True Crime Campfire - Neighborhood Watch: The Kidnapping of Doe Roberts

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Small towns are interesting places. Everybody acts like they’re the “real” America—simple, safe places where life moves at a slower pace and everybody can trust everybody else. As true crime shows never tire of telling us, small town folks don’t even lock their doors. Crime just doesn’t happen there. Except of course, when it does. And then everybody talks about how the town has lost its innocence, and things will never be the same again. Not that some of that doesn’t have a basis in truth. But if you grew up in a small town, you know that’s not the whole story. See, people are people, no matter where they call home. And in a small town, where everybody tends to keep a close eye on everybody else’s business, and gossip can ruin a reputation faster than a summer storm can wreck a cookout, people can have an awful lot of incentive to keep their secrets…well, good and secret. And when something threatens to dredge up an inconvenient truth that they want to keep hidden, people can get desperate. And a desperate person is one of the most dangerous creatures on earth. Sources:Investigation Discovery's "Hometown Homicide," Episode "Hold the Line"Discovery's "FBI Files," Episode "Fatal Friendship"https://www.leagle.com/decision/19941206894sw2d31211197https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Martha_Doe_RobertsPatreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Small towns are interesting places. Everybody acts like they're the real America. Simple, safe places where life moves at a slower pace and everybody can trust everybody else. As true crime shows never tire of telling us, small town folks don't even lock their doors. Crime just doesn't happen there, except, of course, when it does. And then everybody talks about how the town has lost its innocence, and things will never be the same again. Not that some of that doesn't have a basis in truth, but if you grew up in a small town, you know that's not the whole story. See, people are people, no matter where they call home.

And in a small town where everybody tends to keep a close eye on everybody else's business and gossip can ruin a reputation faster than a summer storm can wreck a cookout, people can have an awful lot of incentive to keep their secrets. Well, good in secret. And when something threatens to dredge up an inconvenient truth that they want to keep hidden, people, can get desperate, and a desperate person is one of the most dangerous creatures on the earth. This is Neighborhood Watch, the abduction of Doe Roberts. So, campers, we're in Eats, Tennessee, a little bitty town about a half. half hour outside Memphis, Friday, August 7th, 1992. It was a beautiful, sunshiny summer day when

Alan Roberts came home after a long afternoon of sprucing up one of his residential real estate properties to get it ready for sale. He was feeling a little bit perplexed and a little bit annoyed, too. He'd gone out there to meet a potential buyer, and the guy never showed up. As Alan pulled up to his garage, he noticed the garage door was standing open. That was weird. His wife Doe never left that door open. He noticed her car in the garage and then he saw something else kind of odd. Doe's bike was standing in the driveway with the day's mail still in the basket from where she'd ridden up the driveway to get it. Huh. He went in the house and called out for Doe. No answer, and the house had that kind of heavy stillness houses get when they're empty. So he wandered around from room to room

looking for her. There was no note, and she wasn't there. But her asthma inhaler was, and when Alan saw it lying there on the kitchen counter, he felt a little jolt of fear. 65-year-old dough never went anywhere without her inhaler, ever. Alan was worried that maybe dough had gone out to do some gardening and collapsed. He went out and searched the property, but still, no dough. So he went back inside and started calling around to family and friends. Had anybody seen dough? Heard from her?

Person after person said, no, they sure hadn't. It was becoming increasingly clear. that something was wrong. Doe was missing. He paced around for a minute or so, then turned back around to the phone to call the police. But before he got to the phone, it rang. The voice on the other end of the line was strange, deep, male, with a hard-to-identify foreign accent. It said, We have your wife. By some miracle, Alan had the presence of mind to hit record on his answering machine, thinking at least he could get this on tape for the police, but then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The voice

said, take that tape out of the recorder and smash it now. How the hell did the caller know he was recording? Panicked, Alan did as he was told. Took the cassette tape out of the answering machine with shaking hands, dropped it on the floor and stomped on it until it was ruined. The voice continued. We want $100,000. Do not call the police. We are watching everything you do. You do

everything I say, or we will split her head open. split her head open. His sweet wife, Doe, as gentle as her name, who'd never hurt anybody in her whole life, Alan felt sick at the thought. Alan told the caller he'd pay the money, he'd do anything to get Doe back safely. There was a click, and then Alan was left holding the phone, listening to a dial tone, and realizing that the caller hadn't left any instructions on when, where, or how to pay the ransom. Alan called his nephew, asked, What do I do? He said not to involve the police. But the nephew said, look, Uncle Allen, you cannot handle this by yourself. You have to call the

