Speaker 1: Before we begin, please note this series includes talk of
Speaker 1: suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. There
Speaker 1: are things I know about Sandy that I only know
Speaker 1: because she wrote them down herself more than four decades ago.
Speaker 1: She was a planner, a checkbook balancer, and the type
Speaker 1: of teen who kept detailed notes about her life. Among
Speaker 1: the things that Kim, her cousin, gave me to look
Speaker 1: through is a date book that Sandy used to track
Speaker 1: the last two years of her life seventy six and
Speaker 1: ninety seven. On the front of the date book is
Speaker 1: a picturesque winter scene, and on the inside of the
Speaker 1: cover is a poem. The final lines read, as you
Speaker 1: close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God
Speaker 1: will say you have earned one more tomorrow by the
Speaker 1: work you did today. The first entry in Andy's calendar
Speaker 1: is in March of ninety six, when Sandy was still
Speaker 1: a senior in high school. Her entries are sparse in
Speaker 1: the beginning, but by August the pages are filled with
Speaker 1: her soft curse of handwriting. August, I think, is when
Speaker 1: Sandy met her boyfriend. She wrote in her calendar, met Doug.
Speaker 1: The fourth went out, the eleventh and the twenty three.
Speaker 1: He got his new police car. He was twenty eight
Speaker 1: to her eighteen years of age. She marked down his
Speaker 1: birthday in both years of her calendar, but she wouldn't
Speaker 1: live long enough to see him turn twenty nine. Doug
Speaker 1: had been married for a few years by the time
Speaker 1: he met Sandy. In her calendar, Sandy marked down the
Speaker 1: days they met together, as well as his absences, like
Speaker 1: when he was going to be out of town hunting.
Speaker 1: She described him as six ft a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: five pounds, blue eyes, and brown hair. There's a photo
Speaker 1: she kept where he's wearing his Maryland State Trooper uniform.
Speaker 1: He's holding his car door open, parked in front of
Speaker 1: a McDonald's. The picture is blurry, but he's smiling and
Speaker 1: making eye contact with someone out of frame. By December
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy six, the tone of Sandy's calendar changed,
Speaker 1: went to doctor, she wrote, and then the next week
Speaker 1: set aside money. By January, number started appearing sixty days,
Speaker 1: eight days. Sandy drew a square around the date January
Speaker 1: and wrote, eight am. I've seen that date before. It's
Speaker 1: on a receipt from the Women's Medical Center of Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. That was found in her purse on the
Speaker 1: morning of her death. The receipt was for a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five dollars and seventy cents. The payment was
Speaker 1: for an abortion. I think the running tab of numbers
Speaker 1: in her calendar was her attempt to estimate how far
Speaker 1: along in her pregnancy she was. The following week, she
Speaker 1: scrawled forget it in capital letters across one of the
Speaker 1: pages of her calendar. Within a month of having the abortion,
Speaker 1: she was dead. From My Heart Radio, I'm Melissa Jelson,
Speaker 1: and this is what happened to Sandy Beale an I
Speaker 1: Heart original podcast, Chapter two. Dear Doug. After a couple
Speaker 1: of days, when I try to get my mind together,
Speaker 1: I called the doctor. He said, I cannot give you
Speaker 1: any answers, and I said, Dr Boyle, I said she's dead.
Speaker 1: I said, she's gone. Can't you give me the answers
Speaker 1: that I need to have? And what did he telling?
Speaker 1: He told me that she had come to him, that
Speaker 1: she had had the abortion, that she was bleeding. This
Speaker 1: was all new information to Joanne. Sandy had kept her
Speaker 1: pregnancy and her abortion a secret from her family. Her
Speaker 1: mom learned about this for the first time at the
Speaker 1: police precinct after Sandy's death. But Sandy did confide in someone,
Speaker 1: her family physician, doctor Boyle. She went to him in
Speaker 1: December when she would have been a few months pregnant,
Speaker 1: and then again after the abortion. Sandy was experiencing some
Speaker 1: residual bleeding and wanted to make sure she was okay,
Speaker 1: and he said, I want you to go into the
Speaker 1: hospital and I will take care of you. She didn't
Speaker 1: want to. She was scared too because she would have
Speaker 1: to tell us. She would have had you know, everybody
Speaker 1: would have known, and she was embarrassed. I've thought a
Speaker 1: lot about how stressful this unexpected pregnancy must have been
Speaker 1: for Sandy. She was already in a hidden relationship with
Speaker 1: a married police officer. If they were discovered, it could
Speaker 1: be catastrophic. Now, at eighteen, she believed she was pregnant
Speaker 1: with his child. Sandy was living with secrets upon secrets
Speaker 1: upon secrets. We don't know how Sandy came to the
Speaker 1: decision to have an abortion, or how long she considered
Speaker 1: her options, or if she was influenced by anyone else,
Speaker 1: but ultimately she ended up at a clinic in downtown
Speaker 1: d C. When I first learned about this, I had
Speaker 1: so many questions, what would have been like to terminate
Speaker 1: a pregnancy in nine, only four years after Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade made access to abortion at constitutional right. How did
Speaker 1: Sandy pay for it? How did she get home? A
Speaker 1: lot of these answers are lost to time, and the
Speaker 1: Women's Medical Center of d C is closed now. But
Speaker 1: I was able to track down a former employee who
Speaker 1: worked at the clinic at the time Sandy would have visited.
