Criminology - The Cruel Writer

Episode Date: March 23, 2019

Three girls disappeared, each in a different year, in different states, and under different circumstances. Deborah Ann Quimby vanished in 1977, Colleen Orsborn in 1984, and Alicia Markovich in 1987. There was nothing to connect the disappearances of the 3 girls. That was until an apparent connection was seen in an anonymous letter writer. In each case, someone had written at least one letter related to the disappearance of the girls. Some of the letters were sent to family members and some were sent to the police. But it appeared as though all of the letters were written by the same person. Some of the letters contained very graphic descriptions of what happened to the girls. This case remains a mystery but the details need to be heard. There is someone out there that may know what happened to these 3 girls. Was the anonymous letter responsible for their disappearances or was this someone playing a sick game to torment the family and police? You can support the show by going to patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfares app, when you spot it, a brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too? All right, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast experts set up on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair, every style, every home. Quality proteins aren't just for special occasions.

With Omaha Steaks, you get mouth-watering proteins delivered right to your door. Individually packaged and portioned, so a great dinner is just minutes away. From Taco Tuesday to a weekend feast. Taste the Omaha Steaks difference. Start getting flavorful proteins delivered today. Visit Omaha Steaks.com and get $35 off with promo code audio at checkout. That's Omaha Steaks.com code A-U-D-I-O. Terms apply.

See site for detail. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. I'd like to welcome everyone to episode 53 of criminology. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Morph, how are you today? I'm doing good.

How about you, Mike? I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. I've had an interesting last week. My 14-year-old had her tonsils taken out. and I knew it would be rough on her, but I had no idea how rough it was going to be. So she's been in a lot of pain. It's been a constant, you know, getting her stuff, making sure she's taking her medicine,

making sure she's drinking, things like that. Hopefully she's feeling better soon. Yeah, I hope so. It's actually been longer than I thought for her to get back to being pain free. But other than that, I'm just waiting for it to warm up. You know, the weather kind of gives us glimpses here and there. I've ridden my motorcycle a couple of times, but I'm just ready for it to, you know, get into routinely the 70s, 80s to get out there and do some stuff. Yeah, I don't know about how it is out there in Ohio, but in New Jersey, one day it's 65 degrees, 70 degrees. The next day it's like 30. So I'm just waiting for some kind of steady, steady temperature. Yeah, I think we're, you and I are pretty much the same as far as temperature was.

All right. We had a lot of new Patreon support. So let's give some shoutouts. We had Denise Callahan, Joanna Daniela Himdahl-Sahar, Tammy Berkman, Sarah Wadley, Laura, Ava Bouchel, Adrian Esser, Bryn Hogan, Sophie, and Natalia Fontavara. So a lot of new support, some amazing support on Patreon. And we said it. We appreciate the new support.

We appreciate the continued support. It really does. Goes a long way towards helping you and I put out this podcast. Yeah, that really is great support and we can't do it without those supporters. So again, thank you very much. If you'd like to support the podcast on Patreon, visit patreon.com slash criminology. If you're supportive of ours already, watch your Patreon feed because not only will you get early access to add free episodes of the show, but we're also going to steadily be adding lots of bonus content that you don't hear in regular episodes. CrimeCon is coming up very quickly, June 7 through the 9th.

If you're on the fence, if you're thinking about going, I always tell people, you know, pull that trigger. It is a very fun time. You will love it. And if you do make that decision and you need to buy your badge, go out to crimecon.com. But make sure you use our promo code, Criminology 19. You'll save 10% off your standard badge price. And you talk about warmer weather, Mike.

New Orleans in June. That should be warm. I would say so. And there'll probably be some humidity as well. but I welcome it. And before CrimeCon in April, I'll be in Albany, New York, attending the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases event on April 15th and 16th.

If you're in that neck of the woods, come out and say hi. All right, Morf, it's time to start this episode. And there's no doubt. It's going to be a tough episode. We'll be discussing multiple cases of missing children, all girls. And everyone knows, right?

A child goes missing. That is an unimaginable nightmare for that child's parents. I say everyone knows. There's no way that most of us can really know unless something like that has happened to you exactly what a nightmare is. But we can imagine, right? Being parents, we can imagine how horrible that would be. The agony of not knowing where your child is, that would be torture.

it would be very difficult to sleep, very hard to eat. You would, I would think, more cry nonstop until there were no more tears. And for many people, this is their reality. And there are a lot of cases out there that go on for decades. And some sadly, as we know, go on in definitely. They've never been solved for long periods of time. Up until the 1980s, the investigation into missing children cases was mainly left up to local law enforcement officials. There were no alert systems in place like there is now.

