Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt. And before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to make sure you guys didn't miss what we were up to a couple of weeks ago on the deck.
I'm sure many of you, most of you know by now, the deck is my other weekly podcast where each week I tell you a victim's story that is featured on one of Law Enforcement's Cold Case Playing Card decks.
Every episode we talk to Law Enforcement or Family Members and we're talking about cases that do not get attention anywhere else.
And the podcast is fantastic.
You need to listen if you don't.
All right. Thank you. Thank you.
But one of those cards that I recently did was Dana Chism, the Jack of Diamonds from Washington, DC.
And there was something about Dana's case that I could not let go of.
It was one that I knew. I just felt like listening wasn't going to be enough.
I needed everyone to see it, watch it, hear it.
I needed to reach as many people and as many places as possible.
So for the first time ever, we not only gave you the episode in audio in the deck podcast feed, but you also got a visual as well on YouTube.
And it is amazing. I mean, I've watched you tell victim stories for years now, right?
But like watching this episode on Dana's case, honestly, it was like nothing I've ever seen before.
And her case, oh my God. The case is wild.
The case is wild and the team did amazing.
We wanted to be more than just like a camera on me recording.
It really has like a higher production value.
It feels a little like a documentary.
It was immersive. Yeah, it's a full hour long.
So please, if you haven't watched it yet, go to the Crime Junkie YouTube channel.
You can watch the full episode on Dana's case.
I'm actually going to have a link directly to it in the show notes.
But as you guys know, unfortunately, Dana and her family aren't the only ones out there waiting for justice.
Each week, right here, we tell you guys the stories that are just as important that need your attention to.
And the story I have here for you today is so tragic in many ways because it's about a woman who had already faced death once and one only to have it come for her again.
And it's about how some cases are so stubborn to give us the truth, no matter how hard we may want it.
This is the story of Robin Pope.
I'm going to have to go. It's Saturday, March 2, 2013, when a 911 dispatcher gets a call sometime after 230 in the morning from a man named Wayne Pope because he's starting to get worried about his 51-year-old wife, Robin.
After being married for 20 years, Wayne and Robin have been separated for about a month.
But she had just come by their house, which is perched up right along the Chesapeake Bay in Steven'sville, Maryland.
She was there to collect some of her things and to see their dog Bella.
So in order to give her some space, again, separated, Wayne decides to get lost for a couple of hours while she's there.
But he says that when he got back, he notices Robin's car still in the driveway and Robin in their dog nowhere to be found.
Where you know, yeah, I'd like to report that it's the activity or abnormal activity.
I'd like not be concerned at all.
I'd like to answer up to my house, so there's her.
My wife, she came by the house.
And once she got here, I left her.
Her car is still here. But she has nowhere to be found.
Bulls you were. I had no idea.
According to an article by Hannah Combs, when Queen Anne's County Sheriff's Office arrives at Wayne's house, they take a look inside Robin's car and they find her keys, her purse, her cell phone.
And then there's something else they find of significance.
Robin's medicine. You see, Robin is a breast cancer survivor and she needs to take medication daily, so it's not something that she's just likely going to leave behind, carelessly.
But as Wayne tells investigators about the sequence of events that night, he shares something a little odd.
He says that while he waited for Robin to show up at his house to pick up her stuff, he had dosed off for a little bit until like 11.30 pm.
And this technically would have been just the night before, so this is March 1st.
And he says, when he wakes up, he walks outside.
He sees Robin's car and Robin is in the car sleeping.
Any clue why she's just sleeping in her car?
Did she try to call Wayne at any point?
Maybe just thought she'd like, you know, wait it out until he answered or something?
Well, that's what's weird and honestly, why this case is a challenge?
Because it's not entirely clear during these beginning hours of the investigation how much Wayne shares with investigators upfront.
But we do know that he tells investigators that once he sees Robin in her car, he knocks on the window, tells Robin that Bella was inside and whatever else she needs to grab is there.
And then he heads out and goes to his parents' house so she could just do her thing in peace without him there.
Could they tell if she was able to grab whatever she had been stopping by for?
I think they could tell, but I don't think that she got the stuff she was there for.
Because according to an episode of Breaking Homicide from 2019, when they enter the Pope's home, Sheriff deputies find no sign of a struggle, they see some of Robin's mail left on the table, which was one of the things that she planned to pick up.
