The Deck - Dorothy Kajpust (4 of Diamonds, Idaho)

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Our card this week is Dorothy Kajpust, the 5 of Diamonds from Idaho. On August 21, 2004, 54-year-old Dorothy Kajpust was staying at a friend’s mobile home in eastern Idaho as a temporary living arr...angement when, suddenly, in the early morning hours of that Saturday, an unknown individual entered the home and brutally assaulted Dorothy, leaving her for dead. Five days later, Dorothy passed away in the hospital without regaining consciousness. For nearly two decades, Dorothy’s case has remained unsolved, and the mystery surrounding her death is still just as puzzling for detectives today as it was in 2004.If you you have any information on the murder of Dorothy Kajpust please, please call Detective Sgt. Joshua Fielding at the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office at 208-529-1200.  To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Our card this week is Dorothy Kapust, the four of diamonds from Idaho. In August 2004, 54-year-old Dorothy was crashing at a friend's house in eastern Idaho when suddenly, in the middle of the night, someone entered the house and brutally beat her, leaving her for dead. Dorothy's case is still just as puzzling for detectives today as it was 18 years ago. What could have possibly been the motive behind one of the most brutal beatings police have ever seen? And what kind of monster could have done it?
Starting point is 00:00:34 I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was nearly 5 a.m. on Saturday, August 21, 2004 in Rivey, Idaho. And Ruby Dugan was just getting home from celebrating her 33rd birthday with some friends. She'd been out all night getting coffee with them at a 24 hour truck stop and was finally returning home with her young daughter after a long night of celebrating. Now Ruby and occasionally her daughter had been staying at this home for the past month or so, but it wasn't actually Ruby's house. It was her sister's boyfriend's mobile home that he let others use from time to time. And two days before her birthday, Ruby had welcomed a temporary roommate whose name was
Starting point is 00:01:45 Dorothy. Dorothy had been in a fight and needed someplace safe to stay for a while. So when Ruby got home that Saturday morning around 5, she was probably prepared to stumble inside in the dark trailer without turning on any lights because Dorothy was likely asleep. But as Ruby pulled up to the mobile home, she noticed something peculiar. All the lights inside the house were already on, and Ruby immediately felt in her gut that something was off. When she and her daughter stepped inside the house, Ruby's suspicions were confirmed.
Starting point is 00:02:19 Down the hall in the master bedroom was a horrifying scene that would be carved into her mind forever. Sprawled out on the floor of the bedroom was Dorothy, laying in a massive pool of blood with a black duffle bag placed on top of her head. Dorothy was clearly unconscious with extensive head trauma, but she was somehow still clinging to life, but just barely. Ruby was overwhelmed with complete panic and she rushed back outside to call 911. And there is a lady that's staying with us. There is blood all over the floor. It looks like somebody broke into the house while I was gone.
Starting point is 00:03:09 She has passed out and there is blood everywhere on the floor. I walked in, went back and found Dorothy on the floor. There is blood everywhere at Orsayham. I don't know her last name. It is one of my sisters and her boyfriend's friends. Okay? And now it is her by Dorothy. Somebody named Dorothy. Hello, does she? Is she conscious?
Starting point is 00:03:31 She is in her 50s. She is breathing, but turns blood everywhere. Ruby's call has been edited for Time's Safe. Now, nine minutes after she placed that 911 call, a sheriff's deputy arrived on scene, and it didn't take long for the home to be swarmed by first responders. The scene was gruesome. Dorothy had sustained damage to the right side of her head,
Starting point is 00:03:56 so extreme that part of her skull had been crushed. A bloody belt buckle was tangled in her hair and her face was bruised in places. It was a miracle that she was even still alive. And since she was somehow still holding on, responders first priority was getting her the immediate medical care she so desperately needed. Dorothy was airlifted to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, which was only about 15 miles away. And as doctors were prepping Dorothy for surgery, police were taping off one of the
Starting point is 00:04:25 most horrifying crime scenes the small town of Ribery had ever seen. Here's Detective Eric's Southwick with the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office. He was one of the first responders on scene and he's still assigned the case today. The dispatch initially had been told that it was a gunshot wound or maybe a stabbing. She wasn't deceased, but she'd been transported already to the hospital by a helicopter, actually. So when I got there, I didn't know what I had, honestly. Because Dorothy was still alive when first responders arrived, Medics had tracked blood everywhere in the midst of attempting life-saving measures.
