The Deck - Rose Marie Gayhart (Queen of Diamonds, New York)

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Our card this week is Rose Marie Gayhart, the Queen of Diamonds from New York.When 23-year-old Rose Gayhart left Dansville, New York with her boyfriend for Cape Coral, Florida in December of 1984, she was looking for a fresh start. But as Rose hugged her sister goodbye on that cold December day, neither of them could have imagined that it would be the last hug they’d ever share… or that within 3 short months, Rose would be gone.If you have any information about the disappearance of Rose Marie Gayhart, or the activities of Roland Davis in Florida in the mid-1980s, please contact the Cape Coral Police Department at [phone].To apply for a Cold Case Playing Card grant through Season of Justice, please visit www.seasonofjustice.org View source material and photos for this episode at thedeckpodcast.com/rose-marie-gayhartLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at [phone] to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our card this week is Rose-Marie Gayheart, the Queen of Diamonds from New York. When 23-year-old Rose Gayheart left Danesville, New York with her boyfriend Bobby for Cape Coral, Florida in December of 1984, she was looking for a fresh start. But as Rose hugged her sister goodbye on that cold December day, neither of them could have imagined that it would be the last hug they'd ever share, or that within three short months Rose hugged her sister goodbye on that cold December day. Neither of them could have imagined that it would be the last hug they'd ever share, or that within three short months, Rose would be gone. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. When When Lori Travis answered the phone at her home in Rochester, New York on Christmas Eve

of 1984, she was happy to hear her sister Rose's voice on the other end. But she was surprised by what Rose was saying. Her and her boyfriend decided they wanted to move to Florida, and she called me up on Christmas Eve and said, we're headed to Florida in the morning if you want to see me. Of the six gay heart daughters, Lori and Rose had always been close. So even though she was living with her husband in about an hour away from Danville at the time,

Lori did what any good sister would do. She hopped in her car and made the trip to see Rose and give her a proper send-off. And even as impulsive as this whole thing felt, Lori could understand why Rose was eager to get out of Danceville. She just wanted to start her life over, you know. For someone so young,

Rose had already experienced more than her fair share of tragedy and hardship, including the death of her six-month-old son Danny under suspicious circumstances when she was just 19 years old. Though investigators had initially blamed her then-boyfriend Kevin for the infant's death, they soon turned their sights on Rose herself, based largely on the questionable science of bite mark analysis. According to media coverage in The Democrat and Chronicle at the time, Rose never confessed to biting her son or to causing his death, but the DA claimed that she acknowledged causing

him to hit his head in his crib somehow. Of course, we can't know the full context of this supposed admission, and Laurie is adamant that Rose was not responsible for Danny's death. But what we do know is that in an attempt to avoid a lengthy prison sentence, Rose entered an Alfred plea, maintaining her innocence, but contending that the state stood a good chance of obtaining a conviction if the case was taken to trial.

So in exchange for doing that, she was eligible for parole after just one year of her three-year sentence. She'd since given birth to a second son, whom she'd given up for adoption. So this move to Florida was more than just new scenery. It really was a fresh start. And Laurie was happy for her sister, as they said their goodbyes before Rose set off for

Cape Coral with her new boyfriend, Bobby. And they picked that area because it's where Bobby's mom lived. So even though Laurie wouldn't be near her sister, she knew she'd at least have some kind of support system in this new place. Someone who could help out in a pinch. But Lori would still be her rock back home, no matter how far away her sister went. And we talked about make sure we ride each other so we keep in contact. For the next few months, Rose and Laurie bought stamps by the pack

and continued racking up phone bills with long-distance calls back and forth. When Laurie got a letter from Rose in early March, it was just the latest in a string of correspondences between the two. In her letter, Rose thanked Laurie for her recent birthday wishes, and I'm sure Laurie was just relieved to see how well Rose seemed to be doing. Her and Bobby were going to go get the pictures taken, and they were talking about buying a house and all this stuff.

They're never thinking good. Rose sounded happy and cheerful, and maybe a tiny bit lonely, but in overall good spirits. She even tried to pitch Lori on the idea of moving down to Florida with her husband, Bill. She was just wanting me to move down there and said that there's a lot of work down there and stuff like that. She would love me to come down there because we were pretty close for her and I.

