March 23, 2022 • 34 mins
A journal entry sheds light on Sandy’s desires to be a police officer. When she suddenly dies, the homicide detective tasked with her case is inundated with strange phone calls.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, Please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. I
have dreams about Sandy for an entire year. She's been
in the back of my brain, never far from my
waking thoughts. The white coat she was wearing on the
(00:22):
last night of her life. It hangs in my closet.
I see it every time I get dressed. Her things,
her check book, her calendar, notes she wrote are laying
across my desk. Her handwriting is familiar to me. Now
there's a note Sandy wrote to herself that I have have
almost memorized. I've read it so many times. It helps
(00:44):
explain where her interest in policing came from and where
her career ambitions might have first begun. It's called My
Life as a Cop Freak. This is a real story
of my life as a cop freak. It goes back
to when I used to walk past the police department
to catch my bus for school. I was only fifteen,
(01:07):
and policemen would wave, smile and say hi. They looked
so good in that white county car and blue uniform.
I've always wanted a job where I could be looked
at with respect. They always seemed to have that sort
of ego with them. Then one day I got a
job at the local drug store and at nights we
had county policemen in there. I met three that were
(01:30):
really nice guys. First night I met Ray, a real nut.
He was short and looked a lot like John Denver.
He asked if I wouldn't mind a cold beer after work,
until I told him I was only seventeen. Then he
kind of said, we'll wait until you get older. After work,
my dad was there to pick me up. The next night,
(01:52):
a real young, great looking guy came up to me
and asked who I was. I could hardly believe what
he asked. He stayed by my counter all night, talking
about bullshit. I'm pretty sure Sandy was still in high
school when she wrote this note. The infatuation, the excitement,
(02:14):
the giddiness about attracting male attention. It reminded me of
how I felt about boys at that age. I'm not
sure exactly what Sandy meant by cop freak, but by
her own admission, she was one. She simultaneously wanted to
be liked by them and wanted to be like them.
She wanted to enter their world, where their uniforms try
(02:39):
on their egos, and at some point in her senior
year of high school she did. Sandy's family told me
that's when she set her sights on becoming a cop
and began training in earnest going on ride alongs with
local police, and according to her brother Michael, it all
started out okay. She had her heart sat on I'm
(03:00):
a police officer from the time she first mentioned it
all the way up through. You know, she had nothing
bad to say, probably a good year and a half
that she did the ride alongs whenever they got a
call that they went for, from speeding tickets to traffic accidents,
(03:22):
nothing nothing major. M if something major came up, I
think that she had to get dropped off. Ride alongs
are exactly what they sound like. A civilian rides with
an officer in their patrol car as they go about
their duties. The earliest record of one that Sandy attended
(03:42):
is marked in her calendar on March nine, Sandy would
have just turned eighteen and been in high school. Still,
based on my reporting, she would have accompanied one other
police officer on a shift that typically lasted from three
to eleven PM. I actually, you know, the way she
talked I actually kind of wanted to do one to myself,
(04:05):
just to just to see, you know, hey, what goes
on here? You know, what do you do when you
pull somebody? What do you do when you're you know,
you're in a bad situation? How how do things go here?
You know? I wasn't as enthused about that as she was,
but I did think it was kind of neat. But
Sandy's sudden interest in policing was a bit confusing to
(04:26):
her family, who had no ties to the profession. At first,
I was a little surprised, like, really, yeah, So she
was talking about these rid alongs and how she enjoyed them.
Some of the long she was saying that, you know,
they know it wasn't hundred said about board? What I
do we call She's saying, yeah, man, Jesus, guys, get
away with ship. Sandy didn't go into detail about what
(04:50):
kind of ship they got away with, but the Pig
County Police Department was notorious for its use of excessive force,
especially against the county's growing black population. Once a predominantly white,
working class county, the area saw a radical demographic shift
in the seventies as black families moved there from d C.
(05:12):
But as the racial makeup of the community changed, the
police department remained overwhelmingly white, the results of which were
often brutal for people of color. As one veteran cop
told The Washington Post at the time, quote, it was
a known fact that if you came into Page County
and made trouble, the police would kick your head in
(05:32):
simple as that. Here's a story from around the same
time Sandy would have been going on ride alongs in
Thomas Pete, a black man, was pushing a stalled car
in a seven eleven parking lot when several PG County
police officers arrived. Witnesses reported that, unprovoked, the officers began
(05:53):
beating Pete to the ground, cracking his head open. This
incident triggered a public conversation about police brutality, but ultimately
the police faced no real consequences. Like Sandy said, they
got away with ship. From My Heart Radio, I'm Melissa
Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy Beale and
(06:16):
I Heart original podcast, Chapter three, My life as a
cop freak growing up. She wasn't any different than us
getting in trouble. We had all three kind of seemed
to get in the same kind of trouble. After a while,
Sandy kind of her own way. Michael is in his
(06:39):
early sixties now and moves with a quiet and deliberate air.
He's warm, but also a little bit guarded, which makes
sense when you learn his backstory. He has lived through
the excruciating pain of losing two daughters, one to congestive
heart failure and another in a car accident. But Sandy
(07:00):
is the first loss of Michael's life, and it came early,
when he was a senior in high school. The two
siblings were close, both in age only a year apart,
and in the intensity of their relationship. With most of
her family. Sandy was tight lipped about her time with police,
but Michael was granted a rare glimpse of her world.
(07:22):
She graduated a year before me, and while she was
out of school, most of her time was spent with
work and with um, hanging out with the police department
and the ride longs and stuff like that, and then
going to these FLP lodges and hanging out with them
(07:43):
and drinking and stuff like that. He said, she said
they all were just let the hair down, when in
that FOP stands for fraternal Order of Police. It's the
largest professional police organization in the country. State level outposts
are called FOP lodges, and some, like the FOP Lodge
(08:05):
in Prince George's County, have a bar where officers can socialize.