Starting point is 00:05:04 So the usual investigative techniques police normally use in cases like this, such as analyzing blood spatter, was almost impossible. Not only that, but the bedroom Dorothy was found in was completely trashed. Whoever hurt Dorothy had totally ransacked the place. A gun safe that had been hidden in a closet had been dragged out to the driveway, loads of personal belongings were scattered across the floor, the drawers of a nightstand had been emptied on the bed. But then, as detectives were carefully processing the crime scene and collecting evidence, Detective Southwick made a discovery. On the bed beneath a pile of junk was blood, like a significant amount of blood loss. But
Starting point is 00:05:44 remember, when Ruby had found Dorothy, she was on the floor of the bedroom in a pool of blood, not the bed. So to Detective Southwick, this meant that there could have been two separate attack points. And then I don't know if she was rendered unconscious, and then woke up later after all this ransacking started and confronted the suspect again. And that's when she really got beat down. Everything police were finding at the scene agreed with the theory that Dorothy had been attacked twice,
Starting point is 00:06:15 once on the bed and once in the middle of the room. But detectives still had a big question to answer. What weapon was used? Her head trauma wasn't consistent with a gunshot or stab wounds, and there was no way the belt buckle found tangled in her hair could have caused the massive wound. So what could have been used to inflict such extensive damage? It didn't take long for police to discover the grizzly answer to their question. In the ransacked bedroom, amongst all the scattered clutter was a desk, and one of the corners of the base of that desk
Starting point is 00:06:46 was covered with blood. I've looked at it a million times, and I'm pretty sure that she was laying face down on this floor after she'd gone down in the second time, maybe, and I think that the suspect was kicking her head into the corner of that desk, and that's what caused the... because it was protr her head into the corner of that desk. And that's what caused the... because it was protruding, had damage.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Judging by how brutally Dorothy had been attacked, it almost seemed as if this might have been a crime of passion. But conflicting with that narrative was the fact that several items had been stolen from the trailer. The missing items were a metal detector, a 9-millimeter pistol, one of those small, travel-sized TVVCR combos, and Dorothy's leather satchel. So one could think that this was looking like a robbery. But what really perplexed police about this hypothesis was that there was no signs of forced entry, meaning that either Ruby hadn't locked the door when she left like she thought, or Dorothy knew her attacker and let them inside. Investigators swept the scene carefully,
Starting point is 00:07:52 searching every inch for fingerprints or anything they could possibly get the suspects DNA off of. They found one fingerprint on the gunsafe outside, but they didn't get any hits in Aphus, so they were hoping that some blood they collected would give them more. They took samples from the light switch, the edge of the closet, a floppy disc container, and a wet sample from the center of the room. They didn't know if the perps blood was even there, it could all have been dorthies, but there was only one way to find out. Unfortunately, at the time, they knew it wasn't going to be a quick answer, because it could take more than a year to get results back. Which I thought sounded bananas, even in 2004. But I guess Idaho state lab didn't do testing of that nature. So get this. They actually had to wait until there was like a stack of samples from a bunch
Starting point is 00:08:41 of different cases that needed testing. And then when they had enough, the detective today didn't know what exactly that number was to constitute enough, but when they had enough, they then had to apply for a grant to have those samples sent off to a lab in Texas. So needless to say, no one was holding their breath just waiting for those results. It was going to take some boots on the ground investigative work to keep this case from stalling out. Detective Southwick said perhaps the most difficult part of the investigation was putting together victimology on Dorothy, because at this point,
Starting point is 00:09:14 even though Dorothy was still clinging to life in the hospital, she was unconscious, and police had yet to even figure out her last name or where she'd come from. Police checked with Ruby, but like she said in the 911 call, she had no idea what Dorothy's full name even was or what her backstory was. They had just met less than 48 hours before.
