Part 2 | Cold Blooded Killer: Felix Vail

0:15 I walk straight line. Shackle change. Oh weesome, Girdie, it's calling my name. There is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice as the huge stream game Rango three. Come here by me to die. Inside these walls, inside the wild.

0:56 And went no girl as I. Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Andngola, a podcast one hundred and forty two years in the making, the complete story of America's bloodiest present. I'm your host, Jim Chapman.

1:42 I'm dropping this episode on Thanksgiving Eve, and hopefully you're out there with family and friends you're cooking it up and maybe even listening to Bloody Andngla. I'm absolutely thankful for every single one of you who, like me, share a unique interest in history, prisons, the criminal mind, and all that encompasses that. So from me to all of you, thank you so much for hanging in there and staying with me. Now today I'm continuing. With the story of Felix Veil. In the last time that I left you, Felix Veil had finally been arrested for the murder of his wife Mary, which occurred some fifty years prior to his arrest. On May eighteenth, of twenty thirteen, and Felix was seventy three y'all at the time of his arrest. Now, Veil was arrested in Kenyon Lake, Texas.

2:40 Undercover cops actually waited for him outside of his home. They were doing kind of a stakeout, but when he didn't arrive there, they put out an APB and he was actually arrested at a local post office. And his statement upon his arrest was, I don't know why this is happening, that's all he said. He actually waived extradition to Calcashu Parish, Louisiana, and they drove him straight there from his arrest. And that arrest was significant. This was to be the oldest prosecution of a serial killer in a cold case in the entire history of the United States. Now, what prompted his arrest is an interesting story in and of itself. An investigative reporter for a Jackson, Mississippi newspaper called The Clarion Ledger. His name was Jerry Mitchell, and he started investigating this case again kind of on his own in twenty twelve. That investigation led him to publish a special report titled Gone in that local paper, and that in turn prompted authorities to open a case up of their own. So I cannot overemphasize how big of a role that Jerry Mitchell played in this case. As a matter of fact, were it not for Jerry Mitchell and that report, Felix Veil would have never been arrested or convicted in his wife Mary's death. And another large

4:13 bit of credit goes to a nets mother, Rose, who never gave up on her own pursuit of justice after her teenage daughter had went missing while being married to Veil. So what was Veil up to between the years of nineteen eighty five where I last left you in episode one and twenty thirteen when he was finally arrested. Well, I'm going to give you the rest of the story through the eyes of the guy who really deserves all of the credit, and that is Jerry Mitchell in his account of the details. And I'm going to pick up in nineteen eighty seven in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, Rose at this point is fed up with the lack of of progress in her daughter's death. She had spent thousands of dollars by this time on private investigators, and she was trying to start a new life. She had just started a new job at a bakery. She fired all these private investigators that seemed to lead nowhere, and she decided to look for Veil herself. So she put some information out there, she's looking for this guy, and she actually got tipped off. Someone told her he was staying at a house, and she got her friend and they go to that house and they actually see him sitting outside.

5:37 Imagine that, after all these years of looking for this guy, there he is sitting outside on the front porch of a house. So she walks up to him and she says, where did that go? And he said Mexico? And she said where in Mexico? And Seveil told her that he and a Nette had made a pact that they would contact each other after five years. He never looked up at her, he never stood up, He never looked her mother in the eye, and shocks. She just walked away, shaking her head in disbelief. She didn't believe a word of what he had said. Now they'll became fast friends with a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the name of Scott Porter, and he was an expert in martial arts.

6:26 Had like a ton of black belts, and they'll believed he was a martial arts expert too. After practicing flying kicks into a mattress. Each morning, he and Porter they would work out. They would left weights together before hitting a Chinese buffet over lunch. VLL had shared with this guy that he had never felt he was bound by society rules. As a matter of fact, Porter recalled, he dropped his silverware and began eating with his hands like a caveman. And at nights the pair would play pool, they would drink beer, and they would sometimes visit strip clubs in Tulsa. Porter was quoted as saying, Tulsa has more churches than gas stations, but also more strip clubs than anywhere else I've lived. The two men reminisced about the women missing from their lives. Veil at forty five, had been married to a Net just eighteen, if you'll remember, and Porter, at twenty eight, had dated.

7:25 Rose, who was thirty six. That's right, they dated mom and daughter at one point in their lives. Porter had driven Rose to California before returning home alone, and he said, my heart was absolutely broken. She needed to move on, and I didn't now. Not long after, a Net had vanished. Rose telephoned Porter and shared some of her suspicions that Veil had something to do with their daughter's disappearance. Porter began examining each word his friend spoke while he discovers his hopes of reuniting with Rose. He noticed Veil never mentioned the possibility of reuniting with a net One night, Val seemed more open.

8:10 He was crying like a baby, Porter recalled, angry it didn't work out differently, They'll explained that Annette wanted to recreate herself and that she didn't want any contact with any portion of her past life. She wanted to totally break with herself now. While Veill talked of breaking with the past, Porter he was busy searching for his He had been adopted and decided to move to Minnesota to reconnect with his birth parents, and while there he met his future wife, Jenny. Returning to Oklahoma with a small son and another on the way, he renewed his friendship with Veil, who was so kind. He later watched the boys while the couple went out on dates. Once, during a discussion of fidelity, Porter said, Veil shared that he felt nobody could ever be fake to one person. Months later, Val started hitting on my wife, Porter said. Upset about this, he took Veil on a walk and confronted him, and of course Val denied it all. Porter recalled, He said, no, no, she was hitting on me. As they crossed the Arkansas River bridge, of fleeting thought ran through his head. I wanted to throw Felix off that bridge and was wondering if I'd get away with it now. After these incidents, Val began dating someone by the name of Beth Field.