Speaker 1: That's how I met Kathy. I will share my story um.
Speaker 1: When I was seventeen, I was abducted and assaulted and
Speaker 1: helped for a number of days. Was horrific. Well, I
Speaker 1: was abducted mid day from a city street in blue
Speaker 1: jeans and a pco, so straight up abduction assault. It
Speaker 1: was not questionable. I am well aware that police do
Speaker 1: not always do the detective work they should be doing,
Speaker 1: because they sure didn't. Kathy was abducted and raped in St.
Speaker 1: Louis in nineteen sixty nine. She was able to escape,
Speaker 1: but it was understandably a life altering experience. And my grandmother,
Speaker 1: who was completely uneducated, but escaped from the Warsaw ghetto,
Speaker 1: and she said in a very dear Eastern European voice, Darling,
Speaker 1: you have a choice. You can hide, you can get
Speaker 1: very sad, or you can speak your truth and teach
Speaker 1: something about this. Those words stayed with me a very
Speaker 1: long time. There with me still, Cathy chose to speak
Speaker 1: her truth. She became an activist involved in the women's
Speaker 1: reproductive rights movement. She received her PhD in counseling, and
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties seventies began working at the Women's
Speaker 1: Medical Center of DC. She started as a mental health
Speaker 1: counselor working with patients and later became the director of
Speaker 1: the counseling center there. So we were in a large
Speaker 1: office building, was very spacious, It was very comfortable. One
Speaker 1: could come in for birth control counseling, or abortion counseling,
Speaker 1: or crisis counseling. In stars counseling wide array. Cathy reminded
Speaker 1: me that this was all pre internet and pre cell phones.
Speaker 1: She said, Sandy likely would have heard of the clinic
Speaker 1: through word of mouth or been referred by her doctor.
Speaker 1: It was also before at home pregnancy tests became widely
Speaker 1: available in the US, so to confirm that she was pregnant,
Speaker 1: Sandy would have had to have visited a doctor. If
Speaker 1: it was determined she was pregnant and she was in
Speaker 1: a reasonable time frame for our work. She would be
Speaker 1: sent to a counseling room where she would meet with
Speaker 1: a council who would have asked many, many questions to
Speaker 1: see if this sounded okay, like someone who had thought
Speaker 1: this through. Was likely as best as we could determine
Speaker 1: to handle the procedure and aftermath. After speaking with Kathy,
Speaker 1: I was left with the impression that Sandy could have
Speaker 1: received really good care at Women's Medical Center. She would
Speaker 1: have been evaluated by counselors before the abortion, and they
Speaker 1: would have followed up with her afterwards to make sure
Speaker 1: she was doing okay. If any of us had any
Speaker 1: inkling that this would be extremely disregulating, emotionally, extremely destabilizing,
Speaker 1: she wouldn't have had the abortion at Women's Medical Say.
Speaker 1: I told Kathy about Sandy's story to get her take.
