MISSY: The Twins Day Festival kind of
put Twinsburg on the map, because when you talk to
anybody and say you're from Twinsburg,
"Oh, is that where they have that
Twins Day festival?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's it.
You got it." [laughs]
But I gotta say, Charlene's death
changed my whole opinion on life.
I became this paranoid freak.
I was afraid of everything.
My children, my poor children, were
just raised with a paranoid freak mother.
KEN: Murder destroys families.
It was hard on my wife, how I acted towards her.
She was killed in front of her children.
That would have tore me up.
No one should have to go through a life losing a mom
to where she can't be with her boys.
They're always wondering, what's my mom like?
Something they'll never know.
ERIC: What happened? Why did it happen?
How did it happen? It didn't make any sense.
MISSY: Nothing is safe. Nobody's safe.
You're not safe.
[theme music playing]
MICHELLE: I lived here for a lot of years --
since '88.
The apartment complex,
it was a lot of single mothers,
and everybody cared about each other and their kids,
you know, like family.
It was just very tranquil and quiet until that day.
My neighbor next door, Charlene, babysat for
a lot of mothers in our complex.
She was with her boys, Dustin
and Derrek, all the time, and we became friends.
I would come over and visit her, and she would come over
to my house and visit me,
and she used to cook, and she made the best snickerdoodles.
That day, you know, I was knocking on
her door and seein' how she was doing that morning,
and no answer.
My sister came over to my house that Monday
and said, "Charlene ain't waking up."
It's early in the morning,
so I'm like, what the hell you talking about?
So I got dressed, and I go over there,
I open up the door...
[door creaks open]
The mom was laying on the couch,
and she was just, you know, laying over here like that.
She looked like a ghost.
I picked up Dustin and Derrek
and got 'em out and shut the door
and took 'em over to my sister's house,
and that was it -- ain't nobody went back up
in there until the police came up in there.
-Morning. -Morning.
Can I get a pair of size 11s and maybe throw a game?
Sure.
At that point, I was
with the Twinsburg Township Police Department.
I had under five years of service.
It wasn't a rookie status, but might as well be.
It came out as an innocent call of an unknown injury.
[indistinct radio chatter]
Got the address -- I had may have been
in the car for two minutes, and I'll never forget,
the dispatcher came on the radio,
she just said, "Eric, this sounds bad, hurry."
[sirens and indistinct radio chatter]
As I approached that February at this time,
I'm the only one here as far as worker bees.
Here's where Charlene lived.
You first walked in the apartment,
the apartment wasn't ransacked.
Um, and obviously, you see the body,
and you see what it had gone through.
She was laying on the couch, under a blanket, um,
dried blood on her face.
She had a belt wrapped around her neck.
It was early morning, and...
she had been on the couch for a while.
So obviously, it had happened the night before sometime...
in the overnight hours.
Her arms and hands had some defense wounds.
It was the first murder scene I'd ever even seen
in real life.
Your initial reactions,
it was -- it was an uh-oh moment.
It wasn't panic, it wasn't fear.
It was just like, I gotta get this right, I gotta be perfect.
I got to be good.
PHYLLIS: I got a call from one of her neighbors.
Charlene didn't have a phone in her apartment.
And they said, you know, come over to
Charlene's apartment.
And they says, "Don't -- don't rush," you know,
but they said, "Charlene has been hurt."
I just felt, you know, just worrying.
I says, well, you know, how bad was Charlene hurt?
And, like, her two boys were there, were they okay?
Did she need help?
You know, for me to...
like, watch the, you know, the boys.
You know, I had
no idea what I was walking into.
When I got there, they wouldn't...
they wouldn't let me into Charlene's apartment.
I said, "I want to see her."
And they said, "You can't."
And that's when,
yeah, the police said, you know that she had been,
you know, murdered.
I was, like, stunned.
It was just -- you know, this can't be.
KEN: I was in college.
So unfortunately, I was out of state when I got
the news, and I ended up calling my mother...
