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Today's episode is a fan favorite. It comes from episode number 72, which is titled Debbie's Last Dance.
In 1982, a young woman walked up a flight of stairs to her friend's apartment and knocked on the door.
But as she did, she noticed the little window on the door was broken.
Worried something was wrong with her friend, the woman knocked again, this time a little louder, while also now peering through the broken window to see if she could see anything inside.
However, she couldn't, but she could hear music playing inside her friend's apartment.
After another minute went by and still her friend did not come to the door, the woman tried the door handle and found that it was open.
With her heart racing, the woman slowly opened the door and stepped inside.
And a few seconds later, she would see something in that apartment that was so horrible, it would send her sprinting back outside.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
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21-year-old Debbie Carter looked around at the Tuesday night crowd in the Coachlight nightclub where she worked part-time as a waitress.
All her tables were taken care of, and the rush of after-work customers had ended at least an hour ago.
Grateful for what looked like it would be an extended lull in business, Debbie leaned against the bar, already looking forward to the end of her shift when she could finally get off her feet.
As though reading Debbie's mind, Debbie's high school friend and Coach Light regular, Gina Vietta, caught Debbie's attention from across the room, where Gina and some friends were sitting at a table pushed up against the far side of the metal building.
As soon as their eyes met, Gina raised her beer bottle in Debbie's direction and then pointed at the seat next to her before mouthing, "'Come join us.'"
Debbie gave her old high school friend a big smile, then she checked with the bartender to see if he had any more drinks that she needed to serve.
And when he shook his head no, Debbie turned around and then tracked down her boss to see if she could officially go off the clock to go hang out with Gina and their friends.
Like the bartender, Debbie's boss didn't have anything for her to do, and so he quickly smiled and said, go have fun.
Not only was Debbie hardworking, but she was also popular with customers, and she was good at handling any unwanted attention or advances in a way that was direct but not confrontational.
So Debbie's boss, who couldn't ask for a better employee, was glad to give Debbie a little break.
As Debbie grabbed a beer and walked over to join her friends, the bouncer made a mental note to make sure that Debbie got safely to her car when the coach light closed later that night.
And that, in a nutshell, was the town of Ada, Oklahoma.
It was a tight-knit community. People knew each other, and people looked out for each other, and a lot of people in town didn't even bother to lock their doors, at least when they left their houses during the day.
As for the Coach Light, on that night, December 7th, 1982, the popular local watering hole was a perfect example of how the town as a whole had held on to those deep-rooted small-town values despite the huge social and economic changes of the last eight decades.
Gone were the oil gushers and the huge deposits of petroleum and natural gas that had put Oklahoma on the map back in the early 1900s.
And while Ada was still home to some small oil rigs that were still operating, most of the rigs in and around the town were rusted and derelict.
Since the 1950s, when Oklahoma started emptying out more oil and gas reserves than it was discovering, the town of 15,000 residents had mostly turned from oil to other industries that paid by the hour. like work on pecan farms and in factories and feed mills.
But as the county seat of Pontotoc County and one of the larger towns in rural southeast Oklahoma, Ada was still busy.
People were no longer making overnight fortunes on oil, but the town was known nationally for horse breeding and for top-of-the-line horse sales that drew customers from all over the country.
Ada's courthouse and jail, as well as the town's lawyers and police force, were also busy.
They had plenty to do trying to keep up with the ravages caused by the local methamphetamine drug epidemic that had hit so many towns in rural Oklahoma.
But even in the face of these changes, Ada was holding its own.
A lot of local businesses had moved to the edges of the town, but Main Street was still doing okay.
There were no boarded-up storefronts, and neighbors and coworkers gathered for lunch in cafes and sandwich shops.
The town was also home to East Central University, whose 4,000 students, a lot of them commuters, helped boost the local economy and bring a little diversity to Ada's mostly white and mostly Christian population.
And places like the Coach Light, with its cheap beer along with food that was more filling than it was fancy, did very well, especially on weekends when it was filled with a mix of factory workers, 20-somethings, and a dance and party crowd who went there for the live music and the big dance floor.
On her way over to Gina's table, Debbie had to slow down a couple of times to say hi to a few of the regulars.