Speaker 1: Sandy died just one month after her abortion. I wanted
Speaker 1: to know had Kathy ever heard if any of the
Speaker 1: clinics patients dying by suicide. I wondered if it might
Speaker 1: have gotten back to them. I can't remember a single
Speaker 1: case like that. To the family. The revelation that Sandy
Speaker 1: had had an abortion provided a motive for Doug. Sandy
Speaker 1: was a complication in his life. The Bells didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: imagine that Doug had an elaborate plan to get rid
Speaker 1: of Sandy. Instead, they thought that maybe there had been
Speaker 1: an altercation of some kind. Kim's theory as to why
Speaker 1: Sandy had the gun with her that night is that
Speaker 1: maybe she was trying to scare Doug and maybe things
Speaker 1: just got out of control. And their fears that Sandy
Speaker 1: was murdered by an intimate partner aren't outlandish. In the US,
Speaker 1: four women a day are killed by their boyfriends and
Speaker 1: husbands and exes. While it's uncomfortable to talk about, women
Speaker 1: are at greater risk of violence at the hands of
Speaker 1: someone they know than by a stranger. Here's what the
Speaker 1: Beale family knew. Sandy had been in a secretive relationship
Speaker 1: with a married man. She had gotten pregnant and had
Speaker 1: an abortion, and then ended up dead one mile away
Speaker 1: from her boyfriend's place of work, and found with her
Speaker 1: body was a letter she had made out specifically to him.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read it now. Keep in mind, this
Speaker 1: is all coming from her perspective, and we don't know
Speaker 1: if everything in it is true, but it gives us
Speaker 1: a great deal of insight into how she felt around
Speaker 1: the time she died. Doug, I know now it's over,
Speaker 1: and it has been all along. I guess I'm going
Speaker 1: crazy and nobody can see it. You know you're right.
Speaker 1: I am trouble. I lost my baby. I wanted so much.
Speaker 1: I thought it would bring some kind of love because
Speaker 1: I was looking for love of and never found it
Speaker 1: from you. But you didn't care. You never came when
Speaker 1: I was sick. I only wish I could start all
Speaker 1: over again. Then you wouldn't have used me like you did.
Speaker 1: You didn't care, and I guess you never will. I
Speaker 1: never want another man to ever want me. I just
Speaker 1: want to leave and forget the pain. You see, I'll
Speaker 1: have to one day pay for the loss of my baby,
Speaker 1: and when that day comes, Douglas will pay for what
Speaker 1: he did to me and his baby. I love you,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry for all of this I've caused you.
Speaker 1: So this letter was interpreted by police as a suicide.
Speaker 1: What do you see in this letter? She wasn't committing suicide,
Speaker 1: but I just don't believe it. That's Sandy's cousin, Kim.
Speaker 1: Did you believe she wanted to get away from it
Speaker 1: and she was going to have to go through a
Speaker 1: grieving process. I see that she was in a lot
Speaker 1: of pain, and she was a kid. She's about to
Speaker 1: be nineteen, and she sees the way the world is,
Speaker 1: and she's recognizing that she loved him and she couldn't
Speaker 1: have any more than that. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: this is where her fire comes out, and I just
Speaker 1: want to leave and forget all the pain. How how
Speaker 1: do you hear that line? Now? That's when she wanted
Speaker 1: to go to Maine. In the last few months of
Speaker 1: Sandy's life, she had started talking about moving. She wrote
Speaker 1: to her grandmother in Maine and asked if she could
Speaker 1: live with her. These plans are a major reason why
Speaker 1: the Bell family so vehemently rejected the theory of suicide.
Speaker 1: Sandy was hopeful about the future. Here's her mom, Joanne.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't have gone to the lengths of calling her
Speaker 1: grandmother and talking with her. And she loved a grandmother Beale.
Speaker 1: She didn't like my mom. She liked a grandmother Beale,
Speaker 1: and that's why I don't think she committed the suicide.
Speaker 1: When I first read Sandy's letter, it didn't seem to
Speaker 1: me like a suicide note. Instead, I recognized it as
Speaker 1: a certain type of writing specific to teenage girls who
Speaker 1: had had their hearts broken for the very first time,
Speaker 1: girls who learned too early how men could use and
Speaker 1: take advantage of them, take their hearts and bodies and time,
Speaker 1: and then just discard them like trash. I recognized the
Speaker 1: letter because I had written ones just like it. The
Speaker 1: note could be interpreted manyways, though, depending on the lens
Speaker 1: you read it through heartbroken teen or as the cops
Speaker 1: read it, girl on the brink of suicide. If she
Speaker 1: hadn't written that damn note, ship head, I wish she
Speaker 1: had a mail that son of a bitch instead of
Speaker 1: leaving it in the gun, Joanna Leaves. The police closed
Speaker 1: the case so quickly because of the letter Sandy wrote
Speaker 1: to Doug. Without it, she thinks Sandy's death would have
Speaker 1: been investigated as a murder, and that those closest to her,
Speaker 1: including her boyfriend Doug, would have faced questioning. If you
Speaker 1: was going with a girl and you got her pregnant
Speaker 1: and you was married, and you told her to go
Speaker 1: get an abortion and she did, and then she still
Speaker 1: was hanging onto you, what do you think you would do.
