On June 25th, 1973, Suzie Jaeger was abducted from her tent while camping with her family in Montana. The FBI was baffled by the mystery, until two agents begin using new profiling techniques to narrow in on a local oddball named David Meirhofer.
Assisting them was Suzie’s brave mother, Marietta Jaeger, who over a series of phone calls with the killer was able to provide invaluable clues that helped lead to Meirhofer’s arrest and confession. And he would confess not only to Suzie’s murder, but the murder of three other people as well.
My guest is bestselling author Ron Franscell. His new book is called Shadow Man: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling.
More information about the author and his work can be found here: https://ronfranscell.com/
Transcript of Episode:
Erik Rivenes 0:01
On this episode of Most Notorious, a murderer stalks Southwestern Montana in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Ron Franscell 0:11
The lawyer is not only astounded but so is the prosecutor when the defense lawyer comes to him and says, how about if you take the death penalty off the table and we confess to two more killings?
Erik Rivenes 0:51
Welcome, everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. This episode involves the murder of a child and listener discretion is advised. I am so pleased to have as my guest today on his second visit to most notorious Ron Franscell. He is the acclaimed author of 18 books, including the international true crime bestsellers, The Darkest Night, and the 2017 Edgar finalist Morgue: A Life in Death. His debut book, Angel Fire was listed by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century West. Alice and Gerald, a Homicidal Love Story, one of his more recent books, was the subject of our Most Notorious interview back in 2019. And he is here today to talk about his newest book, titled Shadow Man: An Elusive Psycho Killer, and the Birth of FBI Profiling. Great to have you back on. Thank you for joining me once again.
Ron Franscell 2:04
Erik, thank you for having me. I’m privileged to have a little more time with you.
Erik Rivenes 2:10
Yes, yes, this is exciting. So when did you first come across this case? And what made you think it would be a great topic to write about?
Ron Franscell 2:22
Let me start by saying, The secret of my success as a writer, has been that I never pick a story I can screw up. And I think Shadowman early on struck me is one of those. I mean, its power was kind of universal. It was a mother’s anguish and persistence among the law enforcement and our fear of the dark. So immediately, it appealed to me. I first heard about it when I was a senior writer at the Denver Post, and my job was covering the American West. And I think sometime in Montana, I heard the basic story, which is basically about a kidnapping. And then the resulting creation of the FBI this first criminal profile. That’s about all I knew. So I kind of set it aside, and really didn’t revisit it for more than a decade. When I did, I discovered it was more than a simple kidnapping – a lot more. It was about this grotesque series of crimes in a part of the country where I grew up. I grew up in Wyoming, and this is in Montana, and they’re otherwise indistinguishable except for maps. But it was also this turning point in forensic history. And nobody had ever told the stories, either one of them. So the more I, the more I dug, the more I wanted to know. And when it came down to it, I saw these two stories kind of on a collision course, these ghastly crimes and this historic moment. And it all centered around this one little girl.
Erik Rivenes 4:32
So let’s just start there, if that makes sense. Will you tell us about the Jaeger family and their ill fated vacation? In June of 1973?
Ron Franscell 4:48
Yep, exactly. They, they start west on this grand family vacation from Michigan. They stop it all but the wonderful roadside attraction Along the way, they end up in a small State Park in Montana. They have a great time there for a day or two. And the night before they leave, they expected to leave, four of their five kids kind of jam themselves into a camp tent, snuggled down in their sleeping bags, in close together to stay warm, and go to sleep. The next morning, one of them awakes early and notices that there’s a big hole in the back of the tent. And their little sister, Susie was gone. At first they think, you know, she’s she’s just pushed her way out of a ripped seam or something and is going to the bathroom or messing around outside. But very quickly, they realize she’s not there. And as they begin to fear the worst they call the sheriff and the sheriff calls the FBI, which is kind of required by federal law in cases like this. Within hours, they’ve got 1000 people literally beating the bushes for this little girl, and they can’t find her. And they’ve got no evidence. They’ve got no witnesses, they’ve got no leads. So they have no suspects. And they’re flat footed and they’re not really sure where to turn next. And that’s the way it stays for weeks and then months until another crime happens.
