Every Town - The Strange & Creepy Mystery of The Old Man In The Trunk

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Today we have a strange case to cover that thank god has a satisfying ending. It revolves around a trunk in the middle of the Appalachian trail, The body found inside of it and the dark investigation that followed. So lets head down to Virginia now and get into the Mystery Of The OLD Man In The Trunk. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/LcnspVD0ugM 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy International & Other Ways To Watch: https://www.anangryboy.com/ 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/ 💀 Free 7 Day Trail on Exclusive Episodes, Podcasts & Perks! https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 👁 X: https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1 👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 👁 X: https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1 🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between.

With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime. Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. The overlook at Harper's Ferry National Park was just another stop on police deputy Clark Jackson's early morning patrol route, a scenic viewpoint where tourists would go during the day to photograph the misty mountains of Virginia,

or even use it as a jumping off point for a day of hiking. But back in the spring of 1996 in the gray light of dawn, while this peaceful overlook changed into something else entirely. It became the backdrop for a bizarre and a bizarre and a darker. and unique murder scene with a case spanning another decade before it was solved. And when it was all said and done, well, it showed the world what true evil look like, and I promise you, it's a face you wouldn't expect. Hey, guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to this episode of Everytown,

where today we have a strange case to cover that, thank God, has a satisfying ending. It revolves around a trunk in the middle of the Appalachian Trail, and the body found inside of it, and the dark investigation. that followed. And so, let's head on down to Virginia now and get in to the mystery of the old man in the trunk. In Loudoun, Virginia, May 14th of 96,

started off with the usual routine for Sheriff's Deputy Clark Jackson. He'd been doing this route for three years now, and every morning and around dawn, the same sequence. Check the Visitors Center at Harper's Ferry National Park into a sweep of the parking lots and inspect the overlooks.

The most days the only signs of life out there with the occasional deer or early morning hikers prepping for a walk along the trails. But this morning was different. As it turns out, it was anything but the usual. As Jackson's patrol car rounded the curve towards the Route 340 overlook, his headlights flashed past something that didn't belong. It was a large steamer trunk, old-fashioned, the kind you might find in your grandmother's attic.

and it seemed very out of place there, perched on the edge of the wilderness next to some trash cans. In 13 years of law enforcement, Jackson had seen plenty of illegal dumping, but something about this felt all wrong. The trunk looked too expensive and too nice to simply just abandon. Jackson put the car in par and stepped out of his cruiser. With his flashlight beam cutting through the fog, it illuminated the trunk's weathered leather. its brass fittings dulled with age. When he tried to move it with his foot, while the trunk wouldn't budge.

And that's when the first real surge of unease hit him. And whatever was inside was far too heavy to just be abandoned luggage. Jackson knelt down and unlatched the trunk. Inside was a large duffel bag crammed awkwardly into the space. He reached for the zipper, pulling it back slowly, and the harsh beam of his flashlight. A single human eye stared back at him through the opening, lifeless.

As he fully unzipped the bag, the full horror revealed itself. It stuffed away like discarded garbage was the body of an elderly man. And the victim had been forced into the bag in a fetal position, his limbs contorted in an unnatural way to fit the confined space. He was emaciated, his skin drawn tight across his bones, almost beyond recognition. The sun was rising by the time more police arrived, and they then carefully extracted the body. In the morning light, the true extent of the victim's suffering became clear. His clothes were dirty

and hung loose on the skeletal frame. His wrist showed signs of restraint. Every detail pointed to a slow, methodical kind of cruelty. The medical examiner would determine he hadn't been dead long, perhaps 48 hours at most. But his body, told a story of prolonged suffering, a nightmare that had lasted much longer than just two days. And cuts and abrasions marked his skin, as some old and partially healed, others fresh. A significant blow had been dealt to the back of his head, likely disorienting him in his final hours. It was his toxicology report, though, that revealed the most disturbing details. In his blood, and they found high levels of sedatives, enough to keep him docile.

helpless, at the mercy of whoever had put him in that trunk. And this, it appeared, wasn't a sudden act of violence at all. Someone had systematically broken this man down, mentally and physically, before finally putting him in that trunk. And the days following the discovery, investigators found themselves in a frustrating position. They had a body, they had a crime scene, but they had absolutely nothing that could tell them who this man was.

