Hi, Crime Junkies.
I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt.
And today's story is about two deaths in one family, a mother and her son.
And on paper, both died by suicide.
But their daughter and sister Robin Altman, had this nagging feeling for decades that something just didn't add up.
And that feeling builds when an old friend of her brother's tells her some things that Robin has never heard before.
And it leads her on an investigation of her own.
Because what if these weren't suicides at all, but murders staged to look like suicides?
And if that's true, who would want both her brother and and her mother dead.
This is the story of Stephen Altman and Marianne Hayes.
In 2013, 51-year-old Robin Altman is recovering from surgery at her home in Charleston, South Carolina.
Laid up in bed and kind of going a little stir crazy, she starts poking around on Ancestrycom just to like pass the time.
And she's curious because...
There is a lot about her family's history that has never sat right with her.
Her brother, Stephen, took his own life unexpectedly back in 1984 when he was just 21.
And then her mom, Marianne, died by suicide 12 years later in 1996.
And both deaths just never made sense to her.
I mean, few suicides do make sense to those closest to the people who are left behind.
But little things made her suspicious that maybe one or both of them could have been murdered.
But she'd never known what to do with those suspicions.
I mean, honestly, she still didn't know what to even do now as she's poking around the Internet.
Because, like, truthfully, she doesn't know what she's looking for on Ancestry.com.
Yeah, I was going to say, what would...
Yeah, not the place that I would think to go for like the whys or the clues to a murder.
But whatever it was that pulled her there, whatever little voice was in the back of her head, it knew something.
Because when she starts typing in her family members' names to the search bar, what comes up surprises her.
It's an entry for her brother and her mom.
But they're in a family tree made by a woman named Rachel Kunin.
Now, Robin actually knows this woman.
Rachel went to high school with her brother, Stephen.
But she also knows that they're not related.
So, curious why she would have made this thing, she reaches out to Rachel, like...
Hey, long time no talk.
Why'd you do this weird thing?
And Rachel responds pretty quickly.
And she tells Robin that she was really close to Stephen.
She actually had a big crush on him when he was a teenager.
And so she put his name on her tree because she wanted to make sure there was some kind of record of him online.
And then she just added Marianne to the tree, too.
Which is it's a little odd and Robin was a bit confused but like, nothing about this seems malicious or sinister.
I don't know, maybe the same little nagging thing that brought Robin to this site brought Rachel there as well.
Because it turns out that these two women needed to find each other.
And I don't know if there would have been any other way.
Now the two of them end up connecting and when they get to chatting, the conversation is circling a lot around her brother and his death.
Really how Robin was blindsided by it because he didn't seem to be experiencing suicidal thoughts from what she knew.
He'd been making plans for the future.
He was excited about a date that he had the very next day after he died.
And that is when Rachel begins to unload.
She, her sister, and her mom, who Stephen was close with, all thought his death was suspicious too.
Rachel actually tells her the night before Stephen died, he drove past her house.
A bunch of their friends were like together hanging out and he told them that he was just going to run this errand for his stepdad and then he was going to come back in an hour.
But then he just never returned.
Next thing she heard, he was found dead.
And that detail stops Robin in her tracks.
Because that would have been one of the last times someone saw her brother before he died.
And she never knew that he was going to run an errand for their stepdad.
She just knew that at 715 the next morning her brother was found hanging by his neck from a crane hoist at their stepdad's workshop in Chicago.
Now, their stepdad, Don, hadn't been there when Stephen was found.
So everyone just assumed that Stephen had picked that place.
I don't know, maybe so his family wouldn't have to find him.
I mean Stephen like, worked at the shop from time to time, so it wasn't odd for him to be there, or anything like that.
But Don had never said anything in all those years about Stephen running an errand for him the night before.
Yeah, so that would make this, like, brand new information that never came out for, like, decades?
Yes.
And listen, him running an errand for Dawn might not even have really been what he was like doing.
Like who knows what he's telling his friends or what he was like really going to do.
I mean, I think the part that really sticks out to Robin is just the fact that the very night that Stephen like right before he dies, he's telling someone he's going to be right back.
He's giving every indication in the hours leading up to his death that he wasn't planning to kill himself.