In fact, as far as Lori could tell from the letter, there was really only one thing bothering Rose. The only thing she did ring the letter was that his mama's crazy. They didn't get along. A little headbutting was almost to be expected. I mean, there's always an adjustment period when adults have to share a home and a small home at that. It was tight quarters and Rose hadn't known Dorothy prior to coming to Cape Coral. So, Lori wasn't too concerned at first. Plus, at some point, Rose and Bobby had just moved into a separate trailer, although from what I can tell it was still owned by Dorothy. And as March of 1985 unfolded, things slowly started to become concerning to Lori. The first little warning bell went off when Lori's next letter back to Rose was returned as undeliverable.

Her letter came back to me on March 8th. The next red flag came on March 14th, when Rose called her mom hinting at even more trouble that she'd been having with Dorothy. Rose said that she was calling from a neighbor's trailer because after a big fight with Dorothy, she had told her to leave and to never come back. When asked what the fight was over, Rose told her mom that she was pregnant again

and that Bobby and Dorothy both wanted her to end the pregnancy. After this fight, it seemed like Bobby moved back in with his mom, leaving Rose alone in the new trailer. And in a show of exasperation that I am sure would haunt her over the coming years, Rose's mom kind of shrugged her off during this call. Basically said, there's nothing I can do for you, like from all the way up here, like you're going to have to take care of yourself.

But then a few days later, Rose's mom received a bizarre letter from Dorothy that was postmarked March 19th. This next voice you'll hear is a voice actor reading Dorothy's letter to Rose's mom in full. It has been edited slightly for clarity purposes, but you can see the full note on our website. I'm sorry for what happened,

but I did all I could for Rose. She sure didn't appreciate it. full note on our website. home and she told me to leave her alone. She was an adult could take care of herself so I said, okay, I then called you and proceeded to go to the bus terminal and pay for a ticket. Now the sheriff's department has a copy and we have one and here's one for you. She had money because she babysat last week plus she took $20 from Bobby's wallet Friday night when he went to sleep. Today and every day she sat in a man's bar like the Town Grill in Dans. Between beer and cigarettes, it would take a millionaire to pay for her. Today, she cut up all Bobby's important papers, plus she cut up his National Guard uniforms with the sheers, and they are government property, so she may be in trouble if I catch her.

She left the bar with a guy in a red pickup. No one knew who he was or where she went. If I find her, I will give her the ticket home, but if I can't find her, I'm not responsible. She came back to the camper last night. Bobby has to make up his mind either camper and car or her. I offered the ticket to her, and she refuses to go back to New York so there's nothing you can do. She's going to get out of the camper if I have to get sheriffs to put her out and the

sheriff's department says the same thing. As far as her being pregnant, it could be one of four guys she's been traveling with. She told Bobby and I she couldn't get that way. I wanted her to go to doctors and I would have paid for it for pills. And she said she sure didn't need them. Sorry, but I can't do any more. If I find her, I'll sure give her the ticket. And if I can't find her, I'm covered because I have proof." And what she thought this proof established isn't entirely clear to me. And what exactly

transpired between the end of March 1985 and mid-May 1985 is also a little unclear. It seems as though Rose's family was mostly operating under the belief that she was making her way back up to Dansville from Cape Coral and that she would just show up one day. Lori, being an hour away from the rest of the family in Rochester, kind of assumed that her parents were on top of it. But now, 39 years later, it's not clear whether they reached out to authorities in Cape Coral in those two months between mid-March and mid-May. But that's not to say no one did.

In fact, since Rose and Bobby moved down in late December, Bobby had been working for a carpet cleaning company called B&D Carpets, Inc. It was owned by a couple named William and Donna Johnson, and the Johnsons had gotten to know Rose a little bit, or at least gotten used to seeing her around with Bobby, and by mid-May they were concerned. I mean, they knew she and Bobby hadn't been getting along, and now it had been almost two months since they'd seen her around. And when they took their concerns to Bobby,

let's just say that their minds weren't exactly put at ease. since they'd seen her around. And when they took their concerns to Bobby, let's just say that their minds weren't exactly put at ease. Bobby tried to ease their minds, I'll give him that. But he told them that Rose left her clothes and a box of important documents behind. And when I say important documents, I mean really important documents, like a scrapbook for her son who had died and his birth certificate.

And his death certificate. The things you would grab if your house was on fire and you could only save what you could carry. So I'm sure the Johnsons were just becoming more and more convinced that something was wrong as he's telling them this. But Bobby assured them that, you know, there's nothing to worry about. Rose was just fine. No, he hadn't talked to her himself, but he had talked to the FBI and they had talked to Rose and said she was a-okay, just out there somewhere living the dream.

And listen, no one gets less worried when you bring up the FBI out of nowhere while simultaneously saying that there's nothing to see here. And like me, I don't think the couple was under any illusions that the FBI was really involved, much less that they'd made contact with Rose. So feeling even more unsettled than before, William and Donna filed a report with the Cape Coral Police Department on May 10th, and they didn't hold back. They told him everything. Bobby and Rose hadn't been getting along.

She had disappeared suddenly. She'd left those important items behind. And they suspected foul play. This report was taken by a detective sergeant named Dave Stadelman, but not much seems to have happened at first. Because they just said that she was an adult. She wants to run away, she can run away. Rosa's parents hadn't known about the police report, but I assume they found out about it when they filed their own,

which they did on May 22 after getting a call from Dorothy's ex-husband asking how Rose was doing. And that's when they realized that something was truly wrong. In full disclosure, I don't know exactly how involved this ex-husband was with Bobby and Rose when they were in Cape Coral or if he even lived down there or up in Danesville. But either way, he knew enough to know that Rose had been in Cape Coral and that she was no longer there,

and she should be back up in Danesville by now. And he was surprised when her parents told him that she wasn't. So my mom finally went to the Sheriff's Department here and lived in St. County and told him something's not right. You know, I got this letter. Rose would not just stop talking to us." Livingston County is up in New York, where the Gay Hart family lived. The case there was assigned to Major John York.

Now, he's no longer working the case, but Detective Joshua Monster worked it for most of the past decade before retiring in 2023. That's whose voice you're gonna hear now. In 85, when we initially got the complaint from the Gayhearts, Major York asked why it took so long for them to report it. And they said, well, we thought we'd show up. What really got it going was the phone call basically saying, I thought she'd be in New York by now.

When L.C.S.O. Major John York got his head wrapped around the case, and he realized that the last place anyone had seen Rose was in Florida, he reached out to the agency there. Detective Sergeant Stadleman was the one that York spoke with, and he decided he'd get the ball rolling by contacting the people who were thought to have last seen Rose, namely Bobby and his mom Dorothy. We were suspicious of Dorothy, Bobby.

They were kind of the last known people to really see and be around her. So that was, of course, our number one people to look at. Dorothy mostly repeated the things that she had written about to Rose's mom, like the fact that there had been a big argument at her trailer in mid-March and that she'd kicked Rose out. It sounds like she was pretty verbally abusive towards both her son and her after she found out that Rose was pregnant and that her son was potentially the father. She said the last time she'd seen Rose was at a place called Jim's Bar when she tried

to give her that bus ticket back to New York. She paints the picture that she was trying to do the right thing, trying to get her up here. Her and her son were no longer together. They were no longer wanting to be together. So she was trying to do the right thing and get her back up here to her family. And then that's when she came up missing.

Just like she said before, Dorothy tells them that Rose told her to get lost. And so she went to the Lee County Sheriff's office to give them a copy of the ticket and make it perfectly clear that Rose was not welcome back. Bobby also said that he hadn't seen or talked to Rose since the middle of March. He said the relationship was off and on

and toward the end, Rose was drinking heavily and started to use illicit substances. He confirmed that she told him she was pregnant and also that he wanted her to end the pregnancy but that she wanted to continue the pregnancy. He didn't know why Rose left all her belongings behind, but he agreed that it was strange. He also said that he'd assumed the whole time that Rose had gone back to New York. But Stadleman wasn't totally buying it.

The thing that really stands out that makes him suspicious is he's telling his boss that she's fine, the FBI talked to her, And then we were able to debunk it. That never happened, right? The FBI never talked to her. I couldn't find who it was if it was us or if it was them that checked with the FBI. But I do know that it was ruled out that FBI never spoke to Rose.

See, I knew it. Bobby gave Stadleman the name of the restaurant Rose had worked at in March, which was called Big Howie's Hot Dogs. Stadleman interviewed Big Howie himself, Howard Grout, and he told him that Rose had shown up on March 19th and applied for a job. She was basically hired on the spot, and she worked there for a total of 23 hours over the next three days.

Howard said that most of the time, Rose had walked to and from her shifts at Big Howie's, but on March 21st, she'd been picked up instead. Specifically, she'd been picked up by a man with dark curly hair in a red pickup truck. And that was where she was last seen getting into a red pickup truck from Howie's hot dogs. Now, keep in mind, this is days after Dorothy claimed to have seen her getting into a red pickup truck

outside of Jim's bar. So next, Stadleman got in touch with a few local clinics that primarily served low-income pregnant women. Bobby had mentioned one by name, a place called the Women's Clinic in Fort Myers. But it was a dead end. The nurse he spoke with advised him that their patient's names were confidential, but she did confirm that there was no Rose Gayhart on file. But she was quick to caution that that didn't necessarily mean Rose hadn't used their services,

because I guess a lot of their patients were known to use pseudonyms. When Staddleman touched base with the state agency responsible for processing benefit applications, he met a similar dead end. He was told that no Rose Gayheart had applied for any benefits. One of his next stops was to Jim's Bar where Dorothy said she had last seen Rose on March 17. He showed Rose his picture to the Bar owners, Mary and Jack Kava. They recognized her and advised him that though Rose had been a regular, they hadn't seen her in a few months, not since March.

By July of 1985, Stadelman had largely run out of new leads to pursue, so he decided to involve the press. He sat down with Frank Rinella of the news press, and when the report was published on July 5th, he asked that anyone with information on Rose contact him directly. And that same day, he received a call that actually backed up Dorothy's story. The call was from a guy named Fred Reepie. And he had the same account of seeing Rose associating with the guy in a red pickup truck outside of Jim's Bar on March 17. So that's at least the third person to mention this red pickup truck outside of Jim's Bar on March 17th.

So that's at least the third person to mention this red pickup truck, right? It seems significant, but if Staddleman made any attempt to zero in on the owners of red pickup trucks in the area, it's not documented anywhere, not in the investigative records we've obtained and not in any subsequent media coverage of the case. No press, no leads, no movement.

It appears that in 1988, LCSO had started working the case a bit again, including interviewing Dorothy and seeking an interview with Bobby. Both were splitting their time between New York and Florida doing the typical snow birthday, you know, summers up north, winters down south, and they managed to get Dorothy in for an interview in May of 1988. But by December of that same year, they still hadn't been able to get an interview with Bobby. So I'm sure they were delighted when Bobby called them up out of the blue on December 19th and said that he'd heard they wanted to talk with him. Yeah, January 3rd, 1989, he agreed to come in and take a polygraph with Sergeant Jack Steenbra from the New York State Police.

I believe it was inconclusive, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty much the same thing that Dorothy said. You know, they had been fighting prior to her disappearance. She had told him that she was pregnant. He then admitted that, you know, yes, they were both using drugs and alcohol pretty regularly then. So it was pretty similar to Dorothy's story." They did manage to get him on the record regarding one perplexing detail, though.

When we interviewed him, he did deny ever making that comment to his boss about the FBI. And that was about it. For some reason, in 1989, the file was officially handed off from the Kid Coral PD to the Livingston County Sheriff's Office in New York, even though there was no proof that Rose ever actually made it back there. The families didn't hear much more from them than they had from Cape Coral PD. When Rose's sister Lori moved back to Dansville in 1995, she made an appointment with LCSO to go over her sister's file, and what she found out was a little devastating. I just wanted to know what they were doing about this case

and try and figure out what I was going to do to find my sister. And I realized nobody was doing anything about Rose. And I'm like, you know, because I thought they were taking care of this and they weren't. I'm like, you know, because I thought they were take care of this and they weren't. Thus began Lori's brutal education on the tireless work of being the family member of a missing person. Over the coming years, she began doing whatever she could to bring attention to her sister's disappearance. Yeah, I was writing the TV shows and newspaper, all that kind of stuff.

And I was like, getting anywhere. I was getting frustrated and just looking for answers. Nothing would be done. In 2008 is when I really started getting into things and getting calls from the newspapers. And it was around this time that she received a phone call that would change the course of her life. It was from a couple named Doug and Mary Lyle. They were the parents of Suzanne Lyle, a 19-year-old college student who had gone missing

from upstate New York in 1998. If that name sounds familiar to you, it might be because we covered her case on Crime Junkie back in April of 2019. Three years after Suzanne disappeared, the Lyle's founded a nonprofit, Center for Hope, which provides resources and guidance to families of missing persons. Mary is quoted in reporting for ABC News, saying,

When somebody goes missing in your family, you think to yourself, it's just me. Why did this happen to me? And then she goes on to explain that the Center for Hope, quote, brought a lot of people together. When you're sitting in the same room and looking around at all these other faces, you're not alone in this fight. This turned out to be the lifeline that Laurie needed. So I went to this seminar and that was really interesting to me. And I learned a lot from other families.