Even though it wasn't a busy night, there were more than a dozen people at the coach light who knew Debbie by name or who had gone to school with her.
And noticing that she had stepped away from work, A few of the men decided then and there to see if they could get Debbie out on the dance floor before closing time.
Because Debbie was one of those very easy-to-like people.
It wasn't just that she was attractive and athletic, standing 5 feet 7 inches tall before pulling on her work boots.
She also had an open smile and friendly dark eyes that matched the color of her glossy shoulder-length dark brown hair.
In addition to her part-time job at the Coach Light, Debbie babysat, she worked part-time at the local glass plant, and she served food at a local drugstore lunch counter.
As a child and teenager, Debbie had never been a huge fan of academics, and her father, Charlie Carter, still liked to tell the story about how Debbie, on her second-ever day of going to school, had looked up at her parents and asked, "'You mean I've really got to go through with this?'
So instead of going on to college after graduating from Ada High School in 1979, Debbie had put all her energy into saving money to buy her own car and rent an apartment of her own.
It was a goal that meant she had sometimes clashed with her mom, Peggy Stilwell, who felt that Debbie was spending too much time at places like the Coach Light and drinking too many beers with old high school buddies like Gina.
But two months ago, Debbie's dream of living on her own, a big girl life, as her family called it, had come true.
That's when Debbie had packed her belongings into the 1975 Oldsmobile car she had bought with her own money and moved into her very own three-room apartment above a garage at 1022 East 8th Street, right next to the campus of East Central University.
Once Debbie's mom was satisfied that Debbie had chosen what seemed like a safe location to live alone, Peggy had given her blessing to Debbie and mom and daughter were right back to being as close as they had always been.
And that closeness was true of Debbie's relationship with her father too.
Even though Debbie's parents had divorced five years ago, both Peggy and Charlie shared a bond of unconditional love for Debbie and her two younger sisters.
And since Charlie sometimes picked up a shift as a bouncer at the coach light, he was able to keep a protective eye on his daughter without being intrusive.
Now, slipping into the seat at the coach light next to Gina and a group of their other old high school friends, Debbie stretched out her long legs under the table and sighed with contentment.
It had been a long day and just sitting down was a relief.
But even as Debbie exchanged greetings with her friends, her mind drifted to her new home.
And just thinking about the apartment she had worked so hard for gave Debbie a thrill.
She'd always been someone who liked her independence, and now that she had a place of her own, she loved keeping her cozy living room, kitchen, and bedroom absolutely spotless.
And with no one to look over her shoulder, she could eat as many mayonnaise sandwiches, a personal favorite of hers, as often as she wanted to.
Even the things Debbie didn't have turned out to be an advantage.
As Peggy pointed out, the fact that Debbie did not have her own washer and dryer was actually a blessing.
It meant that Debbie made regular trips to her mom's house to do her laundry.
Which is exactly where Debbie had been just two evenings earlier, listening to the tumble of the dryer while she curled up on the bed next to her mom, which is where Debbie wound up falling asleep and spending that night.
Peggy, whose motherly instincts were always on high alert, still couldn't help but worry about her daughter's safety in her new apartment.
But Debbie had always said, Mom, as long as I have my teeth and nails to fight with, no one is going to hurt me.
Debbie's thoughts were suddenly pulled back to the present when one of her high school acquaintances stopped by the table and asked her to dance.
Debbie had always had her share of boyfriends, but she'd never been known for sleeping around.
In fact, her closest girlfriends knew that Debbie was very modest and shy when it came to letting anyone see her undressed.
But this was someone Debbie had known for a long time that was asking her to dance, and even though she was tired, she pushed herself up from her chair and headed out to the dance floor.
But by the time Debbie had come back and ordered another beer, she was already glancing at her watch, just waiting for the night to end so she could go back home.
That moment came a little sooner than she expected when her boss started closing the coach light early at around 12.30 a.m.
Gina immediately invited everyone at their table back to her apartment for one more drink, but Debbie smiled and shook her head no, Debbie was going to head straight home to her apartment.
She promised Gina that if she changed her mind, she'd give her a call.
As customers made their way back to their cars, the bouncer made sure that Debbie was not walking out of the nightclub on her own.
