100th Celebration with author Rita Schuler

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[00:00:46] Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash income. All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash income now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Welcome back to Crime Capsule. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris. And thanks as always for joining us.

[00:01:17] As we continue our 100th episode celebration, there was one name that rose straight to the top of the list for all our returning All-Stars. Rita Shuler, author, historian and retired lieutenant from the South Carolina Law Enforcement

[00:01:31] Division, who famously cracked a cold case of the murder of a young woman years ago. Rita shared her experience with us as one of our very first guests ever and we've drawn on her experience for all sorts of things over the years.

[00:01:47] We couldn't be more grateful for her expertise and her dedication to justice. Today, we're catching up with her down on Johns Island, South Carolina and hearing a bit more about one of her books that we haven't previously discussed, Murder in the Midlands.

[00:02:04] What a joy to get to travel back down to the low country. Rita, welcome back to Crime Capsule and thank you so much for joining us for our 100th episode celebration. Well, thank you for including me. I'm all excited about this.

[00:02:22] I'm looking forward to talking to you again. You are too kind and when we were trying to figure out just who we wanted to speak to, we thought we got to go straight to the source, right? We got to go to one of our All-Star legendary guests.

[00:02:37] And it is just such a joy. Tell me, how are you and how is the fishing down in Johns Island? Well, right now it is hot, but I haven't done any fishing, but I have done a few crabbing trips.

[00:02:52] Actually, for this time of year, crabbing has been pretty good. And we're getting fairly decent sized ones, but you have to know where and what time. You got to work the tide a little bit. I usually do most of mine in the fall, September, October, November.

[00:03:09] Boy, they come in big then. Oh yeah. But we've sneaked out a couple of times and done some here, so we've done pretty well. My dad's trick down in the Pascagoula River in Mississippi was always to take a chicken

[00:03:23] leg and tie a string around the chicken leg, a raw drumstick. And then you just drop it off the side of the boat. And then you wait about two or three minutes. It's usually about all it takes.

[00:03:35] And then you reel that sucker back up and guess who's hanging off the end of it. There you go. We do it with the chicken. I use chicken backs more often.

[00:03:45] We do it with the cages off of the dock or if you find a good area where you can walk out in the water. Now, it has to be clean. I don't go out and lie all that mud and everything, but it has to be where you

[00:03:56] can walk out in the water and throw that chicken back out on that string and then walk in the water and scoop them up. That's really the big sport of it. Either way, either way we can get them.

[00:04:11] They're doing better this year than they have in the last two years. Good. I'm glad to hear that. There's nothing better than walking up to a big old crab boil and just seeing all the claws sticking out of the pot. You know what I mean?

[00:04:24] And you just think, now I have arrived. They've got their own world. They sure do. But I tell you what, I've had many a crab bite too with the claws and everything you know and had to shake them off. But it's all worth it.

[00:04:39] The joke is, and this brings us to my first question for What's Been Going On in Your Neck of the Woods lately. The joke is you throw a line out there and you never know exactly what you're going to

[00:04:49] catch and it might be a crab or it might be somebody's bloody vest that is a piece of evidence from a crime scene, right? That does happen. It does indeed. It does indeed. And it occurred to me that the last time that we got together was right after

[00:05:05] the conviction of the Alex Murdoch trial and his conviction for murdering Maggie and Paul and so forth. And I've got a couple questions for you about what things have been like down in the low country.

[00:05:21] We are now a year out and he was just recently convicted of his fraud and conspiracy misdoings as well. He's got 40 more years on top of the 27 for the murders. What do things look like in the aftermath of all this a year out?

[00:05:38] I haven't really been following in the last couple of months and I just kind of got over the whole thing, I guess. But as far as I know it's been quiet. The news down here in the last couple of months has been quiet except bringing up

[00:05:55] about the latest ones. Now, of course you saw with the court, his attorneys got her and took her to court about the books she wrote and all that was in there too. And a lot of, I mean, I think Becky had, you know, people were pulling forward

[00:06:20] and then all of a sudden this happened and then more things came out and that was pretty big. A lot of people were disappointed of the outcome and a lot of people were just amazed that Waddell did come out of it.