He was planning on coming back.
Now Rachel went on to tell Robin that her mom had such a weird feeling about this whole thing that she actually called the Chicago Police Department urging them to investigate.
She'd been a sheriff's deputy before, so she hoped that they would maybe give a little weight to her suggestion.
But according to Rachel's sister Becky, their response, like the Chicago police's response, was something to the effect of like please stop calling us.
Yeah.
Now, this obviously isn't proof of anything.
But whatever tiny suspicion she had planted deep inside of her being Robin, it grew larger that day.
And this gave her the push she needed.
Because that same year, 2013, she filed a FOIA request with Chicago PD for her brother's records.
And you know what?
While she's at it, she submits one with Norfield PD for her mom's case, too.
Now, when the response comes back for Stephen's case, she's a little shocked.
All Robin receives is this short letter from Chicago PD saying they searched for the records and they don't have anything.
Which doesn't seem right.
Like she knows that they didn't do a big investigation.
I mean, police never so much as called her or her mom for an interview.
I mean, they never asked like any questions.
And they basically ruled it a suicide without talking to anyone in the family.
That's weird, right?
Well, I mean they talked to Don, because he ended up showing up that morning to work and then he found police over at his workshop.
But it seems like that is the only person that police talked to, apart from maybe like a couple of employees there.
And we have no idea what those employees said either because, like I said.
No documents.
No documents, right.
But even suicides, though, should have some sort of record.
Yeah, but there's just nothing.
There is nothing in Stephen's case.
The one that she was getting the most suspicious of.
But it turns out it was actually her mother's death that was really going to unlock the mystery.
Because in the same year, 2013, her FOIA for Mary Ann's file is approved.
And it is the total opposite of Stephen's case.
There is a treasure trove of documents that paint a picture of her mother's death that is completely different from the story she has been living with for the last 17 years.
The police reports, Robin had in front of her, included a handwritten statement from her stepdad Don explaining how he'd found his wife dead in their bedroom on September 25th 1996.
Don told police that he had tried calling his wife from work that day, but no one picked up.
And when he got home at his usual time, he found her laying on the floor in just her underwear and a shirt with an extension cord wrapped around her neck like three or four times.
Now, by the time police arrived at the scene, Dawn had already removed the cord from her neck and placed a towel over her legs.
There's no note and strangely, it looks like Marianne was in the middle of trimming her nails when she died.
Because they found and collected some nail clippers, fingernail clippings and one of Marianne's broken fingernails which had blood on it.
That...
Doesn't read suicide to me.
No, not at all.
Especially because it's not like the extension cord was tied to anything.
It was just like wrapped around her neck, like a ligature someone would have held and then tightened around her neck.
And someone must have seen the obviousness of what this really looked like, because Northfield police at least started an investigation.
The reports detail that they collected all of the stuff that I just mentioned, along with the cord which had stains on it, and they took vaginal swabs at Mary Ann's autopsy.
Now those swabs turned up an unknown male profile and the crime lab recommended performing an analysis if DNA from any suspects were collected, which no surprise, based on the later ruling of suicide, it never was.
Now police also questioned Robin, alongside her younger half-brother and sister, who are Marianne's children with Dawn.
And the reports from police recounting those interviews were in the file.
And this is when Robin realized that she was really onto something big, because she said most of what the report about her interview says wasn't true.
It says that Robin told them three major things.
That, I assume, is what like helped shape their suicide theory.
One that her mom had struggled with mental health issues and had been refusing to go get treatment on a regular basis.
Number two, that her mom had threatened suicide before.
It specifically mentions one time when Dawn threatened to divorce her, and it says that she had even been hospitalized for attempting suicide a couple of years earlier.
And the third thing that two weeks before her mom's death Dawn took her and her half siblings to dinner without her mom to tell them that their mom was suicidal.
And Robin couldn't believe what she was reading because none of that is what she said.
Or like part of it is what she said, but it is all taken so out of context.
And then some stuff is just like downright made up.
So, like, yes, her mom had struggled after her brother's suicide.
She felt deep guilt and sadness after Stephen's death and that took a toll on her mental health over the following 12 years.
Yeah, I would imagine.
