The Deck - Rachel Hurley (9 of Hearts, Florida)

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Our card this week is Rachel Hurley, the 9 of Hearts from Florida. Rachel Hurley, a whip-smart eighth grader on the verge of young-adulthood, spent the afternoon of St. Patrick’s Day 1990 out on a boat with friends. She was last seen headed down the beach on her way to meet her mother at a pick-up spot ... but she never made it. That evening, following a frantic search, her body was found in a nearby wooded area. The specter of the 14-year-old’s inexplicable murder has lingered over the coastal South Florida beach town of Jupiter for more than three decades. If you were near Jupiter Inlet or Carlin Park on March 17th, 1990, and have any infomration on the murder of Rachel Hurley, call Detective William Springer at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office at 561-688-4013. 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

Our card this week is Rachel Hurley, the 9 of Hearts from Florida. On St. Patrick's Day 1990 in the picturesque beach town of Jupiter, 14-year-old Rachel joined a group of friends for an afternoon of boating. After the teens disembarked a few hours later, Rachel was supposed to meet her mom at their pickup point, but she never made it. That night, the middle schoolers' body was found in some woods nearby. For three decades, Rachel's murder has haunted this idyllic south Florida paradise. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was just after 3pm on March 17, 1990. An Andrea Hurley was starting to get antsy.

Her daughter, Rachel, a fiercely independent 14-year-old, was supposed to meet her near Carlin Park after spending the day outboding with friends off Jupiter inlet. It was St. Patrick's Day, and despite so-so weather, families and groups on the other side of the dense underbrush dotted the white sand beaches, enjoying a warm, but gusty Saturday afternoon. Andrea scanned the area and called out for her daughter, but there was no sign of her. Rachel's mom was immediately worried, considering they had planned that afternoon to go door knocking and sell tickets for a pancake breakfast to benefit the middle school or softball program.

And Rachel would never blow off her teammates. Andrea figures she should give her daughter a few more minutes before going full-blown panic mode. After all, she was a teenager, out with her friends, so maybe wires got crossed and she just got another right home. But Andrea's uneasiness only intensified when she caught up with Rachel's two friends, Erin and Maddie, who she knew her daughter had been with that day after a sleep over the previous night.

Andrea asked the girls if Rachel was with them, but they said no. They said they'd last seen her about a half hour ago when she left the group to go get picked up at Carlin Park. Andrea returned to her family's Jupiter home to see whether Rachel just blanked out and got home some other way, but she wasn't there either. After an hour of searching and trying to backtrack Rachel's movements, Andrea called the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. In pretty much no time at all, a coordinated search effort was underway. For the next few hours, officers from both the Sheriff's Office and the Jupiter Police Department canvassed the beach as well as the nearby parks. They also looked in stretches of wooded areas and the parking lot.

Between the dozens of officers scouring the area on foot, eight mounted deputies, three canine units, two boats and a helicopter, more than 100 law enforcement officials comprised the search party to find Rachel. And that didn't even include family, friends, and other volunteers who joined. By sunset, the search party was still navigating the beach and the thick shrubbery that ran parallel to the shoreline. They were losing light and Andrea and the rest of Rachel's family were sick with worry. All they could do was hope that she was somewhere safe and this whole thing was some kind of misunderstanding.

But finally, around 8 p.m., one of the volunteers searching the wooded area signaled that he'd found something. On the ground, lying among the shrubbery was Rachel and it was worse than anyone could have imagined. She was naked from the waist down, covered in scrapes, and there was no indication she was still alive. After calling out and while he waited for deputies to arrive at his location, the man, whose

own daughter had been friends with Rachel, took his jacket and did his best to cover the 14-year-old. He paced anxiously and smoked cigarette after cigarette until authorities and her parents arrived and confirmed their worst possible fear. This was their daughter, their Rachel, their eighth grader who was the undisputed leader of her friend group, their bride-eyed girl who was about to start high school and who decided that she wanted to be a fighter pilot after seeing the movie Top Gun. Devastated and broken doesn't even begin to explain how they felt. Investigators cordoned off the area and began the difficult process of shuffling and bushwhacking through shrubbery and terrain in search of possible evidence.