9:34 She was attracted to its intelligence, and the pair grew close. Then during a December nineteen eighty seven argument, he became so violent he ruptured her ear drum. She told Val there was no justification for physical violence, and she said He replied, if you quit behaving like a whore, I'll quit hitting you. She recalled. Discussing this with a therapist, I finally told this woman, it's all very nice, but one of us is going to be dead before this works. Field eventually took the advice of a close friend and attended an intensive ten day mediation course in August of nineteen eighty eight on Colorado's Western Slope. To her surprise, Veil came to after the course, she received a telephone call from Rose sharing details about the disappearance of her daughter Annette. From that point forward, Field said she began to examine Vale's words more closely, realizing the probability that he had taken Annette's life.

10:38 He told Field he. And a Nette had gone camping and that she wanted to get away from her mother, and that he had helped her set up an opportunity for her to change her. Name and move on. Veil denied to her any involvement in Annette's disappearance. Then one time she recalled, he said, what if I said yes. Four months after the mediation course, he entered her home unannounced, Already drunk, he accused her of imagined promiscuity. According to the court order, he slapped her, he struck her, and he threw across the bedroom. She asked if he was going to kill her, and he said, it depends on what you tell me. So the judge here in all this information. He gave her a protective order and he required Veil to keep his distance. Two weeks later, the sheriff reported that Veil was nowhere to be found. Field said she was caught in a sick, addictive relationship, and it took quite some time to fully unrival. Over time her attachment to him it began to fade, and while Field was visiting a mediation center again in Texas, this was in nineteen ninety, Vail arrived and chastised her. She felt the same anger and defensiveness rising up as before, she said. She walked away to compose herself, and when she returned, she sat down next to him. I told him there is a part of you that goes off, and it's sick and it's dangerous, she said. He looked at her and said, really, yes, Really, this time the

12:13 message seemed to sink in. Vail left the next day, and with a single exception of about five years later, she never saw him again. Now Mary Rose, she moved to Ashland, Oregon. This was in nineteen eighty nine, and she was working as an administrator for a private school. She was hoping for a quieter life, obviously than the one she had in California. More than a year later, she goes and she visits a psychic and she asked if she could talk to her daughter a net. The psychic put her hands over her forehead and spoke, oh my gosh, this is not something I usually talk about when I see images like this. She never shared what she saw, but Rose knew her daughter was dead and that she needs to get to the bottom of it.

13:01 So in the summer of nineteen ninety one, she removed the back seats from her Toyetta vann and put in a makeshift bed for sleeping. She actually made curtains to hang over the windows. She had previously taught by phone with Felix Veil's sister, Sue Jordan, who now lived in Canyon Lake, Texas, so Rose decided to drive more than two thousand miles there, hoping she might find out more in person. So Jordan answered the door, She invited her in, and the two women they sit in the living room and Jordan recalled the last time she saw a Net. That was in October of nineteen eighty four, when the family attended a fair in Sulfur, Louisiana. She said Veil was there and a nut, and she told Annette's mom that Felix was giving a Net a hard time. He criticized the way she was dressed. He was just very rude to her. Days after the fair, the couple left again in a few days after that, Vale returned alone.

14:04 He looked extremely distressed and he was drinking a lot. Jordan also said that Val told her and Nette had wanted to leave, and that he took her to a bus station and that she left with some Mexican men heading to Mexico. Jordan also mentioned that VAL's first wife had drowned, which Rose by this point did not know, and before she left, Jordan said, oh, you know, there was another woman that disappeared. I remember her mother calling my mother for years, checking to see if they had heard from her. I think her name was Sharon. Now, after this conversation, Rose sits down at a typewriter and she basically logged every word she could remember from that conversation, knowing she may need it later. She also called a public library in Lake Charles. That librarian remembered the nineteen sixty two drowning of Vale's first wife, Ma, and that library recalled that he had taken out life insurance policies on his wife prior to her drowning. She also said the insurance companies were suspicious and didn't pay the full value.

15:12 The library made some copies of the newspaper articles and actually mailed them to Annet's mother. After reading them, Rose reached out to Mary's family in Louisiana and she spoke to Will Horton, which was Mary's brother. He shared the suspicions he had about Vail, and also a copy of a nineteen seventy one National Inquirer article. When she read it, she knew that Sharon's last name was Hensley, so that solved one problem, but created another. Where was Sharon Hensley from? She didn't have any idea, she had never heard of her. In nineteen ninety four, she read in the newspaper about Delores Strullo's disappearance from Medford, Oregon, seven years earlier. Police had just arrested her husband thanks to the work of a detective by the name of Terry Nele. So she got an idea. She figured, if this guy could do that, maybe he can help me. She contact Noll and he was able to help her find the family of Sharon Hensley.