No wallet, no letters, no receipt. not even a scrap of paper in his pockets. And so, the investigation team had to start with the basics to try and get a hit. And they ran his fingerprints through every database they had access to. Local police records, nothing. State criminal records, nothing. FBI database? Complete silence. I was starting to feel like this man had never existed in any official capacity at all.

They tried DNA testing, but this was 1996, DNA technology was still new and limited. The samples they collected just weren't enough to work with. The science that would later solve so many cold cases simply wasn't there yet. Next up, the team expanded their search, digging through missing persons reports. And they figured if he was systematically broken down as it had appeared over a long period of time, well, maybe somebody was looking for him, a spouse perhaps, or a child.

They started with Virginia, then expanded to Maryland and West Virginia. Day after day, they compared photos, checked descriptions, and followed up on possible matches. Every lead went nowhere. Every potential match fell apart under scrutiny. They then looked at the trunk itself, and maybe something about it could tell them where it came from or where it had been. And just one piece of physical evidence stood out on that front, though at the time it seemed almost ridiculous. There were these small stains on the outside of the trunk. Splashes of nail polish, pink and purple, tried long ago on the leather. The kind of marks you might find on any teenage girl's belongings.

The crime scene photographers documented them anyway, taking close-up shots from every angle. It seemed like such a small, unimportant detail, something that would probably never matter, but those simple nail polish stains, those tiny splashes of color, would eventually crack the entire case wide open, though that would come much later. For now, when they were just another dead end in a case that seemed to have nothing but dead ends. In the case quickly captured national attention, and here was a murder victim, presumably somebody's father, grandfather, friend, and nobody seemed to be looking for him. And no family members came forward to claim him. No concerned neighbors reported his absence.

Someone had to be missing him, you'd think. People don't just disappear without anybody noticing. Whoever had put him in that trunk had done more than take his life, they'd erased him. They'd systematically removed every trace of who he was. And so, the case went cold. For seven long years, the old man in the trunk remained nameless, just an unclaimed body in the morgue, another unsolved case in the files. However, in January of 2003, a breakthrough came from an unexpected source.

The Department of Defense granted the FBI access to its internal fingerprint database. And suddenly, Gondot had a name. Jasper Frederick Watkins. Known to his friends as Jack, Watkins was no ordinary victim. He was born on March 21st of 1920 in Richmond, Virginia. He was part of that generation of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression, who learned the value of hard work and helping others, even when you had nothing yourself. Jack was barely 21 when he heard his country's call.

He enlisted in the army just weeks before Pearl Harbor, not knowing that the world was about to change forever. Like so many young men of his generation, he traded his civilian clothes for a uniform and headed off to war. He would spend the next four years of his life. life, fighting in World War II, witnessing humanity at its worst while displaying humanity at its finest. He survived one of histories deadliest conflicts and came home and built alive for himself, only to meet his end in a steamer trunk on a foggy Virginia morning. That's just no way for someone

like Jack to end up, and he deserved much more than that. As investigators began to dig into Jack Wocken's life, they discovered something disturbing but also could lead them right to the killer. And someone was still cashing his social security checks nearly seven years after his death. Where they were sent to? A P.O. Box in Ellicott City, Maryland. That's when the investigators began to uncover a story so twisted and calculated that it would challenge everything they thought they knew about evil. Because the person who killed Jack Watkins wasn't some random drifter or opportunistic thief. It was somebody he trusted, someone he had loved, and somebody who had spent decades perfecting the art of destruction. And to understand how Jack ended up in that trunk, we need to go back

a little. Back to the moment when a lonely widower opened his door to find a friendly face selling burial plots, never suspecting that he was looking into the eyes of his future killer. After coming home from the war, Jack did what many veterans do. He looked for a steady job and a chance at a normal life. He He found work at a local auto parts store, a local type of spa where people knew your name and trusted your word. It wasn't glamorous work, but Jack enjoyed it and took pride in what he did. He became the guy everyone in the neighborhood went to when they needed honest advice about their cars. And for years his life followed a simple routine, work, home, church on Sundays, all alone. But that changed in 1964 when he met Mary Triplett.