This is a popular beach and in the wooded area there were obvious homeless camps. So as Palm Beach County deputies scoured the scene you can imagine how difficult it must have been to differentiate between random litter like beer cans, miscellaneous trash wrappers, and actual evidence, clues. But they did find some, like a hairbrush nearby, that looked like it might belong to a teenage girl, and the hair in the brush appeared to match the color of Rachel's. They also found loads of spent cigarette butts that were littered in the area near where Rachel was found.

But they soon learned when they talked to the man who had found her that this wasn't as promising a lead as they had hoped. Here's Palm Beach County Sheriff's Detective William Springer, who's assigned to the agency's cold case unit and is the lead on Rachel's case. And of course, when they, when we first got to cigarette butts, we thought, boy, this looks good. But then when he said, we asked him, did you smoke there? Oh, yeah. So, and I understood, I was a smoker too. I'd probably been smoking right away along with him, yeah. Because I mean, that's, that's traumatic for him.

You got to realize when you find somebody and you're not used to dealing with with Ballon crimes and same dead people when you find a 14 year old girl deceased in the woods that you've been looking for That's very traumatic But you know like said he did but a normal father would do he covered her body up with his jacket He covered her body up with his jacket. Police sort of shrugged and decided to collect the cigarette butts anyway, just in case. Again, this was 1990, so DNA was the hot new thing. And back then, deputies knew that stuff like cigarette butts would be loaded with DNA and could be the key to solving a case.

Nearby, they also found a t-shirt bathing suit and gym shorts that Rachel's friends said she'd been wearing earlier that day. It was obvious just by looking at the condition of the clothes and the wounds on her body that there was a struggle before she died. I mean, this young girl fought for her life. But there was one more item in particular which deputies found inside a burn barrel that stopped them in their tracks. A bloody shirt.

The burn barrel with the blood stain shirt, was located in the same immediate area where Rachel's body was found. We're talking like 200 feet away. The shirt was collected, bagged as evidence, and sent to a lab for testing. Now, it wasn't immediately clear to investigators exactly whose blood was on the t-shirt, only that it likely wasn't Rachel's considering there wasn't a significant amount of blood at the crime scene to begin with, which made sense considering she died as a result of asphyxiation. As if the situation couldn't be any more devastating, the location

where Rachel's body and all of this evidence was recovered wasn't this super secluded area. It was near Carlin Park, a mere stone's throw from the general parking area where she was supposed to meet her mom. On the opposite side of the wooded area were some beachgoers who lounged and swam. That night, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, which was initially working alongside the Jupiter Police Department, took lead on the case. The following day, deputies started interviewing anyone who could help them piece together Rachel's last movements. The usual picturesque beach scape was now crawling with cops and news crews, all of whom were angling to talk to the same people. That included Rachel's friends, Erin and Maddie, and at least two teenage boys who were all together on the boat the day of her murder. Each of Rachel's friends who were on the boat with her

that day cooperated with the investigation and provided DNA samples that would help eliminate them as suspects. The girls in the group told deputies that unbeknownst to their parents, they made plans to meet the boys at a dock near Dubois Park the next morning, which is about a mile from Carlin Park,

and they were basically gonna all spend the day together on the boat. In a 2019 podcast produced by the Sheriff's Department called The Lead, they recount Aaron saying, quote, Rachel was her usual self, bossing us all around and being the center of attention. I remember her falling off the hydro slide at one point and the boys kept the boat going pretending they didn't see her fall. She was so mad when we finally circled back to her, and we all, including Rachel, laughed and laughed. We had a blast." The girls told deputies that they had docked the boat sometime around 2.45, which would have given Rachel like 15 minutes before she had to go meet her mom. As they disembarked,

Erin and Maddie wanted to make a stop at a nearby wrecked area restroom to freshen up, but they said that Rachel was nervous about getting to the pickup spot on time. She knew that her mom wanted to start selling their softball tickets right away and she didn't want to be late. So Rachel said bye, gave her signature hair flip, and took off running down the beach toward Karlin Park. Arlen Parks. Detective Springer told us he's not sure what took Rachel into the woods that day. There are only a few possibilities.