Naturally.
But she says not only did she tell the police that her mom had been regularly going to mental health treatments for years, she says she told them in no uncertain terms that her mother was not suicidal.
And yes, that dinner where Dawn took her and her younger siblings out did happen.
But there was a key piece from her interview that was missing from the report.
She told us that when Dawn said at dinner that Mary Ann was suicidal, Robin pushed back.
She did not buy it when Dawn was saying all of this.
And she didn't believe it after her mother's death when she was talking to police either.
Now, as for the past attempts at suicide, this is the one that totally blows her away.
Because according to Robin, her mom had not tried to take her own life ever.
There was this one time.
Ten years after Stephen died, this would have been 1994, where Marianne's younger son Brian, walked in on his mom with this bathrobe tie around her neck as if she was choking herself which, to be fair, could be construed as a suicide attempt.
Mm-hmm.
But Robin says that's not really what was going on, because she shared a letter with us that Marianne wrote to Brian after this incident, where she explains that she wasn't trying to harm herself.
She would never leave her children.
She wrote that she just wanted to feel what Stephen was feeling.
And we did reach out to Brian to ask about this, but we haven't heard back as of this recording.
It feels to me like police were just cherry picking facts from interviews to fit their narrative.
From her, definitely.
Yeah.
But I don't even get where the suicide narrative is coming from.
Like she's telling police her mom wasn't suicidal.
The scene isn't reading a suicide.
Did they just pull this out of thin air?
Not exactly.
I don't know what conclusions they came to on their own.
But there was someone pushing a suicide narrative, and that was Don.
In his own written police statement he said that the couple had been talking about divorce, but Marianne didn't want one.
He's the one who told them about her threatening suicide over it.
And that seems to have bled into Robin's statement, even though she never said that.
And in a later conversation with police, when they asked him if he had had sex with his wife recently, he said he didn't recall 100 percent, but more than likely they did, which could explain away anything they may have found when testing the vaginal swabs.
So I believe everything they learned from him played a huge role in how this case shook out.
Maybe they assumed that if they found any DNA, it just would have been her husband's.
And he's saying she was suicidal because he was going to leave her.
She's been a mess since after her son committed suicide.
What a dark, sad family.
So they never ended up testing the evidence that they collected.
And the M.E. ruled Marianne's death suicide by self-strangulation.
And with that, the case closed.
But according to Robin, Don, who seems to be the basis for their ruling, should not be considered the most reliable narrator when it comes to their relationship.
The couple had been together for 28 years, but it sounds like their marriage was always pretty rocky.
Robin says that Dawn was controlling and verbally and emotionally abusive.
And she said that yeah, they had talked about divorce, like Dawn said, but her mom was actually happy about it.
According to a letter that Marianne had written, her son, Brian Dawn, offered to buy her out of their house in Northfield and then give her a condo that they had in Florida.
And in the year leading up to her death, she spent months fixing that condo up.
She was jazzed and ready for a new chapter.
But just a few months before she died, something happened.
Mary Ann moved back into their Northfield home where Don was.
But according to Robin, it's not like they were back together.
They were still separated.
They slept in different bedrooms.
And Robin says that Don took back the condo offer.
Listen, put all the divorce stuff aside.
It could be considered like a he said, she said, right?
And people might argue that a mother might not share the realities of her marriage with her daughter, even if her daughter was grown and in her 30s at that time.
Fine, whatever.
There was something else that always bothered Robin about the idea of ruling her mother's death self-strangulation.
Something she even told police back in 1996.
Robin says that sometime in the eight weeks before Marianne's death her mom had tripped and shattered both of her wrists so badly that one wrist required bone grafts.
And she was still healing from that.
That is just eight weeks before.
Yeah.
Shattered.
So in her mind she always felt like it would have been super hard for her mom to even pull the cords tight enough around her neck on her own.
Was that even mentioned in the report or did they leave that out too?
Oh, it was in there.
But officers framed that as just another bad thing in Marianne's life that could have contributed to her suicide.
Like, it's so odd.
But listen, by the time Robin is done reading everything...
She's no longer just suspicious about her mom's death.
She is convinced that her mom's suicide was actually a murder.