You know, I got to learn what other families were going through and what they did and how they got help and stuff like that. And they started playing cards, so they got Rose on the playing cards here in New York. In the many years since she became a member of this awful club that no one wants to join, Laurie has spent countless hours investigating Rose's case. Well, I have a stuff I have done myself because I was not comfortable with the way they were taking care of the case.

But she's more than just her sister's advocate. She's become a force for other families of missing persons as well. I want to get this word out, all of us out to people that are going through it because they need to know, they need to know that they have to call and stay on top of this. Don't wait for the investigators to call you because you'll be sitting there all day a week, all year, 10 years, whatever. You call them every single month or an email that I'm and ask, do you have any updates?

In 2016, Laurie took her own investigation. More boots on the ground when she worked up the courage to approach Bobby in a Danesville bar. I was going to a local bar that's in town and he would come in there. And then one day I just got the nerve and I said, I gotta ask him. And perhaps counter-intuitively, she kind of believed him when he said he just didn't know. When she asked him if he thought that his mom,

who had passed away in 2000, had anything to do with it, his answer was a little surprising. He did say to me that she could have done it, because they didn't get along. But in 2021, a friend of Lori's forwarded her a news article that would completely change her perspective. It was about the 1990 cold case murder of a woman in Charlotte County, Florida, named Sharon Gill. Sharon's case was solved in 2020 when investigators submitted a newly built

DNA profile from a bloody towel found at the scene, and they got a hit on an Ohio death row inmate named Roland Davis serving time for the murder of an Ohio woman in 2000. serving time for the murder of an Ohio woman in 2000. In the article, the bars listed as bars by sisters. Sister, hundred in the 80s. It just hit me, yeah, this is the guy. I mean, he lived right in Fort Myers at the time my sisters, they were hunting the same bar. Immediately, Lori knew that someone needed to confront

this Roland guy about her sister's case. She was even more sure of it when she found a mugshot of Roland from the early 90s and noticed his dark, curly hair. We've included this picture on our blog post for this episode. She was ready to go talk to Roland herself, but she was advised against it by the Cape Coral PD and the Crime Stoppers of Southwest Florida.

So she was completely devastated when she got word just last year that Roland had passed away from brain cancer. But even though she didn't get to go talk to him, Charlotte County detectives had, plenty of times, when they were working their case. Now it wasn't about Rose specifically, but the interview nonetheless covered a whole lot of relevant ground. And that interview provided some interesting information to Detective Monster when he got his hands on the transcript.

I remember when Detective Kurt Mille there gave me the transcripts I'm reading, and I'm like, holy cow, he puts himself in Cape Coral, he puts himself, you know, picking up women. He puts himself of killing prostitutes. He puts himself driving a truck. Like a lot of those things were adding up for me. Roland Davis, for me, that was the, that was the one. The 10 years that I've been overseeing the case, that was the best lead that we had. Though we weren't able to confirm this with Cape Coral PD because they didn't respond to our interview requests, according to Lori, Roland Davis didn't just seem like a good

candidate in more recent years. They told her he was actually a suspect in her sister's disappearance way back in 1985. This James Cannon is the one that told me that Rowan Davis was one of their suspects back when Roasters came up next to him. And they did question him back then, but he wasn't even known as a serial killer back then. So what now? Now Lori is left trying to pick up the pieces of her sister's case following the death

of the most promising suspect in 39 years. I mean, I was so close, so close. Now I'm lost, I have no what to do, I have no way to turn, I don't know, you know, I just, all I can do is get my story out there, go from there, all I can do. Well, please, I find somebody, but I know she's dead,

I know she's been murdered I know she's been murdered. I know all this. It's been nearly four decades since Rose Marie Gayheart suddenly disappeared from Cape Coral, Florida, never to be seen again. That's nearly four decades her loved ones have been left without answers. So if you know anything about her disappearance, or anything about Roland Davis and his activities in Florida in the mid 1980s. Please reach out to the Cape Coral Police Department at 239-574-3223. The Deck is an audio-chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr