The Deck - Dorothy “Dee" Scofield (4 of Hearts, Florida)

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Our card this week is Dorothy “Dee" Scofield, the 4 of Hearts from Florida.Ocala Police Chief Mike Balken was just a toddler when 12-year-old Dee Scofield disappeared from a local department store. When he was a teenager, he remembers his parents bringing up the missing little girl from his hometown. Later, as a dad, it would cause him to lie awake at night, worrying about his own daughter. And down the line, as a new detective, it would continue to haunt him when he began investigating the case for himself. And today… even as a Chief of the entire department… he won’t rest until he knows what happened to Dee Scofield.If you have any information about the disappearance of Dorothy “Dee” Scofield in 1976, please call Ocala Police Chief Mike Balken at 352-369-7000, or email [e-mail]. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/dorothy-dee-scofield   Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo apply for a Cold Case Playing Card grant through Season of Justice, please visit www.seasonofjustice.org The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our card this week is Dorothy D. Schofield, the four of hearts from Florida. Ocala police chief Mike Balkan was just a toddler when 12-year-old Dorothy Schofield, who most commonly went by D or DD, disappeared from a local department store. When he was a teenager, he remembers his parents bringing up the missing little girl from his hometown. Later, as a dad, it would cause him to lay awake at night, worrying about his own daughter. And down the line, as a new detective, it would continue to haunt him when he began investigating the case for himself. And today, even as chief of the entire department, he won't rest until he knows what happened to Dee Schofield.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. When afternoon rolled around on Thursday, July 22nd, 1976, Lena Schofield was starting to regret the decision to let her pre-teen daughter go off by herself. Dee had gotten tired of waiting in line for her mom to renew her license, so for literally the first time ever, Lena agreed to let Dee leave on her own, just across the parking lot, to the J.M. Field's department store. Here's Ocala Police Chief Mike Balkin. Dee had a pair of sandals that she had bought her sister that had broken, so she was going to return them at the J.M. Field's department store,

buy a watch band for her brother for his birthday. And then the plan was to go take in a movie here in Ocala, and ultimately go to dinner before returning home. Lena handed her the keys and told Dee to meet by the family's car when she had finished shopping so they could go to the movies. Lena expected her to be waiting in the car when she was done taking the written test, but now here she was waiting on Dee. The Florida Highway Patrol Station at the time was located right on the southeast corner of the intersection of State Road 40 and 25th Avenue. The JM Fields was located adjacent to, really, in the same parking lot. So we're not talking about a mom that let her

12-year-old cross a four-lane highway. She literally had to walk maybe 200 yards through a parking lot to get to the department store. Certainly in the mid-70s and even today, I don't think that's out of anyone's reasoning of a parent of a 12-year-old kid to allow them to walk across to do that. It wasn't a dangerous area. It wasn't crossing traffic. It was none of that. She literally would have walked out of the door

of the highway patrol station, walked maybe 200 yards at the very most to the entrance of this department store to do what she needed to do. Lena's eyes swept the parking lot from end to end, but Dee wasn't in the car or by the car or anywhere else. So she made her way inside to the department store to look for her daughter.

She walked around a little, doing a once-over of the entire floor, even calling out for Dee multiple times on the store's intercom. But still, her daughter was nowhere to be found. So she went back over to the Florida Highway Patrol office, hoping that somehow maybe they just missed each other. Maybe Dee had gone back there after she finished up shopping and was just waiting inside. But she wasn't.

And when no one at the Highway Patrol office had seen Dee come back inside, Lena became worried. But at least she was already with law enforcement. They should know what to do. She was able to file a missing persons report right then and there, sometime between 2 and 2.30 p.m. And officers got started trying to track Dee's last movements, starting at the department store that Dee set off for. We know that she made it to the return counter because we have a clerk that not only remembered her

distinctly but remembered the sandals. We ultimately recovered those sandals, which were identified by the parents as the ones Dee had for return. We know for a fact that the clerk at the jewelry counter dealt with her and ultimately sold her a watch band for her brother. That's all documented and certainly substantiated by those employees at the store. So we have that dialed into between 115 and 130 that she was dealing with those employees inside the store.

That made officers confident that she had made it inside the store. And as of about 130 that afternoon, they can say with near certainty that Dee was likely still there by herself. But after that, no one they spoke to at the store, employees or fellow shoppers, noticed Dee. They didn't see anyone approach her or talk to her. Didn't see her physically exit the store. Didn't see her walking in the parking lot.