police. So, Alan called. It didn't take long for local cops to arrive and only a little longer for agents from the FBI field office in Memphis. As I'm sure you campers know, the FBI often gets involved in abduction cases because there's always a chance that the victim may have been transported across state lines, thereby putting the case into federal jurisdiction. Soon, Alan and Doe's house was swarming with investigators, as well as a few family and friends who showed up for moral support. Alan just seemed to be in shock. He sat on the couch and just kind of stared unless somebody asked him a direct question,

and even then he seemed to struggle to come up with an answer. He seemed reluctant to talk about the ransom call. He said he was worried that involving the police and the FBI might be putting Doe in more danger. But he wasn't exactly uncooperative. It just seemed like he was kind of stunned. Alan and Doe Roberts had been married for 43 years by this point. They never had kids, so they had lots of time and energy to spend on each other. They liked to travel and garden and go square dancing, and they were close to their families,

especially their nieces and nephews who thought of Aunt Doe as pretty much an angel on earth. She was one of those people it's easy to love, and you can really see it in pictures of her. She had a cute kind of pixie-ish face with a page boy haircut, and she was always smiling. In one picture, her arms are covered in parrots, and she looked exactly like I would have had parrots lined up on my arms, by which I mean, her face was pure joy. Oh, absolutely. I would be grinning ear to ear. In another snapshot, you can tell she's laughing out loud. Dole liked people, not just her people, but all people.

And according to her family, she was always looking for ways to help and support and befriend them. In other words, she was a good egg. And people felt the same way about Alan. Over the years, they'd made millions of dollars with several different business ventures. And since retiring, Allen had invested in residential real estate, so they had wealth, but they weren't the type to flaunt it. Their focus in life was each other, their family and friends, their Square Dancing Club, and the Eids United Methodist Church. You ever been square dancing, KT? No.

No, no, I have not. Did you need to think about it? Well, I've done like the two-step. Is that square? That's not square dancing. Like, one, two, one-two. Well, think about it. That's two.

You need four. You need four. Yeah, I have four to be a square. I don't actually know. It might be square dancing. I don't remember anything called a two-step. But it's been a while. We learned it in school when I was a young-in.

See, that's how southern I am. It's actually. so much fun and it takes a lot of skill too. The outfits are a little bit unfortunate. I'm not going to lie, but we got to take a little rough with the smooth, right? And I mean, at the end of the day, what's not to like about a bolo tie? I mean, come on, easy on, easy off, no knots to worry about tie and I'm going to do it. Yeah, and there's the added benefit of bolo ties that you automatically look like you know how to rustle some cattle. I don't know what cattle wrestling is, but, like, you look like you could do it.

Yeah, and it seems like the kind of thing that, like, a badass person would do. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alan told the FBI that he'd last seen Doe that morning at breakfast. Then he'd gone out to one of his residential properties to meet a prospective buyer, but the guy never showed up, so he'd done some landscaping work for a while,

thinking maybe the buyer would show up late, but he hadn't. So he came home to find Doe missing. As I'm sure you can imagine, the FBI agency ears perked up at this. You had an appointment who didn't show up? Tell us about that. Alan said that the day before, Doe had taken a phone call from a guy who said his name was Sam Wagner. She said she'd had a little trouble understanding him, but she did understand that he was interested in buying one of the homes Alan had listed for sale. He wanted to come and look at it the next morning, so Doe made an appointment for Alan for 10.30 and told him about it when he came

home. Why? Did she have trouble understanding the guy? Because he spoke with an odd accent, she said. Uh-huh. An accent, like the one the kidnapper had? Everybody's eyebrows hit the ceiling at this. It looked like the agents had just uncovered their first lead, the mysterious Sam Wagner. They made a note to look into the guy. This is like the beginning of an episode of Law and Order, isn't it? God, it totally is. It's just like that little nugget about the guy with the accent. Yeah. You know, it's just perfect. It's just like a TV show or a movie.

Exactly. Of course, they were also side-eyeing Alan in a major way. I mean, kidnappings for ransom were not exactly common in Eads, Tennessee. So the house showed no signs of forced entry, though, or struggle. And what struck Alan's family as shock looked more like

unusual calm for some of the investigators. And it didn't take them long to realize that Alan's alibi, doing yard work on the house, he was trying to sell, didn't cover enough of the day to put him in the clear. So Alan was by no means out of the woods. Even if they did find this Sam Wagner dude and prove he was involved, that didn't mean Alan couldn't be in on it with him. Yeah, and all this was running through the agent's minds. on that first night of Doe's disappearance,

but for now they installed a trap and trace on Alan's phone line, and later that same night, the kidnapper called back. Same strange accent as before. He said Doe was safe, for now. He said he knew the cops were listening, and he demanded Alan smash the tape again. So Alan went out in the driveway and stomped it,