Erik Rivenes 6:55
Right. Yeah. I mean, a campground is a difficult place to look for suspects. People coming in and out all the time. How did law enforcement dragnet an area like that?
Ron Franscell 7:09
Well, they they were they were as confused as you are right now about how could someone in the middle of the night make their way to a camp tent. It was fairly centrally located in this park and surrounded by other campers is summer. How could somebody make their way into the middle of a campground, slice open the back of a tent, drag out a little girl who they presumed would be struggling, maybe even trying to scream and get to vehicle or something and get away and disappear? And and that was where they were stumped. The the only bit of evidence that they had was the deputy who arrived on the scene first noticed the kind of footstep path through the dew in the grass toward a parking lot that was nearby. But otherwise, that was it. That’s all they had. And of course that disappeared with the sun coming up. So they were flummoxed, they had no idea and a lot of it didn’t make sense. But they remained frustrated for, as I say for weeks and months. And it’s only you know, in February of 74 when a teenage waitress (Sandy Smallagen) in a nearby the little nearby town of Manhattan, Montana, goes missing – now they don’t have any sense. They haven’t even thought that these two things are related. So they search for this young waitress and they find her car hidden in a barn at a remote abandoned ranch. And as they look closer, they find shards of bones scattered everywhere. They collect what they can – they send it off to the Smithsonian which rules that indeed, these bones were the remains of a teenage to early 20s female but among them were bones that belonged to a little girl under 10 years old. And at that point, they believed that these were the remains of Suzie Jaeger, and they now had one criminal or one set of criminals instead of two separate crimes. And while that sounds like a break in the case, the fact remains that other than these bones, they had no real physical evidence, they still had no witnesses. They still had no legitimate leads, and of course, no suspects. So this continues to be a frustrating situation for the lead FBI agent, a guy named Pete Dunbar.
Erik Rivenes 10:44
So your book opens with a description of southwest Montana, and this little town of Manhattan in the late 1960s, early 1970s. Normally a tranquil idyllic area of the country. But there had been a couple of violent incidents, you write. That had caused grief in the community. One on a bridge and another involving a Boy Scout.
Ron Franscell 11:17
Yeah. In the late 60s, ’67, a young boy 13 years old was with a friend and they were diving off a bridge into the river below which is what kids did in that town every summer. When he suddenly cries out, I’ve been shot and then he falls into the river and drifts away. The friend runs to the nearest farmhouse – it was about a mile away. And by the time cops arrived, deputies arrived, there’s no sign of this boy who was presumably shot from the top of the bridge. They do find him in a few weeks. And he indeed was shot in the chest. But murders don’t happen in Manhattan. Montana’s not that kind of town. It’s this little as you said idyllic town. They presumed that he’d been hit by a stray bullet, you know, somebody’s hunting rabbits or target practicing something. And that he had been hit by a stray bullet that the shooter didn’t even know happened. And that’s the way they closed the case. They just said this was an accidental death. And it was put away. About a year later. There’s a Boy Scout gathering in that same park that we talked about earlier. And there were 300 Scouts there and they were all in pup tents that were arrayed throughout the park five, six feet apart, plus all their scoutmasters and troop leaders. One night, well actually one morning, one of the scouts just erupts in fear. His tent mate was bleeding and and barely conscious. He mobilized the the scout leaders who found this kid – had looked like he had been beaten and stabbed. They didn’t know – they called the sheriff who rushed the kid in to the hospital and a few days later, he died, not of his stab wounds, but of his head injuries looked like somebody had bashed him with a blunt instrument or kicked him. The investigation into that kind of went off in the direction of the tent mate, you know, a 12 year old kid, there was a belief that maybe they’d been gently you know, roughhousing as little boys will do and was being done by all the scouts in this camporee, and that during that he had fallen and hit his head and they kept it a secret. So not to get in trouble, something like that. And again, that’s kind of where they left it that this was an accidental thing. And didn’t need to go farther. So those two crimes are sitting back there in 1967 and 68. Both related to this little town. But they weren’t considered murders, they were just tragic, accidental deaths.
