True Crime Campfire - Wrapped Around Her Finger: The Murder of Ron Whitehead

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Two of the closest bonds a person can have are with a spouse and with a child. Ideally, in the first you're a loving partner, and in the second, a guide and a caregiver. Of course, real life doesn't always match the ideal, and both of those relationships can get twisted and strange. Sometimes your spouse and your child can even become the deadliest enemies. Join us for a bizarre story of lust, greed and motherhood turned dark. Sources:Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/woman-sentenced-to-22-years-in-prison-for-plotting-slaying-of-her-husband/Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/des-moines-murder-for-hire-brings-25-year-prison-terms/Murderpedia, various articles: https://murderpedia.org/female.O/o/ogden-whitehead.htm#google_vignetteInvestigation Discovery's "Mother May I Murder," episode "Mommy's Little Sex Dungeon"Oxygen's "Snapped," episode "Velma Ogden-Whitehead"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome 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. Two of the closest bonds a person can have are with a spouse and with a child. Ideally, in the first, you're a loving partner, and in the second, a guide and a caregiver. Of course, real life doesn't always match the ideal, and both of those relationships can get twisted and strange. Sometimes your spouse and your child can even become the deadliest enemies.

This is wrapped around her finger, the murder of Ron Whitehead. So, campers, for this one, we're in Des Moines, Washington, a suburb, just south of Seattle. March 18, 2005, a little after 5.30 in the morning. The city was just starting to wake up, with a few early commuters already on the roads. Unless they'd really loaded up on coffee, a lot of those drivers were still probably kind of sleepy, but the people waiting at the intersection of 8th and 188th streets were about to get a rude awakening. A gunshot rang out in the pre-dawn darkness. A moment later, a black Mustang waiting at the intersection started rolling slowly forward.

The driver's side door opened, and a body was kicked out onto the asphalt where it lay still. Three more gunshots crackled from the open door, and then the door closed and the Mustang sped away. Police and paramedics got there fast, blocking off the traffic and securing the scene, but it was clear they could do nothing for the victim. One of the shots had hit him in the head. He was dead, blood pooling around him as he lay face down on the road. One shot to the head, three more in his back. Whoever had killed this man wanted to be sure.

The media, on very little evidence, described the murder as a deadly carjacking right away. The investigators had different ideas early on, but they didn't see any need to correct the reports. It's not exactly a bad thing to have criminals think you're barking up the wrong tree. ID in his pocket gave them the victim's name, Ron Whitehead, a 61-year-old computer program manager at Boeing, the aircraft company. He'd worked at Boeing in one way or another since he was a teenager, and he was well-liked there, a calm, solid guy who could get along with anybody. By 61, he was mustached and mostly bald and had a little bit of a Sean Connery and the Untouchables and the Last Crusade thing going on.

It's not a bad look. March 18th had been a normal day for him, up before five and on his way to work not long after. The shooting had happened along his normal route. There was nothing to suggest anything unusual in his routine. that morning, or that Ron had been aware of anything wrong. Ron had two grown kids from his first marriage and two stepkids from his second. His daughter Kimberly got a call telling her to come to the police station right away. On the news, she could see a body, covered in a yellow tarp, lying in the middle of a road beside a police car.

I'm sure it made her heart freeze. Ron Whitehead had grown up in Seattle in the 40s and 50s, and he'd lived his whole life either in the city or the suburbs. He got married in 1966 and had two kids, Jim and Kimberly. That first marriage fizzled out, and in the late 80s, he hit it off with a co-worker at Boeing, a woman named Velma Ogden. Before long, she and Ron moved in together, along with Velma's six-year-old daughter, Angela, and her toddler son, John. Ron treated Angela and John as if they were his own kids. They called him Dad. Ron and Velma made it official a few years later, and by the time of his death, they'd been married for 10 years.

A lot of people loved Ron, and losing him shook them to the core, especially Ron's wife, Velma. In the days after the murder, she couldn't stop crying. She gave heartbreaking interviews to the local news, begging anybody who knew anything about the murder to come forward. Velma Ogden was born in 1958, out in the boonies of northwest Arkansas. Her dad was a minister, and her mom was a Sunday school teacher, and they kept a pretty straight-laced house. Now, I know some of y' all know this. Preacher's kids tend to go one of two ways, right? Either they're just as starchy as pops or they rebel.

