Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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In 2013, police were searching a home in St. Louis when they discovered what could only be described as a torture chamber. Inside this room were videotapes that were apparently so disturbing, officers that watched them were ordered to go to psychological counseling.
This is a story about a marginalized community, missed warning signs, and a killer whose ego finally led to some answers. Let's get into what was on those tapes, what really happened to these victims, and try to determine if there are more out there that still need to be uncovered.
Hi guys, welcome back to Clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
I'm Kaelin Moore, and I'm gonna be the one digging deeper into the timelines, the backstories, and the court files released on these cases.
And I'm your internet sleuth, Morgan Absher. I'm the one who's diving into Reddit forums and anything else I can find online. to talk about those lesser known details and pulling out threads that just don't add up.
Also, don't forget to share your thoughts on social. We're always going through comments. We love hearing from you guys. And if you want ad-free listening or early access, you can subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. Let's get into this case and the clues that defined it.
OK, this is one of the worst cases I think I've ever had to research. I didn't sleep. It's heavy. Yeah, it is heavy. And it really does highlight, I think, some progress, at least in the way we treat the marginalized community that is sex workers. I mean, this this case, this killer is often referred to as the streetwalker strangler.
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Chapter 2: What led to the discovery of Maury Travis as a serial killer?
You're right. But okay, without further ado, let's get into this one.
Yeah, and if you're watching on YouTube, you're going to see some assets, some images, videos, sometimes maps that will help you kind of visualize the case. And if you're listening, you can find those same pictures, videos on our social media. That's at Clues Podcast on Instagram.
And just a quick warning, this episode does contain some pretty graphic discussions of kidnapping, torture, essay, suicide and murder. So please, please listen with care. We mean it when we say this is a bit of a heavy case this week.
All right. So this case starts on the morning of May 15th, 2001, when a maintenance worker was out mowing grass near Highway 67 close to West Elton, Mississippi. It's an area north of St. Louis that sits kind of along the Mississippi River. When all of a sudden, as he's mowing this grass, he sees something in the distance just laying down in the grass.
The closer he gets, he can start making the outline of a body, and it's the decomposed remains of a woman. Now, immediately he calls the police, and while the remains are too decomposed when the police arrive to identify this victim just by looking at her, the woman does have something on her that helps police make a positive ID.
Now, one source that I read said that it was this dental plate that she had in her mouth. Another source coming from the St. Louis dispatch said that she still had her fingerprints intact. We don't know exactly how the positive ID was made, but regardless, she's able to be identified as 36-year-old Teresa Wilson.
And aside from her identification, just by looking at her body, the police can tell a few things about the scene. One, foul play was definitely involved. Two, Teresa was killed somewhere else and then her body was dumped in this location. And three, this type of crime was not unusual for this area. And actually, it was starting to become much, much more common.
Now, after learning the identity of the body, investigators learned a couple more things about Teresa's life leading up to her death. In the spring of 2001, 36-year-old Teresa Wilson was living in Baden, a predominantly Black neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, about 12 miles from where her body was ultimately found.
It's a place where about a quarter of the population is living well below the poverty line. And Teresa was described as being somewhat of a latchkey kid growing up. Her parents left her to her own devices a lot. And typically, you know, latchkey kids can get into trouble. But Teresa really didn't in her childhood. She always had really good grades.
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Chapter 3: Who were the victims targeted by Maury Travis?
She kept using cocaine. She kept doing sex work. One quote that we have from Reverend Monguzi about this is, she felt trapped, you know, and she knew that what was happening with her was wrong. It was not good for her. She knew all of this. What she didn't know was how to get out of it. And on the night of March 31st, 2001, things took a turn.
That evening, Elisa called the Reverend from a customer's house, saying that she was going to spend the night there. And to the Reverend's surprise, Elisa actually put the man on the phone. And then she calmly explained that they had just met and she was going to spend the night at his place.
After some small talk, Reverend Monguzi let the man know, quote, She even said that people would look for Elisa if she didn't come home. And this man told her, quote, And those last words, she's safe, would go on to haunt the reverend for the rest of her life.
Because nine hours later, on April 1st, 2001, Elisa's partially clothed body was found in Washington Park, Illinois, just north of East St. Louis. and she also had been moved there after her death. They determined that the cause of death was strangulation, and the medical examiner also found ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, along with evidence of cocaine and alcohol in her system.
Plus, there was something else at the scene.
And this was a detail that seemed like a pretty big deal to investigators. One that, if examined closely, they thought could unlock what kind of car the killer drove. Which brings us to our first clue, a tire track. It was right near Elisa's body. Experts actually determined it was from a Bridgestone Potenza. These were performance tires oftentimes used for sports cars or amateur racing.
So it told them that this killer might be a car enthusiast. It's a very specific tire.