She was a 40-year-old divorce, say, with three grown daughters, and something about her caught Jack's eye. Maybe it was her warm smile of the way she could make anyone feel at home. And whatever it was, 44-year-old Jack had finally found the love of his life. And Mary's daughters weren't sure what to expect from their mother's new husband at first, but Jack won them over almost immediately. He didn't try to replace their father at all. He just showed up day after day with quiet support and genuine care. Before long, he was the one they called when they needed advice, the one who showed up to help them move and sat proudly at their graduations. And he became the father. They never knew they needed. And for 25 years, Jack and Mary built a nice life together.

Their house wasn't fancy, but it was always open to family and friends. They weren't rich by any means, but they were constantly. comfortable. Jack had learned the value of a dollar during the depression. Me and Mary were careful with their money. They saved what they could, spent what they needed, and always had a little set aside for emergencies. And then in 1989, when Mary got sick, the cancer moved fast and within months she was gone, Jack was devastated. The house that had once been filled with family gatherings and laughter suddenly felt empty. But he was determined to keep going, just like he had done after the war. He retired, sold their family home, and bought a modest place in Reisterstown, Maryland. It wasn't much, just a small house on a quiet street, but it was

enough for him. He lived simply on his social security check of $1,200 a month, clipped coupons from the Sunday paper, and kept his old car running with parts from his former store. But in 1995, Jack's spending habits changed dramatically. And the man who would always live within his means suddenly withdrew equity from his house. He then purchased a brand new BMW for $44,000, an expense that seemed completely out of character. By 96, he had sold his house, but somehow only received $3,800 from the sale. What could make a prudent, experienced man like Jack Watkins, act so recklessly with his life savings? When investigators examined Jack's financial records, they found that it was.

wasn't just that someone had taken his money. They had stripped him of everything he owned, and they had done it with surgical precision. The trail led to that PO box in Ellicott City and to a woman named Nancy Siegel. But Nancy wasn't just any fraudster. She was a chameleon, a master manipulator who had spent her entire adult life perfecting the art of deception. Born in 1948, Nancy's early lives seemed marked by tragedy. Her mother abandoned the family when Nancy was young. Her father, who raised her alone, would go on to be killed outside a bar when she was just 16. Looking for an escape, she found brief fame dancing on the Buddy Dean show,

a local Baltimore dance program that would later inspire the musical hairspray. But beneath the surface of this sympathetic figure lay something far more sinister. Nancy's first victim was her high school boyfriend, Charles Kurcharski, whom she married in 1968. She and her husband have two daughters. She devotes her time to raising them, and things go quite well for many years. I don't know if she was just tired of playing mother and wife, or she just at some point begins checking out gambling. In the early 80s, Nancy found herself gambling way too much. an addiction that would go on to reveal her true nature. I think underneath it was controlling her more than she was controlling it.

Whatever she did win, it seems that she reinvested that back into gambling and eventually wound up on the losing end. To make back some money, she started taking out loans and credit cards in her husband's name, and he didn't have a clue. She begins opening lines of credit in her husband's name. She relatively quickly racks up tens of thousands of dollars in debt, By the time they divorced in 85, well, he was $120,000 in debt and had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. And he was victim number one.

Nancy needed a new way to get cash flowing, so she married Ted Gessendaffer soon after, only to repeat the pattern. She used all his information to get loans, even altered the mortgage payment checks to make them payable to herself, instead of where they should go in case she needed to skim some cash from them. Both those marriages were just warm-ups for Nancy, though. Over time, she honed her craft, swiping mail, snatching wallets, and collecting people's personal info, and driver's licenses, credit cards, social security numbers, you name it. And though she got arrested more than once, while the charges were scattered across different towns, and so she never spent more than two weeks behind bars.

