Tricia Reitler

All witnesses purchase of interest, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome back to Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We don't have any time to talk about this week with Right now in true crime, we're going to talk a little Chad day Bell. They wrapped up on Friday. They have a total of fifty seven potential jurors, and on Monday they are going to start with their preemptive strikes. Each side the prosecution, the defense has sixteen preemptive strikes and they will use those and it will end with twelve jerors total being picked and six alternates. So the reason that it took them a whole week to get to this process where they finally got to their lucky number of five fifty even though they picked fifty seven. They were going through and of course eliminating anyone from the potential jury pool that had exposure to the case or knew about the case in some way, shape or form. Also, if people had any issue with it being a death penalty case. If they were going to have any issues going forward with that, they were struck from that as well. And then of course anyone that had any major ongoing work conflicts or personal conflicts that would get in their way of being one hundred percent dedicated to this trial because it's going to go on for a bit. It's going to go on for a while, so they of course want people who are going to be able to be present and not have other things that they need to focus on. So Monday they will officially start the preemptive strikes and kind of go from there. I'm really curious to see how quick this process is. I feel like hopefully we're going to get to openings of this trial at some point this week. I did hear that there is some new evidence that is going to be brought in, And even though we don't have a list of witnesses, I do believe Chad's children, especially Garth and Emma, are going to be testifying. They have been very much in support of their father, which I will never understand. But I do believe that Chad is a massive manipulator, and I don't put it past him to be manipulating his own kids through all of this. So I am very eager to see this all go down and try to navigate through this next two and a half months of this trial. It's going to be a wild ride. We do have a little bit of news in the Adelson drama. Donald Adilson has a new trial date is going to be September seventeenth. It was originally going to be another date, but she asked it to be moved due to Yan Kapor because she is such a devout Jewish woman that she hated her Jewish son in law so much that she ended up plotting his death, which is why she's going to trial even though she herself was Jewish. She hated that he was so devout in his faith and used it against him, which is so sketchy. And now she wants her trial day to be moved. I just can't with this woman. There is going to be a whole summer series delving in to the adel Sins and all of their drama. I am going to be releasing one episode a week on Thursday night slash Friday morning, and it is going to be the twenty twenty four summer series all about the death of Dan Markel and how the Adle Sins are all tied up and weaved into it, and you don't want to miss it because it is insane. If you aren't familiar with the story, I'm going to try to break all down so it's all just kind of crystal clear what happened, So be sure to tune in for that. Starting the first Friday in May, I will be doing summer series twenty twenty four on Dan Markel and the crazy Atle Sins because they are crazy so shockingly. That's all I have for you for right now in true crime. I know there's probably a ton more going on, but my life has really been taken up by the Chad day Bill of it all, and it's probably going to be that way for the next three months or so. But we are going to go ahead and get started with today's episode. Okay, guys, we are jumping in to a new case today. We are going to talk about the disappearance of a gal. She was nineteen years old. Her name was Tricia Wrightler. We are going to talk about her disappearance. She disappeared in nineteen ninety three. So we are talking about a case that is thirty one years in the making, so let's dive right in. Tricia Reiitler was born on February of nineteen seventy four to her parents, Gary and Donna. She was the oldest of four children. Her parents described her as a very strong willed child, and they said that she had all of your normal characteristics of a firstborn child. She loved being a big sister to her siblings and what her little brother was born, she even pretended that she was his mother and loved to play that mom role. She would grow up and go off to college. She had ambitions and dreams and hopes of being a psychologist and she wanted to really work on putting families back together. That was her dream. She ended up going to Indiana Wesleyan University, which I'm going to call IWU, and she was on an academic scholarship there. She was also a avid runner and was in the process of training to join the track team. Trisha was from a small town in Ohio called Olmstead Township, and this wasn't far from the area of Cleveland, Ohio, but it was about four and a half hours from where she was going to be attending college and Tricia was a little bit hesitant to go to IWU at first because I think it was so far from her family. But her parents really liked that this school, IWU had some good Christian values. It aligned with what they thought was good for their family, so they encouraged her to go and she ended up going. And actually Tricia's younger sister, she was only a year younger, was going to be joining her the very next year at the same school. So Tricia was a freshman at IWU. She was working to join the track team, she was going for this psychology degree. She was thriving in her life, doing