Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. On a cold winter night in 1999, a man drove down a dark street towards his house in a small Iowa town.
As he was driving, suddenly he saw something glowing in his headlights and he slammed on the brakes.
He got out of his car and there in the lights, he saw a dog standing all by herself and she was making this soft squeaking sound like she was scared.
The man slowly approached her, doing his best to keep her calm as he got close.
He knew everybody who lived in this neighborhood, and he had never seen this dog before.
He finally reached the dog, and she seemed very scared, and he pet her a couple of times and, you know, still tried to keep her very calm.
And as he looked her over, she didn't seem hurt, and she also didn't have any tags on her.
The man looked up and noticed he was actually right near his house.
And so he decided he would just lead the dog to his house and figure out what to do with her after that.
So he coaxed her and she followed him right along and they went inside his home.
And over the next few weeks, the man would do his best to try to locate her owner, not realizing that this dog had not just wandered off.
In reality, this dog would become the key that police desperately needed to solve a gruesome crime.
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.
So if that's of interest to you, please sign up for as many telemarketing calls as you possibly can, but don't use your phone number.
Use the follow button's phone number. Okay, let's get into today's story.
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Service is not available in all states. On January 20th, 1999, 28-year-old John Helble sat at a table in his trailer home in the small town of North Liberty, Iowa, staring down at a gun.
But this was not just any gun. This was a classic old revolver from the 1950s that had seen better days, and so John was intent on restoring it to its former glory.
So he picked up a gunsmith screwdriver, which is a small screwdriver with a hollow ground tip, and slowly began taking pieces of the revolver apart.
Then once he had done that, he began cleaning the pieces and removing rust that had collected over the years.
John knew restoring a gun like this, at least restoring it the right way, would be slow, painstaking work.
And that's actually one of the reasons he loved doing it so much.
John had a collection of over 40 classic and customized guns.
And when he was working on them, it felt like the rest of the world just disappeared.
Somebody could be in the room with him and he'd forget they were even there.
That's how focused he'd become on restoration projects.
And staying focused had not always been easy for John.
Not long after he had graduated high school and enrolled in college, about 10 years earlier, John had gotten involved with drugs, both as a user and also as a dealer.
He was frenetic and all over the place, and so drugs had just caused him a lot of problems.
He'd had run-ins with the police, and he'd struggled to hold down a job.
But over the last couple of years, he'd really tried to make some changes in his life.
And that's where restoring and customizing guns came in.
It wasn't really about selling them for money.
Instead, it was about having an interest in something that he was really good at and also that helped him stay calm.
It was also something he could do entirely by himself.
And John loved being on his own, to the point that some people called him a recluse.
He had a small circle of friends and family, but he was known to go days at a time without seeing or calling any of them.
Back at the table in his trailer, John looked down at the work that he'd already done on this revolver, and he smiled.
It would still take him several more hours, maybe even another full day, to get the gun looking as good as new, but he could already see a huge difference.
Still, he figured it was time to stop for now.
Because he heard his dog, a three-year-old black-and-white Siberian Husky mix named Keisha, barking from the front room of the trailer.
That meant she wanted food. And as far as John was concerned, whatever Keisha wanted, she got.
John stood up, carefully put the pieces of the gun back in its case, and went to the sink to wash his hands.
Then he poured some dog food into a bowl on the floor, and Keisha came running and John crouched down, scratching behind her ears and talking to her like she was his best friend.
Because in reality, she was. In fact, everyone who knew John said he treated Keisha like she was his child.
She went with him almost everywhere he went when he left the house, and there were long stretches of time when Keisha was actually the only other living thing that John interacted with.
As Keisha ate the food in her bowl, John walked over to a small refrigerator and grabbed a slice of cold pizza.
He ripped off a small piece of it, and immediately Keisha turned from her bowl, jumped on top of him, and devoured the human food that John always gave her as an extra treat.
When Keisha was done eating the pizza, John walked to a small room at the back of his trailer.
This is where he kept his gun collection and several different gun boxes.
He opened up a polished wooden box, looking for a spot to put his current project when it was done.
And as soon as he did, his face just lit up.
Because in this box, he saw his prized possession.
A Colt .45 Gold Cup semi-automatic pistol.