And then, in November of 94, while selling burial plots door to door, Nancy crossed paths with a perfect victim in Jack Watkins. The lonely widower didn't stand a chance against her polished charm. Within weeks, he was telling everybody that they were engaged. I think everyone was concerned because these people weren't intuitively a match made in heaven. There were decades apart in terms of their age and quite different in terms of their lifestyle. And what followed was a master, class and manipulation. Nancy had Jack take out over $60,000 in mortgages, and then she got a bunch

of credit cards under his name to max them out in no time. She isolated him from family and friends, making him unavailable when they tried to check in on him. Nancy would intercept Jack's phone messages and never, never pass them along. And after a while, this keeps happening again and again, the calls just stopped coming in. And eventually, Jack was... on his own with Nancy. But eventually, Nancy's plans were complicated by a new romance. While stealing Jack's cash, Nancy then began romantically seeing Eric Siegel, a loan broker with a lot of money.

And suddenly Jack wasn't so important, and in fact had become a bit of a liability, somebody who could potentially expose her schemes. And since Nancy had never been one to leave loose ends, as she began to plan. He had nothing left by the time that she was finished with him in just about 18 months. As a result, she had to do something with Jack. After forcing him to sell his home in April of 96, Nancy moved Jack into her house.

What happened next was almost too cruel to comprehend. She began drugging him with sedatives and slowly started to starve him to death. In his final days at the age of 76, Jack was reduced to a shadow of himself. Within 48 hours of May 13th of 96, Nancy drove to Virginia and dumped Jack's body near some trash on an access point to the Appalachian Trail. The trunk she used belonged to one of her own daughters. And why she just dumped it there in the open is a major misstep for her. Perhaps she thought it would just get picked up along with the rest of the trash like it was no big deal, but she didn't count on Deputy Jackson doing his rounds.

While the investigation into who Jack was began, when Nancy moved on quickly, marrying Eric Siegel in December of 98. And true to form, she defrauded him of $300,000. Rather than report her to the authorities, Eric paid off her debts himself. When investigators finally caught up with Nancy in 2003, the whole puzzle started coming together.

authorities discovered she had been the last person to be seen with Jack. She was the one who helped him sell his house, and she was the one who had convinced him to buy that expensive BMW. But instead of answering questions, she put on quite a show. And she burst into tears at the sight of photos of the trunk where Jack's body was found. And through her sob, she spun a complicated tale. According to her, she had been Jack's caretaker. claimed he was like a father to her that he had been suffering from dementia. She even tried to

convince them that he had in part done this to himself, and she found him hanging from a ceiling fan, and she didn't know what to do. A story that defied common sense, and it sounded exactly like the kind of lie someone makes up when they're running out of options. Ultimately, the final nail that sealed Nancy's coffin came from the people who knew her best, her own daughter. Her own daughter, and they knew all too well about their mother's criminal history, and she had even stolen their identities and ruined their credit, so they weren't exactly trying to help their mom get out of this. It was actually the perfect time for them to get a little bit of revenge.

When shown a photograph of the trunk, one daughter immediately recognized it as her own, identifying it 100% by those little nail-polished stains. In January of 2004, Nancy Siegel was indicted, on multiple charges, including murder, theft of government property, identity theft, bank, wire, and mail fraud. Her trial started in 2009, and after seven hours of deliberation, a jury found her guilty on 20 of 21 counts. He noted that at her age, a sentence of 33 years was quite likely a life sentence, that she would never rejoin society, and that there was justice in that.

and I think Judge Davis was exactly right. But the story of the old man in the trunk has one final chapter. In August of 2009, 13 years after his body was discovered in that lonely overlook, and Jasper Jack Watkins received the dignity and debt that had been denied him in his final days. With full military honors, he was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, surrounded by representatives from every agency that had worked to bring his killer to justice. In the end, evil often hides right in plain sight, so be careful who you trust out there.

And they're sitting across the table from you, mowing the lawn next door. And sometimes, they're the ones selling burial plots, the very people they plan to kill. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. Remember, you can watch all these podcasts over on our YouTube channel called Scary Mysteries. If you want exclusive episodes in a library of strange cases to go through, but check us out on patreon.com slash scary mysteries. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because you never know.

Maybe your town will be next.