[00:06:43] But, you know, as far as why, when or where, I don't know. I know she did resign as clerk of court and I knew Becky. I liked Becky. I read her book. I enjoyed the book. Yeah, what was your take on it? I enjoyed the book.

[00:07:01] It was behind the scenes of what happened at the trial and, you know, what she wrote and then, you know, it came out that she had plagiarized some which, that surprised me because she had originally asked me too about,

[00:07:25] you know, the legalities of me writing my books and her too. And I said, well, you're elected official. You work. And I was already retired. Plus the fact I did talk to a few attorneys about it and I mean,

[00:07:42] the aftermath of my cases, they had to be adjudicated and I could use anything, of course, that was out in the media. And I could also bring in my opinions as well that if you get information

[00:07:57] from somewhere else, it's easy enough just to say put a footnote or as was reported in the newspaper this morning or just add the name. Make sure you get permission to use it. I hate that happened to her but as far as I'm concerned,

[00:08:18] I enjoyed reading the book because I worked behind the scenes a lot too when I did the quest at juries with my work at SLED and I was just amazed how the courtroom and all the proceedings got done. There's so much that the court has to do.

[00:08:37] The very privileged position of witness and so forth but that does require you, you know, to maintain, I think, an extra level of care and integrity, of course, in what you're writing about. I think the circumstances, yes, of yours and hers are very, very different

[00:08:55] and your vantage points are different. Absolutely and then I told her that. I said, you know, you're still an elected official but I did talk to a few attorneys to make sure what I could do. I mean, I covered my butt on everything. Yeah.

[00:09:12] Well, and that's one of the things that I really sort of admired so much about the Elaine Fogle book was that, you know, here you have the balance between what is hard, hard evidence, right, which has been collected and assessed and so forth.

[00:09:27] And then you have and you write about this explicitly, you know, sometimes you get hunches, right? Sometimes you get kind of intuitions and you think, OK, hold up. Let me just there's something bothering me about this particular photograph or, you know, crime scene analysis.

[00:09:42] Let me go back and take a second look at that and so forth. And those hunches are kind of they're not just what propel the narrative of the book, they're actually what propelled the case forward, right? Which is fascinating if you think about that.

[00:09:55] It is fascinating and I called them in my book, I would call them hand to God moments on time and you're going, oh my God, this happened. Just a happenstance. I don't believe in coincidences that much, you know, but a happenstance and a hand to God moment.

[00:10:11] It's almost like he's OK, work with this, work with this. And you feel so good when you when you find one of those and then you feel so bad. Why didn't I find this before? Well, the timing was not right.

[00:10:27] I think everything happened at the right time, at the right time. In fact, the detective, the chief that worked with me on this, you know, afterwards, he said, Rita, you know, this thing could have been solved a couple of years back. And I said it could have.

[00:10:46] I said, but we were supposed to do it, Jean. I said we were the ones that were supposed to do it. And I said, you know, we got what was done and then the two of us together. Our thoughts came together and.

[00:11:02] It was it was the right time. It was a time that was supposed to be done, I guess, although it if it had been done years ago, you know what? What difference would have been made? I don't know. But they got him off the street, I guess.

[00:11:15] But they got him off the street for a lot of stuff and put him back out. Timing is a lot then in these cases. Absolutely. And sometimes things just aren't ready. You know, evidence needs to percolate a little bit or we need a better

[00:11:29] technique, right, that hasn't been invented yet or something like that. Correct. And you can't start with just one thing. I mean, unless that's the only thing you've got, just like we had the fingerprints and palm prints and then, of course, the DNA.

