Cold Cases That Were Solved This Year

Written By Kaelyn Moore

When a case goes cold, it's easy to lose hope that it will ever be sold. But sometimes a leap in technology, or even a deathbed confession, can help families get the closure they've been looking for.

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SOURCES

  1. 17. The Day 3.14.24 pt 1.pdf

    17. The Day 3.14.24 pt 2.pdf.pdf

    18. Hartford Courant 9.4.1974.pdf

    19. The Bridgeport Telegram 5.28.75 pdf.pdf

    20. Hartford Courant 1.9.1980.pdf

  2. 24. New London Day 11.13.1975.pdf

    25. Hartford_Courant_1976_07_24_32.pdf

TRANSCRIPT

On May 30th, 1970, a phone in a police precinct in the smalle town of Ledyard Connecticut, rings off the hook. An officer answers and asks who’s calling, but the voice on the other end wont give a name.


Instead, they say that they have some information that the police might find interesting. They said that in the backyard of an A frame house on Shewville Road, they’d find two bodies.


The officer perks up and starts asking more questions, whose bodies are they, and who put them there. But the caller isn’t willing to give them that information, instead, they tell the officers that the murders happened four years prior, and then the line goes dead.


So a few officers decide to go check out the scene. Occasionally, they would get prank phone calls from local teens about “tips”, so they were skeptical, but they wanted to go look just in case. 


The A frame in question was down a two lane road with thick woods on either side and houses peppered in between, and as the officers pulled up, it appeared as if no one had lived there in quite some time. 


No cars were in the driveway, no lights were on in the house. The grass was overgrown and the house had signs of wear from the elements. It gave the officers  a bad feeling. 


They started walking around the property seeing if there was any sign of the bodies, when they came upon a big overgrown garden in the backyard. 


Thick weeds and brush tangled into each other, but one officer could see through the mess that there was dirt underneath that had been dug out, and then filled in again. The area was about the size of a body. 


Beneath the disturbed dirt, were two badly decomposed bodies. Upon initial investigation, it was determined that one was male, and one was female. But who were they, and how did they get there. 

This is heart Starts Pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore, and today, were talking about Cold Cases that were finally solved this year


Just a reminder, we upload episodes for the darkly curious each week on Wednesday evenings at 7pm Pacific, that’s 10pm if you’re listening in Salem, Massachusetts.  


You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, including the Audacy app. If you noticed the logo change on the show cover you are truly an eagle eyed member of the Rogue Detecting Society, but I am super excited to join their network alongside some of my favorite shows like Search Engine, You Must Remember This and of course our friends Tank and Investigator Slater at Psychopedia. We have some fun things planned for next year, so stay tuned. 


But for now, let’s get back to the bodies found in the garden in connecticut, because when the police uncovered them, they had no idea the 50 year long goose chase they were about to embark on.

After the bodies in the garden were exhumed, they were sent to a medical examiner who was able to at least determine the cause of death. 


It appeared that the male had died from a gunshot wound to the head. Another bullet was found near his body, and one was lodged in his stomach. 


the woman had suffered the same fate as the man, a shot to the head and to the stomach. Her remains were so decomposed, though, there wasn’t much else the medical examiner could learn about her, other than she was white, probably between 18 and 30, and 5’2”. 


No hair color, no eye color, nothing that would help identify her. 


So the police had to look at what was left at the scene, in hopes there would be some clues. She was wearing a tan sweater and a brown tweed skirt. 


She also had some jewlery on her, like a school ring with the letters J.H.S.N engraved on it, and the initials I.L.N. However, the ring had the year 1917 engraved on the inside, so it was likely a family heirloom.


They also found documents that identified the couple as Dirk Stahl and Lorrain Stahl. 


So all the police had to do now was confirm these identities and then they could close the case. When they searched the name Lorrain Stahl they got a hit, but it wasn’t the one they were looking for. 


They found a living woman named Lorrain Stahl who had previously moved out of the neighborhood the A frame was in. She said that she believed the young woman was using her identity.


That’s when the police get a call. The medical examiner was also able to get an X ray of the man's teeth, which matched the records of someone who was in a Wisconsin correctional institute in 1965. 


A man named Gustavous Lee Carmichael, not Dirk Stahl, like the documents found by the body suggested, so he, too, must have been using a fake identity.


Gustavous Lee Carmichael was a notorious bank robber who had been in and out of prison for a lot of his short adult life. In 1970, he was just 25 years old.


A spree of bank robberies he committed in 1968, after he had been released from prison, had netted him around $1 million dollars. And when he was arrested for that, he was able to escape out of the car that was bringing him to the courthouse by overpowering the marshall that was driving him and handcuffing him to a tree. 


