The Deck - Margaret Reimann (Queen of Spades, California)

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

When 73-year-old Margaret Reimann was murdered in her garage while getting ready to leave for church in 1986, everyone immediately started pointing fingers at one particular relative. And in the investigation that followed, detectives uncovered a decades-long family feud, grudges that had been festering for years, and questions about just how far someone might go when there’s money on the line.But almost four decades later, new DNA testing pointed them in a completely different direction. And now, the case is hotter than it’s ever been.If you have any information about the murder of Margaret “Myie” Reimann in November of 1986 in Camarillo, California, please speak up. You can reach Detective Gerardo Cruz directly at (805) 384 - 4726 or by emailing [e-mail]. If you’d prefer to remain anonymous, you can also call Ventura County Crime Stoppers at [phone] or visit www.venturacountycrimestoppers.org to submit a tip via text or email.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/norris-evansLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText 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 Margaret Reimann, the Queen of Spades from California. When 73-year-old Margaret Reimann was murdered in her garage while getting ready to leave for church in 1986, everyone immediately started pointing fingers at one particular relative. And in the investigation that followed, detectives uncovered a decades-long family feud, grudges that had been festering for years, and questioned. about just how far someone might go when there's money on the line. But almost four decades later, new DNA testing pointed them in a completely different direction. And now, the case is hotter than it's ever been.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. It was 5.30 p.m. on Sunday, November 2, 1986, when Pat Wise, pulled into her, her cousin Margaret's driveway for their weekly Sunday dinner. But that evening was different from the moment that she went inside Margaret's two-story ranch house. Margaret was nowhere to be found. Neither was Pat's son, Mark, who had actually just moved into the ranch house a few weeks before. Now, the 73-year-old lived on a sprawling stretch of farmland, 10 or 20 acres with other houses on it that she rented out. So Pat figured that she could have just been out somewhere on the property. But when she called

one of those renters, Wayne Hoffman. That hope started to fade. Wayne said that he hadn't seen Margaret at all that day. And Pat hadn't even noticed, but Margaret's newspapers, which she always collected in the morning, were still laying in the driveway. Plus, Margaret's dogs hadn't been let out of the house all day either. And that is when Pat began to worry. So she started calling around to see if anyone had seen or heard from Margaret. There were no cell phones at the time, so she couldn't contact her son, Mark, but she was able to get in touch with another one of her children,

30-year-old Elaine. I remember that day like a movie. My mom called me in the late afternoon and said that she hadn't heard from Margaret. She would usually go down there on Sundays and they'd read the paper. But I could tell that her voice, that she sounded stressed.

So Elaine, who lived nearby, decided to go down to the ranch to help Pat and Wayne figure out what was going on. And we walked around in the yard. We were talking to each other. And we went over to the garage door and noticed that there was a padlock on the garage door, which had never been there before. It was Wayne who noticed the padlock. Margaret's one-car garage wasn't connected to her house. It was a separate cinder block structure about 100 feet away with barn-style doors, but it had never been locked before. Margaret usually just slid a drumstick through the latch to keep the doors closed. So Wayne peeked through a small window on the side of the structure to see

if anything looked off inside. Margaret's 1965 Mustang was parked right where it always was and everything seemed normal. So with a massive farm and multiple homes to search, Wayne, Pat, and Elaine moved on. At some point, Elaine's brother Mark came home and joined the search, and from For a bit, even Elaine's then-boyfriend. And together, they looked everywhere, up to the edge of the property line for nearly five hours. But nobody saw any signs of Margaret. And with daylight, now long gone, that's when they decided it was time to call for some

professional help. Here's Ventura County Sheriff's Detective Gerardo Cruz, who is the lead investigator on Margaret's case today. So I would say around like 10, 10.30, a call for service was made to the sheriff's office to report Margaret Riemann as a missing person. At the time of the call, when the deputy showed up, there was multiple people at the scene, some family members, some non-family members. And they just reported that it was very out of the ordinary to not have heard from her or seen her. Mark Weiss, who lived in the house with her, had not seen her since the night

before at dinner time. And one of the biggest clues for Wayne was that the newspapers hadn't been picked up. I guess she was rigid in her routine. And the newspapers had not been picked up all day. So the deputy began searching himself. An officer came down and drove her on the property as much as he could with his lights. It started to get dark. And then he did some footing. And he didn't find anything strange. And he thought, well, you know, maybe she went some, you know, not everybody tells everybody everything, but we pretty much knew. The deputy didn't have the same gut feeling that Margaret's family did, though. And even after Wayne told him that in the 10 years he'd been living there,