everything that she could, and she very much stayed very close with her family. She was always close with her family growing up, and even though she was four and a half hours away, that didn't change. She still remained in constant contact. Her dad said that there would be evenings that they would stay on the phone and talk until two in the morning, just talking about life. And her parents said that when she was at IWU that first half of the school year, she loved it and was really really enjoying it. So Tricia was seemingly thriving in her new school. So the dating question March twenty ninth of nineteen ninety three, Tricia was studying. She was working on this term paper that she had, and she decided that she was going to take a break around eight o'clock at night, and she was going to take a walk to a supermarket that was called Marsh Supermarket, and it was only about a half a mile from the university campus where she lived, and she wanted to go there and get a snack and something to drink in a magazine. So she did, in fact make it to Marsh Supermarket. She purchased a soda in a magazine and then went to leave to head back to campus, and literally that is when she vanished into thin air. I don't quite know the circumstances of what happened next, but law enforcement got in touch with her family and it was in the middle of the night, and her dad said that they asked, do you know where Tricia is? Tricia's mom was obviously listening to this phone conversation, and Tricia's dad, Gary said, She's not here, She's at college. Immediately, Tricia's mother, Donna, knew that something was wrong. Investigators have been forthcoming and said that they do believe that Tricia was abducted somewhere between her leaving the supermarket and making her way back to the college campus, somebody took her. Upon receiving the news, her parents immediately made the four and a half hour track from Ohio to Indiana to try to help find their daughter. Her dad, Gary said that it was the longest drive of his life. It was drizzling, it was cold, and he said that looking back now, he guesses that it was the start of a thirty year journey. Now thirty one years. So two days after Tricia initially goes missing, they find the bag of stuff that she bought from the grocery store, a receipt from the supermarket, and her clothes and they had small amounts of blood on them. So this was found across the street from the Marsh Supermarket near like this community pool, and this community pool was also adjacent to a basketball court, and there was a local guy that came forward and said that around the time that Tricia would have disappeared, there was about six to seven guys playing basketball at the court that was adjacent to where the pool was where the clothes and the bag and all were found. And he had proof of this because he had recorded the guys being out there, He had captured some of that. I don't know what he was doing out there that night, but he had captured the audio of them playing basketball. And none of these guys who were out there playing basketball, it was six to seven people he said, have ever been tracked down. They have never come forward, and honestly, I don't feel like they're involved in any way, shape or form. But they easily could have seen something if they were in the area that night. They could have seen her walking by, they could have seen somebody with her and not even realized. They could have seen somebody drop something off since it was right by where they were. It's just really interesting that after all of this time, nobody has come forward with any information. And I feel like one of them probably has the smoking gun, being able to say yeah, I saw that, and probably doesn't even realize that they saw something that night. That's why getting these stories out is so so important to help put it out there for the masses, because you never know if you're going to be that one person that holds the missing puzzle piece to a cold case. So I did some digging on Google maps because it's my favorite place to get lost in. And the proximity from where Tricia lived on campus to the March Supermarket not far at all, like literally a one to two minute walk, like she wasn't going super super far. And then the proximity from where the clothes were found and where obviously Tricia was last seen leaving the March Supermarket, again very very close, super close proximity. The clothes were found in an area that was is between an elementary school which was called Center Elementary and a pool. The pool was called Seabold Pool. Neither one of those places exists anymore. The elementary school closed in two thousand and seven and the pool is no longer there. Obviously, the area where the clothes were found, it was kind of like on an in between in like a field type of area. But I'm going to put up a map just so you guys can see how close in proximity everything was kind of found. So it's interesting to me that investigators knew pretty much quickly that something nefarious had happened to Tricia, and they didn't find the clothes until a couple days later, So that's very interesting. I'm sure they weren't out searching at nighttime. Looking for any evidence or clues, but a whole two days later the clothes were found. So let's talk possible suspects. We have three different ones, and we're going to kind of talk about each of them individually and then we'll go on from there. So one of the possible suspects was a guy named Donald Grenier, and he was arrested in nineteen ninety nine, and he was charged with the abduction and molestation of a young girl from the Marian area, which is directly around the area of iw and the March Supermarket and all of that. They ended up doing a search of his home to try to find any evidence that would connect him to