with everybody wondering if the kidnapper had someone hiding in the woods nearby watching. It was creepy. However, he did manage to keep the kidnapper on the line long enough for the FBI to trace it to a pay phone not too far away. But of course, by the time they got there, the caller was gone. Ain't that always the way? By the next day, the whole town knew about the kidnapping, and as you can imagine, they were

freaked to feck out. And they rallied around Allen, of course. The Eads United Methodist Church held a prayer vigil. The news was there, and church members told reporters how great the Robertses were, and how they couldn't imagine who would do something like this to them. Alan spoke to a reporter, but he wasn't up to saying much, just, I will meet any demand for her safe return. He still seemed to be overcome with shock. So his friend Charles Lord, one of the church leaders, stepped up and talked to the media forum. After that, Charles became a sort of spokesperson for Alan whenever reporters came around sticking cameras in his face.

The FBI were working on the Sam Wagner lead already, but they also wanted to see if Alan could pass a polygraph. Now, Alan seemed kind of startled to be asked, but he agreed right away, and passed the test pretty easily. That didn't put him in the clear, of course, but it made the investigators feel a little bit better about the guy. They weren't ruling him out, though. Especially since some of the oh-so supportive church members they'd questioned had told them that there'd been obvious tension between Alan and Doe at church the Sunday before she went missing. Tension about what? They didn't know, but they'd noticed it. and a few wondered out loud

if Alan had been having an affair he was quite the gent at that square dancing club now this seems unfair to me by the way you have to dance with multiple people at a square dance that's how it works I mean it's not just two people people are always slinging each other around and passing their partners off to other dancers

it's you know it's a free-for-all so a man shouldn't be punished for being a damn fine dancer now should he but anyway that's what they said gossipy little shits but I mean I guess in fairness we have to acknowledge the roiling maelstrom of raw sexuality that a square dancing club must inevitably be. I mean, who knows what kind of dark temptations might overcome a man once those petticoats

get to swing in. Right? My grandma tells me the clogging club is just as bad, by the way. If not worse, total meat market. And that's despite the fact that their youngest member is 73. Everyone knows that the square is the sexiest geometric shape. So the ladies could hardly be blamed if Alan was irresistible to them. All those even edges, right angles. Sorry, uh, you were saying? Just like peeling an onion.

Anywho, Alan passed his polly, plus he consented to a thorough search of the house and property, which turned up nothing of interest. And an investigation of the Roberts bank records, etc., turned up nothing other than the ordinary life they seemed to have lived for the past 43 years. Neither Doe nor Alan. seemed to be involved in anything shady. Meanwhile, an extensive search had completely failed to produce any house hunting accented specimen named Sam Wagner.

The guy just didn't seem to exist. Now, this would throw suspicion back on Allen, but the investigators knew somebody had called the house that first night. I mean, they were there for that second call. So it was starting to look as though Sam Wagner had been a ploy by the kidnapper to get Alan out of the house and make it easier to snatch dough. Which is so flippin creepy, just... It's so devious and mean, like, arranging for that poor lady to be homo alone. Of course, this still didn't totally eliminate Alan as a possible suspect. And as the weeks went by, some people in town called the detectives to make sure they knew that, in their opinion, Alan was acting awful suspiciously.

After kind of going to ground for the first couple weeks, Doe was missing, Alan started going to the square dances again. And he didn't go alone. He took a lady friend with him. Now, this struck the Eidsians, Eids, Edites, Eids, Eids, this struck the people of Eids as sketchy as hell. They didn't like it. They didn't think it was how a grieving or worried husband should be acting. But Alan's nephew said, look, lay off him. He's going through hell, and all he's trying to do is distract himself a little.

So stop being such judgy fucks. Yeah, stop being such judgy fucks. So the investigation wasn't going very well for a while there. No Sam Wagner, no hard evidence against Allen, still no specifics on how to deliver the ransom payment. It was frustrating. Alan was so frustrated that against FBI's advice, he held a press conference and offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to Do's safe return. Yeah, and the reason why they tend to tell people not to do that is because they're afraid it's going to bring every fraud out of the woodwork to try and get that money with just, you know, gobs and gobs of false. tips. And then they're the ones that have to

certify them. To chase those down and it's just a huge waste of their time. Exactly. Everything got quiet for a while. The FBI set up a headquarters and Eads and everybody just kind of held their breath. And then, in October, two months after

Doe disappeared, the kidnapper called Alan again. He ordered him to drive to a pay phone so the call couldn't be traced or recorded. And of course Alan did as he was told. The phone was already ringing when he pulled up to the booth. This time, the kidnapper's ransom had gone up.

