170. Mabel Greineder - The Park Murder
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Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband. Okay, I don't think we have any, you know, announcements or anything like that, so I think we can jump straight into your 10 seconds today. A bonus episode just went out, so if you were subscribed to Apple or Patreon, you will have that now. So we're just letting everyone know. Well, we have a couple of rodents that are attacking our backyard.

So that's number one priority at the moment. We will find them. They will be gone. Anytime there's like mice or rats. I mean, they're pooping all over our backyard. No, but it's sad. Anytime there's like mice, rats, rodents in general, I think of the movie Mousetrap. Have you seen that movie? Classic. Where the mouse is so smart. So it's such a good movie. If you haven't seen that movie, it's an older movie, but it's a classic movie.

Pretty sure it's a Disney movie. I think you might be right. It's a good one. Mousetrap. So, yeah, we're getting rid of those. We finally... We have been without one of our cars for like a month. Like a month. That's finally fixed. And it was, I mean, it's partly my fault. It sat in our driveway for like two and a half weeks because...

I don't know. I had to get it towed somewhere and I was just being lazy. But I finally got it towed to the dealership. They fixed it. Bunch of electrical issues. All good. So between mice or between rodents and cars, you know, keeping myself busy. You know, I think that shirt is your color. Green. I feel like a lot of people tell me this. I think it's probably because I have green eyes.

Okay, you can't even see your eyes. I just think he looks good. Well, I have green eyes. Maybe Brandon can zoom in if you're watching on video. If not, just imagine my sparkly, extremely extravagant green eyes with a green shirt. And on that note, let's hop into today's episode. Our episode sources are A Murder in Wellesley, Murder at Morse's Pond, Ancestry.com, VanceHolmes.com, and MetroWestDailyNews.com.

Alright, today's case was a big story back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it's sort of fallen off the radar in the decades since. It has all of the ingredients, though, for a sensational true crime case. A murder in an affluent, crime-free community, an esteemed doctor, a murdered wife, a secret life, even Nazi heritage. Oh.

Dr. Dirk Grenader was a guy whose life began in darkness. He was born in 1940 in Berlin in Nazi Germany to a father who was a doctor in Hitler's army.

When the war ended in 1945, his parents fled Germany with the family and settled in Lebanon where they lived until the insurrection and political crisis of 1958. And at that time, Dirk graduated from high school speaking four languages, German, English, French, and Arabic. He won a scholarship to Yale and moved with a single suitcase to Boston to begin his studies majoring in biochemistry, which

on his way to becoming a doctor just like his father. When Dirk finished his undergraduate studies in 1962, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio to pursue a combined MD-PhD in pharmacology and medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

And during his studies in Ohio, he met a woman named Maybel Chegwin, or May, as everyone called her. And just like Dirk, May was an immigrant. Born in Columbia, South America, she moved with her parents to New York City when she was just a year old. She grew up in relative financial comfort in New York's Upper West Side and then Queens.

She was the youngest of four children born to Angel Chegwin, a financial auditor, and Marty Chegwin. She graduated from William Cullen Bryant High School with honors, attended nursing school at Hunter College, and then moved to Ohio to pursue her master's degree in surgical nursing, and that's where, in 1964, she met Dirk.

So just two smarties. Respect to people that go to school for a very long time because it is not something that I can do or did do. So Dirk's intensity of focus and his ambition wooed Maybel and they began dating. Dirk was a man that projected authority and perhaps too much authority. During their courtship, as the possibility of marriage became more and more imminent, Dirk told May that if she wanted to marry him, she'd have to learn how to speak German and

and how to cook German food. And so she did. That's how much she was into Dirk. And in 1968, they eventually married. When May graduated from Case's master's program, she joined the faculty as an assistant professor. And then once Dirk finished his studies, they moved together to New York City where May had grown up.

She took a position as an assistant professor at Cornell Nursing School, while Dirk did an internship and one-year residency at Cornell's Medical School and the New York Hospital. But May left her position in 1970 when she got pregnant with their first child, a daughter born in April 1971 that they named Kirsten.

