The Deck - Stewart Simmons & Margaret Walden (Ace of Diamonds & Hearts, Colorado)

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Our cards this week are Stewart Simmons and Margaret Walden, the Ace of Diamonds and the Ace of Hearts from Colorado.The bodies of Stewart Simmons and Margaret Walden were found in the fall of 1982 on the banks of the San Juan River, right where Colorado meets New Mexico. For years they went unidentified, and were even buried without names to mark their graves. When a Colorado detective decided to find out who they were, he would go on to find out even more … uncovering their names, their stories and the likely truth behind their murders, decades after they were killed. If you or someone you know has information about the murders of Stewart Simmons and Margaret Walden, please contact the Archuleta County, Colorado Sheriff's Department at 970-264-8430. 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 cards this week are Stuart Simmons and Margaret Walden, the Ace of Diamonds, and the Ace of Hearts from Colorado. With the help from the lead detective, I'm going to tell you the bizarre tale about these two people who were murdered in the 80s and went unidentified for almost 30 years. And now, law enforcement needs your help to find their killer. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck. On September 19, 1982, a rancher working his land near the San Juan River on the border of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado was out looking for a flock of geese on his property when he saw what he thought was a dummy on an island in the river.

The rancher's name was Frank Chavez, and he was riding his horse, so he went down to the river's edge to get a closer look. When he got close and hopped off his horse, he saw that it was actually a woman's body. According to reporting by the Pagosa Spring Sun newspaper, initial reports describe the woman as a 30-year-old white female, 5'5", with brown hair and a medium build. She was wearing Wrangler blue jeans, a blue quilted jacket, a purple halter top, a gold heart necklace, and a horn-shaped pendant. Frank immediately rode back to his house and called 911. When officers arrived, they realized they had a jurisdictional issue on their hands. No one could tell for sure if

the body was in New Mexico or Colorado, because that area of the San Juan River could be in either state depending on where you're standing. But they ultimately decided the woman's body was a few yards over the New Mexico state line, so it was taken there for autopsy. The New Mexico office of the medical investigator ruled it homicide by strangulation, but there was no ID with her to help them identify the woman. From the autopsy report, investigators learned that she was partially decomposed and still had some skin and clothing on her. When they searched her pockets, they found a piece of paper with a woman's name in a

farming-to-new Mexico phone number written on it. Unfortunately, when police called the number, the lady who answered couldn't provide them with any information about the woman they had found. She also couldn't recall any reason that her name and phone number would end up in a dead woman's pocket. According to all the research material we could find, this woman from Farmington was cleared as a suspect pretty quickly. Authorities sent out the usual bulletin with the Jando's information on it to drum up leads, but not much came in. Then, a month later, on October 22, 1982, a family walking the northern bank of the San

Juan River near Pagosa Springs, Colorado found another body. This time, a man's, and it was badly decomposing. He was about a mile further down the river from where Jane Doe had been discovered a few weeks before. He was fully clothed wearing corduroy pants, converse tennis shoes, and a t-shirt, with the words, lazy-be-guessed rants written on the front breast pocket. The man was classified as a jondo, because he also had no idea on him.

The only thing investigators could try and use as a clue was the writing on his shirt. The man's autopsy revealed he'd also been murdered, but not the same way as Jando. Jando was shot with 22 caliber bullets. The medical examiner determined that his ribs were likely broken before he was shot, indicating he might have been in a fight shortly before his death. Right away, police wondered if the murders were connected, but it wasn't until they released

sketches and started interviewing people around town that they got their confirmation. Some locals told police that they'd seen a man and a woman together at bars and restaurants in the area, but nobody knew their names. Because of state-lined jurisdictional issues, any hope to find out who Jane and John Doe were or who killed them was bleak. Investigators did some more interviews and filed them away, but a crime scene was never established. Because of their location, though, police figured the bodies were tossed off the nearby Caracas bridge.