There were no organizations dedicated to finding missing children. But after the highly publicized cases of six-year-old Ethan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981, The National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC, was formed on June 13, 1984, by John Walsh, his wife, and many other child advocates. In 1996, the Amber Alert System was created and named after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and brutally murdered that same year. Deborah and Quimby vanished without a trace in 1977. Colleen Orsborn in 1984 and Alicia Markovic in 1987. Only Colleen's remains were found and later identified. Dabra and Alicia remained missing.

There have been no arrest in any of the cases. These three girls vanished in different years, from different states, and under different circumstances. There didn't seem to be any reason for anyone to think the three cases might all be connected. and it wasn't until about five years ago that someone spotted something that seemed to connect these three cases. That someone was me. I'd been compiling a list of unsolved cases in which an anonymous letter had been mailed to either a victim's family member or to police investigating the case or to local newspapers. As you can imagine, most killers don't want to reach out and connect with police.

They avoid attention, so the list was pretty short. But there were several cases. When I look closely at the list, I saw that letters mailed in the Quimley, Orsbourne, and Markovic cases, all had been mailed from Manchester, New Hampshire, or very close to it. That seemed to me like much more than a coincidence. When I read the contents of the three letters, I knew that it wasn't a coincidence,

that the letter writer was the same in all three cases. In each of the letters, in these cases, the author claimed to have killed the victim and gave a post. possible location where remains could be found along a creek or river. The author never came forward and wasn't identified. And as Morph said, no one had really connected the postmarks of these letters coming out of the Manchester, New Hampshire area. The question was, were these letters legit or just cruel and sick hoaxes?

Alicia Bernice Markovich was born on February 20th, 1972. By 1987, Alicia was 15 years old. Her parents were divorced and she lived with her mother in Winbur, Pennsylvania. Winbur is about 100 miles east of Pittsburgh. Alicia was a freshman at Winbur High School and she was considered to be a good student. She was also a member of the school's track. Alicia's father, John Markovic, lived about 40 miles away in Blairsville, Pennsylvania. Blairsville's just a bit over 40 miles east of Pittsburgh, and it's basically a halfway point between

Windburn and Pittsburgh. Blairsville sits along the Connemaw River. On April 26, 1987, Alicia was visiting her father at his home on Dunn Avenue and Burrell Township. That evening, the two had an argument, and Alicia has stormed out of John's house. Reports differ on what the argument was over. Some said it was over Alicia's grades and her choice of friends. Others said it was over her mother, Marcy, wanting more child support money from John. Whatever the reason, it was one of those typical kind of arguments in which a teenager storms out of the house in frustration, slamming the door behind them. At the time, there was nothing overly unusual about it, just a typical argument between a teenager and parent. Assuming that a

Alicia was going to a friend's house, John hollered at her to be home by 8 p.m. Alicia never acknowledged John as she walked away. And that was the last time he saw her. 8 p.m. came and went with no sign of Alicia. And at first, John thought his daughter was still angry with him. She was going to push him. She was going to purposefully stay out past the time he told her to be home. But as the hours passed, he became more and more concerned. And then by the next morning, Alicia still was not home. And John reported his daughter missing to police. At the time of her disappearance, Alicia was wearing a white crop top with three red, yellow,

and blue stripes, a pair of jeans, and white athletic shoes. She was carrying a pair of purple sunglasses, police initially classified Alicia as a runaway. But as time passed, investigators believed that she met with some type of foul play. In 1990, around the three-year anniversary of her disappearance, the Pennsylvania state police told the media they were now treating Alicia's case as a homicide. One theory in Alicia's disappearance is that she left her father's home and walked a short distance to Route 22, where she hitched a ride with someone who may have

later killed her. Another theory is that she was killed by someone she knew. Police had no suspects and followed up on any lead they were given. Thirteen years went by before a possible solid lead emerged. In October 2000, John Markovic received a letter postmarked from Bedford, New Hampshire, almost 600 miles northeast of Blairsville. Police didn't release the letter's contents until March 2001. And even then, they only released a small portion. In the letter, the anonymous writer claimed to have killed Alicia and disposed of her body. He stated that he felt guilt, remorse, and depression over her death. The writer also stated that he decided to write to John Markovic because he had seen an old missing person's flyer posted on the side of a mailbox in Philadelphia.