So that could mean she might not have even made it inside.
And this is leaving deputies scratching their heads a little bit, because it's as if Robin and Bella just vanished into thin air.
And by the way, despite the cutesy name, Bella isn't something like T.
Cup Chihuahua. Bella is a great dain.
Oh, so like a small horse.
Yeah, which makes matters even weirder.
What time did Wayne say he got back from his parents house?
Well, he just went there to like swap his car for his truck, which I guess was there, and he needed his truck for the next day.
So he was only there for a little bit.
Then he said he headed over to a 7-11 for a late night cup of coffee.
And ultimately, he got home some two hours later.
And then calls at 2.30. Yeah, so according to Wayne, between the time he got home, because again, he wakes up, sees her, at like 11.30, then like two hours later, 12.31.30.
And that hour difference, he says, was him trying to figure out what was going on, trying to look for Robin.
He said he reached out to their 19 year old daughter, Rachel, reached out to some of Robin's friends.
He also went to Robin's best friend's house, Debbie, to see if she had heard from her.
And when he did, Debbie said that she had gotten a text from Robin at about 6.45 that evening, saying she was at a job interview, but that was the last she had heard from her.
And so that was when Wayne decided to go to the condo, where Robin was staying out at the time.
She's not there either.
So when he finally goes home, that's when he called 911.
Got it. For at least part of Saturday, detectives talk with Robin's friends and family the same way Wayne had, trying to gather as much information as they can from them, hopefully, stuff that will lead to locating her.
They also put Robin into the NCIC database as a missing person.
But it isn't until one of Wayne's neighbors makes a discovery early afternoon Saturday that investigators get their first lead.
Only two peers down from Wayne's residence, Bella's body is found washed up near their neighbor's peer along the Chesapeake Bay.
Is there any indication of how she died?
I mean, it can't just be coincidence, right?
I mean, nothing seems obvious at first glance.
I mean, they're going to have to do basically a dog autopsy to find out, but it is an ominous sign for sure.
Because with the discovery of Bella, a alarm bells are now going off for the Sheriff's Office.
And the next day, on March 3rd, they bring Wayne in for a formal interview.
And again, they've obviously talked to him before this, but this is like the real sit down.
Now, according to that episode of Breaking Homicide, when investigators interrogate him, they really grill him on what he thinks happened on the night he last saw Robin.
Was she stuck in here or else?
Something happened. Maybe she's playing with the dog, I don't know.
And we think she's playing with the dog near the water, and they go and sell it.
That's a thought I had. Maybe Bella fell in the water and run it once together.
I don't know. You think Robin fell in the water and I went fall in the water, but if Bella fell in water, she's going to go after her right.
Absolutely. Yeah, I think she's a strong enough slow.
She thinks she would have probably been able to stay.
I don't know if that was a hard advantage.
I mean, I'm just trying to come up with any scenario that we're not going to get.
It's the only investigating scenario.
Your wife betrayed you.
And there's a lot of bad feelings.
What somebody does that to you.
What's that? You kill it like an asshole.
That's right. That is not true.
Are you sure? I am positive.
That's not the only problem.
You just went to me right now and tell me you didn't have anything to do with your wife, just right now.
I didn't know that we were doing my wife's death.
And I had nothing to do with her anymore.
I'm not into that. But what did he mean by Robin betrayed him?
Well, the reason Robin and Wayne had been separated for a few weeks leading up to Robin's disappearance is because Robin was having an affair.
Wayne had discovered the affair recently after finding some text messages on Robin's phone.
And what really concerns investigators is not just this quote unquote betrayal, but how he acted after he found out.
Wayne says that he was so upset over it that at one point, he literally figured out where Robin's boyfriend lived, went over to his house with a gun in tow to confront him, but the guy's fiance was there and she started screaming and so Wayne left.
Did anything happen or did they press any charges against Wayne?
No. And before you start thinking that maybe the boyfriend or the fiance had something to do with Robin's disappearance, according to an episode of Crime Watch Daily from 2018, detectives definitively follow up on this and they're both ruled out pretty quickly.
But anyways, after that happened, that's when Robin was out of there.
Like she's not gonna stick around and live with Wayne.
Girl packed up her, moved out of the house and into that condo.
But the catch was she couldn't bring Bella because the condo didn't allow dogs.
