Park Predators - The Confession
Episode Date: June 24, 2025When a hiker emerges from the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee claiming he murdered a woman with a hatchet, it seems unfathomable… But when investigators discover the brutal truth, they realize they�...�re dealing with a dangerous man who has a disturbing past in multiple U.S. states.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-confession Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
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Hi, park enthusiasts, I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra.
And the case I'm gonna tell you about today is a particularly difficult one.
I feel like I can say that about nearly every episode on this show,
because it's true.
Each case I cover in depth has its own unique trauma and
loss narrative that's important to process through.
But I don't know why, for whatever reason,
this specific episode just really got to me.
It happened 50 years ago on the Appalachian Trail, which is a trail I've covered now multiple times on this podcast.
And I think that's because the AT itself, though beautiful and
for many people a cathartic experience, is just unfortunately a place that's
been home to incidents of violent crime across several decades.
I could give you more interesting facts about it
as an outdoor destination, but I won't,
because I really think it's important
that we dive headfirst into the story of this victim
and the human predator who committed
a truly unspeakable crime against her.
The story of Janice Balza is one you may be familiar with,
but in this episode, I hope to bring a little
bit more of who she was to the forefront. Because I think that all too often her memory
has been overshadowed by some of the more shocking aspects of her notorious murder.
This is Park Predators. So Just after a daybreak on Saturday, April 26th, 1975, a man cutting timber near Dennis Cove, Tennessee,
stopped what he was doing when he saw a bearded man in his early 50s approach him.
The guy who'd seemingly emerged from the forest out of nowhere looked grisly and a
bit worse for wear.
The stranger told the woodcutter that he'd killed someone in the woods a few days earlier.
But I guess instead of being overly concerned
by this man's confession,
the timber cutter just directed him toward the house
of a woman who lived nearby named Ethel Childress.
I know, I wish I had more context
about this timber cutter's decision-making process
or could at least try to understand his rationale
behind sending someone who claimed to be a killer
to a woman's house
alone.
But I don't, so I kind of have to leave it at that.
Anyway, what I can tell you is that the man from the woods with the bizarre tail ended
up making it to Ethel's house.
Once he was inside, Ethel fixed him some coffee and quietly listened as he relayed his story
of having murdered a young woman a few days earlier on the Appalachian Trail.
Around 1230 p.m., Ethel let the man use her phone and he called the Carter County Sheriff's Department to report himself.
A captain from that agency, along with two deputies, immediately responded to Ethel's house and took the man into custody.
After speaking with him some more, they learned he was 51 year old Paul Bigley,
a transplant from Tucson, Arizona.
Paul told authorities that on Monday, April 21st,
he'd killed a young woman at a shelter on the AT somewhere on Iron Mountain.
Then he'd hidden her body in some brush.
This confession was bold to say the least.
And at first the captain and deputies from
Carter County weren't really sure if Paul was serious.
Joe Ledford reported for the Johnson City Press that right after investigators took
Paul to the sheriff's department for further questioning, an assistant district attorney
general for the county named David Crockett came to speak with him as well.
And at the start of the interrogation, even David wasn't quite sure if Paul was being
truthful.
Initially, the prosecutor said he just thought Paul was a worn-out hiker who was looking
for a warm place to stay, like the county jail.
So David suspected that Paul had likely made up the wild story about murdering someone
so that he could be guaranteed shelter.
But as more and more time went by and David continued to question Paul, he started to believe the 51 year old story.
Turns out David had actually bumped into Paul several days earlier in
a totally random coincidence.
And like the more he stared at Paul's face,
the more he began to realize where he knew him from.
According to Joe Ledford's piece I mentioned a second ago,
when Paul first exited the Appalachian Trail
shortly after allegedly committing the crime,
he'd hiked into the town of Hampton, Tennessee.
And the first person he had a friendly conversation with
about his travels was David Crockett,
who I guess was just like on the sidewalk or something,
or in the same place as Paul was.
I know, talk about a small world.
Anyway, on the afternoon of the 26th,
so a few hours after Paul came forward,
the Sheriff's Department, Forest Service,
and Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency
sent out personnel to the area
where he claimed he'd left his victim.
And sure enough, around 4.45 p.m.,
not long after everyone arrived,
searchers discovered the body of a young woman who'd been brutally attacked in the head with a hatchet.
One source says she was near the base of a big oak tree,
about 50 to 100 yards away from a designated shelter on the AT, known as Van Deventer Shelter.
However, I should mention that a few other articles reported she was several hundred yards from the actual trail.