They relocated to Maryland for a few years, where Dirk began a three-year program at the National Institutes of Health in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. And the couple had two more children during that period, a son, Colin, and another daughter, Britt. Two girls, one boy.

When Dirk finished his three-year program in 1975, the Grenaders relocated to where they would ultimately settle down, in the affluent town of Wellesley, Massachusetts. Wellesley is located just outside of Boston and is one of the safest and wealthiest towns in the state.

And over the next two decades, the Grenaders were, by all outward appearances, the model of a successful upper-class American family. Dirk became the chief of clinical allergy at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He taught at Harvard. Too smart for me, man. Yeah. Maybell worked as a nurse while raising their three children, all of whom excelled academically and were competitive swimmers, which is not surprising.

All three children attended and graduated Yale just like their father, and two of them, Colin and Britt, went on to medical school like their father and his father.

Kirsten studied in Germany and Spain on a Fulbright scholarship and moved to Michigan in 1998 for her medical residency. And in 1999, she broke the news to her parents that she had become engaged, which thrilled her parents. But Kirsten was sad to have left New England. And with all three children now moved out of the house, Kirsten worried about her parents now that the nest was empty. She was worried about what might happen to them. And...

Well, as it turned out, her concerns about her parents were even more valid than anyone might have imagined. On Halloween morning, 1999, the day began ordinarily enough.

It was a clear, beautiful morning, not a foggy one like the day before. The clocks had just been set back, but Dirk and May woke up around 6 a.m., which was typical for this couple. They were in their three-story house on Cleveland Road. Their morning routine on weekends usually consisted of eating breakfast together, which was usually fresh fruit salad and bagels.

And then afterward, they would take their German shepherd on a walk down in the woods in the 100-acre park around Morses Pond. This just seems like the...

It seems like I'm watching a movie and it's like, you know, like the rich family, they get up, eat their fruit. Their bagels. Eating their bagels. Their empty nesters. They got their 10 story house. Take their German shepherd out for a walk in the beautiful park. It's a perfect life. Yeah. I'm trading. Well, it's, you don't want to trade because it's not about to be.

Okay. So far, it sounds good. The Grenaders actually had two German Shepherds, but for the past several years, they had to leave the other one, Wolfie, at home because he was aggressive around other dogs. So this morning, they were just taking their usual one German Shepherd out, following their usual routine. May threw some bedding into the washing machine while Dirk prepared breakfast. Instead of bagels this morning, though, it was muffins. And after they ate...

They got Zafer, their German Shepherd who could be around other dogs, ready for his walk. Dirk got his red backpack, which is where he kept the dog's leash, an extra pair of gloves, and some Ziploc bags in case May wanted to pick some berries to put into their bird feeder, which is something she liked to do. They loaded everything into the van, but Zafer the dog was being difficult because he was preoccupied with the other dog, Wolfie, who did not appreciate being left home alone.

So once they got the dog under control, they headed out and arrived at Morse's Pond a little after eight in the morning. They parked the van on Turner Road in front of a locked gate. They let Zephyr out, walked around the gate, and headed into the pine tree forest to walk him. And whatever happened next is known only to Dirk and May. But only one of them would make it out of the woods that morning alive. Okay. And that was Dirk.

Around 8.45, he came running from the woods, encountering a man walking his dog. Dirk told the man his wife was hurt and asked if he had a cell phone, but the man did not. Dirk then ran into a second man, who also did not have a phone. So he returned to his van with the second man from the trail following him, and at first he dialed his house line, which he'd later claim was an accident. And then at 8.56 a.m., he called the Wellesley police.

Okay, so just to confirm, they were in the woods walking the dog. His wife got hurt. They ran into two other guys, and one of the guys basically is going to help them.

Yeah, he followed him back to the van. He accidentally called home first, and now he's calling police. Okay. His voice was wailing like a siren. Someone attacked my wife at Morse's Pond, he said. He explained to police that while they were walking their dog, his wife heard her back, so he continued walking the dog solo, leaving her. When he returned, he found that she'd been attacked, and he believed she was dead. Red flag. Right. Huge red flag. Like, oh, she...

