Divided Minds — Sandy Beal E6

The Beals' distrust of police leaves even the most basic facts about Sandy's case up for interpretation. 

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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. So
I guess we can start driving now. So what does
beat you over there in ten minutes? However, so I'm

(00:30):
just in the car now. Last night the family gave
me Sandy's coat that she had with her the night
that she died, and so I'm feeling a great weight
of responsibility. I'm taking the coat with me and We're
going to go to the cemetery this morning. Sandy's body
is not there, but there's a marker for her, and

(00:53):
I'm just popping in the address. We're rolling. Yeah, okay,
so tell us where we are. We're at Greenwood Cemetery. Um,
it's I think it's the largest one in john Sport

(01:15):
because there's probably like ten cemeteries here and we are
in our family cemetery for many generations, many centuries. And um,
we're about to walk to where Sandy's memorialize. That's interesting.
I wonder what the pennies are. Is that just a
show that you've been here? I wonder what does anyone
know what pennies have put on there? For the first

(01:38):
time I met Kim and she told me about Sandy.
I don't think she imagined her cousin's story would become
the subject of an entire podcast. A year went by
before I asked her if she would be willing to
embark on this project together. I couldn't do it without
her buying and Kim she was immediately yes, which I

(01:59):
thought is pretty brave, because when you invite a journalist
into your life, you're opening yourself up to a lot
of questioning, not all of which is comfortable or feels natural.
Kim was allowing me to scrutinize her long held belief
that Sandy was murdered. She was essentially giving me permission
to check her work and risking the prospect of being

(02:22):
proven wrong. Early on in the process, she invited me
to come to Maine to meet the whole family and
to crash a big birthday party for one of her
relatives who was turning eighty. This trip it was an
intense two full days of interviews. For hours at a time.

(02:43):
I sat down with members of the Bale family, and,
like an investigative reporter does, I peppered them with questions,
trying to establish the basic, undisputed facts of the case,
and a lot of these questions were directed at Kim,
as she was my conduit to the family and the
one who had spent the most time investigating Sandy's death

(03:03):
on our own. The final day of my trip, we
drove to the cemetery where Sandy has a grave marker.
I only had a few minutes before my flight back,
but I wanted to get Kim's temperature. After a long
and emotionally grueling weekend, I'm still processing it. It was.
It was definitely different to dredge it all back up

(03:24):
your the questions that you were asked. I was like, WHOA,
I've never thought about those things before. And then some
of the things that we came up with that I
thought were solid evidence and now we got to figure
out what it means and what it all was. But
that was a little disturbing. But the questions you asked,
we're we're pretty uh. They caught They caught me by surprise.

(03:49):
I have more questions than I thought I did, and
I'll send them to you. I'm trusting that it's all
going to unfold and we'll get the answers that we
need to help bring some closure for them. Well for
me too. I'm so glad you guys came up here.
I can't believe you'd come to jal Sport nine and
do this From my heart radio. I'm Melissa Jolson, and

(04:14):
this is what happened to Sandy Beale and I heard
original podcast Chapter six, Divided Minds. When I first met
the Beals in Maine, I made them a promise that

(04:36):
I would keep an open mind and follow the evidence,
and I wouldn't be swayed by one side or the other.
It was clear from the get go that there were
two opposing sides here. Mine so divided that there was
very little agreement on what the most basic facts meant.
The Prince George's County Police Department and the Bell family

(04:56):
had examined the exact same documents. Dice did the exact
same set of facts and come to wildly divergent conclusions
about what happened to Sandy. As a pair of fresh
eyes on the case, I wondered whether both sides were
trapped in their own cycles of confirmation bias, processing the
information in a way that aligned with their own preconceived ideas.

(05:21):
Like the cardboard under the wheels of Sandy's car. The
Bills interpreted it as a sign that Sandy was trying
to leave the pollard on the night of her death
and wasn't planning to die by suicide. But this detail
was not even remembered by Detective sachel Ski. It didn't
register as important because it didn't fit neatly into his theory.

