Shownotes Transcript
Hello listeners, it's 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sant. Today, I have a special episode to share with you from my new podcast, Trained to Kill, the dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard. You are about to hear the bizarre story of celebrity dog trainer Mark Stover, who was known as the dog whisperer of the Pacific Northwest.
He trained the dogs of the rich and famous with clients including music stars, athletes, and top business executives. But this story isn't just about a dog trainer. It's one of obsession, control, and murder.
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I remember being woken up early in the morning by a hellacious barking. It was 2009, three days before Halloween, a time when the boundaries between the living and the dead become blurred. Stephanie Poore said the dogs next door were going crazy. And they were upset and it was loud. What did you think to yourself when you were lying in bed listening to that?
something was going on over there and I wanted to get some more sleep and I was gonna have words with Mark. Mark was Mark Stover, Stephanie's next-door neighbor and her boss. Stephanie was a dog trainer at Mark's facility in Anacortes, Washington, an island community about 80 miles north of Seattle.
He had built a successful business working with the dogs of the rich and famous and had earned the nickname the Dog Whisperer of the Pacific Northwest. That morning, Stephanie made her short commute to work. She assumed Mark had already left to meet a client in Seattle. And I'm on the phone leaving a message with him and he's in the driveway. The car is in the driveway parked up by the house.
And I'm thinking, wow, that's weird, because he really-- he's probably going to be a little antsy, because he would have rather been gone by now. Mark had a reputation as a bit of a pit bull, intimidating and impatient. I saw who I thought was Mark going into the house, coming out of the house, putting stuff in the back of the hatch. What made you think it was Mark?
Because it was his hat and his jacket. He opened the door to the car, looked at the front windshield, grabbed something off the front, and then just tore, like literally tore down the driveway. Then Stephanie went up to the house to the bathroom. As she walked up the driveway, she saw tire marks from the car and some spots of blood on the gravel.
Stephanie assumed that the blood belonged to Ding, Mark's guard dog. Ding recently had surgery. I explained it away that Ding must have ripped her stitches out here. The blood wasn't the only sign something was wrong. I could smell the bleach before I even opened the door. Stephanie stepped inside. She noticed a bedroom door that was usually never shut was closed.
And as she went into the house, Stephanie saw three big spots on the floor. Did they have a color? It was blood. It was red, dark, dark red. Stephanie was worried. She kept calling Mark, but he never answered. Stephanie hoped the blood was from Ding's surgical wounds. She was doing her best to avoid imagining the worst. But the next morning, when she came back to work,
She was startled to see Ding sitting by the back door. She was on all fours and she was growling. Something had happened to her. Maybe she had had a stroke. It was obvious one eye was in a horrible mess. We couldn't find Mark. I was calling him. I left a message. Mark, we're really concerned. Where are you? You know, why is Ding here? An unsettling feeling hit Stephanie. I can only describe it as evil.
Something horrible, something terrible. I knew something bad had taken place. Stephanie called 911. Mark's new girlfriend had also called the police after not hearing from him. Soon after, sheriff's deputies arrived on scene. Investigators believed the bleach, the blood, and Mark's vanishing act all added up to one inescapable conclusion.
It was a cold-blooded murder. But detectives had no idea they were about to step into a hall of mirrors where nothing was as it seemed. I've never seen in my career a case that has as many twists and turns and mysteries as this case with Mark Stover.
They soon discovered a story tangled in obsession. We don't have the truth yet. We have some of the truth, but we don't have all of it. But who was the hunter and who was the hunted? I'm Peter Van Sant. From 48 Hours, this is Trained to Kill. The dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard. Episode 1, Puppy Love.
The coastline of Washington State, just north of Seattle, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Back in the 1800s, my ancestors were homesteaders on an island not far from Anacortes, Washington. It's gone now, but one of my great-greats even had a small apple orchard on Orcas Island. Anacortes is the gateway to the San Juan Islands, where ferry boats depart to these wooded jewels.