Erik Rivenes 15:13
So after Susie Jaeger disappears, authorities canvass the area drumming up suspects, suspects that include members of biker gangs, drifters…
Ron Franscell 15:29
Right, right. Everything I think there’s – they were fanning out across the region. They were going to the local bordello and asking the girls if they had, you know, done business with any especially weird people, and they were doing everything they could – they were doing what law men did, and still do to a great degree. And that is a lot of footwork and talking to a lot of people in trying to logic this thing out about what might have happened. And they were still coming up empty. The Sandra Smallagen issue comes in and and suddenly, they’re they’re thinking that there’s somebody out there who has to be local, they couldn’t have some drifter or some passerby doing these two crimes eight months apart, in disposing of the remains in the way he or she did. But that’s about where it ended. And they had, you know – occasionally names would pop up, but they tended to be from people who were kind of settling scores with other people, not seriously. Not seriously thought out accusations. It was, you know, people reporting the guy who skipped out on his rent or something. So it can’t be overstated, that in those first eight or 10 months, they had no ideas. They, they were flat flummoxed. They had nothing.
Erik Rivenes 17:32
The Jaeger family, of course, was beside themselves in shock, in grief. They were all eager to help, especially Marietta. Susie’s mom.
Ron Franscell 17:45
Yeah, I mean, they did what they could, but there wasn’t much- they stayed on there in the campground for a long time. They were supported by the locals who’d bring food over – whatever they needed. But the time came that they had to go home to Michigan. And so they, they do that, and they sit by the phone, and they hope that the news is going to break, they hope that their daughter is going to be found and returned to them. There was a part – a secret part of them that that believes she was dead. And another part that didn’t want to believe that. So they are patiently waiting for some information. The FBI is doing a good job of keeping them updated. The problem is that there’s not much to tell them because nothing is happening. It’s it’s a couple of months after the waitress (Sandy Smallagen) was found and Susie Jaeger’s remains – both presumptive – it was a couple months after that the lead detective or the lead agent, Pete Dunbar is is in Quantico for some ordinary routine training in the FBI. And he happens to listen, he attends a workshop by these two fellow FBI agents, one who had a background in psychology and another one who was known to be a great crime scene analyst. And they had gotten together and had an idea that there was a way to look at a crime scene and the evidence and and to do certain things about the behavior and the psychology of the perpetrator. It it hadn’t really gotten traction because Hoover opposed it but Hoover was gone, he had recently died. And more progressive leadership had come into the FBI. And they gave these two agents, Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, a little longer leash. And they were able to pursue some research a little more openly, even though on the street cops and deputies and other law enforcement still, were suspicious of this, this “voo-doo”, and Dunbar attends this workshop. And when it’s over, he thinks, you know, I’ve got nothing, maybe these guys could help me. And he literally follows them back to their basement offices, and presents the story of Suzie Jaeger and of Sandy Smallagen, the waitress. They examine his case file later. And they they assume that this is a this might be a case, that would be good to test their theory. And so they tell him that yes, they will create the first ever profile, they they considered it a safe one to test the theory. You know, they they thought this is this is a couple of kidnappings that end in murder. So let’s see if we can, let’s see if we can come up with anything. I hate to use the word ordinary, but it tended to be a more ordinary case, on first examination. Of course, it grows into something far bigger and darker than they ever imagined. But at the beginning, they saw it as a no risk or a low risk case to test their theory.
Erik Rivenes 22:10
So this first FBI profile, what were some of the characteristics, they believed the killer they were hunting for possessed?