[00:11:44] So you have to keep you have to try and find everything you can. Absolutely. Let me ask you, I'm curious with respect to the Murdoch, you know, the aftermath and so forth. One of the biggest questions and I never heard the answer to this read

[00:12:00] and I was always curious about it. Well, the biggest questions that came out, you know, as far as matters of evidence went in that particular trial was the weapon. Did they ever find the gun? Not that I know of. Never heard anything about that. OK.

[00:12:12] Not that I know of or his clothing. Yeah, I didn't find that. Took me a while to get into Paul's phone. I know that. I remember that. Yeah, sure. But just curious if there had been any further sweeps of the land, you know.

[00:12:28] I was so curious about that, I had to go back and make me a timeline on that just to understand it all too, because, you know, you mentioned that in your in your retirement, law enforcement does still call you every now and then for,

[00:12:46] you know, for thoughts on cases and for, you know, different little things here and there. Have there been any that you have been working on lately or any cases that have kind of come back to your desk in the last year or so that are of interest?

[00:13:04] Yes, there have been a few that they've called me about my part of working with the evidence when it happened. And one in particular is the Larry Gene Bell, Sherri Smith, Deborah May Helmick story. Larry Gene Bell was a serial murder hearing in South Carolina back in 1985.

[00:13:26] And he kidnapped and killed Sherri Smith. And about two weeks later, he kidnapped and killed nine year old Deborah May Helmick. And that case has been out there since 1985. And now it just keeps coming up. There's been documentaries on TV.

[00:13:47] I wouldn't even want to think about how many they've been. But they always call me about my part in it. And Larry Gene Bell made tawning phone calls to the family. And I still do have those phone calls that the investigator gave me

[00:14:08] to keep when they would call to share with them, you know, after the fact it had to be adjudicated first and after he was caught. But that case is it just seems to come up ever so often that it's just so amazing how it was solved

[00:14:29] with some indicted writing in a letter that Larry Gene Bell, his first victim, Sherri Smith, right. She wrote it to her family. She wanted to tell them goodbye. And it was titled Last Will and Testament. And there was some indicted writing that our question

[00:14:47] documents examiner was able to pull up. And it was a partial phone number. And that phone number led them to a few links to find the bad guy who was Larry Gene Bell. And he was house sitting at a house there in Saluda,

[00:15:04] South Carolina, for a couple when they went on vacation. Let's just do a quick bit of contextualization here because it does actually matter. In 1985, I mean, we're talking there's no Internet, right? I mean, computers are really in their kind of infancy in their home in their home versions.

[00:15:23] We didn't have we didn't have a misfledge anybody. Yeah. Yeah. But law enforcement is not really using it very widely. I mean, you're talking so many just analog technologies there that I mean, it's almost like going back to the

[00:15:38] Sherlock Holmes era of if there is a physical piece of evidence, you have to examine it in every single capacity under every single angle for anything it can possibly reveal, because there's just you can't cross check it against anything at that point, can you?

[00:15:53] No, you can. And, you know, one of the amazing things about him calling the family when he first the first time he called, they were not recording any phone calls. They set up a task force in the yard of Sherry Smith's family. And she was missing.

[00:16:13] And the first phone call he called and said that he had her and that they would be getting a letter the next morning. Well, after that first call, then they set a recording device up on the telephone. And they were hoping that he was going to call.

[00:16:29] And he did. Oh, man, he was having a big time. He was having a big time and he'd call. But even in 1985, they were with the name of the phone company. And this is ironic was Southern Bail. And then Larry Jean Bail's last name was Bail.

[00:16:46] I thought these things hit me like that sometimes. I think AT&T bought Southern Bail eventually. They did. They did. I still have a Southern Bail email address. How about that? Bail South, it was when I had it. But anyway, they were able to trace

[00:17:10] him back to every phone call that he made even back then in 1985. They worked closely with Southern Bail and they were able to trace it back to every phone booth that he had used to make those calls.

