Fateful Connection

0:07This is one of those cases that haunts you. It's about two missing women that disappeared at the same time.

0:18In 1982, my sister Amy Hurst and her husband Bill moved to Florida. When I was nine years old, my mother left, and I always wondered why. All of a sudden, she stopped calling, and when she didn't call my mother on her birthday, we knew something was wrong. The other young woman that went missing was Wendy Huggy. She was 17 years old. Wendy's mother, Susan, was a Playboy bunny. My name is Angeline Chester, and I worked with her. She flew on Hugh Hefner's plane. She was a jet setter. So Wendy might have felt rejected by her mother, and they fought a lot. She said she wanted to go to Florida and stay with Grandma and Grandpa, and she knew that they could help her out.

1:07She went to a party and disappeared from there. Two women missing for 30 years, where do you start? Now, at that time, we had a serial killer in the area. His thing was to kidnap women, take them out on a boat, put them in the water alive, tied to a cement block, and let them drown and die. September 5, 1982, what happened out here? A fisherman found a body floating in the Gulf of Mexico. This body was weighted down with one concrete block. Oh, boy. You can see how far offshore she had drifted. It had no face. It was badly decomposed, and there was no way to identify it. Was this Amy? Was this Wendy?

1:51The body itself was wrapped in a homemade-looking afghan. Then there was the afghan. It had very distinctive markings. This led us to another suspect. One that's still out there, I think we're about to find him. The cases are connected. We couldn't have solved one without the other, and we're not done yet. Someone thinks they got away with murder. No way.

2:26My concerns are danger. More than 30 years after Amy Hurst and Wendy Huggy disappeared, Detective Lisa Shahneman is about to make an arrest. We had received information that he did carry a gun. She's tracked her suspect from Florida to Michigan, finally hitting pay dirt here in the backwoods town of Dawson Springs, Kentucky. And her fugitive knows she's here. And he told his friend that if I had pushed him any further, that he was going to take the gun out and shoot. This doesn't seem to faze you. Well, of course, I'm going to be cautious. I don't want to take any unnecessary risks. But this case means a lot to Shawneman.

3:12Why is your heart in cold cases? Because they're the hardest. You know, they're the toughest. When I do bring closure to a family, there's nothing better than that. Unless, perhaps, it's two cold cases, intertwined. That's what she's juggling now. Two victims, two distraught families, two eerily similar situations, forever linked. Both began some 30 years ago in Pasco County, Florida, Seaniman's home turf. The first to go missing was a 16-year-old girl named Wendy Huggy, who vanished in April of 1982. Wendy Huggy was a beautiful 5 '8", 5 '9", blonde girl who came to Florida to visit her grandparents and to live here.

4:03And she'd only been here for a short time. Her grandparents were going to pick her up at Countryside Mall. They got a phone call from her and she said, you don't need to pick me up. Don's going to bring me home. Don? Don, whoever that is, unfortunately we don't know. She never arrived home. And that's the last anybody has seen or heard of Wendy Huggy? That is the last anybody has ever seen or heard. Oh, it's my darling girl. Patty Sprague is Wendy's aunt. She was just a girl. She was just a regular little girl. Patty says Wendy moved to Florida from Chicago in part to get away from her mother, Susan, Patty's sister.

4:47I know she didn't always get along with her mother. I know they fought. Who doesn't? Susan, who died a few years ago, was a single mom and a Playboy bunny, which apparently aggravated the usual problems between teenager and mother. Well, it definitely did not involve what people usually think it involves. Angela and Chester, who worked with Susan in the Chicago Playboy Club, says Wendy had no reason to object. The job was basically that of a waitress, but in a costume. Certainly not the same thing as a Playboy playmate. The difference is that a bunny is an employee, we have a uniform, a playmate is nude.

5:30And they are in the centerfold. Doesn't make them bad, it just means that that's the difference. In any case, Susan soon was promoted. to flight attendant on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's private plane. That meant lots of travel and even more problems with Wendy. The fact that she was gone, maybe she thought that she didn't care about her. But Angie says Susan was, in fact, a devoted mother. She was always concerned about her. In Chicago, Wendy often stayed with Susan's parents. and when they moved to Florida, the 16-year-old, who had dropped out of high school, was quick to follow. She just wanted, I guess, to come down here and start over.