Ron Franscell 22:20
Well we have, you know, between 15 and 20 elements in this first profile, and there are – some of it was experience and logic. Some of it was guesswork. But you got to remember they had no rulebook, they had no roadmap, they had no established system. They had their experiences, but they had no model. It was all based on what they knew. And like I say, a little bit of guesswork. You know, these days, we all – anybody who’s watched TV or movies, or even read newspaper stories – knows that the first presumption is that a serial killer tends to be a white male in his 20s. That’s because we have more than 50 years of data. And today’s profilers have talked to 1000s of killers, they, they know and they, they know that that’s a predominant description. Teten and Mullany had visited with a couple of killers, and they had no database. In this case, they deduced that the killer was a white male in his 20s because the crimes themselves seem to require an astounding degree of stealth and strength. That suggested whoever did it had military experience during Vietnam, which is going on at the time, that’s largely male. They believed that this killer, this abductor and what they presumed was a killer, had knowledge of surroundings or he wouldn’t have been able to get away as easily. He wouldn’t have been able to take the risks that are required to go into that crowded campground and abducted a little girl in the middle of the night, where maybe he can’t see much in the dark either. He had to know local law enforcement maybe was lacking in training and didn’t have much experience with this kind of thing. And that suggested that knowledge about moving around at night and the training and the abilities of local law enforcement suggested he was local in that county. It was a large, it wasn’t largely, it was almost completely white. So you put all those things together, and you come up with white male in his 20s. And that’s kind of how it went. Some of their other elements, they believed the unsub was probably fairly intelligent. The crimes showed somebody that was a highly organized thinker. And he hadn’t had anticipated a lot of the investigation. They deduced he was a loner, and he probably wasn’t married, and probably had very little experience with women. And that when he did, it didn’t last. That’s what they knew about people who they presumed him to be among. That they didn’t see any evidence that suggested that other than how it happened. So this was their experience. And they believed his his heterosexual experience was limited. They believed he worked alone in a solitary profession, like cowboy or carpenter or something. And, and the reason is, he doesn’t want to interact with other people. You know, we all have different lives. And and criminals are no different. And they just try to protect these secret lives that they have. So they would feel vulnerable among bosses and co workers who were who they presumed could see these secrets, and know them. And so they don’t want to work with other people. It was things like that, and, and then it goes on to be a little more complicated as they go. It just proceeded from there. They believed he had killed before some of this showed evidence that he was not a first timer that he had actually had some learning involved, he had progressed. So you see where they’re going. They they’re they’re trying to tell the FBI agent and the local law enforcement, the kind of person they’d be looking for. The military thing would allow them to narrow their pool a little bit. Did they know he had military experience? No, it was a guess. But it was a good guess. And, and so they were able to save a little energy a little bit of time, by looking at people with military experience, and that’s the way a profile works. It’s not always dead on. It’s just saying, your guy or your woman. They are part of this limited subgroup of people, or are likely members of that subgroup. So that gives investigators a place to start and that’s what they did here.
Erik Rivenes 28:42
Right. So there were two separate murder investigations going on. As far as Sandy’s case, the FBI believed that her boyfriend, Bob Harrison, might have had something to do with her death. But there was another character, a peripheral suspect, named David Meirhofer, also in the picture. Agent Dunbar, however, didn’t really believe that he had anything to do with either Sandy or Susie’s case. He thought David was odd and socially inept, more than anything and felt sorry for him.