[00:17:24] But of course, when they got there, he was gone and he'd left nothing. There was nothing that they could use. They didn't find anything they could use. But he he covered some ground now. He would call from the up country. He would call from the low country.

[00:17:40] He he went around calling just taunting the family. And then he did call and tell them where Sherry's body was after about I think it was the third or fourth day. And then after he took little Debra May Helmet,

[00:17:56] the little nine year old girl, it was it was longer than that before he called. And he had to call the Smith family to tell them where her body was, because they didn't have a telephone. They had just moved down from Ohio and they didn't have a telephone.

[00:18:13] They lived in a trailer park. And that was when they knew that it was the same guy. And then they got back to work on that phone number. And within a few days, they had a good phone number there that they called the phone number.

[00:18:29] And he said his mom and dad lived in Saluda when they'd go on vacation. He would Mr. and Ms. Shepard would leave the numbers of where they could be reached. And there it was his son. It was Mr. and Ms. Shepard's son out in Alabama, his number.

[00:18:47] And he said, you know, they live right there in Saluda, so they went and questioned them. And soon as I saw they were middle aged and retired, they knew it wasn't them. And they let them listen at the phone calls, the audio. And I think Mr.

[00:19:03] Shepard, I believe he said, I'll be damned. He said, that's that son of a bitch Larry and Jean-Belle. That's what he said. And so he's our house sitter. And then, of course, he lived right up there on Lake Murray.

[00:19:17] And they just put a roadblock up the next morning and when he was coming out to go to work, they got him. But he never admitted to it. He always said the bad Larry and Jean-Belle did it inside of him.

[00:19:29] If it was anything inside of him, it did it badly. Or Jean-Belle did it. It wasn't the guy sitting there. How well does that hold up in court, Rita? That defense. I tell you what, he tried to use it. He tried to make people think he was crazy.

[00:19:45] But he wasn't crazy. That man was evil. He was just evil. But that case is out there if anybody wants to. It's podcasts. It's been on documentaries, on TV. And forensic files. It's been on that. And I don't think it'll ever go away because of the uniqueness

[00:20:07] of how it was solved back in 85 with that Indian number and how they traced the phone calls back to those phone booths. But even though it didn't help that much, they saw how he was just moving around. Supposedly, you know, he told the family too, you know,

[00:20:26] they stopped me in a roadblock last night, but they let me through. But you couldn't believe nothing he said. You don't know whether he was lying or telling the truth. So and then he got fascinated with Sherry's sister because Sherry's sister looks so much like Sherry.

[00:20:44] But law enforcement used Don. That was Sherry's sister. OK, when he calls, you keep him on the phone. And she had to just keep her composure. And she did a just an excellent job of talking to him. And and they were all very religious people.

[00:21:09] And he was saying, you know, please forgive me and God forgive me and all that and whatever. And then she went along and said, you know, God will forgive you. And then she kept him on the phone so that they could trace the phone back.

[00:21:25] Wow. You know, back to the phone. But he was always going when they got there. But she she has quite a few testimonials out there too. And she's written two or three books. How long? So, I mean, in the 80s,

[00:21:40] how long would that take to get a reverse trace established? I mean, how long does someone need to be on online, so to speak? On the phone. You know, I don't know the exact minutes, but it wasn't that long. They said, and you might could look that up.

[00:21:58] I don't know the exact minutes of how long it took back then, but they were able to trace it. Even that first phone call when they didn't even have a recorder on it. They traced it back to a little convenience store there

[00:22:09] just right around the corner from where the shepherds lived and where Sherry's body actually was found not too far from the shepherds house. Yeah, you know, Rita, I have to say this is something that has been a a source of just real admiration

[00:22:28] for me and for all of us here at Crime Capsule. Just hearing about the high level of coordination with SLED and with County and with Citi, you know, just the way in which you guys all came together and and, you know, just operations and

[00:22:49] just really impressive to see like that level, you know, in order to get these guys. And it just it's a running theme. You know what I mean? And in all these cases that you've worked on, it's really very impressive. One of Scotland's most notorious unsolved murders.

