Going West: True Crime - Aimee Willard // 215

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

In June of 1996, a 22-year-old college lacrosse player had a casual night out with friends at a bar in suburban Philadelphia. But on her way home, she disappeared. Shortly after leaving the bar, her car was found running with the driver's side door open on an Interstate, painting a violent attack. After an important tip came in from a local woman, a concrete suspect emerged, and it turns out, he had other victims. This is the story of Aimee Willard. BONUS EPISODES patreon.com/goingwestpodcast CASE SOURCES 1. Unsolved Mysteries:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz6hfYxIyI0 2. Aimee Willard.com: http://www.aimeewillard.com/pics.html 3. Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/205392915/aimee-ellen-willard 4. List of Death Row Inmates: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_death_row_inmates_in_the_United_States#/google_vignette 5. Philadelphia Daily News: https://www.newspapers.com/image/186768530 6. Philadelphia Daily News: https://www.newspapers.com/image/187123202/?terms=ryan%20hutchinson&match=1 7. Philadelphia Daily News: https://www.newspapers.com/image/186685509/?terms=ryan%20hutchinson&match=1 8. Commonwealth v. Bomar: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/pa-supreme-court/1426072.html 9. Philadelphia Inquirer: https://www.newspapers.com/image/179305947 10. Philadelphia Inquirer: https://www.newspapers.com/image/179244365 11. Fort Worth Star-Telegram: https://www.newspapers.com/image/647148343/?terms=maria%20cabuenos&match=1 12. The Daily Item: https://www.newspapers.com/image/483344803/?terms=arthur%20j%20bomar&match=1 13. Delco Times: https://www.delcotimes.com/2013/11/16/aimee-willards-family-continues-creating-goodness-in-her-memory/ 14. Fourth Estate: http://gmufourthestate.com/2019/04/15/honoring-former-mason-athlete-aimee-willard/ 15. Forensic Files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNzWSIAp6TQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is going on True Crime fans, I'm your host Tee. And I'm your host Daphne. And you're listening to Going West. Hello everybody, thank you so much for joining us once again for an episode of Going West. Hello everybody, thank you so much for joining us once again for an episode of Going West. Today we want to give extra thanks to Charlotte and Jessica, both whom recommended today's case. So thank you guys so much, without you, we wouldn't have known about it. Absolutely. And also if you're looking for more Going West episodes head on over to our Patreon, that's p-a-t-r-e-O-N dot com slash going west podcast.

And you can find a ton of extra episodes. Almost 70. Yeah. And today's episode is one of those interesting ones where because this case was sorted, you know, I'm not trying to give too much away, it was determined that this person killed other people. So it's always crazy when that happens,

when you're like, wait, now, because this one is solved, these other ones are also solved. Right, some links have been made. Yeah, absolutely. All right, guys, this is episode 215 of Going West, so let's get into it. Music In June of 1996, a 22-year-old college lacrosse player had a casual night out with friends at a bar in suburban Philadelphia.

But on her way home, she disappeared. Shortly after leaving the bar, her car was found running with the driver's side open on an inner state, painting a violent attack. After an important tip came in from a local woman, a concrete suspect emerged and it turns out he had other victims. This is the story of Amy Willard. Amy Ellen Willard was born on June 8th, 1974 in Chester, Pennsylvania to parents Gail and Paul Willard alongside her older siblings Nancy and Tim. So the city of Chester is actually a suburb of Philadelphia and it's just 20 minutes from

the center of the city and it's situated right on the Delaware River, and on the other side of this river is the state of New Jersey. During Amy's upbringing, her mother-gale worked hard as a nurse while her father-Paul worked as a police officer. But at some point in Amy's childhood, her parents divorced, and they maintained a pretty strained relationship, although her relationship with both parents

was known to be strong. During this time, Amy moved with her mother Gail to Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, which is just a few minutes from Chester in the opposite direction of the river, so not far by any means, which was convenient since Amy was a teenager, so she didn't have to totally uproot her life. She attended the Academy of Notre Dame Dana Moore, which is a Catholic independent All Girls College Prep School for sixth through twelfth graders in Villanova, Pennsylvania, which is about 25 minutes from Brookhaven, and actually her aunt Nancy, a nun and her sister's namesake, taught there.