Instead of $100,000, he was now demanding $185. Such a weirdly specific number. Alan said, fine, you'll have it. Whatever you say. Now, can you please give me some proof that my wife is still alive? And then tell us where to drop the money? But the kidnapper just hung up the phone. What the hell?

And that was it for a while. The FBI were still looking askance at Alan, and Alan was still squiring his lady friends around to dinner and square dancing. People were confused, and they were suspicious. And then, oh, campers, and then. A woman named Melinda Lancaster called a press conference to announce that she had gotten call from the kidnapper. She said she didn't think the kidnapper wanted to deal with Alan Roberts anymore, so she pleaded

with the kidnapper directly. She said, if he was willing, she'd be happy to be the go-between. All the town wanted was to get Doe back. Bizarre. But Melinda was only the first. After that press conference, all kinds of Eadsian started getting calls from the kidnapper. He was burning up the phone lines all over town. Oh, my God.

It was always the same voice with that odd accent. It sounded kind of like a white person doing a racist imitation of an Asian voice. That's exactly what it sounds like to me, yeah. The caller gave different specific details to different people, but the common thread was that Doe was still alive and Alan was involved in her disappearance. He said Alan had wanted out of his marriage to Doe, so he'd hired a kidnapper. And then, the bastard had gone and screwed the guy over by refusing to pay. Pam. Oh, can we say Fargo?

You all seen that movie? Where William H. Macy hires a couple of doofuses to kidnap his wife for ransom, and it just all goes horribly wrong. It's a great movie. Fantastic. And then, during one of the calls, he announced that the ransom price had dropped to $80,000. Now, who saw that one coming? Not me.

Any of you campers ever heard of a kidnap or lowering the ransom price? He's like, people say I'm insane to offer savings like this. But I say, what matters in this game is volume. You've got to move merchandise. The kind of deal you can only find at Crazy Kidnapper's Coffee Clatch. For weeks, various Eads residents would pop up on the evening news, reading stilted, prepared statements describing whatever the kidnapper has said them the night before, and then pleading with him to give specific instructions for the delivery of the money

so they could finally get dough back safe and sound. It was bizarre. So bizarre. This case is like something David Lynch would come up with. I keep expecting the log lady to pop up, you know, or like a little guy to pop out and start dancing around and speaking backwards. It's just, it's exactly like Twin Peaks. Exactly. Except Southern.

So despite the townspeople's pleas, not to mention Allen's reward offered, the kidnapper never let anybody talk to Doe and never offered any proof she was still alive. And he still never gave any instructions for dropping off the third. ransom money. Now this was very weird, and to the FBI, very suspicious. See, kidnappers for ransom don't tend to do that. They tend to, you know, want to get their ransom money. That's kind of the whole point. Yeah, every second spent without their money is time wasted and more opportunity to get caught. Exactly. So, of course, the FBI agents were starting to wonder what this guy's motive really was. It didn't seem to be financial, so what was it? Was it personal? And if so, did that point right back to Alan?

Most of the townspeople seemed to think so. Even Alan's good friend Charles Lord, the one who'd stepped in to talk to the media for him in the early days, was having some creeping doubts, and it was eating him up. He told the press he was having trouble eating or sleeping. And finally, he asked to speak to the agents. He didn't want to betray his old friend,

but his conscience had been nagging at him. Alan and Doe had been having some problems, he said. There was another woman. He just felt like they needed to know. That was all Charles was willing to say right then, but it was enough for the agents to lug Alan in for another hours-long interrogation. And it was enough to show up with a backhoe

and start digging around in his backyard. They found nothing. Alan just kept saying the same things he always had. He wasn't involved. He didn't know where Doe was. He just wanted her back. And then campers, shit got even weirder. On March 4, 1993,

WMC action news anchor Joe Birch answered the phone at his desk to hear the kidnapper's creepy-clipped voice. Intrepid reporter that he was, he immediately started recording, and he kept the man on the phone for several minutes. And this time, the kidnapper had a bombshell to drop. He said, Robert's woman die. She died this morning, uh, 9 o'clock. Birch asked, well, where is she?

Can we go and get her body? Why are you doing this? The kidnapper's response to this was to get pissy, and tell Birch he was asking way too many questions. He said, We now leave this tragic situation. You pass information to FBI. And then he hung up. So, of course,

Bertch shared the tape with the feds, and they confirmed that the voice was the kidnappers or as near as they could tell. And they told Birch that if he called again, he should record that call too, try to get as much information out of him as he could. And lo and behold, a couple days later, he did call again.