Someone attacked her and she hurt her back and I thought she was dead so I ran off. It's just not the worst luck. If it's true and he had absolutely nothing to do with it, it is really bad luck. So when the police arrived, he told them he'd found May at the foot of an embankment and she appeared to be hurt. He said he'd checked her artery for a pulse and it was weak. Later, Dirk's more fleshed out version of the story went like this.

He explained that after he and May got out of the van, they began walking down the path that wound through the pine forest, throwing the dog's ball at various points for him to go fetch it. A couple times they threw the dog's ball down the embankment because it's good exercise for her. They eventually made their way to a gravel pit, and as they were walking into it, May suddenly slipped and groaned in pain. When Dirk turned around, he saw that she was unable to move any further, explaining that her back problems were flaring up again.

She had been ordered to wear a back brace, but on this particular morning, she'd forgotten to put it on. May told Dirk, she'd be fine after a few minutes. Just go on without me. I'll be fine. She said she'd meet him at the rock in the parking lot.

So he walked the dog down to the beachy shore of Morses Pond, and when he returned to the spot where he was supposed to meet May, she wasn't there. So he began looking for her, he said, and Zypher, the dog, then ran down the embankment. And when Dirk looked over it, that's when he saw May, lying at the foot of it. Zypher was nuzzling her at this time. He climbed down the embankment and pushed the dog out of the way, proceeding to ask May if she was alright, but she was unresponsive.

He said he reached down to check her pulse, and that's when he said he noticed blood, a lot of blood. He tried picking her up, but couldn't shift her. He freed the dog's leash from May's body and took the dog from the scene and began looking for help. After hearing this story, police went into the woods to the location that he had described, and they found May. From the looks of it, she had been brutally attacked.

She had multiple wounds on her head, her throat, and her chest. Wow. And Dirk himself, when they arrived, he was covered in blood all over his windbreaker, his sleeves, a spot of blood on his shoes, and a smudge of blood on his eyeglasses. Which is hard. You can't really use for evidence at the moment because it's his wife. Well, and he said he touched her. Yeah, he found her. But curiously, there was no blood on his hands.

which if he did touch her and check her, that would be the one spot you think would be covered. Yeah, it was kind of weird. Dirk seemed nervous. He couldn't keep still. He was pacing back and forth, which, okay, yeah, I mean...

You just found your wife dead. Like, I will be nervous too. So it happens when you kill your wife. But it does kind of remind me a little of Chris Watts. If you remember the body cam footage of Chris Watts when police were at the neighbor's house, they were about to view the surveillance footage that Watts knew would be damning. And he's just pacing back and forth. And this is kind of how Dirk is behaving as well. And at one point, he laid down on the ground on his stomach with his elbows on the pavement and his chin resting in his open hands. And then he got back up.

So it's just kind of bizarre. And then when the cops told him that they located his wife and she was deceased, he asked the cops, are you going to arrest me? That was his response.

Which, again, a pretty unusual response. More police arrived at this time to process the crime scene, and among other things, they found hill prints and drag marks near the body. And a Ziploc bag, which they later determined was from the Grenader's house. Detectives arrived at the scene as well and proceeded to question Dirk further and to get his story.

And already, Dirk was looking pretty suspicious. And so by making him tell his story as many times as they can, they increased the likelihood of the suspect slipping up and introducing inconsistencies. Which is hard because I 100% agree. But I also try to think, when I tell stories, you know, I tell them over and over again. Sometimes, you know, I might add something or take something away, you know, just for the fun of it. I mean, maybe it'd be different if it's like you died and I had to say where I was that day and what I did.

But I don't think that I would be instantly convinced that he was guilty if he did a small slip up. Well, it's just so we went in the forest. There was no one around. Yeah. Like how many times. She slipped and hurt her back, which is why she was alone. Yeah. And here's the thing. Human behavior is just so bizarre, especially in trauma. Yes. I don't.

