Oct. 21, 2026
Chapter 4 | Strega One
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00:00:00
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. Dan Ritchie is a former reporter and historian in Putnam Valley. As such, he seems to have saved anything that ever caught his eye. An original bracket from the Statue of Liberty, a load-bearing bolt from the Brooklyn Bridge, and an outtake from an ancient Coca-Cola ad. In the tidy house he shares with his wife, his study is a crazy quilt of oddments and arcana.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: The reason I don't like to throw things out is because historically, you know, there might be Something of value.
00:01:03
Speaker 1: Among those curios is a scuffed brown folder. It contains a record of every step he ever took to crack the mystery of Robin Murphy. Now, since he's also a guy who taught criminal justice, Dan's a guy who likes facts, not ephemera. But as he explained to our ace reporter, Kathleen Horan, sometimes you have to step outside of science.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: You want to see a real ghost?
00:01:30
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:01:36
Speaker 4: The ghost is in your office?
00:01:39
Speaker 1: Dan clicked a screen to load a video. Kathleen peered over his shoulder while he clicked the mouse. On the screen flashed the image of a cement wall, the wall of a high school where a kid crashed his car and died of his injuries from the impact.
00:01:57
Speaker 4: So describe what we're looking at, please.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: We're looking at the back of a school, and we're going to see something come right out of there.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: Dan pointed to the screen.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: I'm going to put it on play, and you're going to watch, and you're going to see something unusual.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: Oh, wow. As Kathleen told me later, Spielberg himself couldn't have crafted a realer ghost. A swoosh that seems to evaporate before your eyes.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: So, um.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: You.
00:02:32
Speaker 4: So it's not like you don't believe in ghosts?
00:02:34
Speaker 2: No, I mean, this is obviously some... Let's see if we can... This is one frame at a time. You see, like, you see legs.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: Dan, as I said, likes to stick with the facts. But the more he looked into Robin's disappearance... the more space he made for the paranormal. Because after the cops and feds got nowhere, when Robin's case turned cold, the only folks providing leads to follow were calling from the next dimension.
00:03:09
Speaker 4: Do you hear my madness?
00:03:16
Speaker 3: Laughter hides my fears.
00:03:23
Speaker 1: Sorrow's depths are endless in this valley.
00:03:35
Speaker 6: Of tears.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry.
00:03:57
Speaker 5: How much time did you dedicate to searching and to really delving into this?
00:04:01
Speaker 2: Over a period of maybe five years, I just stayed almost obsessed.
00:04:11
Speaker 1: In 1997, Dan covered the Josette Wright murder trials for the Putnam Observer. After those ended, he met Judy Murphy, the mother of Robin Murphy. Judy went to the trials desperate for leads that might point to Robin's abductor. She was enraged at the Carmel cops for the handling of her daughter's case.
00:04:32
Speaker 2: When I entered the scene, there was kind of a standoff, you know, between the family and the police, so I tried to, you know, mend that as best we could because I felt as though, you know, in order to make progress, it was better for people working together than not working together, so.
00:04:49
Speaker 5: So you were kind of a go-between between the family and.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: The police department a little bit?
00:04:56
Speaker 2: A little bit, yeah.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: Dan's passion for the case endeared him to the family. They tipped him to any clues that came in. At a certain point, in fact, he became the Murphy's bloodhound, running down every lead for them, no matter how weak or wacky.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: I think people were kind of disappointed. Nobody really knew what was going on and, you know, who's responsible or what were we dealing with here? You know, was it a serial killer? I mean, you know, so it was, for little Putnam County, it was a big deal.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: He traced and retraced Robin's steps on the night she disappeared. He recanvassed her friends and coworkers, and he conducted the kind of painstaking search that no one else seemed willing to undertake.
00:05:48
Speaker 4: Can you describe, uh, what this map is of and kind of, you know.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: It's a search map. It includes searches that occurred before I got involved and searches that I was involved in and in some cases organized.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Dan spread a map out in his study. Its dotted lines and routes ran a radius of circles around the Shoprack Plaza, the place Robin was last seen.
00:06:15
Speaker 2: The suspect or the person of interest, Howard... claimed to be 45 minutes he was missing, that he can't account for the time. So we looked at that as, you know, okay, let's kind of do a measurement out, 22 minutes out, you know what I mean? And, you know, and then see if, you know, we felt that was, you know, he'd have better luck searching if, you know, he'd dropped her someplace, you know, so.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: On his own time, he searched every dump site he could think of within a half-hour drive.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: All the little circles... were searches that, you know, took place at different times. Some of them prior, like 495 is, you know, behind ShopRite when they found the purse and stuff. And then some of them when I was involved as well.
00:07:01
Speaker 1: And he shared his suspicions about Howard Gombert with the Murphys, suspicions heightened by Gombert's suicide bed in April of 95. He says he heard details that might point to Robin's remains.
00:07:14
Speaker 2: Or that, you know, someone, a nurse or someone had, you know, said, that he had, you know, marks like he had kind of been under, you know, thorns or maybe dragged somebody, you know, under the thorns. So, you know, we definitely looked, you know, at thorns and thorny patches. I mean, in a case like this, you can't really rule out anything.
00:07:40
Speaker 1: And so another year passed with no trace of Robin. Her mother, Judy Murphy, sat and seethed. and cast around for someone else to help her. Finally, a development.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: There's a press conference on here on VHS.
00:07:59
Speaker 6: First, I'd like to start with Mr.
00:08:01
Speaker 2: And Mrs.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Bryant and Judy Murphy.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: We're here.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: Among the files in Arcana and Dan Ritchie's study was an old videotape he gave to Kathleen. The sleeve was dated July 27, 1997. The tape showed a press conference set in the charmless office of a Putnam County executive.
00:08:23
Speaker 8: The purpose of this morning's press conference is to announce a reward.
00:08:30
Speaker 6: Of $ 5, 000.
00:08:31
Speaker 4: In connection with the missing Robin Murphy.
00:08:35
Speaker 1: That's the county executive, Robert Bondi, announcing a reward in the case. Robin's parents were there, along with a Carmel police chief and several local reporters, including Dan. Chief Greg Amato gave a run on account of his detective's efforts in the case. But slouched in his seat, he looked frankly annoyed by the whole business. Judy and Brian Murphy sat across the table, looking like they hadn't slept in years. Heart-sick and sullen, Judy glanced at her lab, where a photo of Robin glanced back. Brian, a tall man with a brushed mustache and a face gone gray with grief, took one of her hands in his.
00:09:22
Speaker 3: Mr.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: And Mrs. Murphy, would you like to make any comments?
