to your family, you're lucky to make it up to life. Streaming on Peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out, it's my golden chance.
Put a bullet in her head. I'm the co-creator of Ozark. Looks like a family was running drugs. Education stopped killing us.
We're at the Keys. I only saw who they might have been lying for. The cartel killed my family. I'm gonna kill them.
All of them. MIA, streaming May 7th, only on Peacock. Hi, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor, host of the podcast, The Drink. This month, I'm grabbing a matcha latte with comedian Taylor Tonlinson.
The drink is always about someone's journey to the top, and Taylor's story is remarkable. She tells us all about her unlikely path, from performing in churches, all the way to headlining her own Netflix specials, like her latest, prodigal daughter. And she opens up about her religious upbringing, what drew her to stand up, and how she feels when she gets on that stage. Hope you'll listen and follow the drink wherever you get your podcasts.
Tonight on Date Live. She locked horses. She was a horse girl. Well, he was just a cowboy.
You never ever thought that something like this would touch your life, that somebody would break into your home and kill you. My sister was stabbed. Tim was stabbed. Tim was stabbed.
They was pretty much gut-wrenching devastation. The major scene took place inside the house. What did you see when you got in there? A lot of blood.
Probably the worst scene in my entire career. There were some strange going on before this occurred. Tim's truck was blown up? Is that right?
There was an explosion, and all of a sudden it was burning. He had gotten at least one threatening letter. The letter scared me. I just said, you need to be careful.
There were a lot of suspects. A lot of people who might have done it. I thought that's insane. There's been a mistake.
In my heart, I know he did not do this. He's an innocent man. Thirty years without an answer. And then finally there is one.
It's pretty tough to talk about. I mean, murder is shocking, but this? Two deaths. Three decades.
Three decades. One shattering twist. Murder at the farmhouse. I'm Lester Holt.
And this is Dade Live. Here's Keith Morrison with Raising the Dead. The morning was grey. And saw him.
It was Friday the 13th of June, 2025. We are present at Oakwood Cemetery in the city of Waiawida. This is the official recording for the court order exhumation. They knew every one of them knew.
They could all turn on this moment. Raising the dead to solve the murders. Evidence doesn't lie. Was the man in the grave the killer?
Did you hear that he had made statements about getting away with murder? I did. Or would he? No.
Long dead. Point to someone else. He's not a man. He's a monster.
It all started on another Friday in tiny Waiawida, Wisconsin. That was March 20, 1992. Tana talks to add that her boyfriend Tim Mumbrew were heading for a night out at a bar. Tim's sister Tina.
Their plans were they were going to go watch a band called Sweetwater. Are you coming? This is Tana's brother, Rick. They were up there dancing and stuff.
They like to have a noisy good time. No, yeah. Yeah, they did. Yeah, they attended Tim.
They enjoyed having fun. Yes. And why not? She was 23, B-34, and their love was still new.
Exuberant. They were on a double date with their friend Jill and her boyfriend. It was elbow to elbow. Tim and Tana started dancing.
Country swing, which takes up a lot of room and it's a very fast moving dance. Not everyone loved that. As Jill could see, even if Tana didn't. I said I might be a good idea for us to leave.
I expected an argument, but she's like, yeah, I think I'm ready. Yeah, I think I'm ready to go too. You don't forget certain moments. Even now, Jill recalls it fresh, like a wound.
She gave me a hug, which was odd. We weren't really, you know, physically affectionate at all. And then she said, you know, when you come over to my house tomorrow morning. When Saturday broke, Jill saw that if it snowed overnight, she didn't feel like going to see Tana.
I talked myself out of going over there. We did that often, you know, I guess, broke commitment. And I thought maybe she would call me later in the day and say, hey, are you going with us tonight? But I never heard from her.
All day that Saturday, no one heard from Tana and no one heard from Tim, which was unusual given Tana's family lived right next door. And then the following day, Sunday, they couldn't help but notice Tana and Tim's trucks hadn't moved and Tana hadn't fit her horse. And so, they walked over to her farmhouse, went inside. What they saw could not be erased or undone.
I was the detective on call for the weekend and my weekend was winding down. It was mid-afternoon. When Al Craker, then a newly promoted police detective, got the call. Go to Tana's farmhouse.
