On an early morning in December of 1991, a woman living in Largo Florida, woke up to the sound of pounding on her front door.
And as she climbed out of her bed she realized it was not just pounding on her door, she was hearing also.
Whoever was out there was screaming, screaming for help.
When the woman realized there was some sort of crisis here, she kind of rushed and ran to the front door.
She opened it up and standing out on the front porch was her neighbor.
And she was practically covered head to toe in blood.
Her head was covered in gashes.
Her throat clearly had been slit.
But before this woman could say what was even going on...
She just fell to the ground and passed out.
But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do.
So if that's of interest to you, the next time the follow button is taking a well-deserved nap, make sure you immediately go over and wake them up with a leaf blower.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the evening of December 14th 1991, a 31-year-old man named Keith Young grabbed his car keys from a hook by the front door of his home in Largo Florida.
Behind him, his wife, Anita, slipped on her favorite pair of heels.
The newlywed couple was about to head out on a much-needed date night.
They were both actually on their second marriages and they had six children between them from their previous relationships.
So naturally, it was pretty hard to find time for just themselves.
But that particular night, Keith's two kids were staying with their mother, who had shared custody, and Anita's eight-year-old daughter was at a sleepover and her 12-year-old son Jason, had agreed to stay home and watch his two younger siblings so that the adults could go out for dinner.
Before they left, Keith gave Jason a final rundown of his expectations.
Don't make too much of a mess.
Make sure nobody gets hurt.
And if there was an emergency, he'd written down the restaurant's phone number on a notepad in the kitchen.
But Keith reminded Jason that if there were like a real emergency, like a true crisis, he should call 911 right away.
And when he heard this, Jason the 12-year-old just kind of rolled his eyes and said yeah, I got it.
It's under control.
Now, Keith knew he was actually being a little bit uptight here, but there'd been an attempted break-in at their house earlier that year and he'd been on edge about leaving the kids home alone ever since.
The intruder had actually cut their phone lines and then also taken off a window screen, and they'd also tried to break down a door as well.
But they'd actually left without taking anything and there hadn't been any more issues in the months since.
But critically the suspect was never caught.
So it felt kind of unresolved and scary for the family.
Keith and Anita both hugged Jason goodbye as they walked out the door.
And then, once the door closed behind them, Keith turned around and checked the handle to double-check that he'd locked it just to be safe.
Less than a half hour later, Keith and Anita sat down across from each other at the restaurant and unfolded their napkins onto their laps.
They were excited to have a few hours of peace and quiet where they could just, you know, focus on each other, something that didn't happen very often.
The couple had gotten married earlier that year after meeting at a support group for single parents, and they were very grateful to have each other, because their previous marriages were really not that great.
Anita's ex-husband, Luther Bass, had a violent temper and even though he now lived all the way across the country in Idaho, he still found a way to always complicate Anita's life.
That summer Luther had driven all the way to Keith and Anita's house to take his kids on a vacation which Anita had initially agreed to.
But when he showed up he was unexpectedly driving a camper with his new girlfriend and her kids.
And at that point, Anita had gotten a really bad feeling about the whole situation.
And she actually started to worry that Luther would take her kids and then refuse to give them back.
And so they had this big argument and it got so bad that actually Anita had threatened to call the police before Luther finally backed off and left.
Meanwhile, Keith had been having equally heated arguments with his ex-spouse Linda, about whether their kids would spend the upcoming holidays with him or with Linda and her new husband Steve.
Things had gotten so nasty that Linda had actually recently begun harassing Anita over the phone and was also gearing up to go to court and try to get the custody agreement changed if Keith wouldn't agree to do things her way.
But their bad relationships with their exes only made Keith more happy that he'd found Anita.
He was glad that he could take care of her and her kids the way he felt like they deserved.
So, despite all the tension hanging over them, he tried to keep the mood light and they enjoyed a very nice dinner.
And then when the check came, Keith glanced at his watch and realized it was getting pretty late.