Like, so he left a part out of the story and then told it the second time. I don't find that odd for a man who's in as traumatic of a situation as finding his wife dead, if that's really what happened. Yeah. But as we know, we are doing a true crime podcast. So instantly he killed her. Instantly you're suspicious. Well, and in this instance, one inconsistency in his story did surface. Yeah.

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He claimed he checked his wife's artery for a pulse and he couldn't feel any. Whereas previously he said he'd felt a faint pulse. So the first time he says, no, I did feel a pulse.

figured i couldn't help her and ran away this time he says no no she was dead they asked dirk if he and his wife slept in the same bedroom which he said they did they also asked him if he and his wife had any sexual intercourse that morning the rationale behind this is that if they do find foreign dna on or in the body they'd be able to rule dirk out as a suspect but he told the police he and his wife had not and in fact they hadn't had sexual intercourse in several years about

So they responded to this by asking why his hands were clean...

and didn't have any blood on them, and he couldn't offer an explanation.

The investigators then advised him to call his daughter and ask for a change of clothes because they needed to confiscate the clothes he was wearing. It was at this time that Dirk decided he should call his friend, Terry Sagal, who happened to be an attorney. Of course. And when he returned from his phone call with Terry, the attorney, he said that Terry told him not to talk to them anymore, obviously. I've told you everything. I'm not trying to hide anything. You say you want my clothes and it suddenly scares me.

But really, Dirk, if you truly have nothing to hide, why should this scare you? Like just them asking for the clothes. That's pretty, that's normal protocol. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it'd make me nervous too.

Well, I think I'd just be nervous because my wife is dead. Yeah. But I mean, like, yeah, if you if you'd been killed and it wasn't me and they needed my clothes, I mean, I'd be nervous, too. I'd be like, well, I swear I didn't do it. Like, I swear it wasn't me. Why do you need my clothes? You know, I would, too, but only because of what we do. And because, you know, the husband is always a suspect. So immediately you'd be like, I'm going to jail. Exactly. I'm sure he's probably thinking the same thing.

Right. So later in the morning, Dirk decided that maybe his wife had given him a back rub earlier that morning. And because of that, they may find his skin under her fingernails. So he tells police, if you find my skin under your under her fingernails, it's because she gave me a back rub. And then the couple's daughter, Britt, arrived at the police station hysterically crying. She was like in complete disbelief. Why do these effed up things always happen to our family? She cried hysterically.

They're going to think it's me, Dirk said to her. I've seen it on TV. But, you know, we need to probably discuss what the effed up thing she's referring to.

Back in 1968, her uncle, Fred Chegwin, drove to his father-in-law's home in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles and opened fire with a .32 caliber handgun, killing his wife, her sister, their two parents, and then himself. Oh my God. This was the culmination of a love triangle involving his wife and sister and his father-in-law, who was also his boss, finding out about it and then firing him. Before Dirk was allowed to leave the police station, he was photographed both with and without his clothing.

With his clothing off, police noticed scratch mark and bruises on his face and chest. When questioned about it, Dirk claimed he had cut himself shaving. Just like how later on he would try to explain the presence of blood by giving an account of nosebleeds that he and Mae experienced at the same time. So he's like, oh, my blood and her blood are on me because we both had a nosebleed at the same time. I still can't believe that happened to his family. Yeah.

So I'm not kidding. Seriously, he told police that as he was putting Zypher, the dog, into the van, Mae suddenly got a nosebleed, which he said she'd been getting for quite a while now. He said he found a towel and handed it to her and suddenly the dog became agitated and started bouncing around the van and then hit Dirk in the nose, causing his nose to start bleeding. So they both got nosebleeds that morning around the same time.

And already this is sounding really strange. And if I were a cop, this would definitely raise my eyebrow. Like how improbable does that sound? Both Dirk and his wife get nosebleeds at the same time in the same place caused by entirely different circumstances. But anyway, before they let Dirk leave, they confiscated his clothing and took fingernail clippings, both of which he consented to. However, when asked to surrender his eyeglasses, which had spots of blood on them, he refused saying he would need them for driving, which makes sense.