Amy was a kind, quiet child who grew into a gifted athlete. While attending Notre Dame, she quickly rose to stardom in basketball, soccer, and lacrosse. In her senior year of high school, she let her school soccer team to an interacademic league title.

And because of such victories, her basketball coach, Mary Beth McNichol, called Amy the best athlete I've ever coached. That says a lot. Yeah. So that just kind of goes to show you what kind of future Amy could have in sports. She was just an extremely talented and passionate athlete. After graduating from high school in 1992, Amy settled on George Mason University and

Fairfax Virginia, which is located in the Washington, DC area, about a two and a half hour drive southwest through Baltimore from her hometown of Brookhaven. And there, of course at no surprise, she was an accomplished member of both the women's soccer and lacrosse teams. Amy earned all conference honors for her skill on the soccer team, all American honors for her performance on the lacrosse team, and was ranked among the top 25 female lacrosse players in the entire United States. In the lacrosse season of her junior year, she even broke the all-time scoring record, and she was described as intense on the field,

but off the field she was just a joy to be around. Her lacrosse teammate, college roommate and friend, Erin O'Neill, was Amy's high school rival, competing for Germantown Academy and Fort Washington, which is another suburb of Philadelphia. But after competing together on the George Mason lacrosse team, the two became close friends, and Aaron actually described Amy as very happy-go-lucky and compassionate. Her friendship's florist just she grew close to her teammates, and she started dating her boyfriend Alejandro. In the summer of 1996, Amy was getting ready to start her senior year of college.

She headed home for the summer to stay with her mom and grandma, the yellow bungalow they shared on Greenwood Street in Brookhaven, which again was just a two and a half hour drive from her college. That summer, Amy was looking forward to catching up with all of her high school friends and spending time at her mom's beach house in C.I.L. City, New Jersey, about an hour and a half from Brookhaven right on the coast of the Atlantic. So that would have been super fun. Amy had a fondness for children and was hoping to eventually coach high school sports. She had spent the beginning of her summer break taking an extra course at the Delaware County Community College, playing in a summer lacrosse league, and looking for a job. So despite the fun she was looking to have, she was also keeping very busy with other

important things like school and work. On the evening of Wednesday, June 19, 1996, less than two weeks after her 22nd birthday. Amy was planning on meeting up with some girlfriends from high school at a bar called Smoky Joe's in nearby Wayne, Pennsylvania. A little about this area, Wayne is a suburb that sits along what's called the main line, and that's a string of affluence Philadelphia suburbs that run along the Pennsylvania railroad tracks, and it's one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Smokey Joe's was a simple suburban bar frequented by college students and was known for hosting

comedians for various stand-up sets. The bar eventually shut down in 1999, so a few years later, but up until it did, it enjoyed a lively atmosphere and patronage among locals. The night of Wednesday, June 19th, 1996 began like any other. Amy and her friends from high school, who were also visiting for the summer, had made kind of a habit of meeting up every Wednesday night.

Now according to a bartender atoky Joe's, Wednesday was the bar's most popular night, and they had over 400 people come in on this particular evening, including Amy and her friends. Four of them met up there, so Amy and three of her friends, and remember Amy having less than one beer, so she was not really drinking at all. Yeah, she was just hanging out with her friends, chilling. Exactly, but they were there for about three hours. And then they all left at the same time between 1.30 and 1.40 AM on the morning of Thursday, June 20th, 1996.

So between 23 and 33 minutes later at 2.03 AM, Amy's car was found abandoned on the side of the road by off-duty paramedics. But this was no ordinary scene. Her keys were in the ignition. Her car was running. The driver's side door was open and the radio was on. The car was pulled over on the shoulder of an exit ramp on Interstate 476 near Springfield,

Pennsylvania, just a 15-minute drive from her home in Brookhaven. Upon further inspection, they found a pool of quickly coagulating blood on the pavement beneath the driver's side door, along with blood splatters on the guardrail to the right of the car, and a handrail to the right of the car, and a handprint on the exterior of the car. Also, the bumper of the car was indented, as if Amy had been rear-ended. And that is an important thing to remember, so remember everybody, bumper of her car was indented.

