to look over the case and decide whether or not to indict him. But in the meantime, he had been released out of custody, and he fled. Authorities weren't able to locate him or the victim he tried to kill, so they simply dropped the charges against him. And boy, we've seen that before. And it never fails to ups and... set me when you know we talk about things like this that I get it maybe there was nothing else

they could do but it just sounds like there probably should have been some way to not let that happen yeah it wasn't just bald when fleeing apparently his victim perhaps didn't want to be involved in having to go to court or testify perhaps that was going to be another stressing thing for her so she chose herself to flee and that unfortunately resulted in in a missed opportunity to put him behind bars. In 1997, Baldwin was arrested for an entirely different kind of crime. The Secret Service raided his apartment after discovering that he was creating counterfeit money. He had been using his own computer to print U.S. dollars.

Baldwin and two women were indicted on charges of counterfeiting. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. So no doubt, this is another case where man was free for decades. Aides despite, you know, some pretty serious crimes. And despite a number of, you know, previous contacts with the law, in 2008, Baldwin's candle business in Nashville, Iowa caught fire damaging two adjacent buildings. One of the damaged buildings were the offices for the town's newspaper. It has never been determined what caused that fire. It's possible that he was up to yet another category of crime, insurance fraud, possibly destruction of evidence by eliminating

newspaper archives or maybe both. But he was never charged with anything in connection to that fire. The same year of the fire, Baldwin met a woman named Tanya Edwards Huddleston when he was driving an orange cab company taxi in Newport News, Virginia, and she began working there too. She told the Tennessean, he was the first one to come up and talk to me. And he and I, developed a great friendship. They became close friends and stayed in contact for over a decade. Even when Baldwin moved to Iowa, they didn't lose touch. Tanya recalls Baldwin as the kind of person that if you're in need, he's going to help you. If he's your friend, he's going to help you. She's called him a gentle giant and says that the news of his arrest just doesn't make sense

at all. She recalled letting him come over every night for dinner and watch TV. If this is true, she added, it scares me to death to think that I had my baby living there. Okay, so she was not a victim. She's not the family member of a victim. But I think, you know, once she found out what this man had done or what he had been accused of doing, those thoughts have to run through your mind. That could have happened to me. Something could have happened to my baby. I think that would scare you to an unbelievable degree.

Yeah, here you've got this friend that you're tight with and you think he's just a normal guy. And then out of the blue, you hear this. It's got to be quite a shock for her too. And to me, this is different from the neighbor that says, oh, he was a great guy. He borrowed my lawnmower, always gave it back. You know, we hear that in a lot of stories. This is somebody who's over every night. You're eating dinner.

It's very intimate, maybe not in a sexual way, but that's an intimate. situation, spending that much time with a person. I also think it's an interesting dynamic. It shows here's a guy that's capable of committing these horrible crimes, yet there's another side of them that likes hanging out, watching TV and having dinner with a friend and stuff, and he's almost normal in that respect. So you have to wonder how these killers, or at least in this case,

they balance that and they have these different sides to them. I view it the same. as, you know, the serial killer who is the consummate family man, has a wife, has kids, participates in, you know, things around town. But yet has this other side, you know, is it compartmentalization? I think in part it is. The person is able to separate. Here's who I am at home. Here's who I am when I'm out hunting or, you know, whatever you want to call it. I also think it's a scary thought that Baldwin was driving a taxi. Really just like driving a truck across the country gave him the opportunity to pick up hitchhikers and disappear driving a taxi, gave him the

opportunity to pick up single possibly intoxicated women and then lie about where they were dropped off. So I think when you look at that, it's possible, very possible. He has unknown victims in or around the Newport News area. Neighbors of Baldwin's in Iowa didn't seem to get to know him at all. Jarius Jackson, who lived in the same building as Baldwin for three years, told the Tennessean, I've never seen him talk at all. That's the weirdest thing about it. Jamie Jones lived with Baldwin for three years between the ages of three and six when Baldwin

and her mother were together. They married in December 1987 and divorced just eight months. later. Jamie Jones said to the Des Moines Register, I only thought of him as a monster. As of the last report on his whereabouts, Clark Perry Baldwin has been extradited to the Morrie County Jail in Tennessee and was awaiting his first court date for the murder of Pamela McCall and her unborn child. In December 2021, Carl Koppelman, a forensic artist who creates detailed sketches of unidentified people announced on Facebook that Bittercreek Betty had been identified. But since then, there have been no further announcements or updates and the Facebook pages have

been removed. This has led some to believe that it was a false identification and others to believe that the family just wants privacy. As far as we can tell for certain, she hasn't been officially publicly identified. If you have any information about the identity of Bitter Creek Betty, Sheraton County, Jane Doe, or have any information about Clark Perry Baldwin. You can call the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-7777-1-181. It's important to note that Bitter Creek Betty's Roast tattoo from Tucson, Arizona, was relatively new when she was killed, and she had been traveling the country. It's possible someone knows her and had not seen her between the time.