So Robin reaches out to Northfield PD in 2018.
And luckily, she finds someone at least willing to listen.
And she lays out everything that doesn't add up.
And she requests that they reopen her mom's case.
I mean, at minimum they should still have the physical evidence that they could test and see what comes of that.
And it seems like, at first, Northfield PD actually does take her seriously.
Nearly 22 years after Mary Ann's death, they decide to reexamine the evidence the vaginal swabs, the broken fingernail and the stains from the cord.
It's all resubmitted to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Lab.
I've been doing this long enough.
I'm honestly kind of still surprised that they had the evidence.
Yeah, same.
Now it takes a little bit of time, but when the results come back there's not like much.
That's new, because even though they tested a lot of things, the cord didn't yield anything.
Now, they did get a DNA sample from underneath Marianne's broken fingernail, which would have been great, but there wasn't enough DNA for profiling on that one.
And then her vaginal swab.
They just got the same unknown male profile.
Like they did the first time, they tested it back in like the 90s.
And if it's Don's, he's just going to say they had sex before she died, even though he's not.
What was it?
100 sure?
Yeah.
I assume that he is the first one that they're going to want to at least test so they can say if he's in or out.
Right.
Because if he's in, complicated, right?
Right.
If he's out, very black and white.
Cut and dry, yeah.
Now.
Is he the person that they go to first?
I don't know.
We have the files that show.
After they get these results, they bring someone in for questioning and they ask them that person to provide a DNA sample.
This person initially said yes, but then they asked to speak with a lawyer.
And when that happened, they end up refusing to give a sample.
Okay, so... Problem is, I can't tell you who the person is because the name is redacted.
Does Robin know who it is?
I mean, so she's seen the redacted file.
She believes she knows who it is.
I'm told by our lawyers I shouldn't say who she thinks because it's not proof.
It's just her opinion.
I've also got an opinion.
There's only so many people it could be, right?
Yeah.
I cannot speculate.
But when this person refuses to cooperate, police don't go looking for anyone else.
I mean, I know that much because the very next sentence in the report is that the case will remain closed.
So are subpoenas not a thing anymore?
Like, what are we doing here?
Yeah, right?
Because clearly they saw it was suspicious.
They reopened.
They test again.
All their tests, like, pretty much confirm it's suspicious.
But they run into, like, one little roadblock.
And it's like, sorry, we tried everything.
I know.
We'll just keep it a suicide, I guess.
It stinks to high heaven.
And Robin is not about to give up.
Every corner she turns, every rock she flips over.
She just keeps finding stuff that's telling her she's on the right track.
So she decides after this to hire an organization called Alliance for Hope International.
That was started by two former prosecutors who are experts in what they call hidden homicides, or homicides staged to look like suicides.
I mean, this one was barely even staged.
Yeah, which is why they're quick to take this case on.
And as they interview Robin about her mom's story and they start reviewing the evidence, the inconsistencies just keep piling up.
So they call in not one, but two different forensic pathologists to do a review.
One of them is Dr Megan Quinn, and it is so black and white to her that she calls the investigation into Mary Ann's death a cataclysmic failure.
She says, quote the cause of this woman's death is ligature strangulation and the manner of death is homicide.
End quote.
And they're going to prove it.
Alliance for Hope brings in another expert, Dr William Smock, whose name probably sounds familiar for some crime junkies.
He's come up in a number of episodes, in a number of different series even.
But in this case, he was asked to review Marianne's autopsy.
He combs through the crime lab reports, the ME's findings, the photos, and he finds a lot of problems.
He points out that self-strangulation is extremely rare in And in the cases that do exist, the ligature has to have some kind of locking mechanism to keep pressure on the neck.
Without that, as the person begins to lose consciousness, their hands fall away.
Blood returns and they wake up.
The cord in Marianne's death did not have any kind of locking device.
The second thing that Dr. Smock finds is that there are two different ligature marks on her neck.
What does that indicate?
Well, it means?
It just means that the cord was placed around her neck tightly enough to choke her two times.
Now someone who's going to try and say oh, this is a suicide, would probably just argue his first thing, right?
Oh, yeah, she lost consciousness, woke up, rewrapped it, and like did it again.