That lodge, number eighty nine is where Sandy would go
to grab drinks with cops. Michael said the drinking age
was only eighteen back then. She talked about just going
through the club and hanging out and having a good time,
and the cops will bring her home. Half the time
they had been half drunk. When you're bringing her how
(08:27):
many cop cars? So I'm like, well, there you go.
The FOP lodge Sandy visited is still open today. I
haven't been there, but I looked at pictures online. On
the inside, it looks a bit like your average sports bar,
with carpeted floors, bare walls, and blinds pulled down over
the windows. It has eight flat screen televisions, two pool tables,
(08:51):
and a jukebox. The bar stays open until two am
Monday through Saturday, and on Tuesday's domestic beers are a dollar.
Is long as you were in law and enforcement, you
can go to this place. They just go there and
hang out and swap stupid stories and cheating their wives
and doing silly things like that. So it's about pretty much.
(09:13):
But I got out of it. But she was trying
to learn as much as she possibly could by going
on these ride alongs and hanging out with the police
and and you know, just taking things in and seeing
seeing just what goes on, how things are donned, you know,
so that when she was able to get into the academy,
she would have something, she would know what to expect,
(09:34):
what was coming down the line. At the time Sandy
was trying to become a cop, women accounted for only
two percent of sworn officers, and many of them worked
desk jobs. It was only in two the Prince George's
County started admitting women into the police Academy get Sandy
envisioned a place for herself there, even when there was
(09:55):
little indication that she would be welcomed. I wanted to
understand the climate she was operating within, and without being
able to talk to Sandy, I found the next best thing,
another woman who began policing around the exact same time,
Dottie Davis. It wasn't like it was my lifelong goal
to be a police officer. Um, I literally was looking
(10:17):
for an occupation that paid well and that was satisfying
to me, And so I started as a dispatcher, which
then led to me applying to a neighboring agency. Literally,
I was watching the officers, the troopers that I was dispatching,
the calls for service, and I was thinking I could
(10:38):
do that. First of all, I'm an avid runner, and
um my father was against Smith. So I've been shooting
since I was eight and reloaded new ammunition since I
was nine. I grew up in what I believed to
be kind of a paramilitary household, where the only way
you responded to my parents was yes or and no,
(10:59):
may am. So if you can put everything but I
just said, together, I think about what I recruit classes
like in the academy. Man, I loved it. Dottie has
retired from policing, but she spent over thirty years with
the Fort Wayne Police Department in Indiana. She started as
a patrol officer, moved up to sergeant, then lieutenant, captain,
(11:22):
and finally deputy chief. My very first, very first training
officer told me to get in the car, don't touch anything,
and shut up. If I need anything from you, I'll
tell you. And I was like, this is going to
be a really long eight hours. It wasn't a very
(11:44):
welcoming environment for a female, but I learned early on, um,
you're probably not going to be heard. If Dottie had
been attempting this journey just a few years earlier, it's
likely she would have been shut out. But in nineteen
sixty four, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited
(12:06):
employers from discriminating workers on the basis of sex. In
nineteen seventy two, Congress extended the law to local and
state governments. In practice, that meant women could no longer
be excluded from important jobs like policing and firefighting. Still,
local police departments continued to deny women jobs by issuing
(12:28):
height and weight requirements that many couldn't meet. In nineteen
seventy seven, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of
heightened weight as a screening mechanism was unlawful discrimination. And
so we were still as two babies, if you will,
we were still being looked at as pilot projects, um
to see whether or not we were going to be
able to be successful and hold our own While removing
(12:51):
these barriers made it easier for women to become police officers,
they still had to face workplace environments that were indifferent
to their ambitions or even outright hostile. A detective and
I were writing the elevator back up to the detective Bureau,
which was on the second floor, and he pinned me
against the elevator wall and tried to kiss me, and
(13:15):
I shoved him off of me and started yelling at him.
And then I went into the detective bureau, went to
the captain and said, I'm not riding with him anymore.
He just pinned me against the elevator tried to kiss me,
and I'm not putting up with that. And what happened?
He got nothing other than told leave her alone. Some
(13:39):
of the behaviors Dotty described for obviously predatory, others seemed
designed to simply undermine women and keep them from getting
too comfortable in their positions. So as much as I
love to shoot, I had a firearms instructor that would
stand over my shoulder. I mean I could like next
(13:59):
to my body and he would tell me to squeeze
the trigger like you were squeezing a nipple. And I
know I'm looking at your face. I wanted to bark
because it was just so ridiculous that he would even
say that, and of course it threw me off my
(14:21):
game horribly, which I don't know if that's what he
wanted because he didn't want a female to be the
top gun. Dottie emphasized how isolating it was to be
one of the two, a woman in a sea of
male cops. And honestly, it's not that much different today
currently around of sworn law enforcement officers or women. That means,
(14:44):
in many precincts across the country, it's not uncommon to
be the only woman on a shift, the only woman
in a division. That isolation can have a corrosive effect.
It is very easy for you to lose your identity
and i'd have fit in and become one of the boys.
And I learned that no matter how much rank you
(15:06):
have or time and grade, you are never going to
be one of the boys. And you have to continue
to maintain your identity and be sure of who you
are because they will eat you out. When Sandy's body
(15:26):
was found, there were two small books in her possession,
address books that she used to keep track of the
people she met. I have them now, and I've spent
the last year pouring over them, trying to see what
they can teach me. I've cataloged each of the names
and researched their identities. Alongside her classmates at Bladensburg High,
(15:47):
her neighbors and seat Pleasant, and her colleagues from the
department store are another category of acquaintances, police officers. Every
few pages, the name of a cop appears, either a
PG County Police officer or a Maryland State trooper, along
with their phone number. Examining her handwriting, it's hard to
(16:08):
tell if these cops were her friends or professional contacts.
Some entries include official titles and others are written more casually.
The number for the fo P Lodge is also in there.
And then there's the list in the back of the book,
thirteen names long. In black ink, Sandy wrote down a
(16:29):
series of three digit numbers, each one adjacent to a
last name. As far as I can tell, they're all
PG County Police officers, and the numbers identify their police cars.