Ron Franscell 29:26
Yeah, Dunbar it at different times thinks they’re wasting their time by going back with this, you know, in questioning this guy, because he always comes off as decently intelligent, well dressed well spoken, interested in the work that the investigators were doing even offering to help if he needed if he could. He didn’t have any record of anything, not speeding tickets, not anything. He was he was an entrepreneur. He bought houses and remodeled them and rented them. I had great carpentry skills. He just didn’t seem like a killer. And he kept popping up for different reasons, but also being dismissed. I think he gets on the FBI’s radar three or four times, and then falls off the FBI’s radar, you know, as often. He had dated Sandy Smallagen, the waitress, once, and he had feelings for her, but she didn’t much like him. She considered him to be odd as most of the townsfolk did. They considered him just a little a little off. But small towns are populated by eccentrics, right? That’s just normal. I mean, he David, you know, sent chocolates and flowers, but she just wasn’t interested in him. He kept asking her and she kept rebuffing him. At the same time, she’s going through a divorce, she has a boyfriend, Bob Harrison, but she has other guys that are courting her. And sometimes she goes out and sometimes she doesn’t. She’s not, you know, being lewd or loose with them. She’s just, she’s free. And the local guys know that. And she’s pretty. So they’re, they’re, they’re snuggling up as much as they can. So all of those guys become potential – well, let’s call them persons of interest. In some ways, as the FBI has moved forward a little bit, but nobody is popping up as a really good suspect. In fact that David Meirhofer that we were talking about, took two lie detector tests and passed both of them without even any hint that he might be lying about something. So they were left flat footed. And the frustration continued. Moving to the next sort of important event, one of the elements of the profile, that Teten and Mullaney delivered was that they believed the perpetrator in this case was – that this was a very intimate crime to him. And then, as such, it would take on intimate values to him. And the way we celebrate birthdays and wedding anniversaries, he would celebrate some kind of anniversary too. So they warned Dunbar to be especially vigilant on anniversaries important to the crimes. On on the first year anniversary of Suzie acres disappearance, the phone rings at the family home in Michigan, and the caller identifies himself as the abductor of the little girl. Claims that he still has her and he’s brainwashing her to think he’s her father. They’re not sure about whether this is a hoax or not until he he delivers a description of the little girl – of the small defect in the little girl’s hand that they that they had never discussed publicly. In fact, her mother had never even mentioned it to the FBI.
When he mentions it, then they know that they have the the little girl’s abductor and again, who they presumed had killed her. So now this moves forward a little bit even though they don’t know who that is. They don’t know where the call is coming from. They know very little but they are moving forward a little bit. And while they’re frustrated – still they feel like they’ve made some headway. So that’s up to one year later, and this phone call comes.
Erik Rivenes 35:11
In the call, the way he treats Marietta on the call – It’s sadistic, right? He taunts her – gives her the false hope that her daughter is still alive. He said that she was traveling around with him. He was taking her to places like Disneyland. But by the end of the call, he’s sobbing. And it was an odd trajectory for a phone conversation.
Ron Franscell 35:40
Yeah, absolutely. And this was a clue to the profilers as well. He did just what you said -he taunted her, he was saying sadistic things. It was horrifying. And in if you try to see the things that he was saying, through the eyes of a grieving mother, you can sense that it was more horrific than even what we’re talking about right now. But she hangs in there, she stays on the line with him and she talks to him. She’s she’s amazingly stalwart in it, even though inside she’s afraid, and she’s sickened. And, and, and he’s getting to her. But she hangs in there, she stays on the line with him. She challenges him, she talks, she questions. By the end of the call, as you point out, he is kind of losing his composure, not getting angry, but getting sad. In fact, kinda crying at the end. And the reason say the profilers later, is because he wanted control of her and that that was the reason for his sadism and his taunting. But when she stood up to it, he lost control. He couldn’t control her. And so he was unable – or at least handicapped when dealing with strong women. And they, they suddenly knew that about him, or believed they did. And that again, moves it a little forward. And they were able to say, Okay, well, you’re looking at somebody who, you know, in his relationships with people – likes to be in control. And he is put off when he doesn’t have it. So they said you you need to look at somebody with a particular relationship to his mother. Because they believe that’s where it came from. Is that true? I don’t know. We don’t know actually, to this day. Whether that was true. Events in the investigation keep keep us from knowing but yeah, these were deductions they were making along the way based on what they were learning.