They just said there were people deceased and I was to head over there. The chief deputy was in route. Oh boy, a big deal here. Yes.
Only after the scene, everything was rolled off with the do not cross, share of line. Another detective took him inside the house. What did you see when you got in there? A lot of blood.
Then he takes me to the bedroom and that was like, there was a war in that room. Tim's body was on the floor. Could you tell what had been done to him? He had a lot of blood on his chest.
He'd been in a hell of a fight. Was stabbed 27 times his throat to cut. Tana's body lay on the bed. Totally exposed with no clothes.
And then she had one single piercing to the heart area in the chest. Man. Have you ever seen such a thing before? Never.
Never. In fact, that was probably the worst scene I've ever seen in my entire career, 41 years. Not even Tana's little dog's scruffy was spared. Scruffy, we believe, was stabbed out by the front door.
Did it seem to you like it was done by one person or more than one person? That was tossed back and forth. Could it be one could one possibly do that? Whoever entered?
Took him by surprise. It was very, very angry. Yes. Inside the farmhouse, crime lab techs went about the dismal work.
As best it could be done in 1992. Blood was collected from various spots. There was semen collected on Tana, so we believe she was sexually assaulted. They lifted what fingerprints they could, though.
Perhaps surprising. Given that chaotic scene, they didn't get any useful matches. But there was this. The door was taken because we had a bloody palm print.
They collected anything that they thought might help in the future in case this case didn't get solved immediately. Just as well. Because it did not get solved immediately. Neighbor-eyed neighbor was suspicion.
Are we next? As the families lived in. We lived the pain. Never giving up on justice.
I don't give up. No matter what. They were sure they knew who did it. Guilty as hell.
He knows that he did it. The evidence was overwhelming. They were sure they knew who didn't do it. It's not possible.
I was just in disbelief. They're just no way. No way. But of course, that's why we have juries, isn't it?
I said, he'll either be found guilty by the 12th in the jury or by God. That's Sunday in March, 1992. Amateur is monitoring the crackle of police radios picked up the news that Tana and Tim have been stabbed to death. Neighbors lit up the phone lines as they tried to reach the couple's family.
Get home as soon as you can. I said, well, what happened? Tana's brother, Rick, was out getting farm supplies when his wife called the store to find him. Just in a panic.
She said, Tim is dead, Tim's dead. What happens inside you when, you know, you're stomaching your heart and the pain and the anger and... I guess that was completely distraught. Tana's friend, Jill, who, remember, had planned to see Tana again?
Hours after they'd all left the bar on Friday night was working when she got the news from her mom. At first, I thought, well, this has to be some kind of mistake, and I didn't. I was just in shock. Jim's sister, Tina, had been expecting him to visit that weekend.
I can't even explain how horrific it is to have something that savagely brutally horrific happened. She called her brother, Todd. And the phone rang. It was Tina.
She told me they'd both have been stabbed to death. Meanwhile, Tana's family told investigators about some strange noises they heard from their place just a few yards away, night of the murders. Tana's sister heard a dog barking in the middle of the night. She got up to the explorer and see what was going on.
And she looked out this window right over here. She saw a pickup truck leaving the residence and it sped off very fast. That was after 4 a.m. on Saturday.
The detective figured it could have been the murderer, or murderers, getting away. But why would anyone want to murder this young couple, both from local farming families? Jim, remember, was 34, Tana, just 23. She was just a goofball.
She was an absolute goofball. And captivating, said friends Michelle and Tami, from the minute they met her in high school. It was a smile. And it would just light her face up.
And you'd just see just behind the eyes of this little bit of trouble. She loved horses, but also dogs and cats and cowboy culture. We got along really good. It was just her love of life and her fun personality.
Fun, even when getting busted by the cops. We ended up getting underage drinking, but not Tana, because she told the cops that she wasn't feeling all that great. She's like, fuck her. You got to not mean like, really?
When her father died, Tana moved into his farmhouse. To pay the bills, this being Wisconsin, she worked at a local cheese factory. Boys, her friends said she was cautious, didn't put up with any BS. For her, I think her knight in shining armor would be a cowboy.
And around Halloween of 1991, she found him. Tall, slender, great smile, attractive looking man. If you saw him standing someplace, you would think he came in on a horse. Her cowboy, Tim.