And definitely, Velma was of the second variety. She had a wild streak a mile long. As a teenager, she was kind of a loudmouth. She loved to tell jokes and dramatic stories, you know, the raunchy or the better, and was just generally kind of a freewheeling 70s kid. She got married right out of high school and moved up to Seattle where all of her new husband's family were, and it was a hell of a shift for her,

and not just because she was a small town girl in a big city for the first time. In 1977, there was no internet or social media and long-distance calls weren't cheap. When you moved across the country like that, you really were leaving everything behind. All her family and everybody she knew was back in Arkansas. If you've got a supportive partner by your side, that's maybe not such a big deal. And for the first years of her marriage, that's what Velma had. But after Angela was born in 1982, things started going downhill fast. would later tell oxygen that the only way she knew her parents had ever been happy was from old

pictures of them smiling together. She'd never seen them like that during her own life. The relationship became abusive, both emotionally and physically, and Velma spent most of her time scared, just waiting for the next awful scene. She could never be sure what was going to set her husband off. Yeah, been there done that. It sucks. As it is for a lot of people in a situation like that, it was a relief for Velma to go to work, where she cataloged airplane parts at Boeing. That's where she met Ron Whitehead, and like everybody else, she liked him. They struck up a friendship, and Ron often gave her a ride home after work. Ron was already divorced by this point, and I'm guessing there was already some hot goss going

around Boeing about how well he was getting along with this new girl who was 15 years younger than he was. But as far as we can tell, they were just friends at this point. I'm sure it was hard for Velma not to compare easygoing Ron with her walking on eggshell's life at home. Oh, sure. The abuse in the marriage escalated. Angela remembered hearing her mom scream and thumps as she hit the floor.

In 1988, months after her son John was born, Velma finally managed to get herself out of there. One night, she packed a couple bags, grabbed the kids, and the three of them flew back down to her family in Arkansas. Her main motivation was to get herself and her kids away from her violent husband. But it would also be quicker to get divorced down there, and Velma wanted out of the marriage as soon as humanly possible. But she still had a job and a life back in Seattle. and once the divorce was done, she took her kids back up to the northwest. And once she was there, it didn't take long for her and Ron to realize they wanted more than just friendship. Velma and her two kids moved in.

And Ron, with his own children all grown up, was a dad to a young family again. He was the complete opposite of Velma's first husband, calm and kind and steady, and he was a good father to Angela and John. Velma was active and gregarious, super involved with her kids' education, even volunteering at their schools. On her second try at marriage, it looked like she'd found a pretty idyllic suburban life, one that would be smashed to pieces by Ron's murder in 2005. At the scene, detectives hit on some solid evidence right away. The shell casings lying on the road were a little weird in their dimensions, and the markings showed why. They were from nine millimeter Makarov ammunition. The Makarov had been the standard Soviet military sidearm since the 1950s,

and used ammunition of a slightly different size to the kind that are common in the West, shorter case, wider bullet. In the 90s, former Soviet and East German Makarovs started coming into the U.S. market, but they were still pretty rare by 2005, and it was weird to find their rounds at a crime scene. So if a Makarov turned up somewhere in the investigation, there was a pretty good chance it was the murder weapon. The day after the killing, they found Ron's black Mustang parked in the lot of a nursing home. The police watched the car for a day or so in case the shooter came back to it and then called in the crime scene technicians.

Someone working at the nursing home had seen the Mustang Park and had watched the driver walk away. They were thin, 5-7 or 5-8, wearing jeans and a gray hoodie with a hood up. They'd walked through the parking lot and straight into an adjoining subdivision. Not a lot to go on there. A careful examination of the car provided some evidence, though. A DNA sample from the gear shift. Then a background check on Ron turned the whole case upside down.

He had a concealed carry permit for two handguns, a pair of Makarov pistols. Now, unless there had been a really weird coincidence, this guy had been murdered with one of his own guns. Investigators asked Velma to hand over any firearms in the house, and she gave them two cardboard boxes, one with a Makarov still zip tied to the cardboard inside, but the other box was empty. Velma said she didn't know where the missing gun was. Despite having a concealed carry permit, Ron very rarely had one of his guns on him. He certainly didn't take one with him to work at Boeing. Even if he'd had a gun on him, the idea that somebody in the car could wrestle it away from him

and shoot him in the head with no other signs of struggle whatsoever was extremely unlikely. The more likely scenario was that Ron had been killed by someone who had access to his house and had taken the gun from there. So obviously, investigators needed to take a much closer look at the relationships inside that house. By 2005, Velma and Ron's 10-year marriage wasn't quite as picture-perfect as it may have looked from the outside. If Ron had a fault, it was that he could squeeze a dime flat. He was highly conscious of the money they spent and kept a pretty tight hold on the checkbook. He really didn't have to worry about money.