Trisha's case. They also suspected that he might be involved in the nineteen eighty seven disappearance of an Indiana girl named Wendy Felton. They both kind of had similar traits to each other, Wendy's and Tricia's, so they thought that they could be related, even though they happened a few years apart. So I'm going to do a further story on Wendy. But she disappeared from Mary in Indiana kind of suspicious circumstances. Her sister had left to drop her parents off at an airport, and when the sister returned home, Wendy was gone and everything that was important to her, favorite shoes, her purse, all of her belongings were all left behind. So initially copp thought that she was a runaway, but then they realized that something else might have happened, and they kind of changed their tune, thinking that she might have been abducted. So after Donald Grenier was arrested, they did this search of his home to try to see if they could tie Trisha's case or Wendy's case to him, and he eventually was cleared of any involvement in both of the cases, and he said that he didn't do anything to either of them. He doesn't know either of them. So I will say Wendy Felton's case is still open. It's unsolved. Her remains have never been found, so that is going to be one that I'm going to be digging into very shortly. So our next suspect is a guy named Tony Searci, and he has a habit of doing not so great things and going to jail for them. So the interesting thing about Tony is he made a nimal one call on the night of Trisha's disappearance, and investigators very much think that he made that nine one one call that night to try to lead police away from the area. They gave Tony a polygraph exam and he failed. However, we know that that doesn't make or break a case. They also did walk through some cadaver dogs around his vehicle and there was a hit at the back of his truck. But something interesting I didn't know is that cadaver dogs are hit to pick up the scent of copper as well. And because Tony is not an upstanding citizen, he is also a copper thief. So he had all of the stolen copper in the back of his car, which potentially could be why the cadaver dogs hit on that area. And law enforcement has never been able to tie him to the disappearance of Tricia, so where he may be a not so good person, there's no proof that he is actually the person that took Tricia. So our most notable and high up suspect, I believe, and I think law enforcement believes this as well, is a guy named Larry Dwayne Hall. So authorities discovered some materials that were related to Tricia's case in a van owned by Larry Hall several months after she disappeared in nineteen ninety three. So Larry Hall lived with his parents at the time that Tricia was abducted, and he lived only twenty five minutes away from where Trisha lived in Marion on the ISU campus, So from a proximity standpoint, he easily could have been involved. And investigators said that they found maps, pictures, and newspaper articles that had to do with Trisha's disappearance inside of this van, and they arrested him in nineteen ninety four and charged him with abducting a teenager named Jessica Roach. Her remains were discovered in a cornfield in nineteen ninety three in Indiana. And actually when I first heard about this case, it was during the Jessica Roach story, and they were talking about the suspect because he was pretty much one of the only people they had in mind in connection to Jessica Roach's killing. And he ended up being charged and convicted and he is incarceration for that crime. And they had brought up Tricia and how it possibly could be connected. So Larry Hall did sign a statement and he confessed to killing Tricia, said he kidnapped and murdered her, but then he later recanted and said he was not being truthful, and they were never able to charge him with anything in connection with her murder because of the lack of evidence. There's nothing really tying him to it, other than he had a few little things in his van that anybody could have clipped from a newspaper an article about her disappearance. So Larry had even said that he was going to give them an idea of where Tricia's body was, and he led them to an area in Grant County near a reservoir, and when they got there, they looked for any evidence that would them to believe that Tricia's remains were there, and they came up empty handed. So he very well could have been the perpetrator of the Trisia crime, but there's nothing really tactile to tie him to it, and interestingly enough so, he is still currently still serving time in a psychiatric prison in North Carolina. He is serving a life sentence for the kidnapping and murder of Jessica Roach, and even though he's never been charged or anything like that, police have not been able to get enough evidence against him. He's still considered and presumed a suspect in Trish's abduction. He has since confessed to murdering a few other ladies. He confessed to murdering Lori de Piez, who disappeared from Wisconsin in nineteen eighty eight, and he also said that he was involved in the nineteen eighty eight disappearance of a woman named Paula Webster from Illinois. And police do believe that this guy, Larry Hall, Larry Dwayne Hall, has killed from thirty to forty women, but the only one he's been charged with is that of Jessica Roach. I say it all the time. Bad people just don't do bad things one time, especially if they get away with it. They do it time and time and time and time again. And for whatever reason, Larry Dwayne Hall just seems to be good about getting away with things. So how many other cold cases are out there where he is the offender and he's only serving jail time for one granted, he's in prison for life. He's in this psychiatric unit, which is exactly where he needs to be, but