True Crime: Room 13

A lone leather glove is found inside a locked locker on a Minnesota farm the morning Dawn Haverford vanishes - what did it cost him? The glove he left in a locked locker cost him eleven years of ordinary mornings In this episode, we follow the timeline around Dawn Haverford’s disappearance: her eleven-year Wednesday routine, the locked storage locker with an intact padlock and key still in the kitchen, and the delivery records that complicate the early accident theory. How did a glove inside a sealed locker connect to a man who kept showing up at her property? Person: Dawn Haverford Date: January 8 (disappearance), January 19 (body found) Location: Cresset Lake, Minnesota Item: single leather glove found inside locked external storage locker Person: delivery driver named Norris with six flagged visits over ten months - Dawn drove seven minutes into town every Wednesday for eleven years, ordering black coffee and a blueberry muffin at Patton’s Diner at 7:00, leaving at 7:41 on January 8. - Responding deputy found Dawn’s vehicle at her property with the engine cold, no signs of disturbance inside the house, back door locked, and the padlock on the exterior locker intact. - The locker key was hanging on its hook inside Dawn’s kitchen where she always kept it, yet a large leather glove not belonging to anyone with access was inside the locked locker. - Searchers combed the lake edge, tree line, and county roads; Dawn’s body was recovered on January 19 in a culvert about a quarter mile from the property, east of the house and away from the lake. - Delivery records show an account for Dawn’s rural route was inactive since the prior March, yet a driver named Norris logged six voluntary-detour visits to that address across ten months.

A broken deadbolt at a timber yard and a pair of boots: a dead man is found six miles away - did they make it out? The broken rear deadbolt let someone slip in - did they make it out? In this episode, we follow a homicide investigation that hinges on a ten-minute gap between security footage and creekside bootprints. What choices, oversights, and small details might explain how two facts that cannot both be true came to exist? Person: Melvin Slater Location: Cutter Creek; Slater Timber Supply, Hatchett Creek Date: June 7 (evening) - body found ~40 hours later; discovery June 9 Person: Carol Gallagher Event: broken deadbolt on rear equipment bay noted Feb 14, unrepaired - Detective Carol Gallagher pulls security footage showing Melvin’s spare size-eleven boots on a shelf at 6:00 PM on June 7. - At 6:10 PM on June 7, fresh size-eleven bootprints with Melvin’s toe-in gait are pressed into the bank of Cutter Creek, six miles from the yard. - The rear equipment bay deadbolt was reported broken on Feb 14, signed off by foreman Mark Richardson, but never repaired or alarmed. - Melvin’s routine: kept a spare pair of boots in the rear bay, ran Slater Timber Supply for two decades, and missed his regular Wednesday call to his daughter Becca on the night in question. - Key witnesses and timeline: Tom Vickers found Melvin’s truck June 8; Becca called Vickers after midnight June 7; Deputy Sean Pollard responded to the creek report at 5:40 AM on June 9.

A missing woman's suitcase turns up at a rail depot, tagged with her name and a future date. What does the luggage tag mean? The date on the tag that unraveled a perfect disappearance This episode explores the puzzling case of Erin Johnson, a woman who vanished, only for her luggage to surface under mysterious circumstances. How could a simple luggage tag expose a meticulously planned deception? Person: Erin Johnson Location: Dellard Rail Depot, Dellard, New Mexico Date: April 10th Status: Missing Object: Olive-green rolling suitcase - Erin Johnson, a 62-year-old retired postal clerk, lived a life of precise routines in Dellard, New Mexico. - Her neighbor, Gloria Carlson, 51, held a spare key to Erin's house and had a past unknown to Dellard residents. - On April 4th, Erin attended her weekly card club, leaving 10 minutes later than usual to pick up a casserole dish from Gloria's. - Erin was reported missing on April 6th, over 36 hours after she was last seen. - On April 10th, an olive-green suitcase with Erin Johnson's name and a future travel date of May 12th was found at Dellard Rail Depot.