They were doing fine. He was just one of those people who always felt there might be some calamity just around the corner that he had to prepare for. Ron already worked long hours at Boeing, and in his supposed free time, he'd do some freelance auto repair to make a few more dollars. He and Velma invested in some rental properties. Velma left her job at Boeing to raise her kids and work at managing the properties. Although Ron's family never lacked for anything, they lived modestly, really quite a bit more modestly than they had to. Ron, who was kind of a gearhead, only gave himself one indulgence, and that was the beautiful black Ford Mustang. Now, Velma's attitude about money was very different. She liked to spend it,

which caused some friction in the marriage. And more friction was on the horizon, because she'd run up some credit card bills that Ron didn't know about. There was some distance growing between them anyway. Ron worked so hard that he and Velma just didn't see each other a whole lot. When they were together, Velma felt like he ignored her, which is bad for anybody, but poison to somebody like Velma who needed a lot of attention and affection. There was also some tension in the house about Velma's son John. Even as he grew into a lanky, awkward teenager, John was still very much.

much his mom's baby boy. They were always together, close enough that more than one person thought it was kind of weird. His sister Angela told investigation discovery that Velma treated John like he was made of glass. She'd look after him in every way, even cut up his food for him. And remember, folks, we're talking about a teenage boy here. Okay? A dude who should have been smack in the middle of the time where every single thing your parents do is embarrassing. And she's cutting up his food for him. Weird, right? He was. was a mama's boy, down to his DNA. John had lived with Ron since he was a toddler. Ron really was the only father he'd ever known, and that's how Ron acted. When John was in high school, he started

to get into some high school-type trouble, smoking pot, drinking, staying out late with, quote, the wrong crowd, who in this case might really have been the wrong crowd for him. And of course, Velma was unwilling or unable to lay down the law with her special little guy, you know, mother's little princeling could never do wrong. So that fun chore fell to stepdaddy Ron. Oh, goody. When John started skipping school, as in just stopped going entirely, Ron grounded him, which seems perfectly reasonable to me,

but reason is not really the usual ground state for teenage boys. And John felt like this was basically a hate crime, and somebody ought to call CPS stat. It's like that scene in the office where he's like, this is a hate crime. And they go, no. And he goes, well, I hated it. That's John.

Yeah, he hated it, definitely. With Angela in her 20s and out of the home and John close to graduating from high school, Velma went back to work part-time at an auto repair shop. She was a social butterfly, and she wanted people around her. And Ron was always happy to have more cash coming in, so he was all for it. If he'd known just how sociable Velma wanted to be, he wouldn't have been so keen on the idea. Not long after she started at the auto shop, 47-year-old Velma started an affair with a 26-year-old co-worker.

Didn't really try to hide it either? Their co-workers all knew. When the investigators heard about this after Ron's murder, their ears pricked up. Spouse's sidepiece is always going to be near the top of any murder suspect list, but Velma's boy toy had a rock-solid alibi for the time of Ron's death. Still, police had specifically asked Velma. about any affairs when they first interviewed her, and she was like, affairs?

Me? No way. That in itself wasn't super unusual. People don't love owning up to their bad acts. But Velma was still appearing regularly on local news, begging anyone with information to come forward, saying she'd do anything to help find Ron's killer. Anything except embarrass herself, apparently.

It struck an odd note with the detectives. Interviews with the Whitehead's neighbors focused to attention on Velma's teenage son, John. Just a couple days before the murder, some kids had seen him running toward a local playground with a black gun in his hand. You know, just the kind of thing you want to see in your happy suburban subdivision, the local weird kid armed and sprinting. Yeah. Police brought John in for an interview, where he initially denied ever having the Makarov. It didn't take long to squeeze at least part of the truth out of him, though. Okay, okay. He played around with his stepdad's gun.

But he didn't have anything to do with Ron's murder. He didn't know what had happened to the gun. Sure, Jam. Or sure, John. So investigators had John take a polygraph about his stepdad's murder, fully expecting him to fail. But he passed. Now, as I'm sure y'all know, you're screaming at your headphones right now.