Speaker 1: You're twenty eight years old, You've got a nice career
Speaker 1: with the state police, and you've gotten a girl pregnant.
Speaker 1: If Doug was responsible, the Bills believed that he would
Speaker 1: be uniquely adept at covering up the crime due to
Speaker 1: his training as a law enforcement officer. Here's Kim again.
Speaker 1: He's then the ideal situation. He's in the position of authority,
Speaker 1: he has the skill set, um, he has the trust
Speaker 1: within his department. They're going to believe him over us,
Speaker 1: so he's going to be able to cover up. He
Speaker 1: just has all the resources available to them. Kim suspicions
Speaker 1: of Doug kind of makes sense given her line of work.
Speaker 1: She's a therapist for domestic violence victims and as a result,
Speaker 1: all too familiar with the ways that men harm the
Speaker 1: women they claim to love. Her passion to help survivors
Speaker 1: and her desire to solve Sandy's case a sort of
Speaker 1: interwoven at this stage, feeding off of each other, and honestly,
Speaker 1: it's really impressive just how much energy she continues to
Speaker 1: commit to Sandy. For the last year, we've texted almost
Speaker 1: every single day to compare notes and talk about the case.
Speaker 1: And you have to remember she's been working on this
Speaker 1: for decades now. Her efforts over the years to track
Speaker 1: down documents and navigate the maze of state agencies and
Speaker 1: local police, it's herculean. I'm kind of like gum on
Speaker 1: people's shoes, and I ask a lot of questions. Tenacious,
Speaker 1: that's the word that I've been told before, and it's
Speaker 1: really stubbornness. And the people that I had to keep
Speaker 1: trying to reach over and over again were the law
Speaker 1: enforcement that there. They were really just trying to cover
Speaker 1: their ass and be cautious about what they gave me
Speaker 1: and what they did. Kim had been researching Sandy's case
Speaker 1: in some form or another since nineteen but the investigation
Speaker 1: took on a new urgency in two thousand and six
Speaker 1: after Kim traveled to Maine to see Sandy's parents. Ronald,
Speaker 1: Sandy's dad, was nearing the end of his life, and
Speaker 1: as Kim talked to him, she learned that he was
Speaker 1: still preoccupied with what happened to Sandy and all the
Speaker 1: unanswered questions around her death. I hate that Ronnie died
Speaker 1: not knowing just m It's just not fair that he
Speaker 1: would go to his grave and not now, that's just
Speaker 1: not fair. We need to get those answers, and I
Speaker 1: don't want Joanne to leave this earth and not half
Speaker 1: them too. She was overcome with a deep sense of injustice.
Speaker 1: She told me, Oh my gosh, you know, there's not
Speaker 1: enough time to get to find out these answers and
Speaker 1: we know nothing, and it's oh six, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of time, that's what. Twenty nine years later, Kim decided
Speaker 1: to track down the official police report on Sandy's death,
Speaker 1: thinking it would be simple to get not so. She
Speaker 1: started by calling the Prince George's County Police Department, where
Speaker 1: she was connected to a detective in the cold case unit,
Speaker 1: Bernie Nelson. He quickly referred her to someone else, another
Speaker 1: detective who had a strange story to share. He started
Speaker 1: how humming along and you know, I'm not sure that's
Speaker 1: a long time ago. I don't think I can get
Speaker 1: those records. And so probably three or four calls and
Speaker 1: um then he told me, well the buildings burned down.
