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. One day in the spring of 2006, a detective stood next to a refrigerator inside of a police station holding a little container full of evidence.
She knew that what she was about to do represented a breach of protocol, but that was not going to stop her.
Because she was working her first murder case ever, and she was afraid that she wasn't going to be able to catch the killer.
So she had decided that she was going to run her case her way, no matter what.
She knew she was supposed to send this container to the state crime lab for analysis, but she wasn't going to do that.
Instead, she placed the container inside of the refrigerator and then shut the door.
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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On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 12, 2006, Dr. John Yelnik finished up his final exam of the day at his dental practice in the rural community of Blairsville, Pennsylvania.
He handed his patient a toothbrush, told her to come back in six months, and then headed into his back office to wrap up.
He turned off his computer and made sure he had everything he needed.
The next day was his day off, and he didn't want to have to come back because he forgot something.
Once he was satisfied, he flicked off the light, walked out through reception, and told the receptionist to have a great night.
She waved, and he gave her a big smile. But as soon as John walked out the front door, he let the smile drop off his face.
He had a lot of problems recently, and pretending to be happy all day was pretty exhausting.
And just because he'd finished work for the week did not mean he could relax now.
In fact, it was the opposite, because waiting for John back at home was a legal document that he could barely even stand to look at, but he knew that tomorrow he was finally going to have to deal with it.
John had been trying to psych himself up for this, telling himself it would mark the beginning of a new phase of his life, but it was still very painful.
He got into his car, turned on the ignition, pulled out of the parking lot, and began making his way home.
It was about a half-mile drive from the dental practice to his house.
Blairsville was a tiny little borough, just like a town, not far from Pittsburgh, and it was mostly farmland, with rolling fields of corn and less than 3,500 residents.
John had actually grown up here and then left at some point.
But it had always been his lifelong dream to eventually come back home and raise a family here.
When he graduated from dental school 13 years earlier, he could have set up shop in a big city and made a much higher salary right off the bat.
But instead, he took what was, to him, an even better deal.
He joined the practice of his own childhood dentist, right in downtown Blairsville.
And it would turn out that John actually was able to make a lot of money right here in his hometown.
Once John joined this practice, the practice took off, in part because John himself was incredibly charming and funny and especially good with kids.
He became the go-to dentist for whole families, and pretty soon he was earning more than he could even spend.
He invested in real estate and eventually became a millionaire by the time he was in his 30s.
But it was not until John met his wife, Michelle, that his life finally felt complete.
John thought Michelle was one of the most beautiful people in the world.
She had dark curly hair and striking blue eyes.
When he met her, she was a single mother of two, and to John, that was great, because it meant, basically, she came with a ready-made family.
Now, John's friends were worried that Michelle only wanted John for his money, but when his mom got sick with cancer, Michelle immediately became her full-time caregiver.
And for John, that was all the proof he needed that she did truly love him.
John and Michelle got married in 1997, and shortly after that, they adopted a little boy named JJ and then moved into a big house with a pool.
Everything had seemed perfect. But now, John pulled into his new driveway, turned off the ignition, and just sat there, staring at the modest little brick home where he was currently living.
He still couldn't understand how everything had fallen apart so completely.
John was suddenly tight on money, and his childhood dentist, who was now his business partner, was talking about dissolving their partnership.
John had lent tens of thousands of dollars to a bunch of people, and now he was having to ask for it back.
And he and Michelle had hit a rough patch that just didn't end, and they both admitted to having affairs.
They were now living separately, which was why John was here at this small house, instead of coming home to his big house with the pool.
But of all the stressors in John's life, the worst one, by far, was that John was absolutely convinced that someone was going to murder him.
Now, this fear had not come totally out of nowhere.
A couple of weeks earlier, someone had vandalized John's car with spray paint, and the police had not been able to figure out who did it.
And with all the other bad stuff going on in John's life, John had not been able to get over this vandalism.