16:15 So when Rose dialed Hensley's family, Sharon's mother, Peggy answered the first question. Rose asked, do you happen to know who Felix Vale is? You bet? I do? Sharon Heinsley's mother said back, and Rose replied, we need to talk now. At this time, Vale was living with his mother and father in their home in my Pelier, Mississippi. During the day he will work some on the family farm, and he also tinred with his Fiat which is a car for you young people out there, and used his gravity boots to hang upside down in the barn. One day, he actually chased off a three legged hound dog. He wrote in his journal, Remember I told you he liked the journal. The next day he wrote, I shot the three legged dog and cleaned up the garbage. He detailed in his journal about winning pool games and screwing women, sometimes having sex in a grain bend, an old bus, or their homes while their husbands were away. This was in nineteen ninety two. Also in nineteen ninety two, Robinsinclair, she telephoned a Mississippi newspaper wanting to buy an advertisement to remind Veil that he had a daughter he had never met. The newspaper put her in touch with Vel, and the two began writing letters back and forth and talking on the telephone. In one note, Vel stated he had never gotten over me.

17:43 She recalled. She felt confused by his words, she said, because she said she was already living with a man who made her happy and who would be her future husband. When Vail arrived a few months later, she said, the same magic she had felt with him more than twenty years earlier had vanished. I realized that he was a fraud, of bomb and kind of a joke. So during this time, Mary Rose she had contacted everyone she could think of, even the FBI and the detective who had helped her before, Terry Noll. He contacted Jim Bell, a national expert in serial killings who actually worked for the FBI, and when Rose talked with Bell, she felt like she had hit the jackpot. He was interested in working on Vale's case if he could swing the time he was busy. Serial killers seemed to be active during that time in history.

18:38 Now Vail's son Bill, he told Rose that he was willing to testify as long as authorities provided protection to his family. Both the Tulsa Police and the District Attorney's office in Lake Charles they revived their investigations into Vail, now considered a suspected serial killer, and Bell suggested the victim's families gather with authorities at the FBI Academy in Virginia to share that information on Veil. He was unable to work on the case and left the FBI in nineteen ninety five. The meeting in Quantico never materialized in the case involving Veil grew cold yet again. So obviously Roses devastated. She had worked so hard to make something happen and nothing had happened. She knew that other families felt devastated too.

19:28 Now. In the men nineteen nineties, Veil began dating a woman in Mississippi. At the time, he was fifty five and she was forty four. In ten years, I never saw a temper, the woman said. She recalled Veil taking care of his parents before their deaths, and she described him as very attentive. She said he was just a kind man, although he never worked a job. She said he was the most frugal person she had ever met. He could probably live off three hundred dollars a month. He got rental money from a house in Tulsa, and all that is a nets house that he fucking stole from her.

20:08 One day, she tried to step across the swollen creek in front of her house, knocked off her feet. She got dragged downstream, and she said, if I had died in the creek, I would have been added to the list of people that Felix supposedly killed. And she actually brings up a good point. There would have been another strange death, and she's using that as a example of how that shit can happen. I don't buy it. She knew of the allegations that Veil had something to do with the net Veil's disappearance, but she was unaware of Sharon Hinsley's disappearance or the suspicion surrounding Mary Horton. That man, she insisted, was not the man I know.

20:50 So let's get into after that article I told you about gone was written by Jerry Mitchell, and I'm gonna pick up with his account of that. He starts trying to find Veil hisself in twenty twelve, and he finds out that where Veil was living, he had sold all his acreage he had like seventeen acres from his parents and he shut up there and there was just a storm damage trailer, etc. But no contents whatsoever in that trailer. So he calls Veil's brother, Ronnie, and Vale's brother Ronnie said, I don't. Know where he went.

21:31 He probably doesn't want anyone to know where he is. Ronnie, who had work for the US Army Corps of Engineers for twenty two years, told him that when he had heard the allegations of the disappearances of these women, he was as shocked as anybody else. So the reporter asked him, did the FBI ever interview know? And I'm surprised they haven't, he said, And then he picks up. After my story on Felix veil Gone appeared in The Clearing Life on November eleventh, twenty twelve, I traveled to my failure to meet a man who had telephoned me. Wesley Turnage grew up with Val and recalled a conversation he had in the month following his nineteen sixty three graduation from high school.

22:15 He said he had car trouble one day, and Val gave him a ride to the Nickenbacker Manufacturing Company in nearby West Point, where they both worked. During that drive, he said, Val talked first of his son Bill and then of his deceased wife, Mary, calling her his ex wife, a word that kind of stuck with Turnage as strange, since the two were not divorced at the time of her death. He said, the longer Veil spoke, the angrier he got. You could see the rage in his eyes. Val referred to Mary as a bitch, saying that she thought another child would help solve her marriage problems. Turner's recalled.

22:55 He quoted Val as saying she wanted to have another kid. I didn't want the one I got. I told her I fixed that. Sorry, bitch, she'll never have another one. Time marched on, but he said he never forgot what Veil told him. It's like nine to eleven. He said. Some things just stick in your mind. So the reporter returned to Lake Charles, puzzled by how Veil dided an indictment in that nineteen sixty two death of his wife. Her brother Will Horton joined me in the Calkashu Clerk's office as I poured through stacks of records trying to find out more information about the grand jury that met on the case. Flipping through the pages, I noticed a lot of criminal cases had been dismissed in nineteen sixty two.

23:40 When I added them up, I realized the district attorney had the judge dismissed eight hundred and eighty two cases, which were more than three cases for each working day. Mary's brother told me the original detectives in the case told him that the judge would not allow them to present evidence that they had collected against Vail that match the stories I had heard from the grand Jerry's families. Mary's brother left while I continued to dig. A half hour later, he called me to let me know he was talking with District Attorney John Derozer. He's from Unice, just like me, Horton said. I walked over and met Deroza, a Vietnam veteran. He viewed himself as the guy wearing the white hat and battling the bad guys. He even kept a life size cutout of John Wayne in his office.

24:32 He said he would be willing to reopen the case if there was enough evidence. Afterwards, I telephoned a retired lawyer who had known Frank Salter Junior, who was the then district attorney in nineteen sixty three. The cheerful, white haired man who built boats and model airplanes greeted Horton and me at the door and invited us to join him at the kitchen table. A talented attorney in both civil and criminal courts. Russell Tritticko, Senior, had won a nineteen eighty civil judgment forcing chainsaw manufacturers to put chain brakes on their products. The eighty four year old retired lawyer recalled the corruption of those days. He worked back then under his uncle Joe, who represented the then sheriff Ham Reid, accused of taking bribes but never convicted. Triticko said the sheriff was so paranoid he stayed in his patrol car and he never answered the telephone at home unless he heard the right sequence of rings. He described Salter as a longtime prosecutor whose close friends were mostly what I called hoodlums. In the nineteen fifties, Salter began his legal career as an assistant DA for then District Attorney Ed Shannon. When the senior prosecutor saw reelection in nineteen sixty, Salter ran against him. Triticko said the major issue Salter raised was Shanahan had just dismissed too many cases.

26:03 Then Frank became DA and he does the same thing. Dismissals became business as usual in defense. Lawyer's showered office secretaries with gifts, especially at Christmas. He recalled, it was easy money. Of course, the victim might not be happy. He knew about the nineteen sixty two death of Mary Horton Vale. When his uncle Joe ran against Salter in nineteen sixty six, her death became a political issue. The candidate shed a photograph of her body after it was recovered from the river as proof of Salter's political favor. I asked Triteco about the City's Service, and he told me the company was like the General Motors of the late Charles Louisiana area. I knew Veil's uncle, Thomas Finney, had worked there as a supervisor and had arranged for Vale's job. In searching for Salter's obituary, I had run across the one for his father, who had also worked at City Service. When I visited Vinnie's ninety four year old widow, Virginia, she confirmed the couple's friendship with the district attorney. I shared what Vell said about troutline fishing that night, and Tritiko shook his head. The longtime fisherman questioned why Vell would have traveled so many miles up the Calkashi River when he could have laid trout lines not far from where he kept his boat. You just don't run trout lines in deep water, he said. So

27:33 where had Felix Veil gone? He had just disappeared, like the women he professed to once love. I telephoned more of his relatives and friends. They were just as clueless as me. Weeks after Gone was published, I received a telephone call from a man who had read my nearly nine thousand words story online. We discussed Veil, the case against him, ain't his disappearance before? The man volunteered. I know where he is. You do, Canyon Lake, Texas? He said. Would you like his po box? You bet? I said. Back In Jackson, I telephoned Insign Yassek of Boston, the founder of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative.

28:21 That's a mouthful. No matter what questions I had about serial killers, he had the answers thanks to a huge database he had amassed. My search for answers in the Veil case led Yazak to contact Arman Showalter, acting chief for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, which specialized in serial homicide investigations. He also shared a copy of Gone with Showalter, who in turn, contacted Kaal Kashu Parish Deputy Randy Curtis, now taking on the Veil case. Curtis telephoned me, explained that he was a twenty year law enforcement veteran who had been transferred from the Violent Crimes Unit to the Forensic Cold Case Division.

29:06 After reading gone, he caught me back wondering if I knew where Veil was these days, Canyon Lake, Texas, I said. Days later, the deputy telephone with news that the FBI had discovered Veil purchased property on Shady View Drive in Canyon Lake, and on January eighteenth of twenty thirteen, Curtis decided to confront Vail. He found the suspected serial killer at that address, living in a storage shed so large that it could be a home. Curtis said he read Veil's rights before asking him about the death and disappearances of the women, and Veil refused to say anything, accusing families and the Clarion Ledger of lying about him. The whole time, Veil couldn't stop smirking, and that's his major arrogance.

29:57 Y'all. The sight of that smirk and angered Kurk, who worked days nights and weekends on that case. One day he called me to tell me he found something big, and not long after this call, Will Horton shared the number of his cousin who was in the same rosary group with a caretaker for ninety year old Isaac Sunny. Abshire. I drove to Lake Charles and sat down with the man who was finishing his lunch in front of the television. He remembered Vail well. The pair had worked together at a chemical plant next to the City Service refinery in nearby Sulfur, Louisiana. Abshire described Vel as my helper and a good worker.