Erik Rivenes 38:38
So, Dunbar still believes that Meierhofer really doesn’t have anything to do with this. But agents Mullaney and Teten are more than ever convinced that Meirhofer needs to be looked at. So, Dunbar contacts the US Marine Corps and Dunbar is also able to access Meirhofer’s old therapy records and uncover some really uncomfortable details about Meirhofer’s earlier years.
Ron Franscell 39:12
Yeah, he does a deep dive on David Meierhofer. And in some ways you you turn up some ordinary things like being in the military in the Marine Corps. And some things extraordinary like those psychological examination examinations of him. He is warming to the idea that Meiehofer is is a good suspect. But he’s still not convinced. And there’s there’s some conflict between him and the profilers, the profilers are becoming more and more convinced that Meirhofer’s a good suspect. Dunbar not as quickly. But he he does his due diligence and like I say he does a deep dive on Meirhofer, and he find some things that are intriguing, particularly in Meirhofer’s psychological profile. So we’re now moving more deliberately toward some suspects and some people of interest. As they get more interested in Meirhofer, another call comes to the Jaeger residence in Michigan. And, and this time, it’s a little more pointed. And the caller says that he has a little girl, her little girl with him. And he holds the phone up and there’s a child’s voice in the background. And it doesn’t sound like Susie to Marietta, but there’s some concern that even if it isn’t her, he has another child. So now there’s an urgency about this. At this point they’re really interested in Meirhofer, and he’s under surveillance. They learn that that phone call came from Salt Lake City, a motel in Salt Lake City. But Meirhofer hasn’t been out of their sight in Manhattan, Montana during that period. So how could it be him? Once again, the interest in him shutters a little bit. They’re just not sure they have the right guy. So the investigation continues. And you know, we can talk about that. But I have a feeling you have more questions?
Erik Rivenes 41:58
Well, yeah. So not long before that second call. Dunbar decided that what might be a helpful idea was to have Marietta meet with Meirhofer. So he arranges a sit down. Actually, they talk a couple of times. Would you share with us the gyst of these interactions between them?
Ron Franscell 42:23
Yeah, it goes back to that that belief in the profile among the profilers that he didn’t react well with strong women. And they had the idea that if they could put them face to face, and she could just do what she had done in previous phone calls, that maybe they’d shake him up a little bit. They did that, they took her out to Montana, they put them in the same room, and she repeatedly accused him of being the killer and would say, I know you took my daughter, I know it’s you. Please, please tell me, tell us what you did. Tell us that you did it. And he stood his ground and, and he was even sympathetic. He, he said, ma’am, I know. I know what this must feel like, but I’m not your guy. So it was an interesting thing. Marietta comes away, more convinced that it’s him. Call it mother’s intuition. But there’s no proof. There’s there is no smoking gun here. They also arranged, by the way, that that face to face meeting unknown to him. They wanted it to be a surprise. And they felt that was going to betray certain things about him. If he had to confront it, you know, without thinking about it. So it didn’t. But that’s the way they were thinking. So that’s an important moment in the sense that he did talk to her but that he knew that she that she knew and a later phone call between him purporting to be somebody else – she calls him David. And he reacts by saying “who are you talking about? Who is David? I’m not David.” And she persisted and said “I know you’re David”, And he was shaken up by that. So there were all these interesting interactions between Marietta Jeager and David Meirhofer that really lead to the to the outcome that the book describes.
Erik Rivenes 45:21
Right. And so the FBI comes up with a plan. They wanted Marietta to identify Meirhofer’s voice as the one she spoke with on the telephone call. So they create a lineup, a telephone lineup, and they have five people call her, including Meirhofer. to see if she can pick his voice out.
Ron Franscell 45:48
Yeah, well, they had recorded the the one call where the the purported to have a little girl. And they took that recording and excerpted some things. They then had five men, including Meirhofer, and including a cousin of his who kind of sounded like him. And then they took that script and and had them recite it. They presented that, they played those recordings for Marietta and for her husband separately in a different room. They both very quickly and very confidently identified David’s voice. Voice printing at that point was not not considered a trustworthy forensic science. But it gave them some sense of whether they were on the right track. Had they needed to go to court with that, it might have been questioned and might have not even been allowed. But it it gave them some idea of whether they were on the right path or not. And they believed they were.
