MYSTERIOUS DEATHS OF: Steven Altman & Mary Ann Hayes

0:00Ashley Flowers:Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Britt, and I have big news. One of my favorite seasonal shows, CounterClock, is back with a brand new season, and it is wild. Host Delia D 'Ambra is digging into the 2008 Lane Bryant murders. I mean, this isn't just a recap. It is a reinvestigation. She's talking to law enforcement, people from the community, even sources who have never spoken publicly until now. And you know I love a show that asks all the questions. Listen to CounterClock Season 8 now wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And today's story is about two deaths in one family, a mother and her son.

0:40And on paper, both died by suicide. But their daughter and sister, Robin Altman, had this nagging feeling for decades that something just didn't add up. And that feeling builds when an old friend of her brother's tells her some things that Robin has never heard before. And it leads her on an investigation of her own. Because what if these weren't suicides at all, but murders staged to look like suicides? And if that's true, who would want both her brother and her mother dead? This is the story of Stephen Altman and Marianne Hayes.

1:48In 2013, 51-year-old Robin Altman is recovering from surgery at her home in Charleston, South Carolina. Laid up in bed and kind of going a little stir crazy, she starts poking around on Ancestry.com just to like pass the time. And she's curious because there is a lot about her family's history that has never sat right with her. Her brother, Stephen, took his own life unexpectedly back in 1984 when he was just 21. And then her mom, Marianne, died by suicide 12 years later in 1996. And both deaths just never made sense to her. I mean, few suicides do make sense to those closest to the people who are left behind.

2:26But little things made her suspicious that maybe one or both of them could have been murdered. But she'd never known what to do with those suspicions. I mean, honestly, she still didn't know what to even do now as she's poking around the Internet. Because, like, truthfully, she doesn't know what she's looking for on Ancestry.com.

2:44Ashley Flowers:Yeah, I was going to say, what would be there? Yeah, not the place that I would think to go for, like, the whys or the clues to a murder. But whatever it was that pulled her there, whatever little voice was in the back of her head, it knew something. Because when she starts typing in her family members' names to the search bar, what comes up surprises her. It's an entry for her brother and her mom. But they're in a family tree made by a woman named Rachel Kunin. Now, Robin actually knows this woman. Rachel went to high school with her brother, Stephen, but she also knows that they're not related.

3:21So curious why she would have made this thing, she reaches out to Rachel like, hey, long time no talk. Why'd you do this weird thing? And Rachel responds pretty quickly and she tells Robin that she was really close to Stephen. She actually had a big crush on him when he was a teenager. And so she put his name on her tree because she wanted to make sure there was some kind of record of him online. And then she just added Marianne to the tree too. Okay. It's a little odd, and Robin was a bit confused, but like nothing about this seems malicious or sinister. I don't know, maybe the same little nagging thing that brought Robin to this site brought Rachel there as well.

4:00Because it turns out that these two women needed to find each other. And I don't know if there would have been any other way. Now the two of them end up connecting, and when they get to chatting, the conversation is circling a lot around her brother and his death. really how Robin was blindsided by it because he didn't seem to be experiencing suicidal thoughts from what she knew. He'd been making plans for the future. He was excited about a date that he had the very next day after he died. And that is when Rachel begins to unload. She, her sister, and her mom, who Stephen was close with, all thought his death was suspicious too.

4:37Rachel actually tells her the night before Stephen died, he drove past her house. Bunch of their friends were like together hanging out and he told them that he was just going to run this errand for his stepdad and then he was going to come back in an hour. But then he just never returned. Next thing she heard, he was found dead. And that detail stops Robin in her tracks because that would have been one of the last times someone saw her brother before he died. And she never knew that he was going to run an errand for their stepdad. She just knew that at 7.15 the next morning, her brother was found hanging by his neck from a crane hoist at their stepdad's workshop in Chicago.

5:17Now, their stepdad, Don, hadn't been there when Stephen was found. So everyone just assumed that Stephen had picked that place. I don't know, maybe so his family wouldn't have to find him. I mean, Stephen, like, worked at the shop from time to time, so it wasn't odd for him to be there or anything like that. But Don had never said anything in all those years about Stephen running an errand for him the night before.

5:39Ashley Flowers:Yeah, so that would make this, like, brand new information that never came out for like decades? And listen, him running an errand for Dawn might not even have really been what he was like doing. Like who knows what he's telling his friends or what he was like really going to do. I mean, I think the part that really sticks out to Robin is just the fact that the very night that Stephen, like right before he dies, he's telling someone he's going to be right back. He's giving every indication in the hours leading up to his death that he wasn't planning to kill himself. He was planning on coming back.

6:14Now, Rachel went on to tell Robin that her mom had such a weird feeling about this whole thing that she actually called the Chicago Police Department, urging them to investigate. She'd been a sheriff's deputy before, so she hoped that they would maybe give a little weight to her suggestion. But according to Rachel's sister Becky, their response, like the Chicago police's response, was something to the effect of like, please stop calling us. Now, this obviously isn't proof of anything. But whatever tiny suspicion she had planted deep inside of her being Robin, it grew larger that day. And this gave her the push she needed.