I go hiking, swimming, and fishing for Dungeness crabs, and have always considered the small harbor towns here my gateway into tranquility and peace. That's why I was stunned when 48 Hours first got word about this murder. And then I learned that at the center of it all was a celebrity dog trainer. Mark was known as the dog whisperer of Anacortes and the dog trainer to the stars.
That's Victoria Simmons, Mark Stover's younger sister. She said some of Mark's clients included Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam, longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and Seattle mariner Ichiro Suzuki. I believe he came to love all dogs, and no pedigree or fabulous pedigree didn't matter to him. He saw value in all of them and potential in all of them.
Mark offered private training lessons. He could teach basic obedience, but his wealthiest clients wanted him to train their pets to become protection dogs. This is audio from a video of Mark training a dog. He's standing in what looks like a gravel driveway, wearing a dark raincoat and his trademark brown hat with a round brim.
Show me the motion again with the stick. A handler releases the dog. The dog sprints and bites hard enough to lock onto Mark's leg, which is covered in padding. And a tug of war ensues between the growling dog and Mark. Mark commands the dog to stand down.
Right away, the dog lays on the ground looking straight ahead and awaits the next command. I just thought he was so incredibly interesting. His niece Julia, Victoria's daughter, said Mark sometimes expressed his love for dogs in eccentric ways.
You know, he has this beautiful Porsche 911 and a BMW, and then he has this car called the Dog-a-lack, the Cadillac. And I swear half the textile of the carpeting in that car was just dog hair that had woven itself into it. She said it smelled horrible. But one day, they went for a drive.
And instead of taking the Porsche or the BMW, he takes me in the dog. And he said he didn't want his neighbors to know how rich he was. But Mark didn't start out rich at all. In fact, just the opposite. And his upbringing was far from easy.
We went through, our family went through a series of losses early in our childhood. Just seemed to be one after another. This is Victoria again, Mark's sister. They grew up in the Seattle area in the 1950s and 1960s. My father died when I was six months old and Mark was 18 months old. Then shortly after that, a half-brother was killed in a car wreck.
It was caused by my other half-brother, which was sad. And then mother remarried. And shortly after she remarried, my sister died of pneumonia. She was nine. Their mother's second marriage also then fell apart. And so she remarried again, and he was an alcoholic. Life at home was tough. Mark struggled in school. According to Victoria, the family didn't know how to help him.
He got kicked out of high school for smoking dope. I think he was 16. Yeah, he was on a bad path. And then their mother's third husband died of cancer. We were broke.
Our family was broke and there was a funeral and at the wake and family friends brought a German Shepherd puppy for a gift at the wake, which is such an odd choice. The German Shepherd puppy was named Gunter. While maybe odd, the gift would be a godsend. I've never been able to talk to them and ask them what
prompted them to do such an odd thing. But Mark and that dog bonded that very day.
Mark got in touch with the family's old vet. He encouraged Mark to join the Washington State Search and Rescue Canine Unit. They trained him and taught him how to train Gunter, and he loved it. He was flown all over the country to look for lost people as far as the Everglades, and it gave meaning to his life, gave purpose to his life. That dog saved him.
Mark eventually started to train dogs in private sessions where he'd go to people's homes. In a news article from 1981, Mark is described as a disciple of the famous behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. Skinner studied how rewards and punishment can condition behavior in humans.
Mark applied that to dogs by training them with punishment and reward. He's told me that he was the first person to ever apply human psychology to dogs and to understanding the pack and how the pack works. Was your brother an innovator in the dog world? I believe he was.
As for cats, Mark was once quoted saying that he didn't like cats because he wants something he can control. He added, dogs are easy to change. It's people that are hard to change. See, I can't put a choke chain around them.
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Absolutely.
Mark started training dogs in the 1970s and by the 1980s was a well-established canine guru. Mark never married during that time.
Then, in the early 90s, when Mark was nearing 40, a wealthy potential client called. I was looking to do some training with my dog and found him in the phone book. Linda Updike was the daughter of Wally Updike, one of the wealthiest businessmen in the state of Washington.