I know. I was going to say, I imagine it's not super common. Not your typical all-season tire you get at your Costco. Yeah, I've mentioned this in the Maura Murray episode. I know nothing about cars. So maybe in the area, everyone had these tires.
Yeah, no, these were pretty specific tires. And at the time, Elisa's death seemed like a random one-off murder and not related to any other murders in the area. Okay, I think that's a mark. But then, six weeks later, Teresa's body was found across the border in Missouri. That's when the neighboring states started comparing notes and realized our second clue, the killer's pattern.
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Chapter 4: How did the community and law enforcement respond to the murders?
However, when they compared the tire print from Betty's leg, they determined that it came from a Goodrich Advantage tire, not a Bridgestone Potenza. which doesn't immediately rule out that it is the same person. It could mean that they drove a different vehicle or changed tires, but it was going to take a lot more to identify a suspect.
But at this point, police do believe that the person who killed Elisa Greenwade also killed Teresa Wilson and Betty James.
I know, in my mind, too, I'm like, it's really sad to think about, but could just someone else have hit her and not realize? I know. Like, could it just have been a tire from a totally different car?
I know it's hard, but like that's like literally all they really knew at this point. Right. Kind of grasping at straws. And this meant that the killer was still out there, potentially about to strike again before they could find them. This episode is brought to you by Symbiotica.
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Chapter 5: What evidence was found in Maury Travis's home?
We're not talking to you. We don't trust you. And no matter what they did, it didn't turn up anything useful. But the clock was ticking. There was this killer out there. And from what we know now, they were already plotting their next move. So on August 25th, 2001, less than two months after Roney's murder, another body was found in a patch of weeds in East St. Louis, Illinois.
This time, it was a 50-year-old woman named Yvonne Cruz. She was also believed by officers to be a sex worker. She also had cocaine in her system at the time of her death. And Yvonne lived with her mother, who last saw her leaving their house in St. Louis, Missouri, the day before she was found.
Now, Yvonne also had ligature marks on her wrists suggesting that she had been bound before she was killed, similar to that of the other victims. She also had scrapes on her knees and she had either been smothered or strangled.
Yvonne's crime scene revealed a pretty critical clue for investigators, though. And kind of a huge mistake that the killer left behind, but hey, I like it. And this would really get the ball rolling in this case.
Police technicians used an SA evidence kit to look for DNA on Yvonne's body, and they were able to recover semen enough to complete a DNA profile for analysis, which brings us to our fourth clue. But... The other shoe is dropping. There were some minor issues that investigators had to acknowledge.
This wasn't guaranteed to be the killer's DNA, since Yvonne could have had sex with someone else before she was killed. Another thing, back in 2001, DNA databases weren't as big as they are now. Neither Illinois nor Missouri had even begun collecting DNA from convicted felons yet. I think in Illinois, that wouldn't happen for another year. In Missouri, it was like...
three years away and so they don't have this big database I mean we talk about CODIS quite a bit it wasn't vast as it is now right but we do see in a lot of the cases we cover that they hold on to some of that DNA for later and then that's how a lot of these matches are made so at least there was a little bit of foresight but yeah they were still really hopeful because at least now they had a sample they had something ready for comparison that when they did find a suspect their suspect
they had something right it's just so unfortunate to see that they weren't able to really track anyone down at this point because it does not take very long for the killer to strike again after these crimes on october 8th 2001 six weeks after yvonne was murdered 33 year old brenda beasley was found dead in east st louis just two miles away from where yvonne's body was found
Her eyes and her arms were bound with tape. She had been struck in the head and she had been suffocated. She was found wearing just her jeans, which were pulled down around her ankles. Brenda also had some similarities to the other victims. She was a sex worker. She also struggled with a cocaine addiction.
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Chapter 6: What disturbing details were revealed during the investigation?
Like, they knew that those four were probably connected. But there's not a lot of information as to what they were doing about those four.
Just interesting to me.
Yeah. Well, some of them were even questioning whether Mary was a victim of this serial killer at all because she didn't fit the profile of the others as far as age. She was 30 years older than them. She was also not a sex worker, even though now we know that one of them, at least one of them, wasn't a sex worker as well.
But as the murders continued to go unsolved, the public grew more concerned. At the time, no one even really knew that this task force had been created to look into these crimes. But on October 28, 2001, about three weeks after Brenda Beasley's murder, an article mentioned that different jurisdictions had actually begun working together. And for a little while, it seemed like this announcement...
did truly make a difference because throughout the winter of 2001 into 2002, the murders came to a stop. The police actually figured that the killer had died or he simply left the area or he went to prison. Or maybe he was just laying low in the wake of all this publicity. And so maybe because of this, the community of sex workers in St.
Louis were able to breathe this collective sigh of relief because whoever was doing this was gone, at least for now. But that did not last long at all. In early 2002, workers with the Illinois Department of Transportation found three more bodies alongside highways in southwestern Illinois. One body was found on January 30th, one was found on March 11th, and one was found on March 28th.
In each case, the bodies had been dumped months earlier. By the time they were discovered, they were just skeletons. And they had a few items of clothing and jewelry on them, but the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death for any of them. So the police called in this forensic anthropologist who determined that the victims were all black women.
The first two were thought to be in their 20s, while the third was anywhere from her 20s to her 40s. They gave kind of a bigger range. The victims fit the same physical profile as the identified victims. They all had been dumped out in the open. And plus, the timelines all matched. They had all been killed during 2001, when the killer was active.
If these were additional victims of the same killer, his body count was now potentially up to 10. And none of this helped answer the bigger question, though. Was the killer actually gone, or was this just a cool-off period?
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Chapter 7: How did the investigation lead to Maury Travis's arrest?
End quote. Inside this letter was also a map of West Alton, Missouri, printed from a website. They couldn't tell what website, though, because whoever sent this had cropped the borders that would have displayed the URL and the website logo. An X was drawn over a spot on the map just off Highway 67, close to where Teresa and Roni's bodies were actually found.
And Bill, he showed this to his editors pretty quickly after he realized, hey, this is not a prank. This is from the killer. And they turned the letter and envelope over to the police. Unfortunately, police weren't able to recover any DNA or fingerprints from this letter. They did quickly learn, though, what Ithral Dom was. Again, we all know now.
And this made a lot of sense to police, as nearly all of the victims did show signs of being bound before their death. Investigators also followed up on that map, and on May 25, 2002, it became clear that whoever had sent this letter and map was, in fact, the real killer. When searching the area near the X, they found another body.
She was a Black woman who had been killed months earlier and was unidentifiable due to decomposition. Her cause of death, again, couldn't be determined. But now that police knew that this was indeed their killer, they keep going back to the fact that this letter referred to this victim as number 17.
Yeah, when I read it, that was the first thing that jumped out to me. He said 17. And we've been keeping track this whole time and Police at this point only think there's 10.
Maybe 10 if we're counting Mary.
Yeah.
So we're at like nine potentially. So the fact that there's that many women, that many victims potentially missing. I mean, they're they're in a tailspin. Yeah. Like either he's bragging about more murders than he'd actually committed or again, like there's more people out there to be found. In the meantime, the Illinois State Police have an idea about how they could catch this person, though.
So as we just talked about, like the killer did crop that URL after printing the map from the website. Police kind of figured that if they could find out what site that map came from, like there were multiple providers. I was a MapQuest person. There was a bunch of other different providers.
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Chapter 8: What were the circumstances surrounding Maury Travis's death?
Even like back then, limited technology, internet's pretty new. All of this stuff is kind of new for investigators. Like they were moving pretty quick on this IP address and stuff.
I think it also is kind of kismet that it was sent to Bill, who really seemed to care about the women involved and really wanted to see this solved. So when, of course, it's like he gets the biggest clue that is what could lead them to the killer.
I mean, he cracked it. Yeah. He cracked it. Because what investigators find when they get this IP address back, it was from a home that was owned by an older woman named Sandra Travis. Based on, you know, the DNA evidence that police found at the crime scenes, though, they did suspect that they were looking for a man. I mean, some of it was semen. They were definitely looking for a man.
Semen, you guys. It was jizz. So it turns out Sandra wasn't living at the house, but her 36-year-old son, Maury... And to really hammer home that they had the right guy, when Microsoft handed over the IP address to investigators, they also were able to provide this like Microsoft screen name that like this account was going by. And that username was literally Maury Travis. First name, last name.
First name, last name, just smushed together there. The home was placed under around-the-clock surveillance at that point, and it wasn't long before they had enough evidence to make an arrest. While surveilling the house in June of 2002, members of the task force saw Maury taking out the trash. So they caught a ride with the garbage collectors and intercepted Maury's trash without his knowledge.
That's how we actually get our eighth clue, a used plastic spoon. Within a day, the crime lab retrieved DNA from it. It was a match to the unknown DNA retrieved from the bodies of Yvonne and Brenda. But without being able to say who exactly used that spoon, they couldn't prove it was Maury's DNA.
Not yet, at least. Well, on June 7th, police and the FBI knocked on Maury's door with a search warrant. And Maury reportedly complained, quote, it's seven in the morning. Why are you here so early? That's what he said to them when he answered the door. And the detective said, quote, you're right. It's seven o'clock in the morning and we're serving a federal search warrant.
And Maury said, OK, why are you here? And they said, you know why we're here. And Maury just dropped his head and agreed. He said, yes, I know why you're here. And he proceeded to let investigators into his home where he talked to them for over two hours.
Just sitting there on the couch in the living room, just chatting away for a couple hours. And you read something about his cat. You guys, this is the weirdest tidbit rabbit hole piece of information I went down. So I read an article where they interviewed one of the main investigators, Sachs, and Sachs described this like they're just casually chilling on the sofa asking questions.
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