Meanwhile, back at Morse's Pond, photographers in helicopters took aerial photos of the crime scene, and canine units were brought to the scene where the dogs immediately led handlers to a storm drain near where the body was found. The iron grate was lifted off the storm drain, and inside were the head of a drilling hammer, which is similar to a sledgehammer,

The brass end of a knife with the inscription old timer on it and a right-handed brown cotton glove with dog hair on it. Oh my gosh. Okay. At one o'clock in the morning, investigators arrived at Dirk's home with a search warrant. They rang his doorbell and he appeared at the door with the dogs barking behind him. He told the police they'd better not come inside unless they wanted to kill his dogs to which they replied by ordering him to secure his dogs because they're entering regardless. Okay.

He relented and let them in and then went upstairs to wake his three children, all of whom had returned home by this point. So all the adult children are home. While the police searched the house, the lead detective sat down with Dirk on his couch and told him about what they found in the storm drain near his wife's body. If you tell us where the left-hand glove is, the detective reasoned, it will be a lot better for you and your family. Because remember, they only found the right hand. Oh, so they automatically are just assuming it's him. Yes. There was zero...

There was zero doubt about that. And Dirk claimed, he's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. The detective then told him, we've got DNA. And Dirk looks startled by this, and doubly so when he was read his Miranda rights. So he called his friend Terry again, the lawyer, and then he led his children to a neighbor's house where the neighbor let them chill while their house was being searched. Police were specifically looking for packages and receipts for an old-timer knife and a drilling hammer.

Though they didn't find these items specifically, they did find other stuff of interest, such as credit card statements and a pair of eyeglasses. At autopsy, it was found that May had been bludgeoned on the back of the head with a blunt instrument consistent with that of a drilling hammer. Her throat had been cut. She had been stabbed twice in the chest and five times in her head. So this was a brutal, brutal murder.

The next day, Mae's niece, Belinda, showed up in advance of her mother, Isla, who was Mae's sister. And while she was at the house, Dirk suddenly pulled his niece aside and told her, Hey, Mae and I had intercourse yesterday morning, but there's nothing wrong with that because we're married. And this totally weirded Belinda out. She was like,

Okay. But remember, he told police he didn't. He then explained what had happened in the park afterward without ever explaining why he volunteered this information to his niece about his sex life. But it seemed like maybe he was trying to lay groundwork for explaining the presence of his DNA on the dead wife. But this is only after police told them they had DNA. A little too late for that. So Wellesley was a very safe neighborhood, like I said, and this was the first murder there in 25 years.

However, there had recently been two other murders in the same county that remained unsolved. A 75-year-old woman named Irene Kennedy had been killed in a park in December 1998 after she became separated from her husband, and a man named Richard was murdered in August of 1999 near a park pond. So, similar circumstances in both of these murders.

But police talked to other people who'd been around Morse's Pond that morning, and no one in the area saw anyone leaving the park around the time of May's murder. But Dirk and his three children were supporting him and believed him to be innocent, and they started drawing connections to the other park murders. So the children are like, no, no, no, our dad didn't do this, and what about these other park murders? That proves that there may be a killer in the area who's targeting people in parks.

And the community kind of feared this too, that maybe there was a serial killer on the loose. Which, how convenient for the husband. Right. But police tried to assure the community that this murder wasn't the work of a serial killer. They were, by this point, convinced Dirk had killed his wife. Only they needed more evidence and so far the evidence was lacking. But when they searched Dirk's computer, they found a bonanza of evidence that further implicated him.

Before May was killed, Dirk had been reading up on those other murders, the ones in the parks. So now it looked like Dirk was possibly trying to stage his wife's murder to look connected to those. But beyond that, when they searched his computer, police also discovered that Dirk had been living a secret life. One full of internet porn, erotic stories, extramarital affairs, and trysts with sex workers. Okay.