6:17She was going to go back to school, and she was very excited about going to work. Her new job in a fast food restaurant was to have started on April 8, 1982. She disappeared the day before. Two days later, the grandparents got very concerned, and they came here to the sheriff's office and reported her missing. The Pasco County Police investigation turned up neither the friends from the mall nor the mysterious Don. But it did stumble across one fact that stopped the investigation cold. Wendy Huggy was married. Under the criteria, that made her an adult. If you're an adult and you want to go missing and there's nothing to lead us to believe that you're a harm to yourself or somebody harmed you, you can go missing.

7:08This is a teenager. Who cares if she's married? She's still missing. I agree with you, but for whatever reasons, he took her out of the system. With the case in effect closed, neither the husband nor anyone else was actively investigated. That infuriates Wendy Huggies' uncle, Robert Richards, but as a former cop, he understands why. I don't think they had a whole lot to go on. Florida has a pretty high transient population. People come and go, and the people that make people disappear can come and go. What seemed to be the handiwork of one of those people surfaced not long after Wendy went missing.

7:51Here off the Florida coast in the Gulf of Mexico, about five months after Wendy Huggy disappeared, a fisherman spotted something odd in the water. He soon realized to his horror that he was looking at a dead body. He left it right where it was and immediately called the Coast Guard. When I first saw the body, all you could see were blue jeans and bare feet. Greg Stout was on the Coast Guard boat sent to the scene. The body itself was wrapped in a homemade-looking afghan in a real bright green bedspread. Was this the body of Wendy Huggy, the teenager so excited about her future and her new life?

8:31Whoever it was, her killer probably had been confident she would never be seen again. Then there was rope around the waist of the body, and then you could look down in this clear water, and you could actually see a concrete block floating below.

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9:30The body found in the Gulf of Mexico in September of 1982 was 27 miles offshore, carried out by the tide. It's kind of floating like a cork. The Coast Guard couldn't pinpoint where the body went in, but theorized it might have been near what's now the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. It had been in the water about a week, rising to the surface as it decomposed, despite the concrete block tied around the waist. The medical examiner was pretty sure that there was blunt trauma to the back of the head. They also thought that she was actually alive when she was tossed in the water. Was there any way, if anybody had known who the relatives were, could they have identified this person?

10:18No, not at all. If you put a body in water over a period of time, it's really the worst condition that you can find a body. Still, the victim's family might have recognized personal effects, as well as that green bedspread and that distinctive afghan. Which was she wrapped in first, the bedspread or the afghan? spread first and then the afghan was on the outside. Wendy Huggy had gone missing about five months before this body was found. Is there any indication at all that an attempt was made to determine if this might be Wendy Huggy? Not that I'm aware of. There was, remember, no ongoing investigation.

10:58So Wendy's family never saw the bedspread, afghan, or the jewelry. Never even knew a body had been found, an oversight that decades later would help solve a crime.

11:14The unidentified body ended up here in this Tampa cemetery in the Potter's Field section in an unmarked grave known only as Jane Doe 82120. It would be years before Jane Doe's true identity was known and then only because of the heartache of another family a family some 1200 miles away just outside flint michigan in 1982 the family of a woman named amy hurst was coping with her sudden disappearance amy hurst also went missing in florida about the same time and in the same county as Wendy Huggy. The two women's descriptions were similar, but Hearst was older, 29, and a mother of two. Oh, gosh, Amy was full of energy.

12:06She was a wonderful mother. Laura Champine was Amy's niece. She just loved her kids to pieces and was very devoted to them. Which made it all the more shocking that spring when Amy announced she and her new husband, Bill, were moving out of state, leaving her kids with her ex-husband. She just came up to the house and said that she was going to Florida and she was going to, you know, we would be able to go down there and see her. She'd be back to visit us. Amy's son Jeff was 8, her daughter Lisa then 10. I can remember her, like, talking about us coming down for Christmas and for Easter and stuff like that.