Starting point is 00:09:34 So detectives called up the owner of the mobile home who was the one who agreed to let Dorothy stay there. He'd been in Ohio with his girlfriend at the time and he was shocked to learn about the gruesome murder, but he too couldn't give police any helpful information regarding Dorothy's identity. He knew her last name started with a K, but he wasn't sure how to spell it or anything. He told police it was an unusual name, but that was all he knew.
Starting point is 00:09:58 I mean, the two weren't exactly super close friends. They were more like acquaintances. He was a truck driver, and she often hung out at truck stops and cleaned trucks for some extra cash. That's how they knew each other. So unfortunately, he wasn't able to tell investigators much new information about Dorothy.
Starting point is 00:10:14 Then, five days after the brutal attack, the urgency to find Dorothy's attacker hit an all-time high. After five long days in a coma, Dorothy passed away in the hospital on August 26, 2004, with no friends or family by her side. She never regained consciousness after the brutal beating, and detectives still didn't know much about who she was. And they wouldn't be able to confirm her identity for another few days.
Starting point is 00:10:51 When they finally uncovered Dorothy's last name, Kapust, they unearthed more information about her, but not as much info as you'd expect. Police learned that Dorothy was born in Chicago in 1950, which made her 54 at the time of her death. But other background information was hard to come by. Dorothy was known to be a drifter and kind of bounced all over the place. Her last known physical address was in California, but she'd never actually settled down anywhere. And not only was getting background info difficult, but finding Dorothy's family proved to be
Starting point is 00:11:24 equally frustrating. Investigators found no evidence that Dorothy had ever been married, so there was no spouse to contact. Next, they looked for any children. Detectives knew she had given birth to a daughter in the mid-1990s, but Dorothy had lost custody of her after an incident in Las Vegas in 1997. She'd taken her infant daughter to a bar with her and gotten drunk. And while she was holding her daughter, Dorothy ended up falling off one of those tall barstools. The daughter hit her head pretty hard on the ground, which led to Dorothy getting arrested for injury to a child. And after that incident, Dorothy lost custody of her daughter. Now, police were aware that Dorothy's
Starting point is 00:12:02 daughter was still very young when all of this happened and maybe wouldn't even remember her biological mother, but they still wanted to do everything they could to locate her because they thought finding her would help them with the victimology they were still trying to put together for Dorothy. She would have been about seven or eight at this time, but despite their best efforts, it was a lost cause. They were unable to find Dorothy's daughter. For law enforcement, I'd imagine that one of the worst parts of the job is having to ring that
Starting point is 00:12:31 doorbell or make that phone call and deliver the horrible news to a victim's parents or spouse or child. The gut-wrenching news that no one ever wants to hear. But I'd imagine that the only thing more heartbreaking for police than having to break that news to somebody's loved one is when the victim has no one in their life for them to break that news to. Dorothy was laid to rest on September 1, 2004, six days after her death. Her funeral was short, maybe five minutes long, and no one she knew was in attendance. There was no eloquent sermon, no tearful friends or family, no somber music, no flower lined casket. Her body was dressed in donated clothing and laid in a simple wooden coffin with a plain
Starting point is 00:13:17 cloth draped over it. An article in the Times News described Dorothy's brief funeral. The article read, quote, this is how people are buried when there's no one to claim the body. Funeral workers lowered the body into a hole. They stayed silent for half a minute. They shoveled dirt. They left. End quote.