[00:23:09] To think that someone could turn a cheese wire into a grot and take someone's life. The level of violence, the uncertainty and the randomness frighten people. She always thought the killer was going to come back after her. Society needs to find out killer.

[00:23:24] Who is the cheese wire killer? Listen to the full series now, wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. And you know, back then, like you said, we didn't we didn't have cell phones. We didn't we didn't have I mean, in the late years,

[00:23:46] we had a little flip phones and we had beepers, the beepers. So we really had to get out. They had to get out and dust the bushes. And you had it was manpower. You had to go out and walk.

[00:24:01] In fact, when Larry Gene Bell was doing his thing and they didn't catch him at first, they kind of had a description of him in some cars. But he switched cars. His sister had a used car dealership and he would switch cars.

[00:24:19] But they had everybody just anybody that looked strange, whether we were working or not or anybody. If you see anybody strange, let us know. They had a description at first, but he was clean. And then when he took little Deborah May Helmick, he had a beard.

[00:24:41] So he actually had clean shaving himself when he took Sherry because he took her first. And then when he took Deborah May, he had let his beard grow back. So the composite they got was somebody that said they were driving by when he picked up Sherry.

[00:24:59] He picked her up from the mailbox when she was getting mail. They did a composite and they just kind of drove by and they said they didn't remember facial hair. So the composite was without facial hair. But we did find out later he had shaved his beard.

[00:25:19] He had a beard and he'd shaved it. But then he let it grow back when little Deborah May was taken. And the neighbor, the neighbor actually saw him pull up to the trailer from his window of the trailer across the road

[00:25:37] and saw Lara Jean Bale get out and take little Deborah May. She was kicking and screaming, getting in the car. And another happenstance here. It was hot. It was hot in me. And his air conditioner was broken. He was in the kitchen making orange juice.

[00:25:58] And he had the windows up, the guy that saw Lara Jean Bale take her, the neighbor. And he ran out the house and ran over. And her daddy had just come home from work and he was backing his trailer.

[00:26:12] And he said, somebody just stopped by here and took your daughter. And her little brother was with her, but he didn't take the little boy. And then his name was Woody. It scared him to death. But anyway, that guy gave a wonderful composite. And the facial, if

[00:26:35] if you look at how Lara Jean Bale looked when they arrested him and that facial composite that the neighbor gave, it'll put chills on his spine. Wow. And I mean, it was it was that close. I had heard that that they used an inmate

[00:26:54] to talk to that guy. He was an artist. And they use an inmate to work with the neighbor to draw that picture. And then that that ran into faithful. They got rid of the of the the first clean shaver. And then when he was arrested, the Shephards remember

[00:27:14] he would go and pick them up from the airport and bring them home to take them back to the airport when they leave. And Miss Shephards, when she remembered that she looked at him when the first time he came and picked him up.

[00:27:27] And that was right after Sherry was taken. She wouldn't even found yet. When you finally see that ugly, ugly beard off. And you have written about all of this in your Murder in the Midlands book, is that correct? That is correct. Yes.

[00:27:41] And then this I wrote it from the law enforcement view of what I did and what the investigators did. And Don, Sherry's sister has also written a book about it. She's written quite a few books, I believe. But this one was the one to me.

[00:28:04] This was probably one of my career cases. Yeah, because of the way it went through the Midlands and how long it took. It's probably the longest man herniating South Carolina to really. I believe it. I believe it was.

