The Deck Investigates - Episode 4: Another Missing Woman

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Not long before Ada went missing, another nearby mom named Linda VanBuskirk mysteriously disappeared during a routine walk on a warm March day. As her family and police launch a desperate search, a young boy’s chilling eyewitness account and the discovery of Linda’s body in a shallow grave send shockwaves through the community - while police wonder if Linda’s murder might be connected to Ada disappearance. If you have any information about Ada Haradine, please contact Michiana Crime Stoppers at 574-288-STOP or 800-342-STOP or submit tips online at michianacrimestoppers.com. Tips can be made anonymously.You can also reach out directly to the Cass County Sheriff’s Office by calling their main line, 269-445-1560, their tip line at 800-462-9328, or online at www.ccso.info. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/another-missing-woman/ Find more of The Deck Investigates on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc The Deck Investigates is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to share your thoughts about the case, discuss all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

A newly single mom, 27-year-old Linda Van Buskirk, had a routine on Tuesdays. She'd drive from her home near Three Rivers in St. Joseph County, Michigan, to Kalamazoo for her Bible study group. Tuesday, March 26, 1985, was no different. So that morning, she dropped her two daughters off at her parents' place. She and a friend decided to make a day out of the trip, and after Bible studies, they did some shopping before heading back to Linda's. It was around 3.10 in the afternoon when Linda was dropped off,

and unseasonably warm for late March. So Linda called her mother, Evelyn, to ask if they could keep her girls just a little later than usual so she could take a walk. Evelyn told her it was fine. Take your walk. Enjoy. We'll watch the kids till you get back. But Linda never came back from that walk. This is episode four, her parents grew anxious. She was a devoted mother, and it was totally out of character for her to go MIA. They went to her house, started checking with people who knew her, but no one knew where she was.

It was obvious to them that something was wrong right away. And like Ada Herodine's family, they didn't waste any time. They started searching the area, focusing on the familiar stretch of rural roads surrounding her house that she liked to walk and jog. And when they still couldn't find her, they called the St. Joseph County Sheriff's Office and reported her missing.

Police quickly joined in the efforts, but there wasn't really a neighborhood to canvas per se. This was farm country, mostly woods and fields, although there were a few houses around. And as luck would have it, several people had seen her go by as late as 3.40 that afternoon, wearing a green sweatshirt, jeans, and jogging shoes. Here is St. Joseph County Judge Jeffrey Middleton, who was chief assistant prosecutor at the time. It was a very nice spring day. It was one of those early spring days where the snow was melted, the ground is thawing out, and it smells like earth. And so people were out

and about doing things. The police found a bag of live puppies. They found random people that got in a fight with their boyfriend that were walking down the street. I and another found a dead German shepherd with a collar on it in a cornfield. A lot was going on. Awful dog-related discoveries aside, when officers knocked on the door of nine-year-old Todd Terrell's family, things took a turn that no one saw coming. Todd told them that he'd actually seen something that Tuesday afternoon when he was outside playing with his dog. He said he heard gunshots, a sound he recognized from hunting.

And he said that the sound was coming from the nearby intersection of Mount Zion and Bent Roads. Curious, Todd said he climbed up a hill to get a better look. And that's when he saw a man dragging something out of a ditch and putting it into a small black car, the same kind of car that his grandpa owned, a hatchback. Now, at first, he thought the man was carrying a deer, but it wasn't deer hunting season. Plus, he could see hair trailing behind, and he realized that what he's seeing must be a girl. His chilling account was backed up by physical evidence, because when police went out there, down a steep embankment next to the intersection. Officers found the copper jacket of a hollow point bullet and two fired bullets in the dirt.

As if someone had stood up and pointed down at the ground. There was also a pool of blood on the ground, along with traces of hair and tissue, and even drag marks that led from the blood to the roadway. According to Jack Baker's reporting in the South Bend Tribune, lab tests later confirmed that the blood was human and did match Linda's A-positive type. But even before getting those results, even without her body,

it was clear that something terrible had happened here, and investigators were confident that Linda had been murdered. And so they immediately began an extensive investigation, one that pulled in law enforcement from multiple agencies and our very own Larry Sarhat, who, along with his wife Betty, knew Linda's parents. He was quite an accomplished guy. His wife's family was from here.

And so he came here and just came over and introduced himself and said, hey, I'm from around here, and if you got anything you needed any help on, I'd be willing to help. He had expertise that we didn't, so we used him.