Not a single person that we know of saw or heard any commotion that day. The Ocala Police Department, the Florida Highway Patrol, along with some family members, searched that entire area. It's a pretty large parking lot and there was a lot of activity. There was construction work going on, so a lot to be done. But the bottom line is Dorothy Schofield left that store and vanished off the face of the earth.

Initially, the Florida Highway Patrol took lead on the case since they handled the missing I'm the first person to have ever seen a man stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and stand up and away to hang out with friends. One of Dee's older sisters, Shelley Edwards, told us that unfortunately, this may have been the belief of law enforcement for far too long. But Chief Balkin said that nothing in the case file pointed to Dee being a runaway. She left a jar full of her life savings in coins and cash at her house.

There were no clothes taken, we know that. She left her mom with nothing but a pair of sandals and a couple dollars in cash. There were no issues between her and mom. They were having a good day. They were coming in together, mommy-daughter date. There was absolutely no indication of any type of runaway whatsoever. So that was quickly put aside. And the searches started very quickly, not only locally in and around the JM Fields Department Store, but you have to keep in mind where we're located, right? We're just west of the Ocala National Forest, a huge, huge area that needed to be checked. And those

searches began pretty instantaneously, both on foot, horseback, vehicle, helicopter, you name it. Now, those grew in size as the hours were on. Certainly, the next morning, that was ramped up. And that's really what started pushing our detectives, our officers, out into the county, into these more rural areas, because they found absolutely no trace of her in and around where she disappeared from. They got their first break when they ventured outside of the shopping center on day two of the search. They were especially focusing on nearby areas on the way out of Ocala,

and there was this little corner store that would have only been about 10 to 15 minutes from the shopping center. It would have pretty much been the last sign of civilization as you headed out of town. Newby's Corner was really set at the crossroads of the state highway. It runs all the way through the forest.

Basically, the corner of a thoroughfare. If you're traveling the forest, you stopped at Newby's Corner to get everything from a soda to your lunch, to your fish and bait, your hooks and everything in between. They walked in and began to ask questions of the clerk who was on duty the prior day about who she may have seen or didn't see that day. Ultimately, they showed a picture to this clerk, Rochelle is her name, and she immediately without hesitation said, I saw her, I saw her yesterday, and identified the time as right after two o'clock. That time frame coupled with when they knew Dee was

last in J.M. Fields was significant in regards to how believable is this woman's story. Because we know eyewitnesses sometimes don't get it right, sometimes they want to be involved, and they really aren't. But I think they really substantiated her statements through her knowledge about what this young girl, who she saw, was wearing, the time that she entered the store. Without any hesitation, she stated the girl was wearing glasses, her hair was braided, she had on a red shirt and either blue jeans or blue slacks." But the most significant detail of all was who was with this little girl when she came in.

While the girl had entered the store alone and purchased a Coke with a dollar bill, the clerk also spotted a white man standing in the parking lot who appeared to be waiting for this girl. The clerk hadn't noticed a vehicle outside, as the parking spots were all kind of out of sight from inside the store, so she never actually saw the little girl get into a car or even technically go with the man. But to her, it was clear that the two were together. Now, when you look up this case, there is some misinformation about this sighting that

Chief Balkan hopes to clear up. While there are some reports that this little girl appeared to be in distress, Chief Balkan said that isn't true. According to the clerk's recollection, documented in her statement, there was nothing off-putting about the way the girl was acting when she came into the store. And this provided a major clue for investigators. If this girl really was Dee, she was likely familiar, even comfortable with whoever she was with that day.

So with this as their only real tangible lead, they had a special detective go out to newbies to work with the clerk to come up with a composite sketch of the guy that she had seen in the parking lot. Even though this woman admitted she hadn't gotten a great full-on view of this guy, but it was still worth trying. And when that sketch was done,

the final picture looked a lot like someone very close to the family. When they got done with Rochelle in her composite sketch of the man that she saw Dee with, I think there was a quick belief that that image looked quite a lot like Dee's brother-in-law, who is Ronnie Carr, who Dee lived with all the way up in Citra. Chief Balkan said Dee lived with him, but it wasn't just her. Her entire family did. You see, when Dee's parents decided to move their two youngest kids from Ohio to Florida the year before, they were temporarily living with their oldest daughter, Toni, and her family

while they were building a house. Tony was married to Ronnie Carr, and they had two boys, so it must have been a tight squeeze, at least momentarily, while the whole family squished into a single mobile home on about 40 acres of land. Needless to say, Ronnie would have been someone Dee would have known very well by that point. But to be clear, a composite sketch isn't a sure way to incriminate a potential suspect. Chief Balkin even acknowledges in all of his experience they're usually not super reliable. But this one, he believes, had an uncanny resemblance to 29-year-old Ronnie Carr.