12:47She just said bye and she left.

12:52I didn't care much for Bill. Amy's sister Sharon blamed the move on Amy's second husband, Bill. He drank a lot. And Bill was abusive. When were you first aware that there was actual domestic violence involved here? I saw the bruises, and there was one incident that I witnessed where he hit her in front of me. I never understood with Amy why she stayed in that kind of a relationship. She didn't need to. Amy and Bill settled in Newport Ritchie in Pasco County, Florida. Bill got a job as a truck driver. Amy worked in a grocery store. At first, she kept in close touch with her family. I had a whole shoebox, as a matter of fact, full of letters.

13:40And Amy always called her mother on her birthday. Until that year. When my grandma's birthday came and went and Amy didn't call, My grandma got on the phone to all of us and, you know, something's wrong. And that's when I called the Pasco County Sheriff's Department. They called me back the next day and said they went out to check and Bill was there. And they asked him about Amy. And he said that they got in a fight three days earlier and she left. They contact her work. They find out that she's not been to work. Nobody's heard from her. Nobody's seen her. Bill Hurst was a suspect in Amy's disappearance from the very start.

14:20Everybody knew that he had something to do with it. His actions only seemed to confirm it. They did ask him if he would take a lie detector test, and he said he would. But when the police showed up the next day, he was already gone. He left in the night. And just as in Wendy Huggies' case, the Hurst investigation stalled before it even began. This time because of a clerical error involving her maiden name, Amy Rose. And when her sisters reported her missing, they reported her as Amy Rose, not Amy Hurst. Her sisters contacted police, but no one ever changed the records. A simple mistake that had disastrous results.

15:02We kept making inquiries over the years and, you know, really getting the run around, not really getting any answers. And did you at any point just acknowledge, even privately, that in all probability we're not going to see Amy again? Yeah. I knew Amy would not go that long without talking to her kids. That is not Amy. As for Bill Hurst... At one point they had found traces of him in one of the New England states. And then after that it just kind of fell off and nobody did anything about it. But 20 years later, a new suspect surfaced. Unfortunately, there was a lot of female bodies that were being recovered in this area.

15:48Were Amy Hurst and Wendy Huggy both victims of a serial killer?

16:02For years, Amy Hurst's family clung to the hope that as long as no body had been found, there still was a possibility Amy was alive, somewhere. Amy's son, Jeff. I always thought for the longest time that she started a new life, maybe. And then one day she would just show off. Amy's sister, Sharon, was sure of it. I remember one time I was driving, and I looked in my rearview mirror, and I could have swore the person in the car behind me was her. I opened my car door and jumped out of my car, and I thought, how stupid, you know? But, you know, you always hope. It was much the same for Wendy Huggies' family.

16:46Her uncle, Robert Richards, says that in the decades after the 16-year-old's disappearance, her distraught mother, Susan, barely could bring herself to mention her daughter's name. I think she had some of the guilt of, you know, maybe I could have kept her here. Maybe I could have changed jobs sooner and been at home more. It was not something that she liked to talk about. Wendy's aunt, Patty Sprague. It was devastating. But I would think at any sort of family gathering, this is sort of the elephant in the room, right? You're always aware that she's not there, you know, when you have Christmas and...

17:29Birthdays. And birthdays, yes, birthdays. In 2001, Wendy would have celebrated her 36th birthday. About that time, some 20 years after she went missing, a Pasco County cop decided to take a fresh look at this very cold case. His name was Robert Hamm. He became fascinated with it, and then to the point of obsessed. Really? I mean, he was determined to find Wendy. Hamm soon unearthed the 1982 report of the body found in the Gulf. In his heart, he knew he was on to something. Now, at that time, we had a serial killer in the area, Opa Chandler. His thing was to kidnap women, take them out on a boat, put them in the water alive, tied to a cement block, and let them drown and die.