And after having a brief conversation through her car window with another Coach Light regular, Debbie rolled up her car window, turned on the car engine, and drove out of the Coach Light parking lot towards her new home.
At 2.30 AM on the morning of December 8th, two hours after the coach light closed its doors and turned off the lights, Gina heard the ring of her telephone cut through the noise of the people talking and laughing over drinks at her apartment.
When she answered her phone, she was surprised to hear Debbie's voice on the other end.
She was even more surprised by what Debbie was asking Gina to do.
According to Debbie, there was a visitor in Debbie's apartment who was making Debbie uncomfortable, and Debbie wanted Gina to drive over and give Debbie a ride to Gina's house.
Since Debbie had her own car and could drive to Gina's house, the request made no sense to Gina, unless Debbie's visitor wasn't letting Debbie leave.
Gina tried to ask Debbie who the visitor was, but their conversation was cut short by muffled noises on Debbie's end.
Gina heard Debbie talking to someone and then the sounds of what might have been a struggle over control of the phone.
Gina didn't wait to hear anything else. She sensed something was wrong.
Before hanging up the phone, Gina told Debbie that she would be there as soon as she could.
But before Gina even made it out the door, her phone rang again and again the caller was Debbie.
But now Debbie sounded much calmer and told Gina not to come get Debbie after all and that everything was actually okay.
Debbie did ask Gina to please give Debbie a call later that morning to make sure Debbie was awake.
After hanging up the phone a second time, Gina's first impulse was to ignore Debbie's second call and just still drive over to her apartment to make sure she was okay.
But by the time Gina had made it out to her car, she was already having second thoughts.
Even though it seemed unlikely, if Debbie did have a man over for the night, Gina didn't want to barge in on them.
And Debbie had seemed very emphatic on that second call, telling Gina not to come over.
So even though Gina had almost reached her car, she slowed down and then reversed course.
A few minutes later, she was back inside of her own apartment, where her friends that had come over were now starting to gather their coats and leave.
When Gina woke up later that morning, she completely forgot to call Debbie and check in with her.
At 11.20am on December 8th, that same morning, Donna Johnson headed up the narrow wooden stairway to Debbie's apartment on East 8th Street.
An old high school friend of Debbie's, Donna now lived an hour away in Shawnee, but she was back in Ada for the day to visit her parents and to catch up with old friends like Debbie.
But just as Donna reached the tiny landing outside of Debbie's front door and had already raised her hand to knock, she felt bits of broken glass grinding under her shoe.
And at the same time, Donna registered the fact that the little window in Debbie's door was broken.
Even as Donna did reach up and start knocking on the door, she heard the faint sound of a radio playing inside of Debbie's apartment.
When there was no answer to her second knock on the door, Donna checked the doorknob and realized that the door was unlocked.
As soon as Donna stepped inside, she knew something was terribly wrong.
The living room in front of her was a mess.
The sofa cushions were scattered on the floor, and strewn across the linoleum in the kitchen off to her side, Donna saw a woman's blouse and a pair of jeans.
Even as Donna started to step past the mess towards Debbie's bedroom, she took in the sight of words scrawled in red on the living room walls and on the small white table in the kitchen.
But nothing could have prepared Donna for what she saw next.
Lying face down on the floor of the bedroom on the far side of the bed, nude except for one sock, lay Debbie's bloody and lifeless body.
The bed had been shoved away from the wall, and all the covers were pulled off of it.
On Debbie's back, Donna saw more words written in red liquid.
Stumbling backwards in horror, Donna suddenly realized that whoever had done this to Debbie might still be hidden inside of the apartment, and a minute later, Donna was clattering back down the stairs outside.
Hopping into her car, Donna drove to the nearest payphone to call Debbie's mother, Peggy, who in turn quickly called her ex-husband, Charlie.
Charlie arrived at his daughter's apartment ahead of the police and medical personnel.
In Debbie's bedroom, Charlie fell to his knees next to his daughter's body.
Charlie called Debbie's name twice before gently lifting one of his daughter's shoulders so he could look at her face.
A bloody washcloth was stuffed deep into Debbie's mouth.