Not much evidence was collected, and the bodies ended up being buried in separate unmarked plots in New Mexico graveyards. Back then, at least in New Mexico, unidentified murder victims got buried, but there wasn't much fanfare to their funerals. They usually just got buried in the cheapest way possible due to the absence of family or loved ones showing up to claim them. Decades passed and the John and Jane Doe's cases went cold. That is until 2008, when in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, a retired drug enforcement agent named George

Barter was considering getting back into detective work. George had heard stories about the bodies that were found in the San Juan River decades before, and he wanted to take a crack at solving the case. I got sort of, I don't know if it was obsessed, but I lay it awake at night thinking about these two kids under the bridge and thinking about how to walk into the sheriff's office and say, hey, I want to work on this. As luck would have it,

George's wife Jennifer got a job as an office manager at the Artuleta County Sheriff's Department. And after advising the department on some drug raid cases, George got resertified as a law enforcement officer and agreed to become the sheriff's second detective on one condition. And I said, all right, but I want to work on the co-case and he's like, what co-case? George didn't realize just how little work had been done on the 1982 John and Jando case

that was 26 years old by that point. We started hunting around for this co- case and they couldn't find anything. They couldn't find a file. They looked in their archives. They looked in the basement and old boxes. They looked in a storage room and they couldn't find anywhere. George took on new murder cases and another cold case while he kept looking around for some sort of file on the San Juan River Jane and John Doe.

And then one day, thanks to his wife, he caught a lucky break. There was an old office that had been unused, it had been the patrol captain's office, and they were cleaning it out to make it into a file room, and in the back of a cabinet there, there were going to hull off was a little brown folder. And my wife ran into the office, and my detective office with this folder says, is this this what you're looking for and it's tiny, you know? But it was about that case and it gave me a really good start. Inside the folder were initial scene reports for both Jane and John Doe, which included their initial autopsy reports from New Mexico

and some interviews with witnesses. It was the beginning of how complicated this thing became. George got in touch with a technician at the New Mexico office of the medical investigator witnesses. It was the beginning of how complicated this thing became. George got in touch with a technician at the New Mexico office of the medical investigator, and luckily they kept records that old. The investigator sent George the full autopsy files, but when he asked about the possibility of doing new DNA testing to try and identify the victims, the lab tech had some unexpected news. The remains of John and Jane Doe had been buried in unmarked graves in the 80s and their skulls were in a museum.

Now if you think the fact that their bodies were buried but their skulls weren't sounds weird, that's because it is. And I'm like, why? And he says, well, it turns out while we had the skulls and we're trying to do facial reconstructions, they buried the remains of the two bodies. Turns out while we had the skulls and we're trying to do facial reconstructions, they buried the remains of the two bodies. And we didn't really want to dig them up. So we archived the skulls with other historic bones found in New Mexico.

And I asked him, would you go get them? He went and got them. And so I said, well, this is pretty cool. Can we do two things? Have new facial reconstructions done and submit them for DNA? You says, I'll take care of that. While George was holding out hope for science to do its thing with DNA, he got busy investigating. Knowing he might get DNA hits on the skulls gave him new motivation.

After going back through the old reports, he pieced together information about a bus being the possible crime scene. And thanks to media attention about him reopening the case, he gotced together information about a bus being the possible crime scene. And thanks to media attention about him reopening the case, he got a new tip about a fight that actually went down at that bus. So George developed a pretty good idea of where he believed John and Jane Doe had been murdered. I find out where I think where we believe the crime scene was. It was in a bus actually in New Mexico. And I had looked all over down there for it. I didn't really know where it was. I'd driven

down there hours, days, you know, trying to find where this thing was. That area of New Mexico and Colorado is rural and vast. There's more forest and reservation land than anything, and populated towns and cities are few and far between. But George in a New Mexico State police Officer eventually found the bus. It had been abandoned and was sitting in a field in New Mexico for what locals told them had been nearly three decades. So based on what George had put together, he really thought that this was the initial crime scene, so he applied for and got a search warrant.

When he finally got inside though, the bus was a mess. Back there where the stove is knocked over, there was still some bricks that the stove might have gone on. We find blood, what we think is blood. George and the state investigator did a field test on the area of carpet inside the bus that had the dark stain on it, and it came back positive for blood. They also found four spent 22 caliber cartridge casings in the bus. So knowing that John Doe was killed with a 22, they backed up the shell casings as evidence. And for the first time, in 28 years, the San Juan River John and Jando double homicide had some physical evidence.

The only problem was, George had a really hard time finding a crime lab in Colorado that would actually test the evidence. Well, that ends up being a mess because the Hauntavirus, CBI laboratories are like, we ain't touching that Hauntavirus, you don't bring that to our laboratory. It takes us months to get someone to take the stuff and process it. Because the bus had sat abandoned in a field for so long, it's only residents had been mice. And in that part of the west, Haunted Virus, a disease that's spread by rodents is a real concern.

