Chapter 1: What is the background of the Robert Doerr murder case?
It's the middle of the night in a small town on the Jersey Shore. Someone reports an abandoned car on a bridge. A search gets underway for the missing driver, 19-year-old Sarah Stern. Is it a missing person? Is it a suicide? At this point, nobody knows. Old friendships, buried cash, and a sinister plot that was once pitched as a movie plays out in real life.
I'm Juju Chang from 2020 and ABC Audio. Listen now to Bridge of Lies, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi there, everybody. Welcome to 2020 The After Show. I'm Debra Roberts. And as always, it's great to have you with us as we take a deeper look at one of our 2020 episodes. And today we're going to look at our latest one called One Last Call. Now, this is a story that is riddled with family betrayal, lies, a secret relationship, a cold blooded, calculated murder.
I mean, it sounds like something out of a TV movie, right? Well, this was real life in Evansville, Indiana. Robert Doerr was a 28-year veteran firefighter in Evansville. He was a father, a grandfather, and many considered him one of the community's bravest first responders. Well, on February 26, 2019, after getting off work, Robert was gunned down in his driveway.
Police body camera footage captured the heartbreaking moments of the family learning of the news of his death.
It's my dad. I need to get down there. I understand. You're not going through this crime scene.
Okay, well then get my mother down here. Her name is Elizabeth Dorr. Where's my mom? Follow me.
Okay, let's go. Is he alive?
No. Oh my God. Is that the daughter? No.
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Chapter 2: How did the community react to Robert Doerr's murder?
So Robbie's how everyone refers to him. And Robbie was just like a beloved teddy bear type of guy. And he loved the job.
a true hero yeah a real hero he he famously rescued a baby from a burning building and a photo of him carrying the child away from the building made the local papers that classic photo right yeah we had that in the show and he he just lived for the job he lived to help other people um he just loved doing good and putting good into his community and he didn't get rich off of this job.
He had to take a second job in addition to being a firefighter. But he just really loved what he did.
Yeah. So that was why it was even more shocking, I think, because this was a guy who had such heart in what he was doing and to be gunned down in such a horrible, vicious, tragic way. So let's go back to that night of the murder. He's arriving home. It's somewhere around 7 or so in the evening. His wife, Elizabeth, who they refer to as Becky, is at home. He pulls up into the driveway.
She would tell police that she heard gunshots. Later on, we would hear the 911 call. So these first responders, people who know him, are responding to his killing and learning in real time that it's one of their own. Describe that scene a little bit because we played that out in our episode two on Friday.
Yeah, you see in real time the first responders getting there, the members of the fire engine arriving, looking at the victim on the ground and realizing, recognizing him as one of their own. And you just hear their disbelief and shock realizing that it's Robbie, their close friend, their colleague.
And then we see one by one his loved ones and family arriving at the scene and just the look of absolute disbelief. and panic on their face, trying to get information, not really knowing what's happened yet, then realizing that he's dead. That he's gone. He's dead on the driveway. They'd heard he'd been shot and didn't necessarily realize that he had already passed away when they got there.
And that is just heart wrenching.
One interesting thing when the investigators got there, of course, they're always looking for DNA or something that's telling on the scene. They're not finding anything right away.
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Chapter 3: What evidence led police to suspect Becky and Larry?
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Welcome back to 2020 The After Show. I'm Deborah Roberts, and I am here with our editorial producer at 2020, Mike Replier. Mike and I are unraveling a case that we just featured on 2020. It is the murder case of Robert Doerr, a veteran firefighter and a local hero in Evansville, Indiana.
When we left off, Mike, you and I, we were talking about the fact that his wife, Becky, and her sister's fiancee, Larry Sr., were hiding a secret. And police, of course, were suspicious. They weren't quite sure. But there have been whispers around, I guess, the area, right, that Becky somehow might have been connected to Robert's murder, even before police were absolutely certain.
When she showed up at the fire station asking about his pension, not long after she just lost her husband, a lot of folks thought that was pretty strange.
Definitely. Even her own son really, really was concerned and disturbed by that. Why within a day of her husband's death, she was questioning the pension, going to find out more about the pension at the fire station. And for her part, she says that so many people were asking her about his pension and her plans for it that she wanted to get more information because she didn't know anything.
Well, paint a picture, Mike, because you were there on the ground and you're getting a sense of this community. You're getting a sense of these people. Becky was his second wife. They both had children. She had grown. He had grown children. Talk about their relationship a little bit and what people thought of the two of them.
So Becky and Robbie had actually known each other for years. They were colleagues at Taco John's, a local fast food joint. Robbie actually helped train Becky when she joined the store and he apparently fell in love with her right away. He was kind of smitten with her from the start, but they were in the friend zone for many years.
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Chapter 4: How did the police connect the dots in the investigation?
It goes in a box. Because I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. Because I know it's supposed to do something to me. I know it's supposed to make me scared of him. I know it's supposed to make me hate him. I know what it's supposed to do. But it doesn't. He was never scary to me. He was my protector. He was showing up when I would get off work at 10.30 at night.
just to be there to make sure we got to our cars okay.
So she spoke so passionately about her relationship. What about her relationship with her sister Becky? That's gotta be kinda tricky.
It's definitely tricky. It's very touch and go, I think still. But after our interview with Mandy, she and Becky did speak for the first time in years. And she describes it as a hopeful conversation. I think that Mandy told her that she will always love her and support her, but that she can't talk about what happened. And...
That makes sense.
Yeah, I think that's how she has to compartmentalize these conflicting feelings she has about people that she loves still very much who she feels have done horrible things.
Have betrayed her. I mean, she's got her sister in prison and she's got her fiance in prison for killing her brother-in-law. Well, I want to talk to you a little bit more about her and those exclusive interviews because that was really something else. When we come back, we're going to have more that you haven't heard from inside the prison, actually, where Becky spoke with Mike.
And you're going to hear about that conversation, details that you did not hear on Friday night. So do not go anywhere.
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