For the task force, Todd was shaping up to be a crucial witness. On Wednesday, March 27th, he was shaping up to be a crucial witness. On Wednesday, March 27th, he was interviewed four separate times, and by evening, they had brought in a psychologist to hypnotize him. Investigators put out alerts for a dark hatchback and got a sketch artist to create a composite based on what the boy remembered. The resulting image was of a white guy in his mid-20s to mid-30s

between 5'5 and 5'10 with a stocky build, mustache, and goatee. Betty Sarhat says she remembers how vivid Todd's account was. He had such a distinct description of the guy, the car, and where it happened. But Robert Karras, the St. Joe County prosecuting attorney, basically their version of a DA, he saw things differently. In a memo he sent the task force that April, Robert warned against giving Todd's story

too much credence. Here's a voice actor reading that memo. In my opinion, the key identification witness has been tainted by improper interview techniques and by improper influence from family members. I hope the damage is not irreparable. The problem has been tainted by improper interview techniques and by improper influence from family members. I hope the damage is not irreparable. The problem has been magnified because of the distribution of the composite,

which may be one gigantic red herring. If any other potential identification witnesses come to the surface, use careful interview techniques. If you have any questions as to what is proper procedure, ask me. Also, consider the use of investigative hypnosis. And I'm pretty sure he meant consider, like, think long and hard before you do this hypnosis shit again,

rather than like, hey, try this. Although he didn't elaborate in the memo. As he said, though, that sketch had been disseminated publicly. And whether or not police were looking for this mustached man, they were looking for Linda.ached man, they were looking for Linda. But between the woods and the swamps and farmland that dominated the area, it was like

looking for a needle in a haystack. And despite all their efforts, there was no sign of her. Until Friday, May 10th. A utility worker over in Colwyn happened to stop to relieve himself, and he smelt something bad and found this girl's remains in a very shallow gray. There was too much decomposition to visually identify Linda then and there. But it was her, face down, fully clothed, in the same outfit that she was reported wearing when she disappeared. And finding her there, actually just north of Colon, was a shock. The little village is about 40 minutes away from the Mount Zion intersection that she was taken from.

According to an episode of the Oxygen Network's Buried in the Backyard series, detectives figured that her killer must have known this remote area well enough to choose it for the burial site. And the shallowness of the grave, just two or three inches of dirt, suggested that he was in a hurry to cover his tracks. The medical examiner confirmed that it was Linda with dental records, and he determined that she had been shot three times. Once in the arm, once in the shoulder, and once in the head behind her left ear. They already had the first two bullets, and the last one was recovered during her autopsy.

Investigators theorized that the killer shot her in the arm as she was moving away from him or trying to shield herself, which must have knocked her off the roadway 15 feet down into the embankment. And then they figure he went down after her, shot her again, this time in the shoulder. And the fatal shot was execution style to the head, fired as he stood over her while she was laying on the ground. By the time Linda's body was found,

Ada had been missing for two days. And right away, speculation started up about whether the cases could be linked. Women disappearing 30 miles apart from each other while they were just going about their everyday business in broad daylight. I mean, rumors began circulating that maybe they knew each other, that maybe they went jogging with one another. There was even a rumor that Linda, like the Haradines, had a cabin on Quarry Lake. Maybe someone in that area had targeted both women. But Linda actually lived about six miles from the lake, which police didn't think was close enough to indicate a connection.

And they couldn't verify any other rumors, so while they didn't want to totally discount the possibility of a link between the two cases, they didn't think it was likely. Still, Ada's and Linda's investigation unfolded in parallel, with Larry Sarhat serving as the bridge between both. He moved quickly to share his sister-in-law's information with Linda's task force in case there was any underlying connection. But Ada was a missing person, while Linda was now a confirmed homicide victim. And unsurprisingly, Linda's case picked up speed once police had the best

evidence of all, her body. Now here's the thing. Even before Linda's body was found, there was no shortage of suspects to sift through. Authorities had already been working through a list of more than 80 potential culprits. One of them was her estranged or ex-husband, 29-year-old Bruce Van Buskirk. We couldn't confirm whether they had officially divorced yet or not. The county had no record of it. Although she is listed as divorced on her death certificate. Either way, police learned that they did not part on friendly terms.

They'd only split up a few months before she was killed, and amid rumors of his infidelity, there was apparently a custody battle brewing. But something that really caught investigators' eyes was that copper jacket found at the scene. Hollow Point ammunition was popular among law enforcement at the time, not so much the general public. And Bruce was a cop in Three Rivers, in addition to being a firearms expert. The composite sketch that Todd had helped with didn't look anything like Bruce. But for police, he was still an obvious frontrunner, even after he passed a polygraph. He told them he was on patrol when Linda went missing, even after he passed a polygraph.