[sighs]
And...
She's the one that told me.
So, um... [clears throat]
So she just basically said she was gone.
And then, you know, I flew back up to town,
and, you know, the hardest challenge was she has two kids.
One was three, the other one was two,
and there was no father figure for them to lean on.
Throughout the day,
our chief started calling in other officers of ours,
because there's work to be done, there's interviews to be done.
There's searching to be done for evidence,
for clues, for whatever.
The evidence we collected,
I wanna say there was over 150 items.
So we took -- cut out carpet.
We basically disassembled the couch and collected each piece.
We went through the sink drains and the tub drains.
It was reported to us that the house was locked.
The neighbor discovered it when she went over to get the kids.
We did not find any forced entry.
The deadbolt was locked.
PATRICIA: I don't think I've ever had
a case where somebody's locked the door behind them,
honestly, in the 28 years I've been around.
I mean, it's just rare.
It was obvious their concern was keeping those kids inside.
The sad part is, is those kids
spent the night with their mom, who was gone.
That was the tough part of the case for everybody,
is those kids had to endure that through the night.
ERIC: These kids, two and three,
spent the night in the apartment with their dead mother.
I mean that's...
that's -- that's not -- that doesn't happen, right?
I just -- I don't know how they did it.
PATRICIA: A lot of cases, boyfriends are usually
the number one suspect.
Depending on what the situation is,
they're your top tier from -- from the beginning.
In interviewing the family,
we found out Charlene's kids had two different fathers.
Dustin, the oldest boy,
his dad is Alan Redmond.
The father of the youngest child was Willard McCarley.
Our chief started calling in other officers of ours.
One of our other officers had just showed up, and when
the older boy saw him, he just pointed and said, "He did it.
He hurt my mommy."
What I thought at that moment was why him?
It's not the first officer he'd seen today.
So it was very strange and very suspicious.
It didn't cross my mind that the person he pointed at
had anything to do with it specifically.
So it had to be a characteristic that
he shared with the person who did do it.
Was it somebody dressed up as a cop?
It's possible.
STEPHANIE: In my 25-year-plus career as a reporter,
I love the fact that you never know what you're gonna do
on any given day -- as soon as I heard about this case,
I, you know, delved into it and talked to the family,
and I wrote a couple of stories.
This type of a murder
in a place like Twinsburg is very rare,
and obviously very disturbing to the --
to the people that live there, because they're not used to
reading about, you know,
a woman who's been strangled and bludgeoned to death.
CHARLES: So the first time that I actually heard about the whole
Charlene Puffenbarger murder case
was when I was working at the auto plant that I was at.
The plant was horrible about gossip.
There were people that acted like they knew
what was going on.
You'd get little snippets of comments,
you know, different places.
You know, they think somebody that
works here is involved in it, all kinds of different stuff.
JAKE: You can't help but think that, you know,
maybe this guy is the guy that did it, or maybe this guy knows
who did it but is not telling anybody.
Maybe you're -- you're helping
somebody inadvertently by fixing their car.
This was my first saddle I ever bought,
and I used it for years,
and then I got into the sheriff's mounted unit,
a horse unit, and then eventually,
in the detective bureau.
Anything where somebody got hurt,
that was my case.
In looking back at Charlene's case, during that time,
I was on edge,
and you just want to do it for the family and for Charlene
and -- and even the residents there that were so afraid,
you know, that -- that that person was gonna come back.
Dustin was her three-year-old son, and there's no doubt
in my mind when Dustin was pointing at this deputy,
you had to believe that maybe it was
a police officer involved.
You can have very good witnesses with kids,
especially in a traumatic event.
They remember things -- they may not be verbal,
but they can point them out.
They can tell you, to a certain degree,
what went on -- for an officer to be involved,
that'd be not a good case scenario,
but he was only pointing out this black tuff jacket
that we had back then, the winter jacket.
And I know it was the buttons.
If you -- if -- I wish I had my tuffy coat,
I could show you -- they stand out.
Now we need to look for a suspect with a police jacket,
tuffy jacket, black one.
-Hello! -Hi, Skye.
-How you doing today? -Good, how are you?
-I'm good, thank you. -Everything going okay?
It is! Are you ready for dinner? -Okay, I'm ready.
PHYLLIS: When it happened,
my first thought was Emma.
Charlene and Emma White went to school together,
and they lived in the same apartment complex.
She came to Charlene's apartment, and I think Emma was
wanting some money, which, you know, Charlene didn't have it.
Charlene offered her some food, but...
she wouldn't take it.
Emma threatened her after Charlene wouldn't give her any
money, and then, of course, Charlene was afraid of Emma.
MISSY: When we got called in for an investigation,
they kept asking me, "We wanna know about Emma White."
Emma lived in one of the apartments and went
to high school with Charlene and I -- she's mean.
In school, she was just constant fighting with somebody.
So everybody knew to stay away from her.
Miss Emma made me feel kind of nervous, and that's all I know.
And I go in my little world, and she'd be in her little world.
Up in the complex, there was a huge drug bust up there.
I think Emma thought, you know,
Charlene was the nark and got 'em busted for drugs.
So then, every time Emma saw Charlene, she would just jump in
her face and yell and just be
belligerent, and Charlene was just so nice, and she would tell
her that she's not the one who narked,
she would never do that, and whatever you're doing is
your business, but Emma didn't believe her.
PATRICIA: Emma White --
we did track her down.
Emma and Charlene,
they argued all the time, they just did not get along.
She did have a criminal history
involving an assault back in high school.
Emma White had denied any wrongdoing.
And so, you know, obviously, we had to confirm her alibi,
because she was high enough up on the list
of suspects, uh, to have that done.
But for the time being, we wanted to talk with
Alan Redmond -- he was the father of Dustin.
We also really wanted to talk to
the father of the younger son, Willard McCarley.
ERIC: When we got to the McCarleys' residence,
they let us in, but Willard wasn't there,
so we talked to his mom and dad, Larry and Sarah McCarley.
They sat down and talked to us.
My initial impression of the McCarley family,
I didn't have a lot of trust for Larry for some reason.
Charlene, she told me once, Larry tried to pin her down
and force himself upon her.
Then she said, "You're supposed to be, you know,
the grandfather of this,
you know, baby," said, you know,
"How can you do, you know, such a thing?"
PATRICIA: Larry McCarley worked with Willard
at a local auto factory.
Larry did have a sexual history
where he had touched his -- his cousin.
Um, no charges were filed.
But regarding the assault that Charlene
had talked about with Larry,
Larry just vehemently denied it,
that it didn't happen.
She's making it up, and -- and it just, um...
it kind of went nowhere.
It was her word against his.
There we go. And what can I get you to drink?
-Lemonade. -Lemonade?
Mm-hmm.
[indistinct chatter]
PATRICIA: When they continued interviewing Larry's family,
Sarah, Larry's wife, was interviewed.
Her reaction when she heard about the death of Charlene
is not, oh my God,
you know, Charlene, it's, "I want to adopt my grandson."
We just completely bypassed Charlene and -- and went and
decided that, you know,
this is what she wanted to do, which was kind of unusual.
Because she wanted to adopt Derrek,
which is kind of strange.
I thought, well, was it the McCarleys that killed Charlene?
You have to go with it until you can prove it otherwise.
ERIC: It wasn't long going into the investigation,
we get this pool of potential suspects, these names,
including Willard, the father of one of the boys.
Could have been Larry, who was Willard's father,
and Alan Redmond,
the father of Charlene's other son.
It could have been a neighbor.
Emma and Charlene just did not like each other.
Could have been, you know, all of them,
but not one piece of physical evidence.
It was the all-inclusive game of clue,
because anybody had the opportunity to do it.
We knew it was solvable.
We're still just trying to find that one thing.
PHYLLIS: Charlene and Alan,
the father of her first son,
probably lived together for about a year,
and then things just weren't going that smooth.
Alan, he was sort of, like, controlling.
One time, he came to the house, and he came to the door.
It was late, but he was wanting to see Charlene,
and I said, "No," I said, you know, "She's already in bed."
It was something about him.
It was hard for me to put my finger on.
I just didn't care for him.
Charlene didn't stay with Alan very long.
I guess it was just tension.
She said that was enough, so she came home.
And then Charlene, she started dating a guy, Willard McCarley.
She went out with Willard on her birthday,
and she was very happy.
She was wanting to form a family.
And so she got pregnant with her second baby with Willard,
but when Charlene told Willard she was pregnant,
he denied it.
And he says, "Well, you know, it's not my baby."
She had no doubt, because when she
was seeing him, it was strictly him.
She did have a paternity test, because I think
Willard's mother,
Sarah McCarley, wanted to make sure that it was her grandson.
And then it came back.
Willard was the father.
ERIC: When I met Willard,
he lived in the basement of his parents' house.
I think he was nonchalant, very carefree.
You know, he kind of had that --
that aura about him of he can do no wrong.
PATRICIA: Willard, as far as the last time
he had seen Charlene,
he advised it was two days before the murder.
It was at the complex that Charlene lived at, and they had
a conversation, and according to him, it was fine.
There was no issues, and he was only there for a few minutes,
and then he left.
ERIC: He claimed that she called him
to discuss the results of the paternity test.
So he knew that she had him, he knew what her next step was.
She had been trying to get child support.
That night of the murder,
he said he was with his girlfriend.
We talked to the girlfriend.
She verified that they were together that Sunday night.
But...
you know, you kind of take that with a grain of salt.
Did you notice the license plate when you come in?
I kind of debated between a horse theme
or a cop theme when I went with the "Cuff M."
In the investigation, when talking with Alan Redmond,
he advised that he had last seen Charlene
probably about a week before.
And Alan was very timely with his child support.
There was -- didn't appear to be any problems
with him as far as relationship with Charlene.
Mr. Redmond had stated that the night of the murder,
he was at his house
with his girlfriend, and so, you know, obviously,
we had to look at his alibi.
ERIC: On this particular case,
there's just a lot of legwork in verifying all
of their alibis, because again, at that point in time,
nobody was the hardened suspect.
You don't have physical evidence right now.
So everybody's in play.
We just -- we were lost.
PHYLLIS: After my daughter was murdered,
when Charlene's oldest, Dustin, first got here,
he seemed okay.
And then, a couple of days later...
Dustin, he was sitting there in the chair
and playing around.
He picks up this toy telephone,
and he just starts talking,
saying all these things.
I said -- stuff that's just not normal.
"He hurt my mommy.
The policeman did it. The purple stick."
Just all different little sayings
that were just not right.
You know, where she just kept
kicking, trying to get, you know, away
from him -- you can see....
tears in Dustin's face.
I just grabbed papers, and I
just kept scribbling whatever he said.
PATRICIA: It was suggested rather than
try to interview Charlene's son, Dustin,
that they would let
the child psychologist, Dr. Lord, interview him.
They're more well-versed in
interviewing young people like that.
Dr. Lord got a lot out of Dustin.
There was some mention of the blood,
the pillow.
There's a fascination with the gold buttons
on this police officer's jacket.
The argument between two people, back and forth.
And the comment, "I will kill you."
I mean, he really started to come out with
almost a play-by-play, and the floodgates opened.
I want to show you something.
This photo, the last photo of her being
at my son's birthday party in Burger King.
Just how happy she was and her son,
Dustin, that day -- she was a loving, caring mom.
After Charlene's death, I had family stay with me.
It made me feel kind of nervous not knowing who did it.
I figured that it might not get to be solved.
But I wanted the -- wanted it to be solved,
because of her kids.
They deserve that.
And her mother -- her mother deserved some --
I mean, because it took a toll on her.
PATRICIA: As far as the investigation with Emma White,
she was a resident at the complex where
Charlene lived.