Speaker 1: I'm like what, So he said, well, the probably the
Speaker 1: only thing I'm gonna be able to get as a
Speaker 1: tickler file. Well, I've been in marketing before, I know
Speaker 1: that's just an index card, and it's jumped from one
Speaker 1: month to another to follow up on people. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't care what you have, Just get me what
Speaker 1: you have. Okay, I'll work on it. Well, that was
Speaker 1: the last communication I had with him, because he would
Speaker 1: never return my calls anymore. So I gave up on
Speaker 1: the police report. Actually, instead, she focused on getting Sandy's autopsy,
Speaker 1: which she eventually was able to acquire. It added one
Speaker 1: very important detail, Sandy had sperm inside her body, suggesting
Speaker 1: that she'd recently had sex. Though it's hard to know
Speaker 1: exactly when I think what happened, and maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: I think that he met her, they had sex, and
Speaker 1: she probably was thinking, well, i've had the aboortion, everything's fine,
Speaker 1: we're gonna stick together. And I think he said, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going back to my wife. The family had already
Speaker 1: believed Sandy wasn't alone in the Pollard that night. Maybe
Speaker 1: the letter to Doug was supposed to have been given
Speaker 1: to him in person. Fast forward to seventeen, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't until my niece introduced me to her new boyfriend,
Speaker 1: and he was a Prince George's county cop. And I
Speaker 1: said that I've been looking for this police report for decades,
Speaker 1: and um, they set the building burned down and he goes,
Speaker 1: the building never burned down. I'm work out of it
Speaker 1: and it's about a seventy five year old building. That
Speaker 1: building never burned down. And so that got my you know,
Speaker 1: blood boiling. So Kim picked up the phone once again
Speaker 1: and dialed the Pugi County Police. This time though, she
Speaker 1: connected with a sympathetic clerk who passed her requests along
Speaker 1: to Cold Casse Detective Bernie Nelson, the same detective she
Speaker 1: first spoke to in two thousand and six. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I got that emails dating Bernie Nelson has
Speaker 1: found the police report. He didn't tell me where he
Speaker 1: found it. He just said he found it and that
Speaker 1: here it is attached. Oh my gosh. I like was nervous,
Speaker 1: and I was driving as fast as I could to
Speaker 1: get to my computer so I couldn print it out
Speaker 1: because I thought it was just going to go away.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't believe that it was twelve pages, which
Speaker 1: was just amazing. But because they assured me that there
Speaker 1: was there was no way that this was going to
Speaker 1: be available. The entire time that Kim had been looking
Speaker 1: for it. The police file had been safe and sound
Speaker 1: in the home of the cop who investigated the case
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, retired Detective at Selski. When he
Speaker 1: left the force, he took his files home with him.
Speaker 1: In a full thirteen years after Kim's initial request, cold
Speaker 1: case detective Bernie Nelson went to Shechelski's house and physically
Speaker 1: retrieved the file from his boxes of papers. And even
Speaker 1: Bernie said, I don't even know why he saved it,
Speaker 1: but for whatever reason, he saved it, and they found
Speaker 1: it in his mouth. Bernie went up with men went
Speaker 1: through the boxes to get this report for me, but
Speaker 1: they probably wanted me off their butt, And I said
Speaker 1: that when I emailed, and I'm like, I'm not going away.
Speaker 1: The full police report is actually a seventeen page digital
Speaker 1: file filled with details about what detectives found when they
Speaker 1: arrived on the scene. Sandy was sitting on a gold
Speaker 1: blanket in the driver's seat, her white coat sat on
Speaker 1: the seat next to her, and on top of it
Speaker 1: was a gun, a three seven Ruger revolver. The police
Speaker 1: report also includes a series of photocopies. There's a copy
Speaker 1: of the letter Sandy wrote to Doug, along with what
Speaker 1: looks like a rough draft and an envelope addressed to
Speaker 1: his work. The last page of the report is another
Speaker 1: photocopy of something that was found in her car. But
Speaker 1: it's really blurry, so I can't read what's on it.
Speaker 1: All I can make out or you faint lines of
Speaker 1: Sandy's handwriting. For months, I assumed it was another note
Speaker 1: Sandy had written the contents lost to time. But then
Speaker 1: one day I found the original in the stack of
Speaker 1: documents that Kim gave me. Turns out it's not a letter,
Speaker 1: it's a photograph. The police report only includes a copy
Speaker 1: of the back, but what's on the front is far
Speaker 1: more revealing. It's Sandy's photograph of Doug standing in front
Speaker 1: of the McDonald's in his state trooper uniform. I don't
Speaker 1: buy any of that ship. There was a lot of
Speaker 1: things that they said and did that I didn't that
Speaker 1: I argued with them about. But they looked at us,
Speaker 1: I think, as well than nobody that little class. According
Speaker 1: to the police report, there were empty pill bottles in
Speaker 1: Sandy's car and loose pills scattered on her seat. Although
Speaker 1: this description might give the impression that Sandy was trying
Speaker 1: to overdose the autop She did not find any drugs
Speaker 1: or alcohol in her system at the time of her death.