When I first flipped through Sandy's address books, it wasn't
clear to me how a high school student would know
so many police officers. That change once I connected with
(16:52):
one of the PG County cops from Sandy's books. Ray.
That's Ray from the drug Store Ray, the John her
look alike from Sandy's note My Life as a Cop Freak.
Ray's name appears in her books a few times, along
with a phone number, an address, and what appears to
be his police car number. Ray told me that he
(17:14):
doesn't remember Sandy, but he did have an idea why
she was able to go on so many ride alongs
as a teen. As he explained, Sandy was likely part
of the Police Explorer program in Prince George's County, which
launched in nineteen seventy six. The program allowed teens to
shadow police officers at work and try out or explore
(17:36):
the job to see if they might want to pursue
a career in law enforcement. I hadn't heard of Police
Explorer programs, so I did some research. Turns out they
now exist all over the country. They began in the
nineteen fifties as part of the Boy Scouts of America.
Although side note they're now run by a subsidiary called
(17:56):
Learning for Life. Girls weren't allowed to join in until nineteen.
In nineteen seventy six, the Boy Scouts received a grant
from the federal government to promote the program, and it worked.
A lot Of new posts, as they're called, cropped up
all around the country, including one in Prince George's County.
(18:28):
Based on my reporting, I believe that Sandy joined the
Prince George's County Explorer program in its very first year,
when she was a senior in high school. Sandy would
have been one of the first generation of trainees, though
I wasn't able to confirm this, as a spokesperson for
PG County Police said they were unable to locate a
record of participants from that year. The program is still
(18:51):
active today, open to those aged fourteen to twenty. When
I checked recently, there were about ninety current members. There's
an established set of rules around who can join and
what requirements you need to meet, but back in its
early days, it wasn't such an official program. Ray didn't
want to be recorded for the podcast, but he did
(19:13):
offer some helpful context. He told me that he was
part of the p G County Explorer program when it
first began, and as he described it, the program was
pretty loose and disorganized. Officers didn't receive any specialized training
before being placed with teens, and there were very few rules.
You recalled chaperoning a ski trip to Pennsylvania with a
(19:35):
bunch of teenagers in the Explorer program. When he went
to check on a group of girls in a hotel room,
knocking on their door, he discovered they were smoking pot.
That was his queue to quit the program. I understood
from Ray that the point of his story was to
illustrate that he saw the Explorer program as a risk
(19:56):
to his career. The potential for things to go wrong
was is too high, and so he left. He was
looking out for himself. But it made me wonder who
was looking out for Explorers like Sandy. Over the past year,
I've tried to connect with every cop in Sandy's address
(20:18):
books that I could track down. I've sent emails, letters,
and messages on social media. Few responded to me, but
I did manage to talk to a couple of police
officers whose names corresponded with Sandy's records. There was one
PG County police officer in particular, though, who I really
wanted to speak with, Bob. Sandy listed him as her
(20:41):
emergency contact. She also noted his birthday and his name
pops up on occasion in her calendar too. I thought
if any of these cops were Sandy's friend, if anyone
could provide some insight into her life, it would be Bob.
Bob didn't want to be recorded for the podcast, but
he confirmed that he worked in the Explorer program at
(21:03):
the time that Sandy would have been in it. He
recalled taking students on ride alongs, but he couldn't explain
why his birthday and phone number were written in Sandy's books,
or why she would deem him important enough to list
him as her emergency contact. He, like Ray, said he
didn't remember her. This became a recurring theme in my reporting.
(21:28):
To my surprise, none of the cops I spoke to
remember Sandy, at least they said they didn't. They didn't
even remember that a police trainee had died by suicide,
something I thought would leave an impact. Sandy, it seemed,
had been invisible to them. I wondered what that said
about how she was treated when she was alive. I'm
(21:52):
going to play the second part of my interview with
Detective Shosselsky, now the PG County police officer who handled
Sandy's case, because I think it speaks to this question
of how police interacted with Sandy, Shelski told me about
something unusual that occurred right after her death. Let me
say this nice found lying after him with the police
(22:18):
officers if their names in the book, Shelski is referring
to Sandy's address books which were discovered in the car
with her. Were these just Prince George's County police or
with these state troopers County Okay? Why were they calling
(22:39):
she listed them as one of her friends. What was
their motivation though for calling? Like? Were they trying not
to get in trouble professionally, personally or like? And you
estimated about ten people called you. Did they it to
(23:00):
having relationships with her? Pretty much? It was pretty clear
who wasn't really a part of my investigation. But when
they heard that she had killed herself, being will what
was their end goal to calling you? They wanted to
see if she had made any mention of them in
(23:25):
case it came out in some way they wanted to
head to like not necessarily well, I don't know, well
now what I had to be? You know, they were
sexually involved with her. Did any of the police that
called you express sadness about her death? No? Very nurse
(23:49):
a personal stress were stressed, and that there was perhaps
there's something written with their name for the obvious reason.
What did you make of her spending all this time
and having sexual relationships with police officers? I knew it
was going to be a stink. I didn't imagine years
(24:13):
later stink is going to come. I want to slow
down here because this is really important and the audio
is not great. Detective Selski is a little blase and
his delivery. But what he told me is that while
he was investigating Sandy's death, ten PG County police officers
(24:35):
called him to find out if their names had been
linked to Sandy. And this wasn't an off handed comment either.
Selski told me this detail in two different phone interviews.
He wouldn't tell me the names of the men who called,
which made this claim hard to fact check, but I
believed him the way he divulged this information though it
(24:57):
was like a gossipy aside, not something that he thought
should warrant any further investigation. But it sounded like a
big fucking deal to me. In my line of work
reporting on domestic violence and sexual assault, this scenario of
a teenager having intimate relationships with upwards of ten adult men,
let alone police officers who were supposed to be training her.
(25:20):
It rang every alarm bell in my body. I started
this project wanting to find out what happened the night
Sandy died, but as I got deeper into the reporting,
I had more and more questions about exactly what happened
when she was alive, specifically when she was hanging out
with cops on these unsupervised ride alongs. I knew I
(25:43):
had to tell the Bills what Schelski said because it
confirmed their gut instinct that the cops were hiding something.
It just wasn't what they had thought. The family was
heartbroken to learn about these pg con the police officers,
who Shallski said spoke so callously after her death. Here's Kim,
(26:06):
her cousin. Well, until you guys uncovered all of that,
I think that I had a sense in naivete where
I just really believed that all of these people that
she had the names of were just nice people and
we're her friends. And that snapped me out of my
believing in the kindness of these people, that they're really
(26:29):
just trying to cover their butts. Like me, Kim hadn't
known exactly what to think about Sandy's address books and
the list of cops she was collecting. She had settled
on a generous interpretation that the officers in the books
were Sandy's mentors who helped her as she tried to
pursue a career in law enforcement. Now she had to
(26:50):
contemplate something more nefarious. Now. I don't know what her
thinking might have been. Then, I do know that she
was very um, happy, lucky, and maybe she thought that,
you know, with sex, pame power. So she was probably
pretty enamored that any of them would be interested in her.
And she probably saw it as Wow, these people that
(27:12):
have some authority and power are interested in me. And
she probably hoped that there was more to it than
it was. But she was a kid, and she was naive,
even though she thought she knew more than she did.
But when ten of them are are asking is my
name in there? There are some fishy stuff going on.
(27:33):
I don't know. It feels disgusting to me. Really, I
don't know how they live with themselves. Kim had believed
the police swept Sandy's case under the rug because of
her involvement with Doug, the state trooper. She suspected that
Doug was in the ployard that night. That Doug held
all the answers the family desperately yearned to hear. But
(27:53):
now there were other possibilities, And then you know, it
could have been any of those other guys too. But
man with that kind of power and that kind of
ability to manipulate and be charming and grooming her, how
overwhelming for an eighteen year old girl to try to
sort all that out, The immense pressure and shame she
(28:19):
must have been under at the time. It's really sad.
It's sad. It's just sad. So I do believe they
have equal responsibility and hurting her. There have been few
(28:48):
times in my career or my perspective on a story
has changed so quickly. Kim initially asked me to investigate
Sandy's case because of my experience reporting on domestic violence,
specifically domestic violence homicides. Sandy's family was worried that she
had been killed by her boyfriend, but my conversation with
(29:09):
Shashelski opened up a whole new line of reporting as
I tried to make sense of the calls that flooded
in after her death. On the one hand, it provided
some evidence that Sandy might have been struggling emotionally keeping
secrets that would have been profoundly isolating for the team,
And on the other it hinted at a larger conspiracy
(29:32):
involving many cops with a lot to lose. It all
reminded me of a story Joanne told me the first
time I met her in the summer of one. It's
about one of Sandy's friends. Her name is also Sandy,
Sandy Sheridan. According to Joanne, Sandy Beale and Sandy Sheridan
(29:57):
spent a lot of time together in the months before
Andy died. Despite my best efforts, I've never been able
to find her, but Joanne told me she called shortly
after Sandy died. She called me right up. She said,
what happened all those cards that we collected of different cops.
Sandy Sheridan explained that she and Sandy Beale had been
(30:18):
collecting business cards of all the cops they met, But
when Joanne looked through her daughter's belongings, there was only
two cats in her belongings that then laid out on
the table for us to say. Sandy Sheridan told Joanne
one more thing that local police had been told to
stay away from the funeral, and as far as Joanne
(30:40):
could tell, they did. I wasn't sure what to make
of these claims. At first they felt a little conspiratorial,
but after learning about those calls to Shahlski, it seemed
a lot more likely that the stories were true. I
ain't got no reason to really not trust the cops.
But there's you know, ship ain't add enough. You know
(31:00):
I've always had that was ship just ain't adding up.
That's one thing I did tell the detective and that
other guy. I told him, I said, you know what
really burns my ask is she wanted to be just
like one of you. She wanted to be liked by them,
and she wanted to be like them. And at some
(31:22):
point between her innocent flirtations with cops at the drug
store and her body being discovered on a cold February morning,
something went horribly wrong. Whatever happened to her while she
was in the Explorer program, I think it's unlikely she
was the only one. I asked p G County for
(31:43):
any records related to complaints of inappropriate sexual behavior within
the Explorer program from s to now. They told me
that a search of the current internal affair system uncovered
no complaints, and that to search an older system, I
would need to give them the officer's name in question.
I've passed along a list of names in Sandy's books,
(32:05):
and I'll let you know what we hear. But here's
what I found when I searched for old news articles
about the Pig County Explorer program. In just five years
after Sandy died, a veteran Prince George's County police officer
took a sixteen year old on a ride along. The
girl ended up attending the police academy and becoming a
(32:27):
police officer, fulfilling the dream that Sandy had. But thirteen
years later, after she joined the sex crimes unit, she
reported that she had been raped by her mentor on
one of the many ride along she attended. The officer
was later convicted of child abuse. I think Sandy was
a victim too. I think her desire to be a cop,
(32:51):
her teenage infatuations, and her inexperience they all coincided to
leave her open to exploitation. That's next week. Well, this
is the whole thing about predation. It works better for
the predator if your victim is vulnerable. And what more
(33:14):
vulnerable plays than you know, a desperate young person trying
to start a Korean law enforcement I'm not done digging
into this story, and i have more questions about what
happens in police Explorer programs. If you have ever been
part of a police youth program or participated in a
(33:36):
ride along, or you witnessed or experienced some sort of
inappropriate sexual conduct, please email me at what Happened to
Sandy Beale at gmail dot com. What Happened to Sandy
Beale is hosted by me Melissa Jolson. It's written and
produced by me and Katrina Norvell. It's edited by a Bussafar,
(33:56):
Josh Fisher, and Mary Do. Sound design by Aaron Kaufman.
Jason English is our executive producer and Merissa Brown is
our associate producer. To find out more about the investigation,
follow me on Twitter at q U A S I
am A d O. Thanks so much for listening
Before we begin, Please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. I
have dreams about Sandy for an entire year. She's been
in the back of my brain, never far from my
waking thoughts. The white coat she was wearing on the
(00:22):
last night of her life. It hangs in my closet.
I see it every time I get dressed. Her things,
her check book, her calendar, notes she wrote are laying
across my desk. Her handwriting is familiar to me. Now
there's a note Sandy wrote to herself that I have have
almost memorized. I've read it so many times. It helps
(00:44):
explain where her interest in policing came from and where
her career ambitions might have first begun. It's called My
Life as a Cop Freak. This is a real story
of my life as a cop freak. It goes back
to when I used to walk past the police department
to catch my bus for school. I was only fifteen,
(01:07):
and policemen would wave, smile and say hi. They looked
so good in that white county car and blue uniform.
I've always wanted a job where I could be looked
at with respect. They always seemed to have that sort
of ego with them. Then one day I got a
job at the local drug store and at nights we
had county policemen in there. I met three that were
(01:30):
really nice guys. First night I met Ray, a real nut.
He was short and looked a lot like John Denver.
He asked if I wouldn't mind a cold beer after work,
until I told him I was only seventeen. Then he
kind of said, we'll wait until you get older. After work,
my dad was there to pick me up. The next night,
(01:52):
a real young, great looking guy came up to me
and asked who I was. I could hardly believe what
he asked. He stayed by my counter all night, talking
about bullshit. I'm pretty sure Sandy was still in high
school when she wrote this note. The infatuation, the excitement,
(02:14):
the giddiness about attracting male attention. It reminded me of
how I felt about boys at that age. I'm not
sure exactly what Sandy meant by cop freak, but by
her own admission, she was one. She simultaneously wanted to
be liked by them and wanted to be like them.
She wanted to enter their world, where their uniforms try
(02:39):
on their egos, and at some point in her senior
year of high school she did. Sandy's family told me
that's when she set her sights on becoming a cop
and began training in earnest going on ride alongs with
local police, and according to her brother Michael, it all
started out okay. She had her heart sat on I'm
(03:00):
a police officer from the time she first mentioned it
all the way up through. You know, she had nothing
bad to say, probably a good year and a half
that she did the ride alongs whenever they got a
call that they went for, from speeding tickets to traffic accidents,
(03:22):
nothing nothing major. M if something major came up, I
think that she had to get dropped off. Ride alongs
are exactly what they sound like. A civilian rides with
an officer in their patrol car as they go about
their duties. The earliest record of one that Sandy attended
(03:42):
is marked in her calendar on March nine, Sandy would
have just turned eighteen and been in high school. Still,
based on my reporting, she would have accompanied one other
police officer on a shift that typically lasted from three
to eleven PM. I actually, you know, the way she
talked I actually kind of wanted to do one to myself,
(04:05):
just to just to see, you know, hey, what goes
on here? You know, what do you do when you
pull somebody? What do you do when you're you know,
you're in a bad situation? How how do things go here?
You know? I wasn't as enthused about that as she was,
but I did think it was kind of neat. But
Sandy's sudden interest in policing was a bit confusing to
(04:26):
her family, who had no ties to the profession. At first,
I was a little surprised, like, really, yeah, So she
was talking about these rid alongs and how she enjoyed them.
Some of the long she was saying that, you know,
they know it wasn't hundred said about board? What I
do we call She's saying, yeah, man, Jesus, guys, get
away with ship. Sandy didn't go into detail about what
(04:50):
kind of ship they got away with, but the Pig
County Police Department was notorious for its use of excessive force,
especially against the county's growing black population. Once a predominantly white,
working class county, the area saw a radical demographic shift
in the seventies as black families moved there from d C.
(05:12):
But as the racial makeup of the community changed, the
police department remained overwhelmingly white, the results of which were
often brutal for people of color. As one veteran cop
told The Washington Post at the time, quote, it was
a known fact that if you came into Page County
and made trouble, the police would kick your head in
(05:32):
simple as that. Here's a story from around the same
time Sandy would have been going on ride alongs in
Thomas Pete, a black man, was pushing a stalled car
in a seven eleven parking lot when several PG County
police officers arrived. Witnesses reported that, unprovoked, the officers began
(05:53):
beating Pete to the ground, cracking his head open. This
incident triggered a public conversation about police brutality, but ultimately
the police faced no real consequences. Like Sandy said, they
got away with ship. From My Heart Radio, I'm Melissa
Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy Beale and
(06:16):
I Heart original podcast, Chapter three, My life as a
cop freak growing up. She wasn't any different than us
getting in trouble. We had all three kind of seemed
to get in the same kind of trouble. After a while,
Sandy kind of her own way. Michael is in his
(06:39):
early sixties now and moves with a quiet and deliberate air.
He's warm, but also a little bit guarded, which makes
sense when you learn his backstory. He has lived through
the excruciating pain of losing two daughters, one to congestive
heart failure and another in a car accident. But Sandy
(07:00):
is the first loss of Michael's life, and it came early,
when he was a senior in high school. The two
siblings were close, both in age only a year apart,
and in the intensity of their relationship. With most of
her family. Sandy was tight lipped about her time with police,
but Michael was granted a rare glimpse of her world.
(07:22):
She graduated a year before me, and while she was
out of school, most of her time was spent with
work and with um, hanging out with the police department
and the ride longs and stuff like that, and then
going to these FLP lodges and hanging out with them
(07:43):
and drinking and stuff like that. He said, she said
they all were just let the hair down, when in
that FOP stands for fraternal Order of Police. It's the
largest professional police organization in the country. State level outposts
are called FOP lodges, and some, like the FOP Lodge
(08:05):
in Prince George's County, have a bar where officers can socialize.
That lodge, number eighty nine is where Sandy would go
to grab drinks with cops. Michael said the drinking age
was only eighteen back then. She talked about just going
through the club and hanging out and having a good time,
and the cops will bring her home. Half the time
they had been half drunk. When you're bringing her how
(08:27):
many cop cars? So I'm like, well, there you go.