he'd never once seen the garage door padlocked ever, the deputy just took a missing person's report, told the family to keep looking around and call him back if Margaret showed up. Then he left. And they did call him back just 30 minutes later, but not because Margaret had returned. There was something about that lock on the first. a garage door. Wayne just could not get it out of his head. So he grabbed a flashlight and went back

to the garage window to look around a little harder. He flashes it in, sees the vehicle, and then sees what he described like her hand on the floor. And that's when they realized she's in there. So they were, oh my God, oh my God, both of them running back to the house. And to the point they came in, they were both frozen. They were both like white. And I was. I leaned over to Wayne, and I don't even remember if they said we found her or something. I don't even recall that. I just knew the sinking feeling, I was frightened. I felt evil.

And I said to Wayne, I go, was she there? He just kind of shook his head, and I go, do you think she's, I knew, I mean, it's just a sense of fear came over me. And it was like I wanted them, I didn't want them back out there. I didn't know that she'd been murdered. I didn't know if, you know, she'd fallen out. They didn't say a word. And I still see it in clips, but it's like a black and white movie. And so they came in and we called 911.

When deputies came back to the ranch around 11 p.m., they forced the garage doors open and immediately saw Margaret lying on her side on the floor in a pool of blood. This was on the passenger side of her Mustang. She was pronounced dead right there at the scene. Now, Margaret was fully cool. clothed in an orange print dress, a beige coat, and stockings. Her watch and diamond earrings were untouched, as was her purse, which was still on her left arm with two church donation checks inside, as well as the keys to her Mustang.

So that, along with the cut to her neck and the blunt force injuries to her head that would be ruled her cause of death, told investigators a lot. If this was a robbery, whoever was could have just punched her and then taken her stuff. and taking her car, or pushed her even, right? But to beat her and to slice the neck open, that's personal. In other attacks that, you know, I personally investigated, the more brutal it is, the more personal it is. The more violent it is, the more personal it is,

as opposed to a random attack where it's a quick hit, get what you're trying to get, and then you leave. Aside from the stuff on her, there was really nothing else valuable enough to steal in the garage anyway. Detective said that Margaret kept it very neat and the only things inside were car things like tools and parts and the drumstick that she used to secure the latch. Now detectives did find and test a tire iron, but there was no evidence that it had been used in the murder. And nothing else inside the garage could really have been turned into a weapon. So whatever was used to kill Margaret, the murderer took with them.

And it's possible that they brought the padlock that was on the door because nobody could say where it had come from and no keys to it were ever found anywhere in or around Margaret's property. So whoever did this, they were prepared. They attacked Margaret in her garage before she even realized what was coming. And then, to delay the discovery of her body, they decided to lock her inside of the garage. There wasn't evidence that there was like a chase around the car,

her left knee had an injury to it and a scrape which means she could have fallen to one knee quickly as opposed to like running away and her clothes weren't dirtied up like she fought on the ground. There's nothing to indicate it happened anywhere else but in that specific spot, which leads you to think it happened quickly.

And this is just my opinion as investigator from what I saw, what I read, the person who attacked her was lying in wait. So it was a purposeful planned attack. This was a clue to investigators that whoever killed Margaret must have known her routine, known that it was her car in the garage, known that she was going to take it out that morning, and that she would be alone when she did. You see, Margaret lived a very regimented life.

Based on reports actually from Wayne, from Mark, from Pat, who knew her, knew that on Sundays, she would get up around 5, 5.30, get ready, and make the 6 or 6.30 mass at a local church in Camarillo. Margaret lived around 10 minutes away from her church and would always drive there in her car. But she never made it to church that morning. Margaret's family said that before ever getting in her Mustang, she would always check its tires. And they think, that's what she was doing when someone surprised her, which would explain why she was found on the passenger side of the car. Knowing that Margaret was planning to attend the 6.30 a.m. Mass, as she always did,

detectives estimated that her murder probably occurred around 6 a.m. Right when she would have been planning to leave. Now, to learn just how many people might have been privy to Margaret's routine, detectives had to talk to everybody who knew her. But in doing so, that night, everything they learned about Margaret only made her brutal murder more confusing. The original reports indicated she was a very caring person, a very giving person, devout to her religion. She went to church regularly.

She helped the community, like Mark, who needed a place to say, sure, you can come here. There was a landscaper who reported, sometimes she would just give me busy work so she could pay me, all right, just to help him out. Detectives also learned that Margaret never married or had any kids of her own. So she fostered a very close relationship with her brother, her cousins, and godchildren. They affectionately called her, my, here's Elaine again. She was around since the day I can remember. She was more of a grandmother. She's also a cousin to my mother, but she's more than that.