Starting point is 00:13:37 According to the Associated Press, local high school students learned about Dorothy's meager burial and wanted to do whatever they could to properly honor her. Although Dorothy was largely alone in life, these students didn't want her going into death alone. So three weeks after her five-minute funeral, those students organized a proper memorial service for Dorothy and even raised enough money to formally mark her grave with a headstone. And while those students were doing their part to honor Dorothy, detectives were marching forward with their investigation,
Starting point is 00:14:09 determined as ever to find this brutal killer who stole an innocent life. Naturally, one of the first people investigators looked into was Dorothy's temporary roommate, the person who discovered the crime scene, Ruby. Now, it's completely normal for police to investigate whoever found the body. That's actually a common theme amongst
Starting point is 00:14:28 most murder investigations. But detectives may have had other reasons to find Ruby suspicious. Ruby told police that she'd last seen Dorothy around midnight. She had just gotten off her shift at the local sonic. She popped by the house for a quick second to chat with Dorothy, maybe grab some things,
Starting point is 00:14:44 and then she left around 1.30 a.m. to go grab coffee with friends at a nearby truck stop. And Ruby said she didn't return home until nearly 5 a.m., which is when she found Dorothy's near-lifeless body. So I'm sure police had some of the same questions you and I are having almost 20 years later. Coffee at 1.30 in the morning? And what kind of coffee with friends last more than 3 hours? I mean, okay, maybe Ruby was just a die-hard night owl and after all it was her birthday, so maybe she just wanted to enjoy an extra long hangout session
Starting point is 00:15:16 with her pals, or maybe grabbing coffee wasn't the only stop she made. Perhaps there were other errands that she ran and contributed to her for five hour absence. Whatever the case, any suspicion around Ruby and her story quickly melted away after police gathered eyewitness accounts from some neighbors. These neighbors were outside working on an RV in the wee hours of the morning on August 21st, and they saw a car matching the description of Ruby's car leaving the trailer around midnight, and the car didn't return at all until later that morning at about 450. So this told police that even though Ruby's story was a bit odd, it checked out, and there was no way she'd come back to the trailer at any point during the night to commit this crime. That paired with the fact that Ruby
Starting point is 00:16:02 literally had no reason to do any harm to her new roommate, meant that detectives had no reason to pursue her as a suspect. Now, another person investigators looked into pretty quickly was the owner of the mobile home, who, remember, was Ruby's sister's boyfriend, and he was also someone acquainted with Dorothy. He told police that he'd been in Ohio with Ruby's sister at the time of the murder, some 1700 miles away in a 27 hour car ride. But police needed to confirm that before ruling him out as a suspect. So they got a warrant and obtained his cell phone records, which confirmed his story.
Starting point is 00:16:38 Ruby had called his cell phone right after she got off the phone with 911 the day of the murder, and records indicate that his phone was in Ohio when he got the call just as he told police. And the owner of the trailer also had no motive. He had no obvious reason to kill Dorothy, let alone ransack his own property, so police moved on. The next person that they had on their list seemed like a more promising suspect. This person did have a motive for killing Dorothy. Remember, the whole reason Dorothy was staying at that trailer in the first place is because
Starting point is 00:17:12 she'd gotten into a fight. Now, who exactly that fight was with wasn't initially clear, so police did some digging. They interviewed some witnesses, and then they uncovered the name. Charles Turner. Charles Turner was a construction worker. We've been brought out here by his company when they were building our Corona plant. It was a big deal. So we had construction workers all over that went from the area. So he gets in a fight with her. During the interview with him, it was over. She had received sexual favors from her a couple of weeks prior when she was in town.
Starting point is 00:17:56 And she was drunk, I guess, and decided to get some money from Charles. And wanted a hundred bucks, and he refused to give it to her. So after this verbal argument, Charles walked to the restroom at the bar that they were both at, and Dorothy followed him in there. It's unclear what exactly happened or what was said, but police said that the fight turned physical, and Charles hit Dorothy.