And this time, he said Doe was alive. Like, for Pete's sake, bro, this kidnapper, whoever he is, is a hot mess. I'm sorry, he's all over the place with this thing. Make up your mind what you want to do, you feckin weirdo. You're just confusing everybody. You know? Like, what is this? This is terrible.

This is just amateur hours, push league. Anywho, so Birch asked him, as, you know, everybody on God's green earth had by now, where the flippin'n' fuck he wanted the ransom money dropped off. So they could get dough back and put a lid on this thing. thing once and for all. And for the first time, finally, he gave an answer. The kidnapper wanted Alan to drop off the money at a local mall, and he wanted him to come alone. Okay, so thank God we finally got something specific out of this guy. So Alan got the cash together, got in his car, headed over there at the appointed time, and one of his nephews insisted on following in his own

car and posted up at a gas station across from the mall, just to kind of keep an eye out. And of course, the police were there, too, recording the parking lot and everything. And Alan waited for hours and hours with the money, and Bupkis. Nobody showed to pick it up. Just, ugh, this guy. Okay. So, y'all remember Charles Lord, right? Ellen's buddy-slash spokesperson who liked the guy, but was also starting to have some

uncomfortable suspicions about Alan. Well, he stepped back into the limelight at this point to hold a press conference of his own. He said to the kidnapper, look, we want to give you this money. For the love of God, please, let us give you this money. It's like that Futurama meme, shut up and take my money. That's just please. But Charles said if they were going to pay this ransom, they were going to need some proof of life. Basically, he was like, look, you've been dicking us around long enough, my guy.

We need to hear from Doe or no deal. Possibly, because he'd put himself in front of the cameras again, Charles soon started getting letters from the kidnapper. That's new. They were straight out of an old movie, too, like the kind with cut out letters from magazines spelling out the words. And there was no postage, so it was clear that these had been left in the mailbox by the kidnapper himself, or somebody working with him. So to try to catch the guy red-handed, the FBI set up a surveillance camera in a birdhouse across the street from Charles's mailbox. A birdhouse. They waited.

Charles did get a couple more letters, but equipment failure prevented any usable footage of whoever dropped them off. The investigation just could not catch a break. Oh, my God. By summer of 93, Allen's family were getting thoroughly fed up with the investigators. It had been a year since Doe was ripped away from them. The yellow ribbons people had tied around trees and hopes of bringing her home were starting to fade. Oh, that's so sad. a couple of Allen's nephews were feeling restless.

They felt like they had a good idea of who had taken their sweet Aunt Doe, and they had a feeling the investigators were thinking the same thing, even if they couldn't say so. This, by the way, is really common in missing persons and homicide investigations. Detectives really can't share all of their information with the victim's family members because it could seriously compromise the investigation. Because you just don't know who's involved, you know, and you don't know who might say something to somebody and then you've tipped them off it. So they really can't do it as much as they might like to keep, you know, the family in the loop. Right. So anytime you're like watching a press conference and you're like, why aren't they telling us anything? They cannot. They can't, you know? I mean, because they might ruin the whole thing. They're not, they're not sitting on their hands. They are not sitting on their hands. It can give the impression that nothing is happening. It can give the impression that nothing is happening. It can give the impression that nothing is happening. even when that impression is wrong, as it was in this case, as it turned out, the Knox brothers and the investigators were onto the same suspect.

Anyway, the nephews, William Paul, and Larry Knox got together and came up with a plan. And I got to say, any plan launched by a pair of dudes who call themselves the Knox brothers sounds like a winner to me. And I also feel like it's probably going to involve like a car chase at some point, like Smoky and the Bandit kind of action and maybe like a CB radio. Like at some point somebody's going to say something like, all right, Billy, I'm right on his tail.

We're eastbound a down, good buddy, come back. You know, it's true. It's true. The Knox brothers absolutely make moonshine in their bathtub. And they would share it with everyone free of charge, which is my idea of a good old boy. Absolutely. You might go blind drinking it,

but you'll have a good time. Basically, The Knox brothers decided to set a trap for their suspect. One of the brothers had a phone number that was unlisted, and the suspect didn't know that. Back then, pre-cell phone era, having an unlisted number was kind of uncommon. So if you gave your phone number to somebody, they'd assume it was in the phone book, publicly available to anybody who wanted it. So one afternoon, Larry casually gave out this unlisted number to the man they suspected of kidnapping dough

and campers, lo and behold, the next day, the kidnapper called that number. He was back to insisting that Doe was alive, and the Knox brothers got him to agree to meet the next night at a motel to hand off the ransom money. The brothers got to the motel early and laid out the cash on the bed. They covered it with a sheet, sat down with their guns on their laps, and waited. About an hour in, there was a knock. on the door. And standing there, just as the brothers had expected, was family friend, church leader, media

