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. Just after 11 a.m. on a fall day in 2003, a crime scene analyst named Anna Cox was standing in the middle of a horrific crime scene inside of an apartment near Tampa, Florida.
At Anna's feet was a dead body in a huge pool of blood, and moving all around her were dozens of police officers and other investigators taking photos and collecting evidence.
None of those things or those other people around her stood out to Anna.
Because right now, the only thing she could think about was what she had just noticed on the wall.
She had never seen anything like it before.
Well, except for in movies. But no, sure enough, when she walked up to that wall, she realized the thing that was on the wall was very real and very, very disturbing. quite possibly more disturbing, at least psychologically, than the dead body nearby was.
And it would be this discovery on the wall that would lead police to one of the coldest killers in Florida history.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
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Okay, let's get into today's story. If you're anything like me, you love a good story that has twists and turns and moments that make you stop and think like, how is the story even real?
That's why I want to recommend the podcast Crime Junkie.
Every week, amazing host Ashley Flowers unravels stories about missing people, murders, and mysterious deaths.
These strange, dark, and mysterious cases range from stories ripped straight from the headlines to cases you really won't hear anywhere else.
It's binge-worthy, true crime storytelling that is thoughtful, well-researched, and always leaves you wanting more.
Discover why Crime Junkie has such a loyal community and dive into your next mystery today.
Search for Crime Junkie wherever you're listening right now.
On October 10th, 2003, Karen Pinnell was spending a Friday evening alone with her two cats at her apartment just outside of Tampa, Florida.
Karen loved the Florida lifestyle, the beaches, scuba diving, nightlife, all of it.
But the 39-year-old was happy to have some time alone at home by herself that night.
She had a really early shift the following day as a customer representative at Tampa's busiest airport.
So she just wanted to relax tonight and then go to bed early and get a good night's sleep.
Karen grabbed her cell phone and ordered a pizza.
Then she sat down on the couch, turned on the TV, and zoned out while she waited for her food to arrive.
Karen was beautiful, with long wavy brown hair and dark eyes.
She was a former model and flight attendant who had always had more men chasing her than she knew what to do with.
There were so many boyfriends, in fact, that Karen came up with nicknames like Car Guy and Dr. Pilot to help her friends keep the cast of characters straight.
And Karen could get entire rooms full of people to burst out laughing whenever she talked about all these guys she had dated because she told great stories and had a great sense of humor.
Karen's sense of humor made her perfect for her job at the airport, where she spent her days at work helping stressed-out travelers, and she always managed to do it with a smile on her face.
But Karen's easy smile hid the fact that she was actually having a hard time in her personal life.
Two years earlier, Karen had been through a really bad divorce.
Then, right after that, she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, or MS for short, which is a debilitating disease that can lead to nerve damage, blindness, and even paralysis.
And recently, Karen had begun having blackouts from her MS, and it made her worry about the future.
She knew that her MS would likely only get worse.
On the couch, Karen watched the end of a TV show.
Then she stood up and walked outside to get her mail.
She took a stack of envelopes out of the mailbox and then headed right back inside to the couch.
As she sat there, she flipped through the envelopes and tossed all but one of them on the coffee table.
Karen stared at the remaining envelope in her hand, and she could feel her shoulders tense up.
It was a bill from her doctor's office. Karen opened the envelope and scanned over the bill.
She almost felt like crying. Her health insurance did not fully cover the cost of the steroid injections she was getting for her MS, and so she owed her doctor thousands of dollars.
Karen had gotten a judge to require her ex-husband to increase his alimony payments to help her pay her growing medical bills.
But her ex-husband was still trying to fight the judge's ruling, so she wasn't actually getting any of the money that she really needed.
She tossed the doctor's bill onto the table with the rest of the mail and tried her best to relax and keep watching TV.
But she just kept thinking about her ex-husband, and that stressed her out even more.
Karen had been married for five years to a handsome scuba diving instructor named Jeff.
The first years of their marriage had been some of the happiest in her life, and there were still times when Karen wished that she and Jeff had never split up.
But the court battle over the alimony payments had shown her an ugly side of Jeff.
So Karen often tried to remind herself that getting divorced had definitely been the right thing to do.
And Karen's friends and her brother Michael always tried to reassure her that she had been right and that things were going to get better.
They told Karen she was beautiful and smart and that she would find the perfect guy for her.
Karen appreciated her friends and family's support, but she knew they were subtly trying to get her to date more respectable guys than some of the ones she had been involved with recently.
A coworker had told Karen flat out that some of the guys she had dated seemed dangerous, especially the biker with a serious drug habit and a bad temper.
Karen had always thought of herself as someone who could handle men.
After all, she had grown up with five older brothers, and her mother had died when Karen was only a little girl.
So Karen was used to being the only woman surrounded by men.
But she knew her coworker was right about some of the guys she'd been seeing, and Karen worried that her confidence around men had made her overlook some of her recent boyfriend's red flags.
In fact, the biker that Karen had dated had gotten violent with her on multiple occasions.
He had screamed and shouted at Karen, and he had thrown things across the room at her.
Karen had stood her ground and fought back when this happened, but of course it was a really bad situation.
The sheriff's department had even been called three different times to break up domestic disputes between the couple.
On the couch in her living room, Karen flipped through the TV channels and tried her best to push away thoughts of her ex-husband, her violent ex-boyfriend, and the huge medical bill she was facing.
Her two cats hopped up on the couch and sat on either side of her.
Karen lightly scratched their chins, and as she did and the cats began to purr, Karen felt herself start to calm down.
But then her phone rang. Karen leaned forward, trying not to disturb her cats, and grabbed her phone off the table.
She saw the caller's number. It was her latest boyfriend, a car salesman named Tim Permenter.
Karen answered the phone, and Tim almost immediately said he wanted to drop by to see her.
But Karen thought she knew what Tim really was saying, and frankly she was not interested in having a romantic evening that night.
She wanted to be left alone so she could watch TV, eat pizza, hang out with her cats, and then just go to bed.
So she told Tim that she didn't have the energy to hang out with him that night, but maybe another time.
A little while later, the doorbell rang.
Karen thought her pizza had finally arrived, so she got up and went over to the door.
But when she opened it, it was not the pizza guy, it was Tim.
Karen was annoyed because she'd literally just told him that she did not want him to come over tonight.
But Tim said he would not be there long, he was going to stay with friends in a cabin at a nearby lake, so he just wanted to drop by to check on Karen before he headed out.
And he'd also brought a small gift because he could tell she'd been stressed out lately and he thought it might cheer her up.
Tim handed Karen the gift. It was a calendar with pictures of kittens on it.
Karen thanked Tim for the gift and she let him inside.
They would sit and talk for a bit and then eventually Tim would leave the apartment and drive off to meet his friends at the lake.
At 9am the following morning, Tim called Karen from the cabin at the lake to check in on her.
Tim knew she was working that day, but she usually could step away and chat for a few minutes.
But Karen didn't answer the phone, and when Tim tried calling her again a couple of times, the calls all went straight to Karen's voicemail.
Tim and Karen had met three months earlier, and Tim had basically fallen for her right away.
Even just the way the two of them had actually met seemed like fate to Tim.
Karen had been looking at a car at the Volkswagen dealership where Tim worked, but at the time she was working with another salesman.
But when she came back to the dealership for a second look at the car, that other salesman was not working, so Tim took over.
And he had sold Karen a new black Jetta and asked her out on a date that afternoon.
Tim had been a regular at Karen's apartment ever since.
And on days when they weren't going to see each other, they almost always talked on the phone.
So that morning, Tim was a bit concerned that Karen hadn't picked up any of his calls or called him back.
This just was not like her. But there was a chance that Karen was just really busy at work, so Tim called her work phone at the airport.
But he quickly found out that Karen's coworkers were also very concerned about Karen.
Karen had not shown up for work that morning and she hadn't called in to say she wouldn't be there.
Karen's coworkers said that was not normal at all because she was one of the most reliable people at her job.
The second Tim heard that, he left his friends at the cabin, he jumped in his car and sped to Karen's apartment.
He knew something was wrong. When Tim arrived at about 10.30 a.m., he saw Karen's black Jetta still sitting in the driveway, which was strange.
If she was home, why wasn't she answering her phone?
Then Tim walked up to the front door and he could see that it was open a few inches.
Alarmed, Tim pushed the door the rest of the way in, stepped into the apartment and yelled out for Karen.
But the second he walked forward into the small dining room, he knew that Karen would not be answering back.
Tim saw Karen lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Her upper body was covered with deep wounds, and when Tim touched her skin, Karen was cold.
Tim grabbed his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911.
His voice cracked as he told the dispatcher that he needed help right away.
His girlfriend was on the floor covered in blood.
After Tim got off the phone, he just ran outside and began vomiting.
A few minutes later, Tim was still bent over, struggling to catch his breath when he saw two sheriff's deputies step out of their cruiser.
Tim wiped his mouth and motioned the deputies over towards Karen's front door, and then he continued to throw up.
After walking past Tim, one deputy went inside the apartment while the other brought Tim over to the cruiser to have him sit down inside and try to calm down.
The deputy told Tim that he really needed to collect himself because soon they would need to question him about what happened.
Tim nodded and then put his head in his hands.
About 30 minutes later, just after 11 a.m., crime scene analyst Anna Cox arrived at Karen's home.
Cox went inside and saw the place was already crawling with police.
She made her way through the crowded apartment to the dining room, and she saw that the walls were covered with blood spatter.
She thought the pattern of the blood suggested there had been a struggle and that Karen had tried to escape from her attacker.
Cox crouched down near Karen's body. She saw smaller cuts on Karen's forearms that supported the theory that Karen had tried to fight off her killer.
Those cuts on her arms were defensive wounds that someone suffers when they try to hold off a frenzied knife attack with their bare hands.
Looking at the pool of dark blood on the floor under Karen's shoulders, Cox was struck by how hard this woman must have fought to try to stay alive, and Cox was determined to make sure that fight had not been for nothing.
She couldn't do anything to change what had happened to Karen, but Cox would use every piece of evidence at the scene to help investigators find the person who had committed this horrific crime.
Police officers told Cox that the sliding glass doors in the back of the apartment appeared to have been broken into.
They thought that might suggest some kind of burglary, and Cox could see Karen's handbag turned upside down on the kitchen counter, which seemed to reinforce the burglary angle.
But looking at the bloody body at her feet, it was hard for Cox to believe someone would do that to another human being just for the contents of a purse.
But just then, Cox happened to glance at the wall near Karen's body, and for a second, it was like everything else in the room disappeared.
Three capital letters, R-O-C, were handwritten in blood on the wall about a foot above the floor.
Cox looked more closely at Karen and saw blood on the tip of her index finger.
Then Cox looked back at the wall, totally stunned.
Had Karen spent her final moments writing a message in her own blood?
Suddenly, Cox felt like she was in a Hollywood movie.
In 10 years of scouring crime scenes for evidence, she had never seen anything like this, the last words of a victim written in their own blood. and she knew the first job of the investigative team would be to try to figure out what the letters ROC meant.
As crime scene analyst Anna Cox remained fixated on the bloody letters written on the dining room wall, lead detectives Sergeant Michael Holbrook and Larry Nelvin walked out of Karen's apartment.
The detectives had met with Cox, and they had conducted a thorough search of every room in the house.
Now they wanted to talk to Karen's boyfriend, Tim, who was still sitting in the backseat of the police cruiser parked in front of the apartment.
When police had first arrived, Tim had been a complete wreck, vomiting constantly on the ground.
But when he stepped out of the cruiser and joined the detectives, he was now much more calm.
And he said he wanted to help in any way he could.
Tim told the detectives that he had stopped by Karen's place the night before to give her a gift, that kitten calendar, before he headed off to see his friends.
Detective Holbrook wanted to know why Tim did not spend the night with Karen, and Tim said he knew Karen had to wake up for work, which is why he had made plans to stay with his friends at a place on Moon Lake, 30 miles away.
Tim said he'd left Karen's at about 7.30 p.m., and as far as he knew, Karen was going to eat some pizza, watch some TV, and then go to bed.
Holbrook didn't say anything, but Tim's story sounded plausible.
Investigators had found a partially eaten pizza in Karen's kitchen, along with a receipt showing it had been delivered at 8.48 p.m.