We know she got off the boat. We know she ran down the beach. We don't know if she went through the woods on her own or somebody took her through the woods. But if you think about it, I mean, it's broad daylight, so she probably went through that shortcut through the path. Maybe she knew it was there, because they were there all the time. So if she went through there, then somebody just grabbed her, saw the opportunity, and grabbed her. It's very possible that whoever did it had been sitting out on that beach for weekends at a time, just them a prime opportunity.

According to one and injustice article written by Jen Baxter, that Sunday investigators continued talking to friends and other witnesses who were in the area the day Rachel was killed. One teen told deputies that he saw an unknown man exiting the wooded area where her body was later found. According to Jen's write-up, the teen also told detectives at the time that the man with dark blonde hair appeared to be in his 30s had a thin build look like he weighed maybe around 150 pounds. He was shirtless in wearing jeans and construction boots.

What especially stood out the teen told authorities was the apparent scratch marks on the man's chest. But this might not be as suspicious as it sounds. Detective Springer told our reporting team that the wooded areas near the beach drew a lot of transient people who often congregated in the area and would set up camp. So maybe this guy had nothing to do with Rachel's murder, though it's possible he saw something. And speaking of seeing something, with more canvassing, came more hope that police might be able to see for themselves exactly what happened that day, because there were a bunch of parents at a nearby park watching a baseball game.

And you know parents in the 90s, there were definitely camcorders out and at the ready. And maybe if investigators were lucky, those recordings could capture a glimpse of what happened to Rachel. Authorities asked, begged even for anyone who was recording the game to share any of their footage with the department, which they did. But the footage wasn't particularly helpful and failed to advance the case for detectives. But at least one person who was in the area that day told cops that they saw someone who matched the description of the scratched up shirtless man. But the info was pretty vague and didn't really give authorities anyone to narrow in on. Rachel's autopsy was performed soon after,

and during the autopsy, the medical examiner determined that the 14-year-old had been sexually assaulted and suffocated. Detective Springer declined to say what led the ME to determine she'd been assaulted, other than there were physical evidence that backed it up. Now while the autopsy was being done, all the other evidence that was collected was being processed by a lab for foreign DNA. Things like strands of hair on her body that didn't look like hers, her clothes, even those spent cigarette butts.

While they were waiting for results to come back, the town of Jupiter was all consumed by this case. The service held for Rachel collectively drew at least 3,000 mourners who came to pay their respects. And the resources provided by law enforcement matched this. At least five detectives had been assigned to the case. The sheriff even oversaw the creation of a task force, responsible for basically working the case full time.

In less than a month, the task force fielded more than 1,000 calls from an increasingly frantic and concerned public trying to provide tips and information. That in and of itself spoke volumes. The people of Jupiter were desperate to assign blame in this case, a case that had unarguably upended a community's collective sense of security. It wasn't much, but that early tip about a shirtless man nervously exiting the wooded

area that afternoon Rachel was sexually assaulted and murdered took on a life of its own. Like literally, this is how scared they were. According to reporting in the Palm Beach Post newspaper, a little over two weeks after Rachel's murder, the town council approved a $62,000 spend to hire additional police officers just to arrest transient people and patrol the beach for the remainder of the fiscal year.

The town's mayor at the time, Mary Hinton, basically rubber-stamped, her approval of the measure, the story said, because, quote, she blames transians for many of the town's burglaries, including one to her residence last year in which $6,000 worth of property was stolen. End quote. Jupiter police chief Richard Westgate

said in the same story, quote, they roam the town and stay in the wooded areas at night. Much of their pay goes to alcoholic beverages. It's a slim existence." According to more reporting from the Palm Beach Post, as detectives continued to return to the scene where Rachel was assaulted and murdered, people experiencing homelessness would simply hold up the business card of a detective whenever they saw a cop approaching them in order to signal that they had already been questioned.

Now mind you, this man who was described by witnesses wasn't named a suspect. They didn't even know who he was. If both witnesses were even describing the same person, there were just no arrests and everyone was freaking out. And so as a result, this idea that they would just scoop up and arrest every transient person as a way to solve their problem in my mind was a bandaid and a flimsy dirty bandaid at that. It didn't get to the heart of the issue.