The FOP lodge Sandy visited is still open today. I
haven't been there, but I looked at pictures online. On
the inside, it looks a bit like your average sports bar,
with carpeted floors, bare walls, and blinds pulled down over
the windows. It has eight flat screen televisions, two pool tables,
(08:51):
and a jukebox. The bar stays open until two am
Monday through Saturday, and on Tuesday's domestic beers are a dollar.
Is long as you were in law and enforcement, you
can go to this place. They just go there and
hang out and swap stupid stories and cheating their wives
and doing silly things like that. So it's about pretty much.
(09:13):
But I got out of it. But she was trying
to learn as much as she possibly could by going
on these ride alongs and hanging out with the police
and and you know, just taking things in and seeing
seeing just what goes on, how things are donned, you know,
so that when she was able to get into the academy,
she would have something, she would know what to expect,
(09:34):
what was coming down the line. At the time Sandy
was trying to become a cop, women accounted for only
two percent of sworn officers, and many of them worked
desk jobs. It was only in two the Prince George's
County started admitting women into the police Academy get Sandy
envisioned a place for herself there, even when there was
(09:55):
little indication that she would be welcomed. I wanted to
understand the climate she was operating within, and without being
able to talk to Sandy, I found the next best thing,
another woman who began policing around the exact same time,
Dottie Davis. It wasn't like it was my lifelong goal
to be a police officer. Um, I literally was looking
(10:17):
for an occupation that paid well and that was satisfying
to me, And so I started as a dispatcher, which
then led to me applying to a neighboring agency. Literally,
I was watching the officers, the troopers that I was dispatching,
the calls for service, and I was thinking I could
(10:38):
do that. First of all, I'm an avid runner, and
um my father was against Smith. So I've been shooting
since I was eight and reloaded new ammunition since I
was nine. I grew up in what I believed to
be kind of a paramilitary household, where the only way
you responded to my parents was yes or and no,
(10:59):
may am. So if you can put everything but I
just said, together, I think about what I recruit classes
like in the academy. Man, I loved it. Dottie has
retired from policing, but she spent over thirty years with
the Fort Wayne Police Department in Indiana. She started as
a patrol officer, moved up to sergeant, then lieutenant, captain,
(11:22):
and finally deputy chief. My very first, very first training
officer told me to get in the car, don't touch anything,
and shut up. If I need anything from you, I'll
tell you. And I was like, this is going to
be a really long eight hours. It wasn't a very
(11:44):
welcoming environment for a female, but I learned early on, um,
you're probably not going to be heard. If Dottie had
been attempting this journey just a few years earlier, it's
likely she would have been shut out. But in nineteen
sixty four, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited
(12:06):
employers from discriminating workers on the basis of sex. In
nineteen seventy two, Congress extended the law to local and
state governments. In practice, that meant women could no longer
be excluded from important jobs like policing and firefighting. Still,
local police departments continued to deny women jobs by issuing
(12:28):
height and weight requirements that many couldn't meet. In nineteen
seventy seven, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of
heightened weight as a screening mechanism was unlawful discrimination. And
so we were still as two babies, if you will,
we were still being looked at as pilot projects, um
to see whether or not we were going to be
able to be successful and hold our own While removing
(12:51):
these barriers made it easier for women to become police officers,
they still had to face workplace environments that were indifferent
to their ambitions or even outright hostile. A detective and
I were writing the elevator back up to the detective Bureau,
which was on the second floor, and he pinned me
against the elevator wall and tried to kiss me, and
(13:15):
I shoved him off of me and started yelling at him.
And then I went into the detective bureau, went to
the captain and said, I'm not riding with him anymore.
He just pinned me against the elevator tried to kiss me,
and I'm not putting up with that. And what happened?
He got nothing other than told leave her alone. Some
(13:39):
of the behaviors Dotty described for obviously predatory, others seemed
designed to simply undermine women and keep them from getting
too comfortable in their positions. So as much as I
love to shoot, I had a firearms instructor that would
stand over my shoulder. I mean I could like next
(13:59):
to my body and he would tell me to squeeze
the trigger like you were squeezing a nipple. And I
know I'm looking at your face. I wanted to bark
because it was just so ridiculous that he would even
say that, and of course it threw me off my
(14:21):
game horribly, which I don't know if that's what he
wanted because he didn't want a female to be the
top gun. Dottie emphasized how isolating it was to be
one of the two, a woman in a sea of
male cops. And honestly, it's not that much different today
currently around of sworn law enforcement officers or women. That means,
(14:44):
in many precincts across the country, it's not uncommon to
be the only woman on a shift, the only woman
in a division. That isolation can have a corrosive effect.
It is very easy for you to lose your identity
and i'd have fit in and become one of the boys.
And I learned that no matter how much rank you
(15:06):
have or time and grade, you are never going to
be one of the boys. And you have to continue
to maintain your identity and be sure of who you
are because they will eat you out. When Sandy's body
(15:26):
was found, there were two small books in her possession,
address books that she used to keep track of the
people she met. I have them now, and I've spent
the last year pouring over them, trying to see what
they can teach me. I've cataloged each of the names
and researched their identities. Alongside her classmates at Bladensburg High,
(15:47):
her neighbors and seat Pleasant, and her colleagues from the
department store are another category of acquaintances, police officers. Every
few pages, the name of a cop appears, either a
PG County Police officer or a Maryland State trooper, along
with their phone number. Examining her handwriting, it's hard to
(16:08):
tell if these cops were her friends or professional contacts.
Some entries include official titles and others are written more casually.
The number for the fo P Lodge is also in there.
And then there's the list in the back of the book,
thirteen names long. In black ink, Sandy wrote down a
(16:29):
series of three digit numbers, each one adjacent to a
last name. As far as I can tell, they're all
PG County Police officers, and the numbers identify their police cars.
When I first flipped through Sandy's address books, it wasn't
clear to me how a high school student would know
so many police officers. That change once I connected with
(16:52):
one of the PG County cops from Sandy's books. Ray.
That's Ray from the drug Store Ray, the John her
look alike from Sandy's note My Life as a Cop Freak.
Ray's name appears in her books a few times, along
with a phone number, an address, and what appears to
be his police car number. Ray told me that he
(17:14):
doesn't remember Sandy, but he did have an idea why
she was able to go on so many ride alongs
as a teen. As he explained, Sandy was likely part
of the Police Explorer program in Prince George's County, which
launched in nineteen seventy six. The program allowed teens to
shadow police officers at work and try out or explore
(17:36):
the job to see if they might want to pursue
a career in law enforcement. I hadn't heard of Police
Explorer programs, so I did some research. Turns out they
now exist all over the country. They began in the
nineteen fifties as part of the Boy Scouts of America.
Although side note they're now run by a subsidiary called
(17:56):
Learning for Life. Girls weren't allowed to join in until nineteen.
In nineteen seventy six, the Boy Scouts received a grant
from the federal government to promote the program, and it worked.
A lot Of new posts, as they're called, cropped up
all around the country, including one in Prince George's County.
(18:28):
Based on my reporting, I believe that Sandy joined the
Prince George's County Explorer program in its very first year,
when she was a senior in high school. Sandy would
have been one of the first generation of trainees, though
I wasn't able to confirm this, as a spokesperson for
PG County Police said they were unable to locate a
record of participants from that year. The program is still
(18:51):
active today, open to those aged fourteen to twenty. When
I checked recently, there were about ninety current members. There's
an established set of rules around who can join and
what requirements you need to meet, but back in its
early days, it wasn't such an official program. Ray didn't
want to be recorded for the podcast, but he did
(19:13):
offer some helpful context. He told me that he was
part of the p G County Explorer program when it
first began, and as he described it, the program was
pretty loose and disorganized. Officers didn't receive any specialized training
before being placed with teens, and there were very few rules.
You recalled chaperoning a ski trip to Pennsylvania with a
(19:35):
bunch of teenagers in the Explorer program. When he went
to check on a group of girls in a hotel room,
knocking on their door, he discovered they were smoking pot.
That was his queue to quit the program. I understood
from Ray that the point of his story was to
illustrate that he saw the Explorer program as a risk
(19:56):
to his career. The potential for things to go wrong
was is too high, and so he left. He was
looking out for himself. But it made me wonder who
was looking out for Explorers like Sandy. Over the past year,
I've tried to connect with every cop in Sandy's address
(20:18):
books that I could track down. I've sent emails, letters,
and messages on social media. Few responded to me, but
I did manage to talk to a couple of police
officers whose names corresponded with Sandy's records. There was one
PG County police officer in particular, though, who I really
wanted to speak with, Bob. Sandy listed him as her
(20:41):
emergency contact. She also noted his birthday and his name
pops up on occasion in her calendar too. I thought
if any of these cops were Sandy's friend, if anyone
could provide some insight into her life, it would be Bob.
Bob didn't want to be recorded for the podcast, but
he confirmed that he worked in the Explorer program at
(21:03):
the time that Sandy would have been in it. He
recalled taking students on ride alongs, but he couldn't explain
why his birthday and phone number were written in Sandy's books,
or why she would deem him important enough to list
him as her emergency contact. He, like Ray, said he
didn't remember her. This became a recurring theme in my reporting.
(21:28):
To my surprise, none of the cops I spoke to
remember Sandy, at least they said they didn't. They didn't
even remember that a police trainee had died by suicide,
something I thought would leave an impact. Sandy, it seemed,
had been invisible to them. I wondered what that said
about how she was treated when she was alive. I'm
(21:52):
going to play the second part of my interview with
Detective Shosselsky, now the PG County police officer who handled
Sandy's case, because I think it speaks to this question
of how police interacted with Sandy, Shelski told me about
something unusual that occurred right after her death. Let me
say this nice found lying after him with the police
(22:18):
officers if their names in the book, Shelski is referring
to Sandy's address books which were discovered in the car
with her. Were these just Prince George's County police or
with these state troopers County Okay? Why were they calling
(22:39):
she listed them as one of her friends. What was
their motivation though for calling? Like? Were they trying not
to get in trouble professionally, personally or like? And you
estimated about ten people called you. Did they it to
(23:00):
having relationships with her? Pretty much? It was pretty clear
who wasn't really a part of my investigation. But when
they heard that she had killed herself, being will what
was their end goal to calling you? They wanted to
see if she had made any mention of them in
(23:25):
case it came out in some way they wanted to
head to like not necessarily well, I don't know, well
now what I had to be? You know, they were
sexually involved with her. Did any of the police that
called you express sadness about her death? No? Very nurse
(23:49):
a personal stress were stressed, and that there was perhaps
there's something written with their name for the obvious reason.
What did you make of her spending all this time
and having sexual relationships with police officers? I knew it
was going to be a stink. I didn't imagine years
(24:13):
later stink is going to come. I want to slow
down here because this is really important and the audio
is not great. Detective Selski is a little blase and
his delivery. But what he told me is that while
he was investigating Sandy's death, ten PG County police officers
(24:35):
called him to find out if their names had been
linked to Sandy. And this wasn't an off handed comment either.
Selski told me this detail in two different phone interviews.
He wouldn't tell me the names of the men who called,
which made this claim hard to fact check, but I
believed him the way he divulged this information though it
(24:57):
was like a gossipy aside, not something that he thought
should warrant any further investigation. But it sounded like a
big fucking deal to me. In my line of work
reporting on domestic violence and sexual assault, this scenario of
a teenager having intimate relationships with upwards of ten adult men,
let alone police officers who were supposed to be training her.
(25:20):
It rang every alarm bell in my body. I started
this project wanting to find out what happened the night
Sandy died, but as I got deeper into the reporting,
I had more and more questions about exactly what happened
when she was alive, specifically when she was hanging out
with cops on these unsupervised ride alongs. I knew I
(25:43):
had to tell the Bills what Schelski said because it
confirmed their gut instinct that the cops were hiding something.