As he writes in the letter, the second time I saw it, it was like everything faded to gray. Nothing seemed real for a long time. I thought it had all been forever buried. The letter was unsigned and typewritten. Immediately after police received that letter, Pennsylvania state troopers drove 10 hours to Bedford, New Hampshire, to the return address written on the envelope. The person who lived at the residence was shocked to see police from Pennsylvania,

knocking on his door. He had no knowledge of the letter and never heard of Alicia Markovic or Blairsville, Pennsylvania. Police decided that the homeowner was not connected to Alicia's case. Based on the details included in the letter, police also searched and dug up an area near the Connemah River outside Blairsville, where the writer said he dumped Alicia's body. After digging, there were no signs of Alicia's remains, and police called the letter a hoax. Authorities followed leads from Florida to New Hampshire, but nothing panned out. In 2009, police and Alicia's family made a plea to the public to come forward with any information about Alicia's disappearance. An age progression photo was generated of what Alicia might have looked like in 2009 at the age of 37. Two years later in

April 2011, police reopened Alicia's case and they gave a press conference. At that time, Alicia's mother Marcy gave police Alicia's baby teeth to use to create a DNA profile that could be input into the FBI's database and cross-checked with the DNA of all human remains found across the United States. At this press conference, the state police, the state police explained how helpful the baby teeth were, saying, quote, this will allow for any unidentified human remains to be analyzed for a positive identification. At the present time, we have no suspects, and nobody has been ruled out as a potential suspect. At this point, there are so many uncertainties. The only thing we have is the report that she was involved with a disagreement,

with her father at his residence in Blairsville. She left that residence and was walking to a friend's house under the presumption that she would return later that evening. It is highly unlikely that Alicia may be alive. We have not received any information that would lead us to believe in any way, shape, or form that she is alive. The state police also added, quote, we need to make it clear. this case could have been a runaway that met with foul play later on, anywhere in the country.

She could have been picked up by a truck driver. She could have been anywhere and met with foul play. So far, no match has been made using those baby teeth in Alicia's DNA. And there's been no activity in the case since that press conference. However, there was a moment all the way back in 1990 when police thought that they may have caught a break. In July of that year, an unidentified body, of a woman was found face down in a stream bed in Monroe Township, Pennsylvania, roughly seven miles north of Blairsville. Two children out looking for buries in a remote area made the discovery

about three miles south of I-80 near Reedsburg. It was estimated that the time of death for the woman was six to eight weeks prior to her body being discovered. She was believed to be anywhere from 15 to 40 years of age. The victim was Caucasian, had long brown hair, and was similar in height and weight to Alicia. She also had two pennies on her, so authorities named her Penny Doe. An autopsy revealed that she had suffered blunt force trauma to the right side of her skull and had broken her right leg. Police believe it's possible that Penny Doe attended an outdoor rock concert on May 27th,

Memorial Day weekend, about 15 miles from where she was found. This was a concert that about 5,100 people attended. It was called Music Alley and several bands performed. It drew people from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and beyond. Authorities do not believe that the victim, Penny Doe, was from the area where she was found. But they do think that the killer was. The area where her body was found is remote. And the only road that even runs, you know, near this area is a road that is very lightly traveled.

I think it's pretty safe to say that this most likely is not Alicia because, as we mentioned, there's DNA on file for both cases. But what's interesting here is that in the summer of 2002, an anonymous writer sent a letter to police in Monroe Township about Penny Doe. just like someone did in Alicia's case. Police have never released any details of the letter, but there are enough similarities between Penny Doe's case and Alicia's case to at least consider the fact that there's some type of possible connection, especially when you look at the anonymous letter writer in both cases. Could these two cases be related?

There's no way to be sure, but gosh, there's a lot of similarities here. Marcy Smith doesn't believe her daughter Alicia ran away. She was not street smart and could not have survived on her own. Marcy believes Alicia was murdered and while she thinks she knows who killed her daughter, this person has not been named the suspect or charged in the case. Over the years, police have not given up on Alicia's case and have continued to actively work it, trying different methods. But today, after three decades, it appears that they are no closer to finding her.

Something you said, Morf, just kind of caught my attention. And that's, it's actually something that Marcy said in why she doesn't believe that her daughter Alicia ran away. It's because she wasn't very street smart. You know, I go back to cases that we've done. Think of Moor Murray. There are people that think maybe she's out there somewhere. You have to be intelligent slash street smart to pull some of these things off, right? Allude police, start a new life somewhere to where nobody knows it's you. Would you agree with that? Definitely.

And for a girl her age with just the clothes on her back, apparently, it would be tough just going off and starting a new life without a plan. So as you were saying that, it got me thinking, I have two girls. I have a 14-year-old and an 18. year old. My 18 year old is not what I would call very street smart. There is no way. I don't care how much planning that she could go off on her own and purposefully disappear and start a new life. It just wouldn't happen. She doesn't have the life skills, the knowledge, the street smarts to make that happen. And I don't know how many kids do. So when we talk about in some of these cases,

that, you know, could they have run away on purpose to be on their own? As I look at that through the lens of my own daughter, I think, man, that would be so tough. And imagine, you know, both of us are fathers. Imagine if, God forbid, something happened to one of our kids, how cruel would it be to get a letter in your mailbox from someone claiming that they harm them and giving instructions on where you could find their body and the police put the time and effort into looking and to find out that the letter's a hoax. That takes a special kind of crulness, I think, to send a letter like that. Now, I agree with you. I don't know what I would