There's a reason why polygraph results aren't admissible in court. they can throw up both false positives and false negatives, and a century after their first use, there's still no solid consensus on just how accurate polygraphs are. Basically, the forensic equivalent of, you shouldn't have a lot of faith in them, but apparently nobody clued in the Des Moines PD about that. They crossed John off the suspect list. Not only because of the polygraph result, they'd also gotten DNA results back from the gear shift in Ron's car, and they didn't match anybody in the family.

So, with John out of the picture, suspects were in short supply, and the case went cold. A year after Ron's death, Detective Tien Doe asked Velma to contact the media to bring attention back onto the case. Velma was happy to do it. A news crew filmed her laying flowers on the site of Ron's murder, and she had local businesses put up flyers asking for info on the crime. On the news, Velma challenged the killer. Quit being a chicken and come forward, she said. There's nowhere to run. there's nowhere to hide, and I don't care if it takes 50 years.

Oh, really? Vellman looked every inch, the grieving widow on TV, but that wasn't necessarily reflected in the way she's been living her life for the past year. Ron being the guy he was, he'd had great life insurance, and in his 42 years at Boeing, he'd built up a ton of other benefits, too. So practically overnight, Velma had gone from sweating her credit card payments to being a millionaire. She bought a whole new wardrobe, got her hair done all fancy, started wearing more makeup, and you know, people grieve. in different ways, and you don't have to squint too hard to see how reinventing yourself

could make sense after a painful experience. But it didn't stop there. She got a new car, new furniture, a hot tub for the backyard, and made it rain with gifts for Mama's Boy John. Angela had moved out by now, and it was just Velma and John at home. Mama's little hero could do anything he wanted. He had friends over all the time, smoking weed and drinking and partying. Their house was the party house, where anybody could crash and any. anything went. And Velma wasn't just the cool mom who didn't mind if her kid went wild. She was right there with them, drinking and smoking and trying desperately, pathetically, to fit in with a bunch of kids 30 years younger than she was. It's like the Steve Buscemi, hello fellow kids,

meme, except everybody's drunk and high. I think I would literally die of cringe before I would do something like that, but hey. And you know what being stoned and drunk at teenage parties tends to lead to, right? Brace yourself because you're right. It leads to hooking up. Velma started having sex with one of John's friends from high school. This was her new boyfriend. You know, they're just going to date for senior year,

nothing too heavy because they're both going to go away to college at the end of summer. Velma, for God's sake, you're 47 years old. I guess her 20-something boy from the auto shop was too old and stuffy for her by now. Once you have a 401K, you're too old. for Velma. Yeah, exactly. So obviously, this was creepy and predatory and gross, but within that creepy and predatory context, you can kind of connect the dots. Velma had gotten married right out of high school to an abusive prick. Straight after that, she got together with a solid, full-grown man nearly old enough to be her dad. There hadn't been a lot of room

there for her to be footloose and fancy-free. She was trying to fast-track a wild youth she'd missed out on. It's sad and pathetic and possibly criminal in its execution, and I only say possibly, because we couldn't find out for sure if this guy was 18 at the time. But, you know, the pieces fit psychologically. For God's sake, get some help. Ew. But Velma was all in with her new bow. He more or less moved in, and she redecorated her bedroom to make him feel at home. Basically how you'd expect a teenage nerds room to look with a couple of notable exceptions. There was no trespassing sign on the door. Fantasy posters and magic the gathering cards pinned to the walls over god-awful, like faux-medieval stonework wallpaper. Now, Detective Doe seems like a highly

competent and conscientious investigator, but I don't think he's all that plugged into nerd culture. Because he told investigation discovery, quote, her boyfriend was a Dungeons and Dragons fan, so she'd put wallpaper in her room to make it look like a dungeon. Um, no, Detective, that's really not the kind of dungeon that you're going to find in D&D. If that's what she was going for, Velma would have picked like mossy cave walls and maybe gotten like a mannequin of a cobald with a plus one flail or something. This was the other kind of dungeon, I'm afraid, as shown by the various handcuffs, floggers, lube, dildos, and other special fun time toys.

There really shouldn't be any crossover between sex dungeons and D&D. And if there is, y'all probably need to find a new DM. If you're in a situation where you got to like make a saving throw versus rope burn, it's a red flag. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, kinkshaming corner, but this is why a session zero is important for all tables. Make sure your DM is not more master and less dungeon, you know. Make sure everyone knows the expectations, whether you can attack other players at the table, whether you should stop by the first shop you see in game and buy some oil of lubrication,

whether your gods frown on BDSM, BDNDSM. Oh my God. I think we just created something. No, no, don't give us credit for it. No, someone else steal it. Don't, we don't want credit. You can take it and run with it. I don't want anything to do with it.

Okay, copyright Whitney 2020. Whitney can have it. 2024. Whitney can have BT and D.S.m. Yeah, I'm going to run with it. I'm getting a Kickstarter start. Is that what that type thing is? there I could hear you clicky clacking over there, rushing to get that copyright. Stay tuned. Stay tuned.

So investigators didn't know about Velma's weird wild love life yet, but Detective Doe did have the sense that something was odd about her. Her affect when she issued that challenge to Ron's killer on the news was just weird. It stuck like a burr in the detective's brain. And a year after Ron's murder, he decided to look at everything in the case again, top to bottom. Ron's Mustang was still secure as evidence, and when Detective Doe opened the trunk, the latent print examiner noticed a palm print in an odd position. In fact, investigators worked out that the only way the print made sense was if someone had actually been inside the trunk and braced themselves with their hand to push against the back seat and shove it down. Most modern cars have an

emergency lever in the trunk to unlock the back seat in case somebody gets trapped in there. Good info to have, right? Take no as campers. So now they thought they had a pretty good idea of how Ron's murder went down. His killer, armed with Makarov, had hidden in the trunk of Ron's car before he'd even left the house. When the Mustang stopped at an intersection, the killer had released the backseat lock, pushed the seat down, and slid into the back of the car. He'd shot Ron in the head from behind and to the side. It seemed likely that Ron had died without ever knowing he was in danger. With Ron's foot slipping off the brake, the Mustang started rolling forward. The

shooter clambered into the front seat, opened the door, and kicked Ron's body out onto the road. Then he'd shot Ron three more times in the back and peel down out of there. I'm going to throw up. That is the scary... Get an image of that, seriously. That is the scariest freaking thing I've ever heard in my life. Oh,

it's like a horror movie. And the fact that it was still dark, and he didn't even know it was happening and this shadowy figure is crawling out of... Oh, I cannot. It's so... It's terrifying. I'm going to add my trunk to places I check in my car. Yeah. The Mustang had been in Ron's garage.

The only way someone would have had access to the trunk was from inside the house. Re-examining evidence from the house gave them another clue. Police had taken Ron's computer soon after he was killed. At first, they hadn't noticed anything suspicious. But now something caught their attention. A few days before Ron's murder, there was a Google search for Makarov ammunition. Obviously, the guns belonged to Ron, so this wasn't that strange in itself, which is why it hadn't set off any alarm bells at first. But now they noticed that right before that search, whoever was using the computer had gone to the social media page of John's high school girlfriend, which in 2005 was probably a glittery nightmare of a MySpace page playing hollaback girl on loop with a no way to pause it.

Honestly, if you had one of those like automatic play. songs on MySpace with no way to, like, turn it off, I hope, I hope you step on a Lego every day for the rest of your life. Harsh. It's inconsiderate is what it is, okay? Yeah, this is true. It was pretty unlikely that 61-year-old Ron was at the keyboard for that. Yeah.

Anybody remember trying to explain Myspace to your boomer parents? Good luck. Why can't me or your father be in your top eight? Are we not good enough? God, the top eight. Man, that was a friendship killer. Oh, yeah, for sure. So it was almost certainly teenage John at the computer,

searching for where to get ammo. The poem print didn't match John, though, or any other member of the Whitehead family. If this was from the killer, it was from someone who wasn't on the police's radar yet. But that wouldn't last for long. John's cell phone record showed that in the hours before Ron was murdered, like from the previous evening and then almost continuously throughout the night in early morning,

John had sent or received 53 messages with another number, with most of the activity after 3 a.m. The next activity was a voicemail, minutes after Ron had been shot to death. Shortly after that, the communication went dead. The second cell phone was from a virgin mobile burner, John's old phone. It had been reactivated just two days before Ron's death. The reactivation call had come not from John, but from Velma's phone. So now, things were getting juicy, with the police increasingly sure that both Velma and John, mother and son, were involved in Ron Whitehead's murder, along with at least one other person who'd actually fired the shots. Teenage conspirators tend to do dumb shit, and the genius with the burner phone had decided to use it to call a few other people at Mount Rainier High.

