The Deck - Lois West (Aces of Hearts, Virginia)

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Our card this week is Lois West, the Ace of Hearts from Virginia.  One morning in August 1986, a contractor showed up to work on the floors in a vacant house in Williamsburg, Virginia. When he arrived, he found a woman on her side in the mostly-full bathtub. In her wake were a trail of clues: a U.S. Army class ring,  a mysterious hat with feathers, and sightings in what were likely her final hours.  Still, investigators have evidence on file from 1986 that may help solve the case.   Anyone with information can call the James City County Police Department at 757-253-1800 or the Hampton Roads Crime Line at 1-888-LOCK-U-UP. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/lois-west Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media. Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuck Twitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuck Facebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc To support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers.  Instagram: @ashleyflowers TikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkie Twitter: @Ash_Flowers Facebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Lois West, the Ace of Hearts from Virginia. It's been almost 40 years since 24-year-old Lois West was found dead inside an abandoned house in eastern Virginia. And despite many sightings of her in what were likely the final hours of her life, police have never been able to determine who killed her. But that doesn't mean they won't. There is still evidence on file from 1986 that might fill. in some of the holes that have plagued this case for 40 years.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. This story starts at an abandoned house on Richmond Road in Williamsburg all the way back in 1986. At the time, there was no one living in the house. The owners were renovating it to either rent or sell, and it had been vacant for quite some time. Jake Rice is a retired investigator for James City County Police Department in eastern Virginia. Nowadays, he's a civilian employee working property and evidence, and also cold cases.

In the house, there was no furniture, as in beds, any kind of dressers, anything of that sort. There was a bathtub, a sink, and a toilet in the bathroom. A company owned the rancher-style house, so it's not like a family or a bunch of roommates were fixing the place up. save for a pest control guy going in to do a check, no one had been there for one or two weeks at the least. Or at least no one should have been in that house until a contractor named Peter Smith arrived on the morning of August 15th to do some flooring work.

From the reports that we have from back then, the individual said he unlocked the front door. And as you went in the door, there was a small hallway and to the left would have been a bathroom. And that's where he was going to do the work on the floor. The first thing he noticed were bare feet, toenails painted red. And this instantly caused Peter to back out of the house and call police. There was no mistaking this woman for taking a bath or just lounging.

I mean, forget everything else he knew about the house being vacant. The position of her body, it was all wrong. She was on her right side partially faced down, and her left arm floated on top of the dark, grimy water. The water was extremely dark, like muddy in color. Water could be that dark because of the work being done there. If they were using the bathtub, have it filled with water for rags, anything else that they were doing,

we know that it had been raining and was muddy. of the 13th at least of August. Police checked for a pulse, but I have to imagine that was more procedural than anything else. Lying there as still as she was, with her face submerged in water and fully clothed, I imagine that they were pretty certain that she was already gone, even before the lack of a pulse told them so.

But what exactly happened to her, who she was and how she ended up here in a locked, vacant house that they had no clue about. Though the answers would come quickly. As for how this woman got into the house. Well, we do know that there was a couple windows that were cracked, but they appeared that nobody had went through them. It's noted that one of the doors was locked from over near the carport,

but it was not pulled all the way shut. So someone could have thought that they locked the door, but didn't, and it didn't pull all. the way shut, but the doors were locked, but one of them was partially open. So probably that. It's not the only explanation for how, but it does feel like the most obvious. Less obvious was the who. Who was this woman?

She didn't have any ID on her, and there were no personal effects anywhere else in the house, like a purse or anything. The only things that gave them even a small clue were a U.S. Army class ring on the woman's left hand. with the letter S etched in a blue stone and the inscription L. West written on the inside of her shirt. So the police department, of course, was trying to figure out,

was there anyone missing in the area that had been reported missing, runaway, anything else? That led them to a woman missing from Eastern State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, about four miles from the house on Richmond Road. So at that point in time, they asked for any photographs and for fingerprints of that individual from Eastern State. Those were sent to the Chief Medical Examiner's office, and the Chief Medical Examiners notified back that that was not the individual that they had had at their office.

In other words, not our victim. But the staff at Eastern State did have a lead for police. They knew an L. West. Lois West was a former patient of theirs who'd been released back in early August. And it didn't take long to confirm this. Some prints on file from a prior arrest for breaking and entering and a quick follow to get medical records proved that the woman who'd been found was Lois West. All that was left was for the Emmy to figure out what happened to her.

Later, it was learned from the autopsy that was done is that there was contusions that were all over her body on her arms, her neck area, and on her head. And these contusions were not from blunt force trauma, but of some sort of force. So by reading that, it would go along with someone forcefully holding her under the water. Ultimately, the medical examiner ruled her cause of death a drowning, And the autopsy made it clear.

