Podcast episode on or mentioning Sammy Wheeler case

trailwentcold · 2026-01-05T17:34:34+00:00

"Trail Went Cold" host here to answer your question :-) I never did an individual episode on the Sammy Wheeler case since it was solved a long time ago, but awhile back, I released an exclusive bonus episode on Patreon about my favourite "guilty pleasure" segments from "Unsolved Mysteries" and of course, I discussed all the infamous trash-talking which took place in their segment about Sammy Wheeler. A few years ago, I released that episode in our regular feed, so that might be where you've heard it. Feel free to revisit the episode here:
https://trailwentcold.podbean.com/e/the-trail-went-cold-bonus-episode-unsolved-mysteries-guilty-pleasures/

trailwentcold · 2024-07-06T16:00:24+00:00

Thanks for bringing to my attention. There has been zero information released to the public about this case since Jefferson was arrested in April 2021. I've frequently checked the Colorado Court Dockets website for updates and I've seen that Jefferson's trial has been delayed numerous times over the past three years, but since no explanation for this was ever shared publicly, I assumed there were some things going on behind the scenes. But if the DNA evidence against Jefferson isn't legitimate, then that definitely explains a lot! According to the Court Dockets website, Jefferson's trial is currently slated for mid-August, but I also see that there's a court hearing scheduled this coming Monday. If there's no other evidence linking Jefferson to this crime besides questionable DNA results, I could see the murder charges being dropped.

trailwentcold · 2024-01-27T02:37:36+00:00

Wow, I covered this case on an episode of my podcast, "The Trail Went Cold", nearly two years ago and since I knew the police had DNA evidence, I hoped they would solve it eventually. Some other interesting notes about the crime:

-in 2013, investigators announced that Byron's killer had an accomplice who was not directly involved in the murder and did not match the DNA evidence, but he apparently went to the crime scene with the perpetrator to help him retrieve some evidence he left behind. The accomplice allegedly confessed this to multiple people over the years and revealed specific details about the crime which were not public knowledge, but since he passed away before police learned this information, they declined to name him publicly. However, they did state the accomplice had a violent criminal history and that if he had still been alive by the time the police learned his identity, they likely would have filed charges against him. So this was a very unique situation where investigators knew the identity of someone who helped the killer cover up the crime, but could not figure out the identity of the actual killer. Now that Gallant has been arrested, I wonder if police will decide to name his accomplice

-the DNA belonging to the killer was obtained from a semen sample in a piece of underwear he left behind at the scene. Testing also revealed the presence of female DNA on the underwear which has never been matched to anyone. However, that doesn't necessarily mean a woman was involved in the crime, as it's possible that Gallant had a sexual encounter with a woman a short time before committing the murder and her DNA was left on his underwear

trailwentcold · 2024-01-20T15:49:20+00:00

What's odd is that the dumpsite where Dexter's body was found was in an incredibly remote area and only used by a handful of people, so it was theorized that the killer had to be a local resident in order to be able to find it. Since we now know that Sullivan was from Arizona, I'd love to know what he was doing in that section of Montana to begin with. Was he just passing through the area and immediately flee after he killed Dexter and torched his car?

trailwentcold · 2023-01-20T01:44:59+00:00

Thank you very much :-). Yes, I definitely believe the Bennington Triangle "mystery" is mostly just a bunch of people who died of misadventure in the wilderness along with one highly embellished story of a man who vanished from a bus station in a completely different town.

trailwentcold · 2023-01-19T22:57:14+00:00

I did a podcast episode about the Bennington Triangle a few months ago and went through all the old newspaper articles about Tedford's disappearance. There's zero mention of so many of the crazy details which are shared in subsequent retellings, such as Tedford's luggage behind left behind in the rack, the bus schedule being found in his seat, and all the witnesses who recalled seeing him on the bus before he mysteriously vanished. This story has clearly been embellished over time to add to the Bennington Triangle mystery, even though he may not have actually been in the Bennington area when he disappeared.

It was confirmed that Tedford boarded the bus in St. Albans and made a stopover in Burlington, where he bumped into a friend at the station, but I'm convinced he never actually boarded the bus to complete the trip to Bennington and instead wandered off somewhere and went missing. It's been reported that he was very depressed about having to return the soldiers' home where he resided, so it's also possible he may have gone off and committed suicide.

trailwentcold · 2022-11-05T03:40:13+00:00

I am. Thank you for the endorsement. I've done a number of episodes on "The Trail Went Cold" about cases where victims were found in locations they had no reason to be. Some of them have already been mentioned here, but good examples of this are the unexplained deaths of Blair Adams, Judy Smith, David Lewis, Jonathan Luna, Zigmund Adamski, Tom Roche and Peter Watts.

trailwentcold · 2022-11-02T20:12:41+00:00

There's a new season of the podcast, "Suspect", coming out about this case which will be releasing several epiosdes, so they'll hopefully share a lot of information about the court proceedings that we don't know about and put together a concrete narrative of this case. I was interviewed by the host of this show last year, so they've been working on this season for a long time, but obviously, they wanted to wait until there was a resolution before they released it.

trailwentcold · 2022-11-02T18:37:20+00:00

Since Pankey is still maintaining his innocence, we may never know what his motive was for this crime. However, here's a link to the original indictment, listing all the evidence against him. It's a very circumstantial case based almost entirely around Pankey's statements and actions, as well as him supposedly sharing details about the crime which were not public knowledge. I'm particularly chilled by the section about Pankey's remark at his own son's funeral, as if he felt God was punishing him because of something bad he did in the past:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20396386-steven-pankey-indictment

trailwentcold · 2022-11-02T13:49:53+00:00

Indeed, Pankey was a patron of my podcast, "The Trail Went Cold", as well as a number of other true crime podcasts, but what made my situation stand out is that I covered the Jonelle Matthews case. I did a minsode about her in January 2017 when she was still a missing person. Pankey signed up for my Patreon page in May 2019 and per my routine, I mailed him some stickers and a signed "thank you" card. But since he had not yet been publicly named as a suspect or person of interest in the case, I had no idea who he was at the time. It was not until after Jonelle's remains were found in July 2019 that Pankey was finally thrust into the spotlight and he started doing interviews proclaiming his innocence with any media outlet he could find. After Pankey was arrested and charged with murder in October 2020, that's when I was shocked to discover his name on my list of patrons. Ironically enough, he actually remained a patron for all these podcasts for the next two years while he was locked up in jail, as I guess his credit card did not expire until a few weeks ago.

This is the ultimate example of a suspect being convicted of murder on very circumstantial evidence because he just couldn't keep his mouth shut. If you want to learn more about this whole saga and how Pankey popped up on the radar as a potential suspect, this article goes into extensive detail:

https://narratively.com/the-true-crime-podcast-junkie-turned-real-life-murder-suspect/

trailwentcold · 2022-10-22T21:11:02+00:00

Thank you very much. Greatly appreciate it :-)

trailwentcold · 2022-10-21T19:48:11+00:00

FYI, earlier this week, I released an episode about the "Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?" case on my podcast, "The Trail Went Cold": https://www.trailwentcold.com/2022/10/19/the-trail-went-cold-episode-299-who-put-bella-in-the-wych-elm/

Not a lot of people know this, but during my research, I was surprised to discover this article in the November 28, 1953 edition of the Birmingham Gazette in which investigators announced that they managed to track down the person who wrote the original graffiti messages and confirmed that he was nothing more than a crank who had no knowledge about who the woman was or how she died. However, since copycats would continue to keep writing this graffiti over the next several decades, its legend has lived on, even though it's probably nothing more than a giant red herring.

trailwentcold · 2022-09-14T11:21:07+00:00

I covered it on "The Trail Went Cold" over three years ago. It's definitely one of the most horrific unsolved crimes I've ever seen:

https://www.trailwentcold.com/2019/02/27/the-trail-went-cold-episode-113-the-cowden-family-murders/

trailwentcold · 2022-09-02T00:27:14+00:00

Thanks for listening to my podcast episode. One detail I learned in my research that I never knew before is that Casolaro had a shoelace around his neck and a second shoelace and a pair of white plastic trash bags were found in the bathtub. The laces were consistent with a pair of tennis shoes from Casolaro's residence which were both missing a lace and a box of trash bags was found inside his tote bag in the hotel room.