We spent a good deal of our childhood down on her ranch. went for Sunday drives and I fed the chickens. I was one of four. She treated us all like gold. We lacked for nothing. She was everything to us. Margaret's cousin, Trudy Hall, who was really more like a sister, reiterated the same. One word describes my cousin, Margaret Reimann.

She was fantastic. Love the Lord, love people, not a mean bone in her body. She was ever so helpful to so many people, family members, strangers, what kind heart she had. And that was one of the wonderful things about her that made her such a wonderful, gentle, giant of a person. But just because Margaret was nice to everyone, doesn't mean that everyone was nice to her back. And there was one thing in particular at the crime scene that really seemed to suggest that someone might have had it out for Margaret.

The thing is, no one noticed it at first because the simple act of opening the garage doors to get to Margaret hid the message left behind. But as part of processing the scene, those garage doors were eventually closed again. And as soon as they were, the message was clear. Handwritten, in black lettering on the inside of one of the doors, were the words, take that.

By that point in the investigation, detectives had learned from some of their interviews that there was someone who might have wanted Margaret to take what they believed she had coming to her. You see, by no fault of her own, in the years leading up to her murder, Margaret had been thrown into the middle of a bitter legal battle over her family's fortune. A tangle of lawsuits, appeals, and court skirmishes all tied to a multi-million dollar tomato field inheritance. And in digging into those disputes, one family member's name began to come up again and again, someone who was not at the crime scene that night. Barbara Giesler-Kinnelly. Barbara?

Barbara. Yeah, we automatically suspected my aunt and uncle, Barbara and Paul. That's Bill Wise, one of Pat's other children. Because Paul had mentioned something about that there was going to be Cain and Abel in our family. So Paul said that. So we all know, you know, Cain and Abel's story. So, yeah, never think it's going to happen to you. Then you get thrown to the Twilight Zone.

Barbara Giesler-Kennelie was another one of Margaret's cousins. Actually, she is Pat and Trudy's younger sister. But even though Margaret and Pat and Trudy, and even many of the other family members were tight-knit, Barbara always seemed to stand a little apart. Here's Elaine. Well, it's just that she was a very entitled, she was intelligent. And, you know, she had the brains, but just eccentric is all get up.

And you never knew which way you were going with her. But before detectives could make sense of what this meant for Margaret, they first had to understand how everyone was connected in the family tree and how the tomato field inheritance came into the picture. And it is a big tree, so click the link in our show notes were a visual that might help you follow along. Now, it makes most sense to start a generation back. In Ventura County, there was a legacy farming family, the Ryman's, whose assets and fortunes were divided between their children, namely John Ryman and Margaret Ryman Giesler.

And this is a different Margaret than our victim. Now, when John and his wife died, their estate got passed down to their son and daughter. That daughter is our victim, Margaret. Now, neither that Margaret nor her brother had any kids, and they got along with each other, so there was no drama on John's side of the family. But on Margaret Giesler's side, it was a different story. Now, according to the L.A. Times, when Margaret Giesler died in 1955, her husband was already dead, so her estate was split up between her relatives and her children.

Her oldest son, William, got the physical tomato field land, and her youngest son, Ralph, was named the trustee of the estate. And that arrangement worked for a long time. But eventually, both brothers passed away, and by 1972, a bank was acting as the trustee of the estate. But William's widow, Angela Giesler, and their three daughters were still living on the field. The oldest daughter was Pat, who's been playing a role in our story, and then her sister Trudy, who you heard from earlier, and Trudy says that her and Pat were pretty much inseparable. And then, And then along came our, shall I say, weird, 10 years later on, a sister, Barbara. Barbara was the last.

And I think when I say weird, I don't think I have to say anything more, do I? But Trudy did say more. She said that Barbara had one very specific motivator in life, money. That is the word. That is her God. And too bad, and I'm sorry, but there are a lot of people that have that same attitude. And, well, it's the wrong thing. But, you know, she was so weird, and we didn't know what was going on.

And you know what? The thing is, or the fact of the matter, we really didn't care. because if a relative wants to be that way, we have no control over that, and all we can say is love and peace. So that's what we've tried to do, and we really feel sorry for her because she had such a negative attitude for no reason at all. But it must go back to maybe family history because some of the aunts and uncles, they were always fighting or something like that. And sometimes it was overland, and I don't know what it was, because we weren't that knowledgeable about what was going in the other aunts and uncles' life. You know what I'm saying?