And this was a computer that generally only Dirk would use. His wife ordinarily did not use the computer as Mae was not very computer literate. But they did also find Mae's term paper on asthma on Dirk's computer, the one she'd been working on in her pursuit of becoming a nurse practitioner. So they saw it as a possibility that when Mae used Dirk's computer, she maybe discovered his secret life. And what a secret life it was.

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Dirk was not only signing up for porn sites and making rendezvous with sex workers, but he was also downloading erotic short stories to his laptop and writing erotic short stories featuring BDSM, kinky sex. And then there was an email correspondence with a woman he'd clearly been having an extramarital affair with. Okay. Again, motive. This is just speaking to motive. But it seems like the motive would be the other way around.

Right? You think that she would have found it and she would have been pissed off and killed him, but...

He killed her. So what happened? Unless she found it and threatened to leave him or expose him and he wanted his secret life to stay a secret life or he wanted his wife to not divorce him. So Dirk had been using the name Thomas Young as a character in his erotic short stories and also as a pseudonym in online sex chat rooms. And just a week before May's murder, he joined a dating service called People to People and used the screen name Casual Guy 2000.

He created a profile advertising that he was a 49-year-old white male with a doctorate and was looking for white women between the ages of 35 and 60 who were slim to slightly overweight and lived within 30 miles of Boston and at least had a high school diploma. So very specific category he wants for these women.

He also had an American Express corporate credit card under the name Thomas Young, which he used to pay for the subscription as well as hotel rooms and encounters with sex workers. How did he get a card under Thomas Young?

That's really interesting. Right. And also, I didn't know you could use a credit card to pay sex workers, especially back in 1999. That's a good point, too. It's not like they had the little sliders. I didn't know there was, I mean, I guess there's online websites that you can do that. And then just one day after May's murder, the morning that his niece and sister had arrived in town, he was already contacting one of his regular sex workers to arrange another meeting. So it wasn't really looking good for Dirk at this point. Yeah.

He was expected to be charged, and so he hired as his attorney Martin F. Murphy, who didn't come cheap. And after May's memorial service, which was attended by 800 people, Dirk approached Maybel's sister Isla again. And get this, he asked her if he could borrow $500,000 for his legal defense. $500,000?

Police, meanwhile, searched that storm drain again and again and found the other brown glove eventually, the left-handed glove, which they'd apparently overlooked the first time. And DNA from the gloves both matched Dirk. Four months after May's murder, on February 29, 2000, plainclothes police descended on Dirk's office in Brookline and arrested him, charging him with first-degree murder. He was arraigned the following day and pled not guilty. Seems like an open-and-shut case. It kind of does.

The trial began on May 23, 2001. Anticipating the prosecution presenting that porn and sex life, the defense team reminded the jury that Dirk was not on trial for infidelity. He was on trial for murder. Which is true. And he had no motive to kill his wife, they claimed. But in the state of Massachusetts, or sorry, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,

Prosecutors do not have to establish a motive. What do you mean? You don't have to say this is why he killed her. You have to provide evidence saying he killed her. Interesting. You don't have to give a motive legally. Okay. But I still personally think there's a motive here. During the trial, 473 exhibits of evidence were presented to the jury, including that Dirk's DNA was found on the gloves and he could not be ruled out as the secondary source of DNA on the knife. The primary source obviously was May.

May's blood was also found on his windbreaker, his t-shirt, the dog's leash, and his red backpack. May's sister Isla testified that Dirk was controlling and was always borrowing money from his wife's family, which clearly he was still doing after her murder, shamelessly. He was asking for money for his legal defense from the family of the wife that he murdered.

Like he's going up on trial for her murder and he's asking them to pay the bills. I swear it's always the people who look the most perfect on the outside that there's a bunch of crap going on behind the scenes. And according to May's sister, Dirk forced his German heritage on the family, forcing the kids to play with wooden German dolls, prohibiting them from playing with American toys. Moreover, in the living room of Dirk's house hung a photo of Dirk's father in his Nazi uniform. Oh.