Maybe you won't agree, but we have a picture of Ronnie and this sketch on the blog post for this episode if you'd like to compare for yourself. Either way, thinking that whoever took Dee was likely someone she knew since there was seemingly no struggle at the department store, coupled with the fact that Ronnie resembled this sketch, police were starting to focus in on him. And it certainly didn't make him look any less suspicious when his story about what he had been up to that afternoon changed. His statement was first that he was in the office the entire day, and then he, for whatever reason, at some point during them pressing him, he changed.

No, I was collecting for the insurance company way out in Williston. And he said, you know, matter of fact, I was at so and so's house and I had an AC hose blow at the service station. So the detectives follow up on that. They go and they actually find customers, insurance policyholders that he dealt with that day. But what they were unable to verify is that there was any blown AC hose in Williston at the service station. Matter of fact, the service station attendant said there was nobody here broken down, nothing like that. Kind of threw that alibi out the door. So in the end, even if he was collecting payments, debts in Williston, even if that was the case, the detectives basically found they couldn't account for about two hours of his time that day.

And it didn't really make a lot of sense to them why he would change his story, hours of his time that day. And it didn't really make a lot of sense to them why he would change his story, why he resembled the composite sketch so much. The fact that his office was literally a block away from where Dorothy was abducted from. The fact that he knew she was gonna be there that day. He knew their whole plan.

He certainly would have been somebody Dee would have jumped in the vehicle with. No issue at all. She lived with this guy." There were at least two customers who could place him a good half hour away in Williston at some point that day. But it wasn't an airtight alibi. But if Ronnie was their guy, investigators and family alike wondered, why?

What would his motive have been? Both Chief Balkan and Dee's sister Shelly told our reporter Madison that before all of this surfaced, the family didn't notice anything inappropriate about his interactions with Dee, and he had no criminal record. I mean, he could be described as a bit quirky, maybe, but that's it. According to Chief Balkin and witness statements from the case file. In hindsight though, there was at least something that gave some folks in the family an uneasy feeling. In the reports, there's a notation that prior to her disappearance, not too long before they were in

Daytona Beach on basically a little vacation. And for some reason, Ronnie Carr brought Dee home all the way from Daytona alone. And there was a little concern about that, like why, I guess she wanted to go home. He said he would take her. For whatever reason, just a little nugget that I think they were keeping in the back of their mind, like, this is a little odd. Why would a 12-year-old girl leave the beach to go back to a farm in Sitger where there's nothing literally for miles around?

Certainly made enough of an impact on them that they notated it in the case file. Again, at the time, no one had detected anything strange going on between Ronnie and Dee. She hadn't shared anything with her family, friends, or teachers, and to everyone's knowledge, they got along just fine. The two weren't known to be extremely close or anything,

but they had all been living together in tight quarters and hung out together quite frequently as family. So outside of that questionable composite sketch and a slightly compromised alibi, all detectives really had were weird feelings in the pits of their stomachs. So for now, their plan was just to keep putting the pressure on Ronnie to see if his pot would eventually boil over.

What's interesting is they press Ronnie to the point that he failed multiple PSE exams and then multiple polygraphs. And then something that's completely unheard of now, they drove him to Orlando and put him under Tru-Serum drugs, sodium pentothal, to question him about these disappearance. Sodium pentothal basically put you into a stupor. And it was believed, at least back in the 70s, that in this stupor, it would be impossible for you to lie.

That was the approach back then. This practice has proven to be unreliable at best. I would call it quackery and just not suitable for law enforcement purposes whatsoever. Aside from being unethical, dangerous to the subject, it has scientifically been proven to be just unacceptable and not a reliable test of someone's truth-telling abilities. The doctor's report stated he firmly believed Ronnie was telling the truth under the drug. So if you even want to count that as a real test, I guess you could say he passed. You have to compare and contrast that to the PSCs, which I'm not a huge supporter of either. The polygraphs are somewhat different. The contrasting of these different nine examinations is obviously wildly different.