All of our family have been rodeo people. We were all really close. Tim's friends, Carolyn Mark. It was good to everybody.
Easy going, good with the kids. Tim was a protector when his sister, Tina, was 12 years old. We were hunting, and I had fallen through the ice. I was up to my neck, and he was the first one up there to run up to me and grab my gun and pull me out of that.
After a stint in the US Navy, back home, Tim got a job doing maintenance at the local Iron Foundry. He would protect the kids by being cloned to distractibles so that the bulls wouldn't hurt the kids. It was thanks to Tina, the Tim first laid eyes on Tana. He had been looking through Tina's photos.
A picture of Tana was in those pictures, because Tana was at my baby shower. And he saw her, and he's like, who is she? I need to meet her. Awkward, Tim was still married to his second wife, Colleen.
They had a four-year-old son, so Tina said maybe not a good idea. But Tim didn't listen. And anyway, he and Colleen were getting a divorce. It was weeks away from being finalized.
Tim, when he set his mind to doing something, he was going to do it. So Tim and Tana became an item. They rode horses, they went dancing, they fell hard for each other, said Tim's brother-in-law, Mike. He was in love with her.
Devotion, apparently, until his last breath. He did everything he could until he couldn't do nothing else. And it was to protect her and to keep her safe. But why them, of all people?
Neither Tana nor Tim seemed to have any enemies. There was no obvious motive, not from the crime scene anyway. Was there any side of robbery? Not that we could tell.
Not that we could tell. Once the family was allowed to go in there, once the scene was released, they couldn't pinpoint anything that was taken. So somebody just walked in on the middle of the night as they were in bed? Yes.
In a town like Waiawiga, with fewer than 2,000 people, somebody had to know something. Tana's brother Rick was sure of it. Well, little town. Well, little town, as they say.
Everybody knows everybody, and everybody's business. Way back at the beginning. Soon after that office, out of there in 1992, investigators already had some solid leads. They knew who they needed to talk to.
He had a temper, and he was into knives. Let's kickstart your wellness journey with the Dark Today app. Workout's meal plans. It's your fast track to a healthier you.
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With me, your host, Jasmine D'Souguin. We'll take a deep dive into today's top stories with NBC News's trusted journalist. It's a fresh take, a sharp, thoughtful, and informative for you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the Zeitgeist, here's The Scoop from NBC News.
Listen daily on Spotify. Hey, guys. Willie Geist here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I sit down with one of the biggest bands in the world, Mumford & Sons.
As we get the boys together to talk about their new number one album, Prize Fighter, and the evolution of that irresistible foot-stomping sound. You can get our conversation for free, wherever you download your podcasts. Investigators were pretty sure of it. They'd soon figure out who killed Tim and Tana.
Did the sheriff tell you that he thought it could be solved very quickly? I think they did think it was going to be solved very quickly. As Detective Prager interviewed family and friends, he learned that there had been signs, terrible signs, but something bad was coming. Scary stuff.
About two months before the murders, Tim's truck was parked in the driveway. Then we heard just the most horrific boom you could imagine. Something exploded underneath the hood, and his truck caught on fire. And his whole entire truck was engulfed in flames and it was 20 feet near.
Everything that he had from his home was in the back of the truck. Then he was in the back of the truck. They were all yelling at him to get out of there, and it just burned up. Of course they called the police right away.
They couldn't find out if there was something put in there to detonate or what? Nobody knew why or why or why. Correct. Then, boys and ten letters arrived.
About a month before the murders, one warned Tana that Tim was a jealous, violent man and that he was using her. Another warned Tim that Tana was sleeping around. The final threat came just days before the murders. A message scrawled on a bathroom wall at the foundry where Tim worked.
Tim Mumbu was dying on Friday or something like that. And Friday was the day that happened, right? Friday night into Saturday morning, yes. Did you get the sense from these incidents that somebody was targeting?
At least Tim and maybe both of them. Yes. But who? I suspected everybody.
Anybody who looked at me crossways. And one obvious man to suspect was a guy known as Scooter. Scooter was not his ex-boyfriend. What did you know about Scooter?
He had a temper. Uh-huh. And he was into knives. Tana's family and friends had stories about Scooter.
He could be scary, they told the detective. Violent, too. This is where Scooter punched the wall. This is where Scooter kicked the wall and broke the door or whatever.