she got the tattoo and the time she was killed. If you know anything about the murder of Rhonda Annette Knutson, you can call the Chickasaw County Sheriff's Office at 641-394-31 or the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at 515-725-6010. There is still a $50,000 reward being offered by the FBI for information leading to the closure of Tammy Zawicki's case. Investigators are still looking into whether Clark Perry Baldwin is responsible for more murders. As a long-haul trucker, he was able to operate in any state in the continental U.S.

and possibly could have taken trips into Canada or Mexico at some point. Jody Ewing, founder of the Iowa Cold Case's website, turned in a list of over two dozen murders that could possibly match his M.O. It's a scary proposition that Clark Perry Baldwin could have roamed the country, killing random victims and then dumping them. If he has more victims, barring DNA linking him to their deaths, we may never know his true victim count. And one thing we shouldn't lose sight of is the power of DNA and forensic genealogy.

We've seen it used over and over to nab serial killers, but we can't forget that that same technology can also help give unidentified Jane and John Doe's, their names back. victims like some of the ones we have discussed in this episode, it will be worth watching to see how this crime fighting tool is utilized going forward and how many mysteries it will help solve. I think more if the number is going to be staggering when it's all said and done, and it may never be all said and done.

I think it's just going to keep evolving. The technology will get better. Now, like we've said before, you've got to have some type of DNA. You've got to have a sample. And it's got to be viable. And I think that's the problem that authorities run into in some of the very old cases, the older cases where, you know, maybe the collection procedures weren't very good because

they didn't know that this valuable crime fighting tool was going to come along years later. And I'm actually surprised that Bitter Creek Betty in Sheridan County, Jane Doe, haven't been identified yet using forensic genealogy. It seems like it could easily be done, assuming they have relatives who have put their DNA profiles into the databases. And maybe that's just the lack of funding on their part. You know, a lot of these cases can be solved.

It just takes money to do the work. But I'm hoping that we get some news that these cases are definitely solved. And, you know, as it pertains to Clark Perry Baldwin, We'll have to keep an eye on the court proceedings, but, you know, I think as it stands right now, it doesn't appear as though, you know, this is a good guy. How many murders could he potentially be responsible? I don't know what the number is.

I don't know if we'll ever know the exact number. I struggle with that with a lot of serial killers. My thought is always that they have a lot more. victims than is no. Because a lot of these people get away with their, you know, their crimes, their murders for many years. So eventually, you know, when they're caught, and obviously this guy hasn't been convicted yet, but when serial killers are caught, the authorities are able to put together

a victim count. But you can't tell me that they know about all of them. I just don't believe that. I just always think that the number is. much, much higher. And I think for some, it could be staggeringly higher to the point where, you know, some of these people could be some of the most prolific killers if their numbers were truly no. And I think what's frightening is that a lot of people that travel, you know, hitchhikers, people that move around the country and they take highways and stuff, they often catch rides

with truckers. I think not to disparage truckers because I think a lot of them are family men who worry about the people they're picking up, especially if they're young women. They may have daughters at home and they say, this could be my daughter. I want to make sure she gets where she's going safely. I think overwhelmingly, those are the kind of truck drivers that are out there. But as we know, if some of these victims get into the truck with the wrong person, thinking that it's safe, we see a lot of times, you know, it turns out to be that it's, that it's, not and these victims wind up being discovered on the side of the road someplace. Well, and we have a lot of truckers that, that listen to the podcast. We hear from them.

We love them, but it's no secret that there have been serial killer truck drivers. You know, when you look at it more traveling all around the country, like you said, a lot of people try to get rides from truckers and especially have in the past. I hate to say it, but it's almost as if it's the perfect scenario for some killers. They're not really linked to a town where they may pick up their victim. They're not linked to the area where they may dump a victim's body. And then eventually they're back home far away from either of those places. And I think one other thing.

thing that's a problem is trucks are all over the place. So anytime you're driving down the highway, you're going to see 18 wheelers all over the place. So it's when they have to go back and say in trying piece things together in these cases, well, did anyone see an 18 wheeler? Well, of course they did. They sort of blend in all over the place. And it may be hard to piece some of these cases together and pick out a truck and who it belongs to. Well, and when you say blend then they also many of them look alike. You see them for a minute. You're not going to probably be able to give a great description of one.

Now, I have heard from a lot of truckers who listen to the show that some of the new technology in tracking, you know, where that truck is at all times is probably going to cut down or probably already has cut down on some of certain. individual's ability to do these kinds of things that they easily got away with in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, it seems like now with GPS and some of the technology on these trucks, it would make it tougher. Thanks goes out to Sunny Landon for help with writing and research in this episode. As always, if you love the show, but you haven't done so yet, go out, give us a rating,

you can leave a review, and keep telling your friends. That word of mouth about the criminology podcast really goes a long way. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with the handle at Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Criminology Podcast or by joining our Facebook Discussion Group, Criminology Podcast, Discussion and Fans. So that is it for our episode on Clark Perry Baldwin, a nasty individual. It seems like we'll have to wait to see exactly, you know, everything that comes out about him. But we'll be back with everyone next.

Saturday night with an all new episode of criminology. So until then for Mike and Morf. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.