A burgundy trunk arrives with Lori Roberts’ things - but Lori never left her car on Spur Lane; how do you fall from that high? The key he kept sent Lori Roberts tumbling from life In this episode, we follow the sequence of actions, movements, and choices that turned a routine maintenance visit into a disappearance that read like a planned departure. The narrative traces timestamps, objects, and decisions that shaped the investigation and asks: which deliberate acts created the appearance of a woman who left of her own accord? Person: Lori Roberts Person: Curtis Harris Harris Location: Spur Lane, Lea County, New Mexico Event: Burgundy trunk sent toward Tucson with Lori’s belongings Time gap: 37 minutes between last sighting and Harris’s phone ping - Lori was last seen leaving a pinochle game at 9:07 p.m.; her car remained in the driveway. - A workman, Curtis Harris, documented his visit to her home with a photo holding a key and did not return the key as required. - A cell tower in Lea County recorded Harris’s phone thirty-seven minutes after Lori was last seen. - A trunk, sent in cash with no sender name or return address, arrived in Dellhart containing Lori’s clothes, toiletries, books, and a wrapped gift addressed to her sister Sandra. - Sandra collected the trunk at the freight depot and found a Christmas present packed as if by someone who had been inside Lori’s home.

A man’s Buick idling with hazards and his glasses left inside marks when a husband vanished on a quiet road - which tow truck is responsible? The Buick's blinking hazards froze Warren's route - and he vanished In this episode, we follow the morning a domestic routine fractured and a man named Warren did not return to finish it. The story traces the roadside scene, the blinking hazards, and the records that begin to connect a tow truck operator to that empty timeline-what questions does that string of evidence raise? Person: Warren Rice Date: November 7-8, 2003 Location: County Road Nine Person: Donald Armstrong Evidence: laminated library card found in Armstrong’s truck visor - A morning ritual around an insulin shot and a greyhound named Hatch establishes how unusual Warren’s absence was. - Nora found Warren’s Buick parked on County Road Nine with hazard lights blinking and his glasses folded on the passenger seat. - A tow truck operator, Donald Armstrong, was logged stationary on that road for ninety-seven minutes the night Warren disappeared. - Investigators found a laminated library card with Warren’s name tucked in the sun visor of Armstrong’s truck, a card reported lost two years earlier. - County records show multiple canceled or blank dispatch entries for Armstrong on the same stretch of road in previous years.

A red suitcase at Caldwell Crossing ties to one tagged JENKINS V. - the case hinges on a costly coincidence. What did it cost him? The red suitcase arrived on the carousel - and cost him his alibi In this episode, we follow the timeline that links a young woman’s disappearance to a red hard-sided suitcase that showed up on an Amtrak carousel hours after her body was found. The episode lays out the decisions, searches, and missing records that transformed one bag into the pivotal piece of evidence - and asks what that shift meant for everyone involved. Person: Vicki Jenkins Person: Danny Reyes Person: Christine Vickers Date: December 9-14 (key events) Location: Caldwell Crossing station, Merritt County, New Mexico - A red hard-sided suitcase with claim tag "JENKINS V. / CDG-ABQ / Dec 9" completed a rotation on the northbound carousel at 2:17 p.m. on December 14 and went unclaimed. - Vicki Jenkins was last seen boarding a southbound train on December 9; her body was found by Ruth Harris on December 14 in scrub brush beside County Road 7, 1.4 miles from the station. - Danny Reyes placed the missing-persons report on December 12 after calling Vicki’s phone fourteen times between December 10 and 12 with no answer. - Lead investigator Christine Vickers executed an initial search warrant that did not recover a key piece of evidence, then a second warrant five weeks later that did. - Vicki had no hotel booking in Albuquerque, no return ticket, and no confirmed plans after boarding-gaps that only became clear after the body, the missing-person report, and the suitcase were linked.

A surveyor finds a pair of glasses in a harvested field - did they make it in time? The grain truck's weigh ticket pinned him on County Road Twelve at six-ten In this episode, we follow the early, irregular clues of a missing-person case that centers on a quiet rural road and a six-ten morning window. The story traces records, receipts, and the landscape to ask whether a commercial driver passed through the corridor when Darlene Pruitt vanished. Date: May 9, 2019 Person: Darlene Pruitt, 44 Person: Vernon Jenkins, 51 Location: County Road Twelve; Alderman farm field Evidence: Grain elevator weigh receipt timestamped 6:48 AM - Brian Mills, the Harlan County surveyor, found a single pair of reading glasses 340 yards from the nearest road in a freshly turned patch of a harvested soybean field. - Darlene Pruitt walked County Road Twelve at about 6:10 AM three mornings a week and disappeared after leaving on her usual route on May 9, 2019. - A $180,000 life insurance policy named husband Mitch Pruitt as beneficiary but co-op meeting sign-ins placed him elsewhere the morning she vanished. - Contract driver Vernon Jenkins had a grain truck weighed eleven miles east at 6:48 AM that morning, timing that would put him through the County Road Twelve corridor around 6:10 AM. - Soil on Jenkins’s truck scraper blade was clay-loam matching the Alderman parcels, conflicting with paperwork that listed a sandy-loam load from a different farm.

A veterinary clinic’s HVAC log shows an uncontracted tech before dawn the morning Wendy Roberts stopped coming - how do you fall from that high? The HVAC log that taught him when she arrived - why she fell In this episode, we follow the pieces that arrived after Wendy Roberts vanished: a spiral planner in the mail, a vendor log with an unexpected name, and a detective tracing routine records to a narrow morning window. What do a three-and-a-half-hour service call, a white unmarked van, and a missing planner tell us about who was watching her? Person: Wendy Roberts Date: February 18, 2019 Location: Cloverleaf Animal Clinic, Harlow Falls, Ohio Person: Jason Zimmerman Person: Detective Craig Callahan - Wendy Roberts opened the clinic alone each morning, arriving before 6:50 and staying solo for roughly twenty minutes. - On February 18, 2019, an HVAC technician named Jason Zimmerman logged a 3.5-hour visit to Cloverleaf despite the clinic having no active contract with him. - A plain white unmarked van was seen near the clinic corner before seven in the morning in early March, noticed later by a neighbor who hadn’t realized she was a witness. - Wendy’s spiral planner, in her handwriting with six pages torn out, arrived at her parents’ mailbox in Clarksburg on March 11, 2021 - two years after she vanished. - Detective Callahan traced sixteen missed leads, focused on vendor logs and phone records, and narrowed a critical period by crossing service entries with daily arrival times.

A foreman’s keycard kept opening doors and Pamela Reynolds’s boot prints stopped in a frozen forest - so how do you fall from that high? A frozen hillside froze her trail - and sent her into the woods In this episode, we follow the early hours and records around Pamela Reynolds’s disappearance at Harwick Mill and the choices investigators made as the scene and the logs unfolded. What happened between the last badge swipe and the frozen boot prints that stop at the tree line? Person: Pamela Reynolds Date: October 14 Location: Harwick Mill Status: missing Event: four after-hours entries by Ross Williams in six weeks - Donna Hicks found Pamela’s boot prints entering the woods at 6:20 a.m., pressed deep into frozen ground and ending at the tree line. - Detective Eugene Crawford assumed the prints showed an attacker who walked into the woods and vanished, shaping the initial investigation. - Ross Williams, a foreman, used an after-hours keycard to enter the facility four times in the six weeks before Pamela’s disappearance. - Pamela’s final keycard timestamp was the last swipe on the working floor; the logs showed she was not alone in the building that night. - The mill’s access system recorded the timestamps and credentials but did not flag the four entries because Williams’s card was authorized for unrestricted access.

A Seiko arrives in Harwick Falls years after its owner's death, forcing a detective to reopen a vanished teacher's case - what did it cost him? Seiko Mail, Secret Van: How a Returned Watch Broke a Murder Case In this episode, we follow the timeline from a missing teacher’s last planned syringe to a watch mailed back years after her death and the detective work that connects a mobile mechanic to Sutter Road. It traces the small, methodical decisions and records that turned a disappearance into a murder investigation and asks what one object's return demanded of those involved. Person: Jean Donnelly Date: November 4, 2009 (disappearance); November 3, 2014 (watch mailed) Location: 14 Sutter Road, Harwick Falls, Ohio Person: Detective Melissa Bailey Event: Seiko watch with engraving J.D. mailed with no return address - Jean Donnelly, a 38-year-old classroom aide, left pre-filled, labeled syringes for her diabetic cat and failed to administer the evening dose on November 4, 2009. - Fifteen days later Frances McCarthy, a septic service operator, found Donnelly’s remains in a drain on Caldwell Creek at 7:14 a.m. - A cracked-crystal Seiko engraved "J.D. - 2001" was mailed to 14 Sutter Road on November 3, 2014 with no return address or note. - Duane Duncan’s service invoice dated November 4, 2009 lists a 3:47 p.m. battery jump at an address one block from Sutter Road and a customer name that did not exist. - The invoice included a phone number traced to a prepaid cell later tied to Duncan’s prior account, suggesting he called himself to create a paper trail.