Speaker 1: It just staged me, like, oh, we found, you know,
Speaker 1: pills underneath her legs. Well they were they were allergy
Speaker 1: pills and um. So they made it look like she
Speaker 1: committed suicide. But I don't think they did a thorough investigation.
Speaker 1: They didn't do their due diligence. I don't think they
Speaker 1: investigated anything. It was more than forty years after Sandy's
Speaker 1: death before her family would get a copy of the
Speaker 1: police report and be able to read it. They had
Speaker 1: hoped that there would be some kind of in controvertible
Speaker 1: proof in the report that could settle their questions. The
Speaker 1: family felt that with more information that have a clearer
Speaker 1: picture of how and why Sandy died, but the new
Speaker 1: information just muddled the story. The police report provided a
Speaker 1: detailed account of this scene and reminded the family of
Speaker 1: the cardboard shoved under the wheels of her car and
Speaker 1: the tire tracks that seemed to indicate she was trying
Speaker 1: to get her car out of the mud. The report
Speaker 1: also noted that the gun had been collected and dusted
Speaker 1: for Prince. It had none. If Sandy had used the
Speaker 1: gun on herself, wouldn't they find her Prince? And crucially,
Speaker 1: why was there no mention of Doug in the written
Speaker 1: police report, even though his name, his work address, and
Speaker 1: a photo of him were found in her car. Certainly
Speaker 1: they as far as we know, they didn't investigate dog
Speaker 1: because there's no mention of that in the police report either.
Speaker 1: Here's Sandy's brother, Stephen. Well, what I say is, if
Speaker 1: she committed suicide, somebody's going to have to do some
Speaker 1: holl acious proven to me, some how acious proven to me,
Speaker 1: has even that's what they say, fucking proven. Hi is
Speaker 1: his head? He Hi? It's Melissa. Can you hear me? Okay?
Speaker 1: That's retired detective at Sheelski. He's the one who wrote
Speaker 1: the police report and investigated Sandy's death all those years ago,
Speaker 1: the one who stored the police report at his house.
Speaker 1: I tracked him down on Facebook. He was somewhat surprised
Speaker 1: to learn Sandy's family was still uncertain about the events
Speaker 1: surrounding her death. He was willing to answer their questions
Speaker 1: and mine in order to put the issue to rest.
Speaker 1: It's the time that I wrote them aside. It was
Speaker 1: kind of a sought after job to press stige. I'm
Speaker 1: a homicide dick, you know what I mean. But let
Speaker 1: me tell you it had to ye the police department
Speaker 1: well angling well over a hundred murders a year. I
Speaker 1: mean they put us like, don't. Shelski speaks with the
Speaker 1: brash confidence of a lifelong police officer, and he's an
Speaker 1: experienced storyteller. A few years ago, he wrote a novel
Speaker 1: that touches on his time working homicide, called in Cheep's Clothing.
Speaker 1: The book is dedicated to the quote finest group of
Speaker 1: police officers found anywhere the past and present members of
Speaker 1: the Prince George's County Police Department. So I had declare
Speaker 1: I was in my afe, which is only a few
Speaker 1: holes away from where her body was. Arriving on scene,
Speaker 1: he recalled what he noticed, a young woman slumped over
Speaker 1: in a car seat alone, with a gun close to
Speaker 1: her right hand. Her hands were coated in gunpowder, which
Speaker 1: indicated to Shashlski that her hands were on or very
Speaker 1: close to the gun when it was fired. Upon further inspection,
Speaker 1: he saw that the gunshot in her abdomen was a
Speaker 1: contact wound, meaning that the gun had been touching her
Speaker 1: body when it fired. She was made up from there, said,
Speaker 1: I kept very attractive. I asked Selski what he made
Speaker 1: of some of the more unusual details of Sandy's case,
Speaker 1: like the location of the gunshot. He told me something
Speaker 1: a lot of people have said to me as I've
Speaker 1: reported the story, that women, especially young attractive women, don't
Speaker 1: like to shoot themselves in the face because of vanity.
