The Ties That Bind
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In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s

while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out.

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Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Kate. How's it going? It's going well. Tenfold War Wicked Season 9 just began, so I'm really excited. It's about this man in 1840s England who wants to get away with murder, and we'll have to find out if he does, if he doesn't,

And there's an unusual method about how police are pursuing him, and it makes history. So this is a case that you really can't miss. There's so many twists and turns. It's just a crazy story. It's a great story. But enough about my projects. What's going on with you, Paul? Well, I'm actually, you know, super excited now. Out here in Colorado, the weather, even though...

So, I mean, we're still, it still gets cold. We still get some snow. We're really starting to move into the springtime. And it's been so long since I've been able to get out on my mountain bike because I had that shoulder surgery and I couldn't risk falling. And now that I'm well past, you know, the year anniversary, the shoulder is getting stronger where I'm being allowed to go out on the trails again. So, I'm so looking forward to that.

And you have never had a major fall. I know I probably ask you all sorts of catastrophe questions, but you've never had a major, because I know people who have flipped over the front of their bikes before. Oh, I most certainly have done that. I just haven't broken anything doing that yet. Is that what it would take for you to stop doing it? Actually, I think if I were to do a header into a tree or a boulder, that probably is what would do it.

So of the mountaineering type activities in Colorado, what do you enjoy most? Is it the hiking or do you do any whitewater rafting or anything? Well, of course, I've gone hiking. I do enjoy that. I have done a couple of times rafting with the family on the Arkansas River. The last time we went out, which was over a year ago,

It was pretty good flow. Yeah, we had some really good rapids. You know, really my first experience with, and I forget how they grade the rapids, but, you know, there were some significant rapids. It was a ton of fun to go down. For me, you know, from a fitness standpoint and just, you know, the general enjoyment, of course, it's the mountain biking. You know, to get out there on the trail, the challenge, it is a shockingly good way

workout, full body workout, because you're having to use your whole body just to get up and over. It's very rocky on the trails and some of the trails I go on. But from just a sheer enjoyment, I love taking my Jeep out into the back country because I can get to places that you generally... I mean, you're not going to hike out there. It's too far away. My goal is to get to where...

you know, I can get to locations and maybe do some overnight camping and just enjoy, you know, I call them my dandelion breaks, you know, just to kind of get away and not, you know, have people hitting me up on the cell phone or, you know, wanting anything from me. I can just get out and enjoy the nature.

When I was growing up, my grandparents had a cabin in Colorado and it was a fly fishing cabin right on a lake. And I tried to fly fish and it was terrible. And my father, who I adored, was absolutely terrible. I think he was worse than I was at fly fishing. Have you done some fly fishing? Because it's really easy to look pretty silly fly fishing if you don't know what you're doing. I have not. I can only see myself whipping that hook back right into my forehead. Yeah.

That sounds about right. Yeah. Well, I am glad that the weather has gotten nice on your end. I'm bracing myself for another Texas summer, but May is pretty nice in Texas. It's probably in the 90s off and on. We don't hit hundreds, but I am hunkered down and ready for some incredibly hot weather.

But this, you know, this all is a setup for me to transport you to a much cooler climate than what I'm in right now, which is Scotland. Okay. And the story, the historical story that I'm about to tell you is probably one people haven't heard of before. I had not heard of it. But I find it incredibly interesting because it involves something that I really need your help understanding, which is...

bite mark evidence. And we haven't really talked about, we haven't talked about this yet. You know, this is what they got Bundy on. This is when they were initially able to arrest Ted Bundy on was bite mark evidence. And I know it could be good and it could be bad. So I have a lot of photos for you and I have some, to me, upsetting crime scene photos, but this will be an interesting case for you to look at. Okay. Well, let's get going. Okay. Let's set the scene.

This story is happening in the late 1960s in a place called Bigger, Scotland, which is a small town in Scotland. And it has a population of between 2,000 and 3,000 people, not a big place for Bigger. And it's a quaint town, doesn't have a reputation for a lot of violent crime. There is more violent crime happening in Scotland in the late 1960s, which is also the case for the United States.

Something dramatic like what I'm about to tell you happening in this area of Scotland would have been pretty unusual. So let's talk about the victim. The victim is a 15-year-old girl named Linda Karen Peacock, and I'll just call her Linda from now on. So she was born in 1952, youngest of eight children. Every adjective I've ever told you about these victims that we label as so-called innocent victims

The way that we define innocent in crime, I find problematic sometimes. Oftentimes it's white and it's young and it's virginal and, you know, all of this. And so it kind of bothers me when I read the list of adjectives over and over again, beautiful and lively and, you know, attractive, attractive, attractive.

But Linda really fits into typical 15-year-old, big family. She spent a lot of her free time riding horses, not known to really date at 15. And she's from this small town. And the afternoon of when everything starts to happen, she was tending to horses at a nearby farm. And when she finished working at the farm, she went to her house for a couple of hours. And then she went into town to meet one of her friends who was a girl.

And they spent a couple of hours together. And then the two of them said goodbye at about 9.30 at night, which is when Linda began taking a walk home. It is dark at this point. And again, this bigger is not a place that has a high crime rate in particular at all. So she felt safe in this time to be able to start to walk home on her own. She was spotted several times.

while she was walking home by different people. One is a 67-year-old man named David Lennox.