He threw a bottle through the back window of his truck and she was sitting in the passenger side. It came through the window and just ruptured the window. I don't know if she got hit by the bottle. But I went to see Tana the day after and she'd still been in glass out of her hair.
Thing was, investigators learned Scooter was determined that Tana couldn't leave him. He did not take the breakup well. He threatened her if I can't have her, nobody will. So we just assumed it was him that he finally did it.
Here's a good suspect. Yes, he was. He had nobody that could give him an alibi. I interviewed him many times.
I was convinced he was our guy. But relationships. If Tana's ex was getting the third degree, so was Tim's. In fact, Craggard discovered that Tim's not quite ex-wife Colleen was the one who'd written those medicine letters to both Tana and Tim.
Was it obvious right at the get-go that it was Colleen? Yes. The divorce was especially bitter because Tim, who'd moved in with his sister Tina, wanted more access to their four-year-old son, according to family. The divorce that he was going through was the most wicked divorce thing I'd ever seen in her.
I needed to remove my baby daughter from the house because of what was being said on both ends of the phone. Did you question Colleen? Yes, but she was a very small petite gal and there was no way that she could do this. If she wanted it done, she would have to find somebody to do it for her.
So was it a murder for hire? Certainly there was a motive, possible one anyway. There was a $100,000 life insurance policy. To make you think of time or two?
Or three or four. They couldn't find the murder weapon the knife, but they had two viable suspects, and they didn't stop there. They widened the search and rounded up men who lived in the area who were known in the past who had been violent. One of them was a guy who worked at the foundry, which had worked, and also lived close to Tana's farmhouse.
His name was Jeff Teal. He was capable of doing it. He had a record. He carried a knife, but his threats usually were with a gun.
Chief. Nice fella. Yes. A fella investigators learned who liked to drop her two with a hard stuff.
If you ran into him in a bar or someplace where he's having a bunch of liquid fight, you just stayed away from him. He just always carried a knife and he came off as a very mean ombre. I just remember a lot of talk about violence with him, domestic abuse. Kind of the guy you would think we ought to get him for sure.
Well, they did. They did look at him for sure. What might his motive have been? Investigate has found out that Jeff Teal had stolen some wire from the foundry, and Tim had turned him in.
What did you think about him as a possible suspect? With his background and his build and strength. Right. He was certainly a person that we had to go after.
Tim and Tana, such a bright young couple, were gone. The whole county seemed in mourning as their families laid them to rest. All I remember is I could still see her laying there, and the rest of the whole thing was just... I don't remember any of it, really.
That was in shock. Tana's mom, I don't know what's such a gun roll. It sounded like an animal. It was devastating.
She screamed, oh, my tan. Why my tan? No, seriously. It was pretty much gut-wrenching devastation.
It was like, you don't even know the amount of pain that's involved. In a separate ceremony, Tim was honored as any cowboy would hope to be. There was a team of black horses that was the escort out to the cemetery, and they were the capes, and I could see an old movies or something like that. So it was like the old West Hider thing.
Tim's brother-in-law, Mike, remembers how investigators roamed through the mourners. They videotaped the whole thing, and I understood why. Most kind of person does something like this. They may come back and act like nothing's wrong just to see.
Did it help? Not much, apparently. This wouldn't be quick and easy after all. But every day, the investigators chipped away at their leads, and one by one, their list of potential suspects narrowed.
This was 1992, remember? It was two years before the O.J. Simpson case made DNA a household word. Back then, Detective Crager and the others could only compare blood types.
But that simple test was enough to rule out their very first person of interest. Tana's ex-boyfriend, Scooter. He did not match, so then I left him alone and moved on. Moved on to Tim's ex, Colleen.
The investigators brought her in again and again, trying to suss out whether she hired someone to kill Tim for the insurance money. That was looked at very hard. In fact, I think we even held that up for a while. The payment of it, until we were totally convinced that she probably didn't have anything to do with it.
Eventually investigators would rule her out. But they kept looking at Jeff Teal, that known to be violent character from the foundry. He had a town three years after the murders in 1995, but the next year, in 1996, they got a sample of Teal's blood. That's around the time DNA was becoming an evidence gold standard.