So Gustavous had this long criminal record, and it was easy for the police to learn a lot about him. But what about the woman who was found next to him? What did her dental records show, the police asked.


Her dental records didn’t match anything. Was she an accomplice, or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Regardless, there was a family somewhere that was wondering what had happened to their daughter, their sister, their friend. And the people who had done this were still out there.


So the cops got back to work. 


They started going through other people who had lived in the neighborhood, because if this woman had stolen one of their identities, maybe someone else had some information, and they came across a man, Richard DeFreitas who had lived in the house they were found at previously. 


Richard was currently in prison for robbery, but his similar history to Gustavous’ made the police think that maybe they knew each other. 


So they paid him a visit in prison, not really expecting much, let alone a confession, but that’s what they got. Maybe it was because he wanted a reduced sentence or something, but DeFreitas told the police that he and another man killed Gustavous and his girlfriend, but they didn’t know her name. 


Apparently, Gustavous had just pulled off a heist of sixty thousand dollars cash from a bank in New Jersey. Less than a week later, Gustavous and the woman, believed to be his girlfriend packed up their things and arrived at the front door of a married couple named Richard and Joanne Emerson. 

On December 28, 1978, Richard Emerson agreed to help Gustavous and his girlfriend assume the fake identities of Dirk and Lorraine Stahl. He even offered the couple a place to stay for a few nights while they arranged a new apartment to move into.

But Gustavous was aware that Emerson wasn’t entirely trustworthy. In fact, the surname Emerson was actually a partial alias for the 31-year-old DeFreitas, who lived with Joanne Rainnello, his common law wife. 

He had recently managed a successful, if not slightly less impressive, robbery himself, ripping off $30,000 from a financial institution in Newport, Rhode Island, so Gustavous trusted him, he was one of his own.

The night they met, DeFreitas introduced Gustavous to his business partner, Donald Brant. Their business was pulling off historic heists without getting caught. That evening’s work included splitting up the $30K from DeFreitas’ Rhode Island haul.

Defreitas and Brant also had a third partner named James Gardner. The group had promised to use the arsenal of weapons they possessed between them to protect each other from whatever consequences might come from their crimes.

But Gustavous’ girlfriend started getting nervous. Maybe it was the fact they were living with criminals now, ones that owned a lot of guns, but it seemed like she was starting to have second thoughts about living a life on the run. And one night, She turned to her new sole friend in the world, Richard DeFreitas’ girlfriend, Joanne, to express her concerns.

But Joanne was not really a friend to the woman, and she took the gossip back to her boyfriend, who immediately raised the concern to his partner, Brant. 

Brant understood Lorraine’s uncertainty meant their freedom was at stake, what if the girl snitched on them, or took their cash and ran. DeFreitas and Brant were both wanted by the law — Defreitas for armed robbery and Brant on suspicion of double murder.

The career criminals felt they were left with no choice but to silence Lorraine if they wanted to stay out of jail. They agreed to kill her to stop her from talking to the police which meant, in their minds, they’d have to kill Gustavous too.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1970, when DeFreitas drew Gustavous Carmichael to the backyard of his home under false pretenses. He figured he’d deal with Gustavous while Donald Brant shot the woman in cold blood.

Within moments, both of The Stahls were dead, but they still needed to make them disappear. DeFreitas and Brant called their third partner James Gardner, as well as Defreitas’ girlfriend Joanne Rainnello, to come to the house. They were going to need their associates taking care of their latest “problem.”

Around four years and eight months later, the police arrested Richard DeFreitas and Donald Brant for the double homicide of Lorraine and Dirk Stahl. 

But though Gustavous’ case was finally closed, investigators were still no closer to finding out the identity of the woman who died as Lorraine Stahl, the poor woman who wanted to get away from the situation. 

Police traced every possession they could associate with Lorraine, along with her phone records which pointed to connections in Tennessee, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. When detectives analyzed the tanned leather vest, brown tweed skirt, brown leather boots, and gold sweater they were still left empty-handed. 

They spoke to locals in the area who had seen the unknown woman, no one who knew who she really was, but enough to draw a composite sketch of her.

And I’ve seen the sketch. It’s of a young woman with light hair and a shaggy cut with bangs. She has large almond eyes, people knew her face so well, but no one knew HER. This mysterious passer-through with a fake name. 

The image was circulated, but nothing came of it. And the case went cold. Luckily, police knew who the killers were, and they were both sentenced for the murders of Gustavous and the unknown woman, but for now, she would remain unknown, buried in an unmarked grave with no one to bring her flowers. 