So investigators are thinking like if Wayne is willing to roll up to someone's house with a gun over this affair, then else is he capable of?
Precisely. Do we have any idea what Robin and Wayne's dynamic was before he found out about the affair?
We do. We actually have some really good insight directly from someone who witnessed their relationship up close and personal because it was actually one of Robin's daughters, Rachel, who reached out to me and asked me to cover her mom's case.
She was 19 when all of this happened and she lived with both of her parents.
And she just said that in general, their relationship was good until it wasn't, basically.
Robin's oldest daughter, Priscilla, who was from a previous marriage, said that in the beginning things were great.
When her parents met, Wayne was this fun-loving guy, but things began to change over time.
According to Robin's friends, Wayne had this kind of dark side.
He would sometimes tell Robin that she looked ugly or gross or that dress made her look fat.
And if Wayne saw Robin having too much fun at a party, he would leave and tell her to basically find her own way home, add in some possessiveness and jealousy and this is what Robin was dealing with daily.
And it doesn't sound like Wayne treated Robin's dog Bella much better.
I mean, he would often talk about how he hated the dog, red flag, red flag, red flag.
And are you ready for this?
Once he even threw Bella in the pool, claiming he wanted to see if she could swim, even though he knew she was terrified of water.
No, I know. Nope, nope, nope.
I'm sorry, absolutely not.
He very clearly, I think, used Bella as something like a tool against Robin, basically.
Like this party is so f**ked up, but just the day before Robin disappeared, Wayne told Robin that he had Bella put down.
And what? Yeah, obviously he know that didn't happen, but he said it wasn't until she started crying that he told her the truth.
So he's like using this as a tool to upset her, to manipulate her because he knew how much Robin loved Bella.
Exactly. And speaking of Bella, when her autopsy results come back, it shows something interesting.
Though there is water in her lungs, that isn't ultimately her cause of death.
Her cause of death was hypothermia.
So they think that she went into the water alive.
And one of the reasons that they think this is because there is some bruising on her paws, indicating that she might have made it back to shore, but couldn't actually climb out because of these large rocks that line the shore.
Now, to go back to Wayne, during their interview with him, investigators didn't just ask him the hard-hitting questions.
They also decide to check him for injuries or any kind of indicators of some kind of recent physical altercation.
Because I mean, again, Bella alone, she's got bruises on her paws, we know she's a big dog.
So, I mean, if he tried to throw her in the water, like we know he had in the past, maybe there would be some kind of mark on him.
We're not even thinking about Robin at this point.
And when you know it, there are some marks on him.
Based on the pictures I've seen, on Wayne's side, the torso and rib area, there is a large bruise and some scratch marks.
And what does he say happen?
Like, how does he explain that?
Yeah, so in that episode of Breaking Homicide, he tells police that after his neighbor found Bella's body, the two of them went back together and he received those scratches, those bruises, injuries, whatever, while he was leaning over the pier, trying to get her body out of the water.
But there's a problem with that story because according to that neighbor, Wayne never did that.
So, Wayne's just straight up lying to the police.
Someone is lying or misremembering, but who knows?
But the neighbor says something else interesting.
They say that Wayne's reaction to finding Bella was, I don't even say bad, it was non-existent.
I don't trust anyone who doesn't like animals, but I don't think like him not having a reaction is that weird, because we know he was kind of a piece of when it came to how he treated Bella.
Yeah, like he clearly, like, she didn't mean anything to him, he's not treating her right?
No love lost there, right.
And that's fair, maybe with Bella, but then aside, they don't feel like he's even got the right response or demeanor when it comes to his wife.
Like, by this time, investigators have pulled in the Maryland State Police for assistance.
So, while literally everyone from locals to family and friends, and now the state police are looking for Robin, Wayne doesn't actually participate in a single one of the searches or any of the efforts to find her.
I mean, I get she cheated on him, he probably wasn't in like the best place with Robin before she went missing, but they were married for 20 years, they have a daughter together.
That's what I didn't say, they have a family.
Like, this is a person that's at least important to your life in a whole 20 years big picture way.
Yeah, like, you go out and look for that person, even if you aren't exactly happy with them at that moment.
And especially you got Bella showing up, I mean, everyone is concerned, even her daughter Priscilla who lived in California at the time flew in to help look for her mom.
So to your point, and this is pointed out in crime weekly too, like, at least do it for the kids.