30:39 I liked him. Vale was looking for a place closer to his girlfriend, Mary Horton, who was living in Lake Charles. Needing the cash, Abshire offered him a room for rent. He accepted, and Mary became a frequent visitor. I was kind of like a big brother to her. He said. She was a sweet little girl. After the couple decided to get married, Val moved out. At work, his disposition soured. He talked about how ugly his wife was when she was pregnant, and that he didn't like his baby. Even a dog loves their children, Abshire said on the friday before drowning, the couple visited, bringing their infant son Bill. Mary confided in Abshire asking if he thought Val could take her baby away. Two nights later, word came that Mary had drowned in the kal Kashu River. Deputies contacted Abshire's father to help in the search, so Abshire and two fellow workers they went out the next day to drag the river.

31:39 The next morning, October thirtieth, nineteen sixty two, he returned with one of them, Jimmy May, to continue dragging. While they're talking, something popped up. A guy with binoculars asked, does she have blonde hair? I said, yes, that's her. They were covered the body and Abshire could not forget what he saw. Her body was rigid and a scarf was wrapped around her neck before going into her mouth, and had a big old knot in it, he said. The deputies on the boat boiled in anger, all voicing the same opinion Veil had killed Mary. They believed it was foul play just by looking at the body. A deputy shared copies of the photographs taken that day, and Abshar had held on to them ever since, placing them in a folder he marked, keep you hung onto these photos for fifty years? I asked, yes, he replied, he told me. He gave the photos to Deputy Curtis. He also handed over a copy of the nineteen sixty two Sheriffs Support, which listed fifteen points suggesting Vail's guilt. Despite being behind on major bills, Veil had managed to pay an entire year's premiums in advance for a fifty thousand dollars life insurance policy on his wife. He had a second life insurance policy on her for eight thousand dollars, which promised to pay double if she died by accident.

33:04 Deputies reported that witnesses said Veil told them he didn't love his wife and that she was stupid and she looked vulgar. Deputies also reported that Veil had sexual relationships with other females and at least one male. Most witnesses they talked to felt like he was capable of killing his wife. Val told deputies that his wife was wearing an off white leather jacket when she went into the water, but she wasn't wearing the jacket when her body was recovered. Inside his boat, deputies found two life preservers, Mary had not been wearing one, despite her fear of drowning. As for that troutline, deputies found it coiled inside.

33:47 Veil's tackle box. That's why Abshire told me. That's why they thought it was fishy. When he returned to work, he told his coworkers what he witnessed were spread, and he said his boss hauled him in and told him to stop sharing what he saw. Eventually, Abshire faced off with Vel. He said he had lawyers that were ready to see me for everything I had, for all I was saying about him. Get your lawyer ready, I told him I want to get on the witness stand and tell everybody what had happened. After some time past, Abshire said, Val telephoned him, asking if he still wanted to tell everything to the lawyers.

34:28 Get them, Abshire said, He replied, I'm still ready to talk. I want to get on the stand and tell him what I know. Not long after Vell left town, I asked him if he believed thell had killed his wife. Oh my god, yes, he said. I then met with Steve Horton, who talked about his aunt Mary, whom his family adored so much that he and his wife had named their daughter after her. He showed me her nineteen sixty two death certificate, signed by the corner doctor Harry Snattick. The certificate said she fell from the boat while fishing and accidentally drowning. Horton detailed the many errors Snattic could put down, the wrong date of her birth for example, the wrong date of her death, the wrong occupation. He pointed to the neat signature William Veil. It looked nothing like the handwriting William Felix Veil typically had. He then directed me to the date of veil signature October thirty first of nineteen sixty two. That was the same day at the funeral, he said, which was in Yennie. How could he have signed this in Lake Charles. Horton shared other documents which showed Veil had failed to pay any money towards the one thy fourteen dollars bill for his wife's funeral, or her headstone, or even her burial plot.

35:48 Dear sir, I would have contacted you sooner if I would have known anything definite about when I can pay you, Veil wrote order On's funeral home in nineteen sixty three. Thank you for your patience and I'll be in your office in the first part of April to settle the bill. Yours, truly, Felix Veil. Bell never showed, never paid, despite receiving thousands on two life insurance policies that he took out on Mary. The funeral home won a judgment of thirteen hundred and six dollars in Mississippi against Vail, and he still didn't pay. It was during a bridge game in nineteen sixty nine that Mary's mother larned Veil had never put a penny towards the funeral. She was so embarrassed she went in and paid it herself. I spoke with the funeral home operator, Jeane Ordworn. He remembered Mary as a beautiful girl. They had a marriage not made in heaven, but made in hell, he said. So I decided to take a trip to Kenyon Lake, and when I drove into the Canyon Lake neighborhood where Bell lived, I saw a deer grazing the lawns.

36:54 Paperwork I copied at the courthouse prior to my trip showed David Thomason and d need his property to Veil after he paid the back taxes. So I dug into Thomasin's background, and I discovered that he and Vales shared something in common. Each of those guys had a wife who died in an accidental drowning, so I decided to dig deeper. Thomasin's estranged wife, Kathy, she had drowned in Kenyon Lake. This was on. July third of two thousand and five. Her family still had questions. Her mother, Kathy Simon, who still lived in Kenyon Lake, told me her daughter tried to get away from Thomasin, who was charged twice with assault but never prosecuted.

37:39 She was terrified of him. On the back lot of Vale's property, I could see the boat Kathy supposedly fell from and drown Friends told me Thomasin was out of town at the time. If he did take out a life insurance policy on her, I couldn't find it, but I did find insurance companies. Shelled out more than a half million dollars in preseeds to him, including two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars for a house fire that the fire marshal thought was suspicious. Vale now lived on this property, and when I pulled up outside his home, I noticed there were no windows. The padlocked fence had barbed wire across the top. I called out his name and told him I was interested into speaking with him about the missing women.

38:23 There was no answer. On March tenth of twenty thirteen, I received an email from someone by the name of Gina Fretzel, a redheaded private investigator whose colleagues nicknamed her Batgirl. She was obsessed with serial killers. She had already read the e book version of Gone before going online to discover Felix. Vale was now living in Kenyon Lake. That was only an hour and a half away from her home in Kerrville, Texas, where her grandfather had been chief of police for twenty years. I'm a licensed pis, she wrote me. Let me know if you need any help. I promised I would later. I sent a second email saying I'd like to find out more about the suspicious burning of David Thomason's house on the property.

39:08 Where Veil now lived. On April third, she tried to talk to thomasin and when she was unable to, she telephoned and said she was going to see Veil. He won't talk to you, I told her, want to bet. She called back later with the news that vel had indeed talked. She told him she was an investigator looking into the Thomasin fire and he had spoken almost non stop to her. She returned several more times, recording each of her conversations with Vel. He shared details about his life and lectured her about the dangers of ego, even as his own ego overwhelmed their conversations. He told her he had a genius level IQ surpassing one pin forty, and talked to memories from the wound, saying he could fill the sunshine on his mother's belly. Wow I shared the information him from Frenzel's visits with the expert Yazzi. He provided many more hours of advice and insights, saying Val seem more in line with a cult leader than a suspected serial killer. For more than a dozen hours, Vale spouted off to frenzle about diet. He talked about his adventures, which included motorcycling with a Dutch woman across the US and bicycling with a teenage boy across California. Val regaled her with stories of his sexual exploits, having talked of having sex with hundreds, maybe even thousands of women, before adding that he didn't consider himself promiscuous.

40:40 He asked her to have sex. She told him no, that she didn't know him well enough to have sex, and I knew that was coming. By now, Frenzel had begun to play the role of Vale's girlfriend, despite the fact that they had never even kissed. The conversations grew darker. He talked about how much he knew about killing people, murdering, pain incapacitating people. He said he and Thompson had enough an amenity that we are held in suspicion by all of our family and friends for being able to think of something and do it without looking at whether it's legal or not, or permissible by society or not. He talked of eating live raw meat, saying, if you're going to eat animals, you would have to kill them and drink the blood, suck it out of the body and drink.

41:27 It right then that would be live meat. After Veil talked about a young woman who was obviously a net, Frienzil asked him if he had talked to her since his eyes got huge. She told me it was the most evil luck I've ever seen. Eleven days after Frienzill first contacted Mevel's sister, Kay Faulkner telephone destroyed about her younger brother Ronnie's dying. She said. I replied that I was sorry to hear that his body had been ra sage for years by the hepatitis sea he contracted during the Vietnam War. A lever transplant had saved his life a dozen years earlier, but now his second lever was failing. Faulkner told me it was her birthday and that she would never forget this day.

42:16 She began weeping. I know God has a plan, but why couldn't he take Felix instead. After our conversation, I spoke with Mary Rose, mentioning it was Faulkner's birthday. It's my birthday too, She said, I had no idea Cay and I shared the same birthday. We talked about the case against Felix Veil, and she was worried that authorities might do nothing. Ever, since Vail had sold his Mississippi property, she had been wondering if he would also sell his Tulsa property, property she and Annette had once owned. Weeks later, she called with the news that Vail had sold that Tulsa house. The sale price online one hundred and forty nine thousand dollars. Now that he has all the money, do you think he's gonna run? Jerry, I don't know, I replied, he could be running. On April thirtieth, my telephone reigned that Felix Vale had now left Texas. His sister told me that he had shown up the previous morning at the Columbus, Mississippi home of their late brother, Ronnie, who had died five weeks earlier. Veil had skipped the funeral.

43:23 When Ronnie's widow, Bonnie, spotted Vail, she went to a relative's employer, called police and told them that she didn't want to talk to him. A worker told Vale to move on. That afternoon, cal Kashu Parish Deputy Randy Curtis called me with more news. Val had returned to his brother's property again, this time when Bonnie was gone. Neighbors spotted him checking her mailbox, then hopping a fence and circling her house. Columbus police and other law enforcement officials found Veil in a white pickup and pulled him over. He told them he had come there for a funeral before heading to Montpelier. Curtis said Columbus police were sending him a photograph of Veil and his truck, and he could be running. Jerry, I know, I replied. Vel's sister telephoned again, saying she heard her brother was heading to Montpelier.

44:18 She wondered if he was driving to the home of possible witness Wesley Turnage. I called Turnage to let him know that Veil might be headed his way if he sets foot on my property. Turn and said there ain't gonna be a trial. He called me back later, saying no one in mott Peelier had seen Veil. Are the authorities ever going to do anything? I think so well, they better get moving, he said. In his last conversation with his dying brother, Veil had confided to Ronnie, a one time missionary in the Philippines, what he experienced preaching as a teenager at the Montpelier Baptist Church, seeing a divine being that shimmered like the sun. It was a bad mistake, Veil recalled, because he was thinking I was touched by a demon. I called Frenzel, who speculated the Veil's visit has to do with something his brother had, and he wants it now that his brother's dead. Whatever it is, Felix is willing to rest, going to Mississippi and breaking into a place to get it. He didn't even resk going to the funeral. So where's Vel now?

45:28 Columbus police didn't know. The Sheriff's office in Lake Charles didn't know. Even his family didn't know. Frenzid Veil had talked about living in Switzerland. Could this be the last goodbyes? Before leaving? At ten thirty pm, Frenzel telephoned, I'm sorry to be calling so late. It's okay, I'm up, I said. She talked of the journals she had seen the Veil was keeping in the plastic bins. She had been unable to read them so far, but she had taken photoge grass of the backsides of the pages. She shared the photos with a computer expert who analyzed them, spotting these words on the same line, wife, attic and divided. Could Val have given his brother something to keep? Perhaps stuff something in the attic? The next morning I spoke with Deputy Curtis.

46:20 He said Bonnie had given the police permission to search her property in case Veil had hid something there. That search, I told him should include the attic. He called back later to say the search had turned up nothing. Each day, I made a run of calls, and each day no one had heard from Veil. Six days later, Friendze called Val had just left her message saying he was back in Kenyon Lake. Elijah, he didn't leave the country. I telephoned Randy Curtis with the news that Veil was in Kenyon Lake and he sounded relieved. I talked with Frenzle again. She was anxious to confront Veil about the missing women.

47:02 She was also anxious to stop playing the role of his girlfriend. But before she could, authorities arrested Veil, charging him with the murders of his first wife Mary. After that May seventeenth of rest, Veil wrote friends of letters telling her he loved her, and telephone calls from jail in Lake Charles. He shared his. Explanation of what happened that night on October twenty eighth, nineteen sixty two, on the Klikashu River. He referred to his first wife as a kuna ass lady, saying she was half kneeling on his feet when she saw one of his float buckets that were. On the line. He said the boat was going real slow along the edge of the bank when the boat hit a stump and it dumped her right out. Dale said he shut off the murder and jumped in where she had plopped into the water and the river had sucked her right in.

47:55 He said, I dove around until I was exhausted, and came in immediately to the police station in town and reported the accident, and that was it. This story differed greatly from his story in nineteen sixty two, when he said his wife was sitting on top of a boat seat when she fell out, and not that she was kneeling on his feet. Back then, he said nothing about hitting a stump, just swerving to miss it. Vale told Frenzel that the case has been an avalanche coming down a mountain all that time, waiting to hit my head, and it finally has. He blamed the families in me an evil, shrimpy reporter for what had happened, called the charges fabricated, and insisted that a large amount of money, hate, and political ambition is behind it. At Vale's request, Frenzil returned his truck to his home and went inside to take care.

48:49 Of you task. While there, she spent sixteen hours photographing all of his journals. More than twenty four hundred pages. She also photographed letters, documents, photographs, and business cards, some dating back to the sixties. She found a hodgepodge of women's jewelry on buttons and pens, and even a glass dildo. Most disturbingly, she found a photograph of a naked three year old girl. Frienzel later spoke with the girl, who is now woman, and the journals revealed that Veil had stalked her for years. Frienzil discovered the Burth certificate of a nat craver Veil, who had used it for previous strips to Mexico. Obviously, she didn't take that with her. One of her oddest findings was someone else's birth certificate, a man named Henry Curtis ware the third. Two weeks after Veil's arrest, I telephoned public defender Andrew Cassanet. The former prosecutor returned my calls and asked what I wanted. Are you Felix VAL's lawyer for now? Why are you calling me? I explained that I have been working on a story on Veil having a DNA test in connection with a nineteen ninety double homicide in Starkville, Mississippi. Where two elderly women were raped and killed. The crime struck me as the work of someone else, a double homicide, he asked. He explained that the Starkville police had just swabbed the inside of Bale's

50:20 cheeks testing his DNA. He said he hardly knew anything about Vale's case from the district attorney because the DA had been too busy talking to the press. I laughed, you must be the investigative reporter mentioned in the arrest warrant. Yep, that's me, I said. I knew it had to be you. Why, I said, you're the only one who's called me. This killing happened all the way in Louisiana. Why are you covering it in Mississippi. Well, it's where Felix Vale was born and where he was living before he took off, I said, took off. Sometimes people just leave. If I'm in high school and I go to college, I just leave us. I replied, Do you need anything else? Nope, I replied, so Friendzly and I then plowed through Veil's journals, noticing gaps that made us believe he had purged them.

51:12 Times when he would have been with Sharon and Annette appeared to have been destroyed. Throughout his journals, his main topic was sex, describing his exploits of women single and married, straight and lesbian, conscious and unconscious. Even as he hopped from bed to bed, he demanded monogamy, referring to women as whores. Sex dominated his dreams, where women from his past often appeared as characters. The journals also reflected an obsession with children. In a March twenty seventh, nineteen eighty sixth century, Vell described the visit of a woman and her daughter's in his home. The little girls were delicious, he wrote. We massage some, hugged and kissed some, and it was twelve men night, in time for them to go.