Minutes later, the street in front of Debbie's apartment was lined with police cars, a wailing ambulance, and law enforcement.
Stepping into Debbie's apartment bedroom, Ada Police Detective Dennis Smith took one look at Debbie's body and knew that he had a brutal rape and homicide on his hands.
As the 17-year veteran of the Ada Police Department took in the horrific details of how Debbie had died, he also knew that this case felt intensely personal.
In addition to knowing Debbie's parents, Charlie and Peggy, Detective Smith's own daughter was good friends with Debbie's younger sister.
Doing his best to keep his emotions under control, the 39-year-old detective immediately ordered officers to seal off the immediate area around the apartment from the growing crowd of neighbors and bystanders.
After clearing the inside of the apartment, Detective Smith did not waste any time.
He sent police officers out to knock on doors and interview neighbors to see if anyone saw or heard anything unusual during the night and early morning hours.
He also wanted a list of Debbie's friends, boyfriends, co-workers, family members, and possible enemies.
Police would soon find out from Debbie's friend Gina about the two phone calls Debbie had made between 2.30 and 3 a.m. that morning, and based on that testimony, they would quickly narrow the time of the murder to some time between 2.30 a.m. and 11.40 a.m. when Donna had discovered Debbie's body.
With that information in hand, Detective Smith was especially interested in knowing exactly who saw or interacted with Debbie on the night of December 8th and into the early morning hours of December 9th at the Coach Light.
Since that could include a list of dozens of people, Detective Smith also pushed out a general request for the male patrons of the Coach Light the night before, as well as any male acquaintances of Debbie's, to come to the police station and voluntarily submit hair, pubic hair, and saliva samples.
Satisfied that the investigation was now underway, Detective Smith stepped back and tried to make sense of the crime scene, in which all three rooms of Debbie's apartment appear to have been upended by a struggle between Debbie and her attacker.
In fact, starting with the shattered front door window and ending with the ripped and torn trail of clothing and furniture, the apartment was so trashed that Detective Smith realized that this homicide might be the work of more than one perpetrator.
That suspicion grew stronger as the detective looked at the four messages that the killer or killers had left behind.
Written in nail polish on the wall of the den was the sentence, "'Jim Smith will die next,'
On Debbie's back, written in what would turn out to be ketchup, Detective Smith read the name Duke Graham.
Once Debbie's body was turned over, the detective would see a single word written in red fingernail polish on Debbie's chest.
Die. And on the kitchen table, written in ketchup again, was a message that referred explicitly to two killers.
Don't look for us or else. Hey, listeners, Mr. Ballin here.
What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
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The names Jim Smith and Duke Graham were both familiar to Ada Police.
Duke was a local nightclub owner and Jim was a local small-time criminal that Duke had once driven out of his bar with a shotgun.
As Detective Smith, no relation to Jim Smith, completed his examination of Debbie's apartment, he sent officers to find out where both those men were and bring them in for questioning.
Then, the detective watched for a few minutes as crime scene techs went about their work inside the apartment, dusting for fingerprints and photographing and collecting possible evidence.
That evidence included any strands of human hair, the murder weapon, and the removal of a 4x4 inch square of sheetrock from the bedroom wall that contained a single bloody handprint.
The next day, Thursday, December 9th at 3 p.m., the autopsy of Debbie's body would confirm that she had been raped before she died.
Detective Smith was joined at that autopsy by agents from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation who had offered their help and support to local law enforcement.
The men watched as the medical examiner collected samples of hair from Debbie's body as well as scrapings from under Debbie's fingernails, clippings from which were also carefully entered and tagged as evidence.
By this point, more than a dozen men had already come forward to the police station to deliver their DNA samples to the police.
And it was clear to Detective Smith in interacting with these guys that he was not the only person in Ada who was personally upset by Debbie's murder.
One of the first people that police interviewed was a guy named Glenn Gore, who was one of Debbie's old high school classmates who had been with her at the coach light before she was killed.
And he, like the other friends who had been with Debbie that night, was very shaken up and just could not understand who would want to harm Debbie.
And over the next few days, police would hear testimony that sounded a lot like Glenn's.
No one seemed to have any idea who would want to harm Debbie.