Right. But also, I mean, who knows the type of advice Wayne's getting?
I mean, his estranged wife has just gone missing.
He's naturally gonna be under a microscope.
Maybe he is told by a lawyer, by someone to like lay low.
Maybe people just literally didn't want him around.
I don't know. And listen, police are not just looking at Wayne right now.
They're also exploring different theories, like maybe this was an accident.
I mean, if Chuck fell into the water and couldn't get him set out, you better believe my, jumping right in after him, no questions asked.
Right. Knowing how much Rob and love Bella, like that's not a far-fetched idea, especially since apparently the currents there were super strong in the bay, and the tide was so strong, the night that she went missing.
Okay, but it still doesn't explain how Bella ended up in the water to begin with.
I mean, you said she was not a fan of water.
Right. It doesn't. And the other thing that I have heard is that it wasn't common for them to even walk down by the pier.
And I heard this from Rachel.
Rachel said her mom barely ever went out there when she lived at that home.
So to think of them going out there at 11.30 at night, like, does it make a whole lot of sense?
Maybe Bella got out and took off, but she's like a 10 or 11 year old dain.
Right. Depending on whatever source you read, like, I don't see that either.
My poor Chuckleberry fin you guys.
He's 13 now and like the arthritis in his knees and stuff, like he can't run anywhere.
And he's a smaller dog than a dain.
He is. I mean, either way, one of the problems Robyn's family has with that theory, the theory that somehow Bella went in and she went in after her, there are convinced that Robyn would have been able to swim out, even if she had gone in after Bella.
They say she is a gym rat.
She goes all the time, like she's just super strong in general.
But you've got this hundred pound dog who doesn't like water, who's probably freaking out because they're in the water.
And you have that current.
We're talking about that super, super strong.
Like, gym rat, great. But Chuck could take me down.
Like again, he's an old man.
And Robyn's even smaller than I am.
I mean, she's, you know, five to, I'm five to three quarters.
But she's tiny. She's a little over a hundred pounds.
The problem I have with it.
So it's not the fact that like she couldn't swim out.
Maybe she did, maybe she didn't, whatever.
Even if Bella took her down accidentally, even if the current got her, wouldn't you think that she would be found with Bella?
Like if Bella's body is washing up, and she went in to get Bella, where is she?
Well, and Bella's washing up nearby.
Mm-hmm. But there is no sign of Robin.
At least not until March 10th, when members of the local community do an extensive ground search.
And right around the same area where Bella's body is found, they find something washed up along the shoreline, the woman's blouse.
The blouse they found is believed to have been worn by Robin the night she disappeared.
And while there is still nobody, the discovery of this blouse is just a terrible reminder to Robin's family and to all of those looking for her, that this is potentially heading for a tragic ending.
Are there any signs of any blood or tears on the blouse?
Maybe to get there as a fight or a struggle of any kind?
No blood, really no damage to it at all.
And I try to figure out what happens to this blouse from there, but there's nothing about it being tested or what after it's found.
Like, I mean, to be fair, it's clearly been in water for some time.
But I think more than anything, it's just like a sign.
Like it's pointing detectives to the idea that something happened here.
Maybe we need to keep focusing on the water.
We're looking in the right place, basically.
And of course, they're still talking with Wayne, who happens to be changing up his story of exactly what he was up to before Robin showed up at his house on March 1st.
So Wayne originally told police that earlier in the evening of March 1st, he was having dinner with friends in anapolis.
And he said that when he was done, he had brought his daughter, Rachel, some food at her work.
And according to that crime weekly podcast, police did confirm with Wayne's friends that he did in fact have dinner with them sometime between 5-5-30, nothing shady about that.
But it's the second part of his story that Wayne gets himself in trouble with.
Because when they talk to his daughter, Rachel, she tells police that her dad never brought food to her at work.
Like, not just that night, but this was the thing he never did.
And it doesn't even matter because Rachel said she wasn't even working that night.
And she confirmed that with us as well.
I'm so confused as to why Wayne would lie about this, like, little detail.
It's one that they could easily debunk, but it's also hours before he even saw Robin later at the house.
So the lie doesn't do anything?
Well, I thought the same thing, but it sounds like Rachel might have worked at the mall.
And do you remember? So I had said that Robin had texted her friend Debbie about this job interview that day.
Well, that job interview was in anapolis, and she also texted Wayne about this.