Chief Balkan said Ronnie failed five separate PSEs, more commonly referred to as voice stress analysis tests. And he failed three polygraph exams, seemingly all taken within the first month or so after Dee disappeared. The questions that he failed on the PSC and the polygraph are, do you have any knowledge about Dee's disappearance? Did you have anything to do with Dee's disappearance? And do you know where she is now?

Of course, none of these tests could even be admissible in court. But particularly in the 70s, you could say that they were at least pushing police to dig up more on Ronnie's past. I don't think there was anything overt about Ronnie Carr prior to this case developing. However, as they get into who he was and really try to do a workup on him and understand what kind of mindset, is he capable of doing this. So the detectives begin talking with different folks at New D, and one of those was a young girl, well, she was 18 at the time, that they talked with her. We're going to have a voice-after read directly from this detective's report, where he recounted speaking with this 18-year-old woman, who by the way was only 11 around the same age as Dee, when she had this alleged

experience with Ronnie Carr. Some names will only be referred to by initials to protect the privacy of the then-minors mentioned in this story. Pee is 18 years old at this time, lives in a little house about one mile from the Carr Schofield trailer. She knew Dee and they visited back and forth. She says the last summer before the Scofields came to live with the Carrs, Ronnie Carr's wife, Tony, was in the hospital. At this time, Ronnie Carr and R.M., who was 11 years old at this time, and her cousin, L.C., about the same age, come to his trailer to clean it. For the service, he said that he would give them a pony that he had. And he did in fact give the pony to RM. He used to fool around with them, hold them down,

and one time when they were used in the bathroom, he tried to force his way in with them. RM wasn't sure if this gave Ronnie an erection or not. P told me that one day she was going to a party with her 13-year-old cousin, Jay, at the home of M and RW. Ronnie Carr at the time had a blue VW and offered them a lift. They had made punch and a cake, but they refused the lift. About halfway to the M and RW home, Ronnie stopped by them again, and this time they took the ride. He gave them both beer to drink. He gave them both cigarettes to smoke, and he asked them all kinds of questions. As an example, did they date? What did they do on dates with boys?

Did they let the boys feel them? Did they ever go all the way? P said she answered no to the last questions, but her cousin Jay answered yes. He took them into town later on to buy some more beer, but the store wouldn't cash his check, so he didn't get any. P said that Ronnie would fool around with her. I asked if he ever touched her breasts or privates, but she said no. She said that she thought he had an erection several times when he fooled around with her.

Ronnie Carr told them that if they wanted to know about sex, he would show them what it's all about. None of these stories had been reported to police when they had allegedly happened about seven years prior. But the fact that they were coming out now was extremely concerning. Certainly no reason for them to lie about this whatsoever. This witness went on to say that she thought Dee acted strange around Ronnie, not as if she liked him, more like she was afraid of him. Here's our voice actor again with more from that report.

She told me that one time, Ronnie Carr was driving her brother, P, and D into town. At first D didn't want to go and then was talked into it. On the way she changed her mind and jumped out of the car. This detective also questioned a second young girl who had apparently been present for some of these inappropriate interactions with Ronnie. And she had pretty much the same story to tell. Again, these alleged predatory exchanges between Ronnie and these young girls didn't appear to be publicly known in the community, let alone to the family. While Dee's sister, Shelley, who we spoke to for this episode, was in her 20s and already out of the house in 1976,

she had still spent plenty of time together with Dee, Ronnie, and the rest of the family, traveling from her home in Orlando to visit them on weekends. She told Madison that the family didn't suspect Ronnie of any wrongdoing. He was always super cooperative, even assisted with the searches for his young sister-in-law. Although Dee's other sister, Toni, remained supportive of her husband Ronnie, she also understood that detectives had a job to do. The whole family seemed to feel the same way, sympathetic to the fact that detectives needed to look into Ronnie, even if it made them uncomfortable.