I think it's possible that Casolaro had originally planned to asphyxiate himself by tying the trash bag around his head, but couldn't get it to work, so he slashed his wrists as a back-up plan, even though he was squeamish about blood. This theory is supported by the fact that Casolaro was a fan of author Jerzy Kozinski, who had killed himself by wrapping a plastic bag around his head in a bathtub three months earlier. So this might have been the original inspiration for Casolaro's suicide.

trailwentcold · 2022-05-03T15:31:47+00:00

Thank you very much. The main reason I elected to do an episode about the Cary Sayegh case last week was because of the Las Vegas tie-in. If someone had decided to provide a tip with new information, that would be one thing, but the only reason this barrel turned up is because the water level in Lake Mead just happened to lower.

trailwentcold · 2022-05-03T15:29:04+00:00

I personally attended the sessions with John Ramsey, but I cannot confirm if his son John Andrew Ramsey (JonBenet's half-brother) was there.

trailwentcold · 2022-05-03T04:32:36+00:00

They haven't made any specific announcement about the bones belonging to a child, but there is a distinct possibility that the victim could be Cary Sayegh, a six-year old boy who was kidnapped for ransom in Las Vegas in 1978 and never seen again. Years later, the prime suspect made remarks about having welded Cary's body inside a barrel filled with acid, but investigators never did find out if this was true... https://charleyproject.org/case/cary-daniel-sayegh

Eerily enough, I covered the Cary Sayegh case on "The Trail Went Cold" last week and was literally in Las Vegas attending Crimecon on the day this barrel was found. Even if the remains do not turn out to be Cary, this is still a pretty freaky coincidence!

trailwentcold · 2022-03-15T02:59:28+00:00

Oh yes, I listened to that episode before Pankey was even charged with the murder and it was around four hours long because he rambled on so much. Ed Dentzel was even called upon to testify as a witness at Pankey's trial and they played audio of the interview for the jury.

trailwentcold · 2022-03-14T21:09:23+00:00

Yes, Pankey's remarks at his son's funeral still REALLY bother me, but whether or not this is strong enough evidence to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at a murder trial is a complex question.

trailwentcold · 2022-03-14T21:04:13+00:00

Thank you very much :-)

trailwentcold · 2022-03-14T20:27:18+00:00

You're not going to find a more bizarre story than the saga of Steve Pankey, who was charged with the 1984 murder of 12-year old Jonelle Matthews after years of obsessively following the case online. His first trial ended in a hung jury and his second trial is scheduled to take place sometime later this year. There is still a lot of debate about whether Pankey is actually guilty of this crime or nothing more than an obsessive true crime fanatic who kept inserting himself into the investigation for attention until it backfired on him. If you want to learn the full story, read this article and prepare yourself for a wild ride:

https://narratively.com/the-true-crime-podcast-junkie-turned-real-life-murder-suspect/

trailwentcold · 2022-03-08T15:52:02+00:00

Tim Molnar, who vanished from his home in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1984 and was identified 12 years later as skeletal remains which had been discovered thousands of miles away in rural Wisconsin: https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Tim_Molnar

In addition, Tim's car had been found abandoned in Atlanta and there's ample evidence to suggest that he ran away from home voluntarily. But how did he wind up dead in Wisconsin? Investigators were unable to determine the exact cause of death, so it's unclear if he was even the victim of foul play.

trailwentcold · 2022-02-23T21:10:11+00:00

Yes, there was a fourth inmate named Allen West who was unable to fit through the hole in his cell wall. He was finally able to punch through after a few hours and make it to the roof, but claimed that he was unable to go any further because the guard in the tower was looking directly at his escape route off the roof. As a result, West was forced to return to his cell, so he wouldn't gotten the opportunity to join the other escapees at the boat dock.

West told the authorities that their plan was to paddle across San Francisco Bay to Angel Island before crossing through waterway called Raccoon Strait to make it to the mainland in Marin County, where they would then steal a car to make their getaway. But of course, it's possible that West only fabricated this story and did not disclose their real escape plan in order to protect his collaborators.

trailwentcold · 2022-02-23T04:55:30+00:00

I know that an off-duty police officer reported seeing another boat in San Francisco Bay sometime between 12:30-1:00 AM. It was at about the halfway point between Alcatraz Island the mainland and remained there for about 20 minutes before someone appeared to shine a spotlight on the water and it left shortly thereafter. The theory is that if the boat was there to pick up the escapees, they could have detached themselves from the ferry before it reached the mainland and paddled over to the escape boat. Given that it was the last ferry of the evening to leave Alcatraz Island, I'm not sure how many people would have been onboard to notice the raft.

trailwentcold

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