And David was talking to a friend of his in front of his house when Linda walked by and they knew each other. And she stopped and chatted with both of these guys for about 20 minutes. And then she left. So we have somebody who's seen her between 9.30-ish and 9.50, they've been chatting. She spotted again about 70 yards away from David Lennox's house and

It was a local farmer this time who's driving by, and he saw her, and he said hi. And he said he was going to give her a ride home, even though she wasn't far away, but he had a bunch of his dogs in his car with him. So he didn't give her a ride home. So she continues on, and she gets to St. Mary's Church, which has a graveyard attached.

And between 1002 and 1008, there were a lot of witnesses who saw two unidentified people in the cemetery where Linda was last seen. She is not seen in the cemetery. She is not identified positively as one of those people. But she had to walk through the cemetery to get home.

So even though people couldn't identify the woman or one of the people in this pair who are in the cemetery talking at 10 o'clock at night, it's assumed that Linda was likely one of those people. It fits the timeline. So, so far, you understand where I'm going here, right? She encounters somebody in the cemetery.

or she potentially scheduled a meeting with somebody in the cemetery, which just seems like a bad setup for a movie or something. Yeah, or somebody follows her into the cemetery. Exactly. So this case is happening. I was surprised. You said in the 1960s. What year was it? 1967, if she's born in 52? Yeah.

67, you're right. Okay, so this is relative to what we normally talk about. This is a fairly recent case. So imagine, yeah, I've never been to Scotland, but this town, though small, they're going to have streetlights in town.

Is there any lighting available in the cemetery? That's what I'm kind of wondering as I start assessing the witnesses and what they see. And I'm not expecting you to know whether there was lights out. Right. And did the witnesses, are they able to tell, even though they can't identify the two figures in the cemetery, are they able to say that one is a woman and one is a man? Or is it just two...

unknown figures that appear to be interacting in the cemetery? My understanding is very poor lighting. I would also say if it's a cemetery, which I'm assuming is going to be quite old, then probably there are no lights available. It would have been closed by 6 p.m. or sometime. So I don't know if they would have just naturally had lights available then anyway. And I

No, it doesn't say. They couldn't say a man or a woman. They just saw figures. They saw silhouettes. Okay, and the cemetery, I mean, imagine the cemetery is centuries old.

Yeah. So it's possible that you have some of these larger mausoleum-style structures in the cemetery versus just small headstones. So visibility potentially at certain parts in the cemetery may be obstructed just because of the types of graves that are present in this historic cemetery. Well, this transitions us into a nice little show and tell. So let me

show you a photo of the cemetery. It's not particularly big. This is basically in a field. So she would have walked kind of around this pathway, I'm assuming. And you're right, huge stones to hide behind or hide things in between. Yes, to a point. You know, I was also envisioning, you see some of these, you know, older New York cemeteries that have massive, you know, structures to

graves. And I'm not seeing that here, but they look like they have some height to them. Somebody potentially could be committing a crime, ducked down, and the way that they're positioned would obstruct a view from somebody just casually glancing out in the dark into this location. But is this the totality of the cemetery? It looks like it's a very small cemetery.

I think it is pretty small. I think what you see in the far distance is probably the gate that people go through. It could be just kind of a marker, but I don't think this is a particularly big part of it. They identify this as the cemetery. So the witnesses who have seen what they identify as a couple, but they can't really identify the sex. They're just assuming it's a couple. The first witnesses were a couple who were driving by and they spotted two people in

standing together about 15 yards inside the cemetery at St. Mary's Church. And actually, the couple said to one another how weird it was to go on a date at a cemetery. No kidding. So they must have looked and thought, probably a woman. One was probably more petite than the other. And then there was a local man who reported seeing the two people around 10.20 p.m.,

So you have Linda leaving her friend at 9.30. She's having a discussion with two men she knows from 9.30-ish until 9.50, maybe 10 o'clock. And then we see these people in the cemetery. And now at 10.20, you've got the last,

people to see this couple in the cemetery. Now, this local man who saw them at 1020 is key because he says, along with actually a few other people, that they heard someone screaming in the cemetery. But nobody goes in to investigate this, and things get quiet. Everybody in Bigger goes to bed, and

And Linda's parents become alarmed because she didn't come home on time that night. She had a curfew. And almost immediately, they call the police. And the police, recognizing that this is someone who was not in an at-risk lifestyle, someone who people knew in the town and was someone who unlikely ran away, they start driving around. The police start driving around looking for her. And she was discovered, I think, pretty quickly,

6.40 in the morning, an officer notices that the cemetery gate is open and she is found dead lying on her back between two gravestones underneath a tree, which has, you know, some markers on it. I want to show you first. We're going to go back to the photo because I bet you did not notice in this part of the photo, her body was actually in that photo that I was showing you. Do you see down here where it says 7-8? That's her body. That's where she was found.

So I'm looking at a picture of the cemetery, which is from the side. So all the grave markers are facing left and right in the photo. So I'm looking at the side of the grave markers, and they have the one grave marker that's in the front of the photo.

And then her body is laying face up on just the other side of that grave marker. And then there's a large, I'm just going to call it a bush. It's actually a pretty significant dense bush that is on the other side of her body. So her body is positioned between this gravestone in the foreground and then this large bush.