And even though paramedics didn't know that the time, you know, this was so soon after Amy had left the bar, meaning something happened to her fast. Yeah, it almost like seems like as soon as she left the bar some sort of incident happened with her in her car. Yes. So the off-duty paramedics called police right away and as soon as they arrived, which was apparently over an hour later, away and as soon as they arrived, which was apparently over an hour later, police began scouring the area for clues, because obviously this was a terrifying scene. Amy's mom Gail had been at her C.I.L. City home that evening, expecting Amy to join her

the very next day, which is why Gail left Amy her blue 1995 Honda Civic to drive, which was the very car that was found on the side of the road, so this is not Amy's car, it's actually her mom's car. At 5.40am on Thursday, June 20, 1996, Gail received a concerned call from a co-worker, a fellow nurse at Riddle Memorial Hospital where Gail worked. When police began investigating the abandoned car, they ran the plates and the registration and the car came up in Gail's name. A fellow nurse overheard her name come in on the police scanner and after some investigation

of her own, found the phone number to Gail's vacation home, so this was really just a stroke of luck here. Yeah, or else Gail wouldn't have known about this so early because this is only three-ish hours after, or even less, after police got to the scene. Exactly. So after finding out about this information, Gail raised home to Brookhaven,

joining her estranged ex-husband and their two other children on the side of the road, just waiting for more news. So later that morning, farther down the exit ramp from where Amy's car had been discovered, investigators found the underwear and tennis shoes that she had been wearing the previous day. Curiously, it had rained overnight on the 20th, and these items were found dry, indicating that they had been brought back and disposed of after the car had already been found. So this

guy is returning to the scene. Daylight brought hundreds of volunteers flooding to the area along with cadaver dogs and helicopters because it was very clear to police and the community that something very bad had happened to her and they needed to act as quickly as they possibly could. By 9am, so you know seven hours after her car was found, volunteers were traipsing the nearby marshes and overgrowth for clues, but sadly nothing turned up. The ramp was closed to through traffic and surrounded with dozens of cop cars and hundreds of troopers and volunteers. But by 4 p.m. that day, a disturbing discovery was made in a garbage-stroon vacant lot in

North Philadelphia at North 16th Street and West Indiana Avenue by four young boys who were playing tag. It was Amy's naked body, and it had been discarded about 12 miles or 19 kilometers away from where her car was found. She had suffered three deadly blows to the head from an unknown assailant with an unknown object and died from blunt force trauma. The body was quickly confirmed to be 22-year-old Amy Willards from the Nike swoosh logo tattooed

in purple on her ankle. And the autopsy revealed that she had died about five hours after she has thought to have been abducted and that she had also been sexually assaulted. So this person had her for about five hours. So what was this person doing with Amy for five whole hours? Yeah, and where, because it wasn't in her car, because it seems like she was attacked in her car and then taken away from that scene. So of course, the medical examiner collected DNA evidence from the assault, just hoping that it would connect

to her killer eventually. They also discovered a strange geometric pattern that almost looked like a diamond shaped, a her shape, left behind on her abdomen that they couldn't explain immediately, but we will come back to this in a bit. Amy's family, as you can imagine, was absolutely destroyed by the loss of their youngest member, and Gail said it was worse than her worst nightmare. Aside from the handprint on the car, which they had no way to connect to the perpetrator, police had no leads to chase down. But there was one man who had shown up to the search efforts

claiming to be an eyewitness, and with no other eyewitness accounts, he topped the list of potential suspects. Around noon, or about four hours before Amy's body was found, 23-year-old Andrew Kobach, the son of a successful stockbroker who had dreams of becoming a firefighter, stopped by the crime scene where Amy's mom's car had been found, and he told police that he had driven by and seen her car there early that morning, but that he hadn't seen Amy. Police took down his name and his number to look into him further in case this could have turned into an important lead, but they found that Andrew had an interesting prior run-in with police.

A few years before, he had been accused of impersonating an officer. He was reported by a civilian, someone he'd pulled over with a fake police badge, siren, and uniform. Which is so weird and sketchy like why would you do that? And we've heard of this before in cases, and obviously, to me it seems like that's just a way for a predator to become opportunistic, to say, hey, I'm a person of authority, you need to do what I say, and then they gain control of our situation. Right, but in this situation, it's so weird, because it doesn't seem, at least from our

research, that anything happened, like he didn't do anything to this person, so it's almost like, are you just like trying to have fun in a weird way, because you want to be a firefighter, maybe you also want to be a police officer? I mean, it makes no sense. Yeah, it's pretty fucking weird. So while the charges were eventually dropped, there was no doubt that he was now on the investigators radar because of this. So please propose that Andrew may have stopped by and offered his testimony just to keep tabs on their investigation. And obviously we've seen this before as well, such as the case of the Montana State Park serial killer, David Meyerhofer.

Yeah, some killers are extremely invested in the search for themselves. Yeah, absolutely. So with more digging into his past, they found that Andrew worked just five blocks from 16th and Indiana where Amy's body was found. This was obviously suspicious, but also given that they had no other suspects to speak of, the blame really shifted to Andrew. They obtained a search warrant for his home to dig

for further evidence and found a police paraphernalia such as handcuffs, a police grade flashlight, and a catalog used to order police equipment. So this guy was like really wanted to be a police officer. Really into trying to be a police officer. Yeah. Why don't you just go sign up for the Academy York? Yeah.

Seriously. So once the search was performed, he stopped cooperating all together and hired a lawyer who protested his innocence. And Andrew just began denying that he had been on the ramp that night at all. So now he's just completely taking his whole story away from the night that Amy disappeared,

probably in hopes of them dropping him as a person of interest, even though to me that just makes him look so much worse, if you're like, actually, that was the lie. Yeah, you already said that you saw her car. Yeah, like why would, I don't know. But when the tire tracks behind Amy's vehicle believe to, you know, it was believed to belong

to her abductors car, they didn't match Andrew's car and a DNA comparison also brought back no match. They officially cleared him of suspicion. So either he was lying for attention and just to be involved in something police-related, or he really did see her car early on in the morning, before it was found, which it doesn't help the investigation anyway, so we can just kind of push

this aside. Yeah. So a second witness came forward and claimed that he had also seen Amy's car in the ramp that night. This account was slightly more credible because it was coming from an off-duty Pennsylvania state trooper named Ryan Hutchinson. The 29-year-old officer claimed that he saw Amy's car on the shoulder and slowed down next to the Upper Providence Township Police car that was parked behind her, where a uniformed

officer sat in the driver's seat. And by the way, Upper Providence Township is just a little ways outside of Philadelphia, about 30 minutes or so. So Ryan said that he stopped around 1.50 am, so 10 to 20 minutes after she left the bar, and 13 minutes before her vehicle was found by the off-duty paramedics. And after Ryan stopped, he flashed his badge and checked to make sure that everything was okay. And when it was confirmed that the officer had it covered, he went on his way. Now, this is a bit complicated, though, because his superiors argue that they have on record that it was impossible for him to have been there at that time. Now a local tow truck driver also claims that Ryan was on the scene of an accident 16 miles

away just 10 minutes later, but Ryan maintains that he was there by Amy's car. He eventually resigned from the police force, but his recollection of that night never wavered. So this is really strange, because he's so adamant that he saw what he saw, but did he? Because this would be a pretty huge deal. You know, if this is true and it would explain in the moment why Amy's car was pulled over

and then it would make you wonder if a police officer was involved. So this is an important story to prove or disprove. Right. But let's talk about what ended up happening with this story. Over a year after Amy's murder in August of 1997, Ryan Hutchinson, who became a truck driver after retiring from the police force, or resigning from the police force, was tried for filing a false police report, and even under oath, he stuck to his original story. He said, quote, I know and all my friends know that I saw an upper Providence police

car on the ramp that night. He believes he's collateral damage for the police trying to cover up the fact that it took them 75 minutes to reach Amy's car after it had been reported abandoned on the side of the road. And his lawyer, Aurei Moldowski, stated, quote, Ryan's intention was to be helpful. His sympathy has always been with the Willard family. Everybody is anxious to see a conviction and finally get some closure.

A jury found Ryan Guilty and sentenced him to five weekends in jail. Five weekends in jail. Yeah, plus 23 months probation, electronic home monitoring via an ankle monitor for the first 20 days following his release, and outpatient psychiatric treatment. I mean, that really just seems like pretty overkill in my opinion. I agree. It seems a little intense, especially because he's sticking to his story. So we will kind of come to realize that it doesn't seem like this story is actually true, but it's weird that he is so adamant that he saw this and that nobody is believing him.

So they must have some sort of evidence regarding his logs that prove he wasn't, I mean, we know he was at an accident or the scene of an accident 10 minutes later and it was 16 miles away, but he could have like sped down the highway, you know. And this makes me also wonder if maybe he had some resentment towards the police forces because he did end up leaving the police force a short

time later. That's true. And he was also ordered to pay back all the public funds that it was estimated to have cost the police force to investigate his claim. And due to all this, his parents had to sell their house to pay his lawyer and legal fees. So this was like a massive amount of trouble. Dang. And what's so weird to me is the fact that he continued to stick to his story regardless of all of this punishment that he went through. So that makes me feel like he really does think he saw this.

He could have taken a plea deal. So that's why it's weird to me. Yeah, but before Ryan was accused of perjury, a third eyewitness came forward. Another police officer, and this time, belonging to the jurisdiction that Ryan claimed to have spoken with on the night that Amy was taken. Former Upper Providence Police Officer David Buggy asserted that he also drove by Amy's car, and that an ambulance was parked behind her, and that he spoke to EMTs.

And remember, EMTs are the ones that found Amy's car. That's true. So the exact ambulance and EMTs, David, said that he had spoke with, were questioned, and said that they had not stopped there that night, or been involved with the crime scene at all. Weird. Very strange. David Buggy resigned in a plea deal in which he would give up his position in exchange for not being penalized for lying to fellow police officers during

a murder investigation, but it's still unclear why Ryan was sentenced for lying and David was not. But David asserted that he had been under a massive amount of stress at the time and that he was even being medicated for it. He said that he was confused in that he didn't complete his report about what he had seen that night until October of 1996, which was four months later, so by that point he had forgotten the details and perjured himself by accident. Between these three false witnesses, there's a lot of coincidences and similarities at play because every suspect was somehow involved with police. Ryan lived around the corner from Amy, Amy's grandma, and her mom, and David used to take the drunk

drivers he arrested to the hospital where Amy's mom worked, but none of them knew what really happened to Amy. With all three potential suspects out of the running, police were out of leads in the hunt for Amy's murderer. Then, after almost a year with no answers, a local 19-year-old named Patty Jordan came forward with a possible connection between something that had happened to her and what had happened to Amy. On May 29, 1997, so 11 months after Amy's murder, Patty had been leaving a night club called Egypt on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia, and she had been rear-ended by a man following her too closely.

You're really similar? Yes. He motioned to her to pull over under the guise of, you know, exchanging information, but feeling uneasy on the road late at night and by herself. Patty, smart gal, kept driving despite his efforts to stop her. She also had the foresight to take down his license plate number and report it to police.

So, go patty. I know, this must have felt that, like this must have felt pretty sketchy to her if she did that, you know. And that's how this dickhead is getting away with manipulating the situation is he's rear-ending people and then going, hey, let's exchange information then boom, abduction.

Exactly. And we will get into that. Now the Pennsylvania plates were registered to a man named Arthur Jerome Beaumard Jr. for the green 1993 Ford Escort that he had been driving. A quick search of his record revealed that Arthur was a parold murderer from Nevada who had been sentenced to life after killing a man over a dispute about a parking spot. He served just 11 years of that sentence, and upon his release in 1990, he violated the terms of his parole and moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to his family.

So first of all, again, very smart of Patty to listen to her instincts and not pull over. I think we can all take a tip from her there. And the fact that he did end up being a murderer and she was able to report this to police, specifically thinking of Amy's particular case, incredible. But also, who knows what would have happened to Patty if she had pulled over? Because this clearly was his way of getting her to stop her car, which is terrifying.

But let's talk a little bit more about Arthur. So in 1978, Arthur Beaumar was a 19-year-old janitor living in Reno, Nevada, when he shot a man to death in a Las Vegas parking lot after a fight. But while he was in his local jail, he was released on a $20,000 bond. Then the following year in 1979, while awaiting trial for his murder charge, he was arrested for shooting an 18-year-old woman in the knee back in Reno. So while he was awaiting trial for a murder,

he committed another assault. And what happened in this particular case is that Arthur walked into the home of Sherry Newman and her mother and shot Sherry Point Blank in her knee. Then in 1986, while already in prison serving the supposed life sentence that was commuted to just 11 years, he beat his girlfriend in a prison visiting room

and was charged with assault. So it's like this guy's already in prison and he's literally assaulting his girlfriend while still in prison. Yeah, he's just an extremely violent individual. Yeah. And although there were witnesses, he initially claimed that he was innocent before taking a plea deal in exchange for an admission of guilt. Now he fled to Pennsylvania illegally upon release, but the state of Nevada failed to

extra-diet him and charge him, so he walked free without the supervision of a parole officer. In September of 1997, he pleaded guilty to separate burglary, theft, and gun charges unrelated to Amy's death that had culminated in three arrests between June and December of 1996. This man had slipped through the cracks of the justice system for so long, but his time was finally up. It's just frustrating, as we say, in every case it's like this, that he did, or he was able to slip through the cracks because had he not, multiple people would be alive today. Very true.

On June 5th, 1997, Arthur was arrested yet again, this time for unrelated criminal trespassing charges. And for whatever reason, he gave police the alias Peter Thomas Love, but after discovering that this man was Arthur, the same Arthur who had rear-ended Patti Jordan, police were eager to question him about the possible connection between him and Amy Willard. Coincidentally, Arthur had been pulled over at the intersection of 20th Street and Eerie Avenue in Philadelphia, just eight blocks from where Amy's body was discovered, and only a few

hours after she was found, proving that he was in the area. And at this time, he had been driving the same green Ford escort that he was driving when he rear-ended patty. But when questioned about the tire tracks behind Amy's car, he claimed there was no way to make a comparison comparison because he had driven the escort until March of 1997 at which time he had gotten a new car, so by the time they're questioning him, he no longer had that Ford escort. Arthur added that he happened to have been at Smokey Joe's the night of Amy's disappearance,

but that he had nothing to do with her death. But on July 10th, police interviewed his then-girlfriend Mary Rumor, who told them that Arthur had told her that he murdered Amy. The following day, police tracked down the Ford Escort that Arthur no longer drove, and it was found in a field next to a towing company. They removed the left front tire, which matched the tire tracks left behind Amy's Honda Civic, the oil pan from underneath the vehicle, which matched the geometric pattern burned onto Amy's abdomen, and the passenger's side door panel, which had

brownish spots that tested positive for blood, which means he drove that car for almost a year with that blood just inside his vehicle. A comparison confirmed the blood found in Arthur's car was Amy's, and the male DNA found on Amy's body was Arthur's. Police surmised that he had blood in Amy with a tire iron and judging by the oil pan burns from the undercared of his car, run her over before discarding her body. So this is such a violent and senseless crime, and knowing what he had done to Patty, you know, re-rending her to get her to pull over, it made police believe that Arthur did the exact same thing to Amy,

but Amy actually did pull over to fix the situation, especially since her back bumper was indented when police inspected it, so this essentially proved this theory. Yeah, I mean again, this is exactly how he's able to trap these women. So when Arthur had been arrested on June 5th, he turned over a pair of keys to a 1993 Honda Civic that had been in his pocket. When police searched this vehicle, they found that the license plates had been from his Ford S-Court. But the registration belonged to a woman named Maria Cabuenos, who had been missing since March. Maria Cabuenos was a 25-year-old woman who lived in a neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

Buenoz was a 25-year-old woman who lived in a neighborhood in North Philadelphia. She disappeared early on a March morning while on her way to work as a laboratory technician at Smith Klein Beachham, a pharmaceutical company that later became Glaxo Smith Klein. Her route to work was on the same highway where Amy's car was pulled over, interstate 476, and Maria's Honda also had scrapes and indents on the bumper, just like Amy and Patty's cars. Maria was from a large, loving family with 10 brothers and sisters, all of whom roamed the streets daily looking for her after she disappeared. So on top of Arthur having been driving a missing woman's missing car,

Bloodstains matching Maria's blood were found in that car, and a watch-blung to Maria was also found in Arthur's home. That sounds like a lot of evidence to me. So her tight-knit family were just devastated when less than a year after she went missing on January 1, 1998, her skeletal remains were found in a wooded area in Tinnecomme Township just outside of where Amy was from.