18:27And I thought, oh my gosh, it has to be Wendy. He was convinced that she had been kidnapped and she was another victim of his. But from death row, Oba Chandler refused to talk to Bobby Hamm, and eventually Chandler was executed. His silence didn't stop Ham. He retrieved Wendy Huggies' dental records and asked the medical examiner's office to exhume the body. The grave is right over here? Yes. So the exhumation takes place. Everybody thinks that they know who this is already. Oh, Bobby was so sure. He was telling everybody, this is Wendy. I've done it. I found her. It's going to be her. Right. And unfortunately, it wasn't.

19:14He kept trying until he passed away. He kept trying to find her. He didn't give up. I mean, he was devastated. He was discouraged. But he continued to try. And after he was gone, I've continued to try. But for all their efforts, the identity of the body dug up from Potter's Field remained a mystery. But there's a good side to that story. Because she was assumed, now we can get DNA. Well, the medical examiner did some DNA testing, and they had a recreation of her, what she may look like, done and placed her on the Doe network. As in John and Jane Doe. The network is set up to locate the missing and identify the dead.

20:00information about the exhumed body information Bobby Hamm dug up in his failed search for Wendy sat there unnoticed until years later when Amy Hurst's son Jeff went online searching for clues about his mother he was having a really hard time his whole life not knowing what happened to his mother and one day decided that's it I've got to do something and I've got to know I tried I've got to know what happened.

20:31In 2009, 27 years after his mother, Amy, disappeared, Jeff stumbled across the Doe Network website with its description of the body in the Gulf. The artist's rendering didn't look familiar, but something else on the website did. What did you see on there that piqued your interest right away? The bedspread. Jeff and his sister Lisa had loved bouncing on it as children. The bedspread. Anything else? Turquoise jewelry.

21:12An Afghan.

21:18The Afghan really hit home. The Afghans are a big part of our family. My grandmother made everybody Afghans. My mom made them, my aunts made them, everybody made them. And one of them had been wrapped around the body in the Gulf. Amy's sister was sure of that the second she saw the description on the website. It's made of multicolors. It's basically white, but my mother would take all her leftover pieces of yarn and she would make the little squares out of them. And we have numerous Afghans that we all have still today. And all those same colors are in this afghan. This is the afghan that Amy's mother made for her, and it was wrapped around the bedspread, it was wrapped around her body.

22:04You can see why that's something that you would recognize. Oh, absolutely. That's very distinctive. Yes. And each of the sisters had one of these? Yes. No one in Amy Hurst's family needed any more evidence. When I saw the afghans next to her, I was 100 % sure. We knew that it was her.

22:27Despite their certainty, the Afghan and jewelry didn't prove this was Amy Hurst. For that, Shahneman needed hard evidence, and she would find it in, of all places, Potter's Field, where, fatefully, the Hurst and Huggy cases would intersect. The body dug up in 2001. The body that was not Wendy Huggy. Would DNA prove it was Amy Hurst? Tests and analysis to match it to Jeff's DNA took two years. I would have thought you'd be pretty frustrated. I was. Why did it take so long? There's so much backlog DNA, and it just waited and waited and waited and waited. In July of 2011, an excited Detective Shahneman called Jeff with the results.

23:15She just says, are you sitting down? I was like, do I need to be? And she says, I don't know, she might want to. It's her, Jeff. We found her. It's her. It wasn't good news at all. But it was good news for me to know that we knew where she was at. And I just started shaking. Just shaking, shaking, shaking. He called me and we cried together. You were glad to know that you had an answer, but then it was permanent, you know. It was like she just died, because you just found out to you she had just died.

23:53After 30 years, there was no longer any question. Amy Hurst had been murdered. And for Amy's family, no question who did it. We knew absolutely it was Bill. But we have no way to prove it. I thought he would get away with it.

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24:52Amy Hurst's killer had gone unpunished for 30 years, only to be tripped up by a very stupid mistake. When we confirmed that she was murdered and where she was found, there could be nobody but Bill, especially when she was found with the blankets off her own bed. You don't go off with somebody that kills you, and then they bring you home and wrap you in your own blankets to dispose of your body. You were at home when you were murdered. And it doesn't take a great detective to figure that out. Now all this detective had to do was find him. Did you at that point know where Bill Hurst was? I thought he was in Michigan.