They ran a test with Teal's blood. And, investigators concluded Teal was not the killer either. Well, they kept at it, but there were no arrests, no new suspects. Then, in 2008, Mike Sassy took over the case.
Sassy, one of the original deputies of the crime scene, was by 2008 an agent with the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, the DCI. Myself and my partner started to methodically go piece by piece by piece through this investigation, organizing it into the modern day age. They dug all the way back to the first days of the investigation, looking for leads that back in 1992 didn't look like leads. It was granular sort of work, and it seemed to pay off.
When in 2012, they found something, or rather, someone, and they couched on it. I get to a name of Glenden Galker. Glenden Galker was one of the men they'd looked at back in 1992. Glenden Galker then worked for a man named Lane Shields, and he ran a Western store at the time.
Why was that an issue? Tim and Tana bought their cowboy gear in that store, so a kind of connection. Anyway, back in 1992, they interviewed Galker multiple times, strapped him into a polygraph at one point. Nothing came of it then, but now?
I literally go to Google, and I looked at my partner, and I said, is it Glenden C Galker? He said, yeah, why? I said, because he's in Oklahoma, and he's in custody for a homicide. He committed in Oklahoma in 2010, and it was a brutal murder.
The case was displayed across the Internet. In September of 2010, a 19-year-old man named Ethan Walton drove out with his girlfriend to meet with Galker at his home outside of Prague, Oklahoma. Galker lived in a trailer home down a dead-end road. Ethan thought he was there to sell Galkers in land.
There was a property deal that was fictitious put together by Galker. Instead, Galker kills him and puts him in 55-gallon drums. He calls the girlfriend into the shed. She comes in, and he sexually assaults her.
She's naked and literally gets herself free. She squeezed through a window to escape, then ran for dear life through a field to the nearest neighbor's place, and made it. Galker in hot pursuit, shooting off his gun before the police got up to them. And now Galker was facing the death penalty for killing a boyfriend.
As this hits warp speed, like we might be onto something here. We now have somebody that's in custody for the same situation. That's involved in our case, and was a suspect back in 1992. It marries up very similar to Tim and Tana.
It sounds to me like this guy fits the profile of a psychosexual serial assaultor, if not killer. Correct. You think you got something here? Yeah, we think we got something.
Absolutely we do. After the murders, a certain terror descended on Wobaka County, Wisconsin. This was a safe meeting. Tana never locked her doors.
For the longest time, I went through, oh my gosh, is it's something that, did they go after Tana and now maybe Michelle's next? Yeah. No, that was a definite fear. Yeah.
As long as the case went unsolved, that fear lingered. Now, Agent Sassy and his unit had revived the person of interest, Glendon Galker. As they dug into his time in Wobaka County, they discovered police had interviewed him even before Tim and Tana's murders, for another crime, back in 1990. Glendon Galker had been a person of interest in a rape in the village of Iola, which is 20-30 miles from this location.
Just your sort of guy who would do this? Yes. He's a guy with a violent demeanor. He was never caught for the rape.
Back in 1990, in the days before common use of DNA testing, investigators simply didn't have sufficient evidence to charge him. And the case went cold. But now, Galker was in jail in Oklahoma charged with rape and capital murder, and Oklahoma had his DNA. And it matched.
No question, Galker was the rapist. So maybe Galker killed Tim and Tana too. Kind of want to talk to him. Right.
And Galker agreed to cooperate, but with one very big condition. The death penalty he was facing, they'd have to make that go away. And after some wrangling, they made a deal. So we go down and we confront him.
And I said, I know you did this. You were involved in the toxic member case. And he starts faking. He just literally starts faking.
I didn't do it. He swore he did not murder Tim and Tana. So who did? Galker pointed the finger at this man, Lane Shields.
His former boss at that western shop that Tim and Tana frequented. Galker listed off all sorts of crimes he said he'd committed at Lane's behest. Anywhere from Arsenal to burying bodies. Galker told them Shields had asked him to murder Tim and Tana.
He asked me something like, huh... Sliding like hell. He had to freeze me up. He insisted he refused a job.
And Galker said after the murders, Lane admitted he was responsible. As an director, did you do it? He said I brought somebody hand when you said no. And said nothing about nobody else.
He answered me outside and did it. Galker offered to take a polygraph to back up his claims. They conducted it the very next day. Regarding the two victims, then you said I ate a 1 out.