Erik Rivenes 47:13
So when did things really start getting hot for Meirhofer?
Ron Franscell 47:17
It was a casual, voluntary search of his place. That turned up some things that were incriminating, not smoking guns, but were incriminating. So at that point, they were not ready to slap the cuffs on him so to speak. But they were pretty confident he was their guy. It’s after that Salt Lake City phone call. And the possibility that he had another child – that they believed they had to act. They couldn’t let him continue to walk. There were some questions about whether he could make that trip. They were later. They later learned that he actually had escaped in the dark from his apartment and gotten away from the surveillance. That’s when they swung into action. It leads, in a couple of days, to his arrest. And in the search of his home, subsequent to that arrest, they find the smoking gun. They find human remains in his freezer. That are proven to be Sandy Smallagen’s remains. So at that point, they they have him. There’s no question. His lawyer who has believed in him all along, has believed that he’s just being harassed by the cops is shown this evidence and the first thing he does is he goes back onto the front lawn and he vomits. Then he confronts David himself and in and very angrily says, “you are going to hang. There’s no question because this human remains in your freezer. The jury is gonna have a tough time looking past that.” David then proposes, would they take the death penalty off the table? If I could confess to two more murders. The lawyer is not only astounded but so is the prosecutor when The defense lawyer comes to him and says, how about if you take the death penalty off the table, and we confess to two more killings? Ultimately, they agree to do that. David is taken into an overnight interview – starts at about 2am. And their goal is to get him to describe these four deaths, Susie, Sandy Smallagen, and it turns out the two little boys in 67, and 68. So they have now a guy confessing to four murders. And tomorrow, they figure they’ll come back and ask more questions about other cases, about his background and that sort of thing. But overnight, they lose their chance. So I don’t know if I want to spoil it for people. But that’s one reason today, 50 years later, we still have a lot of questions about the motivations, the psychology, the behavior here. And that’s part of the story in this book about regardless of the, the, the the profiling that goes on, and what we know about psychology of criminals. We still have questions about this case.
Erik Rivenes 51:34
Yeah, the discovery of Sandy’s remains in his freezer, specifically her hand with red painted nails was absolutely gruesome. Yeah, his confession. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a chance to talk to him for long. What did he tell them that he had done with Suzie?
Ron Franscell 51:58
Well, he admitted that he had abducted her he had taken her to this abandoned ranch out in the middle of nowhere, that he had molested her. And when she reacted crying and screaming, he killed her. He strangled her. He then butchered her. I’m sorry, if your your listeners are sensitive to that. I apologize. But he butchered her. Then he cremated her and pulverized her bones and spread them out over this ranch, just the way he did later, with Sandy Smallegen, whose murder he also confessed to that night. So there’s some unsettling parts of that in the book. I put the actual conversation that happened – I have that among 13,000 FBI documents, I have the actual transcript of that interview. So that’s in the book. It’s not my interpretation of what they say. My dramatization of what they say. It’s what they said. And I think readers are going to find that fascinating.
Erik Rivenes 53:29
What was his his motive? Do you think, for killing Sandy?
Ron Franscell 53:34
A good question. We don’t know. The way he described her killing was that he intended to abduct her. He went to her apartment, which was actually within sight of his. That he went in and he, you know, tied her hands together and put tape over her mouth and put her in her car to take her out someplace to do God knows what – maybe to kill her maybe to rape her, maybe just to talk to her. Along the way, though, she suffocates from that tape over her mouth and nose. So she’s dead by the time he gets out to that ranch. And then he repeats that awfulness of cremation – of butchery and cremation and pulverization of the bones, and the scattering of those remains. So there’s Suzie Jaeger and Sandy Smallagen. There are pulverized bones all spread across this ranch area. And that’s what ultimately leads to the profile, which then leads to him. So it’s it’s kind of a complicated way for me to explain it, but it I think it makes sense in the book.