It looks like her upper clothing is disrupted. I can't see to what extent. And I can't, you know, her pelvis area is blocked by the gravestone. And then I can see her legs. It looks like she has shoes on. I'm not seeing anything on her legs at this point. So I don't know if she's like nude from the waist down, etc. So I mentioned she's lying on her back between the two gravestones or near the gravestones and underneath a tree, which you and I both agree it looks sort of like a bush. Yeah.

And the tree has strands of a brown sisal string stuck in it.

I did not know what that was. It looks like twine to me. Do you know anything about sisal? Well, sisal is, you know, that's a term that my trace guys would use when they were describing different types of binding material. And it's basically a, I would say it's a relatively generic term used in the industry to indicate that it's a natural fiber versus something that is synthetic. Okay.

It may come from a specific type of plant, but that's something that I'm not aware of. Okay. So we just know that there's this twine. We also know that this twine, this sisal twine, has shown up under Linda's fingernails. So I don't know if the killer tried to bind her to the tree. Does that seem like the most likely thing? When I look at that tree, that tree is, again, it's more of a bush. It does not look like something...

that has a significant trunk and enough space and access to the trunk from the ground up to a certain height to bind a victim to. But the way those branches are formed, I can easily see twine just naturally getting caught up in it, you know, whether it's, you know, during a struggle or, you know,

the offender abandons the use of this binding material and just kind of tosses it out of the way and the tree catches it in essence. Okay, that makes sense. So as we get more information, we'll see what you think about that. So Linda's fingernails are dirty and bloodied. She has a piece of that twine underneath of the fibers of the twine underneath.

The earth underneath her was torn up. Her clothes are pulled up, and I have a photo I'm going to show you in a second. It looks to investigators that she's been dragged across the ground. And when I show you the wider photo for the third time, you'll see that they've marked where the blood is. And there's a spot of blood or some blood that is a significant distance away from where her body was. So that seems logical to me, but I'll show you that.

And you'll see that she was mostly clothed, but that the killer exposed her breasts. And to them, this suggests a sexual assault. But upon examination, they say that this doesn't seem like a sexual assault. They don't find evidence of that. They don't find evidence of semen. But

you and I have talked about this, that doesn't matter, that could have still been in a sexual assault. There most certainly still could be sexual interaction by the offender and the victim without leaving any evidence, or you have a sexually motivated crime, but due to circumstances, the offender never gets to performing any type of sex act. Yeah. I think the motive seems pretty clear. It was sexual, but let me show you these photos and you could tell me what you think.

So this is photo number one that you haven't seen yet. This is her body. So tell people what you're seeing here. Okay, so this particular photo is a photo taken with the photographer standing at the victim's feet and shooting up towards her head. So I am seeing Linda laying on her back.

She appears to be dressed in some sort of maybe button-down shirt or sweater that is pushed up, exposing her breasts, as well as she has what appears to be a skirt. Her underwear is in place, and it is clipped to the leggings.

and I'm not sure if this would be considered a garter type of garment. And her head is looking over to her right hand. Her right arm is up

in a position at a 90-degree angle with her hand laying back above the head, and the jacket I'm assuming that she was wearing appears to have been pulled down the length of her arm and possibly is even off of her left arm, though I can't see her left arm in this photo. It's behind the gravestone.

Then I'm seeing, it appears that on her exposed chest abdominal area, as well as on the top of her skirt, it almost looks like it's droppings from the tree. For me, that's significant from a sequencing standpoint, because this is now showing that the

Material from the tree has likely dropped onto her after she's laying in this position and after her breasts and abdomen have been exposed. And right now, I can't make anything out of that. It's just that that's something that...

always has to be paid attention to is anything that can provide sequence information at the crime scene. So I'm looking at that going, okay, if I'm correct and this debris is from the tree,

then it is dropping down on her after she's been positioned here likely and then after her upper body has been exposed. Well, let's talk about the sequence of events that you just mentioned. I want to go down to that wide photo once again. Notice that they've put these little markers here. So we see numbers one through eight.

You can now see her arm that was hidden behind the gravestone. And so look at the different markers and tell me what you think. So to me, it looks like there is blood, which I assume they would say is significant, very far away, or at least, you know, four or five gravestones away from her. And there is blood beneath where her body was found.

And then her coins and a comb and a purse that are sort of scattered within, what do you think this is, like a 30 to 50 foot radius in this graveyard? I'm actually using, I have to use her body. I'm assuming, you know, she's probably a 15-year-old woman of average height somewhere, you know, from 5'2 to 5'5. She doesn't look like she's a tiny, tiny 15-year-old.

So if I'm looking at her body and just roughly saying that she's five foot from head to toe, then it appears that the distribution along this cemetery of what they have marked as evidence is roughly 25 feet from the furthest.

evidence marker number one to where her body is located. And again, this is rough, but it does suggest that there is a, and it's a linear pattern of these evidence markers. So this seems consistent with the original investigators thought that she had been drugged

or a struggle had occurred along this linear path up to the location to where her body is ultimately deposited. Now, the observation that I'm going to make here is where her body is, is significant because she has been positioned by the biggest structure in the cemetery, which is that tree. And I think that is purposeful by the offender. He is trying to hide her from...

from the casual onlooker. And I don't know, you mentioned possibly that the entrance to the cemetery was in the backdrop of this photograph. Well, her body is on the other side of this tree, which would basically, in essence, act as a blind, preventing people from seeing her body if they are down by, let's say, the road going into the cemetery or at the cemetery gate.

Yeah. From the onset, to me, it looks like a crime of opportunity, but we don't know. What do you think? So far, do you feel like this is someone who was stalking her, someone she knew, or someone who, you know, happened to be in there and was looking to pick off somebody who was walking through it late at night? I think all theories at this point in time are equally possible. Don't know enough about the person that she is seen with in this cemetery.

You know, victimology is huge. This is where getting into her life investigatively is possibly going to provide greater insight. On the surface, it appears that it would be a victim of opportunity. She happens to be walking along this path home, you know,

She's delayed because she stops and talks to her adult male friend along the way, and she ends up going to the cemetery. Now, if this was a routine that she did, let's say she's constantly going into town and taking this path home, and somebody along that path

path, has seen her previously and is now lying in wait. Now, again, it could be a pre-planned scenario. But then does she have a secret life? Does she have a secret boyfriend that, hey, I'm going to be, my parents think I'm out with my girlfriend. They're not expecting me home until 11 o'clock or midnight. They'll be in bed.

We can meet up in the remote location of the cemetery where, you know, nobody can see us to report us back to my parents. You know, so that's part of the investigative process is to figure out which is the most likely scenario. Well, so far, the investigators say that she has no personal life other than her friends. She doesn't seem to be dating anyone. Her friends say she wasn't dating anyone. She was just this happy-go-lucky girl living her life.

and went through the cemetery and ended up dead. Now, let's talk about the injuries, the extensive injuries, because these become important forensic evidence for—

I hate talking, you know, autopsies are always difficult for me with young girls and with women. And the postmortem was conducted in Scotland about 19 hours after her death. I have close-up photos of these things. She had two lacerated wounds on her head, and she had a ligature mark around her left wrist.

and she had bruises on her left forearm, her right breast, and on the top of her right finger, and she had ligature marks around her neck. So wrist and neck. The doctor says these marks were well-defined on the front and sides and less marked on the back of the neck. So less markings on the back, more on the front.

and they concluded that she must have been strangled from behind. Does that sound right to you, just from that evidence? Is the cause of death strangulation? It seems like it, yes. But she was also whacked on the head several times. Sure. They have a specific weapon in mind that I'll tell you about later, and I don't know how they could be this specific, but it seems like most likely it was strangulation. Okay, so when you have a ligature applied to the neck—

When the ligature completely encircles the neck, let's say it is actually tied off and left in place, oftentimes you see when the ligature is removed, the ligature marks that completely encircle the neck versus if you have a ligature that is placed around the neck and placed

pulled and the offender is pulling that ligature tight in order to strangle, the side that the offender is pulling from is often pulled away from the neck versus the opposite side is now where the force of the ligature is now digging into the soft tissues and leaving the ligature mark. So in the autopsy, they are saying that they are seeing the ligature mark

that encircle the front of the neck, but then aren't seeing any ligature marks on the backside. So the conclusion that the offender is strangling her from behind sounds consistent with the description of the ligature marks on her neck.

Okay. Let me show you the photo. And I want you to ignore the bruising around her breast area for now and just look at the ligature mark and tell me if this tallies with what you had thought about. So this is a close-up, and you see the ligature mark up there. And in the notes, it says, in the mortuary, the marks on the breast and neck are seen. This is 19 hours after she was discovered. The ligature mark is most marked anteriorly. Is that right? Anteriorly? Yeah.

Yes. So the anterior is the front of the neck. Posterior is going to be the back of the neck. The mark caused after her brassiere had been pulled up is clearly seen. The blood in front of the left ear must have clotted when she was vertical. I don't have photos of her head injury. Okay. So this is a substantial ligature mark. It's a very thin mark.

mark that has abraded the skin. And at least in this photo, which is a photo taken from her left side, I am seeing the ligature mark that

that comes up from the left side of her neck, encircles around the front of her neck, underneath the chin area, and then can't see the other side. But I'm assuming that the right side, based on the previous description, is just like the left side. This is entirely consistent with my experience of seeing ligature strangulation.

Of course, at autopsy, I'd want them to be noting that petechia was present in the eyes. There was congestion, pulmonary congestion, all the hallmarks of strangulation. But based on what I'm seeing, this ligature mark on her neck is consistent with the application of deadly force to her neck.

The blood flow that is in front of her left ear, they use the term dried. So blood flows with gravity. So if she has an injury to her head,

And that's the reason for the bleeding. She was upright when that blood stream, if you will, flowed down more in her left upper jaw area in front of the ear and then dried before she was on her back. The blood flow would then have curved more.

if it was still actively flowing and she now is put on her back position. So she's upright for a period of time after receiving a bleeding injury to her head.

Do you think that the blow comes first and then the strangulation? That makes sense to me as a sequence of events. I would say that that is the most likely scenario because this strangulation in all likelihood is fatal. So there's no reason for the offender, after she is now unconscious, to have kept her upright and then hit her in the head. So in all likelihood, the offender is hitting her in the head to gain compliance and control, right?

Whether or not she is knocked out, who knows, you know, but after that, now the offender is probably using that twine that is found in the tree, whether it's the same length of that twine or he had a different length that he took with him. Experience the glamour and danger of the Roaring Twenties from the palm of your hand in

In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists

turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out. You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world

and dive into June's world of mystery, murder, and romance. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

Now we're going to talk about the bite marks because she did have those injuries. This became the most important evidence. There were severe bite marks in the lower quadrant of Linda's right breast. They left a ring-shaped pattern, and the person who created them appeared to have a unique bite.

I've got several photos of this. So we've got the wide, and I'll go ahead and go back to those. We have the wide that I had already shown you so you see where on the breast this happens. See?

So this is what you've already seen, and now you can see where the bite mark is, and then I've got some very close-up shots. Give me the close-up shot, please. Okay. So here's one. This is the right breast. Yeah, so, you know, in terms of taking a look at this photo, this is a photo of her left breast that is purposefully focused in on...

sort of the medial surface of her left breast where there's this very large and I will say indistinct contusion-like injury. There's a scale in the photograph. So this large, dark contusion-like injury on the inside surface of her left breast appears to be up to two inches in length from head to toe direction.

Now, kind of going back to our earlier discussion about they're saying this does not appear to have any signs of sexual assault. Right. This is a sexual assault. She has a mark, which I'm assuming they are concluding is a bite mark with suction on her left breast. There is no other way to characterize this as a sexual assault.

Now, they may be saying, we don't find any injuries vaginally. We don't find any semen vaginally. Well, that's just part of a sexual interaction that an offender does to a victim. Offender may bite the victim's neck. That is a sexual assault, even though it's not considered part of the sexual anatomy on the body.

Here, this is on her left breast. There is no question. This is a sexually motivated crime. Now, let me ask you, could anything else have made this marking other than teeth marks? If you were just handed this photo and don't know anything about the case, would you assume this is anything but teeth marks? No.

No. In fact, this photo is a little bit grainy. The resolution is relatively poor. But with what I can see of this mark, I couldn't even conclude that this mark was a bite mark. It is what I described as just a large, somewhat small,

circular contusion that has some darker areas in it. I would need to see a better photo to see if I could see distinct teeth marks. And I see where you're scrolling to now, there's a different photo here. Is this any better? So the note says the right breast has

has been enlarged, showing clearly the ring marks, A and E and abrasion C, the guidelines for the orientation of the bite mark are shown. So is that really teeth right there? Is that what they're trying to show you? Well, with what I am seeing, and again, you know, just for the listeners, this is a clearer photo that the previous photo was really showing a lot of the, you know, undersurface type of bruising that was obscuring the skin

surface marks to the skin. Now what I am looking at is, in essence, around the outer part of this circle are five what I will describe as punctate

Mm-hmm. As if the tip of a pencil had been pushed in at each five of these points. And they've labeled these five A, B, C, D, and E. C is the most significant in terms of the amount of damage it's done to the skin. And then inside these five punctate marks, that's where there appears to be some bruising. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, they mentioned that there is a suction, like a hickey type of formation that's occurring in the center of this. I can't conclude that based on this photo. However, at this point, with what I am seeing, this does not look like a traditional bite mark. There is something unusual about it with the distribution of these five punctate marks on the outside.

So now this is where I need to see if they are comparing this mark to

to somebody's teeth. Yep. I need to see that before I would say that this is a bite mark. And you will, but let me give you some background first. Okay. We have some great photos. I think great photos, of course, what I think is great, you think is like, eh, it's okay. I'm just happy to have photos and not have some rough sketch from the 1800s. I'm happy that you got photos too. Even though they're not great photos, I can at least see what they're talking about and how they're concluding what they conclude.

So we've got Linda Peacock, who is now the autopsy has been completed. The police are gathering evidence and her family within a few days buries her in just a sad footnote in the very same graveyard. Oh, wow. Where she had been killed. It must have been the only option, I guess. I don't know. Boy, how terrible. Yeah.

I don't like that at all. No. I wonder where her grave is relative to where her body was found. I don't know. And I wonder if there's a bigger graveyard, you know, that we don't see. But boy, it looks pretty isolated and it doesn't look very big. No. So now the police are under pressure, of course, because you've got a small town and everybody is under stress and they want answers. Yes.

And as I said, 2,000 to 3,000 people and bigger normally. But when she's killed, which is Saturday, August 5th, there has been a traveling fair that stopped in the town. I know. The damn traveling fairs who doubled the population. Yeah.

So the police interview everybody. So they interviewed around 3,000 people between Bigger and the people who came in this traveling fair. So they've got their list down to about 29 people, and they start taking the dental impressions of these 29 people. And almost all of the 29 people are students at a school that is a boarding school for teen offenders. Okay.

Okay. So now they've got a large percentage of these remaining 29 that are coming from this one facility. Right. Do they narrow down onto a particular person? Right.

They do. So there is a student at the Loningdale School named Gordon Hay. He is 17. And, you know, they have looked at the faculty at this place. And by the way, it's a minute and a half walk from the cemetery. So they've taken the impressions from the faculty and the students. They were examined by experts, cast into molds.

And very quickly, you know, these impressions were eliminated. Everybody except 17-year-old Gordon Hay. So here's the description before I tell you more about Gordon Hay. His teeth had pits in the upper and lower canines, which analysts believe could have caused that weird ring shape there.

He also had a fractured upper left central and a few distinctive cavities, which they think might have caused this bruising that we saw. And I have photos of his teeth. All right. I'm already very skeptical, but let's go ahead and let's take a look at his teeth.

Okay. So I am unfamiliar with teeth. In the order of things, I'm going to give you just a wide real quick, and then they have close-ups of the upper and the lower. So this figure 16 says, shows model of Hayes teeth on a dentatist or teeth.

and I also have his actual teeth. But this is what they're saying it looks like from this angle. So, yeah, I'm looking at basically this cast of Gordon's front teeth, in essence, as if he were standing in front of me and I'm seeing the left side of his mouth. It looks like he's missing a tooth on the left side, lower jaw towards the front. However, he does have all his teeth, with the exception, in fact,

On the left and right side of his mouth, now that you scroll down, I'm seeing that he has a gap. So in essence, it appears that the front on his lower jaw, the six front teeth are all present. And then on the right and left side,

of his lower jaw, he has the same gap, like teeth that just didn't grow in. And then his lower jaw teeth appear to be starting up again. And then he has all his upper teeth. His dentition is unusual. However, he has most of his teeth, even though they're not in great shape.

And if he were to bite down on skin to the point of leaving a mark, I would expect that these teeth that are present would be leaving marks in that skin. And I'm not seeing that in her injury. You know, the fact that he has some cavities or these gaps in his lower jaw means nothing when you start talking about a bite mark. It's what is interacting with

you know, with the skin. And it's the teeth. Who cares if there's cavities in there? His teeth are going to be leaving the marks. And in the photos, at least with the quality that they were taken, I am not seeing the teeth marks that I typically see in bite marks. Well, let me ask you this question.

We might assume that he left these after she was already dead and she's lying still. But doesn't it seem to you a little more likely that whoever killed her did this while she was still alive? She's moving. Is there a way to get an accurate picture of someone's teeth on flesh if the victim is moving around? This is really part of the problem when we get into forensic odontology and bite mark analysis is it's the substrate in which the bite mark is left.

skin generally is really a very poor surface to record bite marks. You can see some of the individual teeth marks in the bite mark itself. And of course, if there is movement while the bite is being applied, oftentimes the teeth will slide on the skin abrading it. Odontologists historically...

Most of the bite mark analysis is usually on skin, which is a soft tissue. And depending on where on the body it is, there's a lot of pliability, especially on the breasts. And oftentimes there's so much distortion that these odontologists that have favorably compared, let's say, a suspect's teeth to

to the bite mark evidence, they often have overreached in their analysis. Yeah. And now I'm looking at the photo that you presented of this mark on her left breast, and I question if it's even a bite mark with what I am able to see. I agree. Now, let me do my due diligence here and show you the rest of these molds and his teeth, just so that I can say I showed them to you. But everything that you say...

makes sense in everything that I have researched for the books that I've written. These are more models. I mean, this is a different point of view of something you've already seen before. And then we have his photos of his actual teeth. I don't know if this is telling you anything new or not. It really comes down to the sample that you're given is not, I don't think there's any way to determine whether or not this was actually a bite mark. And we can go back up and look at it again, if you'd like. With the photos that I'm looking at at Gordon's

dentition in his teeth. For me, what is significant is that he does have, in essence, most of his teeth. And with what I am seeing in that photo of those five punctate marks,

It almost looks like if you were to draw a line linking from punctate mark A to B to C to D to E, it looks like it's almost a perfect pentagon. Yeah. So this is where I really, if this is truly a bite mark, I really struggle to where they could affect any type of comparison from this to anybody's mouth. Boy, they did. They did. They said conclusively, he's the one who did it.

He is arrested on November 24th, 1967. So this was three or four months after this happened.

So let me tell you a little bit about Gordon, because I know we've said this is shaky evidence, but he still might have been our guy. Just because they can't pin it on him, there's a lot about Gordon Hay to unpack. So he was born in 1950, so he is a couple of years older than Linda is. And he was athletic, he played soccer, but he always had problems academically. He didn't have a lot of close friends.

His dad died when he was about 16 years old, and he started hanging out with the typical bad crowd, getting in a lot of trouble, but nothing violent. He had behavioral issues where he was, I love this, the unlawful removal of vehicles. I don't know what that means.

And then he broke into a factory. He stole vehicles. An unlawful removal of vehicles. And then he broke into a factory, and that's how he went to Loaningdale. That's how he landed in this reformatory in January of 1967. Loaningdale did nothing to rehab him, and it doesn't seem like he was violent when he was there, but he wasn't content, that's for sure. So he has this history of behavioral issues left,

But nothing violent. However, a couple of things did happen. A few days before Linda's murder, the headmaster decided that Gordon needed to go. They could not handle whatever his erratic behavior was. We don't really know what it was. We know it wasn't violent, but he just did not seem to be a good fit for their particular school. So he was going to be transferred.

Is that a potential trigger for someone if he wants to stay at the school and he wants to be in this area? He doesn't have a level of violence in his past that we would think would lead him to this. But oftentimes killers don't have a level of violence that would lead to their first murder. So Gordon, the reason he's landing at this home or this facility is

is because of criminal behavior. Now it's property crimes. You know, he's stealing cars. He broke into a facility.

He's showing a propensity to go outside of social boundaries. Now, here you have a scenario in which a 15-year-old girl has been isolated out at the cemetery. There's nothing about Gordon's past that would be predictive that he would escalate to commit this type of crime, but also doesn't mean that he couldn't.

So there are behaviors that some offenders exhibit in terms of the types of fantasy material that they draw. I'm a big proponent of anybody that is doing the animal abuse, whether it be torture or killing of animals, that is on the spectrum of violence that really predicts that that person is going to hurt a person if they do that type of thing to animals.

As of right now, we don't have any information indicating that Gordon was exhibiting that level of behavior.

However, he most certainly could be capable of, you know, here's a woman that is isolated, victim of opportunity. The interesting thing is, is the offender who killed Linda brought binding material with him. Would this be normally something the offender would have on their person? Or was this a planned attack? This offender either knew that a woman would be coming through that location that night.

and brought the binding material with him, or he's out on the prowl.

and was going to find a victim that night and was prepared with the binding material. Two odd things about Gordon that play into what you're talking about. One is he had almost no friends at school, but he was really close friends with his roommate. His roommate liked to play tricks, like rope tricks, including cat's cradle, which I did not do well as a child learning how to do the cat's cradle, but, you know, a lot of, like, kind of string rope tricks.

The roommate says that Gordon became obsessed like a child with playing with this string and different kinds of ropes making different kinds of knots. And I'm sure your profiling propensity has just really become excited by this. Does this mean anything? Not without more details. You know, the first thing I'm thinking about is if he's in the facility and he has binding material, is it the same binding material that is found at the crime scene? Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you in a minute. So we've got some odd things that happened, and this is just sort of the sequence of events. Where Gordon and his interaction with this case starts is the day before the murder. So Gordon had crossed paths with Linda Peacock. He had gone with a friend from school to meet Linda and her friend. They did not know each other. They interacted for less than a minute. And they were

It was not a blind date. It was not anything. It was just really kind of just to say hi, and that was it. The friend said it was literally less than a minute, but nonetheless, Gordon told his friend that he would like to have sex with Linda, and this is the night before.

Well, this is now putting, you know, Gordon within Linda's social circle, if you will. So if these two are the two shadowy figures in the cemetery that witnesses saw, this is that prior interaction is something that Gordon could have taken advantage of.

in order to be able to be less threatening to Linda while standing out there in the dark at the cemetery. The fact that he's making a statement to his friend, I want to have sex with her, tends to suggest that if he's the one out there in the cemetery, he's probably interacting with her in a way where he's expressing, I want to have sex. And that may be, hey, I like you, attempting a consensual type of interaction,

And then she turns him down and he becomes violent. That would be within a scenario that I see as plausible.

So let me tell you some more details just about what happened that night. People had seen Gordon that night around 9.40 at the school's dining room. And after about 9.45, he put on his nightclothes and said he was going to go to bed. But his roommate wasn't around, and there weren't any other witnesses who could say where he was.

So he disappears, and when he comes back around 10.20, so this is maybe 10.25, this is slightly after the time people hear the screams, he comes back. His roommate says that he looks like he's been gardening. He's covered in dirt. He was wearing normal clothes, not the pajamas he had been wearing when people had seen him before. There is a significant thing that the roommate is alarmed by. The roommate had picked up

on a trip to the beach, a large boat hook, very big, about a foot in length. And the roommate had kept it in his wardrobe. That night, the roommate noticed the boat hook was gone. The next morning, the boat hook reappeared. And of course, the police are suggesting that he used this boat hook to stun Linda and then strangle her. Okay. Obviously, there's suspicious circumstances around Gordon. Yep. And

Now it's a matter of closing the loop on him as a suspect. If he is taking this boat hook and using it on Linda to inflict blows that drew blood, and these are blows to her head, there is a possibility that this boat hook has her hair or possible blood on it. Whether he cleaned it up or not, you know, that's always a possibility.

But also they say, well, it looked like he had been out gardening. Well, that is entirely consistent with now the offender is interacting with Linda, is on the ground with Linda in this graveyard. You have that tree in which I had made the prior observation. It appears that the tree is dropping debris. So this is physical evidence now that can possibly be used to help link him to that crime scene. Many people overlook an aspect of crime scene processing.

is you're always looking for evidence of the offender present at the scene. You know, their fingerprints, their DNA, their shoe impressions at the crime scene. But when that offender leaves the crime scene, he's taking part of the crime scene with him. And so when I'm processing a crime scene and the offender is unknown, what I'm doing is I'm looking for what would the offender have taken on his person, either knowingly or unknowingly. And oftentimes it's trace evidence, carpet fibers, or in this case,

botanical material like the debris from that tree. So I would be collecting a sample of that debris from the tree. And if we find an offender and it happens to have similar botanical material, now I want an expert to tell me, is this from the same source? So that would be what I would expect the investigators to be doing with Gordon. I know they're focusing in on this bite mark,

But some of this other evidence becomes very, when you start stacking it up, it becomes very compelling that he is Linda's killer. Do they have that kind of evidence? Well, they do, but they don't have the technology just yet. It doesn't seem like for them to be able to make some conclusive ties between Gordon and Linda. So this is what they have.

They were looking for the rope. It is not the twine, they are saying, that you and I had talked about. They found Gordon's robe. There was a cord missing. Gordon said, I never use a cord. I don't either, incidentally, in my robes.

And they looked in the school's incinerator and found a charred cord, which they believe was of the consistency that caused that ligature mark. However, they couldn't say conclusively. There was a small amount of blood on Gordon's boots and the legs of his pants.

He says it was just some accident he had. With the technology they had, they couldn't prove anything. And then the alibi is very odd. He is spotted at Loaningdale around 9.45. He was home for lights out at 10.30, which gives him 45 minutes to...

to murder and assault Linda at a location that's a minute and a half away from his house. So that's plenty of time, but there was a lot of debate about the timeline. And then the boat hook, they weren't able to pull anything from the boat hook. They had no blood or evidence. It was wiped clean by that point. And in 1967, there's very little they could have done. So I think that they had the impressions that you had about where they could go with the evidence and they just weren't able to pull together more evidence

So they hinged everything on these bite marks. Okay. Most certainly, the association of the crime scene through a botanical analysis was something they could have done if they had gone to an academic professor. You know, they may have had to go to a larger area where there was a university of somebody that would be able to identify any debris found on Gordon's clothing.

you know, and see if it is something that could have been from the cemetery location. And then of course, well, how common is this? Right. That tree, is that a decorative tree that would be unusual and it's not indigenous to the area or is it something that is everywhere? Then it weakens the association. Right.

The blood, you're right. In 1967, the blood, they were limited with what they could do with that in a blood staining. So this blood that's found on his clothing today would, of course, be huge evidence. Yeah. You know, we would be able to do DNA and show this is Linda's blood, you know, and that right there would be very, very compelling that he is her killer. I'm still not hearing, though, whether or not they found a

source of this twine that was found hanging in the tree. No, it sounds like they thought that maybe he tried to bind her with it, but that it didn't work and they used something else. He used something else to strangle her, which would have been the cord from his pocket. He says, for his part, I've never met Linda. I have no idea who she is. I did not do this. And, you know, I have been home off and on, you know, that whole night. And he really just denies it.

So as weak as the evidence is that you and I think, you know, all of this DNA evidence, we lack all the things that we need, the bite mark really convinced a jury. And they handed down a guilty verdict. And because he was under 18, he was ordered to be detained. It's called infidelity.

during Her Majesty's pleasure, which essentially means that he was incarcerated indefinitely. He appealed, it was denied, and we don't know anything else what happened to Gordon Hay. No idea what happened. Yeah, see, based on what you have told me, you know, he's a suspect for sure. Yeah. There's circumstances that are suspicious.

I personally don't hear anything that is probable cause for even arrest. The bite mark, as I mentioned before with what I'm seeing, I can't determine that that's a bite mark. I think they overreached to compare Gordon positively to that bite mark. So...

I negate the bite mark evidence and I look at what they have and it's like, yeah, he's suspicious. He's a suspect. They need to continue their investigation and build a case against him. He very well may be Linda's killer, but they don't have enough. And the fact that now that he's been convicted, this just kind of underscores how easy it is to convict Linda.

using very loose evidence. That's the scary part about any justice system. And I'm not sure exactly what was in place in Scotland. Did you say that's a jury? It was a jury, yes. Okay. And this was significant. And one of the reasons why I picked this is because it was the first time a British court had convicted someone based almost entirely on bite mark evidence.

Yeah. Bad bite mark evidence. It really does underscore, you know, sometimes, you know, the term junk science is something that is bantered about. And sometimes I think that that term is misused by people who really don't understand how really there is solid scientific underpinnings for some of the forensic evidence out there.

But this is where this term comes in to where now you do have experts that are, they may be well-intentioned, but they are overreaching in terms of their interpretation. It is an over-interpretation of the evidence and it has dire consequences when you have an expert come in in front of a juror and they put more weight on that expert's opinions than probably what they should be.

Yeah. One of the things, I don't know if I've told you this before, my dad used to say, he started the actual innocence clinic at the University of Texas. And he used to say, I'd rather have 50 criminals go free than one person be wrongfully incarcerated. He said that our law has to work in a way where everyone gets a fair shake. And of course, it doesn't happen anywhere.

Now, and one of the things that we do talk about a lot with junk science is when it has been misused and then when we are able to pull legitimate things out of it, like bloodstain pattern analysis. And I think they were looking for void marks almost, a void pattern with these teeth marks. And I have a feeling that Gordon probably was responsible for this. We don't know for sure, but it does seem like an awful lot of weird circumstances that

but I don't think it was enough, certainly, to convict him. Well, my experience working cases is there are suspects which circumstantially become convinced they're involved. And then eventually they're eliminated.

And this is where you'll hear sometimes very experienced investigators say, I don't believe in coincidences. Coincidences do occur. And so that's with Gordon. He's a suspect in my book based on the circumstances. However, having worked cases in which I've had suspects that circumstantially look great and then they're ultimately eliminated.

He may be a victim of coincidence. Until there is more convincing evidence in this case, both circumstantially as well as physically, I just don't see how they could have moved forward with an arrest, let alone a successful prosecution. Well, Gordon Hay disappeared. We don't know what happened to him.

I would assume at some point he was released, but I don't know. And this is just another one of those messy cases where you think one thing, and I was pretty convinced one way, but boy, if the evidence doesn't back it up. But the bottom line is we're left with Linda Peacock's family who certainly was in mourning, and it must have been at least some sort of comfort for them to know that their daughter's killer was behind bars. But on the other hand,

If they had any doubt about any of this evidence, how terrifying to think that there was someone out there in this small town who might have been a local, who I feel like probably was a local, to know about this cemetery and how this would have been isolated and a good time to do this. So what an upsetting case. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, go hop on your mountain bike and I'm going to go for a swim and let's try to think about the next case and enjoy the weather while we can. Yeah, you got to take advantage of it when it's here. Thank you. I'll see you next week. All right. Sounds good, Kate.

This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashen and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our art

work is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod. Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.