So no one was vehemently sticking up for Ronnie, per se, but they definitely didn't think he was capable of doing something to Dee. Tony never gave any indication that, not that she was standing up for him, but never gave indications that anything was out of sorts with him. Even after they divorced, years down the line, Tony never wavered on this. She didn't think Ronnie would ever hurt Dee. Police were skeptical of him, but there was nothing concrete. A note a detective wrote in the case file from around this time reads, quote,

case against Ronnie is all circumstantial. He looks like best bet so far, end quote. Even if he looked like the best bet, the best for what? They didn't even know for sure if Dee was dead or alive as they continued to look for her. They were tracking down sightings, not only sightings, but also comparing dental work of bodies all over this country, which is kind of where the FBI gets involved. Every time a body was found in this country, to this day, they're entered into FCI, CNCI when they're unidentified.

And if anything about those remains match anywhere close to Dee's entered descriptors, we have to go back and look at that. Every sighting turned out to be a false alarm. And no recovered remains belonged to Dee. And that brought both equal amounts of hope and gloom. And that went on for a decade, and then another. And despair flooded any remaining ounce of faith that was left. The year was now 1999.

And while with the passage of time, it was more likely than not that Dee was no longer alive, there was a new detective on the case, and he was determined that whoever was responsible, well, their days were now numbered. So, fast forward, I'm going through this case decades later. Shelley Edwards, her sister, is on me. She finds out that I'm working on this case, and now it's phone calls, and it's,

I want this done, demanding as any family member should be. I loved it. I loved the fact that she would push so hard. It pushed me to go visit Ronnie Carr at his home in Bellevue, which is about 10 miles south of Ocala. Ronnie Carr was living down there with his new wife, with their young son.

And I just showed up one day and knocked at the door, introduced myself, said, hey, I'd like to come in and chat with you about Dorothy Schofield. Balkan said Ronnie, now in his 50s, invited him in, and the two sat down at his kitchen table for two hours talking about the case. Ronnie denied it, vehemently.

Not only did Ronnie deny it, he pointed the finger at someone else that he thought was responsible. Someone related to him. Ronnie told Balkin that he believed his own father was responsible. Dayton Carr, known as Dusty, had been almost as close to the investigation as Ronnie had been. In the early days, while searchers were combing the woods for Dee, he offered up his mobile home as a place for the family to stake out in case any news broke. Our reporter Madison

spoke to Shelley about this, and she said that this news about Dusty wasn't surprising, as there were several things that made him stand out to the family as suspicious. Simply put, he had a reputation of being a bad guy. According to Ronnie, he had been an abusive father, violent toward his own wife and kids, which is why they had a mostly estranged relationship. They had only recently rekindled it enough to the point where Dusty was allowed to spend time with his grandchildren, Ronnie and Tony's two boys. Chief Balkin said that was actually Dusty's alibi for around the time Dee went missing.

He was helping babysit his grandkids up at the mobile home in Citra. But now, it was finally coming out that his initial story about his whereabouts that day may have been just that, a story. The story was simply that, yeah, we were up there babysitting and we didn't know anything about her disappearing until both Dee's mom and dad separately called to see if Dee had returned home because they couldn't find her.

So the story from Dusty's wife was that we were there the entire time, say for a few minutes when Dusty left to take the trash to the dumpster down the road and then he came right back. It would be years later that allegedly Dusty's wife was telling another family member that yeah I lied to the police about Dusty's whereabouts that day. So it puts a whole different spin on this, right? So we get a report that hey I had this conversation with Evelyn, Dusty's wife, and she told me that she had in fact lied to the police that Dusty was supposed to go to the trash dump that day, and when he left, he never came back.

And he didn't come back until really late that night, and he acted really bizarre. What's odd is Chief Balkin said, based on the case files, it doesn't really seem like Dusty was considered a serious suspect way back when the investigation was ramping up. This seemed to be the first time police heard Ronnie point the finger at his father. But Shelley told Madison her family was always skeptical of Dusty. She said she remembers her mom telling police right away that she swore she saw Dusty driving behind them that day, following her and Dee into town.

In the moment, she probably just assumed he was also headed to Ocala to run some errands or whatever. But after Dee disappeared, she saw it as more malicious, like stalking. Only problem is, Chief Balkin said he couldn't find any records of this in the notes that he has. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Either way, the stuff Ronnie was coming forward with now made his dad look really bad. Ronnie described his dad as being at the highway patrol station for two whole days, sleeping inside and anytime anybody came in to give any information or talk or

interview, anytime they would walk out he would follow them out so he was privy to everything that everybody was saying and that at some point he did in fact allow them to come into his trailer they took him up on the offer and at some point something caused him to fly off the handle, threw them all out of the house. This is weeks later after they started a big family falling out and then he quickly moved him and his wife to Eustis, Florida, down in Lake County, a county away, and they didn't talk for 20-some-odd years. They hadn't talked. Now Balkan was getting all this information second-hand, and the unfortunate part was that by this point, Dusty was already dead.