I remember speaking with him on the phone and I felt he was very arrogant, actually rubbed me the wrong way initially. Name dropped a lot of people and had quite a bit of an attitude, but yet he seemed also to know a fair amount about dogs, so I thought, let's try this out. Mark and Linda met regularly to train her dog. A bond was starting to form.
I saw he definitely did have a connection with dogs and I felt that he would be able to help us. Mark definitely had a way with dogs and at times he could be charismatic with people. He was very bright and witty and charming. After eight or nine months, their relationship evolved. And even though Linda was 12 years younger than Mark, his sister says Linda was his type.
She was tall, slender, beautiful. He seemed to like the girls from these wealthy families, which I always was wondered about, just right down his alley. For one of their first dates, Mark asked her to go fishing.
So I drove over and met him and did a day of fishing. And that began when we started dating shortly thereafter. So what was the attraction? You know, he was incredibly bright, eccentric, had a lot of similar interests that I did. Linda grew up camping, fishing, and hunting. They connected over a love for nature and the open air.
What started purely as business turned personal, and they set out to build a relationship and a successful company at the same time. They were coming together despite being from two different worlds. While Mark's family had struggled, Linda Updike was the daughter of a millionaire.
I grew up with my family doing a lot of camping on Whidbey Island. We have a small beach cabin up there and I grew up saltwater fishing, salmon fishing. I was born in California and then moved when I was very young to Bellevue, Washington. I went to junior high and high school there. I was very involved in horseback riding and competed doing Grand Prix jumping and that was really my passion and where I spent my time in my youth. How good were you at this horse jumping?
Well, it probably depends on who you'd ask. And tell me also about your father. He's a famous man in the state of Washington, a very successful man in the state of Washington.
Yes, he started with, came from very middle class background and went to University of Washington and then really became involved in a lot of different businesses, one of them being Chateau Saint-Michel, developing that. That's a very famous winery in Washington, sold
all over the world. Yes, it is. I'm very proud of his accomplishments that way. He was also involved in K2 Ski Company and Jansport Sporting Goods and different businesses throughout his career. Linda is her parents' only daughter. She's a very good friend of mine at an adult age. Yes, we're mother-daughter, but we're very good friends.
That's Nancy Corbin, Linda's mother. She admits that she wasn't entirely thrilled when Mark and Linda started dating. Mark is not a choice I would have made for Linda. From the beginning, Mark showed an arrogance, where he wanted to isolate Linda, all bad signs. And so it was noticed by me right away.
Nancy let her daughter make her own choices and was even supportive when Mark and Linda decided to go into business together.
Linda said she'd been interested in opening a dog boarding business. In 1992, Linda and Mark opened Island Dog Adventures. Linda ran the boarding part of the company, and Mark handled the dog training. You essentially were the CEO, right? Yes. It was all of my, what we developed there was my business idea, my development, my money. I did capitalize it to go in.
Linda thought Mark's reputation in the industry helped, and her parents leased Linda the perfect place to set up shop. Beautiful piece of property that my family has owned, no longer owns, but did purchase in the 80s. Kickett Island and the surrounding area once belonged to the Swinomish tribe.
Besides a clearing for some buildings, the island is a thick forest with tall Douglas firs and western red cedars. I don't think there's probably many places like that, whether dogs live on there or people live on there. It's just a terrific place. Their house was at the end of a long, narrow driveway that felt like you were almost entering Jurassic Park.
The sprawling property, filled with wildflowers, hills, and beaches, made it seem otherworldly. Business started booming. Over time, Island Dog Adventures turned into a million-dollar operation. Linda said that despite their success, Mark started to become obsessed with money, tightly controlling her spending.
For example, an avocado that was too much money really upset him. I remember another time I was... Excuse me. You guys have a million-dollar business. He's upset that you bought an avocado? Yes. Yes. And you're serious? I'm absolutely serious. Yes. He would be in a rage that I spent too much money and it was an inappropriate expenditure on things. Most of their attention was going to the business and not each other.