(05:43):
We each are bringing our own experiences, our own beliefs,
our own desires to the table, so that when two
people with different mindsets are given the same information to
look at by virtue of their different brains, they may
interpret those things in very different ways. Jeff Kakuka is
a professor of psychology at Telson University. He's an expert

(06:06):
on how bias can influence decision making, including an investigations
in psychology. When we talk about bias, what we're talking
about is kind of like a reflex. It's something that
where brains do without us even realizing that we're doing it.
Once you have a conclusion in mind, um, you're no
longer sort of taking in all the information and evaluating

(06:30):
it in an objective way. Instead, what tends to happen
is people will selectively seek out information that fits their
existing beliefs, and if they encounter any information that goes
against their existing beliefs, will either ignore it or find
a way to somehow minimize its importance so that they

(06:50):
can again sort of continue preserving that belief that exists
in the first place. There's an adage that have thought
about a lot while making this podcast. It's called Handlon's Razor,
and it goes like this, never attribute to malice that
which is adequately explained by stupidity. There's a few different

(07:11):
versions of the phrase, and sometimes incompetence is subbed for stupidity.
This proverb, it's a helpful reminder not to immediately assume
the worst intentions in the actions of others, that more
often than not people are careless or selfish rather than
means spirited or evil. Of course, malice exists, but if

(07:34):
you look for it everywhere, you could risk having a
distorted reception of reality. Take, for instance, Sandy's original death certificate,
issued on February. It was given to Joanne back then
and has remained in her possession ever since. At the
bottom of the page, there's a line with a medical

(07:55):
examiner must indicate the manner of death. Choosing between natural causes, homicide, suicide, accident,
or undetermined, you would expect the box for suicide to
be checked, but it's not. Instead, there's an X through
the box undetermined manner of death. It was always an

(08:16):
odd inconsistency that bothered the family, and a few years
ago it got even weirder. Kim requested a new copy
of Sandy's death certificate. When she received the document, she
was startled to find that the box for suicide now
had an X two. Kim's immediate impression was that the
records might have been altered to fit with the police's story,

(08:40):
And it's entirely possible that the medical examiner's office colluded
with the police to cover up for death. But the
possibility also exists that it's just a typo that the
medical examiner initially stamped the wrong box and fixed it
later incompetence or malice. That's the thing is, these biases

(09:02):
are so pervasive that they can affect every aspect of
our decision making without even us realizing that it's happening.
We have these beliefs, and our brain is wired in
such a way that leads us to pursue information that
agrees with our beliefs, rather than pursuing information that might
prove us wrong, because who likes to be proven wrong.

(09:38):
It's understandable why Kim and the rest of the Beal
family was suspicious of Prince George's County police because the
investigation into Sandy's death was tainted by a clear conflict
of interest. Sandy was a police trainee and her car
was filled with evidence linking her to local cops. And

(09:58):
if PG County police officers were willing to cover up
their sexual misconduct, what other wrongdoing were they capable of.
If Shachelski could forget the cardboard, what other inconvenient facts
might have evaded his memory? Without trust in the police,
the Bills were skeptical of everything they were told. And

(10:20):
this is where I thought I could be of help.
I wanted to bring in some unbiased experts to try
to recreate what happened that night in the Pollard, inserting
some impartiality into Sandy's case. That's how I met Paul Rybay,
a certified forensic pathologist who has worked for the U. S.
Army as well as local and state agencies. He told

(10:41):
me he's performed over autopsies in his career, and hundreds
of those have been suicides. I gave him the rundown
on Sandy's case, the keys in the ignition and the
cardboard under the wheels while she's in the mud, that
might indicate that Sandy had been trying to leave the
location him that she was at. How do you interpret

(11:02):
this kind of information in the context of a suicide.
I would lump that in with Okay, what's the timeline?
What happened in the hours before her death? You know,
even you know, going back like twenty four hours? Why
was she there, who was she meeting with? Who did
she have relations with? You know? And that would answer
the question why are their cardboard under the tires? All

(11:25):
these questions he's asking, they're great ones. We don't have
answers to them, though, because PG County Police closed the
case before establishing these facts, that on its face isn't
necessarily suspect Paul said, Is every death investigated to the
absolute extreme of pushing the investigation as far as we can,

(11:48):
interviewing absolutely everyone possible, and you know, doing a full
court press on every case. No, And that's just that's
that's largely a matter of resources and resource allocation. This
reminded me of what Detective Selski told me about how
overworked and understaffed he was back in the nineteen seventies.

(12:08):
I mean, they us like, don't they really did? Selski
told me that his immediate read of the scene was
that of a suicide. There was ample evidence of it,
he said, and one of the biggest factors was the gun.
If it was as side, if it was a murder.

(12:28):
First off, I don't think the killer when I left
the gun there. Then when I found out the gun
blown to her father, it's not likely that someone would
have murdered her with her father's gun. But from the
Bill's perspective, the gun is the most important piece of

(12:49):
evidence that proves Sandy didn't die by suicide. The gun
isn't abstract to them. It was returned to the family
after Sandy's death. Sandy's brothers have shot it. They know
the power it takes, the kick back after you pull
the trigger, and based on their personal experience, they came

(13:10):
to believe she couldn't have shot herself with it. Not
that Sandy wouldn't, although they also believe that, but that
she couldn't. That the physical evidence just didn't line up.
Here's Michael and Stephen. The thing about that gun. It
was a three fift or seven, and it was a
long gun, long barrel right gun. And when that when

(13:33):
you shot that thing, it kicked, I mean it had
a kick to it, so she would have to use
two hands in order to shoot it. And a trigger
wasn't a hair trigger either. It had a couple of
pounds of pulled So, uh, that's the other thing, you know.
That kind of got me about why they said she
would shoot herself, because if she was able to manage that,

(13:55):
that freaking gun would have shot off, would have taken
off right through the day side glass window. And Kim
shared this opinion that it was impossible Sandy shot herself.
And when I met with the Prince George's County police,
they were so insistent on you just don't understand. We've
seen lots of things like that. And I finally just said,
if you can prove to me through ballistics and show

(14:17):
me the trajectory and all the opportunities that this was suicide,
then I'll believe you. But not until then all your
evidence completely goes against the evidence that I have she
did not commit suicide. Listening to Detective Sachelski and the
Bell family, I was faced with two different interpretations of

(14:39):
the same evidence, and so I asked Paul for his opinion,
and he turned my attention to Sandy's hands. When you
fire a revolver, especially at three fifty seven magnum, there's
allowed a lot of gunpowder that explodes, and a lot
of that gunpowder comes out through what's called the cylinder gap.
So say, if you have your hand and over that

(15:01):
cylinder gap, or even adjacent to it, when you discharge it,
you can get you sit on your hand. That way,
both of Sandy's hands had gunpowder on them, according to
the police report. Paul said he would interpret this to
mean that Sandy was either holding the gun or had
her hands very close to it when it was fired.

(15:22):
So would it be possible to have sit on your
hands and not have been the one to pull the trigger?
If you were in a small, enclosed environment, it could
be like if you were grabbing for the gun to
push it away or something like that. I've done cases
where two people are struggling for a gun and the

(15:43):
gun goes off, and it's very difficult to tell who
you know who pulled the trigger, because they both might
have had their finger on the trigger, or someone had
their finger on the trigger and the other person, you know,
is grabbing their hand to try and either keep them
from pulling the usually to keep them from pulling the trigger.
Paul pointed out that Sandy was also shot at very

(16:05):
close range, which is characteristic of a suicide. Now, if
it's a contact wound, it's either one of two things.
Either the person put the gun to their head and
pull the trigger. In this case, put the gun to
you know, she put the gun to her abdomen and
pull the trigger, or someone else put the gun to
her abdomen and pull the trigger. And then that's where, Okay,
we're looking for We're looking for other evidence to support

(16:29):
that or rule that out. So I can tell you
the range, I can tell you the trajectory. I can
tell you what it injured. I can tell you, you know,
I can give you maybe a little estimate of survivability maybe,
so I can tell you all of those things, but
I can't tell you who shot it. I asked him

(16:53):
about the lack of fingerprints on the gun. Turns out
Paul didn't find this that unusual. Fire Arms are notoriously
hard to test for prints. One study estimated that fingerprints
are recovered from firearms only about percent of the time,
and that's nowadays because of say, you know, the texture

(17:14):
on the handle or just a partial print at a
odd location of the gun, they might not be able
to get it. And I would also have to know, Okay,
what is the fingerprinting policies and procedures of the Prince
George's County Police departments circle, and you know, did they
follow that procedure. Reading the autopsy report, Sandy's gunshot wound

(17:37):
is described in excruciating and impersonal detail. Quote. The wound
is slightly ovoid, a quarter inch in diameter, and is
surrounded by an eighth inch rim of abrasion resembling muzzle imprint.
Powder is noted in the wound margins. I asked Paul,
based on everything that's in the autopsy and the police report,

(17:59):
and take into consideration the family's significant questions, if it
was possible that Sandy shot herself, if you put your
hand right at the base of your rib cage or
base of your stern um, move it over about three
inches to the bottom of your rib margin, that's where

(18:20):
the entrance was. Now. Once again, if she were to
do this herself, she could fire the gun essentially holding
the handle of the gun with her gun with her
with her left thumb on the trigger, which is sort
of like holding it backwards essentially, which is consistent with

(18:40):
her kind of holding her left hand across her body,
so to speak, and then likely firing the gun with
her thumb on the trigger, and that could also explain
why they didn't find any fingerprints on the gun as well.
Paul could see a scenario in which Sandy shot herself
and caused there He's described in her autopsy. What had

(19:03):
been unthinkable to the Beals was a real probability to Paul. Still,
he admitted that the case was unusual. How many times
in your career, if you remember, have you seen a
teenage girl shoot herself? Probably less than five ever in
the apt hunt, the stories Sandy's family tell about her

(19:41):
emphasize her sense of humor and her protective instincts. She
was quick to speak her mind and stand up for herself.
Her family knew her to be cheerful, focus hard working.
She was a well adjusted kid who they trusted, and
based on their knowledge of her as a daughter and
a sister and a cousin, they didn't believe Sandy would

(20:05):
take her own life. It was incomprehensible to them, it
didn't match the person they knew. But during this reporting
I found out a lot of things they didn't know
about Sandy, things that were happening in her life, and
as painful as it is to contemplate now, there's probably
a lot they didn't know about how she was feeling.

(20:29):
Sandy died surrounded by police paraphernalia. Her dashboard held a
shift schedule card, a duty rig and newspaper clippings about cops,
and she was found in a location where cops life
to gather. Her family believed that she was protected in
the presence of police, but I think it's more likely

(20:49):
that all that time she spent hanging out with them
was actually an opportunity for abuse. From what I've discovered,
it seems obvious that at least some police officers took
it advantage of Sandy pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with the teenager,
and in this climate, Sandy became pregnant and had an
abortion in secret. If she was being mistreated by police,

(21:15):
then I imagine she would have felt very alone, possibly scared,
and she probably didn't know how to make it stop.
Sandy kept these painful parts of her life hidden. She
presented to the outside world as fine, and to her
family this was strong evidence that she couldn't have died

(21:36):
by suicide because they didn't see it coming. Their assumption
about suicide was that if Sandy had been considering it,
her pain would have been so visible it could not
go unnoticed. But that's not always the case. If you
think about human nature, what makes it up, purpose, meaning, contribution,

(22:00):
in connection. Thomas Joyner is a researcher at Florida State University.
He spends his days researching ways to prevent suicide. It's
a deep puzzle about human nature about why this would happen.
The bills have not been able to answer this, why
Sandy would have thought that this was the best option
for her, and this question is the subject of Thomas's research,

(22:24):
which explores what's happening in the minds of people who
are suicidal. If you become that convinced that you're a
burden on other people, and if you feel like you're
um disconnected and cut off, ostracized, alienated, if you feel
those two things deeply and then also permanently that they're

(22:46):
they're intractable, that there they'll never change that that mixture
is the danger zone where people might take their lives.
Of those who find themselves in this dangerous zone of
feeling deeply alienated, a burden to others, and convinced that
those feelings will never change, not all attempts suicide. The

(23:08):
vast majority of people who experience suicidal ideation do not
act on it. To put it in perspective, around forty
six thousand people die from suicide every year in the US,
about a million more attempted, and many many more. Around
twelve million people seriously think about it. Yeah, it's one

(23:29):
thing to talk about death in the abstract, but to
actually face it in reality totally different matter. Not everybody
has the requisite fearlessness, pain tolerance, even practical knowledge to
have the capacity to even in act suicide, even if

(23:49):
they really genuinely desire to do so. Did Sandy have
those things? I know she had access to a gun
her father's and her brother Michael actually told me that
he had seen Sandy take it on a few occasions.
Sandy said she was borrowing the gun for target practice.
So it follows that Sandy would have known how to

(24:09):
use it and suicide as a form of death, of course,
is fearsome and scary and daunting, and so to face
it fully, to steer it down, you need a capacity
to do that. Not everybody hasn't I told Thomas about
the bells is vivid memory of Sandy as a happy,

(24:32):
high functioning teenager. Sometimes it does look like that suicide
does look sudden. What does that mean? Does it mean
it was truly impulsive? For Might it mean, for example,
that the person was very successful in concealing their ongoing
misery and planning. And I think it's the latter. I

(24:52):
think it's clearly the ladder, But there is debate about
that and and that that can hurt to the loved one.
It seems like she would have told us, you know,
we're the family, we're the loved ones. But a way
to understand that is that she felt maybe that this
was a profound burden that she's carrying, that she's a

(25:14):
burden to everybody. She felt that maybe on the inside,
to share that with others, in her view, might have
further burdened them. A sudden death in anyone is a tragedy,
and it doesn't matter what the cause was, that that's

(25:35):
gonna grieve families, and and and troubled families for years
or even decades. And then to add the additional layer
of it wasn't just an accident or an illness, so
they took their own lives. That hurts. That, that really hurts.
And and I don't think it needs be very different

(25:59):
than a car accident or or a heart attack. But
to get to that place, you have to have a
particular understanding of the suicidal mindset that most people, most
families don't have. I asked Thomas what to make of
the fact that Sandy had plans for the future. She
was moving to Maine, she was actively pursuing a career

(26:20):
in law enforcement. Even her abortion could be considered a
sign that she was thinking ahead, planning for the life
she wanted. She was still balancing her checkbook right before
she died. If you have plans, it either means that, uh,
suicide is not on your mind at all. It can
mean that, or if you have plans, it can mean

(26:44):
that there's a struggle going on in your mind, a
an argument, a debate between death and life, an ambivalence
that's going back and forth, tilting back and forth, and
when it tilts toward death, ending for future activities seasons
pretty much, and planning for suicide kicks on. And then

(27:05):
when it tilts back towards the other side of the
ambivalence towards life, then you might, you know, put the
suicide planning on the shelf, so to speak, and kick
in plans for activities. And so most go through this
ambivalence process than most are. All. We'll have plans for tomorrow,

(27:29):
plans for next week, just like anyone else will. It's
a striking concept that someone could be planning their life
one minute then end it the next. And it made
me think once more about the cardboard under Sandy's tires.
Could Sandy have been experiencing a struggle in her mind,
feeling ambivalence between life and death. Maybe at some point

(27:52):
she was planning on leaving the pollard until she made
a new plan. I told all of this to Kim,
what I learned from Thomas about suicide and what I
gleaned from Paul, who reviewed Sandy's autopsy with me, and

(28:13):
she listened, took in all the facts with a gentle
smile and a deferential nod. It was something she would
need to think about, she told me. So we casually
said goodbye, and I expected to hear from her soon,
and I did because as I've been reporting this story,
Kim has relentlessly continued her own parallel investigation. Every time

(28:35):
I spoke to her, she had her sight set on
something new, a new document to obtain or piece of
evidence to examine. On her list of critical items to
track down. With Sandy's full medical file, which was held
at the Medical Examiner's office in Maryland, Kim left me
this voice memo after her last visit there. Okay, it

(28:58):
is I think the Johnnie Second. At three o'clock, I
just left the Medical Examiner's office and when I got there,
I was like, God just opened the doors, because the
door just opened. And she's like, Okay, come on it.
So I got right up to the fourth floor and UM,
this really nice lady named Linda, and she was just

(29:20):
most helpful, and UM called the medical records. Medical records
were familiar with my name already, which was kind of cool,
you know. And I've showing her I have the autopsy report.
I don't need the autopsy report. I need the medical records.
I need slides, I need anything else in there that
could help me get this case reopened. Although she already

(29:41):
had Sandy's autopsy, she knew it was only part of
the file on her cousin's death. She wanted to see
what else she might be able to discover hidden in
the depths of the archives. Specifically, she was looking for
biological evidence the sperm that was collected from Sandy's body
to see if it could be tested for DNA, and
she was looking for photos, which she hoped would offer

(30:04):
new insight into Sandy's death. And after about a half hour,
Mike came out and, UM, very nice guy. He's retired firefighter,
retired vet from army. He said, for sure, for any DNA,
I'm going to have to get a subpoena. There's absolutely
no way around it. Um he said, there's probably gonna
be pictures in there. So that's where he was. Sandy

(30:27):
is very helpful. I know he'll help me. I think
I've got there. Curiosity intrigued anyway, so I do feel
like they're gonna help me. Her ultimate goal was to
stumble onto something, anything that Mike get Sandy's case reopened,
forcing Prince George's County to take a deeper look. So

(30:49):
I don't know if we could just get them to
open it. That would be really awesome. Uh, don't likely
see that happening because they're pretty convinced that this is
a suicide. Reopening the case would mean that it would
be considered an active investigation. Again. It would mean that
the police might interview Doug, or test the sperm, or

(31:13):
track down the cops that supervised Sandy in the Explorer
program so many years ago. Anyway, that's where we stand.
It was a good meeting. Um, we'll see. Kim flew
back to Texas with a new agenda of trying to
get a subpoena to retrieve and test the DNA in

(31:34):
Sandy's file, But before she could follow through, she received
an email. It was from Bernie Nelson, a cold case
detective from Prince George's County. He wanted to meet Kim
in person to talk. I asked if I could tape
the conversation and PG County said no. Kim met with
him and that meeting changed everything. So this is eleven

(32:00):
o'clock on Monday morning. He asks, UM, so how did
all this podcast stuff happen? We've talked a lot about
suicide this episode. If you're someone who knows considering self harm,
Please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at seven three

(32:26):
or text Strength to Crisis text Line at seven one
four one. What Happened To Sandy Beale is hosted by
me Melissa Jolson. It's written and produced by me and
Katrina Norvell. The podcast is edited by a bus Afar,
Sound designed by Aaron Kaufman. Jason English is our executive producer.

(32:50):
Research and production assistance by Marissa Brown. To find out
more about my investigation, follow me on Twitter at quasimato.
That's qu a U. I am a d O. Thanks
so much for listening. H