So Balkan couldn't confront him about any of this. Still, Ronnie wasn't done with his accusations. On his dad's deathbed, basically, at the hospital, he leans over and says, Dad, now is the time to set yourself free to tell me what you did and how this ended for deep. And, you know, make your peace with your God. And he said his dad, who couldn't even talk, raged up out of the gurney at the hospital in anger.

And he says, I know it was him. I could see it on his face. He was so angry that I was even asking him about this case, even confronting him. The rage on his face was beyond anything I had ever seen. He firmly believed, at least he told me, that his father abducted and killed Dee Scofield." Dusty never gave a deathbed confession, so best Balkan could do was talk to the people who knew him in life, try to confirm these stories Ronnie was telling him. Specifically, the story that Dusty's wife Evelyn, who actually went by Jean, was telling her sister-in-law, Betty Kolb, the story about how she had lied about Dusty's alibi.

We sent two detectives down thinking, all right, he's dead. Maybe we can get this woman to tell us the truth, right? She's elderly. She's got nothing to lose at this point. The detective's interviewer, she sticks with the original story. Dusty was there that day except for a few minutes when he went to the dump down the street and came right back. There's no way he could have ever had anything to do with it. He never said anything to her. Mrs. Carr stated that Betty Colb had lied about the alleged conversation that she

had no information which would aid in the investigation. She indicated she remembered the events of July 22, 1976, exactly as she had reported during a tape statement that took place shortly after Dee's disappearance. So with Ronnie maintaining his dad, Dusty was the guilty one, Dusty now dead, and his wife sticking to her story about his whereabouts that day, there was only one more person to check in with. I later responded to the home of Betty Cole

and requested that she allow me to record a controlled telephone call in which she would contact Jean Carr. This was being done to determine if Jean had actually made the comments to Betty Kolb about her husband's whereabouts on the day he disappeared. Mrs. Kolb adamantly refused and stated she did not want to get involved.

Even when told that the information which could be obtained from a simple phone call, could open the case, she still refused." After what felt like decades' worth of progress, Balkan hit a dead end. By this point, Dee's family had expressed that they didn't care about prosecuting whoever was responsible for whatever happened to Dee. They just wanted to know where her remains were so they could give her a proper burial. So in 2000, with Ronnie being the only known suspect

still alive, Chief Balkan obtained investigative subpoenas, actually ordering Ronnie and his new wife, Barbara, to testify under oath at the state attorney's office. But they ended up invoking their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, so the state attorney released them from the subpoena. So if he wasn't gonna talk, Chief Vulcan wondered if there was any evidence left that would do the talking for him. And he tried everything, from tracking down the car Ronnie drove in 76, to tracking down those witnesses who made allegations against Ronnie when they were

young girls to see if their stories still held true. Which they did. He even looked at the smallest leads that could have been overlooked and did his best to run them down all those years later. What probably wasn't publicized in this case was a few days after Dee went missing, I think it was three or four days later, there was a young girl that was riding her horse out in the forest. And she was described as riding this horse just east of Clavier Road, which is about 1.6 miles due east of Newby's Corner. But the report was it, I'm riding my horse and I get to a spot on

the trail where I detect this foul odor of decomp. And for some reason, that gets reported to the Fish and Wildlife Commission, who come out and ultimately attribute this to a deer or a bear that got hit by a car, never found, never detected the odor themselves and never found the source of the odor, obviously. Well, fast forward to 2007 with few other leads and not much to lose.

Balkan got his shovel. I end up spending a good portion of that summer out in the forest in this area with a shovel, a metal detector, and a sift box. Brutally hot, but trying to find something. In the course of me out there digging holes and running a metal detector and sifting dirt, I contacted the forestry department because my intent was to burn that entire area to the ground to make it easier because you can't run a metal detector very effectively. And was told, we're not doing that, detective, and two, you should understand that that

entire area has been treed twice since the day of her disappearance. Meaning, if there were ever remains in that area, they would likely only be tiny fragments at this point. Running out of options, Balkans stayed on Ronnie, calling him several times and asking him to come to the Ocala Police Department for a sit-down interview. Ronnie refused the interview several times,