It would’ve stayed cold forever if a Chief Medical Examiner named Michelle Clark hadn’t taken an interest in the unfinished business thirty-five years later.

In July 2011, Michelle added the unknown woman's case data and dental records to the National Missing Persons database, which had been created in 2008. The mystery woman now had a new temporary identity: #UP8909. 

A year later, what DNA they had from the unknown woman was uploaded to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, also known as CODIS. Despite the huge opportunity these mass databases provided Clark’s investigation, neither pulled any hits to match the evidence. Lorraine’s case was proving to remain a difficult one. 

So difficult that the technology needed to solve this case wouldn’t be available for several more years.

In 2022, a specialty facility called Othram reached out and said that they now possessed that technology. 

Though Othram is a private DNA testing company, it works exclusively with law enforcement. The Texas-based labs had recently announced their collaboration with the Connecticut Office of the Medical Examiner to “leverage advanced DNA testing technology to solve human remains cases that have long remained unsolved.” 

Lorraine Stahl’s unresolved mystery was the perfect fit for their work since Othram’s forensic team can take a piece of evidence as small as a bone fragment to create a full genetic profile through Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy testing, also known as FIGG.

Established in 2020, the unprecedented method of DNA genome sequencing is different from previous testing because it identifies up to one million sites on a genome. Existing DNA testing methods could only identify up to twenty-one.

Because of this new extensive sequencing, relatives as distant as a fourth or fifth cousin can be retrieved from a pool of two million people. 

The pool is made up of civilians who voluntarily gave DNA submissions to the GEDMatch and FamilyTree databases. From there, law enforcement transforms a FIGG profile into an identified missing person by building out a family tree from their DNA matches.

And this technology first gained attention when it tracked down the culprit of a much more famous unsolvable case. It helped reveal the identity of the Golden State Killer.

This year, an elderly woman in Kentucky got a knock on her door. It was police officers from connecticut who traveled to her to tell her that they knew what happened to her sister, who disappeared all of those years ago. Her sister, Linda Sue Childers, the unknown woman. 

The woman at the door couldn’t believe what she was hearing. To have closure over her sister’s fate, but also to know where she was resting, 54 years after she disappeared, was a miracle, but, she said, there was someone else who really needed to hear this message.

She put the police in touch with another woman who was around 60 years old. It was Linda’s daughter, who, for her entire life up until this point, had never known what happened to her mother. 

Linda Sue Childers was 24 years old when she died. She was born on September 4, 1946, in Louisville, Kentucky. Her family lost touch with her when moved east in the 70s. 

Though not a lot has been shared about what kind of woman Linda was in her life, it was confirmed the tip about Childers’ murder came from Richard DeFreitas’ former girlfriend, Joanne.

Joanne was friendly enough with Linda Sue to briefly act as a shoulder to lean on before she ultimately became complicit in Childers and Carmichaels’ deaths. She must have cared for the innocent woman, to some degree, when she turned in her former boyfriend out of guilt four years later. 

Without Joanne’s tip, Linda Sue’s life would have remained something more troubling than a mystery. Her memory would’ve been lost entirely.

But because someone chose to come forward, Joanne, and someone else chose to not stop fighting, Michelle the medical examiner, two women in Kentucky were able to find a little bit of peace at the end of their lives. 

Though some crimes take decades to solve, it’s not always emerging technology that helps with the breakthrough. Sometimes, when someone is at the end of their life they re examine everything they’ve done. 

They think about the things they regret, and all the secrets they’ve kept. And sometimes, that can lead to a confession. As is the case with our next story. 

In August of 2000, a 41-year-old woman named Susan Gail Carter and her 10 year old daughter, Alex, vanished into thin air. 

Susan had been involved in a rather intense custody battle with her ex husband, Rick Lafferty. During one custody hearing, she turned to Rick and shouted that he would never see his daughter again.

I don’t know if Susan knew how true her words actually were. Because not long after that, she stopped returning Rick's calls, and then the calls of her family members. And soon, no one knew where she and her daughter had gone.

When that happened, everyone who knew Susan had their theories. Some people saw her as a vengeful ex wife, who ran off with a new husband and brought her daughter along. 

But they also knew that if that was the case, they probably would have heard from her at some point. As the days passed by, though, no word came from the two. 

And by November, people started getting a really bad feeling, like something horrible might have happened, like maybe Susan was serious about Rick never seeing Alex again. Eventually a felony arrest warrant for kidnapping was issued for Susan.

Their FBI missing persons poster described Alex as a 10 year old blue-eyed, blonde white female with a scar over her eyebrow. 