He fails questions about did he kill? Sure. Tana Thox and Tim Umbril. So what was true and what wasn't?
The investigator's headed back to Wisconsin to try to run down Galka's account. They got nowhere. And so they returned to Oklahoma. It was supposed to make inconsistencies last time.
At this time, Galka told them a different story. There's only one thing I haven't told you. He admitted he was at Tana's farmhouse the night of the murders. But he said he didn't stab anybody.
He was just a driver. He was thinking never went down. So I surely drove. He was never going to ask for anything for the mask.
It was Lane who went into the farmhouse, he said. With that guy, Lane had hired. I drove him and his guy out there. That night of the homicide.
I drove. Okay. Followed him. Who's the other guy?
But he brought him to my side. Lane and the unknown third person who he said was an Irish guy. Committed to the homicide. Tell me what's the end of the walkout.
I'm saying anything. Oh ****. You kidding me? I'll tell you.
You've got to take it with the lame rod. This guy. This is my guy. This guy.
This guy. He's a predator. What'd you make of a story? Well, obviously the hair stood up on my neck.
But could they believe him? The truth and Brendan Galka were not well acquainted at all. That was obvious. So...
Are our chips all in on this poker table? Absolutely not. I mean, he is a con man. But a lot was writing on this.
If there was even a chance his Lane Shield story was true, it had to be resolved one way or the other. Just maybe this admitted murderer. This slippery liar would help them finally catch their killer. Certainly not Mike Sassy or his partners.
It helped, mind you. Think Alker came clean and pleaded guilty to that whole other murder in Oklahoma. But his story claiming that his former boss, Lane Shields, was responsible for the dim and tender murders. Well, it might be true, but they couldn't know without learning more about Lane Shields.
And then they caught a break. We were able to actually draft and go up on a state Title III wiretap on Lane Shields. This has only been done maybe a few times in Wisconsin. You wouldn't be able to get one unless it was a pretty good case.
Correct. How to get Lane talking about the murders? Well, get everyone else talking. We beef the media out of Green Bay in Madison, and we put billboards up on near the crime scene, out on our major highways around there.
If you know any information who killed Tim and Tanner, their pictures were on the billboards, please call. Now the thinking went, a nervous Lane would want to make sure the men with him that the murder would keep their mouth shut. So they set up a phone call, Gogger to Shields. And of course, unbeknownst to Shields, they listen to every word full of what, hope, expectation.
Instead, what they got was a nasty deflating feeling of having been had. They're not saying what you thought they'd say. Right. What we were led to believe they were going to say.
Lane didn't sound worried or threatening or indicate any involvement at all. He was just worthless chit-chat. So what did they say? There were no confessions.
There were no admissions. There were no coming after me now. We didn't get what we were looking for. This wasn't the chatter of guilty individuals that we were hearing now.
As for the rest of the so-called evidence Gogger had provided. We pulled out every investigative, high-end investigative technique that we could, and we didn't get anything that corroborated what Gogger was telling us. If that didn't put Gogger's account to rest, this did. They searched Lane Shields property.
He's over here, trash my f***ing house. They interviewed Lane. He was angry, sure, but more than willing to talk. I gave you everything when you were here.
We talked to that. I agree. To the investigators, the hard-as-nails Lane came off as upfront, even honest. I should have an evidentiary hearing on these people that are putting the heat on me, because it's not true.
I want a f***ing doesn't sure. So when he told them he was innocent, they believed him. Hard as they tried, investigators could find nothing incriminating. Agent Sassy walked away knowing Lane was not their guy.
As for Gogger, they had enough of him. But it's never any point in the conversation you had with him when you said, Glendon, you're full of it. Yes. And that was it?
All that time and money that spent on Gogger and his story. Their deal to allow him to avoid the death penalty for his own crimes in Oklahoma. He was all for naught. They wanted so badly to solve the Tim and Tanner murders, and Glendon Gogger had simply played them.
For more than two and a half decades, Tim and Tanner's families were in the dark above the ups and downs of the investigation. There were no arrests, no resolutions. It never got easier. It's really stressful.
It's very stressful. Rick Todd said I didn't blame the investigators. He knew how hard they were working. Still.