but ultimately submitted. Several props were set up in the interview room, boxes, maps, photographs, and case files at the police department, and the interview was videotaped. Ronnie arrived and seemed somewhat defensive with body language that appears suspicious. After only a few minutes into the interview, his cell phone rang and he stated that he had to leave. I advised him to return for the interview before the end of the and he stated that he had to leave. I advised him to return for the interview before the end of the following week or I would seek an investigative subpoena to question him. Ronnie agreed and stated that there would be no need for a subpoena. Ronnie, however,

failed to make any further contact with me and never returned my phone calls. And that's it. That was the end of the rope with Ronnie. Despite cooperating with Chief Balkin in the past, he refused to talk to him after leaving the Ocala Police Department that day. And today, talking to Ronnie would be impossible because he passed away in 2020 at age 72. I firmly believe that he was abducted and killed and her body is somewhere here in Marion County. As much as I want to close this case, the truth of the matter is now, with all the time gone, with Dusty dead, with Ronnie Carr dead, with no evidence in this case whatsoever,

the only way this case will ever be closed if somebody marches themselves into the Ocala Police Department, not only confesses completely, but then has something to corroborate their statements." Chief Balkin's next steps include trying to re-interview Ronnie's widow Barbara if she's still out there, to see if there are any family secrets she now wants to get off her chest. Even though Chief Balkin realizes that all of the circumstantial evidence makes Ronnie look good for this crime, he says there are still things that don't add up to him being guilty. You're out on 40 acres. This girl's walking to the school bus.

There's so many opportunities that you could have out in the middle of nowhere. Fire a gun, nobody cares. It happens all the time out there. You would be a complete moron to drive 16 miles to Ocala while her mother, who knows you, and your vehicle, she's less than 150 yards away. You could have been seen at any time.

It just doesn't make sense to me. Ronnie, even deceased, is still considered a suspect to this day. But Chief Balkan wants to avoid tunnel vision. I'm not sold. And I hate to say it because everything points to him, but I'm fearful that they thought the same thing in 1976, and it's why we're sitting here talking today." And Dee's surviving family members aren't convinced either. Shelley maintains their family thinks Dusty Carr, Ronnie's dad, is the one responsible for whatever happened to Dee that day.

And Balkan still considers Dusty a suspect, too. He also can't rule out the potential an infamous Florida serial killer could be responsible either, or maybe even one of the construction workers who were in the parking lot the day Dee disappeared. There were two different construction sites, kind of jobs going on in that parking lot at the time. So they were working to identify,

okay, who's employed with what company. You know, the workers, you never know who they had hired, that would have had access to deep walking across the parking lot. There is one construction worker that I can't determine if it was substantiated or corroborated that he had an alibi for not showing up to work that next day, and he would have been working at the site of Dee's disappearance. He has this guy's name, and he's been trying to find him. If he's still around, he'd be in his 70s. Now this is where the story really was gonna end.

But months after our interview with Chief Balkan, he called our reporter Madison with a new potential suspect that he now feels very strongly about. Balkan spent years of his life chasing any theories related to the two carmen to no avail. So maybe there's a reason he hasn't been able to zero in on either Ronnie or Dusty. Forced to look outside of the box, Chief Balkan started looking at predators who may have been charged with standout crimes later down the line — someone in the area who was known to target young girls. And that's when he started focusing on Aubrey Adams.

According to reporting in the Tampa Tribune, Adams was convicted of first-degree murder in the case of 8-year-old Trissa Thornley. Adams picked up the little girl on her way home from school in Ocala and tried to have sexual relations with her before strangling her to death. And this happened in 1978, so we're talking only about a year and a half after Dee went missing. Balkan has been working to verify exactly where Adams was staying in relation to the shopping center where Dee was taken from back in 76.

He was able to speak with Adams' ex-wife, who thinks that they were living with his parents about 30 minutes away in Oklawa. But Balkan believes it's still possible Adams may have actually been much closer by that time, living in a rental house in Ocala less than 20 blocks from where the JM Field store was. And, he found a report indicating Adams quit his three-year job at a hotel just a month before Dee went missing, meaning he would have had a lot of time on his hands, time where he could have been up to no good. And something he just can't shake.