and when police talked to these students, they gave up a name, Wilson Sayacek. Wilson was a friend of John's, 17 years old now, 16 at the time of the murder, and he was a tough little nut, a gang member who'd been in trouble for a lot of his young life. He also lived just a couple doors down from the nursing home where Ron's Mustang had been abandoned. God. Teenagers, like most murderers are fucking morons, but teenagers just bring it to another level. like yeah next door to your job dude are you fucking kidding me as we've seen many times and using the burner phone that's supposed to be for the murder it's just wow wow the you know the one like i guess good thing quote unquote about a using a teenage hitman is that you can get him cheap but you also are

going to get what you pay for yeah which is a dip shit it's going to make big giant mistakes Oh, my God. Currently, though, Wilson was in a youth detention facility after being caught brandishing a gun. Not the missing Makarov, but even so, you didn't have to join a whole lot of dots together to figure out that this could be the shooter. And there was a sudden urgency to the investigation. Because detectives had gotten wind that Velma and John might be about to pack up and move out of state. I'm guessing somebody from the high school probably told John that the cops were on to Wilson. So one detective hauled ass over to the youth jail to talk to Wilson

after getting a print from his palm, while at the same time John and Velma were both brought in to be interviewed in separate rooms. Now this was not our boy Wilson's first rodeo with the cops, and at first he took it all in stride, you know, Mr. Cockypants. When asked if he had anything to do with Ron's death, he told the detective, quote, My freaking answer is, whoever said that can suck my dick. Uh.

Okay. helpful. Okay. It sounds like that was a line heard in a bad mobster movie being shown on TV. Like, you can say, suck my dick on TBS, but you cannot say fuck him. So he had to censor himself. TBS. Oh, my God. Yeah. He denied having anything to do with the murder, although he did confirm he'd gotten the burner phone from John. He made it sound like it was just a favor John had done for him. Being interviewed by police was a lot more intimidating for John and Velma, but Velma apparently had a plan already. She took her sweet baby boy gently by the shoulders and shoved him firmly under the bus. I know that somehow my son is involved in this, she told detectives, sounding on the verge of tears, but I don't know how,

and I don't know how deep. Velma had been a colorful storyteller her whole life, which is not necessarily the best trait to have when you're the subject of a police interrogation. You're really want a simple story that you can stick to, but when you're hardwired for embellishment, that can be tough. As the interview went on, Velma said she'd been aware of a plan between John and Wilson, but it was only to rob Ron. Apparently, Wilson had told her that a carjacking paid more from insurance than a simple theft, which sounds kind of weird to me. Also, maybe don't take insurance advice from teenage boys. I'm sure he probably does not have a policy for his skateboard, right? It's like, oh yes, teenage boys, the reigning

experts on life insurance. This didn't make a whole lot of sense, of course. There might be an insurance payment for the car, but if Ron was still alive, it'd go to him, and probably into another Mustang. Velma would get nothing. So then her story evolved further. She was pissed at Ron about something or other,

and wanted him just roughed up a little. That didn't make sense either. Wilson might have been tough, but he was 16, 5'7, and thin as a reed. Ron was a big burly guy I think he would have flattened this kid without even breaking a sweat I told John no guns

no violence Velma told detectives I thought John was listening to me I thought he had enough respect for me that he would listen oh John boy snuggle up under that bus wheel baby mammas finally cut the cord I just can't get over it unbelievable

John wasn't doing so great in his own interview he was nervous Once he'd ace that polygraph a year ago, he'd really thought he was free and clear. But soon enough, he started talking. She didn't want to get divorced, he told detectives. She wanted him to be out of her life, maybe get robbed or something. So I said, okay, well, I know somebody. Now, there's really only one kind of robbery that leads to somebody being out of your life,

and it involves a body on the floor at the end of it. And why? It seems that Velma was just frustrated at not being able to do whatever she wanted and spend whatever she wanted. She was bored. She wanted to have fun. She wanted to screw around. Teenage co-conspirators are easy to manipulate. See also the Pamela Smart case. Velma told John that if she just divorced Ron, they'd have nothing. They'd be broke and homeless living on the street. She drilled this into him again and again. The only way they could be free and happy was if Ron was gone. John would be protecting his mom. Ugh. While the interviews were going on, the results came back from Wilson's palm print. It matched the one in the trunk of the Mustang.