It was unlikely Lois had gotten in that tub by herself. But she wouldn't, or more likely, couldn't, fight off whoever was trying to hurt her. There was no defensive marks on her hands that were noted in the autopsy. There is no, you know, broken fingernails, anything to where they could see other skin underneath of her nails that weren't hers.

Hair, intertwined in her fingers. scratches or anything. Which is a bit strange if Lois had been drowned. How could you be pushed underwater and not scratch and claw your way to the surface? Now one theory could be that she was

intoxicated in some way, but the autopsy ruled that out. Toxicology report was completed and there was nothing that was found when you would get into any kind of alcohol or anything else. She was known to take some anihistamine kind of stuff, and that was at small levels in her system. Lois had been prescribed anti-anxiety medicine, which showed up in her system, too, at low levels.

But that was it. Which leaves another theory. One investigator Rice is partial to. Well, I mean, you definitely could say that if you were being drowned in that way and you were put your head underneath of water, your first instinct is to get out of the water and not really trying to grab the individuals. So you're pressing up on the tub. You're doing whatever you can to try to be able to breathe and then you're going to fight. But you can't breathe right then. So even if you were going to fight when you're being drowned, you don't have a whole lot of time

to be able to fight because you're focusing on not breathing. And that's why I will say with a drowning like that she still could have fought back. So investigators knew who their victim was, how she got into the house, and what happened to her once she was there. But now the big question was, why? What was the motive? At first, it may have seemed simple. An investigator once told me most motives could be boiled down to sex or money.

And in this case, when Lois was found in that tub, her jeans were unzipped and pulled down just above her hips, almost as if she had been in the middle of taking them off, or maybe like someone else had tried to take them off. They could not tell us that definitely there had been any kind of sexual assault. There was some signs that there could have possibly been sexual activity in the days prior or up to that day. But when the chief medical examiner's office ultimately did a sexual assault kit, looking for foreign DNA or hairs, taking swabs, anything that could be a good.

clue, they only found one, two foreign pubic hairs. Just by having them doesn't tell us that because she could have wore someone else's clothing the day prior, just because it was two foreign pubic hairs that were in her pubic region. We don't know that. The only way they were really going to know anything was by going and talking to the people who knew Lois West, to learn who she was and what people she kept around her. And this led them to Mary Alice West, Lois' mom. Investigator Rice told us that police talked to Mary Alice at the police station

about 45 minutes from her home in Gloucester, Virginia. She lived with her mother, her father, and her son. She had a young son that her mother cared for. Mary Alice told officers that her daughter wasn't always easy to pin down. Lois was a wanderer. as was described back then by her mother. She would go places by hitchhiking. She was known to have some mental health issues.

She had attempted cutting her wrists on several times, and that is where she got committed to Eastern State. And Eastern State she had been in and out of several times, and a lot of those were voluntary admissions also, where she checked herself in. Though Mary Alice explained to detectives that Lois had been in and out of Eastern State for suicidal ideation, we can't confirm exactly what condition she was in treatment for. And we can't ask her parents directly because they've since passed away.

But clearly she was getting help with her mental health. Our reporter did talk to Lois' son, but he had no recollection of his mom, said he was raised by his grandparents who rarely talked about Lois. So everything we learned about Lois from her mom, came from the pages of the police file. An investigator Rice explained that those files reflect that Lois was fairly close to her family. She used to call her mom at least once throughout the day sometime.

From what I get from reading this case, she was just one of those free-willed people that didn't want to be just at one place. The main thing that we have is that she was a very easygoing person that could be a friend with anyone, could walk, wander with someone, and that she liked to hitchhike is one of the ways that she got around. She didn't drive, so she would hitchhike places,

which is, you know, one of those things that back then it was done quite often, but it was also known as a very dangerous thing to do. Lois may have been a wanderer, and she may have been more willing to take rides from people she didn't know. But when police talked to Mary Alice, she was pretty clear. Lois wouldn't just wonder into an abandoned house. Here's what she did know. Mary Alice confirmed Lois had been discharged from Eastern State on August 11th.

This is three days before she was found dead in the house on Richmond Road. That day, she hitchhiked home back to her house in Gloucester, Virginia. Her mother said that when she came there, she did have some bruising on her arms and shoulder area and said that that was from her boyfriend. Lois says that she was down and out of it, but all she would do is sit around and write her boyfriend's name, all on the pages everywhere. Lois's boyfriend John was a patient at Eastern State Hospital too.

At times when Lois wasn't an admitted patient, she would come back to visit him, like she did on August 13th, just two days after she'd been released. Hospital staff were able to pinpoint the date precisely because police had been called to check on the couple who were standing at the entrance fighting. According to an incident report from that day, Eastern State Hospital employees returned John to his building and escorted Lois off the premises.

Those bruises weren't the same ones, I mentioned, being found during her autopsy, by the way. Investigator Rice says that a medical examiner could differentiate between these bruises and ones that would occur days later when Lois was murdered. Either way, what police know from talking to her mother is that that night on the 13th, presumably sometime after she got escorted off the property of Eastern State, Lois called her mom asking to be rescued. There's two guys that are following me around, won't kill me. Her mom didn't take it as in, oh, my, let me get over there, because when they go to talk, the mother didn't come to pick her up.

But the mother in the report says that she had called her and said that there was two guys, two individuals. Looking back at police reports from that time, it's not clear exactly when Lois called Mary Alice or from where. And Lois wasn't that easy to keep track of either. Mary Alice had gone to pick up Lois at Eastern State that day, but then wasn't able to find her, so the two never connected. Plus, Mary Alice said that this wasn't the first time her daughter had told her that. her life was in danger. Back in May, Lois said that she got a death threat from someone named Mike, someone that she had met earlier that year.

Then what we had had is that we know by the investigators, by talking to the mother of Lois, she had stated that Lois had told her that she had gotten some death threats from an individual that lived over in Gloucester. Apparently, Lois had met this individual. at a bar. They had some kind of fling that night, went back to his residence the next morning. He was not okay with it anymore.

Wanted her to get out of the house. He tried to escort her to the door. She took out charges for assault and battery on him. Police figured out that Mike ended up turning this all back on Lois. This is how Lois ended up with the breaking and entering and grand larceny charges on her record, the ones that police had seen when they were first trying to identify her. That arrest is why Lois's prints were on file.

Mary Alice told police that Lois said Mike had threatened her. Lois told her mom that he said he'd either kill Lois or get one of his motorcycle gang members to do it. So coming out of this conversation with Mary Alice, police had more leads. Also, more questions. A lot for Mike, but plenty for John too. And so they started with him.

Police went to Eastern State since John was still a patient there. And they didn't play coy for long about why they were there. By the time they went to interview him, it was August 18th. So they didn't think that news should have reached him yet about Lois' death. They wanted to be the ones to give him that news and see how he reacted. Now, when they showed him a photo of, of Lois from the day she died, asking him to identify her. He just asked if she was dead, and then hung his head and started to cry. He seemed pretty upset, but police weren't totally

convinced. They asked him about that big fight outside the Eastern State Hospital building, and John kind of downplayed it, called it a domestic argument. He went on to say that on the evening of August 13th he had hung out with Lois and they had had consent. sexual sex. But later, things soured. She was worried that he won't go be her boyfriend no more, and they'd get in arguments, and she would bite hard on a ring that he had given her until her mouth would start to bleed. Police were able to confirm that this was the ring that Lois had been found wearing, and it was Johns. The conversation with Johns seemed like the last time the two were together.

And by talking further with staff at Eastern State, police were able to confirm John's. whereabouts during the time after his argument with Lois. He worked on property, so they were able to determine that he was there at his work the next day the whole time, the 14th, and we knew the 13th. He was inside of his building that he was in because they do a bed check and that he was there. And also, you know, he was offered a polygraph exam. He did accept to go and take one.

So that helped with the investigators also to go along with his accountability that somebody had seen him at the property and hadn't left from Eastern State. We know that she was found at least probably five miles away from Eastern State. So John was ruled out as a person of interest. As far as we know, detectives didn't ask him about Mike. Instead, they just went and found Mike themselves. By the time detectives tracked him down, they had been able to see that not only had Lois filed charges against Mike, he had filed charges against her. Mike told police that it all started when he met Lois at a place called Dawson's restaurant earlier that year. Mike said the whole relationship was off from the beginning.

They went back to his place that first night, but the next morning he was over it, asked her to leave. and he admitted to pushing her that morning, but he said that he definitely didn't hit her. The whole thing upset Lois. And Mike's statement wasn't super clear, but he indicated Lois left, but then kept coming back to his place. Now, whether that was the same day or later, we're not sure.

Mike said he again saw Lois in May, about three months before she died. And that encounter hadn't gone well either. He told police that Lois broke into his house and stole jewelry, so he took out charges against her. But he said that that was the last time he saw her, never met up with her again after.

Certainly, didn't threaten her life like Mary Alice described. Plus, he said he didn't belong to a motorcycle gang. Mike even agreed to take a polygraph too, and he was found to be telling the truth. Both that he wasn't involved in Lois' death and that he never made death threats against her. So he was ruled out after that. With those closest to Lois ruled out, the scope of suspects broadened.

Maybe Lois had just encountered the wrong person or people sometime after she was last seen, which, as it turns out, wasn't when she was kicked off Eastern State property. It was actually much later. And she was in the company of two men. After Lois was escorted off the hospital grounds, she was spotted six. several times around town, each time in somewhat of a different state. It's like this kaleidoscope image of Lois' last hours in Williamsburg. And accounts make it seem like, discharged or not, Lois wasn't in the best headspace.

Now, earlier that night, she had been using a trash bag to protect herself against the rain, and one gas station attendant said that it seemed like she was slurring her words. It's around this time that she called her mom saying that two men were threatening to kill her. After this, Lois was back at Eastern State, but the officers at the hospital intercepted her and took her to the Williamsburg bus and train station. But there weren't any more buses or trains leaving that night. Next, Lois was seen by a Texaco one worker who said that she looked cold and scared, and she bought cigarettes before taking off again. Police were able to verify that that same night, Lois also went to a motel, but she was turned away when she only had $15.

And then the final verified siting of Lois actually came from an Eastern State employee. She told police that she saw Lois walking down Richmond Road with one man on each side of her. Now, she only saw Lois from a distance and she wasn't able to give police a clear description of the men, but she did say that they were both black. And this ominous last sighting makes something stand out to detectives today. Remember those pubic hairs, the ones that? that they found on Lois during her autopsy? The ones they can't prove are connected to her murder.

Well, they can't prove that they're not either. And interestingly, investigators were sure that these hairs did belong to a black person. Both of these pieces of information refocused the investigation on finding a pair of black men. So they had to go around and actually just do boots on the ground, walking and talking. They did come across speaking with the manager of Rose's department store,

stated he had had two individuals that had got off work around 8.39 o'clock, and they were both known to walk home from work. So they followed that lead, found out who those individuals were. They had photographs of them, and they went and showed the staff member. The staff member said that definitely that was not the two that she said, was walking with. There was an age difference there. So who were those men walking with Lois? That's a question Investigator Rice is still trying to answer. But almost 40 years later, he's got old clues and new technology on his side.

One piece of evidence he finds really interesting is a hat that Lois' mom gave the original detectives. It's brown with two feathers of two different colors on it. I could show you the hat so that way if anyone knows of anyone that might have had a hat that's like that in this area, that could probably reach out to us. Mary Alice said at the time that Lois just showed up with this hat after she was discharged from the hospital on the 11. It was something she had never seen before, but Lois refused to tell her where or who it had come from. She wondered if maybe finding the hat owner might lead to someone who was connected to her daughter. And Rice is hoping the same, which is why he showed us the hat to share with our viewers.

The truth is, though, the hat may or may not be connected to Lois's murder. What feels much more concrete in his mind is the physical evidence that they collected from the scene back in 1986. It wasn't much being a vacant house and all. But as he cataloged what he had to work with, there were a few promising pieces that they still kept in storage, like the hot and cold knobs from the bath, the sexual assault evidence kit. He's already submitted those things for testing back in 2011, but the results were pretty inconclusive. Whatever DNA came back wasn't good enough to enter into any state or national databases. But he's ready to try again in 26. I'm in further discussions with our lab in reference to newer technologies that we can use towards this case at this time, and that's all I'll say on that part.

The big things are to go on the physical evidence. Physical evidence does not lie. Witnesses can change their story. Physical evidence will not lie, and it doesn't change. It's either there or it's not there, and it says one thing or the other. even if you can get it to where it's searching that database, doesn't mean that it's going to hit right now, but it could hit in a week, a month, a year, or 10 years.

Once it's running, it's running. It is a very old case, but one thing that helps you in cold cases is when time goes by, people have a change in life that might have them talk now when they wouldn't have talked 40 years ago. Whether it's a divorce, whether it's spiritual, but there's plenty of things that can make someone finally want to give that information, especially later in life. I can't say that there's a reason to believe that there's more than one person, but I have to also go by she was last seen walking with two people. So maybe only one person done it, but maybe the other person knows.

If that happens to be you or someone you know, Investigator Rice has a message. They can always call 757-254.5.5.5. 1800. That's 757-253-1800. That's for the James City County Police Department. Or they can always call 1-888-562-5887. That's the Hampton Roads Crime Line. It would mean justice. And that's the main thing. Whether a victim has someone that is in their corner fighting for them, they're at least having. have me fighting if I have the file. I believe solving this case is still doable, whether it's me or it's someone after me.

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