The Deck Investigates - 2 of 15: A Stranger's Wrath

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

When police respond to the home of Darlene Hulse, it’s too late. Darlene and her captor are nowhere to be found. All that’s left behind is a bloody crime scene and Darlene’s youngest daughter left in the middle of it. Police know the clock is ticking so they mobilize to locate Darlene, and fast.Click HERE to sign the petition and demand justice for Darlene Hulse.If you believe you have information about Darlene Hulse’s 1984 abduction and murder in Argos, Indiana, please email [e-mail] view information and photos referenced in this episode, visit https://thedeckpodcast.com/strangers-wrath/Brought to you by CarMax. Car buying reimagined. Find a car you’ll love at CarMax.com. Find more of The Deck Investigates on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcThe Deck Investigates is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at [phone] to share your thoughts about the case, discuss all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Everett Fish was the reserve officer who passed 20B Road. The dirt roads off the highway aren't well marked, and it's easy to do. I even missed it my first time up there. It took about.2 seconds for him to realize what he'd done and make a U-turn back toward the Hulse House, which was just a stone's throw away from the highway with a cornfield and a barn between. The first thing Officer Fish did when he pulled up was look for any cars or suspicious activity. And keep in mind, Officer Fish didn't know much yet. He'd just been told that there was possibly an armed robbery at the house with a woman inside.

When he finally pulled up, he didn't see any cars at the house. So he got on his radio and relayed that to Marshall County authorities. Then Officer Fish got out of his police car, grabbed his shotgun from the backseat, and as he walked toward the house, he noticed something. On the ground in front of the house was blood. A long trail of it that led from the driveway right up to the front door. That's when he got back on his radio and was like, hey, whatever this was, it's more than that now. And it's not looking good, so I'm going to need some backup. And just then, he heard something so foreign in that moment,

the last thing he ever expected to hear. It was a baby crying. Officer Fish approached the front door, and before opening it, he called out, announcing himself as police. But there was no response, just more crying. Fish knew he couldn't wait. He threw open the front door and stepped inside. This is Episode 2, A Stranger's Wrath.

Officer Fish was shocked when he opened the door and found a crying baby in just a diaper and covered in blood. But not her blood, it seemed. You see, Officer Fish was also a trained EMT, so he was able to discern just by doing a once-over that the baby was okay. Yes, she was covered in blood, but she didn't have any obvious wounds, and there didn't seem to be any fresh bleeding. He also thought it was a good sign that she was crying,

because that meant she was breathing fine. But just to be safe, he radioed for an ambulance to come right away, both for the baby and for whoever was taken out of the home if they could find them. And Fish knew they needed to find them soon. Just from the looks of things, that person lost a lot of blood. They had to be seriously hurt, if not already dead. The blood trail he found outside extended into the house,

from the front door to the living room carpet. That's where the brunt of the attack seemed to have taken place, because there were streaks and small pools of blood in the carpet, as well as smears on the slate tile by a wood stove near the front entrance. And a struggle had clearly taken place because the stove's fireplace tools were scattered on the floor. Within about three minutes, Lieutenant Ed Criswell from the Sheriff's Office and Indiana State Police Trooper Dan Ringer got there. Lieutenant Criswell took baby Kristen outside to meet the EMS crew.

And together, Ringer and Officer Fish started through the house with guns drawn to see if anyone else was inside. They checked every inch of the house with guns drawn to see if anyone else was inside. They checked every inch of the house. The bathroom, bedrooms, closets, laundry room, kitchen, even the basement. All clear. Once they gave that all clear inside, other police units arrived and checked the outside of the home, looking for anyone or anything. But the outside left more clues than in because the blood trail stopped right at the driveway where a car would have been parked. And beyond the driveway in the road, there was a skid mark pointing eastbound, which is the opposite direction of the highway and the opposite direction that the girls ran in. If you leave the Hulse house going that way, it doesn't really lead to anything. I mean, if you look at the road from the house, all you can see are trees and fields.

There aren't any other houses. But if you take that road, it just takes you east and then south and then eventually feeds you out onto another highway, 110, which, if you wanted, you can take 110 right back to 31. And you can basically do a big square. While some officers and detectives were formulating a plan for how they were going to track down the vehicle and bring Darlene home, others were charged with finding Darlene's husband, Ron Hulse. They phoned him at Young Door, which was a door manufacturing company in the neighboring town of Plymouth.

And police basically just said something had happened at his house, and they were sending a unit to come get him. Now, if they were coming to get him, Ron knew that it was bad. So while he waited, he called his parents' house. I mean, they live just a stone's throw away, so surely they knew what was happening. His mom, Doris, answered and she told him that the kids were okay, but that police couldn't find Darlene. I remember my dad coming through the door and him just sobbing, like, they've got to find her, they've got to find her. He just kept mumbling stuff over and over again. Like, he was just crying, absolutely crying. And I just remember my dad saying, we're going to do everything we can to get her back. We're going to get her back. We're going to find her. We're going to find her. And he's like, I would give up. I remember he said to me,

I would give up everything if we could find your mom. He goes, I would give up all of this. I just, I just, I would give up everything I have to find your mom. Like, why would they not find? I did not even process that it was more than that. I didn't get that she was in humongous danger. I didn't get that she could go away and not come back.