They didn't get along -- her story that was given of her
whereabouts during the time Charlene was killed was
verified by those detectives,
and plus, Dustin said that it was a policeman and not a woman,
and also, she passed a polygraph.
So she was taken off the list as far as suspects.
There was a lot of polygraphs given in this case.
Everyone that they polygraphed passed.
But the McCarleys, Larry and Willard,
none of them agreed to a polygraph.
[distant siren wailing]
All of them interviewed with our detectives.
But whenever somebody denies taking a polygraph, it will send
a red flag up as far as we need to look into this
a little bit more.
Willard McCarley,
his alibi was, he had been out with his new girlfriend,
left her place about 11 o'clock,
went home, fell asleep on the couch,
and then his brother come in later.
In interviewing Willard's girlfriend,
she pretty much confirmed his alibi,
that he left about 11 o'clock, and he bought her flowers
the next day and delivered to 'em at work for her,
and she thought was kind of unusual but nice.
Larry McCarley, his father, had been at home,
and Sarah came in later on that evening.
STEPHANIE: It was -- it was a long time.
It went unsolved for so long.
It really did have an impact on
the community, and they never forgot about it.
We did a story on the -- one of the anniversaries of Charlene's
death where the family and community members
were out and, you know,
they were putting flyers up around, asking for people to
come forward with any information they had.
And so even though this case had grown cold at that point,
they had not given up hope that it would someday
be solved.
There's a murderer running around.
Let's be factual about it -- someplace, there's a murderer,
and we need to get him off the streets.
Knowing that they're still out there.
They have their life...
and hers was taken.
It's just not fair.
The most frustrating part about this case is we never
could find that one piece of physical evidence
that actually amounted to anything which proved who
the murderer was or, you know, allowed us to make an arrest.
You know, this thing went on
even long after I left the department.
This is a book of all the newspaper clippings
that we put out of Charlene,
you know, asking for information.
I had these posters printed up
almost every year, you know, to where if some people
would have some information, just for someone to
come forward.
Who murdered my daughter?
Charlene Puffenbarger's life
was cut too short in Twinsburg on January 20th, 1992.
Information wanted.
KEN: My mother is determined, and she was always determined to
make sure we got this solved, and she never gave up
on the case, she constantly was in contact with
the sheriff's department.
ERIC: Charlene's mom, Phyllis,
the things that she has dealt with,
and obviously, just being the mother when your daughter
was murdered, just a strong,
strong woman -- she has the strength
of 17 tractors.
I think she had more faith probably than anybody.
CHARLES: When I was working at the auto plant that I was at,
somebody had been coming into the plant and posting up
on our hallway bulletin boards,
they had been posting up these posters talking about how they
were looking for their daughter's murderer.
And there was a little bit of information on the poster,
but I never thought anything of it.
I...
Huh.
I felt for the girl's parents. I did.
PHYLLIS: It was important for me to keep this in people's minds.
I didn't want Charlene forgotten.
We just needed information to get this solved.
I didn't want to let it go.
Someone had to pay for what they'd done to Charlene.
CHARLES: The auto manufacturing industry was
really big in that Twinsburg area.
They were a huge employer in Northeast Ohio.
They're the reason that most of these towns took off
the way they did.
Every week, I and a couple of other guys would hop in
a car, and we would drive to Canada on Monday, and Friday,
we would come back, and while we were up there, we would work
on getting the lines straightened out,
getting everything working so
that we could sell them to the company.
One of the days we were driving up to Canada,
one of the guys made a comment, like, "I killed somebody,
and it didn't bother me."
You make a comment like that,
like, I don't know if this guy's making stuff up, but when
he mentioned that, you know,
he had actually known Charlene, I worked with this
person for at least 10 years.
It was kind of a shock.
But, you know, there was -- there was so much
boisterous talk and everything all the time.
You didn't know if he was just, you know, playing it off
or whatever, but it's kind of,
you know, a big deal to hear somebody
saying that they killed somebody.