And we were working, you know, seven days a week, 15-hour days, and there was really not any time for personal relationships. Despite her concerns, Linda was committed to making things work. I just kept thinking that if I could reduce our workload, if we could make some changes and try to get more personal time, that the relationship could be salvageable and work better.
So we went through some counseling and at that point in time, Mark did want to get married. And I, again, because of the commitment, said, "Okay."
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On May 17, 2002, Mark and Linda were married in a small wedding at the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas. She was 38. He was 50. This is a picture from the wedding in Las Vegas. And this is Linda Opdyke. This is her mother, Linda.
Nancy Corbin. Victoria, Mark's sister, showed me photos from the wedding. At this picture, he thinks he's at the beginning of a very happy phase in his life. And he's the beginning of a nightmare. But he doesn't know that yet. Mark has on a dark suit, and Linda is wearing a black dress holding a white bouquet of flowers. They look like a happy couple here. They do. They do.
And your brother thought this is the one. After all those years, he married her and that this was going to be his partner for life. He adored this woman. But Mark seemed different to Linda after the wedding. Things were fine for about four months after the marriage, and then it really started going south. What happened? What went wrong?
I think my desires for a personal, truly a personal loving marriage and relationship was something that he did not want to provide and could not provide. Linda wanted to move off the island, but she said Mark dug in his heels. He wanted to stay. Kickett Island meant a lot to Mark because it had quite a prestige to it.
Linda said she watched Mark's whole demeanor intensify. I saw him becoming more aggressive with people, for example, on the property that were trespassing, pulling guns on people and threatening them, being verbally aggressive and very threatening. According to Linda, Mark developed a reputation for threatening locals. He would even use his dogs to intimidate people.
My experience with him was he was very unstable and with that and his agitated state and he had real highs and lows and rages that he dealt with, it was very concerning to me and what his reaction would be to something, how that would affect my safety.
After nearly 14 years together, including three years of marriage, Linda decided that she couldn't do this anymore. I recognized that I was so unhappy and I knew that I needed to leave the marriage and I got a separation. She moved out of their home. Linda left the island that was owned by her family to start anew, set off on a new path alone.
But she said Mark followed. He told me that he was listening to phone conversations and that he had been in my house and read my diaries. And just it was horrifying. It was chilling to me. Every single moment you're wondering when you walk out the door, is he going to be there? I know how he operated and his stalking abilities and hunting abilities.
The fallout from their collapsed marriage started a nasty back and forth that would culminate in that bloody scene at Mark's house. I really did feel that my life was in danger. Coming up on Trained to Kill, the dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard. I remember at that time thinking, this can't be real because...
No woman alone could go through this amount of harassment. My first thought was, "Oh, a body." I have a safe room in there. I have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C. I think Mark had a very real fear of what Linda was capable of doing to him. He told me that he was capable of killing without remorse. This is not a case of self-defense. This is a case of cold-blooded murder.
From 48 Hours, this is Trained to Kill. The dog trainer, the heiress, and the bodyguard. Produced by Sony Music Entertainment. I'm your host, Peter Van Sant. Judy Tigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Original reporting by 48 Hours producers Ryan Smith and Liza Finley.
Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio. And Maura Waltz is the senior story editor. Recording assistance from Alan Pang and Reginald Bazile. Special thanks to Paramount Podcast Vice President Megan Marcus. It is written and produced by Alex Schumann. Stephanie Serrano is our editor. Our executive producer is Shira Morris. Our associate producer is Zoe Culkin.
Theme and original music composed by Hansdale Shee. Cedric Wilson is our sound designer and mixed the episodes. We also use music from APM and Epidemic Sounds. Fendall Fulton is our fact checker. Our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kolasny.
I'm Peter Van Sant. If you're enjoying the show, be sure to rate and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting. You can listen to Train to Kill early and ad-free right now by subscribing to 48 Hours Plus on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.
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