00:09:28
Speaker 9: I just hope that if anybody's out there, if they can try to say something, come forward.
00:09:35
Speaker 1: Brian begged the public to call with any information.
00:09:39
Speaker 3: Mr.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And Mrs.
00:09:40
Speaker 1: Murphy, I have to ask this question. Do you have any hope that Robin still alive? No, says Judy, because I would have heard from her. Tell me something. It's been too long. It's hard to look at it. A reporter asked Amato if his interest in the case had waned. But the chief sidestepped the question, putting the onus on the media to bring in tips.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: We would hope that the news media would keep on this and Europe's biggest assets.
00:10:36
Speaker 1: It was a dismal capper to a dreary event. The offer of a reward that was two years too late and way too little to matter. Watching the Murphys, I can read it in their faces. No one in charge gave a damn about their daughter. In fact, the cops were still calling her a missing person, as if she was somehow complicit in her absence. In any case, Judy Murphy had seen enough. A week or so later, she sat down and wrote a letter to the governor of New York, George Pataki. Her handwriting is large and overruns the margins, filling both sides of the page. She underlines key phrases to drive her plea home. It's read here by reporter Kathleen.
00:11:23
Speaker 10: August 5th, 1997. Dear Governor Pataki, please help our family. We have not seen our 17-year-old daughter Robin for over two years. We believe she was abducted and murdered the night she vanished in Carmel, New York, near Shoprite and Burger King, only two blocks from our home at the time. Please look at the poster. We made them for the two-year anniversary. Carmel Police screwed this case up from the beginning and will not admit it. The car and pocketbook were found, but not my baby. I feel she is out there in the woods somewhere. I can't even bury her properly in a Catholic burial. We are being tortured by this. I feel her murderer is still in Putnam area and he got away with it. The suspect offered to take a polygraph. He was the last person to see her, but Chief Amato said it wasn't necessary. Then the suspect, within a week, moved to Connecticut, got a lawyer, and tried suicide. Now he can't be questioned because of the legal aid lawyer. This is a travesty of justice. Please help us, as no one seems to want to. For the Murphy family, as well as the other girls who are still alive in this town, but are possible future victims. I want the case changed to the Putnam County Sheriff's Department. I feel they can help us. So far, Senator Leibel's office, DA Kevin Wright, New York State Attorney General's office, will not lift a finger. Doesn't my daughter deserve justice? 17 is too young to die.
00:13:00
Speaker 4: Judy Murphy.
00:13:06
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:13:08
Speaker 2: That's my mom.
00:13:11
Speaker 1: Kathleen showed a copy of the letter to Robin's older brother, Jamie.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: He's frustrated. She has no hair on her tongue. She'd tell them.
00:13:22
Speaker 4: What's coming up for you now that you read that?
00:13:26
Speaker 7: I find it funny because my mom's giving him peace of mind. But I remember the frustration. So it was bringing back a lot of memories and emotions and things that I tried to to forget, you know?
00:13:42
Speaker 2: So I'm feeling a little heated.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:46
Speaker 7: So, but yeah, that's, I know she, she tried her hardest. It was just a nightmare. You know, I know my mother was going through hell. Being the oldest child and her older brother, it was very hard. I mean, it put me in a bad place for a long time until, uh, until I was able to get out of it.
00:14:20
Speaker 1: Alas, there's nothing in his sister's file to suggest the governor responded. Instead, there's every indication that Judy took matters into her own hands. Dan Ritchie began a full-bore investigation on her behalf while she searched for clues from the beyond.
00:14:38
Speaker 7: I think she was just looking for any answer possible. And, uh, She was finding hope anywhere she could.
00:15:08
Speaker 4: Do you think that was your rep in town, that you were a witch?
00:15:12
Speaker 8: Um, kinda, yeah. It's on my plates.
00:15:17
Speaker 4: What does your plate say?
00:15:18
Speaker 8: It says Draga 1, which is Italian. It means one witch.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Lorraine Hahn is nearly 80, but doesn't look a day over 70. She dyes a patch of her hair pink, wears a grin you'd call impish, and loves to tell people about her broomstick.
00:15:40
Speaker 8: I used to get the downpour on everybody that went missing. They all came to me because they all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And I said, we'll tell Lorraine. Maybe she'll find out where this girl is. We tried.
00:15:53
Speaker 1: A year or so after Robin went missing, Lorraine walked into the Carmel police station with 10 pages of notes for the detectives.
00:16:04
Speaker 8: I consulted with the cops on other cases, but I didn't push the way I did with this.
00:16:09
Speaker 1: Those pages were culled from her dreams and card readings.
00:16:14
Speaker 8: I gave them so much to read that I thought they were going to kill me when they saw me walking into the place. And I said, listen, someday you're really going to need this.
00:16:25
Speaker 1: Now, as crazy as it sounds, witches play well with cops. At least the kinds of cops who will accept their help. Lorraine wasn't the first such consultant on Robin's case. Or, Lord knows, the last. At the outset, Dan had his doubts about these folks.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: They're not giving you, if they give you something revolutionary, different, new, then you're interested. But other than that, and there were dozens of them, you know, step forward.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: It's hard to get data on how often cops use tips from psychics. One reputable survey of 102 cops offers a window into how law enforcement approaches these consultants. Of those surveyed, 75 did not recommend soliciting psychic detectives. One of them wrote they'd, quote, never in a million years used that crap, end quote. But 49 of them, almost half, said they'd run down any leads that came in. Only seven of them could remember an instance of psychics actually helping to solve a homicide. The Carmel cops seemed to bird dog every tip they got from the paranormals. You can't go three pages in Robin's case file without hearing from a psychic. They started calling the station days after she disappeared. There was the Burger King employee who swore he'd find Robin. Just as soon as the cops fed him the details needed to read her astrology chart. There was the local man who sat down each morning to take voicemails from the undead. He phoned in after Robin paid him a visit. But some of those calls were outbound, too. Early on, Judy Murphy tried to recruit a famous mystic by the name of Noreen Renier. But Noreen, in her third eye wisdom, declined to play. And so, enter the next psychic and sign in, please.
00:18:21
Speaker 6: Please welcome Dorothy Allison.
00:18:24
Speaker 8: Dorothy has worked with police departments across the country.
00:18:27
Speaker 4: For 30 years.
00:18:29
Speaker 8: She has solved missing persons and murder cases and has the most amazing history.
00:18:34
Speaker 9: Track record.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: Listeners of a certain age will recognize that voice. It's Sally Jessie Raphael, whose syndicated show in the 80s and 90s was every bit as craptastic as Jerry Springer's. Dorothy Allison, the psychic, often appeared on daytime TV. She was diminutive woman in enormous glasses and a dyed brown beehive of hair.
00:19:00
Speaker 6: How many cases have you solved? I've done over 5,000, and I've got 20 albums. That's six of them.
00:19:07
Speaker 4: Isn't that an amazing record, 5,000?
00:19:09
Speaker 6: As I do this, I try to picture what a man looks like. The first thing I try to get is a name. This is how I find dead people.
00:19:20
Speaker 9: This is how I find.
00:19:22
Speaker 6: Criminals, because the dead people are telling me something. It's a very cold feeling. No windows are open, but all of a sudden you feel a cold breeze. You don't know where it's coming from. And that person tells you something.
00:19:34
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. At Judy Murphy's insistence, the Carmel cops wrote to Dorothy Allison, pleading for her help.
00:19:47
Speaker 2: I'm not a psychic. But Dorothy Allison was injured. because she said she would see visions and she couldn't tell whether they happened or whether they were going to happen.
00:19:56
Speaker 1: Dan, as noted above, had his doubts about psychics, but something about Dorothy hit different.
00:20:03
Speaker 2: She was out to dinner with a retired homicide detective who had a private detective agency when she started just blurting out Robin and Howard and said to him, talk to the local police and find out about a case if there's somebody involved named Robin. So, you know, she definitely got her antenna working.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: At Engel, the ex-detective turned PI offered to pitch in for a bono. Soon, he and Dan Ritchie were working together.
00:20:33
Speaker 2: Carmel put me in touch with Ed Engel. I called him and then, you know, started working with him, you know, And he was kind of showing me the ropes, you know, and, you know, investigative, taking pictures.
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Dan was eager to learn from Engle. They did ride-alongs while Engle tailed Howard Gombert.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: He did surveillance, photographed Gombert's father's house. Gombert was working in an auto parts store. He photographed him there, you know what I mean? So he was really, you know, like kind of, you know, dogging him for a while.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: Alas, Gombert never led them anywhere useful. And after a while, Ed Engle stepped away. But Dan carried on undeterred. Only now he took most of his tips from the psychics. At some point, Dorothy, the psychic, sat down with Carmel detectives. Dan was there as Dorothy passed around a list.
00:21:31
Speaker 2: Clues to search for, as it's entitled. Places, anything or a place with a royal name, such as castle, king... Queen, a small zoo should be in the area.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: That list was long and wide.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: Professional games, gambling, auto repair, lion's heads. And I can't tell you how many lion's heads there are in Putnam County, but a lot. A Boy Scout killed in the area. Names, anything with gold in it, like Goldstein.
00:22:01
Speaker 1: Dan chauffeured Dorothy on routes through New York and Connecticut. They even did a drive-by past Willie McCracken's house. But Gombert stayed when Robin disappeared.
00:22:12
Speaker 2: Dorothy had a feeling about the place. When she said, I feel good about this place, it means that there's something there. So, you know, I got used to that was kind of the code, you know what I mean?
00:22:22
Speaker 4: Who else was with you guys?
00:22:25
Speaker 2: Let's see. A couple of guys from the sheriff's office and I think a couple of guys from the Carmel PD.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Dorothy didn't stick around Carmel long, which is probably a blessing all around. Her list of clues proved about as valid as her claim to have solved 5,000 cases. Nonetheless, Dan chased down all those leads of hers.
00:22:56
Speaker 2: I tried to follow, you know, what Dorothy said in the hopes that, you know, if I put it together, you know, maybe, wow, you know what I mean? Here's the solution.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: Dan was so invested that he rode with the cops as they chased their own tails, as well as Dorothy's clues.
00:23:15
Speaker 2: So it was a search, you know, that kind of went on and on, you know. And then I'd be like, I don't want to do this anymore. And then, like, my daughter, I'd put her on the bus, and she had her hair like Joseph Wright. And I'd go, I got to do it.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Here's Dan reading his notes from a search he conducted himself. They concern an old estate called Morningthorpe Manor.
00:23:35
Speaker 2: While trekking through the woods on Friday the 13th, I happened to cross a piece of purple cloth tied to a young sapling. This would have no significance except for the fact that there's no evidence of any surveying work going on and purple was Robin's favorite color. Meanwhile, I found some information in a book called.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: His pursuit of Dorothy's leads turned up nothing, however, until Dan found a clue of his own.
00:24:23
Speaker 4: Do you still think about Robin?
00:24:25
Speaker 8: Oh, yeah.
00:24:26
Speaker 9: Danny and I all talk about her sometimes, you know. I have a daughter her age.
00:24:34
Speaker 3: There but for the grace of God. You know. Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker 9: And boy, did I become protective after this.
00:24:43
Speaker 4: You know, as a mom.
00:24:46
Speaker 9: Things I took for granted all of a sudden I didn't take for granted anymore.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Penny Osborne's a woman in her 70s now, but has a mane of black hair that catches the sun just so. There's a husk in her voice that may come from channeling spirits.
00:25:04
Speaker 9: I was a paranormal investigator, and I did a good share of paranormal investigations.
00:25:12
Speaker 1: Penny holds lots of space in Robin's case file. She and Dan met at the Putnam Historical Society, then worked together on a search that consumed them both.
00:25:23
Speaker 9: Danny and I just hit it off right away. We just had a lot in common and nothing in common. Does that sound crazy?
00:25:34
Speaker 1: After a visit to Dan's house, Kathleen sat down with Penny.
00:25:40
Speaker 9: Call it a hunch or whatever, but for some reason it would come to me as to where to find them or locate them. And I would say 90% of the time, maybe even more, I was right.
00:25:54
Speaker 5: Maybe around the time that you got involved, a lot of other psychics and other people with, you know.
00:26:01
Speaker 9: I never claimed to be a psychic. Never claimed to be a psychic.
00:26:04
Speaker 4: Tell me why.
00:26:06
Speaker 9: Because it's not something that I could turn on and off at will. Either something came to me or it didn't. But once you claim that you are a psychic, people expect you to be able to tell them things that you can't tell them. I don't know.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: As unpaid partners in the hunt for Robin, she and Dan dug up leads together.
00:26:29
Speaker 4: What was your first impression of Penny when you met her?
00:26:32
Speaker 2: She was interesting, definitely interesting.
00:26:36
Speaker 9: The Robin Murphy case was the first real case that I was asked to come and work on. The police were involved, there were detectives involved, paranormal investigators involved, and everybody... was working for the same goal, but in different directions.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: She and Dan re-interviewed old witnesses and dug up new ones. They brought all their findings to the cops.
00:27:04
Speaker 9: They either loved you or hated you. In this situation, they were interested. I mean, I gave information to them if I had a hunch about something.
00:27:14
Speaker 4: And they would take you seriously?
00:27:15
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:27:17
Speaker 9: They knew I was playing with a full deck. I wasn't, I don't think they thought I was some kind of wacko. They couldn't ask questions that maybe Danny and I could.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: In November of 97, they got a tip about a pond. It was a short drive from the Shoprite Plaza where Robin used to work. Dan drove over to case the pond as well as the woods around it. He brought along Judy Murphy and his Polaroid camera. He took dozens of pictures that day But when he went through them later on, he spotted a photo that looked macabre.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: And I thought it looked like a skull.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: It was eerie enough to show to his good friend, Penny.
00:28:02
Speaker 4: Tell me more about these Polaroids.
00:28:05
Speaker 9: I remember seeing a skull in the pond. His hands were out like this. It was outstretched. And it was sort of like wanting me to... It scared me. I don't like this.
00:28:23
Speaker 1: To the untrained eye, the shadows in those photos looks like a trick of the light. But to the eye of Penny Osborne, that's no optic smudge. Instead, it's something ghostly.
00:28:35
Speaker 9: This doesn't intrigue me. When something like this, a paranormal incident happens, it's not something that I'm really, oh, how wonderful. I really don't like it when it happens.
00:28:47
Speaker 4: You're not seeking spooky?
00:28:49
Speaker 3: No.
00:28:49
Speaker 9: I don't like spooky.
00:28:52
Speaker 1: Judy Murphy saw something in those photos, too. She immediately called the Carmel cops.
00:28:58
Speaker 4: What do you remember from her family, from her parents?
00:29:03
Speaker 9: I tried to be very sympathetic with her, Judy. We talked on the phone more than anything. She knew we were looking. She knew we were searching. She knew we were looking for answers.
00:29:14
Speaker 1: Judy demanded that the cops send divers into the pond and fast before it froze over. Detective Randy Tompkins, still in charge of the case, assembled a team of divers.
00:29:27
Speaker 2: So this was the day they were going to dive it, which was a particularly cold day. It was snowing like flurries. On Saturday morning, November 15th, 1997, roughly 20 people gathered at the edge of the pond.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: There were cops and firemen from the town of Carmel and its neighbor, Mayo Pack Falls. Dan and Penny stood with Robin's parents watching men in dive suits enter the icebox water.
00:29:54
Speaker 9: If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. There's no one who'll find it.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: Robin's dad, Brian, leaned over to him. He whispered that the setting, the pond and woods around it, the White House with a dock, looked exactly like the scene that other psychics described.
00:30:16
Speaker 2: We just were hopeful they would find something in that pond.
00:30:21
Speaker 1: Perhaps something of Robin's was down there, if not her skull.
00:30:26
Speaker 2: And they went in.
00:30:28
Speaker 1: The divers took turns plumbing the bottom of the pond. One of them, a guy who'd been at it 20 years, said the floor was so murky he couldn't see his hands in front of him. Quote, once you start moving around, you kick up all the silt, he said, unquote.
00:30:44
Speaker 5: What do you remember of being at the scene? I mean, her family's there. There's great hope.
00:30:50
Speaker 9: I mean, they wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that somebody was going to come up and be able to tell them exactly what happened, how it happened, why it happened.
00:31:02
Speaker 1: After hours of scuttling the floor of that pond, the divers came up with nothing. But Dan and Penny weren't deterred. They returned a month later with a second psychic. Alas, that long walk in the dead of winter yielded nothing more than windburn. Then, the following spring, Dan enlisted volunteers to comb the woods around the pond. He and a dozen members of a metal detecting club fanned out across the site. They found a bone in the brush and turned it over to the cops. But a scan showed it came from an animal, not a girl. And so three years in, the trail went dead from there.
00:31:48
Speaker 4: Do you feel like you've seen Robin's spirit?
00:31:52
Speaker 9: I have talked to Robin.
00:31:54
Speaker 4: What have you said?
00:31:59
Speaker 3: I wish everybody misses her. And I was sorry she died the way she did. She didn't deserve it. She didn't deserve to die the way she did.
00:32:11
Speaker 4: Did she talk back to you?
00:32:13
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. What did she say?
00:32:15
Speaker 9: She would talk about her mom. And I just remember her saying.
00:32:22
Speaker 3: Tell my mom I'm sorry.
00:32:23
Speaker 9: I never wanted to hurt her.
00:32:30
Speaker 1: Dan and Penny gave five good years to their search for Robin Murphy. Pains them still that their labors turned up nothing. Equally painful is their strong suspicion that the killer was right under their noses.
00:32:44
Speaker 9: Danny and I were determined we were going to find the body. We were hell-bent on finding out where Gombert put her. And I think that was probably the biggest disappointment. To us, because we never, never did.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: Yes, the deepest cut for both of them was that Howard Gomber walked free. No arrest, no indictment, no nothing.
00:33:12
Speaker 9: Oh, I think he killed Robin. It's more than an intuition. It's an actual knowing. And I don't know how I know it, I just know it.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: It would take five years before the Carmel chief put a cop on the case who agreed with Penny. In 2000, a new detective took over, and he was both thorough and obsessive. And lo and behold, when he looked into Gombert, he found something that the other cops missed. A collection of trophies that Gombert had stashed, and which might finally tie him to Robin's disappearance. The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company No. 1. I'm your creator and host, Paul Solitarov. Executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardus, and Gilbert King. Our senior producer is Hannah Beal. Our producers are Jackie Pauley, Austin Smith, and Kathleen Horn. Our field reporter is Kathleen Horn. Our editor is Matthew Nelson. Production support from Tara Kornhaber. Fact-checking by Peter Bresnan. Our sound designer is Britt Spangler. And our engineer is Austin Smith. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Head of production, Matthew Nelson. Head of Marketing and Operations, Jeff Clyburn. Publicist, Nathaniel Baruch. Art Director, Andrew Nelson. Social Media Manager, Sarah Gibbons. Legal Review provided by Gibson Dunn. And our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Vocals by Rob Reddy of Californicorns. written by Leah Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility. If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.
00:35:55
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: This series includes sensitive and potentially distressing topics, including sexual assault and abuse involving children. Listener discretion is advised. Dan Ritchie is a former reporter and historian in Putnam Valley. As such, he seems to have saved anything that ever caught his eye. An original bracket from the Statue of Liberty, a load-bearing bolt from the Brooklyn Bridge, and an outtake from an ancient Coca-Cola ad. In the tidy house he shares with his wife, his study is a crazy quilt of oddments and arcana.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: The reason I don't like to throw things out is because historically, you know, there might be Something of value.
00:01:03
Speaker 1: Among those curios is a scuffed brown folder. It contains a record of every step he ever took to crack the mystery of Robin Murphy. Now, since he's also a guy who taught criminal justice, Dan's a guy who likes facts, not ephemera. But as he explained to our ace reporter, Kathleen Horan, sometimes you have to step outside of science.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: You want to see a real ghost?
00:01:30
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:01:36
Speaker 4: The ghost is in your office?
00:01:39
Speaker 1: Dan clicked a screen to load a video. Kathleen peered over his shoulder while he clicked the mouse. On the screen flashed the image of a cement wall, the wall of a high school where a kid crashed his car and died of his injuries from the impact.
00:01:57
Speaker 4: So describe what we're looking at, please.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: We're looking at the back of a school, and we're going to see something come right out of there.
00:02:06
Speaker 1: Dan pointed to the screen.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: I'm going to put it on play, and you're going to watch, and you're going to see something unusual.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: Oh, wow. As Kathleen told me later, Spielberg himself couldn't have crafted a realer ghost. A swoosh that seems to evaporate before your eyes.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: So, um.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: You.
00:02:32
Speaker 4: So it's not like you don't believe in ghosts?
00:02:34
Speaker 2: No, I mean, this is obviously some... Let's see if we can... This is one frame at a time. You see, like, you see legs.
00:02:46
Speaker 1: Dan, as I said, likes to stick with the facts. But the more he looked into Robin's disappearance... the more space he made for the paranormal. Because after the cops and feds got nowhere, when Robin's case turned cold, the only folks providing leads to follow were calling from the next dimension.
00:03:09
Speaker 4: Do you hear my madness?
00:03:16
Speaker 3: Laughter hides my fears.
00:03:23
Speaker 1: Sorrow's depths are endless in this valley.
00:03:35
Speaker 6: Of tears.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: I'm Paul Solitarov, and this is Season 2 of The Devil's Quarry.
00:03:57
Speaker 5: How much time did you dedicate to searching and to really delving into this?
00:04:01
Speaker 2: Over a period of maybe five years, I just stayed almost obsessed.
00:04:11
Speaker 1: In 1997, Dan covered the Josette Wright murder trials for the Putnam Observer. After those ended, he met Judy Murphy, the mother of Robin Murphy. Judy went to the trials desperate for leads that might point to Robin's abductor. She was enraged at the Carmel cops for the handling of her daughter's case.
00:04:32
Speaker 2: When I entered the scene, there was kind of a standoff, you know, between the family and the police, so I tried to, you know, mend that as best we could because I felt as though, you know, in order to make progress, it was better for people working together than not working together, so.
00:04:49
Speaker 5: So you were kind of a go-between between the family and.
00:04:54
Speaker 4: The police department a little bit?
00:04:56
Speaker 2: A little bit, yeah.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: Dan's passion for the case endeared him to the family. They tipped him to any clues that came in. At a certain point, in fact, he became the Murphy's bloodhound, running down every lead for them, no matter how weak or wacky.
00:05:16
Speaker 2: I think people were kind of disappointed. Nobody really knew what was going on and, you know, who's responsible or what were we dealing with here? You know, was it a serial killer? I mean, you know, so it was, for little Putnam County, it was a big deal.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: He traced and retraced Robin's steps on the night she disappeared. He recanvassed her friends and coworkers, and he conducted the kind of painstaking search that no one else seemed willing to undertake.
00:05:48
Speaker 4: Can you describe, uh, what this map is of and kind of, you know.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: It's a search map. It includes searches that occurred before I got involved and searches that I was involved in and in some cases organized.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Dan spread a map out in his study. Its dotted lines and routes ran a radius of circles around the Shoprack Plaza, the place Robin was last seen.
00:06:15
Speaker 2: The suspect or the person of interest, Howard... claimed to be 45 minutes he was missing, that he can't account for the time. So we looked at that as, you know, okay, let's kind of do a measurement out, 22 minutes out, you know what I mean? And, you know, and then see if, you know, we felt that was, you know, he'd have better luck searching if, you know, he'd dropped her someplace, you know, so.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: On his own time, he searched every dump site he could think of within a half-hour drive.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: All the little circles... were searches that, you know, took place at different times. Some of them prior, like 495 is, you know, behind ShopRite when they found the purse and stuff. And then some of them when I was involved as well.
00:07:01
Speaker 1: And he shared his suspicions about Howard Gombert with the Murphys, suspicions heightened by Gombert's suicide bed in April of 95. He says he heard details that might point to Robin's remains.
00:07:14
Speaker 2: Or that, you know, someone, a nurse or someone had, you know, said, that he had, you know, marks like he had kind of been under, you know, thorns or maybe dragged somebody, you know, under the thorns. So, you know, we definitely looked, you know, at thorns and thorny patches. I mean, in a case like this, you can't really rule out anything.
00:07:40
Speaker 1: And so another year passed with no trace of Robin. Her mother, Judy Murphy, sat and seethed. and cast around for someone else to help her. Finally, a development.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: There's a press conference on here on VHS.
00:07:59
Speaker 6: First, I'd like to start with Mr.
00:08:01
Speaker 2: And Mrs.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Bryant and Judy Murphy.
00:08:04
Speaker 2: We're here.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: Among the files in Arcana and Dan Ritchie's study was an old videotape he gave to Kathleen. The sleeve was dated July 27, 1997. The tape showed a press conference set in the charmless office of a Putnam County executive.
00:08:23
Speaker 8: The purpose of this morning's press conference is to announce a reward.
00:08:30
Speaker 6: Of $ 5, 000.
00:08:31
Speaker 4: In connection with the missing Robin Murphy.
00:08:35
Speaker 1: That's the county executive, Robert Bondi, announcing a reward in the case. Robin's parents were there, along with a Carmel police chief and several local reporters, including Dan. Chief Greg Amato gave a run on account of his detective's efforts in the case. But slouched in his seat, he looked frankly annoyed by the whole business. Judy and Brian Murphy sat across the table, looking like they hadn't slept in years. Heart-sick and sullen, Judy glanced at her lab, where a photo of Robin glanced back. Brian, a tall man with a brushed mustache and a face gone gray with grief, took one of her hands in his.
00:09:22
Speaker 3: Mr.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: And Mrs. Murphy, would you like to make any comments?
00:09:28
Speaker 9: I just hope that if anybody's out there, if they can try to say something, come forward.
00:09:35
Speaker 1: Brian begged the public to call with any information.
00:09:39
Speaker 3: Mr.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: And Mrs.
00:09:40
Speaker 1: Murphy, I have to ask this question. Do you have any hope that Robin still alive? No, says Judy, because I would have heard from her. Tell me something. It's been too long. It's hard to look at it. A reporter asked Amato if his interest in the case had waned. But the chief sidestepped the question, putting the onus on the media to bring in tips.
00:10:29
Speaker 2: We would hope that the news media would keep on this and Europe's biggest assets.
00:10:36
Speaker 1: It was a dismal capper to a dreary event. The offer of a reward that was two years too late and way too little to matter. Watching the Murphys, I can read it in their faces. No one in charge gave a damn about their daughter. In fact, the cops were still calling her a missing person, as if she was somehow complicit in her absence. In any case, Judy Murphy had seen enough. A week or so later, she sat down and wrote a letter to the governor of New York, George Pataki. Her handwriting is large and overruns the margins, filling both sides of the page. She underlines key phrases to drive her plea home. It's read here by reporter Kathleen.
00:11:23
Speaker 10: August 5th, 1997. Dear Governor Pataki, please help our family. We have not seen our 17-year-old daughter Robin for over two years. We believe she was abducted and murdered the night she vanished in Carmel, New York, near Shoprite and Burger King, only two blocks from our home at the time. Please look at the poster. We made them for the two-year anniversary. Carmel Police screwed this case up from the beginning and will not admit it. The car and pocketbook were found, but not my baby. I feel she is out there in the woods somewhere. I can't even bury her properly in a Catholic burial. We are being tortured by this. I feel her murderer is still in Putnam area and he got away with it. The suspect offered to take a polygraph. He was the last person to see her, but Chief Amato said it wasn't necessary. Then the suspect, within a week, moved to Connecticut, got a lawyer, and tried suicide. Now he can't be questioned because of the legal aid lawyer. This is a travesty of justice. Please help us, as no one seems to want to. For the Murphy family, as well as the other girls who are still alive in this town, but are possible future victims. I want the case changed to the Putnam County Sheriff's Department. I feel they can help us. So far, Senator Leibel's office, DA Kevin Wright, New York State Attorney General's office, will not lift a finger. Doesn't my daughter deserve justice? 17 is too young to die.
00:13:00
Speaker 4: Judy Murphy.
00:13:06
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:13:08
Speaker 2: That's my mom.
00:13:11
Speaker 1: Kathleen showed a copy of the letter to Robin's older brother, Jamie.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: He's frustrated. She has no hair on her tongue. She'd tell them.
00:13:22
Speaker 4: What's coming up for you now that you read that?
00:13:26
Speaker 7: I find it funny because my mom's giving him peace of mind. But I remember the frustration. So it was bringing back a lot of memories and emotions and things that I tried to to forget, you know?
00:13:42
Speaker 2: So I'm feeling a little heated.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:46
Speaker 7: So, but yeah, that's, I know she, she tried her hardest. It was just a nightmare. You know, I know my mother was going through hell. Being the oldest child and her older brother, it was very hard. I mean, it put me in a bad place for a long time until, uh, until I was able to get out of it.
00:14:20
Speaker 1: Alas, there's nothing in his sister's file to suggest the governor responded. Instead, there's every indication that Judy took matters into her own hands. Dan Ritchie began a full-bore investigation on her behalf while she searched for clues from the beyond.
00:14:38
Speaker 7: I think she was just looking for any answer possible. And, uh, She was finding hope anywhere she could.
00:15:08
Speaker 4: Do you think that was your rep in town, that you were a witch?
00:15:12
Speaker 8: Um, kinda, yeah. It's on my plates.
00:15:17
Speaker 4: What does your plate say?
00:15:18
Speaker 8: It says Draga 1, which is Italian. It means one witch.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Lorraine Hahn is nearly 80, but doesn't look a day over 70. She dyes a patch of her hair pink, wears a grin you'd call impish, and loves to tell people about her broomstick.
00:15:40
Speaker 8: I used to get the downpour on everybody that went missing. They all came to me because they all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff. And I said, we'll tell Lorraine. Maybe she'll find out where this girl is. We tried.
00:15:53
Speaker 1: A year or so after Robin went missing, Lorraine walked into the Carmel police station with 10 pages of notes for the detectives.
00:16:04
Speaker 8: I consulted with the cops on other cases, but I didn't push the way I did with this.
00:16:09
Speaker 1: Those pages were culled from her dreams and card readings.
00:16:14
Speaker 8: I gave them so much to read that I thought they were going to kill me when they saw me walking into the place. And I said, listen, someday you're really going to need this.
00:16:25
Speaker 1: Now, as crazy as it sounds, witches play well with cops. At least the kinds of cops who will accept their help. Lorraine wasn't the first such consultant on Robin's case. Or, Lord knows, the last. At the outset, Dan had his doubts about these folks.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: They're not giving you, if they give you something revolutionary, different, new, then you're interested. But other than that, and there were dozens of them, you know, step forward.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: It's hard to get data on how often cops use tips from psychics. One reputable survey of 102 cops offers a window into how law enforcement approaches these consultants. Of those surveyed, 75 did not recommend soliciting psychic detectives. One of them wrote they'd, quote, never in a million years used that crap, end quote. But 49 of them, almost half, said they'd run down any leads that came in. Only seven of them could remember an instance of psychics actually helping to solve a homicide. The Carmel cops seemed to bird dog every tip they got from the paranormals. You can't go three pages in Robin's case file without hearing from a psychic. They started calling the station days after she disappeared. There was the Burger King employee who swore he'd find Robin. Just as soon as the cops fed him the details needed to read her astrology chart. There was the local man who sat down each morning to take voicemails from the undead. He phoned in after Robin paid him a visit. But some of those calls were outbound, too. Early on, Judy Murphy tried to recruit a famous mystic by the name of Noreen Renier. But Noreen, in her third eye wisdom, declined to play. And so, enter the next psychic and sign in, please.
00:18:21
Speaker 6: Please welcome Dorothy Allison.
00:18:24
Speaker 8: Dorothy has worked with police departments across the country.
00:18:27
Speaker 4: For 30 years.
00:18:29
Speaker 8: She has solved missing persons and murder cases and has the most amazing history.
00:18:34
Speaker 9: Track record.
00:18:36
Speaker 1: Listeners of a certain age will recognize that voice. It's Sally Jessie Raphael, whose syndicated show in the 80s and 90s was every bit as craptastic as Jerry Springer's. Dorothy Allison, the psychic, often appeared on daytime TV. She was diminutive woman in enormous glasses and a dyed brown beehive of hair.
00:19:00
Speaker 6: How many cases have you solved? I've done over 5,000, and I've got 20 albums. That's six of them.
00:19:07
Speaker 4: Isn't that an amazing record, 5,000?
00:19:09
Speaker 6: As I do this, I try to picture what a man looks like. The first thing I try to get is a name. This is how I find dead people.
00:19:20
Speaker 9: This is how I find.
00:19:22
Speaker 6: Criminals, because the dead people are telling me something. It's a very cold feeling. No windows are open, but all of a sudden you feel a cold breeze. You don't know where it's coming from. And that person tells you something.
00:19:34
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. At Judy Murphy's insistence, the Carmel cops wrote to Dorothy Allison, pleading for her help.
00:19:47
Speaker 2: I'm not a psychic. But Dorothy Allison was injured. because she said she would see visions and she couldn't tell whether they happened or whether they were going to happen.
00:19:56
Speaker 1: Dan, as noted above, had his doubts about psychics, but something about Dorothy hit different.
00:20:03
Speaker 2: She was out to dinner with a retired homicide detective who had a private detective agency when she started just blurting out Robin and Howard and said to him, talk to the local police and find out about a case if there's somebody involved named Robin. So, you know, she definitely got her antenna working.
00:20:24
Speaker 1: At Engel, the ex-detective turned PI offered to pitch in for a bono. Soon, he and Dan Ritchie were working together.
00:20:33
Speaker 2: Carmel put me in touch with Ed Engel. I called him and then, you know, started working with him, you know, And he was kind of showing me the ropes, you know, and, you know, investigative, taking pictures.
00:20:47
Speaker 1: Dan was eager to learn from Engle. They did ride-alongs while Engle tailed Howard Gombert.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: He did surveillance, photographed Gombert's father's house. Gombert was working in an auto parts store. He photographed him there, you know what I mean? So he was really, you know, like kind of, you know, dogging him for a while.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: Alas, Gombert never led them anywhere useful. And after a while, Ed Engle stepped away. But Dan carried on undeterred. Only now he took most of his tips from the psychics. At some point, Dorothy, the psychic, sat down with Carmel detectives. Dan was there as Dorothy passed around a list.
00:21:31
Speaker 2: Clues to search for, as it's entitled. Places, anything or a place with a royal name, such as castle, king... Queen, a small zoo should be in the area.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: That list was long and wide.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: Professional games, gambling, auto repair, lion's heads. And I can't tell you how many lion's heads there are in Putnam County, but a lot. A Boy Scout killed in the area. Names, anything with gold in it, like Goldstein.
00:22:01
Speaker 1: Dan chauffeured Dorothy on routes through New York and Connecticut. They even did a drive-by past Willie McCracken's house. But Gombert stayed when Robin disappeared.
00:22:12
Speaker 2: Dorothy had a feeling about the place. When she said, I feel good about this place, it means that there's something there. So, you know, I got used to that was kind of the code, you know what I mean?
00:22:22
Speaker 4: Who else was with you guys?
00:22:25
Speaker 2: Let's see. A couple of guys from the sheriff's office and I think a couple of guys from the Carmel PD.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Dorothy didn't stick around Carmel long, which is probably a blessing all around. Her list of clues proved about as valid as her claim to have solved 5,000 cases. Nonetheless, Dan chased down all those leads of hers.
00:22:56
Speaker 2: I tried to follow, you know, what Dorothy said in the hopes that, you know, if I put it together, you know, maybe, wow, you know what I mean? Here's the solution.
00:23:06
Speaker 1: Dan was so invested that he rode with the cops as they chased their own tails, as well as Dorothy's clues.
00:23:15
Speaker 2: So it was a search, you know, that kind of went on and on, you know. And then I'd be like, I don't want to do this anymore. And then, like, my daughter, I'd put her on the bus, and she had her hair like Joseph Wright. And I'd go, I got to do it.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Here's Dan reading his notes from a search he conducted himself. They concern an old estate called Morningthorpe Manor.
00:23:35
Speaker 2: While trekking through the woods on Friday the 13th, I happened to cross a piece of purple cloth tied to a young sapling. This would have no significance except for the fact that there's no evidence of any surveying work going on and purple was Robin's favorite color. Meanwhile, I found some information in a book called.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: His pursuit of Dorothy's leads turned up nothing, however, until Dan found a clue of his own.
00:24:23
Speaker 4: Do you still think about Robin?
00:24:25
Speaker 8: Oh, yeah.
00:24:26
Speaker 9: Danny and I all talk about her sometimes, you know. I have a daughter her age.
00:24:34
Speaker 3: There but for the grace of God. You know. Yeah.
00:24:41
Speaker 9: And boy, did I become protective after this.
00:24:43
Speaker 4: You know, as a mom.
00:24:46
Speaker 9: Things I took for granted all of a sudden I didn't take for granted anymore.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Penny Osborne's a woman in her 70s now, but has a mane of black hair that catches the sun just so. There's a husk in her voice that may come from channeling spirits.
00:25:04
Speaker 9: I was a paranormal investigator, and I did a good share of paranormal investigations.
00:25:12
Speaker 1: Penny holds lots of space in Robin's case file. She and Dan met at the Putnam Historical Society, then worked together on a search that consumed them both.
00:25:23
Speaker 9: Danny and I just hit it off right away. We just had a lot in common and nothing in common. Does that sound crazy?
00:25:34
Speaker 1: After a visit to Dan's house, Kathleen sat down with Penny.
00:25:40
Speaker 9: Call it a hunch or whatever, but for some reason it would come to me as to where to find them or locate them. And I would say 90% of the time, maybe even more, I was right.
00:25:54
Speaker 5: Maybe around the time that you got involved, a lot of other psychics and other people with, you know.
00:26:01
Speaker 9: I never claimed to be a psychic. Never claimed to be a psychic.
00:26:04
Speaker 4: Tell me why.
00:26:06
Speaker 9: Because it's not something that I could turn on and off at will. Either something came to me or it didn't. But once you claim that you are a psychic, people expect you to be able to tell them things that you can't tell them. I don't know.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: As unpaid partners in the hunt for Robin, she and Dan dug up leads together.
00:26:29
Speaker 4: What was your first impression of Penny when you met her?
00:26:32
Speaker 2: She was interesting, definitely interesting.
00:26:36
Speaker 9: The Robin Murphy case was the first real case that I was asked to come and work on. The police were involved, there were detectives involved, paranormal investigators involved, and everybody... was working for the same goal, but in different directions.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: She and Dan re-interviewed old witnesses and dug up new ones. They brought all their findings to the cops.
00:27:04
Speaker 9: They either loved you or hated you. In this situation, they were interested. I mean, I gave information to them if I had a hunch about something.
00:27:14
Speaker 4: And they would take you seriously?
00:27:15
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:27:17
Speaker 9: They knew I was playing with a full deck. I wasn't, I don't think they thought I was some kind of wacko. They couldn't ask questions that maybe Danny and I could.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: In November of 97, they got a tip about a pond. It was a short drive from the Shoprite Plaza where Robin used to work. Dan drove over to case the pond as well as the woods around it. He brought along Judy Murphy and his Polaroid camera. He took dozens of pictures that day But when he went through them later on, he spotted a photo that looked macabre.
00:27:56
Speaker 2: And I thought it looked like a skull.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: It was eerie enough to show to his good friend, Penny.
00:28:02
Speaker 4: Tell me more about these Polaroids.
00:28:05
Speaker 9: I remember seeing a skull in the pond. His hands were out like this. It was outstretched. And it was sort of like wanting me to... It scared me. I don't like this.
00:28:23
Speaker 1: To the untrained eye, the shadows in those photos looks like a trick of the light. But to the eye of Penny Osborne, that's no optic smudge. Instead, it's something ghostly.
00:28:35
Speaker 9: This doesn't intrigue me. When something like this, a paranormal incident happens, it's not something that I'm really, oh, how wonderful. I really don't like it when it happens.
00:28:47
Speaker 4: You're not seeking spooky?
00:28:49
Speaker 3: No.
00:28:49
Speaker 9: I don't like spooky.
00:28:52
Speaker 1: Judy Murphy saw something in those photos, too. She immediately called the Carmel cops.
00:28:58
Speaker 4: What do you remember from her family, from her parents?
00:29:03
Speaker 9: I tried to be very sympathetic with her, Judy. We talked on the phone more than anything. She knew we were looking. She knew we were searching. She knew we were looking for answers.
00:29:14
Speaker 1: Judy demanded that the cops send divers into the pond and fast before it froze over. Detective Randy Tompkins, still in charge of the case, assembled a team of divers.
00:29:27
Speaker 2: So this was the day they were going to dive it, which was a particularly cold day. It was snowing like flurries. On Saturday morning, November 15th, 1997, roughly 20 people gathered at the edge of the pond.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: There were cops and firemen from the town of Carmel and its neighbor, Mayo Pack Falls. Dan and Penny stood with Robin's parents watching men in dive suits enter the icebox water.
00:29:54
Speaker 9: If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. There's no one who'll find it.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: Robin's dad, Brian, leaned over to him. He whispered that the setting, the pond and woods around it, the White House with a dock, looked exactly like the scene that other psychics described.
00:30:16
Speaker 2: We just were hopeful they would find something in that pond.
00:30:21
Speaker 1: Perhaps something of Robin's was down there, if not her skull.
00:30:26
Speaker 2: And they went in.
00:30:28
Speaker 1: The divers took turns plumbing the bottom of the pond. One of them, a guy who'd been at it 20 years, said the floor was so murky he couldn't see his hands in front of him. Quote, once you start moving around, you kick up all the silt, he said, unquote.
00:30:44
Speaker 5: What do you remember of being at the scene? I mean, her family's there. There's great hope.
00:30:50
Speaker 9: I mean, they wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that somebody was going to come up and be able to tell them exactly what happened, how it happened, why it happened.
00:31:02
Speaker 1: After hours of scuttling the floor of that pond, the divers came up with nothing. But Dan and Penny weren't deterred. They returned a month later with a second psychic. Alas, that long walk in the dead of winter yielded nothing more than windburn. Then, the following spring, Dan enlisted volunteers to comb the woods around the pond. He and a dozen members of a metal detecting club fanned out across the site. They found a bone in the brush and turned it over to the cops. But a scan showed it came from an animal, not a girl. And so three years in, the trail went dead from there.
00:31:48
Speaker 4: Do you feel like you've seen Robin's spirit?
00:31:52
Speaker 9: I have talked to Robin.
00:31:54
Speaker 4: What have you said?
00:31:59
Speaker 3: I wish everybody misses her. And I was sorry she died the way she did. She didn't deserve it. She didn't deserve to die the way she did.
00:32:11
Speaker 4: Did she talk back to you?
00:32:13
Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. What did she say?
00:32:15
Speaker 9: She would talk about her mom. And I just remember her saying.
00:32:22
Speaker 3: Tell my mom I'm sorry.
00:32:23
Speaker 9: I never wanted to hurt her.
00:32:30
Speaker 1: Dan and Penny gave five good years to their search for Robin Murphy. Pains them still that their labors turned up nothing. Equally painful is their strong suspicion that the killer was right under their noses.
00:32:44
Speaker 9: Danny and I were determined we were going to find the body. We were hell-bent on finding out where Gombert put her. And I think that was probably the biggest disappointment. To us, because we never, never did.
00:33:02
Speaker 1: Yes, the deepest cut for both of them was that Howard Gomber walked free. No arrest, no indictment, no nothing.
00:33:12
Speaker 9: Oh, I think he killed Robin. It's more than an intuition. It's an actual knowing. And I don't know how I know it, I just know it.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: It would take five years before the Carmel chief put a cop on the case who agreed with Penny. In 2000, a new detective took over, and he was both thorough and obsessive. And lo and behold, when he looked into Gombert, he found something that the other cops missed. A collection of trophies that Gombert had stashed, and which might finally tie him to Robin's disappearance. The Devil's Quarry is a production of Lava for Good in association with Signal Company No. 1. I'm your creator and host, Paul Solitarov. Executive producers are Jason Flom, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardus, and Gilbert King. Our senior producer is Hannah Beal. Our producers are Jackie Pauley, Austin Smith, and Kathleen Horn. Our field reporter is Kathleen Horn. Our editor is Matthew Nelson. Production support from Tara Kornhaber. Fact-checking by Peter Bresnan. Our sound designer is Britt Spangler. And our engineer is Austin Smith. Original music arranged and produced by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Head of production, Matthew Nelson. Head of Marketing and Operations, Jeff Clyburn. Publicist, Nathaniel Baruch. Art Director, Andrew Nelson. Social Media Manager, Sarah Gibbons. Legal Review provided by Gibson Dunn. And our theme song, The One Who's Holding the Stars, is performed by Alexis Quadrato at the Plaza Rojas Studio. Vocals by Rob Reddy of Californicorns. written by Leah Schofield and Kevin Herrick at the Florida Department of Corrections Hardy Correctional Facility. If you have any information to share about the events covered in this series, please call 1-888-257-7694.
00:35:55
Speaker 3: Thank you.