It just wasn't what they had thought. The family was
heartbroken to learn about these pg con the police officers,
who Shallski said spoke so callously after her death. Here's Kim,
(26:06):
her cousin. Well, until you guys uncovered all of that,
I think that I had a sense in naivete where
I just really believed that all of these people that
she had the names of were just nice people and
we're her friends. And that snapped me out of my
believing in the kindness of these people, that they're really
(26:29):
just trying to cover their butts. Like me, Kim hadn't
known exactly what to think about Sandy's address books and
the list of cops she was collecting. She had settled
on a generous interpretation that the officers in the books
were Sandy's mentors who helped her as she tried to
pursue a career in law enforcement. Now she had to
(26:50):
contemplate something more nefarious. Now. I don't know what her
thinking might have been. Then, I do know that she
was very um, happy, lucky, and maybe she thought that,
you know, with sex, pame power. So she was probably
pretty enamored that any of them would be interested in her.
And she probably saw it as Wow, these people that
(27:12):
have some authority and power are interested in me. And
she probably hoped that there was more to it than
it was. But she was a kid, and she was naive,
even though she thought she knew more than she did.
But when ten of them are are asking is my
name in there? There are some fishy stuff going on.
(27:33):
I don't know. It feels disgusting to me. Really, I
don't know how they live with themselves. Kim had believed
the police swept Sandy's case under the rug because of
her involvement with Doug, the state trooper. She suspected that
Doug was in the ployard that night. That Doug held
all the answers the family desperately yearned to hear. But
(27:53):
now there were other possibilities, And then you know, it
could have been any of those other guys too. But
man with that kind of power and that kind of
ability to manipulate and be charming and grooming her, how
overwhelming for an eighteen year old girl to try to
sort all that out, The immense pressure and shame she
(28:19):
must have been under at the time. It's really sad.
It's sad. It's just sad. So I do believe they
have equal responsibility and hurting her. There have been few
(28:48):
times in my career or my perspective on a story
has changed so quickly. Kim initially asked me to investigate
Sandy's case because of my experience reporting on domestic violence,
specifically domestic violence homicides. Sandy's family was worried that she
had been killed by her boyfriend, but my conversation with
(29:09):
Shashelski opened up a whole new line of reporting as
I tried to make sense of the calls that flooded
in after her death. On the one hand, it provided
some evidence that Sandy might have been struggling emotionally keeping
secrets that would have been profoundly isolating for the team,
And on the other it hinted at a larger conspiracy
(29:32):
involving many cops with a lot to lose. It all
reminded me of a story Joanne told me the first
time I met her in the summer of one. It's
about one of Sandy's friends. Her name is also Sandy,
Sandy Sheridan. According to Joanne, Sandy Beale and Sandy Sheridan
(29:57):
spent a lot of time together in the months before
Andy died. Despite my best efforts, I've never been able
to find her, but Joanne told me she called shortly
after Sandy died. She called me right up. She said,
what happened all those cards that we collected of different cops.
Sandy Sheridan explained that she and Sandy Beale had been
(30:18):
collecting business cards of all the cops they met, But
when Joanne looked through her daughter's belongings, there was only
two cats in her belongings that then laid out on
the table for us to say. Sandy Sheridan told Joanne
one more thing that local police had been told to
stay away from the funeral, and as far as Joanne
(30:40):
could tell, they did. I wasn't sure what to make
of these claims. At first they felt a little conspiratorial,
but after learning about those calls to Shahlski, it seemed
a lot more likely that the stories were true. I
ain't got no reason to really not trust the cops.
But there's you know, ship ain't add enough. You know
(31:00):
I've always had that was ship just ain't adding up.
That's one thing I did tell the detective and that
other guy. I told him, I said, you know what
really burns my ask is she wanted to be just
like one of you. She wanted to be liked by them,
and she wanted to be like them. And at some
(31:22):
point between her innocent flirtations with cops at the drug
store and her body being discovered on a cold February morning,
something went horribly wrong. Whatever happened to her while she
was in the Explorer program, I think it's unlikely she
was the only one. I asked p G County for
(31:43):
any records related to complaints of inappropriate sexual behavior within
the Explorer program from s to now. They told me
that a search of the current internal affair system uncovered
no complaints, and that to search an older system, I
would need to give them the officer's name in question.
I've passed along a list of names in Sandy's books,
(32:05):
and I'll let you know what we hear. But here's
what I found when I searched for old news articles
about the Pig County Explorer program. In just five years
after Sandy died, a veteran Prince George's County police officer
took a sixteen year old on a ride along. The
girl ended up attending the police academy and becoming a
(32:27):
police officer, fulfilling the dream that Sandy had. But thirteen
years later, after she joined the sex crimes unit, she
reported that she had been raped by her mentor on
one of the many ride along she attended. The officer
was later convicted of child abuse. I think Sandy was
a victim too. I think her desire to be a cop,
(32:51):
her teenage infatuations, and her inexperience they all coincided to
leave her open to exploitation. That's next week. Well, this
is the whole thing about predation. It works better for
the predator if your victim is vulnerable. And what more
(33:14):
vulnerable plays than you know, a desperate young person trying
to start a Korean law enforcement I'm not done digging
into this story, and i have more questions about what
happens in police Explorer programs. If you have ever been
part of a police youth program or participated in a
(33:36):
ride along, or you witnessed or experienced some sort of
inappropriate sexual conduct, please email me at what Happened to
Sandy Beale at gmail dot com. What Happened to Sandy
Beale is hosted by me Melissa Jolson. It's written and
produced by me and Katrina Norvell. It's edited by a Bussafar,
(33:56):
Josh Fisher, and Mary Do. Sound design by Aaron Kaufman.
Jason English is our executive producer and Merissa Brown is
our associate producer. To find out more about the investigation,
follow me on Twitter at q U A S I
am A d O. Thanks so much for listening
Host
Melissa Jeltsen
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