He knew Anita's son Jason was a responsible kid and that he could definitely handle getting his younger siblings into bed.
But Keith was still a bit worried about leaving the kids alone for too long.
So he paid the check right away and then he and Anita left the restaurant and drove home.
A little while later, Keith and Anita pulled up outside of their brown single-story home.
When they got inside, Keith was relieved to see that all the kids were calmly watching TV in the living room and the family cat was curled up on the couch right next to them.
Keith told them that it was time to get ready for bed.
And as 12-year-old Jason got up, Keith pulled him in for a big hug and told him he was proud of him for his hard work babysitting.
Anita helped the younger kids brush their teeth.
And then afterwards Keith turned off the lights and he went down the hall and said goodnight to all three kids who slept in bunk beds in the same room.
Then after that, he continued down the hallway to the main bedroom and climbed into bed with Anita.
He kissed his wife goodnight and then turned off the light.
Several hours later, around 3 am early the next morning, Anita's 12-year-old son Jason, awoke to a very loud noise.
And when he heard it, he sat up in bed.
And then he could hear something thumping around in the room next to him.
But before he could figure out what was going on, someone screamed.
With his vision still blurry from sleep, Jason slid off the top bunk and walked over to the door and cracked it open.
And in the dark hallway he could quickly make out these shadowy shapes of what appeared to be two men moving around, sort of struggling with each other fighting.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that one of these men was his stepdad, Keith.
But he couldn't make out anything about the other man, except that he was really big and wearing what appeared to be a black ski mask.
Jason immediately felt paralyzed by fear, because he knew this was obviously another intruder, just like the one who tried to break into their house that summer.
For a second, he was hopeful that maybe his stepdad would fend the man off.
But then Jason noticed there was blood sprayed all over the walls.
And then he saw the glint of a knife in the intruder's hand.
The intruder had Keith pinned to the ground and was stabbing him over and over again.
At the same moment, Jason saw his mother Anita, run out of the master bedroom, also covered in blood, and she was holding a baseball bat.
And she swung it at the intruder and she hit him in the back of the head but it barely slowed him down.
And that's when Jason heard his stepdad yell out for Anita to get the gun.
And Anita.
She ran into another room and Jason just stood there looking out the crack, just paralyzed with shock, watching as this intruder literally picked Keith up and threw him back into the master bedroom.
And the next thing Jason knew he saw his mother standing in the hallway holding a gun and the intruder was running away out the front door.
Suddenly Jason kind of snapped out of the shocked trance he had found himself in and remembered what Keith had told him to do in case of a real emergency.
Call 911.
So he ran to the phone in the kitchen, he picked it up, and he dialed.
But when he put the receiver to his ear, all he heard was silence.
There was no dial tone.
Jason looked over and he saw his mother kind of hobbling over towards him.
She was standing in the doorway and there was blood visibly dripping down her neck.
Jason's voice cracked when he told his mother that the phone line was dead.
Anita told her son to go back with his stepdad and just wait that she was going to go find help.
And so Jason began to walk towards the bedroom where he knew his stepdad was.
And as he did, he watched his mom run out the front door into the night.
And then Jason, he went down the hallway and went into the bedroom where he saw his stepdad sprawled out on the bed.
And he was still alive, but he was clearly struggling to breathe.
You know, he's kind of gasping and, you know, gurgling.
And Jason, you know this 12-year-old kid, not having any idea how to handle this, just walked over to the bed, kneeled down, and he took Keith's hand and just held it while he waited for his mom.
And as he held Keith's hand he could hear the sound of his stepfather take his last few raspy breaths before he went completely limp.
Several hours later, before dawn on the morning of December 15th 1991, Detective Mike Short from the Largo Police Department pulled up to the curb outside of a brown single-story house, surrounded by crime scene tape.
He'd gotten a call from his supervisor, who really didn't know much, just that an intruder had broken in into this house and attacked a husband and wife while they slept.
But now, as Short got out of his car and looked around at the quiet block of modest, well-kept houses, he found that kind of odd.
This really wasn't a neighborhood where they saw violent home invasions.
As Short walked up to the house, a uniformed officer caught up with him and gave him a few more details about what they knew so far.
He said that the wife, Anita Young, had run to a neighbor's house screaming for help before passing out from blood loss in their front yard.
And the husband, Keith Young, was deceased in the bedroom.
The officer also said that the couple's 12-year-old son had woken up at some point and witnessed the attack.
And for now, he was over at the neighbor's house until they could track down another guardian.
The officer said that Anita had been taken to a hospital, but it would be a miracle if she survived.
Her injuries were some of the worst they'd ever seen.
As Short went up the walkway that led to the front door, he saw that blood had dripped all over the cement.
The front door was open and right inside he saw a baseball bat lying on the floor with blood on the handle.
Short stepped inside and he saw more blood, blood that was spattered and smeared basically all over the living room on the walls, the doors, the furniture, as if the suspect and the victims had been fighting all throughout the house.
In fact it was so chaotic and messy that Short thought maybe the suspect was not expecting to fight off two grown adults.
Otherwise, they might have come up with a better plan of attack.
So Short's first assumption was that this likely was a robbery that had gone terribly wrong.
As he continued down the hallway, a cat ran past him.
It was unharmed, and it went to hide under the couch.
The hallway was, somewhat unbelievably, even bloodier than the living room, with red smears all over the walls and floors.
So Short figured most of the attack must have occurred here.
Short reached the main bedroom and looked inside, and he saw Keith's body lying on the bed covered head to toe in blood.
Keith's shirt was shredded and Short could see there were multiple stab wounds to his chest and also a very deep gash down his side.
Short decided not to actually go into the bedroom until crime scene techs had gone through it for forensic evidence.
So instead he just walked down the rest of the hallway and pushed open the door to another bedroom, where he was surprised to see two small children soundly asleep in their bunk beds.
Somehow these kids had slept through the entire attack.
Short went back outside and immediately flagged down a uniformed officer and he told him to go in there and wake up those kids and bring them somewhere safe.
Then, once the officer went inside, Short pulled out his flashlight and began searching the yard for evidence.
Based on Keith's wounds, at least what he saw Short thought he was probably attacked with a knife, or maybe even an axe or a machete.
But apart from that bloody baseball bat that was found in the doorway, there was no sign of a weapon anywhere inside or outside of the house.
But as Short went around the side of the house, he found something else that was interesting.
The home's phone lines had clearly been cut.
The killer must have planned ahead to make sure nobody in this house could call out for help.
And this was interesting because nothing else about the scene suggested that this crime was carefully planned.
In fact, in some ways, you could say it looked like it was very unplanned.
But now, Short had to consider that maybe this was not just a random robbery gone wrong.
Maybe you know, especially given the cut phone lines, this was like a premeditated attack, a premeditated murder.
And if that was the case, he had to figure out who the intended target was, Keith or Anita or both.
A little while later, Detective Short walked up the street to the neighbor's house to speak with his best eyewitness, Anita's 12-year-old son Jason.
After Short knocked on the door, the neighbors let him inside and showed him into their living room, where he saw Jason was wrapped in a blanket and still wearing his pajamas.
Short sat down across from him and told him that he knew it must be extremely difficult to talk about this, but he really needed to know exactly what he had seen and what he had heard during this attack.
Tears began to roll down Jason's face as he began to describe watching his mother and stepfather fight off this intruder.
Jason said he couldn't really describe what this person looked like because they were wearing a ski mask, but he was pretty sure it was a man.
He also said there had been a little bit of skin exposed on the killer's neck and from the looks of it it appeared like their skin was maybe fairly dark.
So Short wrote down that the suspect likely had dark skin.
But because it was dark and Jason clearly had not gotten a very good look at the killer, he knew the boy could be wrong too.
So he was just putting it down as a maybe.
Short asked Jason if the intruder had said anything during the attack.
And Jason just shook his head and said, no.
He said the intruder didn't say a single word the entire time.
And Short made note of that too, because it made him wonder if maybe the killer was someone close to the family.
And they knew that if they spoke, someone might recognize their voice, like Jason.
Later that same morning, once the sun had come up, Short went back to Keith and Anita's house and searched the outside of the property again in case he missed anything when it was dark.
And while he was searching the front yard, another police cruiser pulled up to the curb.
An officer got out and walked over to Short.
She asked if he was the lead investigator on this case.
And when he said he was the officer told him that she'd been waiting at the hospital all morning and Anita had finally woken up enough to say a few words.
She said Anita was only awake for just a few minutes before she had to be rushed back into surgery, but it was long enough to answer a couple of questions.
Anita had described waking up to see a man standing over her with an axe in one hand and a knife in the other.
She said it was a man that she had never seen before.
She didn't recognize anything about him.
The officer said right before Anita was taken off to surgery.
There was one more thing she mentioned.
There had been an attempted break-in at their house earlier that year, and the intruder during that break-in had also cut their phone lines.
Short instinctively turned and literally looked at the side of the house where those lines had been cut and he thought to himself this is too strange of a coincidence to be ignored.
Later that day, back at the station, Short read through reports on the interviews his team had done with Keith and Anita's kids and their neighbors.
A team of five detectives had been assigned to this case and they'd made quick progress on collecting background information on the victims.
Everybody in the neighborhood had described the victims as being a very normal, happy couple.
Keith was an air conditioning technician who'd been working at the same company for a very long time, and Anita was mostly a stay-at-home mom who did some accounting work on the side.
However, what also came out in these interviews was that both Keith and Anita had ex-spouses who could potentially want to hurt them.
Anita's ex-husband Luther, lived thousands of miles away in Boise Idaho, but Short knew that, despite the distance, it was not impossible that he might have traveled to Florida to commit this crime.
So Short called the Boise police and told them about this attack and asked them to track down Luther and question him.
As for Keith's ex-wife, Linda Short had learned that she actually lived right there in town, and Keith's two kids were still at her house, unaware that their father was dead.
And since Linda and her new husband Steve, were potential suspects, Short wanted to be the one to break the news to them, to see how they all reacted.
So he looked up Linda's address in the database and then grabbed his keys and headed out.
Less than an hour later, Short parked his car in Linda's driveway and walked up to the front door.
He knocked, and a woman opened the door, and Short asked her if she was Linda, and she said yes.
And then he flashed his badge and said he'd like to come in.
And Linda, she seemed a bit confused, but she opened the door and let him inside.
Short walked into what seemed like a perfectly normal Sunday morning routine inside of the house.
The air smelled like eggs and bacon and the two kids were in the living room watching cartoons with a man who Short figured must be Linda's new husband, Steve.
And so Short, he asked Steve to leave the kids and come into the kitchen with he and Linda, because he wanted to speak to both of them.
And then, once all three of them had sat down at the kitchen table, Short broke the news that Keith had been murdered.
And then Short watched as Linda literally collapsed into Steve's arms.
Short gave them a minute, but then he cut right to the chase and he asked where Linda and Steve had been at about 3 am that morning.
Linda seemed shocked to realize that clearly the detective was considering both her and her husband as suspects.
But she choked out that they'd both been at home with the kids sleeping.
And Steve just nodded in agreement.
He said they'd all been home together all night.
That was it.
Nothing about their demeanor or their reactions was suspicious to Short.
But when he pressed Linda about what her relationship with her ex-husband was like, she admitted that it was contentious and that actually just a couple of days earlier she'd spoken to a lawyer about potentially changing their custody agreement.
Short found the timing of this a little convenient and he wondered you know, maybe Linda or Steve had decided they would just settle the custody battle by simply taking Keith out of the picture for good.
And he also found it convenient that Linda and Keith's two kids weren't at Keith's house when the attack happened.
It was only Anita's kids who were there at the time.
But Short thanked the couple for their time and told them he would be in touch if he had any more questions.
And then he left their house.
And as he got into his car and drove back to the station, he kept going over the conversation he had just had in his mind.
Linda and Steve's alibis were pretty weak.
They seemed to be the only two people who could vouch for their whereabouts for the night of the murder.
And so what that meant was Short had every reason to keep both of them at the very top of his suspect list.
Late that night, Short was sitting at his desk in his office when his phone rang.
He picked it up, and it was the police in Boise, Idaho.
They'd managed to track down Anita's ex-husband, Luther.
Short immediately sat up straight and grabbed a pencil to take notes.
The officer on the line told him that when they'd gotten to Luther's house, he wasn't there.
But his fiance, Connie, was.
And she told them that he'd been out on a weekend hunting trip.
So the officers had gone out and searched for Luther in the area where he said he'd been hunting, but they didn't find him.
Until that evening, when Luther actually arrived back at his house.
The officer said you know, at that point they took him in for questioning and he had told them the same thing that Connie had, that he'd been out elk hunting about an hour away from boise all weekend.
Luther had been able to describe basically every step of his hunting trip in great detail, but since he had been hunting alone there was nobody to corroborate.
His alibi now, short knew that the drive from boise to largo florida, where the attack took place, took at least three or four days.
So the fact that Luther was in Boise less than 24 hours after the murders meant that he could not have driven there.
But there was still a possibility that if he was involved, maybe he could have flown.
Now Short knew it would be difficult but not impossible for Luther to catch a plane to Florida and back during the time that he was supposedly out hunting.
So he told the Boise officer to look into whether Luther had recently purchased an airline ticket and to also take saliva, blood and hair samples from Luther.
After Short hung up the phone, he just sat back in his chair and thought for a second.
It was less than 24 hours into this investigation and Short already had three suspects in his crosshairs.
Keith's ex-wife, Linda, and Linda's new husband, Steve, and also Anita's ex-husband, Luther.
And then also, to some degree, Luther's fiance Connie could have been involved, but based on logistics and the fact that she was at the house, it seemed unlikely.
But there was one big problem.
Based on Anita and Jason's eyewitness testimony, The suspect they were looking for was a dark-skinned man who Anita had never met before, and that description would not apply to any of their suspects.
Short knew that the suspect description might not be reliable.
After all, it had been dark in the house, so Jason could have been wrong about the killer's skin color, and Anita was barely conscious during her interview, so her recollections might not be accurate at all.
But if it was accurate, it could mean any number of things for Short's investigation.
It could mean it was a random robbery.
After all, just some random person who went in the house and did this horrible thing.
It could also mean that one of his current suspects had maybe hired somebody to commit the crime.
Or it could mean that all Short's theories about the case were just completely wrong and he had no idea what happened.
Short rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock and realized it was almost midnight, so he decided it was time to go home and get some sleep.
Maybe he hoped by morning a new piece of evidence might turn up that would help point him in the right direction.
Around 7 am the next morning, so about 28 hours after Keith's murder, Short pulled into the parking lot of Pinecrest Golf Course, which was less than a mile away from Keith and Anita's house.
And at this very moment, Short was feeling really optimistic about the case because a groundskeeper at this golf course had called the police that morning and said they'd found a ski mask and a glove lying in the grass.
So now, Short got out of his car and he went into the clubhouse, And the groundskeeper was there waiting for him.
And he said he had left the ski mask and the glove right outside, right where he had found them.
So Short followed the groundskeeper out onto the course.
And, as they walked Short, made note of all the ponds scattered around and also the lake at the park right across the street.
He wondered if maybe the killer might have tossed their weapon or weapons into the water.
A minute later, the groundskeeper stopped walking and pointed down at the ground at a black ski mask and a dark-colored cotton glove lying in the grass, exactly as promised.
And so Short put on a pair of latex gloves and he knelt down and he carefully lifted up the mask.
And as he did, he felt that clearly it was crusted with something reddish brown, very likely dried blood.
As soon as Short got back to the station, he sent the mask and the glove off to the crime lab for testing, hoping that they might find a trace of the killer's DNA.
Then Short spoke to his supervisor about sending a team of divers out to search the water at the golf course and also that park, in case the murder weapons had been disposed of in any of those water bodies.
It seemed like a long shot that they would actually find something.
But it was the best lead they had so far and finding the weapon or weapons could really help them narrow down their suspect list.
And by the time Short got back to his desk, he saw that his answering machine was blinking.
There was a new message.
And so he hit play, and the message was from a man who said he had information on the Keith Young case.
So Short called him back right away.
And when the man answered, he said he was a college student who lived a block away from Keith and Anita Young's house.
And he said on the night of the murder he and his friends had been hanging out in his driveway and they'd seen a man jogging east down Coronet Avenue.
And Short immediately turned and looked at the map on the wall and he got really excited because he saw Coronet Avenue was actually the exact path the killer would have had to take to get from Keith and Anita's house to that, golf course.
Short asked the young man to describe this jogger, and the college student said that it appeared to be a white man with short, dark hair.
Short asked him if he was pretty sure about that, and the student said, yeah.
In fact, the jogger had passed under a streetlight at one point, so they all got a pretty good look.
This was a huge development since 12-year-old Jason, you know, one of the eyewitnesses had said the killer had dark skin.
It was very possible now that maybe Jason was wrong.
But it was also possible that there were now two men involved in the attack.
Maybe one had dark skin and one had light skin.
The following week, Short opened up a folder that had just been sent over from the police in Northport Florida, a town 85 miles away.
On December 19th, so just four days after Keith Young was murdered, a man and three kids in Northport Florida were shot to death in the middle of the night inside of their home.
The suspects in that attack were two men wearing ski masks, and they had cut the house's phone lines.
So the similarities between these two killings were easy to see.
But as far as Short could tell, the victims in the second attack didn't have any connections to the Yunks.
Plus, the victims in the second attack had been shot instead of stabbed.
And so, as Short really did try to look for all the similarities he could between the two crime scenes, he just couldn't get over how sort of blatantly personal the very violent and bloody attack felt at the Young's house.
So, even though there was this other, on the surface similar killing in Florida, and even though Jason and Anita both swore they did not recognize the intruder, Short was not ready to rule out that Keith Young had been killed by someone who knew him.
His strongest suspect was still Anita's ex-husband Luther, who claimed to have been out hunting alone at the time of the attack.
As for Anita, her condition had actually finally stabilized and when Short had gone to speak to her at the hospital, she had said that Luther was really the only person she could think of who might want to hurt her, because they'd been arguing a lot about custody and also child support.
But the Boise police had checked with every airline in the country and none of them had a record of Luther flying into Florida that weekend.
So Short couldn't even prove that Luther was in the state at the time of the attack.
And then also Anita had mentioned that she'd been having problems with Keith's ex-wife, Linda.
She said that Linda had been harassing her all summer long, calling her so many times that she couldn't even use her own phone.
Short definitely still had his eye on Linda, but he still hadn't found anything directly linking Linda or her new husband Steve, to the crime.
But Short was still very hopeful that this case would get solved, because a preliminary report from the forensics lab had just come in that said a Caucasian hair had been discovered inside the black ski mask that was found on the golf course, which could point to any one of Short's main suspects.
And Short knew it was only a matter of time before the forensics lab finished its full analysis of that hair sample.
And then they would know for sure if it was an exact match.
One day in early January of 1992 so a few weeks after Keith's murder Detective Short got into the office and checked his answering machine.
And he found that he'd gotten a message from the forensics lab telling him to call back right away.
And so right away he picked up the phone and dialed the number, and he could feel his heart pounding as the line rang.
This could finally be the break in the case he'd been waiting for.
And when the technician picked up he told Short that you know they had analyzed that hair in the mask and they'd analyzed the DNA.
But it was not a match for Short's top suspect, Anita's ex-husband, Luther.
Not a match.
Short thanked the technician and hung up, feeling very disappointed.
Now this still didn't fully rule Luther out, especially because Short still thought there might have been maybe two suspects involved.
But he decided that at this point it was time for investigators to really focus on other possibilities.
Several weeks later, so in early 1992, roughly a couple of months after Keith Young's murder, Detective Short knocked on the front door of Linda's house.
Linda is Keith's ex-wife.
And when Linda opened the door and saw the detective once again standing outside her house, she quickly let him inside.
The house was quiet, and Linda told Short that she was the only one home.
They sat down in the living room and then they ran through all the subjects that Short had grilled her on the first time around her alibi, her custody disputes, her tense relationship with Keith and none of her answers changed.
And she really didn't say anything that could be viewed as incriminating.
But as their conversation began to wrap up, Linda looked anxious, like there was something more she wanted to say.
Short asked her what was going on, and she said that there was something she hadn't mentioned when they had spoken the first time.
It was about her new husband, Steve.
She said that a while back, after she and Steve had gotten married, that briefly she had rekindled her relationship with Keith.
Steve had found out that she was cheating on him, and he was naturally very upset.
Linda said that a few months ago, Steve had even made a few jokes about hurting Keith.
At the time she didn't think he was serious, but after Keith was killed she started worrying that Steve might have somehow been involved.
She said that she had even gone so far as to check Steve's knife collection to make sure none of them were missing.
Short was careful not to let his shock come across his face, But inside his mind was absolutely spinning.
He'd always thought it was possible that Linda and Steve were both in on the murder.
But now it sounded like maybe Steve might have acted alone.
He also wondered, though, if Linda was ratting out her husband to draw suspicion away from herself.
So to help get to the bottom of it, he asked Linda to come with him back to the station for a polygraph test.
He also planned to order another polygraph for Steve, who was suddenly at the very top of his suspect list.
But almost two months later, in March of 1992, Short was back in his office staring down at a pile of documents he'd already read over a million times and the evidence still didn't point him toward anybody in particular.
Linda and Steve had both taken their polygraph tests, but the results did not indicate they were guilty and there was still no hard evidence that tied either of them to the crime.
Also, after searching all the ponds and that lake in the area, police still had not found a murder weapon.
And they'd still not been able to match that strand of hair from the presumed killer's ski mask to any of the suspects on their radar.
Short still had really three main suspects who could have been responsible for the murder.
There was Keith's ex-wife, Linda, who had been fighting with him about custody.
Her alibi was weak and only supported by her new husband Steve, who she had been suspicious of when Short interviewed her for a second time.
And so Steve was also one of his primary suspects, because he had this terrible history with Keith and had even openly joked about hurting Keith.
And then there was Luther, Anita's hotheaded ex-husband, who lived on the other side of the country.
Now, it would have been possible for him to fly from Idaho to Florida and commit this crime, but there was no proof that he did.
And of course, there was still the possibility that this was just a random attack or a robbery gone wrong.
And investigators still couldn't even be sure if they were looking for one or two or more suspects.
They had no idea.
So Short had plenty of theories, but still no evidence to back any of them up.
The investigation had gone so cold that the task force assigned to the case had been reduced from five detectives to just two.
Short was starting to fear that Keith's murder might never be solved.
But just then, Short's phone rang.
And when he picked up the receiver, a voice said that they knew something about that previous break-in attempt at Keith and Anita's house, a few months before Keith's murder.
And as Detective Short listened to what this caller had to say, he suddenly knew exactly who had broken into that house and killed Keith and tried to kill Anita.
Based on all the collected evidence, as well as the killer's eventual partial confession.
This is what investigators believe happened to Keith and Anita Young on the morning of December 15 1991.
At 3 am, the killer saw that all the windows in Keith and Anita's house were dark, so they carefully snuck around the side of the home and cut the phone lines, just like they'd done a few months before.
The first time, they'd second-guessed themselves and didn't go through with what they had planned.
But this time was going to be different.
The killer broke into the house very easily, feeling very calm and in control.
They had an axe in their right hand and a knife in their left.
As they made their way through the living room, they heard growling and hissing, and they looked down to see the family's cat standing in their path.
They thought about strangling the cat to shut it up, but decided not to.
They wanted to do this with as little collateral damage as possible.
So they bent down and tried to soothe the cat.
And when it worked and the cat became quiet, the killer stepped past the cat and began walking down the hall.
They made it to the master bedroom.
They opened up the door and stepped inside.
Anita and Keith were fast asleep in their beds.
So the killer quietly walked over to the side of the bed that anita was on and they stood there looking down at her, you know, getting ready to do what they felt like they had to do.
But as the killer was looking down at anita, anita stirred awake and for a brief second she looked up and locked eyes with the killer, and the killer instinctively just swung the axe down, hitting anita squarely in the head.
But she fought back and she shouted out Keith's name to wake him up.
And the next thing the killer knew, Keith was on top of them, pulling them away from Anita.
And so the killer began hitting Keith with the ax as well, but even despite being hit about three times, Keith would not let up.
And so they struggled and shoved each other and their fight kind of spilled out of the bedroom into the main portion of the house.
I mean, this was not how the killer had hoped this would go.
They'd wanted to get this done quickly and leave without anybody waking up, but they'd clearly underestimated Keith.
No matter how many times the killer stabbed him or hacked at him with the axe, He didn't stop fighting.
And then, as the killer and Keith continued sort of fumbling around and making their way back down the hallway, the killer suddenly felt something hard smash into the back of their skull.
And they turned to see Anita standing there behind them with blood running down her face and a baseball bat in her hands.
The killer heard Keith shout out for Anita to go get the gun and he saw Anita run toward a nearby closet.
The killer also noticed a young boy looking out from a doorway nearby.
And so the killer made a split-second decision.
They just grabbed Keith and chucked him into the master bedroom.
And then the killer sprinted back down the hallway and out the front door.
And then when they got to the sidewalk they removed their ski mask and kind of casually jogged down the street, hoping that to anybody looking outside they would think the killer was just, you know, an unassuming health nut out for a very early morning run.
When they got to a nearby golf course, they stopped on the grass to change their clothes.
And then after that they stole a bike and rode away.
Things had not gone the way the killer had hoped.
But as they reflected on what they had just done, they thought to themselves that, in reality, this actually could have gone worse.
I mean, they didn't kill the cat, and critically, no kids have been hurt either.
And in some ways, that's what this was all about, to avoid hurting the kids.
Because the killer was Anita's ex-husband, Luther Bass.
He'd wanted to get Anita out of the way so he could have custody of their four kids and treat them the way he believed they needed to be treated.
And he'd wanted to get Anita out of the way so that he could have custody of his four kids.
He felt like she was screwing up their lives, that he was the kid's solution.
They needed him.
And so he had to do this.
But Luther's own fiance Connie, had ultimately told the Boise police that Luther was the one who had cut Keith and Anita's phone lines a few months back before the murder.
And she said she knew Luther had actually flown to Florida on the weekend of the murder using an alias and fake social security number that he had gotten from his coworker.
And once the Boise police finished speaking with Connie, they immediately called Detective Short in Florida to tell him what they'd just learned.
It turned out there was no second suspect.
It was just Luther.
So 12-year-old Jason had just been wrong about the killer's appearance and Anita had been wrong about not knowing who they were.
As for that hair that had been found inside the black ski mask that Luther had been wearing, it's unclear how that was there.
It wasn't Luther's hair, but it's possible that maybe somebody else had put the mask on at some point and that's how it got there.
Luther Bass was arrested in Boise Idaho, on March 6 1992 and he confessed to the crime on the same day.
A year later, he was convicted of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and burglary with an assault.
He was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison.
As for Anita, she would recover from her injuries.
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.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone.
This episode was written by Kate Gallagher.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio.
Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
And just a reminder every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr Ballin Podcast you can also now watch on the Mr Ballin YouTube channel that very same day.
And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.
Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin.
If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXMcom slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.
So that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