Starting point is 00:18:22 Dorothy wasn't seriously injured, but it was enough for her to feel that she needed a safe place to stay for a while. After learning this, investigators tracked down Charles to see where he was on August 21st between the hours of midnight and 5am. And it turns out, Charles had been about 12 miles from Rirey at the time. He said between Friday night and Saturday morning he'd gone to some bars with friends, gotten a tattoo, returned to Yellowstone Truckstop where he was staying, and then slept in that morning. For whatever reason, police didn't really question his story. Detective Southwick told us Charles seemed very believable at the time, so police kind of just dropped it and hoped
Starting point is 00:19:02 more leads would come along that would take them in a different direction. Thanks to the story of Dorothy's murder hitting the local news in East Idaho, more leads did slowly trickle in, but some of them led to more questions than answers. Two neighbors called in and gave descriptions of a car that they saw in the driveway of the trailer home, possibly the suspects car. But between these two callers, police got three very different descriptions of a mysterious car, and neither caller could give an exact time that they saw the car. All they could say was that it was in the driveway at some point during the night. And police had more neighbors call in and say that they saw a man possibly taking the trash out sometime in those early morning hours.
Starting point is 00:19:47 But as all of these tips came in, Detective Southwick got a feeling that most, if not all, of these tipsters were confused. He wasn't sure that they were even talking about the same home in question. Like the trash can one caller said that they had seen taken out to the road was still right by the house when police got there. So maybe they'd gotten the trailer Dorothy was found in, confused with another mobile home in the area. The area where the trailer sat was rural. It's not as if it was in some like busy mobile home park. It was one of only a few houses in the area. So I'm not really sure where these conflicting
Starting point is 00:20:24 statements leave us. But as police were So I'm not really sure where these conflicting statements leave us. But as police were trying to make sense of all of these conflicting tips, detectives discovered something that seemed promising. They learned that Dorothy had been seen around Rihri with a man in the days leading up to her death. Apparently, this man was a boyfriend of sorts,
Starting point is 00:20:42 and I say of sorts because nothing indicated it was like a super serious relationship. The man's name was James Peters. He was a long-haul truck driver, and he was actually the one who'd brought Dorothy to the rivalry area in the first place. Detectives tracked down James and discovered that Dorothy wasn't the only woman in his life. James had been living with another girlfriend,
Starting point is 00:21:05 Kathy and Pocahtello Idaho. But once again, when they had someone in their sights, they were met with a pretty solid alibi. James said that he was in bed a sleep at the time in question, and Kathy corroborated his story, saying that he was absolutely in bed beside her the whole night. With a believable alibi and, again, no evidence to actually tie their potential suspect to the brutal murder, police had to let it go.
Starting point is 00:21:33 That is, until a month later, when detectives received a strange phone call from Kathy. During this call, Kathy told police that she was a very sound sleeper. And she had suspicions all along that James may have gotten out of bed without her hearing that night and actually committed the murder. And those suspicions were only growing stronger since one particular day when she walked outside to find James digging holes in their yard. When Kathy questioned him about why he was digging up their yard, he claimed that he was doing yard work,
Starting point is 00:22:17 but Kathy obviously didn't totally buy this explanation. And that's what prompted her to report James's odd behavior to police. This tip was huge for investigators. Detectives thought that they might have just hit the jackpot, so they hopped in their cars and drove out to Poca-Tello to see what exactly it was that James had been burying in his yard. Investigators used a metal detector to see if any of the stolen goods were hidden in the
Starting point is 00:22:43 dirt. They went over the area multiple times, but didn't get any hits. As police looked to this area, they noted that the digging looked to be superficial, as if someone had truly just been gardening or doing yard work just as James had initially claimed. The search was a complete bust, but detectives were still suspicious of James. I actually ended up doing four or five interviews with James. He was odd. He was just an odd guy.