And he slowly became 100% certain that because of this vandalism, it signaled that he was going to get killed, and his murder, like the vandalism, would go unsolved.
And he became so sure of this that he sent his attorney $10,000 and told her to use it to investigate if he just suddenly wound up dead.
John finally got out of his car and walked up his porch steps and into the house.
Then he closed the door behind him and locked it.
It felt so empty now without his adopted son, JJ, who John went long stretches without seeing these days.
John had renovated one of the upstairs bedrooms for JJ, who was five years old, and he even bought a TV and video game console for them to play together that he was going to give him at Christmas.
But Christmas had long passed, it was now April, and those Christmas gifts he had bought for JJ were still sitting unopened in a corner.
This coming weekend was Easter, and John was hoping to finally see JJ again and give him these late Christmas presents.
That would cheer him up. John took off his shoes and walked into his living room.
There, on the coffee table, he saw the legal document that he had been avoiding, because it represented the end of the life he had worked so hard to build.
The document was a stack of divorce papers.
Michelle had filed for divorce three years earlier in 2003, but she and John hadn't been able to come to an agreement.
They were not fighting to save the marriage.
Both of them knew it was broken beyond repair.
Michelle was already living with a new boyfriend, a Pennsylvania state trooper named Kevin Foley.
What John and Michelle were fighting over was JJ.
Michelle wanted full custody, but John was not about to just give up his son.
But in less than 24 hours, it would all be over.
Their lawyers had finally settled on a shared custody agreement, and Michelle had signed it.
Tomorrow, it would be John's turn. And the finality of it all was really starting to hit John.
He sat down on the couch and turned on the TV, but he was feeling too restless to watch.
So he called his aunt, who he was very close to, and he talked with her for a while about the divorce.
She tried to make him feel better, but there really wasn't much she could say that would do that.
And then when he put the phone down, John just sort of felt like, you know what, I just have to find a way to get through tomorrow, no matter how bad it is.
He knew what he should be doing right now is actually reading through the divorce papers one more time, but he was just too tired.
So he just stretched out on the couch and fell asleep.
And when his back door creaked open, he didn't even hear it.
The following day, around 3.30 p.m., a nine-year-old boy named Zach Yuse, who lived next door to John, walked out the front door of his parents' house and across the lawn towards John's house.
It was a warm and sunny day, and Zach wanted to play with John's son, JJ.
Now, JJ hadn't been around for quite a while, but he did split time between his mother and father's homes, and so Zach had no idea if JJ was here today, but he figured it was worth a shot.
But before Zach even climbed up the front steps to John and JJ's house, he saw that something was wrong.
There was broken glass all over the porch in front of the door.
Zach paused for a second and scanned the porch, looking for where this glass came from.
And he noticed the little glass panel to the left of the door had been shattered.
When he squinted, he realized there were streaks of red liquid dried right underneath the broken panel and also in the glass itself.
Suddenly, Zach's throat got tight and his pulse quickened, and he thought about running away.
But he couldn't just leave his friend JJ and his dad if they were in some kind of trouble.
So Zach slowly and nervously climbed up the steps to the door and tried the doorknob.
But he found it was locked. As carefully as he could, Zach stuck his hand through the broken glass panel and reached up and unlocked the deadbolt.
Then he pulled his arm back out, turned the doorknob, and opened the door.
At first, when Zach stepped inside the house, he couldn't really process what he was even looking at.
There were papers strewn all over the floor, and Zach could clearly see JJ's dad.
But JJ's dad, John, was laying motionless face up on the floor inside the living room.
It took Zach a second to realize that the floor all around John was soaked with blood.
And when Zach looked more closely at John, he realized John's throat had been slit from ear to ear.
Zach turned and ran. About 15 minutes later, Janelle Lydic of the Blairsville Borough Police Department was driving with her husband and four kids when she got a call from police dispatch.
A 911 call had come in from a normally quiet residential street.
Dispatch just said there apparently had been a cardiac arrest, and so Corporal Lydic was needed right now at the scene.
Corporal Lydic tried to get more information to determine how urgent this was, but there really wasn't any more information.
And so, she made the decision to just go straight there with her family still in her car.
But the second she pulled up at the scene and got out of her car, she could tell that this could not just be a heart attack.
Because she could see there was a patrol officer waiting for her on the porch, and his face looked grim.
Lydic quickly walked towards him and asked what was going on, and he just pointed at the broken glass and the blood on the porch and then told her, just go inside and see for yourself.
So Lydic, who was pretty apprehensive at this point, stepped inside the house, and she saw the foyer was splashed with blood all over the floor and the walls, and there, lying on the ground in the middle of the living room, was a horribly mutilated dead body.
Right away, Lydic knew this had to be a murder, not only because the body was mutilated, but because she could clearly see numerous stab wounds all over the body, so many that there was no way this person could have self-inflicted.
And even though Lydick had never handled a homicide case before, she knew immediately that what she needed right now was backup.
Because dispatch had somehow recorded this 911 call as a cardiac arrest, the police had not sent a full emergency response.
And so Lydick and the patrol officer outside were the only people on the scene.
Lydick was worried that the killer could still be in the area or maybe in the house.
And now she realized she had brought her kids with her.
So she sent the patrol officer into the house to search it while she went back outside to the front yard to stand between the murder scene and her family, guarding them with her gun.
It was not long before a fleet of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances descended on this quiet residential street.
At the same time, the patrol officer who had searched the house came outside to report that it was empty.
The killer, whoever they were, was gone.
The only thing the officer had found was a huge puddle of blood in the basement where the victim clearly had bled through from the floor above.
Once her backup arrived on scene and she had sent her family home, Corporal Lydick went back inside the house to assess just what kind of crime scene she was looking at.
By now, she had the victim's name, John Yelnik.
As the crime scene technicians started their work processing the physical evidence, Lydek began a slow walk through each room, trying to get a sense of who John was and how he died.
John's body was close to the front door, but it was clear that the attack that preceded his death had been long and chaotic.
There was blood all over the floor in the living room, which was strewn with papers.
And when Lydic looked more closely, she realized these papers were divorce papers, and they too were covered in blood.
Despite John being found barefoot, there were bloody shoe prints leading from the living room through the dining room towards the back door.
They were too big to belong to the boy who had found the body, so Lydic figured they must belong to the killer.
The crime scene technicians were already measuring the prints to determine the killer's shoe size.
As Lydic continued to walk around, she didn't see anything that she thought could have been used as a murder weapon.
She also didn't see any evidence of a robbery.
The electronics that she could see were out in the open, so they weren't taken.
No drawers or cabinets appeared to have been opened, and none of the closets looked like they had been rifled through.
And so to Lydic, it really did not appear that this was a robbery.
Not only because of what she was seeing in terms of things not being taken, but also, more specifically, just how gruesome the crime was.
I mean, to stab someone over and over and over again and mutilate their bodies, I mean, that is personal.
That's not just some robber who happened upon John in the process of the robbery.
So very likely, whoever the killer was, the only thing they wanted to do when they entered this home was for John to die.
Lydic finished her sweep of the scene, ending up back in the living room, where it looked to her like the attack had most likely begun.
And that's when she noticed a check lying on the coffee table.
She had overlooked it somehow before, but now she bent over to read it.
The check was made out to the victim, John Yelnik, for the amount of $15,000 from the bank account of somebody named Melissa Youse.
When she saw this last name, Lydick did a double take.
Youse was the last name of the boy, the neighbor, who had discovered the body.
She wondered if Melissa Youse was related to that boy.
Attached to this check was also a note asking John to hold off for a few days before depositing it.
And so at this point, Corporal Lydic had two good leads.
The first lead was her victim clearly was in the middle of a divorce.
And the second lead was someone, maybe his next door neighbor, whoever this Melissa Eustperson was, owed him a lot of money that apparently she could not quite afford to pay back just yet.
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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.
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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.
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It was evening by the time Lydick stepped back outside the house, and when she did, she saw a crowd of neighbors and reporters jostling each other on the street.
Blairsville almost never had murders, and she knew this was going to be a big story.
She needed to head back to the station to get organized for interviews tomorrow.
But before she could walk down the steps, one of the other officers on scene came up to her with an update.
Police had fanned out to question the neighbors and see if they had heard anything, and they'd come back with two very interesting stories.
The first account came from a woman who said that around 1.30 that morning, she had heard a scream.
It woke her up and she had run to check on her kids, but her kids had been fine.
So she had just gone back to bed thinking she was just being jumpy.
The second account came from another neighbor who had heard something a bit more specific.
Right around the same time that that first neighbor had heard the scream, or maybe a little bit after that, this neighbor heard a man yelling in what sounded like a heated argument.
The neighbor couldn't make out everything the man said, but they definitely heard one sentence very clearly.
And that was, I'll never loan you money again.
Instantly, Lydick thought of the $15,000 check on the coffee table.
The officer had one more important piece of information for Lydick.
In addition to these witness statements, a lot of John's neighbors had told the police that there was one family on the block that detectives should really look into.
And that was the Youse family. The use boy, Zach, was the one who found the body.
And it was his mother, Melissa Use, whose name was on that check.
And there was one more member of the Use family, and that was Melissa's husband, Tom.
Tom was in the Navy, and he was away a lot.
But over the last 24 hours, he had been home.
So he was here when John was killed. Critically, the neighbors told the cops that there were rumors that Melissa Youse and John Yelnik were having an affair.
And so when Lydick heard this, she knew exactly where her investigation was going to start.
The following day, April 14th, Lydick had Melissa and Tom Youse brought down to the station and put in an interview room for questioning.
At this point, so early in the investigation, Lydic was casting a very wide net.
She had never done a murder case before, but she was methodical by nature and liked to do everything slowly and thoroughly.
She even talked slowly in a kind of monotone voice, and she didn't like it when anyone tried to rush her.
So her plan was to go pretty hard at Melissa and Tom Hughes because of that $15,000 check, the rumors of the affair, and the witness account of a fight about loaned money on the night of the murder.
But Lydic was also very interested in John's soon-to-be ex-wife, Michelle.
The night before, Lydic had sent a police officer to tell Michelle that her husband was dead.
But when the officer got to Michelle's house, he found that she somehow already knew, although she said she had heard that John died of a heart attack.
The officer had broken the news to Michelle and her boyfriend Kevin Foley, who was there, that no, John had actually been murdered.
And when he told them that, Michelle had seemed, or at least acted, genuinely shocked.
Corporal Lydick actually knew Michelle's boyfriend, Kevin Foley, personally, because he was a state police trooper, they had worked together, and at one point, she had quite literally trusted him with her life.
But in a murder case, the divorcing spouse and their new partner are always suspects number one and two, and Lydick knew that.
However, before she began grilling Kevin or Michelle with some hard questions, she decided she would first eliminate all other suspects.
She also wanted to get the results of the autopsy, which was being conducted that day.
Basically, she wanted to be really thorough before she went in on Kevin and Michelle.
So, now, Lydick walked into the interview room, where John's neighbors, Melissa and Tom Youse, were waiting side by side at a table.
Lydic sat down and began very bluntly by asking what was the deal with that $15,000 check Melissa had written to John.
Melissa answered in a very shaky voice. She explained that she and John had been friends since 9th grade and she was planning to open up a new bakery in town.
And John had loaned her the $15,000 to help her out, but then sort of out of nowhere, he had asked for the money back.
Melissa said she had been very disappointed, but at the same time, she knew John was in the middle of a long and probably quite expensive divorce, so she understood.
She'd only had $14,000 in her account when she wrote that check, and so she had said that's why she'd left that note for John, asking him not to cash it for a few days while she got the last $1,000 together.
Lydic watched Melissa closely as she gave her statement, and she decided that if Melissa was lying, she was doing a very convincing job of it.
She sounded genuinely distraught over John's death and like the money really didn't matter given the context.
But for Lydic, the obvious warmth that Melissa felt for John raised another, more sensitive question.
And in her typically blunt way, Lydic didn't dance around it, even though Melissa was sitting there right next to her husband, Tom.
Lydic looked right at Melissa and said, Melissa instantly went red and said no.
She said they were close friends, but nothing more.
Lydic turned to Melissa's husband, Tom. He looked very uncomfortable, but Lydic didn't care.
She asked him the same thing. Is Melissa having an affair with John?
For a second, Tom didn't say anything, and Lydic wasn't really sure what to expect.
This kind of question could be so offensive to some people or just plain hurtful.
But when Tom spoke, he didn't sound angry or upset.
He refused to answer Lydic directly and instead just kept repeating over and over again that he really needed to leave to go take care of the kids.
And that persisted basically for the rest of their interview.
He just didn't answer her question. And so by the time Lydick just wrapped it up and told Melissa and Tom Hughes they could go, Tom had firmly established himself, at least in Lydick's mind, as a clear person of interest.
Before Lydick left the station for the day, she checked in with one of her police officers who she had sent to go observe the autopsy of her victim.
The officer told her that the forensic pathologist had determined that the killer had used a one-sided blade to repeatedly slash John during a fight that must have been at least a few minutes long.
John had clear defensive wounds on his hands as well as cuts on his back, which suggested he'd tried to run away.
And in addition to the knife wounds, his jugular had also been cut by glass.
It was an absolutely brutal way to kill someone.
Everyone that Lydick and her officers had spoken to had described John Yelnik in glowing terms.
He was a simple guy who loved classic movies and old music and liked to dance the polka even though he was terrible at it.
At his dental practice, his favorite patients were the kids, who he could always make laugh.
He was a devoted dad who loved going to his stepson's hockey games.
It just didn't square with the violence described in the autopsy report.
Somebody had hated him enough to basically hack him to death in a wild frenzy.
Corporal Lydic felt like she had one very good suspect in Tom Hughes.
I mean, he had acted very suspicious in the interview, and because he didn't answer the question about the affair, you know, maybe he thought his wife was having an affair with John, and that's why he attacked John.
However, because Lydic had never done a homicide investigation before, she was very weary of not focusing too hard on one lead or one suspect.
She wanted to keep her mind open and make sure she didn't miss anything.
Also, she wanted to appear capable in front of her superiors and show them that she was running down every possible lead.
And this brought up another concern that Lydic had.
And that was, she didn't want to share her investigation with any other police agency.
The officer who had gone to the autopsy had come back with John Yelnik's fingernail clippings, blood samples, and tissue samples, which Lydick was supposed to send to a state police lab for DNA testing.
But now that Lydic had them, she didn't want to give them to anybody else.
And Lydic was a pretty stubborn person. So to keep her investigatory options open and to guarantee that she knew every single thing going on with her evidence, she decided not to send the samples to the state police lab.
Instead, she put them in the department refrigerator and went home.
The following day was April 15th, two days after John Yelnik was murdered, and Corporal Lydick had decided to start her day at John's dental practice, speaking to his colleagues.
She had already had her officers canvass John's neighborhood.
That's how she'd gotten the witness statement about the fight over a loan, and also she had heard about the rumors centered on the Yuse family.
Now she wanted to know how other people in John's life viewed him.
And as soon as she arrived at John's office, she was glad she had come.
Because the dental hygienists and the receptionist had a lot to say about John's soon-to-be ex-wife, Michelle Yelnik.
This was because during the long, awful, drawn-out fight John and Michelle had over their divorce, Michelle had at some point lodged allegations against John that he abused their adopted son JJ.
Even Michelle's own family hadn't believed her, and officials had declined to press charges.
But at one point during the back-and-forth, Michelle had also accused John of violating a stay-away order, and police had come and arrested him at work.
John's colleagues thought Michelle was a total nightmare.
She called the office all the time to demand money, and John often caved and gave it to her.
In fact, one of the hygienists told Corporal Lydick that Michelle had called just a few days before the murder.
However, this time, John had refused to speak to her.
This detail caught Lydick's ear. A lot of John's friends had described Michelle as money-hungry.
They said it was Michelle who wanted the huge house and the pool, and that John really never felt comfortable living in such a nice place.
He still drove an old car with 100,000 miles on it.
It was like when he got rich, he didn't know how to act rich.
But Michelle definitely did, and John's friends and colleagues said that was a big part of what ultimately drove the couple apart.
Now, Lydick did not believe Michelle was physically capable of murdering John the way he was killed.
I mean, clearly, John was overpowered and brutalized.
However, she did have enough money to potentially hire someone to do it for her.
And adding more credibility to that theory, Lydick's team had just pulled the paperwork on John's life insurance policy and they discovered that it listed Michelle as the beneficiary.
And with his death, she stood to inherit more than a million dollars.
The dental hygienists and the receptionist at John's practice didn't know of any other money disputes John was having.
And they said he got on well with his business partner, regardless of any conversations they might have had about, you know, splitting up their practice.
Their suspicions were aimed squarely at Michelle.
And now, so were Corporal Lydick's. She was not ready to write off Tom Hughes.
I mean, he was clearly a main suspect. But it sort of felt like she now had two major suspects, Tom and Michelle.
As Lydick left the dental office, she thought about how she was going to approach Michelle.
Given the sensitivity of the fact that Michelle was dating a cop, Lydick did not want to make her move too soon without enough ammunition.
After all, this was the biggest case she had ever worked.
Reporters were calling her constantly. Everybody was asking her about it.
And so the last thing she wanted to do was act prematurely and screw this thing up.
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.
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John Yelnik's funeral was held on Wednesday, April 19th, six days after his murder.
And Corporal Lydic knew that his friends and family were already beginning to get antsy about why this investigation seemed to be moving so slowly.
But she did understand where they were coming from.
After all, John himself had been convinced he was about to be murdered and that the case would never be solved and he was very vocal about it, and so Lydic could see that it was starting to look to the people that loved him like his prediction was coming true.
But Lydic also felt like John's friends and family simply didn't understand.
Lydic was being careful, not just slow. She was a perfectionist, and she wanted to do the investigation her way.
Without any departmental guidance on how to actually work a homicide, she had developed a method of her own.
She knew that some homicide detectives like to start their investigations with the people closest to their victim, but Lydick was going to focus on the outside edges of the case and work her way in.
She felt like this was the most methodical approach.
So, for the next several months, Lydick did that and took her time.
The crime scene unit had not turned up any matchable DNA or fingerprints at the scene, and the bloody footprints they found didn't belong to any of Lydick's suspects.
Lydick still had not turned in the evidence she had stored in the Blairsville refrigerator, so for now, she was relying on interviews.
Lydic ran down every single tip and rumor she found, systematically ruling things out one by one.
She had heard talk that John's partner in the dental practice wanted to stop working together, so she questioned him, but quickly ruled him out.
Just like the hygienist and the receptionist at the practice had said, the men were close friends with no bad blood, they just maybe didn't want to work together.
Lydic had heard lots of talk about how generous John was, so she tracked down every single person she could who John had lent money to.
One of those people was John's cousin, Tracy Jacobs.
Tracy had borrowed $20,000 to start a lawn care business, and so Lydick brought Tracy down to the station to take a lie detector test.
But Tracy passed. And as spring became summer, that was just how it went.
Lydick brought one person after another down to the station, made them take lie detector tests, and then scratched them off her list.
As she did this, she kept tabs on her two best suspects, Tom Youse and Michelle Yelnik, but she made no move to arrest either one.
Sometimes, the complaints from the public and from John Yelnik's family about her failure to solve the case quickly did get to her, but she felt like she was doing the best job she could.
She was doing this maybe a little bit unorthodox, but she felt like she was on the right path.
That was until Melissa Youse hired a pair of psychics.
It was the summer of 2006, about three months after the murder, when Corporal Lydick got a call from Melissa Youse.
Lydick had been surprised to hear from Melissa and even more surprised when Melissa told her she wanted to meet at John's house.
When Lydick showed up, Melissa was standing on the sidewalk with two older women who she introduced as psychic sisters.
She said she had met them at a psychic tea party and they had visions about this case.
Now, Lydic admittedly was not thrilled at the idea of psychics potentially getting involved in this case.
I mean, she felt like, how could they possibly advance this case?
You know, she was already all over it. Why do we need them?
But she also knew that John's family was getting really edgy, and apparently they had given Melissa permission to bring these psychics into John's house and look around.
And so, if Lydic wanted more time to work on this case, she just needed to placate them.
And so if that meant working with psychics contacted by one of the suspect's wives, then that was what Lydic was going to do.
So, Lydick trailed Melissa Youse and the psychic sisters, tried not to roll her eyes, as the sisters began walking through John's yard.
First, the sisters said they felt some hot and also cold patches on the property.
When they walked up the stairs and went inside, they looked around the house, which had not been cleaned out after the murder, and said they thought the killing happened in the dining room area, which was still spattered with blood.
The psychics said they saw a knife and stab wounds and a bloody footprint.
And then they said the killer drove a black or red car and that the killer was not Melissa Yuse's husband, Tom.
Melissa looked visibly excited by everything the psychics were saying, but Lydek thought it was totally ridiculous.
The blood inside the house made it pretty obvious where the killing had happened, and the huge police investigation that followed had been all over the news.
And so the things they were pointing out about, you know, what could have happened in the house were sort of public knowledge.
And then the fact that these psychics, who remember Melissa herself has brought here, like she's commissioned these psychics, are now exonerating Melissa's husband was just not very convincing.
And so as the group walked out of the house, the only thing Lydic thought these psychics had been good for was taking some of the pressure off her slow but steady investigation.
She knew that by this point, John Yelnik's family had lost faith in her.
But she still had one more thing she wanted to try.
She just needed to wait for the right time.
And 10 months after the murder, in February of 2007, Corporal Lydick got her chance.
John's cousins made an impassioned plea to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office to take over the investigation from Corporal Lydick.
Lydic's cooperation with the psychics had bought her a little bit of goodwill and time with the families, but ultimately, both John's family and Melissa Youth's had gotten more and more agitated by Lydic's slow pace.
They began to feel like the psychics had given them as much information as Lydic had.
And the Attorney General agreed. Not enough progress was being made.
This meant that Lydic was losing her case.
And on one hand, this was exactly the thing that she'd been most worried about, that some bigger agency would come in and take over her investigation.
But the Attorney General's office was not the agency Lydic had expected to do that.
And so now, even though it stung, Lydic realized that she could finally make the play she had been sitting on for almost a year.
She went to the refrigerator in the Blairsville police station and she took out the container of fingernail clippings that her officer had brought back from John Yelnik's autopsy, which had been conducted the day after the murder.
Lydek had been supposed to send the fingernails along with the other tissue samples to the state police crime lab, but in what she knew was probably a breach of protocol, she had not done that.
Instead, she had hidden them in this fridge.
But now, with the Attorney General very publicly stepping in and getting involved in this case, it sort of made the case much more high profile, which in turn allowed Lydic to send these samples directly to the Federal Crime Lab or the FBI Crime Lab.
Normally, the FBI would just not take samples for a small-town murder case, which is what this was all the way up until this point.
But again, the case was not that anymore.
The Attorney General stepping in and taking over had elevated this case, giving Lydic access to the FBI crime lab.
So she repackaged the fingernail clippings and sent them off to the FBI and waited.
The day that the results came in, Lydic was very nervous.
There was a chance that she was about to look very stupid for sitting on this evidence for as long as she had.
But as she sat at her computer and opened up the email with the DNA results, when she read what was on the screen, her eyes went wide.
She almost couldn't believe what she was looking at because her strategy of slow playing the investigation had totally paid off.
Finally, Lydic was looking at the name of John's killer.
Based on evidence collected at the crime scene and then tested by the FBI, the following is a reconstruction of what authorities believe happened to John Yelnik in the early hours of April 13, 2006.
The killer drove through Blairsville in their red car sometime after 12.15 a.m., A little after 1230 a.m., they drove down a quiet residential street and pulled up to a modest little brick home and then cut their lights.
They climbed out of their car and looked around to make sure nobody was watching, but the neighborhood was dark.
As quietly as they could, they crept around to the back of the house and slipped inside, going through an unlocked back door.
They walked through the kitchen, then the dining room, and into the living room, where they found John asleep on the couch.
The killer gripped a single-edged knife in their fist, and they raised it in the air and then brought it down on John.
Instantly, John woke up screaming these horrible high-pitched screams.
He put his hands up to protect himself and clawed at the killer, getting their skin under his fingernails.
But the killer kept slashing and cutting at John's hands, so John rolled off the couch, desperate to get away.
As John stumbled in the dark, the killer chased after him, and at some point they began to wrestle, knocking the divorce papers on the coffee table onto the floor, where John's blood splashed all over them as he flailed his wounded arms.
John finally broke away and ran for the front door, but the killer was close behind, still slashing at John's back.
John made it out of the living room and into the foyer, and he was reaching for the front door when the killer shoved him.
John's head broke through the glass, and he made a strangled sound as the broken shard severed his jugular.
The killer yanked John back into the house, wary of waking up the neighbors.
By now, John was already clearly dying, but the killer decided they couldn't leave anything to chance.
And so, with one brutal motion, they slashed their knife all the way across John's throat.
The killer let John slump to the ground, and then they watched until John went still.
Then the killer turned and left the home.
The killer was confident they would never be caught because they knew the police in Blairsville quite literally trusted them with their lives.
John's killer was not Tom Muse or Michelle Yelnik or a hitman hired by Michelle.
However, the killer was connected to Michelle.
It was Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Kevin Foley, Michelle's new boyfriend.
And this fact explained the unbelievably slow pace of the murder investigation and Corporal Lydick's decision not to send all her evidence to the state police crime lab.
Lydick knew Kevin Foley, and she liked and trusted him.
Initially, she had not wanted to believe he could be a killer.
But as soon as her investigation began, she began to hear about how much Foley seemed to hate John.
In fact, he talked openly about wanting John to die, in part because of the allegations that Michelle had made that John abused JJ.
Even though those allegations were ruled unfounded, it seemed that Foley still believed them.
Lyda could become increasingly paranoid that Foley was the killer and that her case would be taken over not by the Attorney General's office, but by the state police.
And she was afraid that if Foley was guilty, then she couldn't trust the state police crime lab.
And so to keep complete control over her investigation, she had opted to keep all those samples from the autopsy, including the fingernails, even though she knew they likely contained the DNA of John's killer.
Then she slow played her investigation, basically biding her time until she could figure out what she was going to do.
And then basically her hands were tied when a year later, the attorney general came in and took the case over because basically Lydic looked like she was being incompetent.
But when they stepped in, it gave Lydic access to the federal crime lab, the FBI crime lab.
And so when she sent the samples off to them, not worried about Kevin Foley getting involved, the FBI scientists finally tested the DNA under the fingernails and found that it was a match for Kevin Foley.
Foley was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Michelle was not charged in connection with the case.
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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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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