spokesperson, and pillar of the community, Charles Lord. William Knox said his first reaction was, quote, I just wanted to twist his head off. Yeah, I bet. This, of course, was the man who, weeks earlier, had gone on TV to demand that the kidnapper provide proof that Doe was still alive. The man who had told the press that ever since Doe went missing, he hadn't been able to eat or sleep. The man who had been there for Allen in private while making sure to tell the FBI that he was allegedly having an affair on Doe. Charles must have seen the looks on the Knox Brothers' faces when he walked into the room because he immediately took a step back and said,

no, no, you don't understand. I'm just here to help. I'm just here to help. In fact, he offered to take it from there. He said, look, now there's no sense in all of us. risk in our lives here. I'll make the drop off to the kidnapper. You all go on home, and once I've made the exchange, I'll let you know. Unsurprisingly, the brothers weren't having any of this. William said, no way, you're going to get dough killed. And then, our buddy Charles, well, he stepped in it. He did what we might call a little oopsie. He was getting a little bit riled up with William, and he said, what are you even doing here? You weren't supposed to come. Your mother was supposed to be here.

Uh, how do you know that, Charles? Nobody but the kidnapper could have known that he demanded Larry bring his mother to the ransom pickup, which, by the way, like, they hadn't brought their poor mom, of course, and it's creepy to me that the kidnapper even asked them to, like, was he thinking she'd make an easy hostage if things got hairy or something? I don't know, but yeah, why would they bring their mother, you know, their elderly mother? So, William said, how do you know my mother was supposed to be here, Charles? and Charles just kirked out.

He lunged for William and they had like a brief little tussle and then Charles Lord just turned on his heel and bolted out the door. And when the brothers called the FBI to report what had just happened, they were not surprised. At least they weren't surprised by the identity of the suspect. They were already looking hard at Charles Lord. I imagine they were pretty rattled by the Knox Brothers' little Scooby-Doo Adventures trap, but, hey, you know, nobody got your time.

killed, so no harm, no foul, I guess, right? Strictly speaking, usually not a great idea, but in this case, very effective and helpful. So, what the family didn't know was that the feds had been uncovering some very interesting stuff about Mr. Lord. They got suspic, you see, when their surveillance

camera just happened to fail every time one of those kidnapper letters showed up in Charles's mailbox. They got even more suspicion when the same thing happened with the trap and trace they put on his phone in case of ransom calls. Every time a call supposedly came in, somehow there'd be an equipment failure. Yeah.

And then, one afternoon, Alan called one of the FBI agents with an intriguing story. He'd had an odd interaction with his buddy Charles Lord, he said. They'd gone for a drive the evening before, and suddenly Charles, like, pulled a car over and said that he wasn't sure if Alan was aware of this, but he had some, quote, underworld connections. And if Alan could give him some money to help grease the wheels a little, he could use those connections to find dough. He said that as Charles spoke, he noticed that he had a gun under his jacket. Part tip from True Crime Campfire. Dudes with actual underworld connections don't need to brag about their underworld connections.

Well, Katie, how else are you supposed to know? If they don't tell you? You don't know. It's just like the spies who go around saying, the world's greatest secret agent. You got to let everybody know that you got under the world contacts. So the whole thing was bizarre, and it had left Alan with an unsettled feeling. I bet, right?

Not only that, but the investigators hadn't managed to come up with one iota of evidence to support Charles Lord's allegation that Alan was having an affair before Doe went missing. So they got to thinking, why would Alan's good friend want to make something like that up? And when the agents dug into Charles Lord's background and financial records, they were shocked at what they found. Lord had embezzled $150,000 from the Memphis Defend Federal Credit Union where he'd worked years earlier. So they started digging deeper, and they came up with a bombshell. Until recently, Lord's position with the Eads United Methodist Church had given him access to church funds. And when they had a forensic accountant take a look at the church's books,

they discovered that Lord had stolen over $77,000 from the church. And this is a small town church. So that's a lot of money to embezzle. And Camper's, guess who the church's new bookkeeper was? The only person who could have figured it out about this outrageous embezzlement. Yep, you guessed it. Doe Roberts. It was time to haul in Mr. Lord for an interview.

And when the investigators laid out all the evidence they'd amassed against him and he realized he facing the death penalty, Charles cracked. In exchange for the DA taking the death penalty off the table, he sat down with the investigators and laid out the whole horrible story. Actually, scratch that. He laid out three different stories over the course of three interviews. His first story was this. He'd called Doe the morning before her disappearance, posing as Sam Wagner, to make sure Alan would be out of the house the next day, and Doe would be home alone. After Alan left the house, Lord said he drove up to the Robert's house and met Doe as she was riding her bike back from the mailbox. Something about that really hurts my heart, thinking of her on her little bike.