And it sounds like the interview happened around the mall over drinks with a manager from the place that she was looking to get the job at.
But there are some conflicting reports that she said she had an interview first and then had a drink with someone after.
No one in Robin's circle really knows which is true.
But the point is she was out with someone, and we know the manager at the very least was a man, considering what we know about Wayne and his jealousy.
Did investigators ever speak to the sky?
Ah, it's not 100% clear in what I've been able to read, but whoever Robin was having drinks with, it sounds like police later ruled him out, so I assume they spoke with them.
Uh-huh. So the police think Wayne was following her, trying to see who she was with, and since his daughter worked at the mall, he'd be like, oh, yeah.
I'll justify being at the mall by saying I was there for Rachel and dinner.
Yeah, there's a chance.
And a pretty good chance, because detectives say that based on Wayne's cell data, he stayed around the mall long after his dinner ended.
And according to Crimewatch Daily, using cell phone records and easy pass and tag readers, police kind of lay out a rough timeline of Robin's movements the night of March 1st.
Police say that around 9.30 pm, she leaves Annapolis and makes her way toward Wayne's house, or their old house together.
And then a little after 10, she texts Wayne that she's going to stop by the house to get her male see the dog.
A few minutes later, around 10, 12 pm, Robin and Wayne speak on the phone.
About what? Well, when police ask him about it, Wayne says that they just talked about the fact that she was coming over, stuff she'd do from the house.
Was this what they talked about?
We don't know. I mean, we only have Wayne's side.
Right. But he said it was nothing like weird.
And then around 10.30, Robin finally arrives at Wayne's house where things are quiet until just shy of 11.
When some kind of cell phone glitch happens, and a single text where Robin is asking to get her male gets repeated like three times all at once.
And it doesn't sound suspicious, especially considering the location of Wayne's house where cell service is or can be spotty.
So I think that's just a glitch.
That's what they write it off as.
But then Robin's final text of the night comes in.
And it sounds like she's getting a little annoyed about her male now because according to crime weekly, that one reads quote, Wayne, I would like to get my male while I'm here.
Now it's assumed line, line to get my male is supposed to actually be like.
It was just a typo. Okay.
And all of this is happening while Wayne is apparently inside sleeping.
Sleeping. Right. That's what he said.
And I mean, let's just entertain this idea.
In the past, Robin had come to the house on other occasions and Wayne would make her just wait there.
I mean, to literally just be like a d- like exert his dominance.
And police believed that she couldn't get into the house because he had changed the lock.
So it wouldn't be out of character necessarily.
And maybe Robin was just used to it.
She knew to stick around until he chilled out or decided to let her in.
Like, I'd sit and wait for Chuck like you better believe.
Did Wayne ever respond to her final text?
No. So all investigators have his Wayne's version of events.
He says he woke up, came outside, found her asleep in the car, and then he left for his parents house to swap his car for his truck.
But here's the other hiccup.
When police talk with Wayne's parents, they don't recall him being at their house that night.
Now, to be fair, Wayne said he didn't go inside.
I mean, it's super late.
No need to bother his parents, who, by the way, also had company over at the time.
But police have this sneaking suspicion that maybe Wayne's movements from 11.30 p.m.
on are all just a ploy to help establish an alibi, which maybe initially he figured he could accomplish by just seeing his parents.
But then after seeing that they had people over, police think that maybe he decides against it.
So as Derek Levasser kind of points out in breaking homicide, he thinks that maybe he improvises by going to that 7-11 for the cup of coffee so that he's captured on surveillance cameras.
And what time has he seen on a security footage?
So this is what's interesting.
He is on that footage at 107 a.m.
He told police he got home at what time again?
So this is kind of where it falls apart.
He gets home, he says two hours after he last saw Robin.
He said he woke her up in the car at 11.30.
So that would put him home sometime around 130, which like, fine, you're at 7.11 at 107.
Maybe you even got home earlier, call it 115.
Right, we're talking about a rounding error.
Sure. But that wouldn't be feasible for him to be home at 115.
And definitely not at 130 because Robyn's best friend Debbie says that Wayne arrived at her house asking if she knew where Robin was between 115 and 130.
So if Wayne is at 7.11 at 107 and he arrives at Debbie's between 115 and 130, when does he have time to go home to discover Robyn's missing, look for her and then drive to Debbie's?
Right, like before he went to Debbie's, he said he did all that.
He's calling people's whatever.
All right, I was going to say like it's one thing to be like stopping by your house, but he's stopping by seeing the car.
Looking for her, calling people, doing quite a bit in those like eight minutes of transition between 7.11 and Debbie's house.
It feels like he went straight to Debbie's house.
Yeah. Like, did you go home and see she's missing?
And listen, the timelines can be tricky.
People's memories of events are skewed.
We talked about this especially in times of trauma.
You have a person missing.
But the thinking is, maybe he didn't go home because maybe he didn't need to take time to look for Robyn because he already knew what had happened to her.
Maybe. And maybe everything he did that night, contacting her friends, texting her daughter, going to his parents, the 7.11 stop, then showing up at Debbie's could all be attempts to establish some kind of paper trail of alibis.
In reality, Robyn's final text was sent around 11, right?
Two hours before Wayne was caught on camera at that 7.11.
Yeah. A lot can happen between 11 p.m.
and 2.00 a.m. Truly. And the mystery of what happened in those hours deepens.
When on March 23rd, a man fishing on a pier with his daughter, finds Robyn Pope floating near the rocky shore.
Based on the decomposition of Robyn's body, they believed that she had been in the water for the entire time she was missing.
And because of this, along with the fact that there's no sign of blunt force trauma or signs that she had been stabbed or shot, the medical examiner isn't able to determine a cause or manner of death.
Now, it does sound like water is found in her lungs, which could indicate that she went into the water alive, but it's also pointed out that after a body has been in the water that long, water can seep into the lungs, so it's a little unclear.
Now, when she's found, she's wearing a pair of jeans, and then there's a piece of t-shirt wrapped around her, like caught on her hand, and they believe she was wearing the t-shirt underneath that blouse that they found previously.
And the t-shirt, by that point, had just been shredded up from the water and the rocks, but something odd stands out to investigators.
She also had on her high heels.
How did her shoes stay on this whole time?
I feel like that's unheard of.
They thought it was weird too, and why they pointed it out, but it sounds like there was some kind of elastic that helped keep them on.
The crime weekly podcast also mentions that her feet would have swelled up to help keep them on, but I think a lot of people find it weird that her shoes are still on, but her blouse was off.
Because remember, the blouse wasn't shredded or anything like the t-shirt.
Right, and I don't know how big or loose this blouse was.
I mean, if she was struggling in the water, maybe it was weighing her down, and she took it off then.
I just keep thinking, and again, I don't know, maybe you take off your blouse, and then maybe you just get swept over the waves.
I feel like I would take my heels off, but maybe not.
I don't know, maybe it's all happening too fast.
How far is she found from where Bella was found?
Not super far, it's just like three quarters of a mile down shore.
I mean, if her body has been in the water this whole time, it's kind of hard to understand why it took so long to find her, or for her to wash up.
In that breaking homicide episode, they have an oceanographer who says that if Robyn's sunk, it would take time for the gases from decomposition to force her body up.
So maybe that's why it took her body longer to go to the surface.
But unfortunately, again, because she was in there so long, we don't learn a whole lot.
Like, her autopsy doesn't give detectives what they needed.
And we're never going to get anything new from it, even if there's new testing that becomes available, because as Robyn's next of kin, her body was released to Wayne, and literally within days, he had her cremate it.
So for police, I mean, that was a devastating blow, because it takes away any chance for future re-examination, or like I said, testing advances.
And they can't even question Wayne about it all, because he has officially loyered up, and he's no longer talking to them.
At one point, I know the state's attorney for Queen Anne's county took a crack and asked Wayne to submit to a polygraph exam.
And surprisingly, he did agree, but on the day the exam was set to take place, Wayne shows up, gets cold feet, and then backs out.
Now in June of 2014, the police formally announced Wayne as a person of interest, but announcing that doesn't actually propel the case forward in any way.
And here's the thing, I mean, when you look at this case, there are only so many ways that this could have gone down.
And really only two people who know what happened, Robyn and Wayne, by crime-weekly and Breaking Homicide, they kind of go through the couple of theories that are out there.
I mean, the only plausible ones in my mind, which there's the accident theory.
So maybe Bella falls in, Robyn jumps in after her.
This is basically what Wayne had theorized to.