He was the shooter. Faced with his evidence, the streetwise Mr. Wilson knew the jig was up and started talking. John had approached him, and they'd decided how the murder was going to go down. Wilson had needed the money John and Velma were offering. He had come over the night before, and he and John had stayed up all night playing video games until they heard Ron waking up. Then they'd snuck down to the garage where John handed Wilson the loaded Makarov.

Velma came in and handed Wilson a pair of gloves. You know, to avoid palm prints. But Wilson didn't bother to put them on. Lord have mercy, long may teenage killers continue to be dwebes. Good God. No, just like helmets, gloves make you look like a dork.

Who cares if you get a TBI or sent to prison for a few decades? It's better than looking like a fucking loser. Yep. Wilson climbed into the trunk and John and Velma got out of the garage. The last text John sent Wilson said, He's coming down. Get ready. The killing happened just as investigator saw it did,

with Wilson sneaking from the trunk into the back seat. In the interview room, Wilson made a gun shape with his hand and put his fingers to the back of the detective's head. This is where I shot him, he said. Then, with the car rolling forward, Wilson jumped into the front seat and pushed Ron out onto the road. He leaned out the open door and shot Ron three more times, then hit the gas and raised away. He called John after it was done. John and Velma paid him $1,000, or rather, Velma did.

John didn't have shit. The whole thing had been Velma's idea. John, Velma, and Wilson were all arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The trials were rockier than they should have been, after a judge ruled that Wilson had asked to leave his police interview before making his confession. With his confession it admissible, Wilson's first trial ended in a mistrial when the jury couldn't reach a verdict. The second became a mistrial when prosecutors asked for more time, because the Makarov and a direct connection to Wilson had finally come to light. Before trial number three, with this new evidence in place, Wilson finally pled guilty. John was found guilty at trial, and in 2008, both he and Wilson were sentenced to 25 years in prison. There wasn't a whole lot of physical evidence against Velma, but unlike Wilson, her own rambling

police interview was admissible. Feeling a little gun-shy from the two mistrials, prosecutors offered her a deal, 20 years for murder in the first degree, with no additional time for firearms offenses related to the Makarov. Velma took the deal, but at her sentencing she threw a curveball, suddenly claiming that her relationship with Ron had been violently abusive. This was the first anybody had heard of any abuse, and nobody really bought it for a second. No one in her family had seen anything like that in the relationship, and although abuse can often be secret, Velma shared everything with John, and he'd never mentioned it. The worst he said was that Velma had been frustrated with Ron.

And it would have helped his case if he had mentioned it, which really makes me suspicious, you know. And I mean, like we've said before, we always have. have to say this, that usually if somebody says they've been abused, it's because they were. But when we do see people lying about it, it's people like Velma. And, you know, yeah, I don't buy it. And Angela, Velma's daughter, had been there for her actually abusive first marriage. And she must have been hyper aware of the signs, but she didn't buy this either.

So her own daughter was like, no. And also, why only bring it up now? Like, it was just clearly bullshit. But if you're willing to throw your own son under the bus, doing the same to the husband you murdered is really not such a stretch. It backfired. Velma's deal had been with the prosecution, not the judge, and he tacked another two years onto her 20-year sentence, saying, you have shown yourself to be selfish and duplicitous. I see nothing that merits mercy. Yeah, me either. Velma wouldn't serve even half her sentence, though. She died in prison in 2015.

Now, I want to end on this, because I think it's one of the most despicable details I have ever come across in a murder case, which y'all know is saying something. After Ron's death, Velma sought out a support group for the victims of violent crime and started attending regular meetings. Meetings with people who had actually lost loved ones to murder. I cannot imagine a more sacred space than that, a place where people can talk about that kind of pain, and Velma just invaded it. I assume just to keep up appearances that she was really a grieving widow. And that just just floored me when I read it. Like, I was so angry I got chills. I can only imagine how the people in that group felt when they learned the truth of who she was, that they'd been confiding

their deepest, darkest pain in a killer. I mean, I can't imagine. I'm sure they felt traumatized all over again. And I think this tells us everything we'd ever need to know about Velma. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. Now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Drew, Momo, Jessica, Maggie, Frankie, Lisa times two. We got two Lies, Marley and Jennifer. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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