Coverage by the Elizabethan Star states that she was clothed in jeans and a shirt
and had been partially covered with leaves.
Meanwhile, still in police custody and standing near the scene was Paul, who
based on an image I found of him in a local newspaper, appeared distressed.
Near the victim, authorities found a hatchet with what appeared to be traces of blood on
it, and not too far away from that, investigators found several pieces of hiking gear tucked
into cracks and crevices of a large rock.
The gear was assumed to belong to the young woman, and Paul actually later confessed to
burning some of her traveler checks and taking some of her best hiking gear. And to help give you a little bit of context about where
exactly Vandeventer shelter is, it's about eight and a half hours east of
Johnson City, Tennessee, if you're walking. It's definitely in the woods but not
super far from civilization. It's about three to four miles away from the
community of Winter, Tennessee, if I'm pronouncing that right.
The shelter itself is built to fit six people inside and is free to stay in overnight.
Some of the source material I found reported that it's located on Iron Mountain, but
honestly, when you look at the location on Google Maps, Iron Mountain's peak is about
30 miles or so south of the shelter, closer to the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
But I think colloquially, locals and newspapers back in 1975 at least just referred to this
general geographic location as Iron Mountain. Anyway, because investigators already had their
prime suspect in custody, they sort of had to work the crime in reverse, starting with gathering as much information
as they could from Paul,
and equally as important, identifying the victim.
["The New York Times"]
According to coverage in the Elizabeth Dunstarr,
investigators found a form of identification
on the young woman's body and tentatively identified her as 22-year-old Janice K. Balza,
who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, but was originally from Green Bay.
The same evening she was discovered, the Carter County Rescue Squad removed her body from
the crime scene and sent her off for an autopsy.
The Kingsport Times News reported that some of her family members were expected
to arrive in Tennessee the following night to officially confirm her ID.
Additional coverage by the Johnson City Press stated that it was actually
her brother-in-law who verified her identity. And I have to imagine
that was a terrible responsibility because by that point Janice was
believed to have been dead for several days.
Preliminary findings revealed she'd suffered numerous blows to her head from what's described as a small hatchet.
Out of respect for Janice and her family, I'm not going to go into any more detail than that.
As investigators learn more about her though, they discovered she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's nursing school in January 1975.
Coverage by the Johnson City Press explains that after earning her degree, she decided to take a year off to travel and volunteer with an organization called VISTA.
Volunteers in Service to America, which is described as a program similar to the Peace Corps but with many or all of its operations taking place within the U.S.
After spending a year doing that work, she wanted to return to school and pursue a master's
degree.
During her gap year, she'd set her sights on achieving her lifelong dream of hiking
the full length of the Appalachian Trail, starting at the southern end in Clayton, Georgia
and working her way north to Maine.
At the beginning of her trip, one of her nursing school classmates had joined her,
but at some point that friend ended up needing to bail, which left Janice to carry on by herself
for a little while, until she came across a familiar face. Joe Ledford reported for the
Johnson City Press that in March, Janice bumped into a girl she knew from Wisconsin.
And this friend was hiking with her boyfriend.
So for a few days, the trio traveled together,
but then that girl who knew Janice fell and broke her arm,
forcing her and her boyfriend to stop hiking the trail.
And an interesting detail I read in this part of the research
was that Janice didn't just leave this couple
to fend for themselves.
Because she had experience in nursing, she was able to set the girl's broken arm
and even made sure to wait with the couple until further help arrived.
So I think that says a lot about the kind of person Janice was
and how seriously she took caring for other people's well-being.
After parting ways with her friends, Janice continued hiking alone.
Records indicate that toward the end of March,
she stayed at a motel and resort near the trail and by mid-April had made it through a few small
towns in Tennessee and North Carolina, where she'd cashed a $20 travelers check at a local
convenience store and bought groceries. The weekend of April 19th and 20th was when it's
believed she arrived at Vandeventer Shelter. Conversely, a few months before this, in mid-November 1974,
Paul Bigley had started hiking the AT from New Hampshire.
But bouts of frigid weather had forced him off the trail a few times.
Along the way, he'd worked a low wage job at a rescue mission in Roanoke,
Virginia, and cut trees for a guy in Damascus, Virginia.
Often he would spend days at a time living in shelters on the trail trying to keep warm.
On April 10th, about 10 days before the murder, which was also Paul's 51st birthday,
he stayed at a shelter in Abington Gap, which was just outside of Damascus.
While there, he crossed paths with several people who were part of the same church group,
and spoke with two guys who were headed in the opposite direction as him.
By Saturday, April 19th, despite terrible weather conditions and lots of rain making the AT difficult
to track, he'd managed to make it about 33 miles south to Vandeventer shelter, before Janice arrived.
Interestingly, he'd bunked up in the shelter with another hiker from Georgia,
who, the next morning, ended up not staying another night and decided to battle the bad
weather and hike north to Damascus, leaving Paul behind.
Now, that hiker from Georgia is probably the luckiest person in the world for making that
decision to leave the shelter sooner rather than later, because it's unlikely they could have known Paul was about to commit an extremely violent
murder against the next hiker who came across his path.
When Paul confessed to authorities about murdering Janis, he claimed that he was concerned he
may do something like it again.
He also revealed a lot more information about his past that I think is critical to understanding
exactly the type of person he was, which by the way, was vastly different from Janis.
He said that at the time of the murder he'd been on probation for an aggravated assault
he'd been convicted for in Tucson.
That offense involved a former partner of his who I'll refer to as Vi. The couple had apparently only dated for like four months when suddenly one
evening after walking her home from a party, Paul abruptly attacked Vi.
Reporting by Joe Ledford stated that investigators who responded to that
crime discovered Vi bloodied and beaten and there was a path of blood leading
back to where she'd been attacked at her home.
According to reports, the weapon that was used to beat her was the rubber roller to
a ringer washer.
Which, if you're like me and initially had no clue what that was, just pop a quick search
into Google.
It's basically a solid roll of rubber that's about a foot long, so essentially a blunt
object or club. According to news coverage about Vi's assault, she survived and Paul was of course investigators'
prime suspect.
When authorities caught up to him, he claimed he had no memory of the incident.
His story was that he'd remembered going out with Vi, but then everything after that
was seemingly blank.
He said he'd woken up somewhere on Mount Lemon in Arizona,
which is a little more than 40 miles northeast of Tucson, and was missing his car keys. His initial
thought was that someone had mugged him and taken him up to the rural location. So according to him,
he hitched hike to a nearby town and called Vi right away. But the person who answered the phone
wasn't Vi. It was Vi's daughter. And Paul
immediately got an earful about the assault.
Not long after that, Tucson authorities arrested him for the crime and booked him in jail.
About a month later, he bonded out but repeatedly violated the terms of his release. At one
point while awaiting trial, a psychiatrist evaluated him using sodium amytal,
aka truth serum. But during that evaluation, Paul maintained that he had nothing to do with what
happened to Vi. He claimed that a crime like what she'd endured was unthinkable, and he would never
attack a woman in such a vicious way. While awaiting whatever further court proceedings
were going to happen in that case, Paul skipped
town and ended up in Nevada and California, where he eventually got married for the fifth
time in his life.
While living with his new wife in California, Paul co-managed an apartment house with her,
using an alias which was, wait for it, the name of his new bride's dead husband. Eventually that ruse fell apart though, because Arizona investigators working
the aggravated assault case that he was still technically a fugitive for,
wanted their pound of flesh from him.
So by 1972, he'd been apprehended and extradited to Tucson,
where he eventually pleaded guilty to attacking Vi.
But, and this was a detail that was absolutely mind-boggling to me,
he was only sentenced to five years probation.
Not prison, not even house arrest, probation.
Multiple news reports back in 1975 stated that he'd formally been
a quote unquote mental patient in Arizona.
But an article by the Green Bay Press Gazette stated
that even though he'd regularly received psychiatric help
and counseling while on probation,
he was never actually admitted as a patient
at a mental health facility.
In November 1974, while on probation,
he was allowed to leave Arizona for six months
to visit some of his family members
in New Jersey and Florida.
He took his new wife with him and the couple traveled as far north as Vermont before apparently getting into a physical and verbal
altercation which resulted in them parting ways.
It wasn't long after that Paul decided to hike the AT by himself, which eventually put him on a path that
intersected with Janice.
According to an in-depth article by Joe Ledford in the Johnson City Press,
Paul had grown up in New Jersey during the Great Depression.
During his early elementary school years,
someone reportedly pushed him down a flight of stairs,
which required doctors to surgically insert a metal plate into his head.
Also at a young age, his father had passed away,
which left his mother to raise him and his four siblings on her own. insert a metal plate into his head. Also at a young age, his father had passed away,
which left his mother to raise him and his four siblings on her own.
Paul and his mom's relationship, though, was reportedly pretty volatile,
with her at one point throwing a butcher knife at his eye.
In his early teens, he struck out on his own and
bounced from place to place just trying to get by.
He was very much described as a loner.
As a young man, he'd picked up the trade of trimming trees, but eventually enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
During World War II, he flew airplanes that delivered supplies to countries like China,
India, and Burma. After his time in the military ended, he returned to the U.S. but continued
living a bit of a nomadic lifestyle. He lived in several different states and according to Joe Ledford's article,
got married at least four different times before finally meeting his fifth wife,
who I already mentioned.
He had at least eight kids between his ex-wives, but
the source material doesn't go into detail about what, if any,
relationship he had with them.
The only thing I could find was that he got in trouble with New Jersey authorities for not paying child support,
an offense he was later arrested for and sentenced to three years at a work farm.
During his life, he'd traveled alone for several years,
often hiking for months at a time in Arizona's Superstition Mountains.
Joe Ledford reported that Paul had always wanted to hike the AT,
which to me makes total sense why when things went south for him with his fifth wife
towards the end of 1974, he decided to finally embark on that endeavor.
But to jump back to Janice for a little bit.
On April 29th, more than a week after her murder, her parents,
Hazel and Gordon, along with her sister sister Pat, laid her to rest in Wisconsin.
She was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Green Bay.
One article I read stated that she may have been engaged at the time of her death because investigators who'd responded to the crime scene found letters hidden along the trail near where she was found that were addressed to her from her fiance.
But I could only find like one mention of this detail.
So I'm not sure if it's true or what, but if that was the case,
it just makes the fracture effect her murder had on her loved ones
that much more heartbreaking.
Because Paul had confessed to killing her,
investigators charged him with first degree murder.
At his arraignment, which took place in Tennessee on the same day as Janice's funeral,
a judge denied him bond and he was sent to the Carter County jail to await trial.
In early May, about a week after his arrest, a preliminary hearing was held,
and Paul entered a plea of not guilty.
But a judge determined enough probable cause had been established to move the case forward to a grand jury.
A Tennessee Wildlife Resource Officer and the Carter County Sheriff's Captain who'd
escorted Paul to the crime scene testified in court that Paul never provided
a reason for why he killed Janice.
The officers explained how they'd initially been hesitant to believe his bizarre
story when he first came forward.
But then, their tune changed.
The sheriff's captain who testified said, quote,
It was the first time in my four years as an officer that anybody had walked out of the clear blue and said they had killed somebody.
End quote.
While Paul's case wound its way through court,
the prosecutor had him undergo a psychiatric
evaluation at Central State Psychiatric Hospital in Nashville.
This testing came after personnel at the Watauga Area Mental Health Center produced a report
that stated Paul was quote unquote, incompetent to stand trial.
Instead of being housed in jail during his psychiatric evaluation, he was kept in custody
in a clinical environment for several months.
In early October, the Carter County Attorney General's Office issued a report that concluded
he was mentally fit to proceed to trial.
So he was transported back to jail and the trial was scheduled for mid-February 1976. But things would end up going in a bit of a different direction.
On February 18, 1976, the day his trial was set to begin,
Paul decided to take a plea bargain
and pleaded guilty to second degree murder.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison,
which he was required to serve in Tennessee.
I don't know the details of his plea deal
or like what led the prosecution to agree
to second degree murder versus first degree
and forego a trial, but I have to assume
it had something to do with the fact that Paul had voluntarily come forward,
confessed, and then led investigators to Janice's body and the murder weapon.
But get this, remember his fifth wife, that woman who he'd reportedly parted ways with after a fight
in Vermont? Turns out that woman ended up reconciling with Paul while his murder case was going through court.
She'd moved to Johnson City, Tennessee and everything
just to be there for him.
Ten months into his prison sentence,
Paul did an interview with reporter Joe Ledford
and said he didn't want to spend two decades,
so basically the rest of his life, behind bars.
He alleged that he'd had opportunities to escape and likely would one day, but
chose not to do something like that yet because he didn't want authorities to
blame his wife.
Something that's interesting to me though, and also a little frustrating,
is that at no point throughout this whole case did Paul explain why he killed Janice. In fact, he claimed that he had no recollection of the murder whatsoever.
I know, sounds familiar, right?
Kind of like how he claimed to have no recollection of the aggravated assault
he'd committed against Vi in Tucson.
His official statement to Joe Ledford about Janice was that he could remember
details from shortly before her
murder and shortly afterwards, like dragging her body off the trail into the woods and
ditching and stealing some of her stuff. But he claimed he couldn't remember committing the actual
killing. However, Kay Wilkins reported for the Johnson City Press that Assistant District Attorney
General David Crockett said Paul had been able to recall some
details throughout his conversations with authorities. David stated that the suspect
remembered waking up on the morning of the crime, chopping firewood, building a fire,
and watching Janice get out of her sleeping bag and sit in front of the fire to warm herself.
David also said Paul had described walking up behind her and hitting her over the head
with the hatchet.
But according to Joe Ledford's interview with the killer in prison,
Paul said he'd suffered throughout his life from blackouts,
which he claimed caused him to lose track of time.
These episodes had worried him,
but he didn't seek help for them or reveal to anyone that they were even
happening.
He claimed that he simply didn't know why he did what he did to Janice.
A direct quote of Paul's that Joe Ledford included in a long article he wrote for
the Johnson City Press was, quote, it's a mystery to me the why and what.
Not that she is dead, but why and what caused the reason for the killing.
If I live through the 20 years, I'll still have to live with it.
You can't get it off your mind.
If I knew it would make it a lot easier.
He later continued.
The last thing I can honestly tell you is she was trying to keep warm on a chair by the fire.
She was drinking cocoa.
We were talking about finding a shoemaker because her shoe was coming apart.
I was on the other side of the fire, sitting on my haunches and poking at the fire.
The next thing I can remember is standing over her with the hatchet and it was done."
End quote.
Paul claimed that after the slaying, he'd wandered into the woods and
then woken up in Dennis Cove, Tennessee, several miles away from Vandeventer shelter.
And it was only at that point he realized what had happened.
According to him, that's when he decided to come clean.
The way he phrased it was, quote, figured I better get my ass off the street for
someone else got hurt, end quote.
In his interview with the Johnson City Press,
Paul described Janis as a congenial person who wasn't a threat to him.
During their interactions, they'd gotten along and each of them had
a shared knowledge of Buddhism and overall found conversing with one another easy.
Paul claimed that Janice had talked to him about her friend breaking her arm earlier in her trip,
and on the morning of the murder,
he'd volunteered to fill up her canteen at the same time he filled up his. Now, because Janis isn't around
anymore to provide what she thought about Paul, his behaviors, or essentially
verify anything he claimed, I think it's totally appropriate to wonder if perhaps
his motive for the crime was sexual in nature, meaning his claims about them
getting along all hunky dory could just
be BS.
But according to what he told reporter Joe Ledford, sex wasn't something he was interested
in.
The Green Bay Press Gazette reported something similar when their coverage attributed a statement
to Assistant District Attorney General David Crockett, who said that Paul denied sexually
assaulting Janice.
In Paul's own words, he claimed, well, I'll just use this direct quote from him because
it's a little hard to understand, and I think that's kind of the point.
He said, quote, it takes a hell of a lot of woman to get me interested in sex.
I'm not over sexed.
In fact, my sex is below par, so there was nothing like that."
So yeah, I don't even really know what that's supposed to mean.
And unfortunately, no one was ever able to get clarity from Paul because he died not
long after going to prison.
According to reporting by the Johnson City Press, in November 1976, so less than a year
after beginning his 20-year sentence, Paul suffered from a broken blood vessel in his brain,
which killed him.
He was buried at the Veterans Administration Cemetery in Nashville.
To this day, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs still has a profile for
him online on the National Cemetery Administration's website,
which to me feels a bit cringe and maybe should be reevaluated,
you know, since he's a a bit cringe and maybe should be reevaluated, you know, since
he's a hatchet murderer and all.
Now I've brought up Johnson City Press reporter Joe Ledford's writing quite a bit in this
episode and that's because he was one of those journalists who really owned this story
back in the day.
In 1978, about three years after Janice's murder, he penned a piece that discussed how
violent crimes seemed to be increasing along parts of the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee.
For example, he cited how in the years since Janice's murder, a pair of women had been
menaced and threatened at gunpoint by two guys if they didn't have sex with them.
And a group of juvenile young women from North Carolina had been attacked and sexually assaulted
by several men along the trail in Carter County. Ledford's article brings up a lot of points I feel I've
reiterated a hundred times in this show, which is just because the AT is a perfect place to go off
the grid and detach from society a little bit, that doesn't mean you should let your guard down.
There are seriously nefarious characters hiking it for
exactly those same reasons.
The story of Janice Balls' life and tragic death is a reminder of how true
that reality is.
A lot may have changed in the 50 years since her murder, but
I think the Appalachian Trail has a unique way of slowing down time and
sort of creating this almost alternate
reality.
I think we all have to remember that we never really know the person sleeping next to us
in a shelter.
And we certainly don't know what they're capable of.
Park Predators is an AudioChuck production.
You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com.
And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, at ParkPredators.
So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?