This was a high-end weapon, known for its accuracy and very unique design.
And John had customized it further with gold screws and gold flourishes, and he was very proud of the work he had done.
Other than his dog and his mom, John said this gun was maybe the most important thing to him in the whole world.
John closed the gun box, excited he'd be adding a new piece to the collection soon.
Later that night, after taking Keisha for a walk, John sat down at his recliner in the cramped front room of the trailer, and Keisha immediately curled up at his feet.
John turned on the TV, and it didn't take long before he had drifted off to sleep.
And a few minutes later, he was already sleeping so deeply that he didn't hear the sound of footsteps creaking slowly across the trailer floor.
On February 23rd, 1999, so 34 days after John had fallen asleep watching TV, Detective Douglas Vinoy of the Johnson County Sheriff's Department got a call when he was at his desk.
Detective Vinoy heard a woman's voice on the other end, and he could tell right away that she was quite upset.
Vinoy asked her how he could help, and the woman told him that she was concerned because she hadn't seen or heard from her son, John Helbel, in over a month.
This took Detective Benoit by surprise. He assumed John's mom was calling to file a missing persons report, but people usually did that when they hadn't heard from a loved one in maybe a few days at the most.
So we asked John's mom why she had waited so long to call, and she told him that her son liked keeping to himself, and in fact, it really wasn't unusual for him to go a week, even two at a time, without talking to any of his friends or family.
But now, it had been over a month, and she'd called him several times, and she hadn't heard back.
But she told the detective that she actually did not want to file a missing persons report.
Instead, she was hoping the police would meet her at John's trailer to basically go check on him and make sure he was okay.
She just had sort of a sinking feeling about this and didn't want to go in there alone.
I mean, she figured her son was probably fine, but she just wanted to know for sure, and she just wanted some other people there with her.
Vinoy said that was fine. Then he got the address of the trailer and told her he would meet her there.
After that, Vinoy hung up and headed out to his car with the deputy.
And as he began to drive, the detective thought to himself that no matter what John's mom had said about her son very likely being fine, well, if she's asked the police to join her at the trailer to go inside and take a look, that actually indicates that she must be really worried.
A few minutes later, Detective Vinoy and the deputy drove through North Liberty's downtown, and it looked like something from another time, like the shops and restaurants lining the main road had been there forever.
Vinoy drove a couple more miles past a stretch of farmland and soon arrived at the Holiday Mobile Home Park that had over 200 trailer homes spread out across acres of land.
Vinoy headed down a dirt road through the park that had snow piled up on either side, and after a few minutes, he and the deputy arrived at John's trailer.
And right away, they saw John's mom, along with a mobile home park employee, waiting for them.
They also saw a blue van parked on the dirt drive in front of the trailer.
The officers stepped outside of the car.
Vinoy thought it was cold, but nothing too bad.
It was sort of a typical Iowa winter day, with temperatures a bit over 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
John's mom introduced herself and told the detective that she and this employee had actually already tried opening the door, but they found it was locked.
And also, nobody was responding from the inside.
Vinoy told them, okay, you know, stand back so I can break the door down.
But John's mom asked him not to do that.
If John really was fine, she didn't want to damage his trailer for nothing.
At that point, the employee pointed the officers to a window on John's trailer that would be large enough for them to climb through.
Vinoy put on his gloves and checked the window, and he found it was locked, but it was pretty flimsy, and so he managed to pull it open without doing any damage and without much trouble.
But as soon as the window was open, Vinoy instantly threw his hands up over his nose and mouth to block the horrific smell coming from the inside.
He stepped back and caught his breath and then told John's mom not to come over there.
Then Vinoy and the deputy kind of braced themselves and went forward and climbed in through the window.
Once they got inside, the smell got ten times worse, and they also immediately saw something strange in the front room of the trailer.
There, in the recliner, something large had been completely covered by a blanket.
Benoit held his breath and slowly approached the recliner.
He reached out and pulled down the blanket, and right away he kind of flinched.
Benoit was an experienced cop, but he'd never seen anything like this.
Sitting upright in the chair was the body of a dead man that had already clearly begun to decompose.
However, as gruesome as it was, the man did not appear to have any injuries.