Susan was listed as a 5’6” white blond with green eyes, though the FBI warned she may have changed her appearance or been using her maiden name of Webb to get out of West Virginia unnoticed.

As far as the Lafferty family was concerned, the mother was capable of almost anything to keep Alex from her father against her daughter’s will. Alex’s grandmother said she believed Alex was afraid of Susan. The Laffertys wanted her home, where they knew she was safe.

But, unfortunately, because Alex was presumed to be with her mother, the police didn’t take the case very seriously. They figured she was safe. 

But, doing their due diligence (editors note: the bare minimum”) they spoke to a few witnesses, including Susan’s landlord, Larry Webb. 

Larry owned a red brick home that Susan was renting part of for her and Alex. But Larry said that he had no idea what happened to the two. One day they were there, and the next they were gone. 

Rick Lafferty, Alex’s dad, was getting furious. He felt like the police weren’t taking this seriously enough and that the case was going cold. He just wanted his 10 year old daughter back, why was it so hard for the police to understand he just wanted to know that she was SAFE. 

So over the years he kept pushing, all of the Lafferty family kept pushing, even when there was no movement. For 21 years they bombarded the police department with phone calls and emails, until finally, the FBI caught wind of the story. 

In December of 2021, Special Agent Jennifer King was assigned to the case, and she was absolutely the right person for this. She had cut her teeth in the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and was known for her unwillingness to quit. 

And she was determined to find Susan and Alex. Even if she couldn’t find them alive, she wanted to find them and give the Lafferty’s some closure 

She was partnered with Special Agent Mike Nordwall who promised Alex’s family and the community that “even though it’s been 21 years this case is not sitting on a shelf.”

The FBI started by offering a $10,000 reward for anyone willing to come forward about what happened during that summer of 2000. The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children created age-progressed portraits of Susan and Alex Carter to help the public imagine what the women would look like at sixty-two and thirty-one years old.

And finally, two years after more attention was paid to the case, they got their first real movement. 

On August 29th, 2023, The FBI, US Marshals, and State Police pulled up to the same red brick house that police had visited just after the disappearances. 

It was the home that Susan and Alex had rented. They hoped that now, 23 years after the disappearance, there was still maybe something inside that would give them a clue

They walked in the door to see Larry Webb, now an elderly man, bed ridden and under the full time care of a nurse. The officers were informed that his mind was deteriorating, but they asked him, once again. Do you know what happened to Susan and Alex Carter?

Larry got a dreamy look on his face and stared past the officers. He said 

“'I've looked for them, over the years, I even went to Cleveland and looked for them,' said Webb. 

'I don't know. I just know I loved her with all my heart, and I loved that little girl, too.'

Slowly, the officers made their way to the section of the house Susan and Alex had lived in.

The reason that they decided to start here, was they now believed, after pouring through old case files, that this was the last place they were seen alive. 

They made their way into Alex’s room, and even after 23 years, much of it was the same. The furniture had been switched out but nothing about the home had really been updated since that time, so they got to work searching every square inch of the room, for anything. A strand of hair, a fingerprint. 

One officer was tracing the bottom of one of the walls on his hands and knees, when he started screaming for the other officers to come over.

There, lodged in the wall, surrounded by faded wallpaper was one. Single. Bullet. 

Police got to work excavating the part of the wall where the bullet was found, and it was discovered that inside of the wall was dried blood. Whoever this bullet had struck preserved a small piece of their identity with it.

The bullet and the blood were immediately sent to a lab for testing, and more of the wall was excavated. It was also reported that a tile from the basement was collected by officials. 

Following the raid, Larry Webb was questioned about The Carters’ disappearance by the police and the media. But he had trouble remembering details, and his accounts of what happened were muddled. Webb claimed he would've been the last person to hurt Alex Carter and that He "loved that little girl". But then, he revealed something that sent shockwaves through the community. 

He said “I think I was married to her mother” I think I was married to her mother? 

Could this be true? The Lafferty’s did assume that Susan ran off with a new husband, but Larry was still in the house, and now blood was found in little Alex’s room. What could a 10 year old girl have done that would have made someone angry enough to take her life?

While the police were meticulously building up a case, Larry reminded them he had previously cooperated in the past. In 2000, He stated he was the one to report his concerns about his “Wife’s” disappearance. 

He even took a polygraph test to prove his innocence. When Susan and her daughter didn’t turn up, Larry said that when he went to Cleveland to try to find them. 

But Webb’s recollections seemed so opposite to the way the evidence was leaning. Was it actually possible Susan Carter had pulled off the greatest disappearing act of all time, and left her lover to pick up the pieces all of these years later? Police were hesitant to take any of this at face value, though, because of Larry’s dementia. 

