Speaker 1: Vehicle scene. Am body lying on a white cloth coat
Speaker 1: with fur collar. Ten cents in pocket, black mark bottom
Speaker 1: left eye, three ruger on coat, powder blowback on barrel,
Speaker 1: key in off position with Sandy key ring park lights
Speaker 1: on mud on rear tire still wet. Left yesterday afternoon
Speaker 1: to see boyfriend father's gun. From My Heart Radio, I'm
Speaker 1: Melissa Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy Beale
Speaker 1: and I Heart Original podcast, Chapter five listener update. Instead
Speaker 1: of releasing a full episode this week, I'm taking a
Speaker 1: small detour to explain some new information. I received. What
Speaker 1: you just heard were notes from the scene of Sandy's death,
Speaker 1: written over four decades ago. A few weeks back, in
Speaker 1: the middle of putting together this podcast, I got an
Speaker 1: unexpected email from the Prince George's County Office of Law,
Speaker 1: attached with Sandy's police file. Kim had given me the
Speaker 1: police report on Sandy's death when I first met her,
Speaker 1: but several months ago I requested quote the entire police
Speaker 1: file of Sandy Beale to see if I'd get anything different.
Speaker 1: I'd all but put the request out of my mind,
Speaker 1: so I was shocked when I opened this email to
Speaker 1: find that the file was pages long. A few of
Speaker 1: the pages are fully redacted, and a good chunk of
Speaker 1: the file is made up of photocopies of Sandy's personal books.
Speaker 1: This content was all familiar to me, of course, but
Speaker 1: on page eighty four the new stuff starts. It's Detective
Speaker 1: Shoelski's handwritten notes jotted down at the scene of Sandy's death.
Speaker 1: Reading these pages, you can sort of follow along with
Speaker 1: his investigation. He writes when he arrives, who we talked to,
Speaker 1: what he did, what he saw, And on one page
Speaker 1: he writes down the items that sat on top of
Speaker 1: Sandy's dashboard. The first item he notes is a quote
Speaker 1: p G County Police rig. I didn't know what that was,
Speaker 1: so I asked him. He didn't remember this detail, but
Speaker 1: he said a rig can refer to a police duty belt,
Speaker 1: which officers used to carry equipment around their waist. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you can picture one. It's unclear if the rig
Speaker 1: was hers, perhaps given to her as part of the
Speaker 1: Explorer program, or maybe it was someone else's. Also on
Speaker 1: Sandy's dashboard was a quote personal card of a Prince
Speaker 1: George's County police officer, Mark Murphy. His name was also
Speaker 1: listed in Sandy's address book. He died on the job,
Speaker 1: but I confirmed he did work in the Explorer program
Speaker 1: at the time Sandy was there. After that, Selski writes
Speaker 1: several police clippings. Again, he didn't recall this detail, but
Speaker 1: he thought the note may have referred to newspaper clippings
Speaker 1: about PGI County cops. He vaguely remembered that the local
Speaker 1: paper used to run an Officer of the Week story
Speaker 1: along with a photo. Maybe Sandy had kept some copies. Lastly,
Speaker 1: he notes that Sandy had a quote schedule card on
Speaker 1: her dash. Selski was pretty sure this was for the
Speaker 1: Prince George's County Police Department. All of these items they
Speaker 1: confirmed Sandy's close connections to pg County police and her
Speaker 1: likely involvement in the Police Explorer program. Not only did
Speaker 1: she have address books with the names and numbers of
Speaker 1: local cops in her car, she had a police frigg
Speaker 1: sitting right on top off of her dash. I sent
Speaker 1: the handwritten notes to Selski to see what he made
Speaker 1: of them so many years later. There are some things
Speaker 1: in here that I had forgotten, like the black mark.
Speaker 1: Selski's notes document that Sandy had a black mark under
Speaker 1: her left eye. I don't know what that was. I think,
Speaker 1: I said, if it would have been a bruise, I
Speaker 1: want to know it. But I don't know what it was.
Speaker 1: And I don't like that. I don't don't you don't
Speaker 1: like that. I don't like to that I don't remember.
Speaker 1: The file also includes a crude diagram drawn by Selski
Speaker 1: showing where Sandy's car was located in the pollard and
Speaker 1: the track marks around it. The drawing is very rudimentary,
Speaker 1: and so I didn't want to read too much into it.
Speaker 1: But there are two sets of tracks next to each other.
Speaker 1: I a car pulled up next to another car. I
Speaker 1: asked him about this. Doesn't it look like maybe there
Speaker 1: was more than one car there? From what I have there,
Speaker 1: it does either that or try ton't make a note
Speaker 1: of it. It would have been her tracks well, certainly
Speaker 1: in the police report it says that there were tracks
Speaker 1: like she had been trying to get out of the mud.
Speaker 1: But the way that you've drawn this doesn't just look
Speaker 1: like a person like backing up and you know, reversing
Speaker 1: and going forward and trying to get out of the mud.
Speaker 1: It looks like someone pulled up, yeah, next to her
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure that one in the case. Okay,
Speaker 1: how does it make you feel reading these notes from
Speaker 1: so long ago? Well, I feel though it's still suicide.
Speaker 1: Schelski is still confident that he made at the right call.
Speaker 1: Those things that bother him now, the black mark, the
Speaker 1: tire tracks, they bother him because he can't remember exactly
Speaker 1: what he meant at the time when he made his notes,
Speaker 1: not because he thinks there was foul play. The notes
Speaker 1: also revealed that Sholski did a search on Sandy's name,
Speaker 1: calling the records department to see if Sandy had any
Speaker 1: previous involvement with the police department, either as a suspect
Speaker 1: or as a victim. At first, he wrote no records,
Speaker 1: Then he scribbled it out because the search revealed that
Speaker 1: in the last year and a half of her life,
Speaker 1: Sandy sought helped from police on three separate occasions. It
Speaker 1: appears that a man had been following her at the mall.
Speaker 1: As you might remember, Sandy worked at the Landover Mall
Speaker 1: in her senior year of high school. She was part
Speaker 1: of a work study program where students would go to
Speaker 1: school until lunch and then work the rest of the
Speaker 1: day at a local job um. According to Schelski's notes,
Speaker 1: in November nine, when she was seventeen, Sandy was assaulted
Speaker 1: at the mall by a twenty eight year old man
Speaker 1: who she said had been following her for three months.
Speaker 1: He grabbed her and made threats to harm her before
Speaker 1: being sent on his way by the security guard. Then,
Speaker 1: in April nineteen seventy six, five months later, another incident occurred.
Speaker 1: The man followed Sandy's through the mall again. In July,
Speaker 1: there's a third report. This time the man apparently threatened
Speaker 1: Sandy forgetting a warrant for the assault. I called Sandy's
Speaker 1: mom to ask her about all of this. Hello, yeah, Nolica,
Speaker 1: Hi Joanne, I just missed a call from you. Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: how he's going? I told Joanne what I found, the
Speaker 1: reference to the three police reports involving Sandy as a victim.
Speaker 1: She didn't know about them, she said, but she faintly
Speaker 1: recalled that something strange had happened at the mall. I
Speaker 1: never heard that from Sandy, but her good friends Sandra
Speaker 1: Sheridan had told me, and I think Sandy might have
Speaker 1: said something to her father, But I don't know. If
Speaker 1: I didn't know how it ended, or how it came
Speaker 1: out of what happened to it? What did Sandy Sheridan
Speaker 1: tell you? And when did she tell you? After Sandy's
Speaker 1: death or before that? I think it was before that.
Speaker 1: I think she called me because she wanted me to
Speaker 1: talk to Ronald about it, because she said, we have
Speaker 1: a security guy that marks her out to the car
Speaker 1: now or after she gets through her shift. Because she
Speaker 1: worked at the mall and it was a new you know,
Speaker 1: it was a big mall and it was new, and
Speaker 1: I guess somebody was, you know, following her. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that she had been assaulted. Almost every time I
Speaker 1: talked to Joanne, she brings up Sandy Sheridan, And this
Speaker 1: is one of the reporting goals I really wanted to
Speaker 1: achieve for the bills. I wanted to find her because
Speaker 1: she was Sandy's best friend and probably knows more than
Speaker 1: anyone else about what was going on in her life.
Speaker 1: I think she's married and has a different last name now,
Speaker 1: so it's been hard to track her down. Joanne hasn't
Speaker 1: lost hope though. The last time I talked to her,
Speaker 1: she said she was optimistic that Sandy Sheridan might hear
Speaker 1: the podcast and come forward, Sandy, if you're listening, we
Speaker 1: want to hear your story. I asked Joanne why she
Speaker 1: thought Sandy Sheridan called the house all those years ago
Speaker 1: to tell her about the situation at the mall. I
Speaker 1: don't know, because we never discussed it. I took it
Speaker 1: for granted that it was taken care of, either by
Speaker 1: the security guard or her father talked her into doing
Speaker 1: something different. I didn't know if Romo got involved with
Speaker 1: that or not. Uh, you know, maybe when she told
Speaker 1: him that somebody was the security guard was going to
Speaker 1: help her, you know, talk. You know, maybe Ronald felt
Speaker 1: but I won't get involved. You know. He was busy,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to take care of the family work,
Speaker 1: and so I don't know all the ins and outs
Speaker 1: about what happened here. In my many conversations with Joanne,
Speaker 1: she had never mentioned this to me, the fact that
Speaker 1: a man had been following Sandy at the mall. She
Speaker 1: had completely forgotten about it, and so had Detective Shoelski
Speaker 1: until I refreshed his memory with these notes. To be honest,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that surprising to me these incidents. They happened
Speaker 1: months before her death, and the actual conduct the stalking.
Speaker 1: In the seventies, stalking wasn't called stalking, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: taken all that seriously. The threshold for tolerating unwanted male
Speaker 1: attention was front at that time, and I imagine that
Speaker 1: the guy who was following Sandy was seen as an
Speaker 1: annoyance and nothing more. I wasn't able to track him
Speaker 1: down based on the information included in Sachelski's notes, and
Speaker 1: the original reports are no longer available. Well, Alissa, it's
Speaker 1: good talking to you, honey. Oh, good talking to you too.
Speaker 1: I did a news archive search about the Landover Mall,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that it wasn't such a safe
Speaker 1: place when Sandy worked there. In the same year Sandy
Speaker 1: was assaulted, three different women were abducted from the parking
Speaker 1: lot and raped in three separate incidents. The victims were fifteen, seventeen,
Speaker 1: and twenty five years old. The perpetrators were caught, and
Speaker 1: none of their names matched Sandy Stalker. But this context
Speaker 1: might help explain the safety measures put in place to
Speaker 1: help Sandy, like the security guard who walked her to
Speaker 1: her car. I don't have any evidence that Sandy Stalker
Speaker 1: continued to bother her after the last known incident in July,
Speaker 1: seven months before she died, and there's nothing at the
Speaker 1: scene of her death that points to his involvement. But
Speaker 1: knowing about his existence it puts her whole experience with
Speaker 1: law enforcement in a new light. We already knew that
Speaker 1: Sandy had met cops just going about her day. She
Speaker 1: saw them in the neighborhood and interacted with them at
Speaker 1: the drug store, but now we know that on multiple
Speaker 1: occasions Sandy appealed to them for help as a victim
Speaker 1: of a crime. Selski told me that Sandy would have
Speaker 1: reported these incidents at the Seat Pleasant Station, which was
Speaker 1: the police precinct around the corner from Sandy's house. A
Speaker 1: lot of the officer names in her address books worked
Speaker 1: at this station, including Ray from My Life as a
Speaker 1: Cop Freak and Mark, whose cards she had on her
Speaker 1: when she died. In the last episode, I put out
Speaker 1: a call to listeners to share their experiences with police
Speaker 1: Explorer programs or police sexual violence in general, and I've
Speaker 1: received a number of powerful messages so far. One person
Speaker 1: told me how they had a positive experience in an
Speaker 1: Explorer program and learned a lot of great skills, But
Speaker 1: most of those who emailed were survivors speaking their truth.
Speaker 1: One woman described how she joined and Explorer program when
Speaker 1: she was sixteen, a junior in high school, and was
Speaker 1: sexually abused by a cop in his thirties. She wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: it has been hard for me to come to terms
Speaker 1: with it because at the time, it was what I
Speaker 1: thought I wanted. I was infatuated. I felt noticed, wanted,
Speaker 1: and special by someone who was seen as a here
Speaker 1: row and role model by a whole community. I can
Speaker 1: relate to Sandy so much because of this, and it
Speaker 1: breaks my heart that her memory was smeared to save
Speaker 1: the reputation of monsters. It was always drilled into our
Speaker 1: head that females just caused problems and we were to
Speaker 1: blame for male law enforcement officers getting in trouble. They
Speaker 1: create this environment that makes the few women feel like
Speaker 1: it's a privilege for them to be involved, like they
Speaker 1: owe every man something just for doing the same job.
Speaker 1: It's like there's an unwritten code among females and male
Speaker 1: dominated fields. We never acknowledge any wrongdoing against us because
Speaker 1: we are quite tough and we just want to fit in.
Speaker 1: Next week, we jumped back into Sandy's story, revisiting the
Speaker 1: evidence at the scene of her death with top experts.
Speaker 1: Was she meeting with someone who did she have relations
Speaker 1: with in the hours for her death? What happened? Was
Speaker 1: there a breakup? We don't know, and that that's kind
Speaker 1: of the big question here, you know, why why she
Speaker 1: in this muddy area, you know, sort of next to
Speaker 1: the barracks. I'm Melissa Jolson and this is what happened
Speaker 1: to Sandy Beale. Thank you so much for listening. M
Speaker 1: h m hmm.