Erik Rivenes 55:06
What about his his motive for killing the Boy Scout? Michael Raney? Do you have any idea?
Ron Franscell 55:15
I, you know, I’ve asked this question about what was, what was the serial part of his killings? What was what was the thing that tied them all together, we have two teenage boys to young teenage boys. We have a seven year old girl and we have a 19 year old woman. There’s nothing similar about them. He uses a gun. In one case, he uses a knife and another he – God knows what he used. Sandy Smallegen just dies and suffocates and he strangles little Susie. So not even the weaponry in the method of killing is the same. So why is it serial? Because that’s what we’ve been trained to think about the the kind of victims, the weapons, what motivated him. Nobody knows – they never got a chance to go that deep with him. I personally think we see in his psychological profile, some conversations that he had with the psychiatrist about his sexuality. He seemed to a lot of people, including the psychiatrist – to be a gay man who couldn’t deal with being gay, and that it was something that he didn’t want to confront. And that that was the underlying motive. I talked to a forensic psychologist about this, who said the kind of victim – the kind of weapons- the way they died, aren’t where the serial part of this was. The serial part of this was his rage. He killed all of these people in a rage. Where that rage came from is the question. And it’s an unanswered question at this point.
Erik Rivenes 57:22
So Marietta is a very strong woman, she did an amazing job of keeping her composure through all of this, outwardly, despite the intense grief, she obviously experienced. After the funeral of Suzy in in Montana, Marietta goes into the junk shop, run by Meirhofer’s mother, and they actually have a brief exchange.
Ron Franscell 57:53
They do. And it’s two mothers both grieving for different reasons. She forgives David’s mother, David’s mother had nothing to do with it, but she wanted to allay the embarrassment and and she does a good job of that. She really does, honestly, and genuinely feel like this is two mothers talking about a terrible event in both of their lives. There’s no question that without Marietta, you and I are talking today about a cold case that happened in Montana. And we don’t know who did it. And that’s, that’s the fact she without her this crime doesn’t get solved. And she’s the hero. She’s the hero of this story. So what we have is this very basic human anguish over on that side of it, and the pain that the we know she felt. And then over on this other end, we have this scientific pursuit to create something that will help them find more bad guys and maybe prevent some of that grief that we saw. But we have the the human element and the scientific element, the heart and the head. And I think that’s one of the beauties of this particular story is that, you know, we get to talk about a real conflict between the heart and the head. And it attracted me and again, to go back to I don’t pick stories that I can screw up and I couldn’t screw this one up. It’s a beautiful story about that – about a grieving mother. And these two pioneering guys trying to come up with something to help the rest of us.
Erik Rivenes 59:59
Right, right. Why do you call him Shadow Man?
Ron Franscell 1:00:07
Because you know, he functions in the shadows. Suzy Jaeger’s abduction happens in the middle of the night and first for some reason he’s able to navigate this park and all the other campers that are there and go in get her and get out without being noticed. Same thing in the boy scouts killing. Same thing in the shooting of the boy on the bridge. Same thing in the abduction of Sandy Smallagen. And then he can function almost completely in the shadows and and is comfortable in the shadows. Even his personality exists in light and dark. So to me, he was of the shadows. And that’s what led to the title.
Erik Rivenes 1:01:06
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great title. So your book is officially out in bookstores and online.
Ron Franscell 1:01:14
Yes. And anywhere you buy books.
Erik Rivenes 1:01:17
this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on.
Ron Franscell 1:01:22
Once again, thank you for making time for me.
Erik Rivenes 1:01:28
Again, I’ve been speaking to Ron Franscell, author of Shadow Man: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling. This has been another episode of the Most Notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world. I’m Erik Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.