Starting point is 00:23:14 So you were suspicious of that? Definitely. He refused to give me fingerprints or DNA, but he agreed to take a polygraph. So we polygraphed Ruby and we polygraphed James. Our polygrapher at the time told me that they were both good to go and he could look some place else. But James was odd. He came back in. He would call me, which was just kind of odd. Detective Southwick said that it was frustrating that James wouldn't provide any DNA or fingerprints, but there was nothing he could do about it. There wasn't sufficient probable cause, so he couldn't get a warrant and force him to
Starting point is 00:23:56 hand his DNA over. Now, what really intrigued me about James is that he had no criminal history whatsoever, but for some reason Dorothy's case wasn't the only murder investigation in the area at the time in which James became a person of interest. About a month after Dorothy was murdered, police and Pocahtello were investigating a homicide in which a woman had been stabbed to death in her apartment, and somehow James' name was brought up. And Pocahtello police ended up asking detectives in Riyrie for their reports on James. Now, there's not a ton of information about if he was ever actually considered a suspect
Starting point is 00:24:36 in that case or if he even knew this other woman who was killed. But I find it so odd that the same man would be on police's radar for two separate murders that happened within a month of each other. But anyways, law enforcement in Riyri had no rock hard evidence to tie James to Dorothy's murder. So they kind of had to drop it once again. And I'd imagine it was hard for police to let this go, because by this point their investigation was beginning to stall. The motive for the murder was unknown. Much of Dorothy's past was still a secret, and most frustrating of all, police still had
Starting point is 00:25:13 a vicious killer roaming the streets. As the months crept by, there were some brief glimmers of hope. More than a year after Dorothy's murder, police got the test back for the blood samples taken from the scene, but the results were not as straightforward as police would have hoped. Scientists determined that some of the blood collected at the scene, specifically the blood found
Starting point is 00:25:34 on the floppy discontainer had DNA that wasn't Dorothy's, and it was DNA that belonged to a male. But that was literally all they could conclude. Detective Southwick said the lab found a male, but that was literally all they could conclude. Detective Southwick said the lab found a, quote, partial male something there. End quote. But for whatever reason, the DNA wasn't usable to test against suspects or anything of that nature. Again, this was 2004, 2005-ish, and DNA testing just wasn't the same as it is today.
Starting point is 00:26:03 And honestly, the discovery of that male DNA wasn't necessarily even the attackers, because remember, the owner of the house was a man, which meant that the DNA could have been his or honestly anyone's. As the months and then years dragged by, Dorothy's case only got colder. But then in 2007, a gas station clerk all the way in Southern California made an alarming discovery that made detectives rethink everything. Just outside the gas station, next to a dumpster, the employee found a gun with a box of ammunition laying beside it. He found it just a couple of days before he reported it and he was reporting some other
Starting point is 00:26:43 crime and said, oh, by the way, I found this pistol. Police in California took the gun and entered the serial number into the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, which is a database law enforcement agency's nationwide use to store information about missing persons, fugitives, stolen property, you name it. And when police in Southern California entered the pistol
Starting point is 00:27:06 into this database, they got a hit. Its serial number matched a gun stolen from the trailer the night of Dorothy's murder. After years of no movement in the case, detectives finally had something to work with. With this potentially game-changing discovery, really made investigators scratch their heads. The gun was found in Desert Center, California, which is a 13-hour drive away from
Starting point is 00:27:30 Rai Rii Idaho. So how did the stolen gun randomly wind up all those hundreds of miles away? Well, it turns out that the gun's location might not have been as random as police initially thought. The gas station, where the gun was found, was only about 100 miles away from the only physical address law enforcement ever had for Dorothy when she lived in California years before. Does that make you think that the killer or killers was someone that she had long been go ties with California?
Starting point is 00:28:04 That's what I want to think. I, but I honestly don't know. But it was somebody, if Ruby actually locked that door when she left, Dorothy had to have let him in the house, because there was no forced entry on the door. Detectives were hopeful that this gas station would have surveillance cameras monitoring the general vicinity of the dumpster, and perhaps caught whoever dumped the gun on camera. But this gas station didn't have any surveillance cameras at all.