do to someone if I got my hands on them, a person that hurt my kids. I don't know what I'd do to somebody like that. That was going out of their way to be cruel. Not only that, but throwing the police off track and keeping them from maybe following up on other leads, I'd have a real issue with that person as well, even though technically, let's say they didn't hurt my loved one. And unfortunately, that wasn't the only cruel letter we're going to be talking about today. Colleen Orsborn was born on March 3rd, 1969. In March of 1984, she turned 15 years old. She was living with her parents and her. siblings in Daytona Beach, Florida.

At 15, Colleen was the baby of the family. She was the youngest of 10 siblings. That is a huge family. But Colleen was described as having an unbelievable sense of humor. And there was a story that when she was just five years old, she walked up to her parents with an encyclopedia in her hand and she told them that she was going to college. She was ready to go right then. But unfortunately, Colleen never made it to college.

On March 19, 1984, Colleen missed the bus, and because of that, she just decided she was going to ditch school. You know, we've all been there, right? You miss the bus. You weigh your options and you think,

okay, I can jump through all these hoops and make it and be late. Or you know what? I can just stay home and forget it. about it. Colleen decided to spend the day at the beach. This was something that she often did. She loved the beach, but she was never seen alive again. Her family last saw her in her bedroom on the evening of the 18th, but she was seen at the beach by witnesses the next day. Four days later, her family reported her missing. That seems like a very long time. Four days to go by before

reporting your 15-year-old child missing. I think one of the things I have a hard time with is it's just unclear as to the family's reasoning on why they waited four days. I think I would definitely call right away, but we don't know the circumstances if she was sometimes would go to friends for a couple days of the time and maybe they weren't alarmed at first. But it's not clear, unfortunately, just why they waited. Yeah, that's what I was saying. We just don't have that information. But when you look at or you hear that four days later,

that's going to jump out to a lot of people. In April of 1984, three weeks after Colleen vanished, a fisherman found the decomposing body of a young woman in a shallow grave in Orange County, Florida, about an hour from Daytona Beach. The woman had been dead for more than a week, according to early reports. Police told local media at the time that the fishermen spotted a leg protruding from a rubbish heap and dirt pile near the intersection of U.S. Highway 192 and State Road 545 at about 3 p.m.

They also said that heavy rains had washed away the soil covering the leg, but that the rest of the body remained buried. A medical examiner at the time determined the body found in Colleen's disappearance were two separate cases. His report showed that the victim had brown eyes and her ears were not pierced, whereas Colleen had hazel eyes and both ears pierced. The news that the body wasn't Colleen's was a relief for her family, but they still didn't know where she was. At the time of Colleen's disappearance, there were several abductions and a few murders of young women in and around Daytona, Florida. Australian-born serial killer Christopher Wilder moved to Florida. around 1970, after his wife left him, he settled in the Boynton Beach area where he soon earned a small fortune in the construction business. He also acquired six parcels of Palm Beach County

real estate worth about $400,000. Wilder race cars. And he once finished 17th in the Miami Grand Prix. He was also an amateur photographer. And he used this hobby of, photography like a lot of serial killers have to lure young girls away. He would approach young women, young girls, often at public beaches and offer to take their picture. He would tell the girls that he could make them famous by turning them into models, but once he had them alone, he would rape and kill them. In February 1982, Walter returned Australia to visit his parents. While there, he prayed on two girls in Manly and was arrested. His family quickly posted 350,000 of his $400,000 bail. The case was adjourned at April 1984, and Wilder was allowed to

return to the United States. At the time of Colleen's disappearance, Wilder was staying at a Daytona Beach motel and checked out on the day she vanished. In March 1984, Wilder traveled extensively around Florida and to various parts of the United States, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. In April, 1984, Wilder was killed in a shootout with New Hampshire State Troopers after he made his way there. Colleen's family always believed that Wilder had murdered her. Wilder's been definitively linked to cases in Australia and the U.S., and he suspected in other cases. However, police have never been able to link him to Colleen's murder. And although they've never been never been able to confirm a link between Wilder and Colleen. They theorize that he most likely

is her killer. And this is a case that, you know, we did on true crime all the time. Christopher Wilder, he was a very bad guy. I mean, there's just no doubt, Morph, that he used this photography thing to hunt his victims and help lure them in. I remember I even got some emails from women, after the show aired that said they had run-ins with Christopher Wilder. One said in particular she met him at a mall in Florida. He had a business card and everything. And it wasn't until later on, right? As the news broke about him that she realized how close she had been to a serial killer.