Shortly after this discovery, dental records confirmed that the remains were Maria's. But get this, somehow Arthur has yet to be convicted of her murder and continues to deny his involvement to this day. There's absolutely no way that this piece of shit was not involved. Yeah, I mean, he also denied involvement in Amy's case, so we know we can't trust this guy. He even denied beating up his girlfriend in a prison waiting room when other people saw him. So this guy does not tell the truth.

And he had Maria's keys and vehicle. Her blood was found inside the vehicle and her watch was in his house. Like, I can't imagine how upset her family as well. Especially considering it's been 25 years. Yeah, that family needs justice ASAP. Agreed. In Amy's short life, she was able to accomplish a great deal. Because of the technicalities which allowed Arthur to remain free and able to continue

to commit these heinous crimes, the victims of trafficking and violence protection act, better known as Amy's Law, was passed in 2000. The law encourages states to detain murderers, rapists, and child molesters in prison for longer periods of time, and holds the state financially accountable if they fail to do so. The law also makes it easier to uphold sentencing and parole, even if an offender moves to another state. Amy's high school named their gymnasium after her and her college started the Amy Willard Endowed Scholarship and hosts an annual Memorial Victims rights 5K. U.S. LaCrosse created a national award in her honor and there's a small roadside memorial to her on the exit ramp where her car was found. Every year at

Thanksgiving orchestrated by her mother Gail, her family and friends host a Thanksgiving dinner and coat and toy drive for those less fortunate. And Jason Culler, one of the four boys who discovered Amy's body, volunteers with them too and still keeps in touch with Gail. That's so sweet. I have no words for you. I know. I have to show you there's a few really sweet photos of them together at these Thanksgiving

dinners, like smiling with their arms around each other. So it seems that they have kept in touch and maintained a positive relationship despite the tragedy that brought them together, which was Jason finding Amy, but they really do look like they have a nice time at these Thanksgiving dinners all together in Amy's honor. That's so amazing. So during Arthur's trial, his lawyer's defense was built around having been neglected as a child and having a low IQ. Yeah, we know, you're dumb as shit.

So he had to be physically restrained multiple times throughout the trial and his family members were also lashing out at reporters, screaming at them and hitting them. His mother at one point hitting a reporter with her cane. Which means they're on his side. I mean, it's...it seems to me that not only is he violent, but we know now where he gets his violence. Right. Like you're just hitting random reporters? And it gets worse.

Then upon his sentencing, Arthur flipped off Gail Willard with both hands and said, fuck you Miss Willard and your two kids. This guy is next level I hate him. Horrible piece of shit. That is the mom of the young woman that you murdered. Yeah. That is so messed up. I feel like in a lot of cases where murderers maintain their innocence, they're at least like, look, I'm sorry this happened to you, but it wasn't me. We've seen that a lot, but to say,

to flip off her mom, like you're in your next level bad dude. Next level POS. So on October 1st, 1998, Arthur was convicted of the first degree murder of 22-year-old Amy Willard, as well as her rape, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and abuse of a corpse. On December 4, 1998, he was sentenced to death. However, he's remained on death row for the last 24 years. Dale Yeager, a criminal analyst, said of Arthur Quote,

Let me tell you something. There are people that cannot be reformed, and no matter what you do, they will not change. And Arthur Beaumar this episode of Going West. Yes, thank you so much for listening to this episode and on Friday we'll have an all new case for you guys to dive into. I just can't believe how horrible Arthur is. I mean, what can you expect from a murderer, right? But yeah, so sad that her family was treated that that way but I'm so glad that they do get together and do all

these things in Amy's honor her family seems truly amazing and yeah so thank you guys so much for listening to this episode and oh god I really hope Maria's family gets some justice. Yeah I was about to say that we really need to push for justice for Maria's family because that's absolutely in stain that there's this amount of evidence and nothing has been done. And this guy's an asshole and he's a murderer and he clearly killed Maria, so charge the guy. Exactly. Well, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. Remember, if you want more episodes of going west, head on over to our Patreon, patreon.com, so I was going with podcasts.

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