But when it kind of all gets -- when that puzzle gets put
together, and you kind of recognize that, like,
oh, [bleep], this really could be the guy that really
killed this person.
-Yo! -Good. How you doing?
-Coming in to shoot? -Coming in to shoot.
CHARLES: I first met Willard in '94.
We ended up working in the same area in the plant.
Willard had mentioned that he had known Charlene and that she
was claiming that her child was his,
you know, and he did tell me that, so...
I didn't really put two and two together
and think that it was anything bad like that.
But probably a couple years later,
one of the things I had told him was in the Army, some of
the ranges, they will use targets that have human faces.
And the thinking behind it is they want you to...
to get used to shooting at something that's looking back.
I had mentioned that to him, and he says,
"Ah, that's not true."
He said, "I killed somebody and looked into their eyes,
"you know, and it didn't bother me,
and I didn't have any problem with that."
And that's not something you hear from everybody.
Charles Kincaid was a very valuable asset.
He had worked with Willard,
and he helped focus the investigation.
[gunshot blasts]
It would always circle back around to Willard.
It just kept coming back to him, but
it just wasn't enough for the arrest warrant.
We got a call one night of a domestic issue
at Willard McCarley's house on Foghorn Lane.
Upon our guys walking into his garage,
there was a police jacket hanging in the garage,
and so this officer, immediately upon
seeing that coat, knew our victim's son, Dustin,
kept saying, "You hurt my mom,"
and he's pointing at the deputies,
and the Twinsburg Township officers, at their jackets.
This was exactly the same, and, in fact, it had
side patches on it, too, identifying it as
a sheriff's jacket.
So that jacket got confiscated, and -- and it really set
the tone of, hmm, there -- you know, there might --
we might have something here.
ERIC: As technology increases, different testing increases.
Well there was a new type of DNA testing
that was made available,
and the big break finally came in.
Off of the leather belt that was wrapped around her neck,
we got the physical evidence that we finally needed.
STEPHANIE: They had retested the evidence,
and it was a match between the DNA
that was -- that was taken from the belt
and Willard's DNA.
When it come back positive, I was like...
thank you, God.
You know, and you don't want
to arrest somebody that's not guilty.
So Alan Redman and Larry McCarley,
they were dropped as far as the suspect.
We all know in our hearts, we got the bad guy.
It was a high five day, there's no doubt in my mind.
PHYLLIS: Patty Kungle,
she called me that early in the morning when she found out,
and she says, "We got good news."
Says, "You know who the DNA --
it came back to be Willard's."
I just felt so happy.
I mean, it's just a feeling you can't explain.
I was watching the news,
and I think that they arrested -- arrested Willard.
I am relieved that they had got the guy.
Phyllis called me and said, "Guess what?
We get to go to court."
I said, "What?" She's like, "They arrested Willard."
I said, "You little bastard, you don't get away with it.
You're not gonna get away with it."
Willard McCarley told Charlene Puffenbarger,
over her dead body was he gonna pay child support.
Right now, I'm just totally elated.
He's in jail where he totally belongs.
I'm just totally relieved it's done. I'm done.
KEN: It's been a challenge for everybody, you know?
It's hard enough losing your sister.
It's hard enough losing your daughter.
I mean, it is unexplainable how hard that is to go through
ERIC: Once there was a conviction, once it was done,
can't help to wonder why, why it ever happened.
How senseless.
This was a murder over a couple of dollars of
child support.
Willard had a good job.
He was making good money.
How selfish can one person be,
that A, they're not going to support their child,
and B, they're gonna kill the mother
to avoid that.
MISSY: She was a beautiful mom.
Those babies missed out on so much.
They would be so different today if she was just
in their lives and she wasn't taken away from them.
PHYLLIS: No one should have to go through
losing, you know, their daughter.
A mom,
where she can't be with her boys, and then
to see them, you know, they're always wondering,
well, what -- what's my mom like?
Something they'll never know.