It sort of looked like he had fallen asleep and just never woken up again.
But as Vinoy walked around the recliner and leaned in closer to the body to get a better look, it quickly became clear that this man had not died of natural causes because Vinoy noticed two small bullet wounds.
The detective and the deputy left the recliner and made their way through the few other rooms of the trailer.
There was a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small room at the back.
But after searching those areas, they didn't really find anything out of the ordinary.
The home had not been ransacked, and there was no sign of forced entry or a struggle of any kind.
The only thing Vinoy thought was odd was that there were dog bowls for food and water on the kitchen floor, but no dog, dead or alive.
Vinoy called into the sheriff's department and arranged for a county forensics team to come out.
He said he had no idea how long the victim had been dead for, but based on the smell and the decomposition of the body, he figured it had been at least a few weeks.
After that, Vinoy prepared himself for what he considered to be the worst part of his job.
He was pretty sure the dead man on the recliner was John Helbel, but now he needed John's mother to ID the body.
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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Minutes later, John's mother stood in the trailer, fighting back tears.
She said that was definitely her son in the recliner.
She kept her composure, and in a quiet voice, she told Detective Vinoy that she wanted to do whatever she could to help the police.
She said outright that John had not always been perfect.
He'd struggled with drugs and had run-ins with the law, but he was a good person, and he always tried to help the people he loved.
Vinoy told her he would do everything that he could to bring her and her son justice.
He also told her that he knew how difficult it was for her to be here in this trailer right now.
But he needed to know if there was anything in the trailer that looked sort of out of place to her.
And John's mom didn't hesitate. She said John's dog, Keisha, was missing, and that he loved that dog possibly more than anything else in the world.
The deputy took notes on Keisha's breed and appearance.
Then Detective Inouye walked with John's mom through the trailer and asked if there was anything else that stood out.
John's mom went through the kitchen and into the small back room.
And after looking around for a moment, she turned to Benoit and said, something else was off here.
Somebody had robbed John of his entire gun collection, which was very valuable.
Benoit asked if there was a chance that John had maybe just sold all of his guns since the last time she had seen him.
But John's mom shook her head. She said even if he had sold the collection, there was one gun he would never get rid of, his customized Colt .45 Gold Cup pistol.
She told Vinoy that John would sometimes say if anybody wanted that gun, they would have to pry it from his cold, dead hands.
Later that day, the county forensics team arrived and began collecting blood samples and fingerprints from the trailer.
While that was going on, Detective Vinoy and the deputy searched John's blue van out front, but the only thing they found inside was a dog leash.
The detective didn't know if this meant that John had taken Keisha somewhere before he'd gotten killed, or if he simply just kept a leash in his van.
Then, Vinoy and the deputy made their way around the mobile home park and began speaking to John's closest neighbors.
But none of them remembered hearing gunshots or anything out of the ordinary over the past few weeks, and they all basically said the same thing.
John was a nice guy, but he mostly kept to himself.
And so at this point, Detective Vinoy didn't really have much to go on to start this investigation in earnest.
He basically needed to wait for the forensics report or the autopsy to get something concrete.
And so while he waited for those things, he just hoped that Keisha would turn up.
On Friday, February 26th, so three days after John's body was discovered, Keisha had still not shown up.
However, Vinoy did now have a copy of the autopsy and the forensics report.
Unfortunately, though, neither of them gave him very much to go on.
The autopsy concluded that John had been killed with a .22 caliber pistol, and Vinoy knew that a lot of .22s don't make very much noise, so that could explain why none of the neighbors heard anything.
And then because of the level of decomposition of John's body, the medical examiner couldn't determine an exact date of death.
But he believed John had been dead for over a month.
And beyond the blood samples from John's wounds and small amounts of blood on the recliner, the forensics team had not found much else.
So, Vinoy had a crime scene with very little concrete evidence, where the door had been locked, yet there were no signs of struggle or forced entry, and John's beloved dog and his gun collection were missing.
All of this led Vinoy to believe that John had likely been killed by someone he was close with, close enough that he would welcome them into his trailer and who would have known about the gun collection.
However, everyone the detective had spoken to said John basically didn't have friends.
He was a loner. And so at this point, Benoit knew this was not going to be an easy case.
And also, North Liberty, Iowa was a small town with a population of just over 5,000 people.
And so a murder in such a small town like that could quickly lead to massive panic in the community, which meant there was gonna be a lot of pressure to find a way to solve this difficult case very quickly.
But as Vinoy sat there getting more and more frustrated thinking about this case, a deputy rushed over to his desk, and this young officer had a really excited look on his face.
He told Detective Vinoy that he was almost positive he had just found John's dog, Keisha.
Vinoy didn't waste any time. He got the location of the dog from the deputy, and then he called John's mother and asked her to go meet him at that location.
Vinoy headed out to his car and sped across town to a house in a small neighborhood just a few miles from John's trailer.
John's mom arrived soon after, and the two of them went to meet with the man who lived in the house.
As soon as they stepped inside, an excited black and white Siberian Husky mix rushed over and greeted John's mom.
John's mom pet the dog and got tears in her eyes and said, yes, this was definitely Keisha.
Detective Vinoy asked the man how he had come to find Keisha, and the man told him he actually found Keisha over a month ago.
It was after midnight on January 21st. He said he remembered this specific date because the whole thing was just so odd.
He said he had come home that night and saw the dog standing in the middle of the street right near his house.
The dog didn't have any tags, and the man didn't recognize her from the neighborhood.
But what had really stood out to him was that the dog, despite being out in the elements, was totally clean, like immaculately clean.
This seemed really weird to Benoit, too.
I mean, it was winter in Iowa. The ground was covered in snow, and the dirt roads outside of town, like where he was describing finding her, were soaking wet and muddy.
If Keisha had gotten out of her trailer and wandered a few miles to this location, her fur almost certainly would have been a mess.
Now, this story to Vinoy did seem sort of far-fetched, but at the same time, he really had no reason to doubt this guy.
I mean, he seemed like he was being very truthful and forthcoming about how this dog came to be in his possession.
And so for now, Vinoy decided he would just simply believe him and he would operate on what this guy was saying.
Which meant if this is really how Keisha was found, well then either John's killer or an accomplice of the killer must have driven Keisha here and left her right here on the street.
Otherwise, how else could she be so clean?
When Vinoy got back to the sheriff's station later that day, he called the crime lab and told them they had located Keisha.
He also said he thought the dog had been driven from John's trailer and dumped sometime early on January 21st.
So he now believed John had most likely been killed maybe late on the 20th.
The forensics officer he spoke to said that the dog being driven somewhere was actually great news because a dog's nose print is like a human fingerprint.
Each one is unique. So if Vinoy could nail down a suspect, a forensics team could search their car to see if there was any trace of Keisha's nose print on the windows or the interior.
Now, Detective Vinoy felt like finding Keisha was a huge deal for this case, but it was no good if he couldn't track down any viable suspects.
I mean, the first thing he did is he contacted the man who had found Keisha, and they searched his car to see if, you know, maybe there were prints inside of his car that suggested he was lying about how he found Keisha.
But no, it was totally clean, the guy was incredibly truthful, basically made himself fully available to the investigation, and so he was quickly ruled out.
And beyond him, there was nobody in the neighborhood where Keisha had been found that had seen anybody drop her off or had any recollection of seeing a car that looked out of place.
It was like nobody knew anything. Keisha had just suddenly appeared.
So, Benoit decided to reach out again to everybody he'd already spoken to, John's mom and his neighbors.
Benoit believed that even if John was a recluse, somebody had to know at least one friend of his.
And this time, one of John's neighbors did remember something important.
The man told Vinoy that he had seen a truck at John's trailer over a month earlier, right around the last time he had seen John.
The man was sure that that truck belonged to one of John's few friends, a guy in his 20s named Mike Harding.
And after a quick search through police criminal records, Detective Vinoy discovered that just like John, Mike had a history of using and selling drugs.
At the end of February, so a few days after police had found John's dog Keisha, Detective Vinoy sat down with Mike Harding in a small interview room at the sheriff's station.
Going into this, Vinoy had no idea what to expect.
He knew that Mike had at one point gotten mixed up with drugs and had some trouble with the law in the past, but it really wasn't anything major.
It wasn't like Mike was some big-time felon dealer or something.