And within days of the murder, police had confirmed that neither Graham Duke or Jim Smith could have been involved in the killing.
Graham had an ironclad alibi, and Jim was locked up in state prison.
By the morning of Debbie's funeral on Saturday, December 11th, three days after her murder, townspeople's fear and frustration only got more intense as mourners filed past Debbie's open casket.
Because all the makeup in the world could not disguise the terrible injuries to the young woman's swollen and badly beaten face.
And whoever had done that was still out walking the streets.
Meanwhile, investigators were frustrated by the fact that they had to wait for results from the state's crime lab.
Investigators knew that a key piece of physical evidence in the case was the bloody handprint that had been collected from the wall of Debbie's apartment.
If that print did not belong to Debbie, it had to belong to someone else who was in the room when Debbie was killed, and that person would most likely be Debbie's murderer. but in the face of growing public pressure to solve a case that was quickly showing signs of getting cold detective smith and ada's prosecuting attorney bill peterson decided they could not wait until the oklahoma state crime lab id'd that print instead in early march of 1983 three months after debbie's death investigators zeroed in on two brand new suspects This new direction in the investigation was based on unsubstantiated rumors about the murder that were circulating in the local county jail.
The first and primary suspect was 30-year-old Ron Williamson, a former minor league baseball player who was one of Ada's well-known Hellraisers and heavy drinkers.
Ron, who lived not far from Debbie's garage apartment, was fingered as a possible suspect by his county jail cellmate when Ron was locked up on a drunk driving conviction.
According to a cellmate, when news of Debbie's murder spread through the inmate population, Ron, who was also known to have serious mental health issues, became very upset.
The second suspect, a 23-year-old man named Dennis Fritz, who was new to Ada but who had been seen in Ron's company at some local bars, was a person of interest mostly because police believed the murder had been committed by two men and Dennis was one of Ron's few friends.
Both men were interviewed repeatedly by police and both denied any involvement in Debbie's murder.
They also submitted fingerprints and DNA to police.
Eventually, after hours of aggressive questioning from investigators, Dennis was told he failed a lie detector test, and Ron was told that the results of the lie detector test he had agreed to take were inconclusive.
But even after the Oklahoma State Crime Lab reported back to Ada Police on March 28, 1983, that the bloody handprint on the wall of Debbie's bedroom did not match prints belonging to Debbie, Dennis, or Ron, Ada law enforcement did just the opposite of backing off that avenue of investigation.
Instead, they began to focus exclusively on Ron and Dennis.
Neither man had been seen on the night of the murder at the coach light, but without any other suspects in the case, Ada investigators doubled down on building a circumstantial case against the men.
The case was based mostly on Ron's history and reputation in Ada as unpredictable, occasionally violent, and at times mentally unstable, as well as allegations from more jailhouse informants saying that Ron had had a dream about Debbie's murder.
The police continued to focus on Dennis based on their conviction that the crime had been committed by more than one person.
In December of 1983, Detective Smith's case against Ron was suddenly strengthened when a customer who had been at the Coach Light on the night before Debbie's murder came forward and told police they had seen Ron at the nightclub that night, just hours before Debbie would be killed.
But it wouldn't be until May 1st, 1986, four and a half years after Debbie's murder, that Ada police got the information they felt they needed to clear the way for an arrest and conviction in the homicide case that had slowly poisoned the once safe and tight-knit little town of Ada, Oklahoma.
That was when Ada's district attorney, Bill Peterson, persuaded Debbie's mother, Peggy Stilwell, to allow police to dig up Debbie's body and reexamine her handprint to see if maybe it did match the bloody print that police found on her wall.
If investigators could somehow prove that the bloody print on Debbie's bedroom wall actually did belong to Debbie, then police would no longer have to find a suspect whose print matched that one on the wall.
And sure enough, after taking prints from the hand of a four-year-old corpse, the same agent who had earlier declared that the print on the wall did not match Debbie's prints, now revised his report to say that it was inconclusive whose print was on the wall.
That shadow of a doubt was all police needed.
Combined with a hair analysis showing that some of the head hairs found at Debbie's apartment bore a microscopic resemblance to samples provided by Ron and Dennis, Detective Smith and District Attorney Bill Peterson were sure they had solved the case.