Speaker 1: I tried to fact check this claim, and there's not
Speaker 1: much research, but I did track down one study from
Speaker 1: that found that men were almost twice as likely as
Speaker 1: women to use a method of suicide that disfigured their
Speaker 1: head or face. But researchers dismissed the theory that women
Speaker 1: were driven by vanity, calling it an empirically unsupported explanation
Speaker 1: that characterizes the suicidal behavior of women as motivated by
Speaker 1: selfish or trivial concerns. While Shachlski had a fairly good
Speaker 1: memory of Sandy's case, he didn't remember one of the
Speaker 1: d tells that the family latched onto the cardboard under
Speaker 1: Sandy's tires. He insisted that I was mistaken until I
Speaker 1: showed him his own police report, where he noted it
Speaker 1: this detail. It doesn't fit neatly into the police narrative
Speaker 1: of suicide. If Sandy went to the Pollard to end
Speaker 1: her life, why did it seem like she was trying
Speaker 1: repeatedly to leave. You don't ruar anything now, So I said,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be a tunnel vision. You want
Speaker 1: to go in there with an open line homicide, suicide,
Speaker 1: natural or whatever. But I mean, I got a gun
Speaker 1: on a truck seat and a build and a bank
Speaker 1: seat or wherever it was. It's not a natural thing.
Speaker 1: Though I can eliminate that. It's not an accident, Singer,
Speaker 1: I can eliminate that. So we lets for frost is
Speaker 1: a homicide or a suicide. And then there was the
Speaker 1: letter to Doug what I interpreted as a suicide night Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, but again, it doesn't say good bye a
Speaker 1: queer world. Either. Sends to me like she's kind of
Speaker 1: talking together a little bit. She's rejected. There's nothing to
Speaker 1: live for. She lost her baby, she lost her lover.
Speaker 1: She probably told her thousands of times he was going
Speaker 1: to leave his wife, you know what I mean. She
Speaker 1: didn't get that. She loses her baby, what does their
Speaker 1: love for? That's what I can see in that letter
Speaker 1: I could think of a lot of reasons Sandy had
Speaker 1: to live. She was eighteen years old to start, she
Speaker 1: had family, a job, friends, ambitions. I have no doubt
Speaker 1: that Sandy was despondent over what sounds like the breakup
Speaker 1: of her very first love. But the jump to having
Speaker 1: nothing to live for it seems quite far, And I
Speaker 1: wondered if these intimate details about Sandy's personal life, which
Speaker 1: were on display in her writings, colored the police's interpretation
Speaker 1: of her death. What if there had been no letter,
Speaker 1: What if there was no receipt from the clinic. Back then,
Speaker 1: much like now, there were a lot of myths around abortion.
Speaker 1: One is that women who obtain them are more likely
Speaker 1: to be depressed or suicidal afterwards. We now know this
Speaker 1: to be untrue. The most comprehensive research project on the
Speaker 1: effects of unintended pregnancy on women's lives, called the Turnaway Study,
Speaker 1: has found that abortion does not increase the risk of
Speaker 1: having suicidal thoughts or the chance of developing depression or anxiety.
Speaker 1: In fact, women who are able to get an abortion
Speaker 1: when they want one are more likely to have a
Speaker 1: positive outlook on the future. Could hit me as a
Speaker 1: suicide right after bat I do what I was supposed
Speaker 1: to do, and it is it was a suicide. I'm
Speaker 1: not even gonna say, in my opinion it was a suicide.
Speaker 1: It was a suicide. That's a simple maybe, but it
Speaker 1: was a suicide. I don't think any suicide is simple.
Speaker 1: But Sandy's case did have an added layer of complication
Speaker 1: for police the fact that her boyfriend was a state trooper.
Speaker 1: Doug's name was all over the scene. The autopsy revealed
Speaker 1: that Sandy had sex before her death. I thought her
Speaker 1: boyfriend would be high on the list of people to interview,
Speaker 1: and in fact, it's standard procedure in cases like this.