[00:28:22] It may have been one later on here in the last couple of years, but I know it took a, let's see, one to I think it was about a month. I'd have to look back in my notes and everybody was

[00:28:37] everybody was afraid to go out, not even in the Midlands. They were actually all around the state. You know, they're afraid to go out. You didn't see a child out hardly anywhere in the Midlands. And then they were afraid to let the children out,

[00:28:51] especially little blonde head ones, because both of them were blondes. No, and that echoes very, very loudly. You know, our very first guest ever on Crime Capsule was Joshua Sushon. And, you know, when he wrote about the killing of Tina Fails in California,

[00:29:08] you know, all the parents kept their kids indoors for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, you know. And it's just kind of natural reaction to circle the wagons. You know, you just don't even, you know, until they get him,

[00:29:22] until they get him, you know, no one's going anywhere. Right. That's true. I mean, I mean, you fair you husband's fair for the wilds, you know, and it was just and we were scared. We were scared, too, because you just he was just so slick.

[00:29:40] He could he was like a cat in the mouse. It could slide in and out, slide in and out. But they did after they got that composite that they knew there after he took Debra May. And they put that composite out.

[00:29:54] They had law enforcement all around the area. And anybody that had a beard, they stopped and talked to them. And they told us when we went out, if we saw anybody or anything, you know, it's just call us and let us know about it.

[00:30:11] And here's one thing that did happen with me. Oh, yeah. I and a friend of mine were looking for a pop up camper doing all this time. And it so happened on our. We had to go to a phone booth to call, let's say scratch that.

[00:30:37] We made let me get the story straight here. OK, my friend and I during this time, we were looking for a pop up camper. We camped with some friends of ours. So we're looking for a pop up camps camper.

[00:30:51] And we had a little trader there that we could look in. And it gave us numbers of campers that were for sale. And it so happened we went up around Lake Murray, looking at one. And then we were going to look at another one.

[00:31:09] And we didn't have cell phones at that time. So I had to go to a phone booth to call the number of the one we were going to look at. And when we got to that phone booth, it was right there at a little

[00:31:26] up a hill from Lake Murray, a boat landing there on Lake Murray, where some residents would dock their boats. And the phone booth was there. And when we got there, this guy was in the phone booth. And he had the phone receiver in his hand.

[00:31:48] And we pulled up close to the boot. And it so happened that I was in my state car because they told us, you know, to take the car out and look for anything you see strange. And I was in my state vehicle.

[00:32:03] And he looked out of the phone booth. He's acting real cocky. And I looked at my friend and I said, now, that's a strange bird, isn't it? Because he would he had the receiver in his hand. He wasn't talking to anybody.

[00:32:14] And he'd look back in and he'd been back out. And we just kind of sat there in the car. Well, he later hung the receiver up, left the booth and walked back down to the boat landing down the hill to the boat landing where the boats would dock.

[00:32:33] And, you know, working in law enforcement and I work with composites, too. I did composites with a kid. Faces just kind of stick with me sometime. But I kind of we kind of shook it off.

[00:32:44] I went and called the number and went over and looked to that camper. Well, when he got arrested, they brought his his mugshot over to me the morning he was arrested. And I had to make copies of it for him to send around to the media.

[00:32:59] And when when I saw his mugshot and his driver's license picture, I went, oh, my God. This is a guy we saw in that phone booth. I call my friend real fast and I said, are you looking at?

[00:33:17] She she she had heard they had, you know, they'd put it out on the media. And I said, did you see that picture? She said, Rita, there's no doubt in my mind that was him. So then it bugged me. Why didn't I think about this?

[00:33:31] And then I found out that this was before Deborah May was taken, that we saw him. So that composite of him being clean shaven was the only one we had ever seen. That was the only one that had been released to the media. And then we have to.

[00:33:49] And this was before Deborah May was taken. Deborah May was taken after we were looking for the camping. And then I later found out to in the second trial of Deborah May, I believe it was that his mother and daddy had a boat dock

[00:34:07] where they docked their boat down at that particular landing. You're kidding. I mean, that just it's too much. It's too much. You know, I look at it. Can't 100 percent say it was, but I can 100 percent say it was.