One week later, on May 8th, 1986, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were arrested and charged with first-degree murder and the death of Debbie Carter.
For Debbie's family and many other residents of Ada, Ron's arrest came as a relief.
Ever since he was first questioned by police back in early 1983, Ron's mental health had deteriorated.
His mood swings were more extreme, his behavior had become even more erratic and at times violent. and he had spent all four of those years since Debbie's murder in and out of jail on charges ranging from forging a check worth $300 to violating parole to public intoxication.
Meanwhile, the long wait for justice had just about destroyed Debbie's mother, Peggy, who had begun to drink heavily and spend hours and hours sitting near her oldest daughter's grave in nearby Rosedale Cemetery.
And so, in April of 1988, both Ron and Dennis were convicted in separate trials of Debbie's murder, and the town of Ada breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Dennis was sentenced to life in prison, and Ron was sentenced to death.
The actual date of Ron's execution was set for September 27, 1994.
Ron and his court-appointed attorney would have six years to file appeals.
Finally, after more than six years, Debbie's family could begin to heal, and Debbie, now buried for a second time, could finally be left in peace.
As the spring of 1988 blossomed in Ada, the town of 15,000 residents could sleep easier knowing that Debbie's killers were safely behind bars.
But all that would change six years later on September 22, 1994.
Exactly five days before Ron Williamson was scheduled to die by lethal injection, a federal appeals judge shocked Ada law enforcement by ordering a stay of execution.
The ruling was based on an appeal by Ron's lawyer outlining violations of Ron's constitutional rights during his 1987 trial.
But even though that same judge would eventually grant Ron's request for a new trial, the tip that wound up cracking the case of Debbie Carter's rape and murder wide open would have nothing to do with legal arguments about police work.
In early 1999, while Dennis was still serving a life sentence and Ron was still in prison awaiting his new trial, Ada's district attorney, Bill Peterson, received a phone call with news so stunning it would place Ada at ground zero of a national media blitz. that would reverberate throughout the town and the Oklahoma judicial system for decades to come.
Based on that new information and follow-up work by local investigators and agents from the Oklahoma State Department of Investigation, here is a reconstruction of what really happened to Debbie Carter on the night of December 7th and in the early morning hours of Wednesday, December 8th, 1982.
It was a slow night at the Coach Light nightclub, and 21-year-old part-time waitress, Debbie Carter, was grateful that her boss had let her go off the clock.
Now she looked around the table at her group of friends, which included Gina, a CoachLite regular who had asked Debbie to take off her work apron and join them for a couple of beers.
On her way over to Gina's table an hour earlier, Debbie had done her usual inventory of CoachLite customers.
She'd waitressed at enough bars that it was second nature now to read the room for any signs of trouble from difficult or rowdy patrons.
Town bad boy Ron Williamson was not there, and it had been weeks since his friend, Dennis Fritz, had stopped by.
Ron was eight years older than Debbie was, and all she really knew about him and his friend was that they liked to play guitar and that Ron had once been a very popular and promising kid who went on to play minor league baseball for the New York Yankees before an injury had ended his career.
Debbie was glad Ron wasn't at the coach light.
You served him a couple of drinks and he could get loud and aggressive, and she'd heard that at least one woman back in 1978 had accused him of rape.
Although Debbie had also heard that those charges were eventually dismissed.
But there was still one person at the coach light that night that Debbie wished wasn't there.
She'd felt his eyes following her when she crossed the room serving drinks, and again when she had walked over to Gina's table.
He'd even come over and asked Debbie to dance.
She had agreed, you know, they'd gone to school together and they had known each other for years, but when he'd gotten so persistent out there on the dance floor, pressing in way too close to her, she'd actually had to push him away and leave him standing out there alone.
When the coach light closed early at 12 20 a.m. and Debbie had declined Gina's offer to go to Gina's place for one more drink, there her creepy dance partner was again.
This time, he was insisting on walking her to her car out in the parking lot.
Debbie had told Mike, the bouncer that night, that this was one of her high school classmates who actually kind of scared her.