Speaker 1: The Department of Justice recommends that death investigators should try
Speaker 1: to quote document when, where, how, and by whom the
Speaker 1: decedent was last known to be alive. I asked Detective
Speaker 1: Schellski if he ever considered Doug a person of interest,
Speaker 1: or if he thought to speak to him to learn
Speaker 1: more about Sandy's mental health or to help recreate the
Speaker 1: last forty eight hours of her life, not as I
Speaker 1: was concern to. He was not aspect than anything. Shelski
Speaker 1: told me that he didn't have any qualms going after
Speaker 1: a fellow officer if it was warranted. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: that Selski didn't know Doug. State and County Police are
Speaker 1: different entities and operate independently, and while Shelsky didn't interview Doug,
Speaker 1: he did do something. He notified the state Police that
Speaker 1: the trooper may have had an inappropriate relationship with an
Speaker 1: eighteen year old girl. I filed the public information request
Speaker 1: with the Maryland State Police to see if I could
Speaker 1: find records of an internal investigation into Doug after Sandy
Speaker 1: was found dead, but I was too late. Internal affairs
Speaker 1: records are maintained for only thirty years. There was no
Speaker 1: occasion of anything in that car, then a suicide. Again,
Speaker 1: the biggies on her her father's glad is the biggest one.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to drag somebody or over to Claris
Speaker 1: another every day guy. Detective Shochelski didn't think it was
Speaker 1: worth talking to Doug, but I did. Since I began
Speaker 1: this podcast, I've tried repeatedly to make contact with him,
Speaker 1: sending him emails and messages on LinkedIn. I've also mailed
Speaker 1: handwritten letters to his home, and in one I included
Speaker 1: a photo of Sandy. To this day, I've yet to
Speaker 1: speak with him, Doug, if you're listening, I still want
Speaker 1: to talk. Over the years, Doug has turned into somewhat
Speaker 1: of a mythic figure for the Bell family. He's an enigma,
Speaker 1: a mystery man who played a pivotal role in Sandy's
Speaker 1: life and then just disappeared. After Sandy's death, Joanne tried
Speaker 1: to track him down. She told me that she called
Speaker 1: the Maryland State Police in hopes of speaking with him.
Speaker 1: When I called the State Police marks, the man was
Speaker 1: not very friendly. He said, well, you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about that, ma'am. He's been transferred. Well, he's been
Speaker 1: wanting to go to Baltimore for a long time. We
Speaker 1: finally got an opening when we sent him along. And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, yeah, right, so, uh, I didn't get anywhere
Speaker 1: with the state place. Maryland State Police informed Joanne the
Speaker 1: dog had been transferred. I wasn't able to verify this
Speaker 1: with the state Police. However, they did confirm that he
Speaker 1: was assigned to a barracks in the Baltimore area. Two
Speaker 1: get that cup transferred right away. They covered everything up,
Speaker 1: I thought. I thought at the time, I thought they're
Speaker 1: just telling me that ship because they know And I
Speaker 1: still think that up until now, I've held back a
Speaker 1: single detail in Sandy's case. I wanted you to get
Speaker 1: to know Sandy in the way her family knew her
Speaker 1: as a daughter, a sister, and as a civilian. But
Speaker 1: one of the major reasons why I held onto Joanne's
Speaker 1: letter for so many years was because Sandy wasn't just
Speaker 1: a regular teenage girl who worked at the mall. Sandy
Speaker 1: she wanted to be a cop, and not just in
Speaker 1: some idle day dreaming kind of way. In the last
Speaker 1: year of her life, she was training to become a
Speaker 1: police officer, going on ride alongs with pg County Police
Speaker 1: and even taking the written test for the academy. So
Speaker 1: Sandy wasn't a stranger to pigg County police. She was
Speaker 1: actively trying to become one of them. Well, I'm old
Speaker 1: enough and worked in organizations long enough to know that
Speaker 1: you're going to want to protect the people that you
Speaker 1: work with or the reputation of the agency. Sander could
Speaker 1: have been retired by now, she's doing a life sex underground.
Speaker 1: So I give a ship about these people. I hope
Speaker 1: they were at now. Well, it's just you know, there
Speaker 1: was dirty cops back then, just like the dirty pops
Speaker 1: cops now you just never know where they're at and
Speaker 1: who they are, you know. On our next episode, we
Speaker 1: learn more about Sandy's gold to become a police officer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, she really talked about want to become a cop.
Speaker 1: At first, I was a little surprised, like really, yeah,
Speaker 1: So she was talking about these ridlongs and how she
Speaker 1: enjoyed them. That's what I do. We call. She's saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: and Jesse, guys, get away with ship. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: Melissa Jelson and this is what Happened to Sandy Beale.
Speaker 1: What Happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by me, Melissa Jelson.
Speaker 1: It's written and produced by me and kittre In and Norville.
Speaker 1: The podcast is edited by Abu Safard, sound designed by
Speaker 1: Aaron Kaufman. Jason English is our executive producer. Research and
Speaker 1: production assistance by Marissa Brown. To find out more about
Speaker 1: my investigation, follow me on Twitter at quasimado. That's qu
Speaker 1: a s I am a d O. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening.