Forensic Expert
speaker
704 appearances
33 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Forensic Expert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This handwritten letter with a happy face scrawled on the top, a smile and two eyes. I thought, he's teasing the police. Like, ha ha ha, here I am, see if you can find me. And then he started confessing to other murders.
This is the recovery of a body that was located over the bank.
It's Tonya Bennett all over again. Gosh, maybe this guy did do it. Maybe these people are innocent.
They now had not just an anonymous letter writer drawing a happy face. They had a real person.
Every morning at the Oregonian, there would be a stack of mail. It was mostly letters and news tips, complaints. I remember that day we got a really sick one. This handwritten letter, several pages, with a, you know, happy face scrawled on the top. And, you know, a smile and two eyes.
And these were anonymous letters.
About halfway through the first page, the writer confessed to a murder. He named the victim Tanya Bennett.
But we already have two people locked up in prison, Laverne Pavlenek and then John Ciesnowski.
So it looked like a hoax. But the letter just went on for several pages, all handwritten. And then he started confessing to other murders. And another murder.
I had to decide whether I was going to recycle it or do something with it. I decided I would give it to a reporter, a guy named Phil Stanford.
Phil Sanford, who was sort of a muckraker in many respects, but he could be pretty thorough.
This person says that he killed five women in the past four years in two different states, in Oregon and California.
I called the authorities in these other locations where the writer claims to have killed women and dumped their bodies, and there were bodies in every one of those cases.
I went over everything that he wanted to report and double-checked it, triple-checked it, and it all checked out. We decided that he would report it in a series.
Now, at that point, they didn't know who had written the anonymous letters. Phil Stanford, Zona came up with the nickname Happy Face Killer.
The letter was of keen interest to the newspaper, but authorities looked at it with skepticism. They weren't going to put much stock in it unless they knew who wrote it.
I read all the information Stanford was putting out in his columns. There really wasn't anything in those letters about Tonya Bennett that hadn't been widely discussed at the trial. It was very good reading, but it was really nothing we could deal with criminally on our case.
We're about a quarter mile, maybe a little less, into Skamania County from the Clark County side on State Route 14, which is also known as the Evergreen Highway. This is where the motorists pulled over to urinate. He had walked across the guardrail and walked over closer to the bank where it's a more wooded area where he could be a little bit more concealed from the traffic.
So looking just down over the bank about 20 feet down there's a little vine maple broadleaf tree that comes up right there. Her body was found just next to that and a little bit uphill from that.
This is the recovery of a body that was located over the bank.
Showing 401–420 of 704 · page 21 of 36
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