just for other families to have closure when there could be forty victims out there of his and there's no closure because there's no really evidence tying him to it. I did a little digging on Larry just to try to see some of the other crimes that they think he might be involved in, and you should see it. It is insane. He started his life of crime between the ages of ten and twenty, committing the you know, little petty thefts, arson, vandalism, all of those kind of things. And then his first alleged victim is a fourteen year old girl named Dean Marie Pyle Peters, and she disappeared from her middle school in Michigan, and Larry Hall is suspected to be her abductor. So they list all the dates. There are so many. I'm going to dig into some of these cases and kind of research them all a little more. But the dates of these the first one official, like first alleged victim, is February fifth of nineteen eighty one. The next one is August thirty first, nineteen eighty one, and then there's like a lull between nineteen eighty one and his next victim isn't until nineteen eighty five, allegedly, and then we have another in nineteen eighty five, nineteen eighty six, nineteen eighty six, nineteen eighty six. Then he starts just going non stop. Eighty seven, there's like seven of them, and then in nineteen eighty eight there's a ton. In nineteen eighty nine, there's a lot, nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety one. It just goes on and on and on and on until eventually he is arrested for the murder of Jessica Roach. He was found guilty of the kidnapping and murder of Jessica Roach in nineteen ninety five, and then miraculously the killing and the different disappearances of random girls in that particular area stopped. So really really interesting. Also, another really interesting tidbit of information about Larry Hall. I am fascinated by looking into like childhood, nature versus nurture, all of that kind of stuff. And Larry seemed to grow up in a pretty normal family, was a twin, and he was bullied a little bit due to some speech impediments that he had, and bullied for his bed wedding, And that kind of sparks something in my brain because I've done a lot of research on like the psychology behind serial killers, sociopaths versus psychopaths, and a lot of the times, they say with people that are going to grow up to commit like horrible, awful crimes, serial killers and other you know, violent offenders, that they'll start with the smaller things. They'll start with the harming of the animals. When they're little, they'll start with arson. And they also have a bed wedding component to their childhood. And I'm not just talking like accidental bed wedding every so often as a child, but like constant, major issues with bed wedding. And it obviously was an issue for Larry because he was teased about it. And I think that that is soh so interesting. His father was an alcoholic, his mom was a stay at home mom. But again, everybody with an alcoholic parent doesn't turn into this deranged serial killer. So I just think it's really interesting to kind of look at the background of this person and try to figure out what made them become who they are. So present day, twenty twenty four, Tricia's kidnapping case remains unsolved. They have never found any remains. Her parents do believe that she is deceased, but at the end of the day, everyone, her parents, her friends, just want closure. They just want to know what happened to Tricia and be able to kind of close a book on the thirty one year journey that they've been on trying to figure out what happened to Tricia. So as always, sharing this episode is super important. It is very very likely that Larry Hall is our suspect and our guy, but there's really no way of knowing until we concretely tie it back to him. And the only way it's going to be able to be tied back to him is with evidence or somebody that saw something that doesn't realize that they saw something, and that is the only way we're going to get justice for Tricia and for her family. So as always share this episode. Check out my Instagram and Facebook pages. I'm going to be posting some photos of Tricia. I'll also post the supermarket, the March supermarket picture. It is now some college type of building. But I'll also post the little map of the proximity from where Tricia was to where her clothes were found, which again I said, is really close proximity. It's all really really close proximity. So before I end this episode, I was doing some digging on Reddit in regards to Tricia's case and somebody had commented this. Now they commented this a year ago, and I feel like it's relevant. I feel like it's pertinent, and I'm going to read this post. A man attempted to abduct me when I was sixteen years old. On seven nine, nineteen ninety three. I was riding my bike and he pulled into a lot with an old barn on it and flagged me down, asking for directions. I helped as much as a sixteen year old could. He said thanks, and as I was getting situated back on my bike, he got out of his car and waved me over and said I went over that way and still couldn't find him. Find it. I told him I didn't really know how else to help. In a flash, he was behind me, put his hands down my shirt and onto my breast, and lifted me off of my bike and started shoving me into his car. I held onto the doorframe. I don't remember having any real thoughts other than chalk until my finger started slipping off the doorframe. At that moment, I knew if he got me into the car, I would never see my family again. Unsure of my stability, I lifted my legs off of the ground and pushed back against him, my feet on the doorframe. He stumbled back, and in a split second, I decided it would be better off. I would be better off getting back on my bike than I would be running. I was terrified he would come after me and I needed speed. In some type of miracle, I turned and memorized a license plate. He did all of this in broad daylight, and my neighbor was a state trooper. I could see his cruiser in the driveway the whole time. This happened to me in the same vicinity that Tricia was abducted from. We shopped at the same Marsh supermarket that she left from because it was so close. This man was arrested, bonded out, and our city police department dropped the ball all along the way. We were supposed to be notified of his court date so that we could be present. They never did. Eight months later, Tricia disappeared. My mom called the police to point out that this man tried to abduct me in the same area. He said, thanks for calling. Life went on. I think I blocked it out. Fast forward and I'm forty six years old. I made a friend who became a trusted person to talk to one night. She said something that triggered that memory. For the first time in my adult life. I told the story. It was like a movie moment where the world stopped and I felt like my sixteen year old self again. All the emotions came back. I could remember everything, but I couldn't remember his face. I wanted to see his face. I looked everywhere. A Facebook profile with a few family members never used was all I could find. I found an obituary for his mother and learned that his father owns a popular business in a nearby town. He always creeped me out. Some things were starting to lay out, but not enough. Shortly after, as by some kind of connection, a local news reporter did a piece on Tricia, kind of reopening things to see if anything new would come up. I reached out to him. He put me in contact with the private investigator that the family had hired. I gave her all of the details, and she put me in contact with Trisha's parents. We spoke over the phone. It was harper breaking. I gave them all the information that I have. I looked up his name on my case dot gov and the very last entry with the same month and year, but he was charged with sexual battery. I was not sexually battered, but rather an attempted kidnapping, so I wanted to find out if that was in fact my case. I went to the local police department to use their computer system to find out. I told the lady at the desk what I wanted to do. She didn't understand, and I ended up explaining that a man tried to abduct me and I saw my case on my case for sexual battery, and I wanted to see if my name was attached. She said okay and left her desk. She returned with the chief of police and took me to a room that had handcuffs attached to the table. She was asking for names and why I wanted to know. I felt like I was being interrogated. She told me I would have to reach out to another person. She was not helpful at all. I get to my car and call this other person, and this woman was waiting. She already knew what I was calling for and said she could not help me, that I would have to call the state. I ended up being directed to a victim's advocate and I left a voicemail several In fact, she never returned my calls. I felt defeated. I wanted this information for myself and couldn't get it. No one was interested. I went on with life. Today I got a strange urge to watch true crime, not my normal I watch cold Case Files on Netflix. I normally only like to watch cases that get solved, not go cold. I took the title of the show to mean that they were solved. I watched the first episode and they saw the case after twenty something years. I kept watching third or fourth episode. It was a case of a twelve year old girl who was abducted and killed. While they were investigating her death, another attempted abduction occurred and the girl said she knew if he got her in the trunk, she would be dead. It triggered those feelings in me. I started looking for the man, and there is nothing of him. I find his family and can see that he lives in Indiana. No pictures, no activity. I looked over my case again and it's like a divine sign. There was an entry made today that this man still owes two dollars on the case that I believe is me. I got goosebumps. I know it's him that he did that to me in the daylight caddy corner to a state trooper car. He had either done it before or was completely willing to take the risk. Only eight months later, Trisha was taken. No one will listen. What if it's him, what if he has hurt others? And when I read that, the chills I got like insane. Somebody asked said, do you have his name? Is it Larry Dwayne Hall? And they replied back and said, I know his name, but it isn't Larry Hall. And then there is no more additional comments on the post, and that is that. So I don't really know. I feel like all leads, whether or not they are tied back to ut Tricia, are important to investigate and important to look into. Whoever this person is. They obviously have information of him, alleged kidnapping, sexual battery. He is somebody that we need to be looking into in regards to Trisha's disappearance, and for some reason law enforcement isn't. And that confuses me because we should be as a whole society doing everything we can to get this horrible human off of the streets, whether it's Larry Hall, whether it's this guy, whether it's someone else. Completely random we need to be doing what we can to get them off of the streets. But I just wanted to share that because I felt like it was a little bit of a interesting kind of outlier and important to talk about because it popped up in my research for this case. So I thank you guys as always for being here listening to this podcast, giving me a platform to speak every week on a couple of different cold cases to try to got the word out. And I will see you guys on Friday for a brand new episode. I hope you have a fantastic week ahead. Bye.