Right.
But by that same, like, logic, she probably would have woken up again.
Right.
It seems more likely to me that someone else wrapped it around her neck twice, either because they had to get their grip again, or maybe she wasn't dead when they thought she was the first time, or Marianne could have been strangled and then the cord was just wrapped around her neck a second time to stage the suicide.
Hmm.
The two prosecutors who run Alliance for Hope also uncover a bunch of other wild stuff, mostly stuff that shows.
If anyone had motive to kill Marianne, it was her husband, Don.
Apparently, Alliance for Hope reviewed a police report, which we have as well, that after Marianne died a friend of hers, Donna Heller, told a detective that over two months before her death Marianne said that she thought Don had been following her.
Ann was going to kill her.
Wait, she told this to them early on?
Yeah, but this just shows up once in the police report.
It doesn't look like anyone followed up on it.
And we reached out to Northfield Police about Mary Ann's case, but they wouldn't comment.
Now, when Alliance for Hope dug in on Don, they found that he stood to gain financially when Mary Ann was out of the picture.
Don got the Northfield home.
He retained partial ownership of the condo.
And Robin claims that because Mary Ann didn't have a will, Don pressured the kids into signing away their portion of their property inheritance from the Northfield home.
And we have documentation of that quick claim that Robin signed.
Now Robin says she's not sure if there was any life insurance that he got, but she knows that she didn't see any insurance money after her mom's death.
And no matter whose idea it was, we know that they might have been separating.
Right.
Which is always a super dangerous time for spouses.
In the end, Alliance for Hope thinks that there was a lot of good reasons to look closely at Don.
He had means, motive, opportunity.
But here's the twist.
They think police should look hard at Don, not just for Marianne's death, but Stephen's as well.
Because they couldn't just ignore Stephen's case when they got into things.
And they identify some weird similarities between his and Marianne's deaths.
First, just like Marianne was telling her friends, she thought someone was following her.
Before her death, Rachel's sister Becky remember her.
She says that right before the time of his death, Stephen was paranoid and he thought that someone was out to get him.
But he didn't say who.
And apparently he told his friends that he was fleeing to Kentucky or even the Caribbean.
And get this.
Stephen also had two ligature marks, one high up on his neck and another below where the rope was found.
Wait, how do they know?
I thought there were no files on Stephen's case.
Well, it took years, but Robin was eventually able to get her hands on a medical report from Stephen's dad.
It was obtained by WGN, this local TV station, and we have it as well.
The report includes photos that show that Stephen's face is actually covered in bruises as well.
And we know that a person's face can show signs of bruising during a hanging, but this was different.
I mean, when I look at these photos, he looks like he was beaten up beforehand.
And I assume he looked fine when Rachel saw him and he said he was going to be right back.
Correct.
No bruises.
So Rachel alleges that he's going to go run this errand for Dawn, right?
So if that's real, what is the errand?
Well, when you dig into Stephen's life, there is a bunch of weird stuff happening around this time.
Becky told us that right before Stephen's death he was going around with this big bag of cocaine and was just like giving it away to friends for free.
Stephen's neighbor told us that he and Stephen used to party together a lot.
And to this day, that was some of, he says, the purest cocaine that he's ever had.
So he was dealing drugs?
Well, this is the thing.
Becky says she's not sure.
Like he wasn't known to be a dealer or anything.
His friends say that he was like crashing on couches.
But somehow he has like thousands of dollars worth of cocaine and is just like giving it away.
Okay, so that's one piece of a very confusing puzzle.
But there's something else interesting that Marianne wrote to Brian in that letter after the bathrobe incident.
She mentions that Stephen wrote bad checks from the business to buy Coke.
Don's business?
Robin thinks that she has to mean Don's business.
It's the only business that they would be talking about.
But she's not 100% convinced that even the bad checks thing is real.
Like, she doesn't know.
But if you combine those two little pieces with the facts that we know from when he died, Stephen goes to run an errand.
It said that he was last seen by co-workers at Don's business alive and well at 5.45 a.m.
And that person told Stephen you know, since it's so late, or technically early in the morning, Stephen may as well just stay there at the business till morning.
But an hour and a half later, around 715 am, another employee found him dead, hanging by his neck.
That employee cut him down.
And when police arrived, Stephen was laying on his back with a nylon rope around his neck.
Don is interviewed by police for both cases.
And you know what he told them about Mary Ann.
But he also said some similar stuff to police about Stephen.
He told them that Stephen had an incident when he was a teenager where he crashed his car into a lamppost in what Don called an attempt at self-destruction.
But Stephen's friend told us that Stephen was drunk and fell asleep at the wheels.
And so it sounds to me like police again are just taking Don's word.
Right.
Now the circumstances around Stephen's death don't feel as black and white as Mary Ann's seem to be.
So, all in all, when all is said and done, it's her case that the Alliance for Hope really focuses on.
Dr Smock writes a letter to the original medical examiner, Dr Kogan, with copies of the original autopsy photos, explaining that this is not consistent with self-strangulation.
He also mentions that he spoke to Marianne's psychiatrist.
And, by the way, she told him that she saw Marianne the day before her death and that she didn't mention suicidal ideation.
But he gets no response.
Dr Smock says Dr Kogan simply returned his materials to him without a single word or comment on the matter.
Excuse me?
Yeah.
Now, he does eventually get a chance to speak with him on the matter.
And Dr Smock said it was obvious that he hadn't even reviewed the photographs and he was unable to explain the second ligature mark.
And we'd love to ask Dr. Kogan about this, but he hasn't returned our requests for comments.
So what now if the original Emmy won't do anything?
Well, so now Alliance for Hope puts together this whole 26-page report saying all of the above.
And in 2021, they submit all of this to the Cook County State's Attorney's Cold Case Unit.
And during a meeting with Northfield Police around that time, the cold case unit expressed concern about the original Emmy's findings.
And then they meet with the chief medical examiner for Cook County to elevate said concerns.
Now, this is someone new.
She wasn't involved in Mary Ann's case when it first happened in 96'.
Whatever meeting they have, it lasts exactly 25 minutes, according to the police file.
And she tells them you know she's reviewed the original Emmy's findings and she will not be changing the manner of death.
And she also claims that after doing her own research, she found a case of documented self-strangulation, but she doesn't actually cite whatever specific case she's talking about or cases
Now, we reached out to both the current chief Emmy and the cold case unit for comment.
But again, we have not heard back.
And so that was it.
What do you mean that's it?
That's it.
I mean, it's shocking.
In spite of all of the evidence Robin pieced together, all of the efforts of Alliance for Hope, all of the phone calls and meetings with Northfield PD and Cook County and the cold case unit and the chief medical examiner.
In spite of everything Robin has done.
Yes.
And in spite of her really dedicating her life to this at this point, to this day, both Marianne Hayes and Stephen Altman's cases remain closed.
Don Hayes has never been charged or convicted with a crime in association with either Stephen or Marianne's death.
And he has been described as cooperative by the police.
Robin is continuing to press for these cases to be reopened.
Stevens is tough because there was no investigation.
But Marianne's is a different story.
Robin believes that there is more than enough evidence to change the manner of death to homicide.
And she is hoping that the DNA under her mom's fingernail can maybe be retested.
To this day, Alliance for Hope uses the case of Mary Ann Hayes to train law enforcement officials on identifying hidden homicides.
They also helped Robin get a bill submitted, Mary Ann's Law that would provide training to law enforcement so that they could be better equipped to identify deaths that have been staged as suicides, especially in cases involving domestic violence.
It's currently pending at the state Senate in Illinois.
Robyn's journey to get justice for her mom and her brother has felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain.
But she also says that there has been hope along the way.
I mean she is grateful to the Alliance for Hope for everything that they've done reanalyzing the evidence in these cases.
And through that organization she's been able to connect with other families who may have loved ones who are victims of hidden homicides too, which is making her feel less alone.
So if you have any information about Mary Ann Hayes' death, you can contact the Northfield Police Department at 847-446-2131.
Or if you know anything about Stephen Altman's death.
You can call the Chicago Police Department at 312-744-2422.
And if there's anything you want to share with us, email tips at audiochuck.com.
Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production.
I think Chuck would approve.