George and other investigators even wore tie-vex suits to execute the search warrant, anticipating the virus might be present. So that seriously delayed the new pieces of evidence being tested. But finally, an FBI lab agreed to do it. When the results came in, the lab told George that the blood was most definitely human of evidence being tested, but finally, an FBI lab agreed to do it. When the results came in, the lab told George that the blood was most definitely human blood. But any further testing beyond that was impossible because it was too old.

But the shell casings? They came back as a likely match to the bullets that had been found in John Doe during his autopsy. George felt good about the progress of the case, but then he got some not-so-good news. The victims' skulls weren't producing any DNA results. I think we submitted their skulls three times, and when it finally came back the third time

from that PI, they said, you know, we don't think we'll ever get any DNA from these skulls. Because of how facial reconstruction was done in the 80s, and because the skulls were in a museum all those years, it's likely that they had been boiled, George said. So there was no DNA left on them. That meant George needed to get access to the rest of Jane and John Doe's remains if there was going to be any hope of figuring out who they were. George got a court order to do an exclamation of John Doe first, and

thanks to detailed autopsy records, they sort of knew where to look, but actually finding the right grave proved to be challenging. He said he's the eleventh grave from the southeast corner of the county graveyard. So the county graveyard in the back of a commercial graveyard is just sand, tumbleweeds, grass. The markers are basically a brick with a John Doer Jane Doe on it. Cemetery workers said they preferred to do the actual digging because they had a back hoe that would be able to get the first few layers up. After that, investigators did the last little bit of digging by hand with shovels until

they finally brought up a body bag. But there was a problem. They opened the body bag and I'm going, well, that's not him. No way, that's not our John Dough. And everybody's arcing with me. And I like to, cemetery, know, this is the 11th grave, this is where it's posse, and I said, no, I can tell you why, because there's a skull in this bag. And we have the skulls

they're not with the body. George said they had to get another court order and another because they dug up two more of the wrong John Does. They're like gonna quit and they say well he must not be here and I'm going leave me a shovel go away I've got an order from my person I will dig him up myself if you're gonna quit and so he said okay, we'll do one more and then we're quitting So they went the other direction from the direction they'd been going closer to the wall and that was John Doe They'd finally found him and they were sure of it because the body bag had the correct markings from the New Mexico office of the medical investigator And the skull of the corpse was missing. George sent off the bones for DNA testing,

and finally, in February 2014, nearly 32 years after this man was murdered, they found out his name. John Doe was a 20-year-old sailor who'd gone AWOL from the US Navy. His name was Stuart Eric Simmons. I had spent hours and hours and hours on these websites trying to find victims to go with my unidentified, you know, missing people. And his name never came up. It never came up.

There was an interesting reason why his name had never come up, and it wasn't for a lack of trying on Stewart's family's part. Back on June 7, 1982, in the North Atlanta suburb of Roswell, Georgia, Joanne Simmons was home feeling a little anxious because she had just gotten a call from her 20-year-old son Stewart, who was at a US Navy base in San Diego, California. He'd hung up, but told her he'd call right back, but the minutes were dragging on, and he wasn't calling. Those minutes turned into hours, and Joanne was now reaching her breaking point.

Stewart had called home to let his mom know that he was on his way to the court Marshall's office to find out what his punishment was gonna be for getting into a little trouble with the Navy a few months earlier. After he completed boot camp in Chicago, he took someone's car for a joy ride and ended up in jail. That arrest made him unable to report to his base in San Diego on time. Charges against him for taking the car ended up being dropped, and the Navy gave him another chance. But he still had to be punished for the delay and being what the Navy considered, Aewol.

Through the grapevine, Stewart heard that his sentence would be minimal, and he assured his mom she had nothing to worry about. If there was one thing Joanne knew Stewart was consistent on, it was that he always kept his word about staying in touch. He constantly called home in wrote letters, despite being stationed more than 2,000 miles from Roswell, the whole Simmons family, Joanne, her husband, Bill Stewart, and their two daughters who were just one and two years younger than Stewart, were all really close.

When Joanne couldn't stand waiting anymore, she finally called the base back, hoping to talk to Stewart, or at least find out what his sentence was. She thought maybe the sentence hadn't been as lenient as Stewart thought, maybe the Navy had tossed him in jail on the base and he didn't have access to a phone. After several attempts to try and reach someone with information, Joanne got a hold of the officer assigned a Stewart's case, and when he answered, he was not happy to hear from Joanne. Joanne told our team that the man immediately started screaming at her, saying that the jailer had given at her, saying that the

jailer had given Stuart permission to move his motorcycle and they had not seen him since. They refused to discuss anything else with her and hung up. That's when Joanne became frantic, trying to make sense of what she just heard. Stuart was a good kid for the most part and was pretty responsible. She told us there were times that he could be impulsive though due to a head injury he suffered when he was four years old. You see, he fell and hit his head at a home construction site in their neighborhood while his grandma was babysitting. Joanne had been at the store and when she came home, there were ambulances there. At first doctors weren't sure he would survive.

He bounced back but there was a part of bone stuck in a way that doctors said was too dangerous to remove, and it could affect his functioning skills. The Simmons family was relieved when little four-year-old Stewart seemed to be himself after recovering from the injury. He seemed like the same nice little boy that everyone loved. His sweet demeanor remained throughout adolescence, but his parents noticed that Stuart would make impulsive decisions without weighing the consequences. He would understand the effects of his actions, but only after he decided to do something. Joanne said this trait followed Stuart into adulthood, and it's why he had made some bad

decisions after boot camp. Joanne called the base the day after she was hung up on to try and file a missing persons report for Stuart, but they told her that they wouldn't take a report because at that point Stuart was considered a fugitive, not a missing person. Joanne said she begged them to be more understanding and to try and help her, but the office refused. The entire day went by after that phone call, and Joanne had still not heard from her son. As a last-ditch effort, she tried filing a missing persons report with her local authorities

in Fulton County, Georgia. But because Stewart was an adult who took off on his own in a different state, the Sheriff's Department said that they couldn't help her either. Joanne felt completely helpless. She and Bill kept hoping their son would just call or walk through the front door, but days and weeks went by and he never did. Joanne said she felt like she might lose her mind, like there was nothing at all she could do to make sure her son was safe, and she was especially worried because of Stuart's old head injury. Because he'd taken off

with no explanation and had not called home, Joanne worried that maybe he was suffering from amnesia, like maybe he couldn't remember their home phone number or where they lived. She grappled daily with the thought of her son out there alone, somewhere, lost and confused. What was especially frustrating for their family in those first few days was knowing there wasn't anyone looking for Stewart. No law enforcement agency would let Joanne file a missing person's report, so there was no investigation going on or any kind of search or any rescue effort underway. Joanne had finally had enough and decided to take matters into her own hands. She and Bill hired a private investigator the same week Stewart disappeared, and that

guy tracked down and interviewed Stewart's friends in California. But she told us the PI was stone walled by the Navy and wasn't able to turn up much new or helpful information. One night, a few months after Stuart vanished, Joanne and Bill were watching TV, and they saw an episode of America's Most Wanted. The story on their screen talked about an unidentified skull that had been found in North Carolina.

Joanne figured it couldn't hurt to call and get more information. I mean, they did have family in the Carolinas, and Georgia isn't too far away from where it was found. So producers for the show connected her with Duke University researchers who were handling the skull, and she sent them to her dental records. After that, everyone waited, and waited. And finally, they found out the results. After that, everyone waited and waited. And finally, they found out the results. The North Carolina school did not belong to Stuart.

The Simmons felt both relief and frustration. I mean, they were happy it wasn't confirmation of the worst, but at the same time, they were hoping for some kind of closure or answers to their questions. Either way, Joanne said it felt good to at least try. After that, she and Bill worked for months to have enough vacation time and money to hit the road and search for their son themselves. As soon as Joanne and Bill got their younger daughters situated at college, they headed west. They made posters with stewards photo on them and drove up and down the entire coast of California.

They even went down into Mexico searching for him. They were willing to do anything to find him. And during their weeks long search, Joanne had to think like her son. One thing she knew for sure about Stuart was if he did go AWOL from the Navy, he would have gotten a job somewhere to make ends meet. He wouldn't just be hopping from town to town without any income. He had an impulsive streak, but according to Joanne, Stuart was responsible and liked structure. She said she knew her son was not a free spirit who would abandon all responsibility and be off partying somewhere. After graduating

high school, Stuart had tried college, but knew after just a few weeks of being enrolled that it wasn't right for him. He spent a few months trying to find himself and figuring out what his passions were. To get by, he worked odd jobs as a bricklayer and a waiter. So because he had experience in those industries, Bill and Joanne checked diners and restaurants during their search. Another big reason they thought he could be working in the service industry was because of something he told them, right before he went missing. Stuart's dad Bill said Stuart called home from San Diego in the weeks leading up to his

disappearance and told them that he was dating a woman he really liked named Margo. During their conversation, Stuart had mentioned that Margo was a waitress and she was quite a bit older than him, 20 years older to be exact. Joanne and Bill laughed when Stuart told them that because that meant Margo was their age but they kept an open mind to the relationship and didn't lecture him. From what they could tell their son was happy with this woman and that's all they ever wanted for their kids. Despite their best efforts, though, and scouring the coastline for weeks,

looking in restaurants, Bill and Joanne came up empty-handed. In the years that followed, Joanne became an amateur sleuth in her spare time. As the internet came about, she would search coroner's websites and look at photos of missing and unidentified people, hoping one day she would see her son's face. What she couldn't imagine though, was that hundreds of miles away, in Colorado, the answers

that she'd been searching for for so long were waiting with George Barter. In 2014, after George got his positive ID on John Doe, he called a detective in Roswell Georgia to notify Joanne and Bill Simmons that their son had been found. They called me a few minutes later, and we're able to get him home to his parents. It had been 32 years since Joanne and Bill Simmons last heard from Stewart, but they never gave up hope that one day they would learn what happened to him. They'd always wished that he would eventually just walk through their front door and explain that the last few decades had just been some kind of wild mix-up,

but they knew deep down for a long time that he was dead. They were in their late 70s and they were relieved to finally learn the truth before they themselves passed. When they came out, they wanted to see where he had lived his last few weeks. themselves passed. Meeting Stuart's parents opened a lot of doors for George. Six years of hard work had finally paid off, and he could tell that they were grateful to have some answers. Learning Stuart's identity also provided clues as to who Jane Doe might be. Joanne and Bill told George about Margot, the girlfriend Stewart had mentioned who worked

as a waitress. Now, there was no mention of a Margot anywhere in George's old investigative files, so with that new information in hand, he ran with it and decided to do an exhumation on Jane Doe's remains, too. But first, he had to find them. George tracked down the Catholic priest who buried Jane Doe in an espanyola in New Mexico cemetery in the 80s. The priest told George, on the day of her burial, he was the only one there besides the grave

digger. But he thought he remembered where they buried her despite there being no markings, no cross, no plot number, or anything. The priest hooked George and a New Mexico FBI evidence recovery team to the graveyard and pointed to an area he thought Jane Doe was laid to rest, but the father's memory was off. And they sort of dig post holes around, seen if they can bring up a body bag because when she was buried in the body bag and they find nothing and we're failing on on fine and Jane Doe. I I mean it's just awful

George was about to give up when he went back to the church to see if he could find anyone else who better remembered where the unidentified woman had been buried He thought maybe a long time member of the congregation who donated to the burial at the time might remember more specifics When he got there another priest intercept him, and insisted they pray about it. But George was skeptical and honestly kind of annoyed. He had prayed about the case before, and up until now, nothing but persistence and science had gotten him anywhere. the crocus bridge and talking to the victims. You guys, if there's anything left, help me. George agreed to pray with the priest. And when he left the church about 15 minutes later, he called a local officer in New Mexico

who he'd gotten to know, just as a courtesy to let him know that he'd be continuing to poke around the graveyard in their jurisdiction that weekend. And the officer said, wait, I think I know exactly where your Jane Doe is. Turns out this officer and his cousin had been digging a grave for their grandparents years before and accidentally discovered an unmarked grave. George is your victim and it was. George checked the bag and it had the right markings of the office that did

Jane Doe's autopsy and the corpse was missing a skull. They sent up Jane Doe's remains for testing and it was immediately clear that she was going to be harder to identify because there was no hit in Codas, a national database for DNA. Then one day in 2014, someone contacted George and it changed everything. One day I get an email from a person and it's a, as I am, it's your sleuth guide. And there's people that just get on those networks and try to connect them. And he says, I think your victim might be Margaret Walden from California. And here's why.

And I look at it and I'm like, oh, yeah. In May of 2014, George sent Margaret's sister photos of a jacket and necklace that was collected with the body was found. She called George this same day and said, yes, those items belonged to her sister. She specifically knew the necklace because she'd been the one to give it to Margaret in 1973. She also recognized Margaret's jacket. Margaret's sister told George they reported Margaret missing

in the summer of 1982, after she left San Diego to go camping in Colorado with her boyfriend and then never returned. The last time they ever heard from her was when she called home from Durango, Colorado, asking for money. She had told her family that she wanted some cash in order to leave Colorado and come home. When they reported her missing, Margaret's family didn't even know the name of her boyfriend. They guessed it was Steve. So when her body was found

in Colorado and an investigation started, there wasn't enough information out there to lead police to a missing person from San Diego. George got more confirmation a few months after first speaking with Margaret's sister. The New Mexico office of the medical investigator said that they were able to get a partial mitochondrial DNA matchback, and that showed with 98.27% probability that Jane Doe was Margaret Walden. And so we went to victims assistance in New Mexico and they paid for the cremation and got her home and I think her sister has her. With both of his Does, real identities confirmed, George continued trying to piece together their story.

What he learned was that in June of 1982, 39-year-old Margaret Walden had been a waitress near the naval base in San Diego. She and Stuart started dating, and after he escaped serving his short-sint of jail time at the naval base, they returned to the base one last time, and used Stuart's military ID to check out some camping gear, and then they drove to Colorado. Margaret got a job as a waitress in Durango, and Stewart got a job with a traveling carnival that was in Pagosa Springs for the Fourth of July. George said it was at the carnival

that Stewart got mixed up with a bad group of people. Based on his investigative work, George's theory is that a group of people killed Stewart over a small time drug payment and that Margaret was collateral damage. George felt so strongly of this was the case, just based on old interviews, new interviews and the physical evidence from the bus that he arrested two suspects, 33 years after

the murders. In 2016, 58-year-old Antoinette Palmer, also known as Tina Madrid, was arrested in Mesa, Arizona and booked on two counts of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Also arrested was 70-year-old Martín Martinez, who was picked up not far from the original crime scene where he lived, and he was booked on similar charges. Tina ended up telling police during one of her interrogations that Stewart had lived in her bus for about a month back in the early 80s. Except she told police his name was Richard Miller. She talked about you know the things that happened in the bus and she talked about knowing where they found the bodies. She's

oh yeah I know where those bodies were and that's all in the interview. Tina told police she had nothing to do with the double homicide, but other witnesses told investigators that Tina implicated herself several times. She would tell people, yeah, if you mess with me, I will kill you and throw you in a river just like I did the other people I killed in through in a river. Ultimately, the charges against Tina and Martine were dismissed, so they were never prosecuted. George said the reason for this was because the district attorney wanted more evidence before taking them to trial. Stuart's mom, Joanne, said they would like to see their

son's killers prosecute it, because as of now, whoever killed Stuart and Margaret got away with it. Despite the hurt of never getting justice for their son, the Simmons were able to give Stuart a proper and loving memorial service when they were given his remains. He loved the water, so they got an eternal reef, which is an environmentally safe reef with his cremation urn that is placed on the ocean floor as a permanent memorial. George and his wife were able to attend the ceremony. You can actually see some photos of the memorial on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. It's been 12 years since George decided to reinvestigate the case of the San Juan River

John and Jane Doe. He might not have a conviction to show for it, but knowing he helped two families find their lost loved ones was a rewarding outcome. If you get stuck, just open up from page one and go through it again. All the Colquay stuff tells you, you've missed something, there's got to be something more, you just wasn't going to give up. And he's not done. Even now, here we are again, and I still have hopes that somehow, you know, there will be arrests made in this. And I think what makes the best detective is not the smartest person in the world, or maybe geniuses aren't that

good at detectives, I think if someone does a quit, I think it's tenacity is the main thing. His tenacity obviously paid off, because when Stewart and Margaret's cold case cards were printed on a Colorado unsolved deck, it was back when Stewart had just been identified, but Margaret's name was still unknown. So on the Ace of Hearts, she's a Jane Doe, with just the police sketch that was sent out after her body was found. If you or someone you know has any information

about the murders of Stuart Simmons and Margaret Walden even after all these years, police want to know anything that could help strengthen their case. The hope is that the agency can get enough concrete testimony to finally be able to close the case and criminally charge the people responsible. So if you're a possible witness, you could be the missing piece of the puzzle needed for prosecution. Please call the Archuleta County Colorado Sheriff's Department at 970-264-8430.

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? What do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH