The Murders of Gloria Gough & Evelyn "Penny" Deans (Maine and South Carolina)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Every case starts somewhere. A small town, a missing person's report, a family asking the same questions over and over. But sometimes a story reaches beyond its own community. Its impact extends further, calling for more attention, more conversation, and a wider audience. That's what Crime Junkie does every Monday. Ashley Flowers and Britt Preywat cover the cases you can't stop. Stop thinking about from unsolved murders to missing people to investigations that still need answers. Because every new person who hears the story is another chance to uncover the truth. Listen to Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. In August of 1972, 44-year-old Gloria Goff left her home in Gardiner, Maine after a late-night phone call and vanished.
Two days later, more than a thousand miles away in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 52-year-old Evelyn Penny Deans was shot to death inside her home. Then police looked in Penny's driveway. Sitting there was Gloria's car. Inside were blood-soaked towels, clothing, and a map pointing toward yet another state. What followed was a multi-state investigation, a murder case built largely on circumstantial evidence, and a second murder case that never reached trial. Not because investigators walked away. But because the family asked for something different from the justice system. I'm Kylie Lowe and these are the cases of Gloria Goff and Evelyn Penny Deans. On dark down east.
Mount Pleasant, South Carolina sits low along the coast, where tidal creeks cut through broad stretches of marsh grass and warm salt air hangs heavy in late summer. is more than a thousand miles south of New England's northernmost state, where the landscape is quite different, with its pine forests, rocky ground, and small towns built along cold rivers. On august twentieth, nineteen seventy two, there was no obvious reason that a quiet house in Mount Pleasant should have anything to do with an unexplained disappearance in Gardner Maine. But that was about to change. Just before midnight that Sunday, William Bill Deans and a friend had driven by Bill's mother's home, who lived in the same neighborhood as him, and noticed the lights were on and there was a strange car in the driveway.
According to the book A Courageous Fool by Todd C. Peppers and Margaret A. Anderson, Bill's mother, 52-year-old Evelyn Penny Deans, and her young daughter weren't expected back from vacation for a few days. So everything about the house and the car didn't make sense. Bill pulled in to take a closer look. Penny and her daughter must have returned from vacation earlier than expected because Bill heard voices as he approached the house and figured she had a friend over or something. He turned to leave, but just as his back was to the house, he heard gunshots. Bill rushed to the front door, pounding on it, trying to get inside, while his friend rounded the back of the house just in time to see an unknown man running from the garage.
Bill found his mother lying on the floor of her home. She had been shot. Penny's young daughter was inside, physically unharmed. Police descended on the house and the surrounding area, and they didn't have to look far for a major piece of evidence. In Penny's driveway was the strange car Bill had seen. A Volkswagen car that didn't belong to her. It had main license plates. The out-of-state plates were strange enough. What investigators found inside made the Volkswagen impossible to dismiss. There was a woman's purse and a rain hat, along with men's pants and a jacket, a radio, and a flashlight. There were also two towels soaked with what appeared to be blood. A map inside the car had Fayetteville, North Carolina circled, and tucked into the men's pair of pants was a piece of paper containing a list of names.
At the top was the name Gloria Goff. Police ran the Volkswagen's registration and found that it belonged to Gloria, a forty-four year old woman from Gardner, Maine.
What happened to Gloria Goff in August 1972 and why did she vanish?
A missing woman from Maine. Two nights earlier, on Friday, august eighteenth, Gloria's sister was visiting from Boston when the telephone rang sometime around nine fifty or ten o'clock that night.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:35
2
What happened to Gloria Goff in August 1972 and why did she vanish?
4:35–7:25
3
How was Gloria’s Volkswagen discovered at Penny Deans’ crime scene?
7:25–11:35
4
Who was Lloyd Wayne Northup Jr. and what was his history before the 1972 escape?
11:35–21:46
5
What evidence linked Wayne Northup to Gloria Goff’s murder?
21:46–39:22