And I think this is something that always troubles me, right? we know from the research that individuals killed X number of people. What I always think about is, okay, how many more victims did they have that either evidence has not been able to link them to or for whatever reason they weren't willing to confess to? I think Wilder has a little bit of Ted Bundy like qualities in the fact he travels around to different areas and charms people gets them to let down their guard, mostly young women who he thinks are vulnerable that he can attack without much resistance. And, you know, Ted Bundy, as we talked about when we covered him, used to use his arm being in a cast and, you know,

asking for help women would let down their guard. And I think water would play to their sense of wanting attention. A lot of girls at that age are flattered by some attention. So when he came along with his camera and said, how would you like to be a model, take some great pictures of you and make you famous, I think a lot of girls at that age might take kindly to that and let their guard down. And I think that's what happened with him. And that leads to your point, Mike, how many places did he do that over how long a period? We might never really know how many people he's responsible for killing. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails 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. So you mentioned more, if police had some suspicion that Christopher Wilder was Colleen's killer, but that didn't mean that they gave up on pursuing other avenues.

Over the years, there were few leads in Colleen's case, but the family never gave up hope. In February 2001, Colleen's brother Bruce received a letter postmarked from Manchester, New Hampshire, 1200 miles away. The letter was dated February 21st and it read, I killed your beloved Colleen nearly 15 years ago. For that, I can only beg your forgiveness. I can only attempt to make amends by disclosing to you where her innocent little body is. And this letter was filled with misspellings. I actually had a hard time just reading that part because the spelling is so bad. But I do think, and I've read this somewhere, I've heard this on a TV show somewhere,

somehow your mind fills in letters or takes letters out to get you to the place that seems most likely. Does that make sense more? Although he's misspelling words, we assume it's a he, you understand what he's trying to say with those words. And this kind of letter filled with misspellings seems reminiscent of other letters and writings from possible killers. We saw that when we discussed the Zodiac case filled with misspellings. And also when we discussed the April Marie Tinsley murder, her killer wrote messages that were often filled with misspellings.

So I don't know if this is a common trait from these kind of people, but it seems that we've come across it several times. Well, and I think the question is, or what people always wonder, is are we dealing with people that have a limited intelligence or are the misspellings put in there on purpose to try to make it seem as though police are dealing with somebody with a low level of intelligence? I actually think more if in a lot of cases, it's the latter. I think it's used as a mechanism to throw police off. And I think sometimes that's the case, but I also think there's times when the killer does have a low IQ and does spell words wrong. In April Marie Tinsley's case, her killer, John Miller, spelled words wrong, but he supposedly has a low IQ. In the case of the Zodiac, there were words that he spelled wrong, but then later on in the same, letter spelled them right. So that may have been a case of him deliberately trying to disguise

his true writing. I think it goes both ways for sure. The anonymous author in this letter said he was dying and that he wanted to come clean about the murder. He gave directions to where he had allegedly dumped Colleen's body. And the letter was signed only with the fish like Mark, similar to the Christian symbol for Christ. Police published an open letter to the author in the Orlando Sentinel, asking for the author to give more details about the location of the body, but the writer never came forward again. The reason why police asked the letter writer to provide more details was because he had given them vague instructions to dig for Colleen's body along the Hamaka River off Route 415 in Daytona.

So I think it's probably twofold, right? One, they want him to communicate again because that gives him another chance to possibly identify him. But number two, that's not much to go on. You know, depending on how big that river is, it's a lot of area to cover. Once again, police couldn't identify the author of the letter. With no suspect in this case other than Wilder, who was killed long before this letter was mailed,

they couldn't compare other writing samples to the letter or any DNA or fingerprints. What they were able to do was look for clues within the letter itself. The writer stated he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. He asked for forgiveness and used the fish symbol. All of the clues are consistent with Alcoholics Anonymous. In part of the 12 steps, their urge to make amends for wrongs they've done. But police hit a dead end when a search of these people,

programs in the greater Manchester area turned up nothing. For all we know, everything in the letters was fabricated, but it definitely made police jump through hoops. It wasn't until more recent years that the Orsbourne family would get answers. And it would be Dr. G from the Discovery Health Show Dr. G. Medical Examiner, who found a DNA link between the Jane Doe found by the fishermen in Orange County, Florida in 1984 and Colleen Orsborn. Dr. G was chief medical examiner in Orange and Osceola counties in Florida from 2004 to 2015. In 2007, she sent the mandible of Jane Doe to an FBI lab for DNA testing and eventually got a hit. The mitochondrial DNA taken from the mandible match DNA taken from Colleen's sister, who had provided DNA to use in the search for Colleen.