Always seems like right around the anniversary, you know, the newspapers and local TV stations, and everybody wanted to know what's going on. And you know, and then I'd get all nerfed up, and I'd be hard to live with, and I'd be just, you know, wanting this thing solved, and it wasn't getting done fast enough. Tim's older sister, Tina. There's no closure, you know, and I watched my family suffer from so much unforgiveness, and hurt, and that hurt would turn into anger and mistrust.
I mean, many of us didn't know who might be over our shoulder, or why, or because there was no answers. 2018, the tech of Captain Nick Traeger, of the Wabaka County Sheriff's Office, had taken over the case. By then, the world of DNA evidence had opened up like a flower, and Traeger wanted to try something new. Familiar DNA.
That is the now widely accepted method of finding unidentified suspects by searching for their family members in DNA databases, and then using family trees to narrow it down. Basically means, okay, not this person, but maybe somebody related to this person. Correct. Sitting in the same genetic in a line.
Yeah, so that was the thought process. They submitted that semen found on Tana's body to criminal databases, and got back, nothing. They were out of new methods to find their killer, out of names, they were rudderless. And then, a surprise, it was April 2022, a woman called investigators.
She was a child at the time of the murder, she said, but she thought she knew who did it, a credible suspect, a suspect she knew all about. Thirty years after the crime, she was still carrying us around and she wanted to do something but it. Correct. She believed she told them that her DNA could finally identify the man who murdered Jim and Tana, and who was that person?
So she turned on her profile and it was like the Christmas tree lit up. Really? Yes. Murder cast his dreadful damage wide, and for a long, long time.
Through the years, Jim and Tana's families never stopped looking for answers. What is it about you, your personality, that made you push so hard for all these decades to try to solve this? Well, I don't give up. Maybe it's just as well, Rick didn't get to know what he was up against.
As he vowed to get justice for his sister, I just don't stop. I won't stop. I will not stop. We prayed a lot that somebody would come forth and somebody wouldn't be able to live with themself.
Three decades after those brutal stabbings in Waiawiga, Wisconsin, the families seemed to get their wish. When a woman called investigators in 2022, her name was Heather. She told the investigators she had heard about those murders when she was just a little girl, and ever since, she'd had this awful feeling that her father had something to do with it. And this got investigators attention because her father was Jeff Teal.
Remember him? Teal, the known violent defender, was one of the original suspects. But why did Heather wait so long? It turned out she didn't.
She told investigators the same thing way back in 2010 when agent Mike Sassy had the case. Do you remember Heather Teal coming forward? Yes. What did she have to say?
She was emotional. She says I think my dad had something to do with this, and I knew that he was ruled out. That's because three years after the murders back in 1995, Jeff Teal got into an armed standoff with law enforcement and then escaped and skipped town. It didn't end well.
He dies by suicide and believe in the state of Washington. It's how investigators were able to get his DNA. The sheriff's department and detectives at that point in time are sent his clothing of when he died. That was blood on the shirt, is that correct?
Yes. And that is sent in to a private lab, and he is compared to the semen left at the crime scene, and he's not a match. In other words, the DNA on his shirt said he didn't do it, and he was cleared. Jeff Teal was buried near his home in Wisconsin, and the suspicion about his involvement in the case was buried with him.
But Heather Teal was so sure her father was behind the murders. 30 years after the crime, she was still carrying us around and she wanted to do something about it. Correct. So Captain Traeger and his partner went to see Heather and her mom, Marie.
You've always believed he's involved in this. What made you believe that? We did it, and I'm sad funny how you can get away from what did he say? Jeff even saying to Marie I've gone away with murder.
And his ultimate dream was to kill somebody. He used to tell me that all the time. Did you believe him? Oh yeah, he's had done in front of my face.
I've ever called the cops on a lot of childhood memories. My favorite memory of my dad is his obsession with knives, too. Sitting in his chair, he brought a recliner, sharpening his knives. On top of all that, they said Jeff made it pretty obvious how he felt about Tana.
He was an obsessive killer. How do you know that? I had heard, and I can't remember who I had heard it from, if it was Tana herself, Jeff wanted to date Tana. Tana wanted nothing to do with Jeff.