So Karen must have been alive at least until then.
Tim told the detectives that he had gotten worried about Karen that morning when he learned she had not gone to work, and so that was why he had drove back to her place to investigate.
And of course, that was when he made his horrifying discovery and called 911.
The detectives asked Tim if there was any other information he could think of that might help their investigation.
Tim thought for a second, and then he looked back up at the detectives and said there was something else they should know.
But it really didn't have anything to do with Karen.
Tim knew investigators would check into his own criminal record, so he wanted to be up front with them.
He said he had served time in prison for something stupid he'd done more than a decade earlier.
He had gotten into an altercation with another guy, things had gotten out of control, and he and the guy ended up getting their guns and shooting at each other.
Both Tim and the other gunman were wounded in this fight, and Tim was convicted of attempted murder.
But Tim swore he was a new man now. He was a successful car salesman, a good friend, and he was very much in love with Karen.
And he said investigators were more than welcome to search him, his house, take his computer, take his fingerprints, whatever they wanted to do.
All he cared about was finding the person who did this to Karen.
The detectives were kind of shocked by what Tim had just told them, but they thanked him for being so honest.
Then they asked him who might have had a reason to hurt Karen.
This time, Tim didn't need to think. He already had the answer.
He said there were two guys the police had to talk to.
The first was Karen's ex-husband, Jeff, who was locked in a court battle with Karen over alimony payments that he didn't want to make.
And the second guy they needed to look at was one of Karen's ex-boyfriends who had lived with her for a short time.
The ex-boyfriend was a big biker, and he had been abusive before he moved out.
And recently, he had apparently begun harassing Karen about some desk she had that he claimed belonged to him.
Tim told detectives that Karen was a very strong person who believed she could take care of herself in all situations, but Tim said he knew she was terrified of her ex-boyfriend, the biker.
Detective Holbrook asked Tim for the name of this biker, and Tim would say the biker's name was Rock Herpich.
Rock spelled R-O-C. Suddenly, the detectives felt like they knew what R-O-C meant.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, my show, Mr. Ballin'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.
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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?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
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You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.
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.
After crime scene analyst Cox learned about Karen's ex-boyfriend, who was named ROC Rock, she told the detectives that she'd made another valuable discovery of her own.
She had found that Karen had tiny bits of skin under her fingernails, likely from fighting off her killer.
Tex had carefully pulled these skin fragments out with tweezers and put them in a sterile bag for analysis.
And Cox told the detectives that she hoped DNA testing on these skin fragments at the lab would reveal the identity of Karen's killer.
But while they waited for those test results, Detectives Holbrook and Nelvin wanted to cover as much ground as they could.
They had police canvass the neighborhood to try to find out if any of Karen's neighbors had seen or heard anything that seemed unusual.
But unfortunately, nobody had seen anything suspicious on the night Karen was killed.
So on October 12th, the day after Karen's body was discovered, members of the investigative team began checking where the different men in Karen's life had been at the time of the murder.
One of Tim's friends confirmed that Tim had indeed spent the night in the cabin at Moon Lake, just like he said he had, and Karen's ex-husband, Jeff, sounded totally heartbroken when police told him that Karen was dead, and it turned out he had been on a scuba diving trip in Miami, 300 miles away from the crime scene.
Investigators also discovered a strange coincidence.
Karen lived a block away from a man suspected of robbing a bank just days before her murder.
So police wanted to talk to the suspect, but they couldn't find him anywhere.
And they wondered if the alleged bank robber's disappearance was somehow connected to Karen's murder.
It seemed like a long shot, but they couldn't rule it out until they tracked this guy down.
But even as the investigative team chased down these other potential leads, Holbrook and Nelvin stayed focused on Karen's former boyfriend, Rock Herpich.
Finding Rock's name written in blood was enough to make him a suspect.
But the more detectives learned about the 45-year-old biker, the guiltier he began to look.
Rock worked at an auto body shop processing insurance claims.
He spent most of his free time on the back of his Harley Davidson motorcycle, and he seemed to pride himself on his bad boy image.
Karen's family and friends said Karen had met Rock almost two years earlier, just after she was diagnosed with MS.
And Rock had quickly become very important to Karen.
He took her to doctor's appointments and he helped her with steroid injections.
But the people closest to Karen were always uneasy about their relationship because Rock had a serious drug problem and a violent temper.
And one of Karen's good friends at work said Karen would sometimes show up at the airport with unexplained bruises on her arms that she didn't want to talk about.
The couple had gone through a bitter breakup six months earlier after Karen filed domestic abuse charges against Rock.
But not long before her murder, Rock had gotten back in touch with Karen.
He wanted her to give him an old desk he said he'd left at the apartment when he moved out, but Karen was adamant that the desk belonged to her.
And so Rock's history of violence, this ongoing dispute over the desk, and Rock's name being scrawled in blood at the crime scene made Rock Holbrook and Nelvin's primary suspect.
So in the days following the murder, the two detectives took a ride to Rock's house almost 100 miles south of Tampa, and they didn't let Rock know they were coming.
When they got there, Rock was in his garage, and they could tell by the look on his face that he was not happy to see them.
But the detectives told him they just needed to talk about a friend of his who was in trouble, and so Rock seemed to relax a bit.
He led the detectives to his front porch, and they all sat down to talk.
Detective Holbrook volunteered that the friend of Rock's who was in trouble was Karen Pinnell.
And Rock reacted like he was not surprised at all.
He asked what Karen had done to get herself in trouble this time, but Holbrook just looked at Rock and said, well, Karen's dead.
Rock sat there for a moment in absolute silence.
He looked stunned. Then Holbrook told Rock that Karen had actually been murdered.
And at that point, Rock's eyes went wide.
He now knew why the detectives were really there.
Rock quickly admitted that he and Karen had a totally tumultuous relationship full of what he called rip-roaring fights.
But Rock said he had nothing to do with Karen's murder.
He said he hadn't even seen her in person for six months, and he wasn't angry at her in any way.
He had rebuilt his life and moved on. But when Holbrook asked where he was on the night of her murder just a couple of days earlier, Rock couldn't come up with an answer.
He said he would have to check a calendar to be sure.
At this, Holbrook glanced over at Nelvin.
They were both thinking the same thing. How could this guy not know where he was a couple of nights ago?
Then Holbrook leaned forward in his chair, stared Rock down, and told him that his name, ROC, was spelled out in Karen's blood on the wall right next to her body.
Rock stared back at Holbrook but didn't say anything.
The three men just sat there in total silence for what felt like several minutes.
Finally, Rock looked like he snapped out of a daze and he began talking really fast.
He told the detectives he would waive his right to an attorney, they could take his fingerprints, he would submit DNA samples.
He said he was willing to do whatever it took to clear his name because he did not do this.
He did not kill Karen. The detectives took Rock up on his offer right away.
They swabbed the inside of his mouth with a Q-tip and collected fingernail clippings for DNA analysis.
They also took his fingerprints. Then they thanked Rock for his time and got back on the road.
Holbrook and Nelvin discussed the case as they drove back to Tampa, and they agreed that Rock remained their strongest suspect.
After all, plenty of guilty people had voluntarily submitted DNA samples during police investigations, so Rock's willingness to do that did not necessarily mean he was innocent.
Rock and Karen had a history of physical violence and an ongoing dispute over this desk.
And Rock knew Karen well enough that she might have let him in the front door without a confrontation, which could have explained why the neighbors didn't hear anything strange on the night of the murder.
But the detectives also agreed that there were still other possibilities.
There was the missing bank robbery suspect who lived close to Karen, and there were several men she dated after breaking up with Rock, including an airline pilot who had sent her a string of sexually explicit text messages not long before the murder.
So as much as Rock did look like Karen's killer, Holbrook and Nelvin knew they needed to keep open minds.
When the detectives got back to their office, Karen's autopsy results were waiting for them.
In a way, the findings were not that surprising.
Karen had died from being stabbed 16 times in her upper body and neck.
One of the wounds was so deep that it nearly severed her spinal column, and another slashed her aorta, which is the body's main artery.
In short, Karen had more than one wound that could have been fatal.
Seeing all of Karen's injuries spelled out in horrifying detail only underscored what the detectives already suspected.
This was likely a crime of passion. The killer didn't just want to hurt Karen, they wanted to destroy her.
That made robbery or any other potential motive very unlikely.
The killer was probably someone who knew Karen quite well.
Unfortunately, the DNA analysis of the skin found under Karen's fingernails was inconclusive.
So investigators knew they would have to find another way to identify their killer.
But there was something in the autopsy report that took Holbrook and Nelvin by surprise.
Karen, despite having ordered pizza, had no pizza in her stomach.
But there were three pieces of pizza missing from the pie that she ordered, meaning somebody else had eaten those three pieces of pizza on the night of Karen's murder.
Detective Nelvin called the pizza shop and asked to speak with the delivery driver who had gone to Karen's on the night of her murder.
And sure enough, the pizza guy told them that Karen was not alone when he'd gone to the door.
He said he could see a man standing behind her and the man looked angry.
So the pizza guy had just dropped off his delivery and headed back to his car as quickly as possible.
By the end of that call, Detective Nelvin was pretty sure that angry man in Karen's apartment was the killer.
On Thursday, October 16th, so six days after the murder, Karen's grieving family had a viewing for Karen at a funeral home in Pensacola, Florida.
The undertakers had made a heroic effort to hide all of Karen's stab wounds, but there was only so much they could do.
So Karen's brother, Michael, had to adjust her bouquet of flowers to hide the defensive wounds all over one of her hands.
The funeral chapel was special to the Pinnell family.
Karen's mother had been memorialized there in 1972 when Karen was just eight years old.
The Pinnell family was a military family.
Karen's dad was a career Air Force guy who had met her mother while he was stationed in Germany.
And for a family that had moved from place to place to follow Karen's father's military assignments, Pensacola became an anchor, the closest thing they had to roots.
Karen's brother Michael said that even though Karen was the youngest of six kids, she was the glue that kept the family together as they moved from place to place.
He said she was smart and talented enough to have become a doctor or a scientist, but she was more interested in spending time with family than going off to get degrees.
So she had chosen the life of a flight attendant and model.
Michael said he felt like he'd had the wind knocked out of him the day that Karen died, and he still felt like he was struggling to breathe.
And Michael knew that nothing he said would express how much he and everyone else who was close to Karen would truly miss her.
The next day, Karen's coworkers held their own memorial service at the airport chapel.
The line of friends and colleagues was out the door as hundreds came to pay their respects.
And all anyone could talk about was how much they had loved Karen.
While Karen's friends and family mourned her loss and celebrated her life, the police started to eliminate potential suspects and really began to hone in on just Karen's ex-boyfriend, Rock Herpich.
The suspected bank robber who lived near Karen turned himself into police, and he was not Karen's murderer.
He had been far away from Karen's apartment on the night she was killed.
Detectives Holbrook and Nelvin also tracked down the airline pilot who had been sending sexually explicit text messages to Karen, and he had a strong alibi too.
He was flying a plane over the Middle East when Karen was murdered.
But even as the detectives narrowed down the list of suspects, they still didn't feel like they had enough evidence to arrest Rock.
The guy had a clear history of violence and his name had been written in blood on the wall, but Holbrook and Nelvin knew they needed something clear cut that would put him at Karen's house at the time she had been killed.
While the detectives continued their investigation, crime scene analyst Anna Cox could not stop thinking about the letters ROC.
She spent hours staring at them on the wall at Karen's apartment.
Those three letters, written in Karen's blood, were powerful evidence, and Cox knew that ROC had potentially been Karen's last word.
In a courtroom, the dying words of a crime victim get special weight from judges and juries.
It's called a dying declaration and treated as the words of someone with no reason to lie.
They're gonna die anyways. In this case, Karen seemed to be saying, Rock killed me.
But Cox had to be sure that was the case.
And her obsession with just staring at those letters on the wall was not giving her any new evidence.
So Cox did something unusual. She cut out the section of sheetrock where the three letters appeared on the wall and brought it back to her lab at the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
She wanted to do some more research there.
In her lab, Cox looked at the letters under a high-powered microscope, and at first, she couldn't believe what she was looking at.
She stepped back from the microscope and took a breath and then leaned back in to take another look at the letters.
This time, Cox felt her face flush and her hands start to shake with excitement.
She knew she had just discovered something that she would never have found if she had just kept staring at the wall in Karen's apartment.
And this new discovery led Cox right to another major piece of evidence.
So she grabbed her phone and called Detectives Holbrook and Nelvin to tell them what she had just found.
And not long after that, the detectives were confident they knew who had killed Karen.
Based on Detectives Holbrook and Nelvin's investigation and the research conducted by crime scene analyst Anna Cox, here is a reconstruction of what police believe happened to Karen Pinnell.
On the night of October 10th, 2003, the killer knocked on Karen's front door.
He could hear the TV inside and then he heard Karen unlocking the door.
When the door opened up, Karen looked exhausted standing in the doorway, but she was still beautiful.
The killer followed Karen into her living room and then sat down on the couch next to her.
Karen and the killer talked for a few minutes and then there was another knock at the door.
Karen immediately hopped up from the couch and began walking towards the door.
She was starving and she figured her pizza had just arrived.
The killer followed her to the door. Karen opened up the door and smiled at the pizza delivery guy and the killer, who was right behind Karen, just clenched his jaw.
He didn't want Karen to smile at anyone except for him.
But the killer took a breath and tried to stay calm.
A smile wasn't anything to get too worked up over.
Karen paid the pizza guy, closed the door, and then carried the pizza into the kitchen and put it down on the counter.
Meanwhile, the killer walked into the kitchen as well.
And before Karen could even open up the pizza box, the killer said something to her that caused her to immediately turn around and snap at him.
The killer snapped back and pretty soon the two were arguing at a full volume.
Finally, Karen told the killer to get out and never come back. but the killer just kept shouting and getting angrier and angrier.
Finally, he pulled open a kitchen drawer and grabbed a knife.
When Karen saw this, she screamed and took a few steps back and then lowered her voice and said, please, please calm down.
But it was too late. The killer flew into a rage and raised the knife and began slashing at Karen.
Karen immediately threw her arms up over her face to try to protect herself, but the killer just slashed right through her arms over and over again.
And so finally, when Karen knew she couldn't fight her killer off, she just turned and ran out of the kitchen, a final attempt to get free and save herself.
But the killer caught her in the dining room.
He grabbed Karen and slammed the knife into her back.
Then the killer turned Karen around, pulled the knife out, and stabbed her again, this time in the chest.
Karen fell into her back on the dining room floor, covered in blood.
But the killer wasn't done. The killer crouched over her, stabbing her in the neck and the chest over and over again.
And as he did this, blood spattered on the walls and pooled under Karen's body.
Finally, the killer stood up and stepped back, out of breath.
Despite the frenzy of this attack, the killer very quickly calmed down afterwards.
In fact, right after killing Karen, the killer, still carrying the bloody knife in hand, walked over to the pizza box, opened it up, and casually ate three slices of pizza.
After eating, the killer walked over to the dining room table and turned Karen's purse over so the objects inside would spill out.
Then he went to the back of the apartment and opened up the sliding glass door.
Maybe the police would think there had been a robbery.
Then the killer casually walked out of Karen's apartment, got into his car, and drove off.
But hours later, when the apartment complex had gone dark and quiet, the killer returned to Karen's apartment, and he slipped back inside unnoticed.
He walked right to a closet and found a pair of gloves that Karen used for gardening.
The killer put those gloves on and then walked into the dining room where Karen was still lying in a pool of blood.
The killer leaned over and then dipped one of his gloved fingers into the blood and then wrote the letters ROC on the wall.
Then the killer dipped his finger in the blood again and he smeared some of the blood onto Karen's index finger to make it look like she had written those letters on the wall.
Then the killer walked out of the apartment again, got into his car, and drove to the lake house where he was staying with his friends.
Karen's latest boyfriend, Tim Permenter, had brutally murdered Karen.
And then he had gone back to the apartment the following day and pretended to be in shock when he discovered Karen's body and called 911.
Tim and Karen's relationship wasn't anything like how he had described it to his friends and to the police.
In fact, Karen's family had worried about her safety with Tim almost from the moment she met him in July of 2003.
Karen's brother Michael said she had called him once to tell him that Tim had tried to choke her.
Michael had urged Karen to file a police report, but she never did.
Karen's co-workers said they too had become very concerned about Tim when Karen began coming to work in turtlenecks on several hot summer days.
They feared she was hiding injuries on her neck inflicted by Tim, but Karen just wouldn't talk about it.
And even though Tim told people he was still Karen's boyfriend at the time of her death, in reality, they had actually broken up two weeks before he murdered her.
Two weeks before he murdered her, on September 29th, 2003, the couple had been watching a TV show about people who keep secrets from other people when Tim decided to share a secret of his own.
When Tim and Karen had met, he had told her that before he became a car salesman, he had been a Navy SEAL.
But while they watched TV that night, he told her that that actually wasn't true.
He said before he sold cars, he had actually been a pimp for a group of prostitutes, and he had served 12 years in prison for shooting a rival pimp.
Tim even showed Karen the Florida Department of Corrections website that still had his face on it, along with details of his felony convictions and imprisonment, Karen had been totally shocked and repulsed by this confession and decided right then that she wanted nothing to do with him and told him he had to leave.
But Tim wouldn't leave, so Karen had called 911 and police had eventually had to come to Karen's apartment to escort Tim out.
In the days following their breakup, Tim had tried, without success, to win Karen back.
He also had begun lurking near her apartment and going through her trash, and in doing that, he discovered that Karen was already dating other men.
And this made Tim insanely jealous. And so, on October 10th, Tim showed up at Karen's house even though she had just told him not to.
Karen did let Tim inside and she had tried to stay calm and polite, but Tim had become belligerent when Karen said she did not want him back in her life, and then Tim exploded into a rage, grabbed the knife in the kitchen, killed Karen, and tried to frame her ex-boyfriend, Rock, by writing his name on the wall.
Detectives Holbrook and Nelvin had always considered Tim a suspect, as Karen's boyfriend and the one who found her body, he couldn't be overlooked.
But believing that Karen had used her final moments to write ROC on the wall had put Rock at the top of the suspect list, not Tim.
But then crime scene analyst Anna Cox had studied those letters in her lab, and Cox found two things that made her believe Rock was not the killer.
Under a microscope, Cox discovered that the letters were written over blood that had spattered on the wall during the initial attack.
But the letters didn't disturb that initial blood spatter at all, which meant the blood spatter that was already there had dried by the time the letters ROC were written over it.
By Cox's calculation, the initial blood spatter would have taken at least 20 minutes to dry.
That meant for Karen to have written those letters, she would have had to be conscious for at least 20 minutes after she was stabbed multiple times, and with the severity of the wounds Karen had suffered, that was extremely unlikely.
Cox also confirmed that the letters on the wall were written by someone who was right-handed and Karen was left-handed.
That was something her family had told police during the course of the investigation.
So Karen could not possibly have written those letters.
It had to have been her killer. Cox called the detectives to let them know, and that was great news for Rock Herpich, because police did not believe Rock wrote his own name in blood at the murder scene.
And Rock was deeply grateful for Cox's discovery.
He would say science saved his life. With Rock no longer a suspect, the detectives focused on Tim.
Detective Nelvin obtained cell phone tower data from the night of the murder, and it showed that Tim had called his friend at the lake at 9.32 p.m. from a spot that was actually near Karen's apartment.
Tim had told police that he'd left Karen's by 7.30 p.m. to go to the lake, but the phone records suggested he was still in or near Karen's apartment two hours after that.
The detectives brought Tim in for a second round of questioning.
They told Tim they were sure he had lied to them about the time he had left Karen's apartment to avoid suspicion in her murder.
They also told him that his fingerprints were all over the pizza box delivered to Karen's home that night.
As the detectives continued to throw questions at Tim, he had no answers.
He just sat there in the interrogation room covering his face for a long time.
And Detective Holbrook said that when Tim did finally look up and look him in the eyes, it was like Satan had suddenly entered the room.
Tim was ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Years after Karen's death, her brother Michael said publicly that he didn't want people to remember Karen just for her murder.
He wanted people to remember her for who she was, an engaging, brilliant, beautiful woman.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
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