It wasn't designed to help any of these people, and this wasn't totally lost on the people living there. A concerned resident told the newspaper back then, quote, it seems like people are letting their emotions get carried away. On the other hand, what happened to Rachel was absolutely awful, so the strong emotional response here made sense to a lot of people. But it was exactly that, an emotional response. There wasn't any sort of credible evidence to support the actions by local elected officials. At the same time, investigators were working tips related to the homeless encampments.

They were also continuing to interview everyone in Rachel's orbit. And there's one name kept popping up again and again. Billy Fagan. When question 17 year old Billy was like, yeah, sure, I knew Rachel. And he and his attorney even told the media that Billy and Rachel were quote unquote beach friends. But it's not like the two were best friends or anything like that. But for someone who apparently didn't know Rachel particularly well, Billy was pretty

front and center. I mean, he was everywhere. Wherever there was a public facing event related to the murder, whether it was volunteer led groups who combed through the beach in wooded areas for possible clues, or even Rachel's own services. There was Billy. He gave interviews to TV News Crews, and the Palm Beach Post reported Billy boasted to a past girlfriend that he had been the one to uncover Rachel's discarded clothing,

which he claimed was buried in the ground. But that wasn't true though. Authorities were extremely interested in sitting down with Billy, and for all the attention Billy was calling upon himself, they were hopeful that he was interested in cooperating. But his lawyer was not about to let that happen. So they hit a wall with Billy. Though that didn't mean they couldn't talk to everyone who knew Billy. And that would pay off in a huge way. As the murder investigation entered its second

month, authorities dropped an absolute bombshell. The state's attorney's office announced that it was charging Billy, the high school sophomore, as an adult, with 16 counts of loot assault, four counts of sexual battery, four counts of sexual battery, two counts of battery, as well as a single count each of false imprisonment, robbery and petty theft. But to everyone's surprise, none of those charges were related to Rachel's sexual assault and murder.

When I looked into him, they found that maybe he was aggressive with a lot of girls. Women, he subsequently got arrested for some sexual crimes. But he was never enough evidence to even come close to charging with Rachel. Again, to be absolutely clear, none of these charges in any way were connected to Rachel Hurley's investigation. At this point, were connected to Rachel Herley's investigation. At this point, Billy's name was on everyone's lips. Yet as far as anyone could tell, authorities investigating Rachel's murder had still not

sat down with him for a formal interview. But the more authorities talk to Billy's peers, the deeper their suspicion grew, and honestly from the outside, the case against the teenager was shaping up to be a strong one. The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in a November 1991 article that the FBI had even provided a profile of the kind of person they think would be capable of something like Rachel's murder. The article stated that the killer was likely, quote, a young white male, upper middle class, charismatic, probably out of work, and not particularly well grounded.

Billy Fagan checked all the boxes. Giving him the benefit of the doubt for a second, though, that same profile could have described any number of the teen boys in the upper middle class haven that Palm Beach County Florida was. And still is. Nonetheless, by all accounts, Billy was an enigma. That same Sun Sentinel article included an interview with a former girlfriend who referred to the teen's disposition as oscillating between high highs and low lows.

At his worst, he was even sometimes violent. The article reads, quote, On the one hand, she got love notes, hand-painted t-shirts, and an abundance of flowers from a boy, teenage girls found cute and charming. And yet, during an argument, this same Billy grabbed her arm so tightly he bruised them, she says. In another fight, she smacked his face and he picked her up and threw her against a gasoline pump.

She spent two and a half days in the hospital recovering from internal injuries. Billy visited her, bringing her roses and voicing regrets." Billy was held for at least three days in a juvenile detention center and released after a judge set a $42,000 bond. As some details about Billy's past behavior and the sexual assault cases started to trickle down down multiple girls who were interviewed by deputies said they felt misled and didn't realize their response to questions from investigators would be used prosecuting Billy. One of the girl's mothers even told reporters at the time that investigators spoke to her 15-year-old daughter without her knowing, and that the middle schooler quote, didn't