And we talked about it earlier. A medical examiner in 1984 said that the body found was not that of Colleen. These were two completely separate cases. It's not known exactly why the original medical examiner that examined the Jane Doe couldn't identify the body as Colleen. The one thing that we talked about Morph was that he said the eye color didn't match. There was the issue of the pierced ears. You would just think there would be more avenues to go down to try to identify that body. And I'm not a medical examiner, obviously, but missing the eye color being off on that.

And especially the pierced ears, that seems like a big, easy thing to see for a medical exam. saying a body doesn't have pierced ears when it did, since we know it's Colleen and she had pierced ears, I just don't know how that medical examiner would miss those things. And I guess where I go with this is, was that the reason that additional testing was not done? You know, because of these what seemed to be glaring mistakes in eye color and whether the ears were pierced or not, did that then mean that, you know, we don't take the, the extra steps. We don't do dental record analysis. My assumption is they would have had Colleen's dental records and could have matched them up to Jane Doe. But did they not do that because right off

the bat, they believed it wasn't her? And then you think about what would have happened if they would have identified Colleen's body back then. I mean, how many decades of pain and, you know, not knowing what happened to their daughter, would that have saved Colleen's family? All those years of not knowing could have been eliminated and they would have had answers a lot sooner. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't remove the pain, but my assumption is it changes it in some way. You know, it goes from not knowing where she is or what happened to her to there's still the pain that she's gone, but it's different. Now, in this guy's, defense, this was a time well before DNA was being used, but they still, like I said,

they still had other avenues before DNA came around. Dental Records was a big one. Colleen's family received a death certificate when she was officially identified. On April 11, 2012, they were finally able to give her memorial service at the Basilica of St. Paul on North Ridgewood Avenue in Daytona Beach. The night before, they held a candlelight vigil in her honor. Margaret Carroll calling her sister told local media. We would have liked a better outcome, and this just prolonged the pain. A memorial is a chance for us to give her a proper service. Sadly, Colleen Orsborn's mother passed away in 1989, and her father passed in 1992. Both of them never knowing what happened to their daughter.

That's definitely true, but I think technically her surviving family still doesn't know. exactly what happened to her. They know that she's no longer alive, but they still don't know how or why. The next case that we're discussing in this episode is the disappearance of Deborah Ann Quimby. Deborah Ann Quimby was born on October 9th, 1963 to Richard and Anne Quimby. She had a younger sister named Nancy. The family lived on Smith Street in Townsend, Massachusetts, Around 4 p.m. on May 3, 1977, 13-year-old Deborah left a note for her parents telling them that she was out riding her bike. She was going to her grandparents' house on Venton Pond Road near West Townsend. In the note, she also said that she would return later that day.

A bike ride was nearly four miles long, and Deborah was joined by a young friend for part of this ride. friend last saw Deborah at the crest of the hill on Turnpike Road. But at that point, the friend had to turn back around and ride for home. This is when she lost sight of Deborah. And sadly, Deborah has never been seen again. Her brown to Kara 10 speed boys bike that she was riding disappeared with Deborah. And it too has never been recovered. When Deborah didn't return home that day. Her parents called police. Police searched her school locker and found a note Debra had written to a friend. In the letter, she said she was upset and needed to talk to the friend. Debra gave directions to her grandparents' house. It's unclear if this is the same friend who accompanied

her on the bike ride the day she disappeared. Police checked out rumors at the time that Debra might have been pregnant, but they could never confirm it. In November 2002, police received an anonymous letter postmarked from Worcester, Massachusetts. The letter urged police to look in Walker Pond, close to where Deborah vanished from. And police searched the Pond. They searched it with Sonar in May of 2003, but they didn't find anything. In November 2003, a year to the day after the first letter was received by police, a second letter was received. This time, the anonymous letter was postmarked from Manchester, New Hampshire. And it instructed police to take a closer look at Walker Pond. So police searched Walker Pond again. They searched it twice in both

June and July of 2004. They drained the pond about 20 to 30 feet. And they focused on the northwest corner of the pond. For the 2004 search, the company Mass Environmental was brought in, and it used a crane, screener, and other equipment to help locate Deborah's remains or find clues to her disappearance. They found a piece of clothing, a couple of buttons, and parts of two bicycles. Police sent all of the items to be tested in a forensics laboratory. The piece of clothing produced no leads whatsoever, and both bikes were determined not to be part of Deborah's missing bike. At the time of Deborah's disappearance, Walker Pond was used by the locals as a dump site. During the 2004 search, a woman claiming to be a psychic approached police and said that

she was communicating with Deborah. The woman was from Mary Mack, New Hampshire, and she offered a number of details about Deborah's case that, matched evidence gathered by police shortly after her disappearance. Some of the information also matched a profile done by the FBI's behavioral science unit. And this woman took it a step further. She actually named a local individual who she said was involved in Deborah's murder and even offered up a motive for the killing. But police didn't take her seriously.