When Larry was asked when exactly he saw Susan and Alex for the last time, he told reporters he “didn’t know” anymore because of his disease. Though it might’ve seemed like the perfect excuse, his caretaker could attest that Webb had been sick for some time now. 

But that caretaker, who also knew the Carters from twenty years ago, wanted to find out what happened to them just as much as anyone else. She didn’t know it yet, but they wouldn’t have to wait much longer for the FBI to come back with an answer. The DNA evidence confirmed that the blood on the bullet was Alex’s

Larry Webb was indicted by a special grand jury for the first-degree murder of Alex Carter on October 24, 2023. The prosecuting attorney promised the Lafferty’s that he was going to put Larry away for good for what he did to Susan and Alex. 

But there were a few problems with this. Only Alex’s blood was found on the bullet, which means there was no physical evidence the prosecution could use to prove that Larry had killed Susan. And also, no body, no crime. 

There was a chance that someone shot at Alex, and Susan fled with the girl, and now they were living somewhere under different identities.

And when questioned Webb refused to admit any guilt. Even as his mind was getting worse he maintained he had nothing to do with it, and that he and Susan were in love. 

There’s also the issue of putting someone with dementia on trial, I talked about this in my episode on the Ruinerwold secluded family, but someone can be deemed not fit to stand trial, and Larry’s condition was making it impossible to question him on the stand. 

So Larry sat in prison as the courts decided what they were going to do. But the chance of justice being fully served in this case seemed increasingly unlikely.

That is, until the first week of April this year.

Larry lay curled up in his prison hospital bed, when he asked if the nurse could bring an investigator to his bedside. With the strength he had in his fragile state, he finally admitted to killing Susan and Alex Carter. 

Back in 2000, Webb had a romantic relationship with Susan Carter, but it was rocky. On August 8 of that year, Larry and Susan started arguing about money. Larry said he had discovered a chunk of his stash missing, and he confronted Susan about it.

The conversation quickly became explosive as Larry insisted the single mother had betrayed him. In a moment of rage, Larry Webb shot Susan Carter point blank, killing her instantly. 

As soon as the moment had passed, Webb said he knew he had ruined his life by taking hers. He had done the unthinkable and with his back against the wall, he made an even more heinous decision: to get rid of the only witness. 

That’s why he shot Alex Carter in her bedroom that day, where the police found the bullet his crime had left behind. 

While he dug the plots in his backyard for Alex and Susan’s graves, Larry left their bodies in the basement to decompose without dignity. Larry Webb said he cried himself to sleep that night, without thinking about all the tears he’d cause the people who loved Alex and Susan to cry for the next twenty years.

As quickly as that moment of deep clarity washed over Larry, it was gone. His eyes glossed back over and he had trouble remembering where in his backyard the bodies were buried. 

Police brought in excavators to his property to search essentially inch by inch until they found the bodies. 

Weeks into the search on April 19, Webb was transferred to hospice care at The Mount Olive Correctional Complex. The window of accessing Webb’s memories to put this case to rest was shrinking rapidly. Investigators had tried bringing Larry back to his home to show them the graves in person, but he was of little help in his “clouded” state of mind.

And then, less than two weeks after his formal arrest, Larry Webb suffered a fatal medical event on April 22, 2024. He was pronounced dead at Montgomery Hospital around 10:30AM that morning, taking whatever memory he had of where Alex and Susan were with him. 

But just the next day, After weeks of digging, K9 Search and Rescue Services of Virginia found something. Dogs had alerted their handlers to the scent of human remains, just hours after Larry Webb had died.

Rick Lafferty had mixed emotions at the long-awaited discovery. He was just happy he could bring his baby home after losing hope so many times. 

He was given the green beaded hairpin Alex wore in her hair the day she was killed. It’s now the only physical memory Laffterty has of his 10-year-old girl. It’s decorated with tiny butterfly clips.

When it came to what Larry Webb did, police had to dig a little deeper to verify his story, and it’s still unclear what parts of the story were fabricated, or muddled in his demented mind. It’s unclear if he really did have a relationship with Susan, or if he hardly knew the two boarders in his house. Was susan stealing money, or had she rejected his advances. 

Those details may never be known, but the most important things now are known, what happened to Susan and Alex, who did it, and where their bodies were. 

These stories are sad, but in a way they give me hope. That even decades after a case has gone cold, it can catch a second wind if someone decides to look back into it. And as technology gets better every year, we’ll see more and more of these kinds of cases being solved. And heart starts pounding will be here to tell you about them. 

Kaelyn Moore
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