Balkan thinks Adams, maybe even more so than Ronnie, looks eerily similar to that composite sketch of the guy that the clerk at the corner store thinks she spotted Dee with the day she disappeared. We're going to have his picture up on the blog post for this episode as well, if you want to look. But again, sketches aren't always dependable. Plus, these two scenarios don't perfectly align. The big difference between the two cases

is that Adams knew Trissa's family. Yeah, he lived near her school and could have been randomly passing by and noticed her walking home, but Trissa would have known who he was. Chief Balkan said he hasn't found anything that would indicate Dee would have known Aubrey Adams. The Schofield family lived up in rural Citra,

only coming into Ocala on occasion. So the question becomes, would Dee have gone so easily with a stranger? Perhaps if Adams is their guy, Chief Balkan speculates he would have just been in the right place at the right time, purely a crime of opportunity. He was likely just passing by or doing some shopping

or in the parking lot if he was the one who spotted Dee and quickly snatched her up without causing a scene. Aubrey Adams was sentenced to death and eventually executed in 1989, so it's impossible for Balkan to confront him. But he is determined to try and track down and talk to those closest to him who are still around to try and find out more. The bottom line is I would want to hear from anyone out in our community that had any direct knowledge of Dee's actions that day. I find it hard to believe that she just walked out of JM Fields and nobody saw her, nobody saw her walk away, get into a vehicle.

I believe somebody out there has that information. I believe if the killer's not dead, that he's old enough, honestly, to maybe want to get this off of his chest at this point. Come forward and give the family, what's left of the family, some semblance of closure and lead us to Dorothy's remains. I would love for somebody to have knowledge of these whereabouts, even if it was third

hand through a distant family member. The one thing I've learned over my 30 years is that a lot of cases go unsolved because what would have been incredible witnesses that could have helped us solve a violent crime rationalize information that they either saw or heard in a manner that prevents them from coming forward. They rationalize something that would be extremely important to us as something that is minor and probably they think would mean anything to us. But the fact of the matter is the smallest lead in this case could potentially lead us to finding these remains and give the family some closure.

Chief Balkin's not naive enough to believe that they're going to be able to prosecute a case that's close to 50 years old in which the victim is still missing. But he is convinced that the truth could still come out. And whoever holds that key piece of knowledge could help set Dee's family free. I've either investigated or been part of many, many investigations where a child is killed at the hands of someone else.

And it is an extremely difficult thing to do to look into the eyes of a parent and deliver that news and then walk them through the case progression, hopefully leading to an arrest and hopefully to a successful prosecution of those responsible for the death of their child. It is something completely different to look into the eyes of a mother, a father,

a sister, a brother, and be unable to even locate their loved one, their daughter. I cannot imagine that happening to me. I've got a young daughter that I can't even fathom what this family not only went through, but continues to go through. There is no closure for them. It's a case that haunts them. It's a case that haunts us. There's an entire community out there that yearns for closure, a family that deserves

it, and a detective turned chief who won't sleep easily at night until he knows what happened to the last missing child from his hometown. A sweet and funny and talented honors student who her sister Shelly thinks, if given the chance to grow up, would have become a nurse. Because even at her young age, Dee already knew that she wanted to help people. But now she needs our help. Help from the public. Help from someone willing to step up and do the right thing. If the person out there that did this is still alive and hears this, obviously they are older in age.

Presumably, they're days of victimizing the young children, hopefully, are behind them. Maybe they have everything to gain by coming forward and understanding the hurt that they have caused an entire family, an entire community, and bringing some closure to that just by doing the right thing, just by getting something off of their chest

that could potentially save their soul, their eternity from one that they clearly deserve. I can't threaten them with prison time. I can't threaten them with what I would do to them as a father if you ever put myself, my family, my daughter in the situation that you've put the Schofield family in. All I can offer now is a little bit of redemption, probably at the end

of their life, to come forward, do the right thing, and help this family try to bring closure to the most horrific event that anybody could ever live through. Not only is Dee unaccounted for, but officers never found anything she would have had with her that day. The watch band that she had bought her older brother, the little bit of change she would have had on her. Nor the family's car keys. Maybe it's one of those things that you found so many years ago that could be the clue to finding Dee. Maybe you knew Ronnie or Dusty Carr or Aubrey Adams back in the day. Maybe one of them said something or did something that made you pause. The smallest tidbit of information could crack this case or lead investigators to Discofield's remains.

So please call the Ocala Police Chief, Mike Balkan, at 352-369-7000. Or you can email him. We're going to put his email right in the show notes. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo