Dear Doug — Sandy Beal E2

Unbeknownst to her parents, Sandy Beal was secretly dating a married state trooper at the time of her death. The letter she left him in her car leaves her family with more questions than answers.

If you or someone you know is considering self-harm, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, or text "STRENGTH" to Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. There
are things I know about Sandy that I only know
because she wrote them down herself more than four decades ago.

(00:21):
She was a planner, a checkbook balancer, and the type
of teen who kept detailed notes about her life. Among
the things that Kim, her cousin, gave me to look
through is a date book that Sandy used to track
the last two years of her life seventy six and
ninety seven. On the front of the date book is

(00:41):
a picturesque winter scene, and on the inside of the
cover is a poem. The final lines read, as you
close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God
will say you have earned one more tomorrow by the
work you did today. The first entry in Andy's calendar
is in March of ninety six, when Sandy was still

(01:04):
a senior in high school. Her entries are sparse in
the beginning, but by August the pages are filled with
her soft curse of handwriting. August, I think, is when
Sandy met her boyfriend. She wrote in her calendar, met Doug.
The fourth went out, the eleventh and the twenty three.

(01:25):
He got his new police car. He was twenty eight
to her eighteen years of age. She marked down his
birthday in both years of her calendar, but she wouldn't
live long enough to see him turn twenty nine. Doug
had been married for a few years by the time
he met Sandy. In her calendar, Sandy marked down the

(01:47):
days they met together, as well as his absences, like
when he was going to be out of town hunting.
She described him as six ft a hundred and sixty
five pounds, blue eyes, and brown hair. There's a photo
she kept where he's wearing his Maryland State Trooper uniform.
He's holding his car door open, parked in front of

(02:08):
a McDonald's. The picture is blurry, but he's smiling and
making eye contact with someone out of frame. By December
of nineteen seventy six, the tone of Sandy's calendar changed,
went to doctor, she wrote, and then the next week

(02:29):
set aside money. By January, number started appearing sixty days,
eight days. Sandy drew a square around the date January
and wrote, eight am. I've seen that date before. It's
on a receipt from the Women's Medical Center of Washington,

(02:50):
d C. That was found in her purse on the
morning of her death. The receipt was for a hundred
and twenty five dollars and seventy cents. The payment was
for an abortion. I think the running tab of numbers
in her calendar was her attempt to estimate how far
along in her pregnancy she was. The following week, she

(03:12):
scrawled forget it in capital letters across one of the
pages of her calendar. Within a month of having the abortion,
she was dead. From My Heart Radio, I'm Melissa Jelson,
and this is what happened to Sandy Beale an I
Heart original podcast, Chapter two. Dear Doug. After a couple

(03:42):
of days, when I try to get my mind together,
I called the doctor. He said, I cannot give you
any answers, and I said, Dr Boyle, I said she's dead.
I said, she's gone. Can't you give me the answers
that I need to have? And what did he telling?
He told me that she had come to him, that

(04:04):
she had had the abortion, that she was bleeding. This
was all new information to Joanne. Sandy had kept her
pregnancy and her abortion a secret from her family. Her
mom learned about this for the first time at the
police precinct after Sandy's death. But Sandy did confide in someone,

(04:28):
her family physician, doctor Boyle. She went to him in
December when she would have been a few months pregnant,
and then again after the abortion. Sandy was experiencing some
residual bleeding and wanted to make sure she was okay,
and he said, I want you to go into the
hospital and I will take care of you. She didn't
want to. She was scared too because she would have

(04:51):
to tell us. She would have had you know, everybody
would have known, and she was embarrassed. I've thought a
lot about how stressful this unexpected pregnancy must have been
for Sandy. She was already in a hidden relationship with
a married police officer. If they were discovered, it could

(05:11):
be catastrophic. Now, at eighteen, she believed she was pregnant
with his child. Sandy was living with secrets upon secrets
upon secrets. We don't know how Sandy came to the
decision to have an abortion, or how long she considered
her options, or if she was influenced by anyone else,

(05:34):
but ultimately she ended up at a clinic in downtown
d C. When I first learned about this, I had
so many questions, what would have been like to terminate
a pregnancy in nine, only four years after Roe v.
Wade made access to abortion at constitutional right. How did
Sandy pay for it? How did she get home? A

(05:58):
lot of these answers are lost to time, and the
Women's Medical Center of d C is closed now. But
I was able to track down a former employee who
worked at the clinic at the time Sandy would have visited.
That's how I met Kathy. I will share my story um.
When I was seventeen, I was abducted and assaulted and

(06:21):
helped for a number of days. Was horrific. Well, I
was abducted mid day from a city street in blue
jeans and a pco, so straight up abduction assault. It
was not questionable. I am well aware that police do
not always do the detective work they should be doing,

(06:44):
because they sure didn't. Kathy was abducted and raped in St.
Louis in nineteen sixty nine. She was able to escape,
but it was understandably a life altering experience. And my grandmother,
who was completely uneducated, but escaped from the Warsaw ghetto,
and she said in a very dear Eastern European voice, Darling,

(07:10):
you have a choice. You can hide, you can get
very sad, or you can speak your truth and teach
something about this. Those words stayed with me a very
long time. There with me still, Cathy chose to speak

(07:38):
her truth. She became an activist involved in the women's
reproductive rights movement. She received her PhD in counseling, and
in the mid nineties seventies began working at the Women's
Medical Center of DC. She started as a mental health
counselor working with patients and later became the director of
the counseling center there. So we were in a large

(08:00):
office building, was very spacious, It was very comfortable. One
could come in for birth control counseling, or abortion counseling,
or crisis counseling. In stars counseling wide array. Cathy reminded
me that this was all pre internet and pre cell phones.

(08:23):
She said, Sandy likely would have heard of the clinic
through word of mouth or been referred by her doctor.
It was also before at home pregnancy tests became widely
available in the US, so to confirm that she was pregnant,
Sandy would have had to have visited a doctor. If
it was determined she was pregnant and she was in
a reasonable time frame for our work. She would be

(08:47):
sent to a counseling room where she would meet with
a council who would have asked many, many questions to
see if this sounded okay, like someone who had thought
this through. Was likely as best as we could determine

(09:08):
to handle the procedure and aftermath. After speaking with Kathy,
I was left with the impression that Sandy could have
received really good care at Women's Medical Center. She would
have been evaluated by counselors before the abortion, and they
would have followed up with her afterwards to make sure
she was doing okay. If any of us had any

(09:34):
inkling that this would be extremely disregulating, emotionally, extremely destabilizing,
she wouldn't have had the abortion at Women's Medical Say.
I told Kathy about Sandy's story to get her take.
Sandy died just one month after her abortion. I wanted

(09:56):
to know had Kathy ever heard if any of the
clinics patients dying by suicide. I wondered if it might
have gotten back to them. I can't remember a single
case like that. To the family. The revelation that Sandy

(10:22):
had had an abortion provided a motive for Doug. Sandy
was a complication in his life. The Bells didn't necessarily
imagine that Doug had an elaborate plan to get rid
of Sandy. Instead, they thought that maybe there had been
an altercation of some kind. Kim's theory as to why
Sandy had the gun with her that night is that
maybe she was trying to scare Doug and maybe things

(10:44):
just got out of control. And their fears that Sandy
was murdered by an intimate partner aren't outlandish. In the US,
four women a day are killed by their boyfriends and
husbands and exes. While it's uncomfortable to talk about, women
are at greater risk of violence at the hands of
someone they know than by a stranger. Here's what the

(11:07):
Beale family knew. Sandy had been in a secretive relationship
with a married man. She had gotten pregnant and had
an abortion, and then ended up dead one mile away
from her boyfriend's place of work, and found with her
body was a letter she had made out specifically to him.
I'm going to read it now. Keep in mind, this

(11:28):
is all coming from her perspective, and we don't know
if everything in it is true, but it gives us
a great deal of insight into how she felt around
the time she died. Doug, I know now it's over,
and it has been all along. I guess I'm going
crazy and nobody can see it. You know you're right.

(11:50):
I am trouble. I lost my baby. I wanted so much.
I thought it would bring some kind of love because
I was looking for love of and never found it
from you. But you didn't care. You never came when
I was sick. I only wish I could start all
over again. Then you wouldn't have used me like you did.

(12:12):
You didn't care, and I guess you never will. I
never want another man to ever want me. I just
want to leave and forget the pain. You see, I'll
have to one day pay for the loss of my baby,
and when that day comes, Douglas will pay for what
he did to me and his baby. I love you,
and I'm sorry for all of this I've caused you.

(12:35):
So this letter was interpreted by police as a suicide.
What do you see in this letter? She wasn't committing suicide,
but I just don't believe it. That's Sandy's cousin, Kim.
Did you believe she wanted to get away from it
and she was going to have to go through a
grieving process. I see that she was in a lot

(12:56):
of pain, and she was a kid. She's about to
be nineteen, and she sees the way the world is,
and she's recognizing that she loved him and she couldn't
have any more than that. But at the same time,
this is where her fire comes out, and I just
want to leave and forget all the pain. How how

(13:17):
do you hear that line? Now? That's when she wanted
to go to Maine. In the last few months of
Sandy's life, she had started talking about moving. She wrote
to her grandmother in Maine and asked if she could
live with her. These plans are a major reason why
the Bell family so vehemently rejected the theory of suicide.
Sandy was hopeful about the future. Here's her mom, Joanne.

(13:41):
She wouldn't have gone to the lengths of calling her
grandmother and talking with her. And she loved a grandmother Beale.
She didn't like my mom. She liked a grandmother Beale,
and that's why I don't think she committed the suicide.
When I first read Sandy's letter, it didn't seem to

(14:04):
me like a suicide note. Instead, I recognized it as
a certain type of writing specific to teenage girls who
had had their hearts broken for the very first time,
girls who learned too early how men could use and
take advantage of them, take their hearts and bodies and time,
and then just discard them like trash. I recognized the

(14:27):
letter because I had written ones just like it. The
note could be interpreted manyways, though, depending on the lens
you read it through heartbroken teen or as the cops
read it, girl on the brink of suicide. If she
hadn't written that damn note, ship head, I wish she

(14:48):
had a mail that son of a bitch instead of
leaving it in the gun, Joanna Leaves. The police closed
the case so quickly because of the letter Sandy wrote
to Doug. Without it, she thinks Sandy's death would have
been investigated as a murder, and that those closest to her,
including her boyfriend Doug, would have faced questioning. If you

(15:11):
was going with a girl and you got her pregnant
and you was married, and you told her to go
get an abortion and she did, and then she still
was hanging onto you, what do you think you would do.
You're twenty eight years old, You've got a nice career
with the state police, and you've gotten a girl pregnant.

(15:33):
If Doug was responsible, the Bills believed that he would
be uniquely adept at covering up the crime due to
his training as a law enforcement officer. Here's Kim again.
He's then the ideal situation. He's in the position of authority,
he has the skill set, um, he has the trust
within his department. They're going to believe him over us,

(15:56):
so he's going to be able to cover up. He
just has all the resources available to them. Kim suspicions
of Doug kind of makes sense given her line of work.
She's a therapist for domestic violence victims and as a result,
all too familiar with the ways that men harm the
women they claim to love. Her passion to help survivors

(16:19):
and her desire to solve Sandy's case a sort of
interwoven at this stage, feeding off of each other, and honestly,
it's really impressive just how much energy she continues to
commit to Sandy. For the last year, we've texted almost
every single day to compare notes and talk about the case.
And you have to remember she's been working on this
for decades now. Her efforts over the years to track

(16:42):
down documents and navigate the maze of state agencies and
local police, it's herculean. I'm kind of like gum on
people's shoes, and I ask a lot of questions. Tenacious,
that's the word that I've been told before, and it's
really stubbornness. And the people that I had to keep
trying to reach over and over again were the law

(17:06):
enforcement that there. They were really just trying to cover
their ass and be cautious about what they gave me
and what they did. Kim had been researching Sandy's case
in some form or another since nineteen but the investigation
took on a new urgency in two thousand and six
after Kim traveled to Maine to see Sandy's parents. Ronald,

(17:28):
Sandy's dad, was nearing the end of his life, and
as Kim talked to him, she learned that he was
still preoccupied with what happened to Sandy and all the
unanswered questions around her death. I hate that Ronnie died
not knowing just m It's just not fair that he

(17:48):
would go to his grave and not now, that's just
not fair. We need to get those answers, and I
don't want Joanne to leave this earth and not half
them too. She was overcome with a deep sense of injustice.
She told me, Oh my gosh, you know, there's not
enough time to get to find out these answers and
we know nothing, and it's oh six, that's a lot

(18:10):
of time, that's what. Twenty nine years later, Kim decided
to track down the official police report on Sandy's death,
thinking it would be simple to get not so. She
started by calling the Prince George's County Police Department, where
she was connected to a detective in the cold case unit,
Bernie Nelson. He quickly referred her to someone else, another

(18:31):
detective who had a strange story to share. He started
how humming along and you know, I'm not sure that's
a long time ago. I don't think I can get
those records. And so probably three or four calls and
um then he told me, well the buildings burned down.
I'm like what, So he said, well, the probably the

(18:53):
only thing I'm gonna be able to get as a
tickler file. Well, I've been in marketing before, I know
that's just an index card, and it's jumped from one
month to another to follow up on people. I'm like,
I don't care what you have, Just get me what
you have. Okay, I'll work on it. Well, that was
the last communication I had with him, because he would
never return my calls anymore. So I gave up on
the police report. Actually, instead, she focused on getting Sandy's autopsy,

(19:18):
which she eventually was able to acquire. It added one
very important detail, Sandy had sperm inside her body, suggesting
that she'd recently had sex. Though it's hard to know
exactly when I think what happened, and maybe I'm wrong.
I think that he met her, they had sex, and

(19:43):
she probably was thinking, well, i've had the aboortion, everything's fine,
we're gonna stick together. And I think he said, no,
I'm going back to my wife. The family had already
believed Sandy wasn't alone in the Pollard that night. Maybe
the letter to Doug was supposed to have been given
to him in person. Fast forward to seventeen, and it

(20:08):
wasn't until my niece introduced me to her new boyfriend,
and he was a Prince George's county cop. And I
said that I've been looking for this police report for decades,
and um, they set the building burned down and he goes,
the building never burned down. I'm work out of it
and it's about a seventy five year old building. That
building never burned down. And so that got my you know,

(20:31):
blood boiling. So Kim picked up the phone once again
and dialed the Pugi County Police. This time though, she
connected with a sympathetic clerk who passed her requests along
to Cold Casse Detective Bernie Nelson, the same detective she
first spoke to in two thousand and six. All of
a sudden, I got that emails dating Bernie Nelson has

(20:54):
found the police report. He didn't tell me where he
found it. He just said he found it and that
here it is attached. Oh my gosh. I like was nervous,
and I was driving as fast as I could to
get to my computer so I couldn print it out
because I thought it was just going to go away.
And I couldn't believe that it was twelve pages, which
was just amazing. But because they assured me that there

(21:18):
was there was no way that this was going to
be available. The entire time that Kim had been looking
for it. The police file had been safe and sound
in the home of the cop who investigated the case
in nineteen seventy seven, retired Detective at Selski. When he
left the force, he took his files home with him.
In a full thirteen years after Kim's initial request, cold

(21:43):
case detective Bernie Nelson went to Shechelski's house and physically
retrieved the file from his boxes of papers. And even
Bernie said, I don't even know why he saved it,
but for whatever reason, he saved it, and they found
it in his mouth. Bernie went up with men went
through the boxes to get this report for me, but

(22:04):
they probably wanted me off their butt, And I said
that when I emailed, and I'm like, I'm not going away.
The full police report is actually a seventeen page digital
file filled with details about what detectives found when they
arrived on the scene. Sandy was sitting on a gold

(22:26):
blanket in the driver's seat, her white coat sat on
the seat next to her, and on top of it
was a gun, a three seven Ruger revolver. The police
report also includes a series of photocopies. There's a copy
of the letter Sandy wrote to Doug, along with what
looks like a rough draft and an envelope addressed to

(22:48):
his work. The last page of the report is another
photocopy of something that was found in her car. But
it's really blurry, so I can't read what's on it.
All I can make out or you faint lines of
Sandy's handwriting. For months, I assumed it was another note
Sandy had written the contents lost to time. But then
one day I found the original in the stack of

(23:10):
documents that Kim gave me. Turns out it's not a letter,
it's a photograph. The police report only includes a copy
of the back, but what's on the front is far
more revealing. It's Sandy's photograph of Doug standing in front
of the McDonald's in his state trooper uniform. I don't

(23:30):
buy any of that ship. There was a lot of
things that they said and did that I didn't that
I argued with them about. But they looked at us,
I think, as well than nobody that little class. According
to the police report, there were empty pill bottles in

(23:51):
Sandy's car and loose pills scattered on her seat. Although
this description might give the impression that Sandy was trying
to overdose the autop She did not find any drugs
or alcohol in her system at the time of her death.
It just staged me, like, oh, we found, you know,
pills underneath her legs. Well they were they were allergy

(24:12):
pills and um. So they made it look like she
committed suicide. But I don't think they did a thorough investigation.
They didn't do their due diligence. I don't think they
investigated anything. It was more than forty years after Sandy's
death before her family would get a copy of the
police report and be able to read it. They had

(24:33):
hoped that there would be some kind of in controvertible
proof in the report that could settle their questions. The
family felt that with more information that have a clearer
picture of how and why Sandy died, but the new
information just muddled the story. The police report provided a
detailed account of this scene and reminded the family of

(24:54):
the cardboard shoved under the wheels of her car and
the tire tracks that seemed to indicate she was trying
to get her car out of the mud. The report
also noted that the gun had been collected and dusted
for Prince. It had none. If Sandy had used the
gun on herself, wouldn't they find her Prince? And crucially,

(25:15):
why was there no mention of Doug in the written
police report, even though his name, his work address, and
a photo of him were found in her car. Certainly
they as far as we know, they didn't investigate dog
because there's no mention of that in the police report either.
Here's Sandy's brother, Stephen. Well, what I say is, if

(25:36):
she committed suicide, somebody's going to have to do some
holl acious proven to me, some how acious proven to me,
has even that's what they say, fucking proven. Hi is

(26:00):
his head? He Hi? It's Melissa. Can you hear me? Okay?
That's retired detective at Sheelski. He's the one who wrote
the police report and investigated Sandy's death all those years ago,
the one who stored the police report at his house.
I tracked him down on Facebook. He was somewhat surprised
to learn Sandy's family was still uncertain about the events

(26:22):
surrounding her death. He was willing to answer their questions
and mine in order to put the issue to rest.
It's the time that I wrote them aside. It was
kind of a sought after job to press stige. I'm
a homicide dick, you know what I mean. But let
me tell you it had to ye the police department

(26:43):
well angling well over a hundred murders a year. I
mean they put us like, don't. Shelski speaks with the
brash confidence of a lifelong police officer, and he's an
experienced storyteller. A few years ago, he wrote a novel
that touches on his time working homicide, called in Cheep's Clothing.

(27:07):
The book is dedicated to the quote finest group of
police officers found anywhere the past and present members of
the Prince George's County Police Department. So I had declare
I was in my afe, which is only a few
holes away from where her body was. Arriving on scene,
he recalled what he noticed, a young woman slumped over

(27:30):
in a car seat alone, with a gun close to
her right hand. Her hands were coated in gunpowder, which
indicated to Shashlski that her hands were on or very
close to the gun when it was fired. Upon further inspection,
he saw that the gunshot in her abdomen was a
contact wound, meaning that the gun had been touching her

(27:51):
body when it fired. She was made up from there, said,
I kept very attractive. I asked Selski what he made
of some of the more unusual details of Sandy's case,
like the location of the gunshot. He told me something

(28:12):
a lot of people have said to me as I've
reported the story, that women, especially young attractive women, don't
like to shoot themselves in the face because of vanity.
I tried to fact check this claim, and there's not
much research, but I did track down one study from
that found that men were almost twice as likely as

(28:33):
women to use a method of suicide that disfigured their
head or face. But researchers dismissed the theory that women
were driven by vanity, calling it an empirically unsupported explanation
that characterizes the suicidal behavior of women as motivated by
selfish or trivial concerns. While Shachlski had a fairly good

(28:56):
memory of Sandy's case, he didn't remember one of the
d tells that the family latched onto the cardboard under
Sandy's tires. He insisted that I was mistaken until I
showed him his own police report, where he noted it
this detail. It doesn't fit neatly into the police narrative
of suicide. If Sandy went to the Pollard to end

(29:17):
her life, why did it seem like she was trying
repeatedly to leave. You don't ruar anything now, So I said,
you don't want to be a tunnel vision. You want
to go in there with an open line homicide, suicide,
natural or whatever. But I mean, I got a gun
on a truck seat and a build and a bank

(29:38):
seat or wherever it was. It's not a natural thing.
Though I can eliminate that. It's not an accident, Singer,
I can eliminate that. So we lets for frost is
a homicide or a suicide. And then there was the
letter to Doug what I interpreted as a suicide night Yes, yes,

(30:02):
I mean, but again, it doesn't say good bye a
queer world. Either. Sends to me like she's kind of
talking together a little bit. She's rejected. There's nothing to
live for. She lost her baby, she lost her lover.
She probably told her thousands of times he was going
to leave his wife, you know what I mean. She

(30:26):
didn't get that. She loses her baby, what does their
love for? That's what I can see in that letter
I could think of a lot of reasons Sandy had
to live. She was eighteen years old to start, she
had family, a job, friends, ambitions. I have no doubt

(30:49):
that Sandy was despondent over what sounds like the breakup
of her very first love. But the jump to having
nothing to live for it seems quite far, And I
wondered if these intimate details about Sandy's personal life, which
were on display in her writings, colored the police's interpretation
of her death. What if there had been no letter,

(31:12):
What if there was no receipt from the clinic. Back then,
much like now, there were a lot of myths around abortion.
One is that women who obtain them are more likely
to be depressed or suicidal afterwards. We now know this
to be untrue. The most comprehensive research project on the
effects of unintended pregnancy on women's lives, called the Turnaway Study,

(31:35):
has found that abortion does not increase the risk of
having suicidal thoughts or the chance of developing depression or anxiety.
In fact, women who are able to get an abortion
when they want one are more likely to have a
positive outlook on the future. Could hit me as a
suicide right after bat I do what I was supposed
to do, and it is it was a suicide. I'm

(31:57):
not even gonna say, in my opinion it was a suicide.
It was a suicide. That's a simple maybe, but it
was a suicide. I don't think any suicide is simple.
But Sandy's case did have an added layer of complication
for police the fact that her boyfriend was a state trooper.

(32:20):
Doug's name was all over the scene. The autopsy revealed
that Sandy had sex before her death. I thought her
boyfriend would be high on the list of people to interview,
and in fact, it's standard procedure in cases like this.
The Department of Justice recommends that death investigators should try
to quote document when, where, how, and by whom the

(32:41):
decedent was last known to be alive. I asked Detective
Schellski if he ever considered Doug a person of interest,
or if he thought to speak to him to learn
more about Sandy's mental health or to help recreate the
last forty eight hours of her life, not as I
was concern to. He was not aspect than anything. Shelski

(33:03):
told me that he didn't have any qualms going after
a fellow officer if it was warranted. It's worth noting
that Selski didn't know Doug. State and County Police are
different entities and operate independently, and while Shelsky didn't interview Doug,
he did do something. He notified the state Police that
the trooper may have had an inappropriate relationship with an

(33:24):
eighteen year old girl. I filed the public information request
with the Maryland State Police to see if I could
find records of an internal investigation into Doug after Sandy
was found dead, but I was too late. Internal affairs
records are maintained for only thirty years. There was no
occasion of anything in that car, then a suicide. Again,

(33:47):
the biggies on her her father's glad is the biggest one.
I'm not going to drag somebody or over to Claris
another every day guy. Detective Shochelski didn't think it was

(34:07):
worth talking to Doug, but I did. Since I began
this podcast, I've tried repeatedly to make contact with him,
sending him emails and messages on LinkedIn. I've also mailed
handwritten letters to his home, and in one I included
a photo of Sandy. To this day, I've yet to
speak with him, Doug, if you're listening, I still want

(34:29):
to talk. Over the years, Doug has turned into somewhat
of a mythic figure for the Bell family. He's an enigma,
a mystery man who played a pivotal role in Sandy's
life and then just disappeared. After Sandy's death, Joanne tried

(34:51):
to track him down. She told me that she called
the Maryland State Police in hopes of speaking with him.
When I called the State Police marks, the man was
not very friendly. He said, well, you don't have to
worry about that, ma'am. He's been transferred. Well, he's been
wanting to go to Baltimore for a long time. We

(35:12):
finally got an opening when we sent him along. And
I'm thinking, yeah, right, so, uh, I didn't get anywhere
with the state place. Maryland State Police informed Joanne the
dog had been transferred. I wasn't able to verify this
with the state Police. However, they did confirm that he

(35:34):
was assigned to a barracks in the Baltimore area. Two
get that cup transferred right away. They covered everything up,
I thought. I thought at the time, I thought they're
just telling me that ship because they know And I

(35:54):
still think that up until now, I've held back a
single detail in Sandy's case. I wanted you to get
to know Sandy in the way her family knew her
as a daughter, a sister, and as a civilian. But
one of the major reasons why I held onto Joanne's

(36:15):
letter for so many years was because Sandy wasn't just
a regular teenage girl who worked at the mall. Sandy
she wanted to be a cop, and not just in
some idle day dreaming kind of way. In the last
year of her life, she was training to become a
police officer, going on ride alongs with pg County Police
and even taking the written test for the academy. So

(36:38):
Sandy wasn't a stranger to pigg County police. She was
actively trying to become one of them. Well, I'm old
enough and worked in organizations long enough to know that
you're going to want to protect the people that you
work with or the reputation of the agency. Sander could
have been retired by now, she's doing a life sex underground.

(37:01):
So I give a ship about these people. I hope
they were at now. Well, it's just you know, there
was dirty cops back then, just like the dirty pops
cops now you just never know where they're at and
who they are, you know. On our next episode, we

(37:22):
learn more about Sandy's gold to become a police officer. Yeah,
I know, she really talked about want to become a cop.
At first, I was a little surprised, like really, yeah,
So she was talking about these ridlongs and how she
enjoyed them. That's what I do. We call. She's saying, yeah,
and Jesse, guys, get away with ship. You know. I'm

(37:46):
Melissa Jelson and this is what Happened to Sandy Beale.
What Happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by me, Melissa Jelson.
It's written and produced by me and kittre In and Norville.
The podcast is edited by Abu Safard, sound designed by
Aaron Kaufman. Jason English is our executive producer. Research and

(38:09):
production assistance by Marissa Brown. To find out more about
my investigation, follow me on Twitter at quasimado. That's qu
a s I am a d O. Thanks so much
for listening.