It never really crossed my mind. Seeing their dad, who was usually so reserved and in control, break down like that was scary for the girls. I mean, again, they were so little and they were confused. And on top of all of that, they were uncomfortable. There were police showing up at their grandparents' house, wanting to talk to them about what had happened. And there were also all these grown men standing around asking them questions, and they just wanted to go home and put on some damn clothes. That feeling of being scared and vulnerable haunted them for a long time.

We were like, we need clothes. I had a blanket on, and I had nightmares for a very long time about going places without clothes on. Marie and Melissa told police what the man looked like and described his car. And pretty soon there were dozens of law enforcement agents out searching for a green or bluish green early 70s rusty car with a blonde man driving. And that was the first issue. What in the world color was this car? And I know it sounds simple, but Marie and Melissa each saw something slightly different. Marie called the car green and Melissa called it more blue. Other witnesses that they would eventually talk to say light green, maybe dark

green with a light top. I've spent more time thinking about this car than I'd like to admit, but I think it bothers me so much because it seems so straightforward. Was it blue or was it green? I really focus on what the girl said. A lot of people try and discount their recollection or will tell you to take their accounts with a grain of salt because they were so young and traumatized. But I believe that car is burned into their brains. Just how is it burned in in two different colors? One of us said it was like a pea green,

and the other one said it was more like a blue-green color from day one. And I don't know how that happened. I don't know how... That frustrates me to this day, that we couldn't agree on the color. Noah could have solved this whole color mystery. Not some fancy equipment. Run-of-the-mill paint swatches. And so last year, that is exactly what we used to get to the bottom of this 38-year-old enduring mystery. Last time Emily met with Marie, Melissa, and Kristen,

they were talking about this, about how they both saw something different. Marie actually whipped out one of those paint swatch fan decks from her utility room, and they found the exact color that they both remember. Now, their memory hadn't changed. That was the color, and they both saw the same color. It's teal green. The problem is that Melissa sees that color as a shade of blue, and Marie sees that as a shade of green. We actually took a picture of the color that they agreed on, and you can see that on our website. But this provided a ton of clarity about the actual color of the suspect's

car. Unfortunately, no one thought to do that in 1984. So in the bulletin that went out to the area, police called the car blue-green. That bulletin also included other details that the girls remembered about the rust and the old age of the car as well. By mid-morning, dozens of officers were looking for that car and that man, but more importantly, Darlene. At the same time they were searching, technicians were collecting evidence from the Hulse home. They recovered some bloody rocks near the front stoop. On the front porch, they found some hair rocks near the front stoop. On the front porch, they found some hair, a piece of gray duct tape on the front step, a white sock, and just inside the door was a Nike tennis shoe and another piece of duct tape. In the dining room, they

collected a smock that had seemingly been ripped off Darlene in the struggle. One of the buttons had flung over by the baby's crib that was set up in the front room. In the kitchen, investigators found the phone cord that had been pulled out of the wall receiver. They dusted for fingerprints on the phone receiver itself, but came up with nothing. The bedrooms were mostly undisturbed, except for one small blood spot on Darlene's bed, which was photographed and attributed to Kristen looking around the house for her mother when she was left alone. They moved on to the fireplace tools that were strewn about the front entrance of the house, and that's when they noticed something that they hadn't before. A part of the fireplace poker was missing. You know how wood fire stoves come with basically

this like carousel of tools? There's usually a shovel, a broom, tongs, poker, maybe a hook. Well, the rod part of the poker was gone. Their assumption was that the poker was potentially what Darlene had been hit with. Now, this was just a guess. The girls had run from the house before the man ever hit their mother, and she wasn't bleeding when they left. But if the officers were betting men, they would have put money on it. This meant that the killer hadn't come with a weapon. This was a crime of opportunity, or even if something was planned, what was planned wasn't murder. Things had clearly gotten out of control. Darlene surprised her attacker with more than he was bargaining for when he barged in.

And she must have made him angry. Because what he was able to do to her in the few minutes between the girls running from the home and the attacker fleeing with Darlene spoke volumes. And they had to find her now. But in a town of 1,500 people, the places an assailant could have taken Darlene were limited. Police went scouring nearby fields and checking under bridges, while other officers went knocking on doors.

The early canvas efforts were tricky, because as I said, the Hulses didn't have any super close neighbors, so state and county law enforcement had to widen their radius to within a few miles of the Hulse home. And they worked to talk to anyone within that bubble. Most people hadn't seen or heard anything unusual that morning. A few people mentioned a book salesman who had been frequenting the area. Sometimes they added a detail about a green car, but that was the only stranger they encountered in recent weeks. Police also asked Ron to come to the house to look around and see if anything of value was missing.