Also, Vinoy had no idea what kind of person someone as reclusive as John would consider a friend.
Like, what's Mike gonna be like here? But right away, Detective Benoit felt like Mike was very outgoing and that he wanted to help.
Mike said that he and John were close friends, even if they didn't hang out a whole lot.
He openly admitted that yes, they both had had issues with drugs and made mistakes in the past.
But he said John was a really good guy and he couldn't imagine why anybody would want to hurt him.
Vinoy asked Mike if he thought it was possible that John might have fallen deeper into the drug scene than Mike maybe realized.
Was it possible he'd gotten in trouble with some dangerous people?
But Mike said there was no way. Maybe John still smoked weed, but he was not connected to major drug dealers or anything crazy like that.
Vinoy thought Mike came off like he was telling the truth, but he'd been a cop long enough to know that some people were just good liars.
So he asked if Mike would be willing to take a polygraph test.
And Mike didn't hesitate. He said if that would help, he'd happily do it.
Before Vinoy wrapped up their interview and took Mike to go take this polygraph test, he said to Mike that he needed to know if there was anybody else he could think of that John might have been hanging out with around the time he was killed back in January.
Mike thought about it for a second, and then he looked up and said, yeah, there were definitely two people the police needed to speak to.
A man named Andy Rich, who'd been John's friend for years, and Andy's girlfriend, Sharon Snyder.
Mike said the two of them lived far away in Wyoming now, but they had come to visit John back in January, and Mike said he had not seen or heard from John since the two of them had left.
In early March, so just a few days after his interview with Mike, Detective Vinoy left the small town of Northern Liberty, Iowa and flew about a thousand miles away to another small town called Gray Bull, Wyoming.
And after meeting with local police there, Vinoy caught a huge break.
Local police were already in the process of securing a search warrant for Andy and his girlfriend's residence connected to an unrelated drug investigation.
So after they got that warrant, which was very quick, Vinoy simply accompanied them when they executed the search on the residence.
And as soon as the door opened up, Vinoy got a look at Andy and Sharon, and the first thing he noticed was that they seemed a lot older than John.
John was 28, and Andy and Sharon appeared to at least be in their 40s.
He could also tell that they were totally panicked by the police being there.
As the search was going on, Vinoy pulled Andy and Sharon aside and began speaking to them.
And during this conversation, Andy would tell Vinoy that, yes, he and Sharon had driven to Iowa back in January, and that he, Andy, had visited John on his own after dropping Sharon off at another friend's house in a nearby town.
Andy said that he and his buddy John just hung out for a little while, and then Andy had left, picked up Sharon, and then the two of them had driven back to Wyoming together.
Sharon would reiterate the same story. But the whole time they were talking, what Vinoy really noticed about this couple is that they both seemed incredibly nervous.
They couldn't stay still, and they kept darting their eyes away from Vinoy, kind of all around the house, like they were looking for something.
And when police finished up their search, Vinoy understood why the couple was so freaked out. because police found inside of their residence a substantial stash of methamphetamine and marijuana.
And, more importantly to Vinoy, they also found bullets for a .22 caliber pistol, the same caliber gun used to murder John.
The local police began to deal with the drugs they had found.
They also bagged up those bullets, so they could run some more tests on them to determine if they were the same kind of .22 caliber rounds that had killed John.
Detective Vinoy did not have enough evidence yet to try to extradite Andy and Sharon back to Iowa, but he now considered the couple his primary suspects.
And just as the police were finishing up inside of the house, a forensics tech came inside and called to Vinoy to come outside and look at something.
Vinoy followed the tech outside to Andy and Sharon's car that was parked right out in front, and the tech led him to one of the back windows and pointed to a faint smudge.
Vinoy asked what he was looking at, and the tech said that this smudge was clearly a dog's nose print.
Vinoy got excited. As strange as it seemed, he felt like this dog's nose print could be the piece of evidence that would solve this case.
It could be Keisha's nose print. The tech said he would pull the print and test it to see if it really was Keisha's.
And Vinoy felt positive that if the prints were a match, he could prove that either Andy, Sharon, or both of them had driven Keisha on the night of the murder and dropped her off where she was found.
And Vinoy was sure whoever had driven Keisha on that night had also killed John.
The following day, Detective Vinoy was back in Iowa, feeling confident that his trip to Wyoming would soon pay off in a huge way.
But over the next several weeks, as test results started to come in from the crime lab in Wyoming, any excitement he had felt had quickly disappeared.
Because the bullets that had been found at Andy and Sharon's place did not match the type of bullets that had killed John.
They were the same caliber, but a totally different design.
On top of that, the dog's nose print taken from Andy and Sharon's car window was not as complete as they had hoped, so the lab couldn't say one way or the other if it actually matched Keisha's nose.
And then also, John's friend Mike had passed his polygraph test.
Vinoy knew polygraphs were by no means 100% accurate, but all of a sudden, it was like Vinoy was back to having no clear-cut evidence that pointed to anyone.
Vinoy continued to try to track down anybody else who might have been close to John or who could at least point him in the right direction, but what everybody had already said about John proved to be true.
He just wasn't that close to very many people.
While Vinoy had hoped John's beloved dog Keisha might be the key to solving this case, he now felt like he had to try going in a totally new direction here.
So he decided to focus on the one thing other than Keisha and his mother that everybody said John truly loved.
And that was his customized Colt 45 Gold Cup pistol.
Since John had added his own specific touches to this gun, like the gold screws and the gold accents, Vinoy hoped that would make it easier to track it down because it was very unique.
And so Vinoy reached out to numerous law enforcement agencies, local, state, and federal, along with gun stores and pawn shops all across the country in the hope that somebody would have spotted this prized gun.
But this extensive search came up empty.
So, Vinoy spent several weeks just kind of retracing his steps all over again.
He went back to the crime scene and looked around there, and he also re-interviewed all of his main suspects.
He spoke to the guy who had found Keisha, he spoke to Mike in Iowa, and he even returned to Wyoming to speak to Andy and Sharon again.
But nothing new developed. Soon, months had passed by without any more evidence, leads, or suspects materializing.
And since Detective Vinoy worked in a very small department and he was one of the very few detectives, his time and focus were quickly needed for other investigations.
But Vinoy never fully abandoned John's case, and he continued his search for the gold-accented gun.
But it just no longer could be his only priority.
And over time, despite his efforts, Vinoy began to worry that John's murder might never be solved.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. For the first time, my show, Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted for a special episode.
A Redacted Medical Mystery uncovers how routine surgery leads to classified government operations.
Listen now on the Medical Mysteries or Redacted feeds, or search A Redacted Medical Mystery wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Mr. Balan. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, my show, Mr. Balan's Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted, Declassified Mysteries with Luke LaManna, to tell a story so complex it required our combined storytelling styles.
This special episode is called A Redacted Medical Mystery.
In it, unexplained symptoms after a routine surgery quickly unravel into something much darker, leading straight to classified government operations hidden for decades.
To listen and uncover the truth alongside us, head to either the Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries or Redacted show pages right now.
Or search for A Redacted Medical Mystery in the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're fascinated by unexplained medical stories, well, stick around on Medical Mysteries.
Every week, we dive deep into cases that will leave you questioning everything you know about the human body.
And if government conspiracies are more your style, Redacted is your go-to for stories that unravel secrets never meant to see the light of day.
Remember, you can listen to both shows early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus.
Fast forward to late December of 2000, almost two years after John's murder.
Detective Vinoy sat at his desk working a totally different case.
Then Vinoy's phone rang. And when he answered, he heard another detective from another city on the line.
At first, Vinoy didn't think much of this.
Detectives from different jurisdictions often helped each other if they had cases that might be connected.
But as this detective spoke, Vinoy almost couldn't believe what he was hearing.
Because the other detective said he had just busted somebody for illegally selling guns, and this gun trafficker over the course of their interview had brought up pretty adamantly that they knew about this missing gold Colt .45 gun.
Now, this detective didn't really know what they were talking about, but they had looked into it and discovered that Detective Vinoy was in the middle of looking into a murder case that involved a missing gold Colt .45.
So he was calling about it. The two detectives spoke for a bit longer about this gun, and then after Vinoy hung up, he felt the type of rush he only felt when he knew he was close to solving a case.
The following day, Detective Benoit and the detective who had called him about this gun sat across from the gun trafficker inside of a cramped interview room in a small police station.
Above them, a fluorescent light buzzed and cast a sickly glow over everything.
The room just felt tense, and the gun trafficker kept looking back and forth like somebody outside might be watching or listening.
But Vinoy and this other detective did their best to keep things as calm as they could, and they explained that any information that led to a murder getting solved would be greatly appreciated by the police and the courts.
The gun trafficker nodded. The message was clear.
Help the detectives with this murder case and possibly avoid serious jail time for their gun trafficking charges.
So, eventually, the gun trafficker gave Vinoy an exact address to visit if he wanted to find this gold Colt .45.
And when Vinoy heard this address, he just stared across the table in disbelief.
This investigation had started in a little town in Iowa and had already taken him to Wyoming more than once.
And now, Detective Vinoy had to pack his bags again and fly down to Dallas, Texas.
A few days later, Vinoy and several members of the Dallas Police Department went to the address Vinoy had gotten from the gun trafficker.
And there, they met with the man who had supposedly purchased this gold Colt .45 gun.
The man was cooperative, but he quickly told them that he actually didn't have the gun anymore.
He said he had sold it months ago and had no idea where it was now.
After hearing this, Benoit felt totally defeated, like this trip had been a complete waste of time.
But then the man said he actually still had the box that the gold gun had been in when he had bought it.
It was a really nice box, so he had kept it for himself.
The man went inside and got this box, and when he handed it over, Benoit looked inside and saw there was a handwritten note.
And on this note was a description of the gun that had been sold, and it included all the customizations that had been made to it.
And that description absolutely matched John's precious Colt .45.
Vinoy thought maybe he could use a handwriting expert to try to prove John had written this note and that the gun that had been sold to this man in Texas was in fact John's gun.
But in truth, Vinoy had really hoped that there would be something more definitive here in Texas to connect this gun sale directly to John's killer, whoever it was.
And as Vinoy was starting to lose hope that any evidence would come from this trip, he decided to look inside of a small ammunition box that was inside of the actual gun box.
And at first, once he looked inside of this small ammo box, it didn't look like there was anything useful inside, just some bullets that may or may not have been used for John's customized gun.
But before Vinoy closed the ammunition box, something caught the light, and he stared at it for a second.
He waved over another officer, and the two of them just looked at this strange small object in the bottom corner of this small ammo box.
Eventually, Vinoy reached in and just lifted up the small ammo box and held it up to the sun to kind of illuminate it with the light.
And when he did, he felt like he had just hit a massive jackpot.
Because with this light coming through the box, he could clearly see there was a long strand of white hair tucked inside of this box.
And Vinoy felt very confident this hair belonged to a dog.
With help from Dallas police, Detective Vinoy collected this piece of hair from the ammunition box and shipped it directly to a woman in California who was one of the few veterinary forensic experts in the country.
Using this sample, she was able to run a series of tests, and she determined there was a strong chance that the hair that was found was from the same type of Siberian Husky mix as John's dog, Keisha.
As far as Vinoy was concerned, there was no way this was just a big coincidence.
So after getting those results, he was sure that whoever had sold the gun to the man in Dallas was the same person who had dropped off Keisha in the neighborhood where she had been found.
And armed with this new evidence, Detective Vinoy and his team tracked down the person who had sold the gun in Texas.
And after two years, they finally knew who had killed John.
Based on the dog hair tests, evidence found at the crime scene, and interviews conducted throughout the investigation, the following is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to John Helbel on the night he was killed, January 20th, 1999.
The killer stood just inside of the trailer near the front door.
Even inside, they could still feel the cold winter air coming through the thin walls.
On the other side of the room, in the flickering light of the TV, they saw John, fast asleep in his recliner, with his beloved dog Keisha curled up at his feet.
And John and Keisha were facing the killer.
The killer, as slowly as they could, reached down and pulled out a .22 caliber pistol from their waistband.
After making sure John and the dog had not woken up, the killer began to walk slowly towards John.
But after taking a few steps, the floor underneath the killer began to creak, and the killer froze, worried that John might have woken up.
But as he stared at John and the dog, neither moved.
They were still sleeping. After taking another steadying breath, the killer continued to move, all the way up to the recliner and then around to the back behind John.
There, the killer raised their gun, placed it right at the back of John's head, and then fired.
Blood rushed out of the small wound as John's head slumped forward and rolled to the side, but the killer fired into the back of John's head one more time, just to be sure he was dead.
And John did die, right there in his recliner.
The killer began to walk back around the chair, but now Keisha was awake, and she was growling.
The killer tried to calm the dog down, but she began barking.
And the more the killer tried to keep her quiet, the louder Keisha got.
The killer thought about shooting the dog, but they just couldn't bring themselves to do it.
Instead, they put the gun back in their waistband, rushed to the kitchen, and grabbed the dog leash that was laying on the counter.
The killer then put the leash on Keisha, grabbed John's keys that were nearby, and led the dog out to John's blue van.
The killer got Keisha into the van, then climbed into the driver's seat, and sped out of the mobile home park.
A few minutes later, they turned onto a dimly lit street in a quiet neighborhood.
They scanned the road and it was empty. So the killer climbed out, opened the passenger door, took off Keisha's leash and let her out into the street.
As soon as she was out of the van, the killer got right back in and sped back to John's.
Once they got there, the killer rushed inside and dropped the keys on the counter.
Then they grabbed a blanket on the floor in the front room and used it to completely cover John's body.
Then they turned off the TV. After that, they made their way into the back room and picked up all the boxes that held John's gun collection and carried them all out to their own car.
Finally, they ran back into the trailer, locked the door from the inside, and then rushed out, closing the door behind them.
The killer got into their car, drove a few miles, picked up their girlfriend, and then began the thousand-mile drive back to Wyoming.
John's friend, Andy Rich, was his killer.
Andy had been visiting with John, secretly waiting for the right time to kill him.
And on the night of January 20th, once John had dozed off in his recliner, Andy felt that time had come.
Andy's motive for killing his friend was he simply wanted John's gun collection.
Andy believed he could sell a lot of these guns, especially John's prized gold customized Colt .45, for really good money.
So he murdered his friend and robbed him.
Detective Vinoy actually suspected Andy and his girlfriend Sharon from the moment he met them in Wyoming.
Andy had been at John's residence around the time of the murder, the couple had those .22 caliber bullets in their home, and they had that dog's nose print found on the window of their car.
But of course, none of that evidence actually panned out, and so Vinoy had nothing tying either of them directly to the murder.
But all of that changed almost two years later when Vinoy received that call about the gun trafficker who'd gotten busted for selling guns.
It would turn out the detective who had called Vinoy was in Wyoming, and the gun trafficker was Andy's girlfriend Sharon, and Sharon was finally ready to come clean.
Vinoy went back to Wyoming to interview Sharon, and she would tell him that she had lied to him during the initial investigation because she was terrified of her boyfriend Andy.
She claimed she had no idea that John was dead when Andy had picked her up at her friend's house in Iowa and they had driven back to Wyoming.
But she now admitted that soon after they had gotten home from that trip, Andy told her he was now magically in possession of John's favorite gun, the Gold Colt .45, and that also Andy was going to be driving down to Texas to meet with a buyer who wanted to buy this gun.
And he told Sharon exactly where this buyer lived.
By the time Detective Vinoy visited Dallas to go speak to the spire, he was sure Andy was the murderer.
He just needed proof to bolster his case.
And that proof came from the dog hair that was found inside of the ammunition box inside of the gun case.
Now, Vinoy never actually found John's prized golden gun, but he did have that handwritten note that had been found inside of the gun box.
And a handwriting expert would confirm that the writing matched John's.
And so, with Sharon's story and the evidence Fennoy found in Texas, he went back to Wyoming and he confronted Andy.
And Andy eventually confessed to the murder, simply saying, I shot John and took his guns.
The weapons charges against Sharon got dropped, and she was only given probation for the drugs found inside of her home.
Sharon said she was glad that Andy left Keisha alive, but she never actually understood why he'd done it.
She said he'd hated that dog, but for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to harm her.
And so it was that decision that ultimately connected him to the murder.
After his confession, Andy took a plea deal and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
He was released on parole in 2020. A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
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