And when this classmate stood outside of her car and tried to talk to her through her car window, Debbie was glad to see Mike kind of slow down on his way to his own car to make sure Debbie was okay.
Seeing her chance, Debbie waved at Mike and then rolled up her car window, turned on her car engine, and drove out of the parking lot, once again leaving her old high school classmate, her creepy dance partner, standing there all alone.
Getting dumped like that did not sit well with Debbie's killer, but he knew where Debbie lived and he'd made up his mind to drop by her place later that night.
A few hours later, Debbie's killer was walking the last few blocks of the way to Debbie's new apartment on East 8th Street.
He was relieved to see a light on in the rooms above the garage.
And a few minutes later, he had walked up the set of wooden stairs to the small landing outside of Debbie's front door.
When Debbie's face appeared in the small glass window, her killer took a step back and put on his most reassuring smile.
He could see Debbie did not look happy to see him, but he made the most of her few seconds of hesitation calling to her through the closed door that he just wanted to say hello. was a cold night, please just let him inside for a few minutes.
And just as he had hoped, Debbie did exactly that.
Except that Debbie's killer did not leave after a few minutes.
And when Debbie picked up the phone and called Gina and asked Gina to drive over and get Debbie and take her to Gina's house, it was all Debbie's killer could do.
First, to interrupt the conversation before Debbie gave Gina his name, and then to persuade Debbie to call Gina back and say that everything with Debbie was okay after all.
But the whole episode with the phone and Debbie's earlier refusal to have sex with him, which is what he wanted and what he'd come there for, made Debbie's killer very angry.
Instead of leaving, which is what he'd just promised Debbie he would do, he waited until Debbie had turned away from him to show him to the door before grabbing her from behind and spinning her back around to face him.
When the medical examiner conducted an autopsy on Debbie's body two days later at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of December 9th, the catalog of wounds and injuries she had suffered, all inflicted before her actual death, told the story of the violent struggle between Debbie and her killer in the early morning hours of December 8th.
Over the course of the assault, Debbie would be beaten, stripped, and raped.
In trying to fight off her attacker, Debbie would sustain bruises, scrapes, and small cuts on her arms, hands, face, under her chin, and on the back of her head, along with bruises and bite marks inside her mouth and on her tongue.
At some point, Debbie's attacker would shove a bloody washcloth down her throat and there were traces of shampoo as well as ketchup left on her back and buttocks.
In addition to the electrical cord that Debbie's father would see wrapped around his daughter's neck, Charlie would also see the beautiful leather belt that Debbie's mother had given Debbie for her 21st birthday, a belt that had now been used to strangle their oldest daughter.
The medical examiner would confirm asphyxiation, lack of oxygen, was the ultimate cause of Debbie's death.
After the killer had squeezed the last breath of air out of his victim, he sat straddling Debbie's body for a few moments so he could catch his breath.
Then he pushed himself back onto his feet and collected and adjusted his clothing before turning his attention to Debbie's apartment.
According to an expert in crime scene reconstruction, Debbie's killer would have spent a substantial amount of time staging the crime scene to make it look like the attack had been the work of more than one person.
And Debbie's killer would also use the messages he wrote on Debbie's back and chest, as well as on the walls and kitchen table in her apartment, to divert police attention to two other men, Duke Graham and Jim Smith, who were already known to Ada law enforcement.
Once he was satisfied with his work, Debbie's killer took a final look around, then stepped to the door of Debbie's ruined apartment.
Before leaving, he carefully broke the glass window in the center of the door so there were bits of glass both inside the apartment as well as outside on the landing.
Pulling the unlocked door closed behind him, the killer walked down the wooden stairway out into the cold Oklahoma night air. later that day debbie's killer would go to the ada police station along with the dozens of other men in town and he would tell police that he did see debbie the night before at the coach light but he had no idea what happened to her and unlike the 44 other men who had come to the ada police station over the next days and hours and weeks debbie's killer managed to go to the police station but slip away without giving his fingerprints and without submitting samples of his saliva and hair He would also change his statement one year later and tell police that on the night of December 7th, he had seen Ron Williamson at the coach light and that when the killer had walked Debbie out to her car just after the coach light closed at 1230 a.m. on December 8th, Debbie had confided to him that she was afraid of Ron.
Later still, at Ron's trial in 1988, Debbie's killer would be the star witness whose testimony to that effect would help put both Ron and Dennis behind bars, Ron facing the death penalty and Dennis facing life in prison.
It wouldn't be until April of 1999, 11 years after Ron and Dennis were convicted, that advances in forensic science and the real killer's own criminal history would finally catch up with him.
Because even as Ron Williamson was filing the legal appeals that would result in a stay of execution just five days before he was scheduled to die, and the granting of a new trial, Dennis Fritz had been working tirelessly to get a new analysis done of all the DNA evidence that had been collected at the scene of Debbie's murder back in 1982.
And by early 1999, Dennis was finally successful.
And on January 26th and 27th, new tests conducted by Laboratory Corporation of America showed that none of the semen samples collected at the crime scene and from Debbie's body matched samples given by Ron and Dennis.
Later, tests on the 17 hair samples that had also been collected at the crime scene, including one strand with a hair follicle still attached, also excluded Ron and Dennis as Debbie's killer.
Meanwhile, even though Debbie's killer had literally gotten away with murder on December 8, 1982, by 1987, he was behind bars serving a 40-year sentence for robbery, aggravated assault, and kidnapping.
And in 1995, the state of Oklahoma began taking blood samples from every one of its prison inmates, analyzing DNA from those samples, and entering the DNA results in a brand new DNA bank.
With recent advances in forensic science, law enforcement would run DNA evidence collected from crime scenes through that DNA data bank to see if any inmates were connected to unsolved crimes.
And in 1999, not only would the Laboratory Corporation of America run DNA tests that would clear Ron and Dennis of any involvement in Debbie's murder, they also ran tests against the Oklahoma Prison DNA Data Bank that would identify Debbie's real killer.
When Ada law enforcement were informed about the results of those tests, not only would Ron and Dennis be set free, but District Attorney Bill Peterson would have to prepare for a new murder trial and build a case against his own former star witness who had helped wrongfully convict Ron and Dennis 11 years earlier.
But before police could charge their new suspect in the 1982 murder of Debbie Carter, this case took one more unbelievable twist.
Around noon on the day that Ron and Dennis finally walked out of prison as free men and drew their first breath of cool and fresh Oklahoma spring air, Debbie's killer quietly slipped away from his prison work detail in the town of Purcell, 50 miles north of Ada.
Pulling off his prison work shirt, Debbie's old school classmate, Glenn Gore, the same Glenn Gore who had been the first to go to Ada police and give them his testimony and say, oh my goodness, I can't believe this happened to Debbie, who would do this to her.
That Glenn Gore melted into the nearby woods close to the ditch he had been cleaning.
And when police arrived at the Lexington prison where he was serving his 40 year sentence, they found that Glenn had escaped.
Six days later, Glenn turned himself in on condition that his return to prison would not be handled by Ada Law Enforcement.
In the days and weeks that followed the release of Ron and Dennis, Detective Smith and District Attorney Bill Peterson would be completely discredited in the local, state, and national press for their mishandling of Debbie's murder investigation.
It would take two trials, but on June 24, 2006, 45-year-old Glenn Gore would be convicted of first-degree murder in the 1982 death of then-21-year-old Deborah Carter, and he would be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Ron Williamson never recovered from his ordeal in prison and on death row.
Although he and Dennis both received an undisclosed amount of money in damages for their wrongful conviction, Ron's mental and physical health just kept getting worse.
After giving most of his money away, Ron died in a nursing home in December 2004.
He was only 51 years old. Dennis Fritz would return to Kansas City where he would go back to teaching school and living with his daughter, but in 2016 he would suffer a debilitating head injury in a car accident.
Detective Dennis Smith would die of a sudden unexpected heart attack in June of 2006, just weeks after being called to testify in Glen Gore's murder trial.
In 2014, Debbie's mother, Peggy Stilwell, would write a letter to Glenn Gore begging him to tell her why he killed her daughter.
Unfortunately, Glenn never wrote back. Thanks to author John Grisham, whose 2006 non-fiction account of the story, The Innocent Man, was an invaluable source of information in creating this episode.
Please see our source list for links to other related material.
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