52:00 Fucker. On August twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two, Vil walked into the Walmart in West Point, and a one year old white girl looked in my eyes, loving me as if there were no age difference between us. Good grief. On July sixth of twenty thirteen, friends will email me something she spotted in the photographs of VAL's wife Mary, taken after her body was discovered in the kayl Kashu River. It looks like her panties are pulled out over the top of her jeans in the small of her back. To me, this would be sign of a struggle. No woman on the planet would allow that to happen with her panties. I think it was a situation where he grabbed for her jeans for leverage and her panty slipped over the waistband. In the other photograph, her cayamegas sweatshirt was bunched up and her mid drift was exposed. Her sleep cuffs looked as if grease had been ground into them.

52:56 The autopsy report showed she had a big bruise on the back of her head. Could she have been struck from behind and then dragged the full weight of her body, grinding the grease into her cuffs. That same day, Veil's sister, Beth Keyes died of a massive heart attack. Her obituary was an impressive one valedictorian of her high school, successful realtor, and generous philanthropists. Her obituary listed all of her siblings dead and living, with one exception, Felix Veil. A day later, fellow goenurernalist Stanley Nelson emailed me the name of a man I. Should speak with. The Next day, I interviewed fifty eight year old Kirk Germany of saucy A, Mississippi, who had worked alongside Veil in nineteen seventy seven. Although Veil was aloof he just seemed to have a strange mind control, trying to bring people into his world in a manipulative sense. Germany said he just had that Charles Manson personality. No matter where they went, Veil attracted women. Felix claimed he was locked in a Bavarian love not with this woman in Germany said something like eighteen errors. What the hell is that?

54:08 He said. Veil also remarked that the best sex he had ever had was with either get this as sick. A two or three year old girl. In fall of twenty thirteen, I telephoned Lee Peck, a reporter for KPLCTV in Lake Charles who had aired several stories on Veil. He had told me before that one of their part time employees was working for Travelers Insurance when they sold Veil the fifty thousand dollars life insurance policy on his wife Mary. This time, Peck gave me her name, Jessine Brooks, whose telephone number I found online. She answered the call and said she remembered the death well, it was, she said, the first time she had ever read an autopsy. She described Veil as cold and unemotional in his dealings. Deputies told her they knew he had killed his wife, but they couldn't prove it.

55:03 She said. Veil's wife did not sign the policy and she needed to sign it. The agent got in a little trouble. Despite being the major breadwinner, Veil didn't take out a policy on himself. The insurance company wound up settling the claim. I was surprised he got anything, Brooke said, because she had not signed it. Friendzil and I tracked down Kurt Ware, who was stunned to learn that a copy of his birth certificate had been found at Veil's home. The copy had been ordered in January of nineteen seventy three. Had Veil ordered that birth certificate? And if so, why was he going to adopt this as his new identity. Ware didn't recognize the name Felix Vel, but he did recognize Vel and his girlfriend, Sharon Hensley. After I emailed him photographs, he said he had met them in nineteen seventy two, possibly at the health food place where he worked.

55:58 In New Orleans. His journals, Veil had written that they went by the aliases Joseph and Helene Martin, and it even married under those names. Where said, those names did ring a bell. He also said he and Vel bore a physical resemblance to each other and would often hang out together on Saturdays. He recalled Val entering a wine store, removing the sticker from the most expensive wine and replacing it with a sticker from the cheapest. He would literally spend three dollars and come out with the best wine, he said, aloof and intriguing. Val talked about grape fast where he ate only grapes, Where said, and he only drank this German wine made from white grapes. During one conversation, he said, Val asked him, have you ever killed someone? He felt to chill. The way he said it made me think he had killed somebody in his past. I tracked down Dick White, who recalled Val visiting him and his wife for a month in their tees Simon in nineteen ninety three, while working on a roof, They'll accidentally hit his finger with a hammer, he said. They'll then argued with his injured finger, you ain't hurting you, son of a bitch, I'll make you hurt. They'll swung the hammer and smash his finger a second time. During their work together on several projects, including building a barn, White said Veil told him my ego wants to talk to you. White said he replied Felix, I'm not dealing with you in the

57:28 third person. White said Veil drifted in and out of different levels of sanity and insanity. Talk of mental illness didn't surprise him. I knew Vel's late father suffered from bipolar disorder. He said. They'll often watch television shows on schizophrenia, a popular topic in his journals. He told Frienzil he believes the whole human species is schitzo and y'all. That's where I am going to cut it off today and we should be able to the next episode will wrap this up. It's about to really get into it because we're about to get into the court testimony. But it's very important that I give you the history of what was going on prior to that so you can see how sick and disgusting this asshole is. So I thank you so much for listening.

58:19 Again. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you're spending it with family. And friends and loved ones, and I am sure thankful for all of you. And until next time, I'm Jim Chapman, your host of Bloody Angoa, a podcast one hundred and forty two years into making the complete story of America's bloody is President Peace?

59:00 I walk the. Street line shackle change, Oh gluesome Gurdie. It's calling my name. There is no mercy and it's been a tentery juice as the hill Stream game rangol the three. I'm here, be. By, here to die inside these walls, inside the wild.

59:40 And when the. Girl, as I know, it's so Bloody, anglebody angle o.