I always would think back when I heard that she was murdered or whatever that, okay Jeff doesn't look far from her, wanted to date her, she wanted nothing to do with him and how he always said he wanted to kill and remember Tana's dog Scruffy was stabbed to death too, apparently trying to protect him and Tana. Well, where he told investigators Jeff had a history of killing dogs, two of them right in their neighborhood. They were two huge dogs, I mean they were really really big, and Jeff shot him both. I saw him shoot him and kill him.
He picked them up and he threw him in the back of his truck and I remember to love him. He saw Jeff, who's dogs? Neighbors dogs. But DNA doesn't lie and DNA cleared Jeff deal.
It just to be thorough, they did a cheek swab anyway of Heather. So we collected her DNA, which she gave along with her mom, and I guess there was really no intent other than to I guess kind of have it because Jeff was eliminated. Then just as they were getting ready to leave, Heather offered investigators something else. I'm on ancestry too.
She had explained that she does the genealogy as well. She told investigators she'd been working on her family tree on ancestry.com and offered them access to her account. The FBI had been helping with the investigation and got to work. And the FBI agent had reached out to Heather to turn the feature on where law enforcement can view your profile.
So she turned on her profile and it was like the Christmas tree lit up. Really? Yes. Heather was right.
There was a connection with her father, but here came the twist, and it was a big one. So the FBI agent said we are very close in the family, but it's not Jeff After 30 years of waiting, investigators finally had a DNA match. And a new name was this their man. Hey guys, Willie Geist here reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast.
On this week's episode, I sit down with one of the biggest bands in the world, Mumford & Sons, as we get the boys together to talk about their new number one album, Prize Fighter, and the evolution of that irresistible foot stomping sound. You can get our conversation for free wherever you download your podcasts. Like a lot of men in town, Tony worked at the Iron Foundry, but unlike his uncle Jeff Teal, he had no criminal record. Just unbelievable.
He's been there his entire life, and he's a nobody hiding in plain sight. Correct. So we spent several weeks following Tony, and it was the same thing almost every day he went to work at the Foundry, and he went home, and he worked around the fire. What to do?
Get the man's DNA. So they rifle through his garbage, but nothing. So we had to get creative. Yeah, I would think.
I mean, because you're chasing him around looking for him to drop. Yeah, throw something out the windows. They noticed that Tony's car was missing its front license plate, so they came up with a plan. Well, let's ride him a warning for no front plates and have him touch a brand new pen, and then we'll send the pen down to see if he's a match.
Clever idea, but it would involve you kind of conducting this ruse, traffic stop, right? That's what we did. They sent the pen with Tony's DNA to the lab, and it was a match. Wow.
Who was that moment like? It was unbelievable. I've never felt so joyous in my life. And yet, nothing about him looked like the killer.
It was just a regular guy, a father of four, with no criminal record of any kind, not even a hint of any impropriety. He lived quietly on the same farm his family had owned for decades. We spent a lot of time goofing off at the farm and with our grandparents. Tony's sister, Sherry, has gust.
But as we got older, he was my defender. I always looked up to him. Jody Lynn Morgan met and rode the school bus with Tony when they were just five years old. He's the gentle giant.
As long as I've known him, always, always has been. So they grew up liking each other and then loving each other. They lived together for about two years. At two kids, before deciding to go their separate ways.
And then a couple of years after that, Tony went on to Mary Tracy. How'd you meet him? We both liked to fish, so we met in a beach shop. Yeah, that was his thing, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Both of ours. Yep.
Tony and Tracy had two kids of their own and eventually grandchildren. The couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in June of 2022. Two months later, investigators went to the Iron Foundry, found Tony, and asked to speak with him. So he came in very nonchalant.
It was low-key. We introduced ourselves. We asked just kind of some basic background questions of him, who he was, where he lives, some work history. He knew Tim and Tana personally.
He said he had never met Tim. He knew of Tana only because they lived in the same town. Interesting. Did he wonder why you were talking to him about this all these years later?
He questioned why we were talking to him. We explained that his name had come up in the investigation. Now, investigators asked him directly. We asked if he'd be willing to give his cheek swabs and fingerprints to us, and he agreed to.
Tony also agreed to take a polygraph, so investigators took him down to the Cheryl station, performed a cheek swab and had him take that polygraph, and then they placed him in an interview room. I'm sure you want to know how you did? Yep. Okay.