He told them he was on patrol when Linda went missing, but I guess there was no record of it because he had no way to actually prove it. Now, Bruce's service weapon was obviously first to be tested when investigators began comparing the guns of local officers to the bullets and jackets found at the crime scene. But the analysis showed that they didn't match Bruce's gun. Even then, detectives weren't ready to rule him out. He stayed on the list, one of the suspects that they deemed a high priority.

But police knew that if Bruce killed Linda, it was personal. That means Ada wouldn't factor in at all. So I doubt they gave him a second glance in her case. But another person they looked into for Linda's case was 37-year-old Jim Briney. He owned the house that Linda lived in after her divorce, letting her stay there with her daughters. She had the place to herself because Jim traveled a lot, and even when he was in town, he'd bunk with her parents, who were his friends from church.

But I guess detectives were kind of weirded out by the living arrangement. They wondered if he was just being friendly or if he had maybe other motives for letting her stay there. They questioned Jim pretty harshly. One investigator even told Oxygen that they, quote, worked him over really good verbally, end quote. But Jim had nothing incriminating to offer them, and his alibi checked out. Turned out he was just a family friend trying to help a struggling single mother and her children. And just as with Bruce, if Jim was involved in Linda's death, it would have been personal. So Jim wasn't a suspect in Ada's disappearance.

But that wasn't the situation for another man. A 25-year-old Elkhart resident named Richard David Parr. Investigators had their eyes on him in Linda's case since April, after he caught the attention of Max Weinhoft, who was a sergeant from a neighboring Indiana police department. Sergeant Weinhoft owned a security company, and Richard worked for him as a guard. Early one morning, Richard stopped by the station to chat.

And out of nowhere, he brought up the jogger who had been abducted near Three Rivers. He seemed to know a lot about the incident, even though I don't think he mentioned Linda by name. And then he told Sergeant Weinhoff that her body had been found. But that wasn't true yet. It was weird enough that the sergeant

relayed the conversation to a colleague the next day. I mean, not only did he find the whole discussion just odd, but a woman had recently reported Richard to the Elkhart Police Department for harassing her, claiming that after she turned him down for a date, he started leaving obscene notes on her windshield. Sergeant Weinhoft half joked that he wouldn't be surprised if Richard was involved in Linda's abduction. But now he wasn't laughing anymore when he learned that Richard drove a black hatchback. He notified St. Joseph County,

and they brought Richard in for questioning. Richard later told a co-worker that he took a polygraph, and during the test, he was asked if Linda's ex-husband had paid him to kill her. Richard apparently knew Bruce or had talked to him at some point, but he told police that he had nothing to do with Linda's death, and he apparently passed a polygraph. He also said at some point that police found blood in his car, but they weren't too concerned about it because it was a small amount, which, like, okay, I mean, I would still have been concerned,

but he explained it away by saying that he had given an injured man a ride somewhere. Whatever St. Joseph County made of the situation, Sergeant Weinhoft remained suspicious. And a couple of days after Linda's body was found, he put Richard on Elkhart PD's radar, just in case he had something to do with Ada's disappearance. But when Elkhart detective Art Kern interviewed Richard, he didn't get any red flag vibes. Richard didn't know or remember where he was the day Ada went missing, but he assured police that he'd never met her, never been to her neighborhood before. He offered to take a polygraph about Ada, but it doesn't look like

Detective Kern took him up on that. He thought Richard was telling the truth. And then suddenly, that was all moot. Because on May 16th, a man was arrested for Linda's murder. A 23-year-old Three Rivers resident named Ricky Lawrence Moore. Now, he wasn't on that long list of names Larry was still looking into by the time she was found. But Judge Middleton says that he was actually initially high up there for police. Second place, actually, sandwiched between Bruce Van Buskirk

and Jim Briney. For some reason, police must have discounted him quickly, and I don't know why, because dude was flashing all the warning signs. For one thing, he was a part-time

reserve police officer. Hello, hollow point ammunition. He also volunteered at this tiny PD outside of Three Rivers. And despite the fact that his department doesn't seem to have been involved in Linda's case, he inserted himself into the investigation almost immediately. The day after Linda went missing, which would have been Wednesday, March 27th,

he called the sheriff's office about her twice. During his first call, he was like, hey, I hear you're looking for my car, question mark, because I was in the area where that girl disappeared yesterday, so you know, you might want to check it out. He told them he was there around 3.30 that Tuesday afternoon, which would have been right around when police thought Linda was attacked. The thing is,

Ricky drove a 1976 Silver Granada, and police told him they were looking for a black hatchback. But even then, even when they tried to write him off, he still didn't give up. He called back again and reiterated, listen, I was there yesterday. How can I help? I did see a couple of sketchy vehicles. Let me tell you about them. Later that night, he even swung by the sheriff's office to informally report that there had been a break-in at his parents' lake cottage. Now, he claimed he had gone over there on Tuesday evening to check on the place because his folks were down in Florida on vacation, and he said when he went there, he noticed a broken window. He asked the deputy to pass a message along to the late shift guys.