They wanted to know what exactly they were dealing with because there's a difference between a robbery gone wrong and a crazed abductor on the loose snatching housewives. I'm sure it was awful for Ron to see his home with blood all over the carpet. But he said that the only thing missing was the fireplace poker and, of course, his wife. Everything else was still there, even the cash that had been left sitting out on the piano. While he was there, Ron was able to grab some overnight clothes for his daughter since they'd all probably have to stay with his parents for a while. And speaking of his parents, back at their house, police interviewed his dad Harvey Hulse, who said that this whole thing was even more shocking to him because he had just seen Darlene and the girls that very morning at like 8 45 when he biked over to drop off some mushy bananas for

baby Kristen. This actually helped police with their timeline because that meant that the man showed up and likely attacked Darlene sometime between 9 when Harvey left and 9.30 when the girls showed up at their grandparents' house. Harvey said that he hadn't noticed anything unusual and that things seemed totally normal when he was there. He said he biked home, got in his car, and went to work after that. Evening was rolling in, and the searches for Darlene hadn't turned up anything. Not her, not the suspect. But at around six, Indiana State Police announced

that they had stopped a blonde man driving a green Pontiac Grand Prix. Officers went and actually got Ron, Marie, and Melissa, and immediately took them to the ISP post in Peru, Indiana to get a look at this guy and his car. But the girls said nope. That wasn't the green clunker they saw outside their house. And the guy wasn't the one that they saw

knelt over their mother, growling. Police knew their best bet would be to put out a picture of the suspect rather than bringing every blonde-haired man driving a green car down to their station. So that same night, they took Marie and Melissa to the South Bend Police Department to make an artist's sketch of the suspect. It was all day long. Someone else would pull me aside and say, OK, Marie, let's go over this again. OK, look at this. And I cannot tell you how many times we had to go into the police station and look at picture books. They were lined up in like those plastic folder things.

And we would just flip, flip. And then dad's like, okay, we're going to go do something fun. And I was like, what? And he's like, we're going to go to a person who sketches people, an artist. And I was like, that's not fun. It was a woman who drew like amazing stuff. And she's like, okay, so when you look at these eyes, what were the shape of his eyes? And I remember, like, lines of eyes, lines of noses, lines of mouths.

I remember his eyes, but beyond that and the color of his hair and stuff, I couldn't really. And then when she got done, the picture did look similar. So I was like, like oh that was neat that you were able to do that yeah but it was constant it was all the time and they would bribe me with cokes which I never drank cokes

and so I remember I don't want any more cokes but you just remember weird stuff like that and I was freezing it's so cold in all of those places that was my memory of it we have that original sketch and you can see it on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. What they really focused

in on for the sketch were the light eyes. Also the fact that Marie and Melissa both remembered him having a distinct thin and long nose, a narrow face, and light combed over hair, which the girls described as streaky. And the way it got reported back in the day was that he had black streaks in his hair. This is something that I also became obsessed over because it seemed so distinct. But when we talked to them today, they said, no, it was more like it was two-toned, like someone who had been out in the sun and it looked highlighted. The other thing that they were both adamant about is that he was clean-shaven with no facial hair whatsoever. By the time Ron and the girls got

back to his parents' house, it was dark out and the searches for Darlene were wrapping up for the night. All the law enforcement agencies from state, county, and local met at the Argus Police Department to make a plan for the next morning. Even two FBI agents from the South Bend field office came down to help with the kidnapping aspect of the investigation. It's hard to imagine what that first night was like for Darlene's family. Ron must have felt totally helpless and just distraught from the thought of his wife being either held hostage by some crazy guy or alone and injured somewhere, or even worse.

And thoughts about the scary man kept running through Marie and Melissa's minds. They had just witnessed such a horrific, life-altering tragedy in the safety of their own home, watching a stranger hurt their loving mom and protect her. Their sense of safety had been shattered. And as they tried to go to bed that night, praying that their mother would be there when they woke up, one terrifying thought kept them awake. What if the man came back for them? Well, dad did the best he could to make it okay. He just kept saying things like, we're going to have a new carpet. You're going to

love it. I picked out new carpet. And he would assure us that, you know, just like lightning's not going to strike the same place twice, that he's like, now this is not ever going to happen to you again. This will never happen to you again. You don't have to worry about that anymore. This doesn't usually happen to anybody. The chances of it happening again, it's not going to, you know, and so we just kind of held on to that, that he's not going to come back. That would be stupid. Ron was right. He didn't come back, but neither would their mother. As they laid tucked into bed that night, unbeknownst to them, Darlene was lying just six miles away. That's next on Episode 3, The Wooded Path.

You can listen to that right now.