[00:34:20] But that'll put shells on your spine more than anything, won't it? I mean, it kind of bothered me then. But then I said, you know, we were looking for a clean shaven guy. We weren't looking for a guy with the with the beer.

[00:34:31] Yeah. No. And you can't beat yourself up for it. Oh, no, no, no, no. It does kind of just give you pause right there. You know, things happen as they happen. Things happen as they happen. Well, good heavens. That is an incredible story.

[00:34:46] And I mean, he got two deaths. So he was electrocuted. I kept him alive for a year. I mean, about 10 years afterwards, though, you know, with the appeals and everything. But he finally was electrocuted for it. Oh, it's crazy. And he did bizarre things in court.

[00:35:04] All that's in my book and in the stories that any stories you read about about that case. Yeah. It's just an interesting way as to how all of that evolved and how much faith Sherry had and her family had.

[00:35:20] And she said in the letter one time, some good will come for this. You know, I think it has. Well, that story and more can be found, you know, in in your books. And we absolutely encourage our listeners to go

[00:35:37] and pick up a copy of Murder in the Midlands or the Lowcountry Murder of Gwendolyn Lane Fogel. I mean, there are multiple different avenues for them to explore life in the low country with you and from from that incredible perspective that you've had over the years.

[00:35:55] Rita, it is just always such a joy to get to hang out with you. We appreciate your staying vigilant and, you know, carrying the fire for all these stories that the victims can't tell their stories anymore. And so often, you know, it falls, falls to you.

[00:36:10] And, you know, we're just so grateful for the way that you keep not just their memories alive, but the hope of justice, you know, which ties it all together. And we know you've played a big, big role in that over the years.

[00:36:21] Thank you. I still have a passion for it and I miss it. I do miss being around all the evidence and I just had a good team. I had worked with at Sled to those guys. They I was one of the guys. It is there it is.

[00:36:36] Well, you all did a lot of good over the years and are continuing to. And I know that I know that I feel like we did. Absolutely. Well, look, tell us this. If you know if you get any more projects on your desk

[00:36:46] or any more books coming out, we want to hear about it. All right. But in the meantime, in the meantime, when the crabs start biting. The crabs are biting. That's what we want to hear too. Well, you know who to call.

[00:37:00] Absolutely. If you ever get down this way, I will take you crabbing. I can't wait. I'm going to bring the chicken legs myself and we'll just get it done. We will get it done. I'll put beer in a cooler for you. Can't wait. Can't wait.

[00:37:15] Well, we'll see you down there, Rita. It's been great talking to you. And thank you again for including me in all this. I just love to talk to you guys. Always a joy. The pleasure is ours and we will see you soon. All right. Thank you so much.

[00:37:28] Take care now. Thanks for listening. Our guest has been Rita Schuller, author of The Low Country Murder of Gwendolyn Elaine Fogel and Murder in the Midlands, both published by the History Press. To order a copy of her books, visit your local independent bookstore or visit our KIDDiApublishing.com.

[00:37:48] Join us next week as we continue our 100th episode anniversary celebration. See you then. Thanks, as always, to our producer, Bill Huffman, our production director, Bridget Coyne, audio engineer Ian Douglas and our executive producers, Michael DeLoya and Gerardo Orlando. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris.

[00:38:09] Crime Capsule is a production of Evergreen Podcasts and a signature title of the Killer Podcasts Network. You can find Crime Capsule wherever you listen to podcasts. Discover more great true crime and paranormal programming at KillerPodcasts.com. Hey there, I'm James, host of Dakota Spotlight.

[00:38:36] We're back with a new season. You killed Chris, a friend's fight for justice. It's a chilling throwback to 1968. A college freshman, Christine Rothschild, is murdered on campus during her morning walk. Join us as we dive into this unsolved case and follow a friend's

[00:38:51] relentless pursuit of the truth all the way from the flower power era to today. Find You Killed Chris on your favorite app or at Dakota Spotlight dot com.