Like if they happen to be near his parents' cottage, just do him a favor and shine a light around to ward off potential burglars. And listen, if it's starting to sound like Ricky was familiar with the department, well, that's because he was. Ricky's dad was a sergeant at the sheriff's department. Ricky's father worked at the lead agency investigating Linda's abduction, and now murder. According to Sturgis Journal reporter Robin E. Brown, he had been with them for more than 12 years. It's hard to understand how they stayed on the case once Ricky's name was tossed in the suspect pool,

even if it was just briefly. It's also hard to understand why no one looked hard at him as soon as he started making those calls. Or maybe it's not. But there was a reason why he came roaring back to the top of the list only after Linda's body was found. Essentially, by his own admission, Ricky had put himself near both crime scenes, clear across the county from each other, and within a time frame that lined up perfectly with the sequence of events investigators believed happened.

You see, that cottage that his parents owned, the one he was checking on the day Linda was killed, it was in the same place that the Moores used to live before they relocated to Three Rivers. Colon. And it was just a few miles from Linda's makeshift grave. I was like, who's from Colon? Boing. So that's when it went to Ricky Moore. So four days into the homicide investigation, on May 14th,

police sat down with Ricky, officially, for the first time. He denied knowing Linda or having anything to do with her murder. He did know her ex-husband Bruce, although not well from the sound of it. He said that Bruce had bought a car from the Moores in the spring or maybe summer of 1984, and Ricky helped transport it to his house. But I'm not sure if he and Linda still lived together at that point. What investigators really wanted was to check out Ricky's service weapon, a.357 Magnum revolver issued by his police department when he started a few years prior. Now, he told them that he didn't have his gun with him that day she was killed.

He was only allowed to have it in his car on the way to or from work. But he still agreed to turn it over as long as his chief okayed it. But when detectives showed up at his family's house to collect it later that day, he was suddenly hesitant. And they noticed that he was shaky, nervous,

pale as a ghost even. A far cry from the calm, collected man that they had interviewed before. But Ricky had an explanation for detectives. You see, he had damaged the barrel of the gun a few weeks earlier while cleaning it with a wire brush and rod. He was afraid that the chief would make him pay for repairs. But here's the thing. The second the crime lab saw the extent of the damage, they contacted investigators and said no freaking way that this was caused by a wire cleaning brush. They said there were gouge marks and scratches. It looked like someone deliberately tampered with it. So fully suspicious now, police got a warrant and went to search his house that night.

In his bedroom, they found the same ammunition that was used to kill Linda. The same kind stuck in the dirt by the Mount Zion intersection. .357 Magnum copper-jacketed hollow point bullets. Yet another clue that stacked the deck against him. And as they poked around, the scale

tipped even further when Ricky dropped a bombshell. That whole thing about him being in the area on March 26th, well, he told them it wasn't true. He just wanted to help them so badly, he concocted a story putting himself in the middle of the action. Detectives could hardly believe it. The changing stories, the damaged gun, the hollow point bullets. In just a few days, they had gone from seemingly infinite suspects to this guy. When Ricky was arrested a couple of days later, he still proclaimed his innocence. And to prove it, he offered to take a polygraph. He didn't want their local examiner to conduct it,

so police brought in this nationally renowned guy from Chicago, Louis Sinise, who administered it in a conference room equipped with a closed-circuit TV system. Investigators watched from another room as Ricky failed the test. They're done, and Louis Sinise is putting his stuff away, putting it in his case, and he says, I just have one question. He said, why'd you kill her? And he starts sobbing.