Right. Police. And again, I can see if you find Bella, like it's kind of a logical conclusion, but I go back to like what Rachel said about her mom, that she's like, she doesn't walk down there.
Like it doesn't, she didn't spend time down there.
Like I said, Bella's old children.
It seems like an unlikely place for them to be for this scenario to even kick off.
Yeah. And again, she's just, I don't know if she didn't want to be in the house.
Like in my mind, if you're there at 1130, he's gone.
So why not just kind of hang out in the house with the dog?
I don't know. The other theory is that she was murdered.
And in that scenario, one of the only things that is the most plausible is that Wayne was somehow involved, that he put her into the water and then also put Bella into either to concoct a story or again, we know he doesn't like Bella.
But there's nothing we have to prove that.
And then there's like maybe a weird combination of the two where potentially like the most plausible in my mind, where it's like, so again, we know Wayne has a history of throwing Bella into the water.
We know Wayne has a history of using Bella against Robin.
So did they get into some kind of altercation?
Is he trying to mess with her?
What if he threw Bella into the water?
And Robin jumped in to rescue her and she drowns.
Like maybe he walked away, doesn't even know that happened.
Maybe he saw what was happening, didn't come to her aid.
Maybe he knew that the current was too rough and he wasn't going to go in because he knew what would happen to him.
But at the end of the day, he's responsible because he started it, if you will, by throwing the dog in the water in the first place.
Right. And so his intention wasn't murder, but like, you know, then he makes up this story.
Because the thing I can't get over is like, where did he get that big bruise and the scratches?
Right? Like to be on your side like that, that does seem more like it could be from Bella than from Robin.
Right. But I mean, at the end of the day, all these theories are just theories for a reason.
Correct. And I mean, that's all they may ever be.
Though I do want to know another theory that has been thrown around that caused me to spiral a little bit, but I couldn't find anything to substantiate it.
So Robin's other daughter, the one from the previous merit for Stella, she pointed out in the Crime Watch Daily episode that her father, whose name is Dean, that would have been Robin's ex-husband.
Apparently he also was found in the Chesapeake Bay, just three months before Robin was found there.
What? Yeah, I know. Like, the details are super scarce on this.
All we know is that Dean was found with a large bruise on his head, but police ruled it an accident.
Though, Priscilla feels like the case was closed way too quickly.
And she points out that her father, Dean, had stayed in touch with Robin and hoped that they would get back together at some point.
Again, though, this is ruled as an accident.
It doesn't seem like anyone else associated with Robin or her case, including Rachel.
Doesn't seem like they think there is a connection between Dean and Robin.
But I thought it was at least important enough to mention.
Oh, it's bad enough that Priscilla lost two parents in such a short period of time, but then to lose them under similar and strange circumstances.
I mean, I can see why she's drawing the connection.
Like, it would, it would look like me.
Yeah. The last update on this case is from March of 2024 on the 11th anniversary of Robin's death.
According to a WMDT article by Javari Bernat, law enforcement still seeks the public's help to craft this case.
And Wayne's name appears nowhere in this article.
Do the police not consider him a person of interest anymore?
It's unclear, but there is no indication they've cleared him over the years.
And it seems that they believe Robin's death is most likely not an accident.
Because the article talks about how they think that a suspect is still out there, whether that's Wayne or not remains to be seen.
And it's important to point out that Wayne has never been charged in connection to Robin's death.
And in the past, his lawyer has claimed he is innocent.
Robin's case is truly at a standstill, and with no physical evidence to test, the only way investigators can definitively get resolution is by someone with information coming forward.
Any type of info, even something you don't think is important could end up being useful.
Because if there is a fourth theory, if this wasn't Wayne, then there's an unknown suspect out there.
And if this were some kind of tragic accident, then police would appear to be chasing a ghost.
Robin's family and friends deserve real answers to what happened to her.
And without them, Robin's without the one thing she deserves the most.
To rest in peace. So if you have any information on the death of Robin Pope in March of 2013, please contact the Maryland State Police at 410-822-3101.
Or if you want to remain anonymous, you can contact the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line at 1-866-756-2587.
There's also an anonymous line directly to the Queen Anne's County Sheriff's Office at 410-758-6666.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkipodcast.com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkipodcast.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
Crimejunkipodcast.com Crimejunkipodcast.com is an audio-check production.
So what do you think Chuck, do you approve?