They didn't act on any of her information. and no other leads or tips with any value came into police. If we consider the two anonymous letters in the Quimby case, the first mailed from Worcester, Massachusetts, and the second from Manchester, New Hampshire, these are two towns about 70 miles apart from each other, but it's noteworthy that Deborah had vanished from Townsend, which is located directly between the towns of Worcester and Manchester. In the early fall of 2009, Robert R. Reinhart started the missing person special investigation unit, a private for-profit business to investigate cold cases. The organization claimed

its main purpose was to use donated money to search for Deborah and solve her disappearance. But this turned out to be just a big scam. And for one thing, Reinhart had zero back. background in law enforcement. He had approached Ann Quimby about investigating her daughter's case, but he wanted a hefty $5,000 fee, which she couldn't afford. But it wasn't just Deborah's case, right? Reinhart went around New Hampshire and Maine, talking with the families of victims that had disappeared from those two states, offering up his services for a fee. He said, and he, to help find their missing loved ones. In December 2009, Reinhardt told a local newspaper

that the organization had stopped soliciting donations after putting in 482 man hours searching for Debra. Five years later in September 2014, Reinhardt was charged with 11 counts of larceny over $250, including larceny over $250 from a person over 60 years of age, He was also charged with attempted larceny, larceny of less than $250 and conspiracy. He posted $7,500 cash bail and had a trial date set for October 20, 2014. Along with Reinhart, two others were charged, Clarissa Rodriguez and William Muller.

Part of the charges stemmed from the Missing Persons Unit, Reinhart formed in 2009. In a statement to the press, the Middlesex District Attorney said, people gave thousands of dollars in their business plans or creative ideas to these defendants and never got the meetings or profits or transactions that were promised. These defendants are alleged to have used other people's money in a series of textbook confidence schemes. These so-called deals took many different forms, so there may have been other people in companies who also have lost money in connection with these defendants. It's not clear what the outcome of this trial was,

but to try and take advantage of families that are searching for loved ones during such a difficult time, that just seems shameful. And really more if it's shameful on two fronts. You know, for one thing, he's bilking people out of money and, you know, as a con man, but to do it in the vein of I'm searching for your lost loved one, I mean, to me, that just adds an even greater. degree of, oh gosh, what's the word? Nastiness to it.

Yeah, it's almost like the term ambulance chasers for some of those attorneys that seek out victims of injuries and in car accidents and stuff. In 2004, years after Deborah vanished, Jake Quimby told local media that he never believed his daughter was abducted by a stranger. He believed it was someone she knew. He said, when she left. it seemed like she had a destination in mind. To me, that's not being snatched. That same year, police said they wanted to analyze the letters again and re-interview eight to 10 people who were

persons of interest at the time Deborah vanished. But as of today, police have not released any information regarding what came from this fresh new look at the case. Jake Quimby passed away from cancer on September 17, 2006. In his obituary, Deborah is listed as a surviving but missing family member. To this day, no sign of Deborah and Quimby has ever been found. And again, Morif, I think it's so sad that these parents are dying without ever knowing what happened to their children. As a parent, to go through years of not knowing what happened to your child, I can't even put myself in that position. I can't even imagine that. Around the time that Deborah Ann Quimby went missing, there were some other missing person cases of interest that we

should talk about in that area of New Hampshire, where she vanished from, and where some of the letters we've talked about in this episode were mailed from. 15-year-old Rachel Elizabeth Garden went missing from Newton, New Hampshire on March 22nd, 1980, after going to a local store to buy some gum. In 2008, a tip led them the search in a pond around Newton, but they didn't find her. There was no information given on whether the tip was in the form of a letter. A month after Rachel Garden vanished, 14-year-old Lorraine Ron disappeared on April 26, 1980 from her home on Mary Mac Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. Police originally considered her a runaway, but now believe she was murdered.

And just six weeks after Lorraine went missing, 26-year-old Denise DeNalte also went missing from Manchester, New Hampshire. And Denise lived just two blocks from Lorraine. But unlike Lorraine and Rachel, who were teens, Denise was in her mid-20s. I don't know more if it seems like this area of Manchester has more than its share of missing women. I mean, for me, I always think about New Hampshire as being this kind of small state. This is a large number of people seemingly going missing from the same general area. Yeah, and it's not just girls and women going missing from this area, but letters about

missing girls are being mailed out from the same area. Very, very strange. During the 1980s, serial killer Terry Rasmussen, who also went by Robert Bob Evans and was responsible for the Bear Brook murders was in the Manchester, New Hampshire area. Although it's not known if he had anything to do with the murders of these girls, but again, it's just another tie-in, right? You have this heinous serial killer known to have been. running around in this area at the time that some of these girls went missing.

So just to recap where some of the letters we talked about in this episode were mailed from, in the case of Alicia Markovic, who went missing from Blairsville, Pennsylvania, the letter was mailed in October 2000 from Bedford, New Hampshire. In Colleen Orsbourne's case, she went missing from Daytona Beach, Florida, and the letter in her case was mailed in February 2001. from Manchester, New Hampshire. Only four miles away from where the letter in Alicia Markovich's case was mailed from. In the case of Deborah Ann Quimby, who went missing from Townsend, Massachusetts, the letter in her case was mailed in 2003 from Worcester, Massachusetts, and in 2004 from Manchester,

New Hampshire. With the exception of the Worcester, Massachusetts letter, these letters were really clustered over a four-mile area. And of course, when I found these different anonymous letters, mailed out from that area in all these cases, I knew that this was more than a coincidence. I did reach out to investigators in all the cases and discuss these letters being mailed from the same anonymous author. They investigated and got back to me and they let me know that the author in all these letters was likely the same person, but that the writer likely didn't have anything to do with these girls going missing. They essentially said that in that Manchester, New Hampshire area, there is one dedicated

cruel writer out there whose sole intent is to screw with police and torment families who have experienced the loss of a child. And I understand where the police are coming from. That makes sense. That's probably the most likely explanation. But how many cases morph over the years have involved letter writing? There have been a number of pretty high profile cases. Could it be?

And I'm just throwing out a theory that for whatever reason, some of these are connected and the person chose to mail the letters from this one area. You know, I go back to a case like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. This guy was living out in the middle of nowhere in a cabin. but had the foresight to take a bus to San Francisco to mail all his correspondence, to mail his bombs. Well, why did he do that? He did that to throw off the police.

And I'm not saying that's what we have in this situation. But I don't think you can 100% discount it. I do think that's a lot of times where authorities get into trouble. when they totally discount something that could be a possibility. And it could be a case of the letter writer not living in that area like you mentioned, but perhaps they're traveling there for work or for the purposes of visiting family. And while they're there, they just dropped the letters in the mailbox. And that puts distance between themselves and where they really live.

Yeah, the other thing that I think about a lot, because I've covered a lot of these cases, of long-haul truckers who, you know, essentially are crisscrossing parts of the country. What if this person routinely makes it to the Manchester, New Hampshire area? And they just mail their letters from there when they get there. But they've been in Florida. They've been in some of these other places and they've committed their crimes. Those kind of predators to me are very scary because they're, all over the place, very hard to track. And then you think about the fact that this could be just

a cruel person writing these letters, didn't have anything to do with the, the disappearances or the deaths of these, these girls. You got to be a pretty sick bastard to derive some kind of pleasure from writing these type of letters to families that have lost children. It makes me think, too, because these letters were mailed not in the very early days of the internet, but before the internet was a lot more popular. How were they finding out about all these cases in different areas of the country over different time periods? Where did they get the information if they really are a hoaxer to come up with material to write in these letters? Well, I think that's a great point because it wasn't like it is today, right?

Today, you can just go on Google crimes, go to different websites. You can find just about anything you want. But at a certain point in time, we didn't have that. So were they reading a number of newspapers? Were they going to the library? I don't know. I don't know. If they didn't have anything to do with it, you know, I don't believe morph that some of

these cases made the national news. I could be wrong about that. I don't think they did. So you do have to ask the question, as you just did, how would somebody have found out about all these cases? And I think unless somehow the letter writer is identified, we might not ever get those answers. But there's no doubt. This is mysterious and extremely painful for the families. But that's it. That's the cases of Alicia Markovich, Colleen Orsborn, Deborah Ann Quimby, and what we're calling the cruel rider.

If you have any information about the Alicia Markovic case, please call the Pennsylvania State Police at 724-832-3-2-288. If you have information about the Deborah Ann Quimby case, please call Townsend Police Department at 978-5972242. And if you have information about the Colleen-Orsbourne case, please call the Daytona Beach Police Department at 386-671-510. Thanks goes out to Debbie Buck at True Crime Diva.com for writing and research assistants in this episode. Take a minute. If you haven't done so, go out. Give us a five-star rating. If you love the show, you can also give us a review.

And make sure you're telling your friends as well about the show. All of that goes a long way towards helping other people find the podcast. And if you want to reach out to us on social media, we're happy to hear from you. You can find us on Twitter with the handle Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Criminology Podcast or by joining our Facebook discussion group, which is called Criminology Podcast Discussion and Fans. All right. So that's it. We will be back with you next Saturday night with an all-new episode of Criminology.

So for Mike. And Morf. We'll talk to you then. Take care, everyone.