Oh, man. And Dirk had an original German copy of Hitler's autobiography. Oh, that's not okay. I've said it before. I think it was in our inaugural episode of Binged. An affinity for Hitler and the Nazis is never a good sign. Yeah. And the sister also testified that she had to pick up May's ashes and also pay for the cremation. So he didn't even do that for his wife. Dirk.

Dirk and his three kids neglected to do this. Another key witness for the prosecution's case was the blood spatter expert who testified that the blood spatter on Dirk's shoe was consistent with high velocity impact spatter, not like dripping or going near the body. It would have been consistent with Dirk standing in close proximity to someone as they were being bludgeoned. So while the DNA evidence in this case was admittedly a bit lacking, the blood spatter evidence more than made up for it.

It was also revealed that the medical examiner found, among other injuries, seven bruises and contusions on May's leg. Some were fresh and some were a week or so old. The wound to May's neck was five inches long and two inches deep and cut into her fifth cervical vertebrae. That wound was so deep that her necklace was embedded inside of it. Oh, this is horrible. How can you kill your own wife? I know. Like, how can you do that?

Yet, she had no defensive wounds on her hands, suggesting her killer had blitz-attacked her by surprise.

On June 29th, 2001, more than a month after the opening statements, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. And Dr. Dirk Grenader was sentenced to life in prison. The couple's three children still believe their father is innocent and they continue to stand by him. All of his appeals have been denied. And before we end, those other murders that Dirk was reading up on, Irene Kennedy's murder, it was solved in 2004 and Richard's murder remains unsolved.

Oh, man. I mean, that kind of just escalated and then ended. I know because here's the thing. It was open and shut. It was just open and shut. I mean, I feel like sometimes you have these cases where a husband murders his wife and it's like, did he do it though?

I mean, there's just so much doubt. Whereas this one, how many coincidences had to have happened? The gloves used in the murder had Dirk's DNA on them and then they were found in the drain near her body dumped.

Why would a stranger have gloves with Dirk's DNA on it? And they lived in a very safe city. There hadn't been a murder there in like, what, 25 years? He had researched the murders on the computer beforehand. He obviously, I mean, there was, like you said, there was motive with, I mean, he was cheating on his wife. No one saw them. No one can account for his story. But obviously he's going to go down with, he's going to die with, I'm not guilty. Yeah. It's hard because the kids don't think he's guilty, which is even worse. Well, yeah.

It's their father. Oh, man. I don't know, though. There's just so much like how he tried to lay the groundwork with her sister saying, oh, we had sex but told police we didn't. And that was only after he found out that there was DNA. You know, it's hard because I get like it's family or it's your significant other. But I feel like I can like separate the two. Yeah. Like if you killed someone all of a sudden, I'd be like, OK, I'm out later. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know. I feel like I can separate the two. It's just.

It's hard. I don't know. I mean, that's crazy. And how do you argue with the blood spatter DNA? It proves that he had to at least be standing near someone when they were bludgeoned. And their mom died too. I mean, which is, that's horrible. Right. But I mean, the husband did it. Their dad did it. I mean, I can say that. I personally think there's a motive. I can say that because he was convicted. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like I'm. According to the law, he did it. According to the law, he did it.

So I don't get sued or anything. But also, I just... I personally think there's plenty of motive here. I think that...

He probably was living a secret life. She found out about it. He hurt her the week before when she found out about it. And then she was threatening to either out him or leave him or uproot his life in some way. So he just killed her. I'm surprised there wasn't more information about like what was going on in their day to day. I mean, because she's. They were empty nesters. They lived alone. So it's like why? Like he could have kept cheating on her. You know what I'm saying? Like why kill her? Because fear of his ego. Yeah.

Just weird. And then why was he borrowing so much money? Like, weren't they making good money? They were both, they both had careers. I just, I don't. I think it was just shameless. He just didn't. Like, where was all this money going that he apparently made? Like, what was going on with everything? Like, there's so many just like random loopholes that I need to know.

But the important thing is, is he was convicted. All right, you guys, that was our case for this week. Remember, we did have a bonus episode and we will see you next week with another regular one. I love it. I hate it. Goodbye.