I know. Just, oh, Lord. He said he pulled up beside her and said, Doe, Alan's been in a bad accident. You need to come with me. But before she could get into his truck, Doe collapsed. He thought it was probably a heart attack from the shock of the news about Alan. He said when he realized she wasn't breathing, he panicked. He picked up her body, loaded into the bed of his truck, drove to a nearby river, and tossed her over a bridge.

When a thorough search failed to turn up any evidence of a body in the river, the investigators confronted Charles again and asked him to take a polygraph exam. At that, Charles admitted, okay, okay, I maybe didn't tell you the entire truth. Oh my God, I'm so sick of this guy. Enter story number two. In story two, he and Doe had been having an affair. And on the morning, yeah. Yep. On the morning, Doe went missing.

He got Alan out of the house so they could talk about their relationship. He said they had sex, and then they started talking about Charles' money troubles. And when Charles asked Doe for a loan, he said she got furious with him, and they started arguing. Doe said, is that the only reason you're interested in me for my money? Lord said at that point he kind of went fuzzy. He couldn't remember exactly how it happened, but he thought he'd smothered her with a pillow and a rage.

And again, once he realized she wasn't breathing, he panicked. I didn't put her in a river, he said. I buried her on my property. So the investigators went out there to search, and behind a compost pile in his backyard, they found the body of Doe Robert. in a shallow grave. He said he'd already had the grave dug,

not because he premeditated the murder, of course, but because he'd been digging a new compost pit. Oh, sure. He said he covered her body in lime to speed up the decomposition. Then he'd poured in some concrete on top of her and covered the spot with dry leaves. Later that night, he made the first ransom call to Alan Roberts. An autopsy would later show that dough

had most likely still been alive when he buried her. She had dirt in her throat and lungs. Oh, it's so awful. So again, investigators went back to Charles and confronted him. Look, dude, the autopsy is going to tell us what happened,

and we don't think you've told us the truth yet. If you want this plea deal, you're going to tell the truth and you're going to pass a polygraph. Now, otherwise, you can take your chances at trial. Charles finally seemed to get it. And enter story number three.

He admitted he'd lied about some stuff in the previous two interviews, but he said now he was ready to tell the whole truth. And Camper's, it is an ugly truth. So, content warning on this next part for some graphic stuff and a brief mention of sexual assault. If you fast forward about a minute and a half or so, that should be enough to get you past it. Lord said he'd lied about having an affair with Doe. He just needed money, and because he's about as bright as a dead Firefly's ass, he decided

that kidnapping Doe Roberts was the best way. to get it. I'm sure it didn't hurt that in addition to being wealthy, Doe also just happened to be the one person on earth who could jam him up for embezzling money from the church. He said he planned the kidnapping for months, and he admitted he dug the grave ahead of time. Oh, you mean you didn't have a conveniently time need for a compost pit, Charles? Say it ain't so. There are very few legitimate reasons to have a grave-sized hole, Doug, and most of them are lies to cover up, like, real grave digging. He said he didn't necessarily plan on killing her, but he knew it was a possibility and he wanted to be prepared. I guess he was a boy scout that way. I think he's full of shit on

this. I mean, Doe knew him. How did he think he was going to kidnap her and get away with it unless he killed her? So, in my opinion, murder was always part of his plan. He said, once Alan was out of the house on the morning of August 7th, he pulled up to the Robert's house and gave Doe the whole song and dance about Alan having just been in a serious accident. So Doe got into his truck, thinking Charles was going to take her to the hospital to see Alan. Instead, he drove her to his

house and took her up to a little apartment he had above his garage, and with his wife, in the house next door, he bound Doe to a chair. He put duct tape over her eyes, and then he forced her to swallow a monster dose of pain medication and sedatives. And

once she passed out from the drugs, he undressed her and burned her clothes. Now why the hell would he do that if he wasn't planning on killing her? He's going to give her back naked? Come on. Yeah. And he was very methodical about it. He even cut off the buttons and snaps so that he could dispose of them separately since he knew that they wouldn't burn. And he didn't want anybody finding like little rivets and snaps from her jeans in his fire pit. So obviously he was being careful not to leave any evidence. He made the first ransom call then from a pay phone, and then he went back home and saw his wife.

And his poor wife, who was totally clueless about what was going on in their garage, like she was not involved in this. She told him, Alan Roberts called earlier to ask if we'd seen Doe. And Charles just said, nope, I haven't seen her. And then, like, spent a couple of hours with his wife before going back to the apartment, where Doe was still tied up and completely blitzed out from sedatives. And at this point, he said he sexually assaulted her and then smothered her with a pill. and he thought he'd killed her, and he buried her in the pit that he'd prepared as her grave.

Now, later on, Lord said the only reason he'd finally told the truth, like admitted to the sexual assault and the pills, was that he knew the autopsy was going to reveal it all anyway. Finally, investigators felt like they'd heard the truth about Doe's murder, or at least as close as they were going to get, and they arranged for Lord to plead guilty to aggravated rape and first-degree murder. At his sentencing, a clinical psychologist named Dr. John Hudson testified that he devaluated Charles Lord and found that he had many of the traits of antisocial and histrionic personality disorders. Lack of empathy, narcissism, superficiality, lack of respect for

authority and societal norms, and extreme self-centeredness. But he was by no means, quote unquote insane. He knew exactly what he was doing when he kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered Doe Roberts. And his motive was money. He was a cold, calculating monster, and that

was that. Yeah, and a manipulator to the core. I think he was getting off on involving the whole town in his little play, his little nightmare, calling people and putting on that ridiculous accent and getting the TV stations involved and everything. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

he was probably enjoying the idea of himself as a master criminal. Yeah, he completely thought he was like Professor Moriarty. I have no doubt of that. Absolutely. Putting one over on all the saps who thought he was a great guy, while, of course, trying desperately to figure out how to actually get a hold of the ransom money, dumbass never seemed to manage that, did he? Yeah, he didn't think that part through.

Anyway, Charles Lord was sentenced to life in prison, and he was there until 2016, at which time he left in a body bag. It's a hell of a thing when a pillar of the community falls from grace, especially when they fall this hard. We see it a lot, and yet somehow it seems to always surprise us. Maybe that should tell us something about putting people up on a pedestal and convincing ourselves that there are places where crime doesn't happen. Yeah, and that just because somebody puts on a good face,

church leader or deacon or community leader or whatever, that that means they're truly virtuous. We're so good at judging books by their covers, aren't we? You know, the pastor must be a great guy, but that girl with the tattoos and piercings and short skirts, well, she must be up to something shady. If those are your standards for evaluating whether somebody is up to no good,

you need different standards. Because as we've seen time and time again, evil can come in all kinds of different packaging, and so can goodness and kindness and generosity and love. This is such a wild story, and, of course, at its center is a woman who was the opposite of her killer. Doe Roberts was a lovely person, and so was her husband Alan, by the way. And one of the casualties of this case was Alan's reputation in his community.

And after Charles Lord was outed as the villain in this case, Alan got up behind the pulpit at the Eads United Methodist Church one Sunday, and he let the congregation have it. He said they'd broken his heart by not supporting him, By gossiping about his poor little square dance nights where all he was doing was trying to get a little human contact so he didn't go mad. And by spreading all kinds of nonsense rumors about him having an affair or not seeming like he was grieving enough for his missing wife. He said he wanted them to strike his name off the church membership roles immediately. And then he walked out and he never went back.

And I say good for him. I'd have done the same damn thing. Absolutely. And this case is actually a perfect example of somebody not reacting how they quote unquote should. to grief. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I've been guilty of that of saying, oh, that's suspicious. He's taking girls out to dinner and everything. I mean, we think we've all been guilty of that. Oh, and we talk about it on the show all the time of suspects, not acting, quote unquote, correctly. And I think there's a line. There's a fine line of, you know, I can't blame Alan for square dancing. And I, you know, I can't say now that I wouldn't have. But it's not super weird. He just wanted to go out. and have a conversation with somebody not about his missing wife. And the people who were close to him knew how badly he was hurting. Of course.

And knew that this was the way that he was trying to save his own life. You know, that that was the one thing that kind of made him feel human. But then when he was in his alone hours, he was absolutely miserable because the love of his life was missing. And honestly, if you look at this case as from an investigator's standpoint, to me, it would be awfully strange if Alan were guilty for him to be drawing a out like this for a year and calling TV stations or even allowing an accomplice to do such a thing if he had any control over the accomplice anyway. That just doesn't strike me as a spouse killing type of a thing. So if they've really been thinking about it, that might have occurred to them that why would Alan if he were guilty? Like surely he would want to sweep this shit under the rug as quickly

as possible and move on. And that's not what happened. Exactly. You know. Apparently, Alan did go on to remarry and have some happiness in his life after the dust settled on the case, although he never stopped grieving for Doe. She was the love of his life, and he missed her awfully. So sad. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again

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