So when William died, Angela, Pat, Trudy, and Barbara were living on the 22-5-acre tomato field. And according to the L.A. Times, the bank, acting as the trustee of their estate, tried to sell it for roughly $200,000, which would have been more than $1.2 million today. But this is not what Angela and William's three, now adult daughters, want it. So they fought back, accusing the bank of shutting them out and mishandling what their father had left behind. So Barbara's attorney-husband, Paul Kennerley, stepped in in 1977 and was like, look, I'll handle the whole ordeal with the bank free of charge on this one condition. Me, and then later Barbara, will be named trustees of the estate. We weren't surprised, and Pat and I knew what Barbara and Paul, especially what they were like.

And Barbara was always the one, if you will, leading her husband by the ring in his nose, all right? Barbara thought she was the attorney and could do everything that she wanted to do. Pat and Trudy wanted the land to stay in the family, so they agreed. to the conditions, and the rift between them and Barbara grew deeper because of it, but things mainly just bubbled beneath the surface, at least until 1983 when everything came crashing down. That is when the sister's mom, Angela, died. And if they were on bad terms before, this was the proverbial nail in the coffin, because now came the time to divide up Angela's estate. And as a part of that process, the trustees, Barbara and Paul, were required by the court to turn in a full accounting of how they had been managing it since 1977.

And in doing that, they included a claim that they were owed over $319,000 for their trustee management services, even though Paul had initially promised to handle everything for free. And on top of all of that, there was the issue of the funeral. I'm sure you would like not to hear some family member doing this to their own family member. When my mom passed away at the funeral, her funeral, I came out from Texas with my husband. We flew out. And Barbara was there with her husband. And we sat there. And it was civil.

We had to be. And later on, Barbara and her husband, Paul Kennerly, wanted to charge us, Pat and I, $500 for their attending my mother's funeral. Doesn't that tell you what was going on? Unthinkable. Unthinkable, right? Well, it does happen. that's when we said and went to court we do not want Paul and Barbara Kennelly anymore as guardians or trustees to my mother and we did go to court over that and had him I got him out of there and I still have all of those papers from the courts in Ventura and the judges and that's when Margaret Reiman, my, became the trustee.

And we knew that my, it would be very fair in taking care of the affairs of that land. Margaret was the perfect person to handle the estate. She was a distant cousin with experience managing property and the family trusted her. She was responsible, fair, and thorough. Plus, Margaret had no reason to be weird about money because she came from the same lineage and was well off in her own right, having the ranch with its multiple homes that she would lease out to renters. And even with all she had, she still lived a simple life. She didn't flaunt anything, and she could have as she wanted to.

She was like a person that only had two dresses, and she wore them alternating times. The L.A. Times reported that it was February 6, 1986, when Margaret. Ryman officially became the new trustee. But Margaret would never get the chance to execute Angela's will because Paul and Barbara relentlessly contested it, apparently believing that they were entitled to more than what was designated for them. They filed dozens and dozens of motions against Margaret to stop the distribution of Angela's assets, the last of which came in September of 1986. But Margaret wouldn't even get the chance to respond that. time. What happened was Margaret, my, was murdered. So she was only the trustee for just a few months.

And guess what people were talking about? The idea that maybe Paul and Barbara had something to do with her murder because they were on such unfriendly terms. Do you see how it gets out of hand? You can, right? Detectives could, too. And the story that they'd pieced together from interviews with family and friends revealed a strong motive for murder that pointed straight to Barbara and Paul Kennerly. The pair had easy access, too, because Barbara and Paul lived in a mobile home together, and one day, out of nowhere, they just decided to up and move the home onto the tomato field property

where Pat and her children had been living. And this was only about a mile away from Margaret's place. Here's Detective Cruz again. So you can imagine how uncomfortable that must have been. It appears one day they just moved a trailer back there and moved in there and didn't tell anybody. Our reporter Nicole Kagan asked Pat's son Bill about this. How often did you see them? Like, would you have meals together or was just separate lives?

No, no, no. It was all fenced off. They had a Doberman. You know, they had plans. that grew up through the chain link that were real sharp, and they wanted to make it as secure as they could. They were real quiet and apprehensive to talk to. They didn't want to talk to your divulge information.

They were always real, like standoffish or paranoid. So you didn't, even though they were living on the property, you really didn't see them that much. No, if I did, I'd flip them off and say, you better get a good lawyer. they always had a, like, demonized, happy looks on their face when they'd stare at us. So, now that you have the whole history, it's not so difficult to read, take that as some sort of message to Margaret that she messed with the wrong relatives.

But even if Barbara or Paul were behind its writing, Detective Cruz told our reporter Nicole that he thinks that writing might not be connected to the murder. It turned out based on interviews that that had been written a long time prior, it was just never erased. It had nothing to do with the murder. Multiple people accounted for that. I can't remember the exact reason why, but I know they were able to say, okay, that's not,

that wasn't written by the killer. Wow. Because this totally seems like a threat. 100%. 100%. They were confident. And from what I read, I feel like, okay, that was to proven it's not associated to the crime.

Bill Wise doesn't agree, though. He seemed to believe that that note had been written that Sunday morning that Margaret was murdered because he didn't remember ever seeing it before then. But regardless of when this note was written, the family was feeling a certain way towards Barbara and Paul after Margaret's death. And detectives still hadn't heard their side of the story. So on November 11th, just over a week after the murder, they paid a visit to the Henry mobile home. But what Barbara told them, only deep in the mystery.

When detectives visited Barbara, she told them that she hadn't seen Margaret since 1983, three years before the murder, even though they lived just up the freeway from each other. So detectives asked to speak to Paul. But Barbara's said that he wasn't home and he would have to call them back later. And he did. The next day, he said that on the advice of his attorneys, he and Barbara would no longer speak to investigators and wouldn't take any polygraph tests. And that was the last anyone from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office heard from Barbara and Paul Kennerly. And not for a lack of trying. Here's Detective Cruz again. The investigators are like, okay, give us your attorney's number. We'll talk to your attorney. Your

attorney can be present, they made every effort to accommodate the Kennerleys to provide a statement. They never cooperated, period. Everyone else in the family cooperated. Everyone took polygraphs. Everyone minus the Kennerlees cooperated with the investigation. And what does that tell you, looking back? Well, again, looking for motive, who had most to gain, who was trying to gain, who would have gained from a murder of Ms. Riemann? It pointed to the Kennelies.

But because the Kennerleys invoked their right to an attorney, investigators couldn't interview them. They couldn't ask them where they were the night of the murder, whether they had been to the ranch, how they saw the family disputes, or even whether they might have had the key to a certain padlock. According to Detective Cruz, they never searched the Kennerley mobile home. Though from the records today, there's nothing to show that investigators actually tried to get a search warrant to do so.

Detective Cruz said that it could have been that there wasn't enough evidence to justify one, but today he definitely would have at least tried to search that property. Now, neither of the Kennerleys had any sort of criminal history that Detective Cruz could find record of. But for those who knew Margaret and her family, it didn't matter. They'd already made up their minds. People even began to talk about the possibility that the Kennerleys had hired a hitman. And on December 8th, just over a month after Margaret said, death, someone wrote an anonymous letter to Barbara that read, quote,

Barbara, I didn't know that you could be so dirty as to have a nice person like Miss Reimann murdered for money. You will be punished. A lot of people know how you were and know about you, end quote. Now this letter only got into the case file because whoever wrote it wrote down the wrong address for Barbara, and when the people who did live at the address where it was delivered opened it, they realized that they needed to share it with law enforcement. No one ever figured out who the author was, but the message was clear. In the court of public opinion, Barbara and Paul Cannerley had already been convicted, but only in the court of public opinion, because detectives didn't have enough to take them into a real court of law. And in their time

investigating no other suspects had surfaced. So with no other obvious direction to go in, the case stalled. Now, Tips did continue to come in implicating the two suspects they already had and a hired hitman that no one could name, but no one offered any real proof that they could work with. It was all just hearsay, like this anonymous letter from May of 1988 addressed to the DA's office. Detective Cruz read it out for our reporter Nicole. It's a nine-by-six lined paper with handwritten words, quote, they hired a hitman to kill Margaret Riemann if you could get him to come forward your case is solved. Ask Barbara Gisler-Kennelie, end quote.

Does it seem like investigators are taking it seriously? Do they like start looking with fresh eyes into... There's nothing documented, like from a detective saying, I received this, this is a good clue. I would imagine that for them, it affirmed what they were thinking in 86 when they have the Kennerleys being completely uncooperative who have either something to gain or something to lose from either Margaret's death or execution of the trust.

Detective Cruz said that there was an askout for this letter to be dusted for prints, but it doesn't look like that ever actually happened. And it's after this letter in 1988 that the case officially went cold. Cruz says that between then and 2022, when he started looking into Margaret's murder, no significant tips or leads came in at all. And the only reason he started looking into it was because he thought that this case sounded kind of similar to another cold case that he was working from 1989, about 15 to 20 minutes away from where Margaret lived in Camarillo,

the murder of 90-year-old Florence Hackney. Florence was found dead in her own living room from manual strangulation. And in that specific case, it appeared to be a burglary of some kind, forced entry, but nothing was taken in that one either. And she was sexually assaulted with no motive. She didn't come from money. She didn't have major assets. She was a grandmother, her family all lived within the same community.

It appeared to be a random act, but yet brutal. So that's what led me down this path of, okay, who else? What other elderly, brutal murder, unsolved murders in Ventura County? According to Detective Cruz, though Florence was living on her own, her kids lived nearby and checked in on her constantly. So even though it could have been pure coincidence, it's more likely that whoever killed her could have known when there would be a gap in those visits.

Just like whoever killed Margaret must have known when she would be alone in her garage. And once Detective Cruz started reading more about Margaret's case, he wasn't able to put it down. I mean, it seemed to him like there were things that could be done, especially given that the Ventura County Sheriff's Office had its very own forensic scientist assigned exclusively to cold cases. Her name was Kristen Canco.

So in 2024, Cruz reached out to her with the case file, and she left no stone unturned. I read every single page. I even read all the reports that are not related to DNA. I read every service request that was ever submitted. I look at the property list. I literally dig through everything. What Kristen and Detective Cruz found was that back in 1986, investigators took fingernail clippings from Margaret's hand to see if there was any blood or skin tissue under them. Now, in 2005, those were sent off for testing, but with technology available then, they couldn't find anything that was foreign to the victim.

So we wanted to go and revisit some old DNA extracts to see if we could get better foreign profiles. So then some things take long, like Kristen's a one-man army with myself, one, two, four, five, six, seven, I'd say seven investigators who were requesting. from her. So she has a lot on her plate. She spins a lot of plates at the same time and keeps them all from trying to crash down. So you just wait in line. It was worth the weight, though. In September 2024, Kristen was able to develop a DNA profile from the material under the fingernails. There wasn't enough information for an upload to Codas, but there was enough for a one-to-one comparison. And because Kristen didn't use the whole fingernail sample up in her testing,

there was enough left to send it to a private lab in December of 2024 to do YSTR testing. And that focus is specifically on the Y chromosomes. From that, Cruz was able to get a male profile suitable for comparison with anyone along the killer's paternal line. Detective Cruz told Nicole he is confident that that profile is who police have been searching for all these years. The evidence we have is great. I believe that male profile is the killer. Whoever's underneath that fingernail, that's the killer. Why in your head is that male profile the killer?

She wasn't in an intimate relationship with anybody. There's no other reason for a single male profile to be underneath her fingernails. When it came to getting male samples for comparison, Detective Cruz started out with Paul Kennerly. Unfortunately, he had died in 2015. But his DNA was on file at the medical examiner's office, available approximately. upon presentation of a court order. But the problem was, the court order required the sample to be returned intact, which wouldn't be possible if DNA analysis was done.

So Detective Cruz set out to find any male relatives of Paul. And through open source databases, he discovered three potential living nephews. So on April 8, 2025, he went door knocking. The first canterly nephew door that he knocked on confirmed that Paul was his uncle. But when Detective Cruz explained the details of the case and asked for a DNA sample, the man explained that he'd actually been adopted into the family. So that was a strikeout. On to the next nephew.

And we'll call him Andrew. It was April 30th when Detective Cruz knocked on his door. He was young, very cooperative, very super, very super. cool, like, hey, no, if we can help catch a killer, even if it is my uncle, they're willing to help, they volunteered the sample, and we compared the YSTR profile from the sample to Paul's nephew, and it completely excluded them. So it's no one within Paul's family, male family line underneath the finger down. Would you still consider them persons of interest? Yes. What makes it hard is I can't exclude them. I, I, I,

I find success in being able to exclude people, you know, being able to say, hey, you're not involved and I can prove it for peace of mind, for reputation, and in this scenario, had they cooperated, maybe we could have proven their innocence, maybe we could have proven they were not involved at all and relieved the family of this infighting and bitterness. And to this day, like, what ifs and what was their actual, if any, involved in this? That's the frustrating part. And when I say that I do find them as persons of interest, it's because of their lack of cooperation, not because I have any physical evidence to say they were there or they committed this murder. But I can't give a reason as to why not cooperate unless you're involved,

whether it was hiring a hitman or not. If it's not any of the Kennerleys and not a hitman, who are the other suspects? None. None. There's no one who we could establish a motive, someone who would benefit from her death. There is no one. Wayne Hoffman had lived there for 10 years. By our accounts, he was a good guy, cooperated fully with the investigation,

had nothing to gain from it. Mark Weiss, a relative, had been there six weeks. Within that six week, he took like a two-week vacation with his brother to Texas. There's no, nothing to Kate, there was conflict. Original investigators did get a list of the people who worked on the Ryman Ranch, but none of their timelines seemed to line up with the timeline of the murder. The first ranch hand arrived around 8, 8.30 in the morning to feed the horses, when Margaret would have already been dead for two hours.

There's also no discernible motive for any of them. Margaret was their employer, and a generous one at that. But as is the case with the Kennerle's, Detective Cruz wants to be able to rule the ranch hands out definitively. Do you have that on your list, like, to contact those people? Yeah, so after I got the results back from the YSTR testing, it's like going back to step one, right? Who did this? Who can we test? What can we test?

And starting over. And if they're not alive, hopefully their next generation can help us and give us a sample where we can do YSTR testing. Detective Cruz is doing this work as we speak. Before Paul's nephew, Andrew, volunteered his sample, no one had ever been swabbed in this case. So Detective Cruz has been going back to everyone individually. As of this recording, he has swabbed all of the living male family and tenants who

were at Margaret's Ranch when her body was discovered. Her distant cousin, Mark, who was living with her, is no longer alive. but Cruz is hoping that his brother Bill's sample will be able to rule out all males in the Wise family line. He is waiting on grant funding to get all of those swabs to the lab. And there are other neighbors and ranch hands that he still wants to test to be able to cross them off the list too. But even if he gets negative results on all of those fronts,

there's also the DNA comparison that he wants to do with the Florence Hackney case to check if it really could be connected to Margaret's. See, though Florence is, his case is still unsolved. Detective Cruz thinks that he may have identified the murderer's profile from some male saliva found on her breast. But unfortunately, there's not enough of it to, like, upload to a CODIS.

There's enough for a one-to-one comparison. Cruz put out a service request to compare the samples from Margaret and Florence's crime scenes after our interview with him in September of this year. And he's currently awaiting results. Something tells me we know it's not, but I don't know why. It could just be me hoping it's not, because then I got a serial killer. Wow. Is there anything about that, though, that could bring you closer to a solve, potentially?

Like, if you do... Not really, because there's not enough DNA to compare on a national database yet. So I would literally have to go to each serial killer, get their profile from whatever investigation. We're like, hey, can I have that so I can compare? Can I have that? It'd be literally one to one. And we don't really have the resources to commit that much time. Even if he strikes out with that comparison too, there is still yet another theory.

See, the land that Margaret's ranch was on. It was prime real estate. And according to Margaret's family, in the time leading up to her death, developers had been making offers on it. Here's Elaine again. People wanted to build a road through the backside of her ranch to go up the hill where all big houses were built and all something about the rights. And she didn't like change. She wanted to stay where her brother had been, where her parents, where she was raised. She wouldn't have known how to live in a little apartment or a palace somewhere else.

That's all she'd known. She wasn't selling. So she was in the way, and she was only 73, and you'd expect, you know, you never know how long people are going to be around. And they wanted to develop. It was worth billions, you know. So the way I look at it, big business, you know, it seems like it was, to me, professionally done, like by somebody hired. And they probably don't live around here, and they probably went away and never looked back. When she died, Margaret left most of her property to the church.

And today her ranch house is still standing, as is the garage where she lived out her final moments. But the surrounding land, that is now a gated residential enclave of multi-million dollar homes surrounding a golf course, all of which was developed after her death. The only problem with this land developer theory is this has the potential to open a whole new can of worms. Going after a corporation is a different beast than going after an individual person. And so before it gets to that point, Detective Cruz wants to be sure that he has ruled out every other option. Like Barbara, she's still alive, now 86 years old and living in a rural area of Southern California. And Cruz wants to pay her a visit, just to see if she's finally ready to talk. There's been no real communication between her and detectives'

since that first door knock back in 1986. I mean, investigators over the years tried to contact her at different court hearings during the civil litigation with the inheritance that did continue after Margaret's death, but Barbara kept invoking her right to an attorney just as she did in 1986. And speaking of the inheritance, the legal battle between Trudy and Pat and Barbara

only got worse after Margaret's death. A big question for me and all of this was, what was gained? by getting Margaret out of the way. It's not like Paul and Barbara would become the executors of the will. So was this just an F-U if they did it? Did they actually have a motive? And the answer is yes.

Margaret cared for Barbara about as much as Pat and Trudy. So when she was deciding who got what, Barbara didn't think that she was getting her fair share. That's what all the legal battling was before Margaret died. So it's very possible that her and her husband believed that with Margaret out of the way, whoever took over as the trustee, even if it was a third-party bank or something, maybe they would split everything up evenly among the three sisters, which is what Barbara wanted. But after Margaret died, Pat and Trudy thought harder to make sure that that didn't happen.

They battled in court over their mom's will for 14 years. And in the end, See, what had happened over time is they were all at each other's throats for years, right? Well, what happened is everybody got old, and they went, oh, hell, we got to settle this crap. We'll never get our money if we keep fighting. But when this started, it was $450,000 farm, and when it ended, it was $6.3 million. So the longer he held this out, he was making us money and him money. while they were keeping us in misery.

So Barbara did get what she wanted. A solution was finally reached in 1997 that the estate would be divided evenly between the three sisters, if any at all was left after paying off 14 years of legal fees. One thing Barbara couldn't contest, though, was Margaret's will.

When she died, Margaret left $100,000 each to Pat and Trudy, as for Barbara. Margaret left Barbara $1 in the will so she couldn't contest the will. See, you can contest a will if you're left zero, but if you're left a dollar, you cannot contest a will,

so that's what Barbara inherited. Our reporter Nicole tried calling and texting, even sending letters to Barbara's address. But as of this recording, we haven't heard anything back, which the wise family says is not surprising. Barbara has never been charged with anything in connection with Margaret's death. As Detective Cruz has explained, the point is to rule out potential suspects where he can. Now, we know Barbara's DNA won't match the male DNA under Margaret's fingernails.

There are other items in evidence, other things that the person who killed Margaret might have touched that day. The garage doors, the padlock, the drumstick. In initial rounds of testing, they yielded low. amounts of DNA, but Kristen, the forensic scientist at the Sheriff's Department, hasn't given up. We're looking for an improved collection method, and there are some private laboratories that use proprietary, like buffers to help them get a better collection of DNA off of surfaces. So we're hoping to outsource those to have a method like that. Nicole also asked Kristen about the anonymous letters sent to Barbara Kennerly and to the DA's office

in the 80s. yeah so your interview has caused me some work because the letters came up and I also had never heard about them so Cruz did call me this week and I think those could be interesting I do question who wrote them and like what the relation would be to the crime and how would DNA be relevant

like I don't know that the suspect would have written them So even if they do yield a profile, I don't know where it could bring us in the end. Like, that wouldn't be a code as eligible profile. So that gets tricky. Like, I think it's a good viable source of DNA. Somebody could look like an envelope or I even told them back in the 80s, you had to look at the stamp. There's definitely, it could be DNA on these items. How relevant is it or how far can we get with that DNA?

I don't know. So I think it's useful and really informative. but I don't know what we're going to be able to do with it. Even if this DNA doesn't necessarily connect to the killer, it could lead back to someone with information and give Detective Cruz the break that he's been working towards for the sake of the family Margaret left behind, family like Bill.

I think about her every day, still. What do you think? What do you think about when you think about her? I just, well, I wish that they would be able to, it would come to justice, whoever did this. As I know, if somebody's had 39 years of freedom, I want that to come to an end. But, you know, that doesn't bring her back,

but at least that gives you a little peace of mind and a little bit of, you know, faith in people in the law system. In Detective Cruz's eyes, that faith is not misplaced. Witnesses may be getting old, and evidence may be degrading. But when it comes to cold cases, Detective Cruz has seen far worse. The Hackney case, I think, has come to a complete dead end.

Unless someone is willing to provide us a one-to-one sample, there is no more evidence to test, there is nothing left that was taken as evidence. This one still has legs. This one still has testing. This one still has people who need to be contacted. This is still workable. Here's our reporter Nicole talking to Elaine again.

Regardless of if you knew who did it, if you didn't know them, whoever it turns out to be who did this, what would it mean to you to just have the closure after 39 years, to not have to wonder anymore? You know, I mean, that would bring me some peace because justice, she deserves justice. She deserved more than this. If you have any information about the murder of Margaret Mai Ryman in November of 1986 in Camero, California, please speak up.

You can reach Detective Cruz directly at 805-3844726 or by emailing cold case at ventura.org. And if you prefer to remain anonymous, you can also call the Ventura County Crime Stoppers at 800-22-8477 or visit you. Visit Ventura County Crime Stoppers.org to submit a tip by text or email. The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit the deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.