feel any of the statements would be used, and that the case should be dropped. Even still, Billy's attorney wouldn't let law enforcement sit down with his client without first being filled in on just what evidence deputies had collected so far in their Rachel Hurley investigation. But investigators wouldn't tell them, so that interview never happened. Instead, Billy's attorney told the local press that his client had an alibi for the afternoon Rachel was killed, and he said he was nowhere near Carlin Park in the mid-afternoon hours of March 17. You see, Billy, who lives in nearby Palm Beach Garden, said that

he wasn't even in Palm Beach County that day, and that he and his friends had been surfing in a town called Sebastian, which is about 80 miles north of Jupiter. The 17-year-old attorney also assured authorities that Billy and his pals who could vouch for his whereabouts that day stopped at a Jupiter area movie rental store on the way back home, sometime between 230 and three, where according to news reports,

they rented Nightmare on Elm Street 5 and Kickboxer, which records from the store confirmed. The video store itself was also at least 10 miles away from Carlin Park, as Attorney said. So there was just no way Billy could have gotten from there to the wooded area where Rachel was killed in the amount of time necessary to cross paths with her. Billy's attorney told reporters that the Sheriff's Office was aware of Billy's alibi, but they still seemed hyper-focused on his client. It seems like instead of investigators sitting down with Billy in his attorney, they just battled it out very publicly using the local media.

By September, the unrelated sexual assault case against Billy had pretty much fallen apart, because prosecutors were having a difficult time getting witnesses who would be willing to sign criminal affidavits or testify against him. Eventually, Billy reached a plea deal with prosecutors where he pled no contest to five misdemeanor charges and agreed to attend counseling. By this time, it had been like six months since Rachel was murdered

and they still hadn't gotten test results back on any of the physical evidence. Rachel's mourning family and friends, the sheriff's office, even the public were all beyond frustrated with the snail's pace of DNA testing. They were worried that the delay was enabling a rapist and a murderer to evade law enforcement. Rachel's mother, Andrea, told the Sunsetnaal, quote, �I do believe this isn't a one-time only thing. I do believe that this will happen again before this person is caught."

Detective Springer was unsure of exactly when the department first received DNA results back from their original processing of the crime scene, but there were no matches to note. Whoever the killer was, it's likely they hadn't been previously convicted of a similar crime, or any crime, really, considering there were no initial hits generated from the DNA.

But at some point, investigators did get a hold of Billy's DNA, and it, too, was not a match for any of the samples found on any of the items tested from the crime scene, including on the shirt found in the burn barrel. They also were able to rule out Rachel as a source for the blood from the burn barrel as well. Between 1991 and 2004, 2004 being the point when the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office cold case unit officially took over Rachel's case, the case stalled significantly, and little new information surfaced. But the lack of progress certainly wasn't through a lack of resourcefulness.

In 1999, Rachel's family and investigators installed microphones at their youngest daughter's tombstone in hopes of catching the killer on a hot mic, maybe making a grave side confession. But unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. The same year, two detectives who had previously worked on the investigation, but had since moved on to other jobs outside the Sheriff's office, took their case notes to the Philadelphia-based Vitox Society.

This exclusive members-only group comprising various law enforcement officials past and present who review unsolved homicides. The Palm Beach Post reported in a July 1999 article that the former county lawman told the group something pretty wild that I haven't been able to get past. They claimed investigators at the crime scene mishandled physical evidence, more specifically that there had been DNA from the killer beneath Rachel's fingernails. Exactly what kind they didn't say. But basically whatever it was was not properly preserved. The former Palm Beach investigators also presented evidence to the group that Rachel had bite marks on her thighs. The VDUX Society's assessment

also provided the name of someone else they thought should be seriously considered as a suspect. They laid out this whole theory on why they thought this guy was the one who killed Rachel. When our reporting team asked Detective Springer about this man, he would only say that the man was considered and later ruled out through DNA testing. He wouldn't say anything more about this suspect though, not even why the society thought he made a strong suspect. In 2004, the Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit officially took over Rachel's case and collected

more than 100 samples from men to potentially test against DNA in Rachel's case. Those efforts failed to produce any matches. Among this huge swath of people who submitted DNA samples and were subsequently cleared, were the teenage boys on the boat with Rachel before she died, even the friend's dad who found her body, and of course, Billy Fagan. The case seemed to be growing colder with each passing day. But a phone call in 2004 to one of the detectives from the agency's own DNA lab finally delivered a new credible lead.

It turns out DNA recovered from the bloody Bernbergle T-shirt matched the DNA of a man named Douglas Gross. His DNA was already in Codis because he had previously been sentenced to 20 years for unrelated, violent crimes, per reporting by the Palm Beach Post. When investigators brought this information to Douglas, who was 17 at the time of Rachel's murder and was known to be acquainted with her, he denied any involvement. Sure, he'd been known to hang around the wooded areas near the beach at Carlin Park, and the DNA hit Prove that the shirt was worn by Douglas at some point, but it didn't prove that he was linked to Rachel's murder. Now, as promising as that development sounds, you probably had the same reaction I did.

Why didn't this come up in 2001 when Douglas was sent away to prison? Well, that's because the shirt wasn't retested until the fall of 2003. Authorities kept this information pretty much to themselves and didn't even share it with the media until years later in March 2005. When they got around to interviewing Douglas,

he told detectives that he had been locked up in a youth detention center at the time of Rachel's murder. So there's no way he could have killed Rachel. According to records back then, he was supposed to be in D.Y.S. on the day that Rachel was murdered. But some people said he actually escaped, got out, and then came back.

We wouldn't have been able to prove that. Then in 2005, a fellow inmate who was doing time with Gros himself, a convicted fellow with a history of providing misleading information as an informant, told authorities that Gros confessed to raping and killing Rachel. But regardless, Gros continued to deny any involvement. He told detectives that even though the shirt was apparently his, it's also possible that he had given it to someone else. As for the blood, well, Gross said that he was pretty regularly wrapped up in fights

when he'd hang out at the beach encampments, so it wasn't surprising to him that the shirt was stained with blood. Gross also stuck to his story about being locked up in Juvie at the time of the murder. Throughout the course of the investigation, a handful of other men with ties to the area and rap sheets that included convictions of violent and-or-sexual crimes against women and girls were vetted as persons of interest. Including Charlie Brandt, a serial killer with strong ties to South Florida. I actually did a crime-junkie episode on Charlie a few years ago, so I specifically wanted

to know if police considered him for Rachel's murder. But Detective Springer said that they kind of did, but not seriously, because Charlie's MO was horrifically violent. He was known to mutilate his victims, and that was not what happened to Rachel, so Charlie has never been on the short list of suspects in this case. Despite Billy and Doug and countless others having been eliminated as suspects in this case through DNA, Detective Springer said that as far as he's concerned, every name will stay on his person of interest list until the right guy is behind bars.

Until somebody's physically arrested and we're 100% sure that's the person, all these people are still potential suspects to me, but I will never completely eliminate somebody until I'm making a rest. To me, everybody is still a potential suspect. I keep an open mind. I don't get tunnel vision on one person and say they did it and that's all I work on

is that one person. I try to eliminate people and like I said he's been pretty well eliminated. Okay, it is their possibility that there's something there that we don't know there's always that possibility because we don't have an eye witness and if we do have an eye witness they haven't come forward yet. So somebody out there witnessed this or somebody confessed to them that they did it, then you know, I'm like I'm coming forward. It's not difficult to see how this case has become part of this town's DNA. It's hard to find people in Jupiter who haven't heard of the case at one point or another.

I know I'll be thinking about Rachel and her family. And the future that was taken from them, the experiences Rachel will never have in all the memories that they never get to make. And I'll be thinking about that for a long time. Her family still lives in the area, but Rachel's father Daniel actually died in 2019, so he never had the chance to learn who killed his little girl. What are the chances you think Rachel knew her killer? That's a good one. I don't. It's very possible she did. Then again, you know, like I said, could just been somebody.

Saw her running down the beach and followed her. There's a $15,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in Rachel's murder. Were you near Jupiter Inlet or Carlin Park on March 17, 1990? Maybe you saw or heard something that you haven't been able to shape. Something you maybe didn't even realize was noteworthy until this moment. Well, this is your chance to make a difference. Your chance to help bring and enduring 30 plus year nightmare to an end. Call Detective Williams-Bringer at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office

at 5-6-1-6-8-8-4013. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?