Starting point is 00:28:36 Police did ballistic testing and dusted the gun for prints. Still nothing. It was basically another den end. And since the discovery of the stolen gun, the case has remained virtually motionless. Please have turned to the media to bring attention to Dorothy's case and pled with the community. Here's a snippet of a news package by Suzanne Hobbs that aired on a local station, NBC News Channel 6 in 2008. She interviewed Sergeant James Foster with the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office.
Starting point is 00:29:08 We're asking for the public's assistance, probably help because somebody knows something, what we need is any information. We'll take any clue and any information and pursue it to the end. Just figure out a homicide case. This case has had no tips in the past year, and the Sheriff's Office has exhausted all of its leads.
Starting point is 00:29:25 Detective say any small thing could be the break in the case they desperately need. Despite law enforcement's pleas to the public, there's been nothing but silence. Recently, the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office has been trying to get the blood taken from the scene retested. DNA testing has come a long way in the last 18 years, but Detective Southwick said it all comes down to the price tag, and right now, the funds for retesting just aren't there. It's been 18 years since Dorothy was murdered, and her killer is still roaming free. We asked Detective Southwick if after all these years he's come up with any
Starting point is 00:30:06 kind of theory about why Dorothy was attacked so violently in the early morning hours of August 21st, 2004. It could go several different directions. She could have been a mule. That satchel she had could have opened it. I don't know. I don't know how she was communicating with anybody because she's supposed to be in her cell phone. I don't know how she was communicating with anybody because she's supposed to be living in a cell phone. I don't know how she would call somebody and let them know that she was at that trailer. But then on the other hand, she's transient. She's surround truck drivers all the time.
Starting point is 00:30:35 That pistol gets found all the way in California a couple of years later or three. I don't know. It's very possible that it was somebody local. That knew that that traitor was empty a lot and just went there. It seems awfully brutal to me, to steal a TV and a metal detector.
Starting point is 00:30:58 Yeah, do the nature of her injuries tell you that it was maybe more personal than that? There was a lot of raves there for sure. The bag on her head, the duffel bag on her heads, I always thought was curious. Why? Well, they tell us in training that people do that because they're ashamed of what they've done. So maybe they knew the victim or maybe they were just sick and buy it. It's hard to say. But it's, uh, yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. It could be a long haul truck driver that knew her or it could have been just, uh, she was in the wrong
Starting point is 00:31:37 place the wrong time. I don't know. Normally at the end of these episodes, I mentioned how terribly the victims loved ones missed them and how desperately they're searching for answers. But as you've heard throughout this story, Dorothy Kapust went to the grave the same way she walked through life, with no one by her side. And that will never sit right with me. Aside from the detectives working her case, Dorothy didn't and still doesn't have the luxury of someone pleading on her behalf.
Starting point is 00:32:06 Begging the community to come forward with information. And that's where we come in. We can and must use our voices to help police bring Dorothy's killer to justice because she doesn't have anyone else. Guys for 18 years, the monster who ruthlessly attacked this innocent woman and stole her life away from her has gotten away with it, and will continue to get away with it unless somebody speaks up. So please go to our website, thedeckpodcast.com.
Starting point is 00:32:35 There you'll find pictures of Dorothy of the mobile home that she was killed in. Look at them, show your relative, show your friends, do you recognize Dorothy, do you know something, do you know somebody who knows something? Because there is someone out there who has these answers that police are looking for. Someone out there has the knowledge and the power to finally bring Dorothy's killer to justice. If you think that person may be you or someone you know, or if you have any information at all about the murder of Dorothy Kapust, please call Detective Sergeant Joshua Fielding
Starting point is 00:33:09 at the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office at 208-529-1200. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To hear more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?

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