And he's just sobbing, sobbing, wailing like a wounded animal in that room. Ricky's dad, along with the defense lawyer he had hired for his son, rushed in. According to the Oxygen Network, detectives could hear Ricky telling his father how sorry he was. But it doesn't sound like he straight up confessed. What really clinched it for police was when the ballistics results came back and confirmed that all three bullets were fired from the same gun, Ricky's service revolver. And that being said, this was not a slam dunk. As far as investigators could tell, Ricky didn't know Linda. He had no criminal record. There were no eyewitnesses to place him at either crime scene. In fact, it was kind of the opposite. Todd, that nine-year-old witness, couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

He explicitly said Ricky was not the man he saw that day, and he looked nothing like the composite sketch. And let's not forget the vehicles. Even if you're not someone who can pick out makes and models on site, a black hatchback versus a silver car with a trunk? I mean, talk about night and day. And sure, studies have shown that eyewitness accounts can be notoriously unreliable and problematic. But it was Todd who showed them

where the shooting happened in the first place. I mean, he obviously saw something. Ricky eventually pled not guilty to first-degree murder, and he was sent to the county jail with no bail to await trial. Meanwhile, as prosecutors in Michigan prepared their case, Indiana investigators tried to figure out if Ricky could have been involved in Ada's disappearance. Theoretically, the answer was yes. It's not like police were watching him on May 8th when Ada disappeared. I mean, they didn't think they had any reason to yet. And he had apparently just returned from a trip to Ohio when he first spoke with police. So there was a whole chunk of time that was unaccounted for.

And Elkhart detectives, along with Larry, wanted to fill in some of those blanks. They flashed around photos of Ricky and his car to Ada's neighbors and friends. One woman who worked at the YMCA, Ada a frequented thought that she had seen him before, but then she realized she was thinking of someone else. They couldn't even find a tenuous connection like the one Ricky had to Linda through her ex's car purchase. Of course, even without that,

they still wanted to speak to him. So Elkhart detective Art Kern paid him a visit in early June, but Ricky refused to talk on the advice of his attorney. His trial was set to start that October. Then, in a last-minute twist, his lawyer filed a motion to pursue an insanity or diminished capacity defense. He claimed that Rickey couldn't recall key events and that new information had just surfaced about his mental state on the day Linda was killed. He didn't get into specifics, at least not on the record, and Ricky was given a forensic

psychiatric exam. But in February 1986, he was found competent to move forward. He chose to waive a jury trial and opted for a judge to decide his fate. Both sides laid out their case that May. Prosecutor Robert Karras conceded from the get-go that he didn't know why Ricky killed a seemingly random woman. There were no signs she'd been sexually assaulted or robbed, and all he could do was speculate. But he didn't need to show motive to prove guilt.

And he argued that all of the evidence, and the cover-ups and lies, pointed to one person. Ricky. Maybe he didn't plan to kill Linda specifically on that warm spring day, but he must have planned to kill someone. As the prosecutor put it, quote, a hunter goes into the woods with a specific goal in mind, not a specific deer in mind, end quote. In his mind, why else would Ricky go to an out-of-the-way spot

like the Mount Zion intersection with his gun, a gun he was only allowed to have for work? As for Todd's account, well, the prosecutor said that it wasn't reliable. He said the boy had been too far away, nearly the length of a football field, so he didn't think he could get a good look at the shooter or his car.

And when he was on the stand, his story seemed to be all over the map. The defense countered that while Todd's testimony was inconsistent at times, key details stayed the same, like the fact that the man he saw putting a body into a car that day looked nothing like Ricky, and that the car looked nothing like his silver Granada. Plus, there was no biological evidence in his car or anywhere else linking him to the crime.

But the judge wasn't buying it. While he thought that each individual piece of circumstantial evidence was open to interpretation, altogether, they overwhelmingly proved that Ricky killed Linda.

He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole as per state sentencing guidelines. And so it was then that Larry finally got to talk to him about Ada. Larry asked to ride in the car with him. They took him up to Marquette, Michigan

to a prison and Larry rode with him up there because he wanted to grill him, felt maybe he had something to do with Ada's case. Whatever Ricky told him, it left Larry as confident of Ricky's innocence in Ada's disappearance as the judge was of his guilt in Linda's murder. Larry was convinced he didn't have anything to do with it.

There were some stark differences. So on its face, I think I agree with Larry. But I don't like to take anything just on face value. We reached out to Ricky in prison for an interview, but we never heard back from him. We also requested all of Linda's case files from the St. Joseph County Sheriff's Office. And after months of back and forth

and emails and phone calls, we finally got some records. But for now, and by now, I mean back then, any connection to Linda was out. And as police really began digging into Ada's home life, past that perfect veneer, they wondered if anyone was involved in Ada's disappearance. I always thought we were a perfect family. And, you know, the old day hit, nobody's perfect. No family is perfect.

That's next in Episode 5. Did she choose to leave? You can listen to that next week.