6:51Because that same year, 2013, she filed a FOIA request with Chicago PD for her brother's records. And you know what? While she's at it, she submits one with Norfield PD for her mom's case too. Now when the response comes back for Stephen's case, she's a little shocked. All Robin receives is this short letter from Chicago PD saying they searched for the records and they don't have anything, which doesn't seem right. Like she knows that they didn't do a big investigation. I mean, police never so much as called her or her mom for an interview. I mean, they never asked like any questions.

7:25Ashley Flowers:And they basically ruled that a suicide without talking to anyone in the family. That's weird, right? Well, I mean, they talked to Don because he ended up showing up that morning to work and then he found police over at his workshop. but it seems like that is the only person that police talk to, apart from maybe like a couple of employees there. And we have no idea what those employees said either, because like I said... No documents. No documents, right. But even suicides, though, should have some sort of record. Yeah, but there's just nothing? There is nothing in Stephen's case, the one that she was getting the most suspicious of.

7:58But it turns out it was actually her mother's death that was really going to unlock the mystery. Because in the same year, 2013, her FOIA for Marianne's file is approved. And it is the total opposite of Stephen's case. There is a treasure trove of documents that paint a picture of her mother's death that is completely different from the story she has been living with for the last 17 years.

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11:19Ashley Flowers:Their Therapist Match Commitment does the initial matching work so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. It works. BetterHelp has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash crime donkey. That's betterhelp.com slash crimejunkie. The police reports Robin had in front of her included a handwritten statement from her stepdad, Don, explaining how he'd found his wife dead in their bedroom on September 25th, 1996.

12:01Don told police that he had tried calling his wife from work that day, but no one picked up. And when he got home at his usual time, he found her laying on the floor in just her underwear and a shirt with an extension cord wrapped around her neck like three or four times. Now, by the time police arrived at the scene, Dawn had already removed the cord from her neck and placed a towel over her legs. There's no note. And strangely, it looks like Marianne was in the middle of trimming her nails when she died because they found and collected some nail clippers, fingernail clippings, and one of Marianne's broken fingernails, which had blood on it.

12:38That doesn't read suicide to me. No, not at all. Especially because it's not like the extension cord was tied to anything. It was just like wrapped around her neck like a ligature someone would have held and then tightened around her neck. And someone must have seen the obviousness of what this really looked like because Northfield police at least started an investigation. The reports detail that they collected all of the stuff that I just mentioned along with the cord, which had stains on it, and they took vaginal swabs at Marianne's autopsy. Now, those swabs turned up an unknown male profile, and the crime lab recommended performing an analysis if DNA from any suspects were collected, which, no surprise, based on the later ruling of suicide, it never was.

13:27Now, police also questioned Robin alongside her younger half-brother and sister, who are Marianne's children with Dawn. And the reports from police recounting those interviews were in the file. And this is when Robin realized that she was really onto something big. Because she said most of what the report about her interview says wasn't true. It says that Robin told them three major things that I assume is what, like, helped shape their suicide theory. One, that her mom had struggled with mental health issues and had been refusing to go get treatment on a regular basis. Number two, that her mom had threatened suicide before.

14:09I mean, it specifically mentions one time when Dawn threatened to divorce her, and it says that she had even been hospitalized for attempting suicide a couple of years earlier. And the third thing, that two weeks before her mom's death, Dawn took her and her half-siblings to dinner without her mom to tell them that their mom was suicidal. And Robin couldn't believe what she was reading because none of that is what she said. Or like part of it is what she said, but it is all taken so out of context. And then some stuff is just like downright made up. So like, yes, her mom had struggled after her brother's suicide.

14:46She felt deep guilt and sadness after Stephen's death. And that took a toll on her mental health over the following 12 years.

14:53Ashley Flowers:Yeah, I would imagine naturally. But she says not only did she tell the police that her mom had been regularly going to mental health treatments for years, she says she told them in no uncertain terms that her mother was not suicidal. And yes, that dinner where Dawn took her and her younger siblings out did happen. But there was a key piece from her interview that was missing from the report. She told us that when Dawn said at dinner that Marianne was suicidal, Robin pushed back. She did not buy it when Dawn was saying all of this. And she didn't believe it after her mother's death when she was talking to police either.

15:29Now, as for the past attempts at suicide, this is the one that totally blows her away. Because according to Robin, her mom had not tried to take her own life ever. There was this one time 10 years after Stephen died. This would have been 1994. where Marianne's younger son, Brian, walked in on his mom with this bathrobe tie around her neck as if she was choking herself, which to be fair could be construed as a suicide attempt. But Robin says that's not really what was going on because she shared a letter with us that Marianne wrote to Brian after this incident where she explains that she wasn't trying to harm herself.

16:10She would never leave her children. She wrote that she just wanted to feel what Stephen was feeling. And we did reach out to Brian to ask about this, but we haven't heard back as of this recording.

16:20Ashley Flowers:It feels to me like police were just cherry-picking facts from interviews to fit their narrative. From her, definitely, yeah. But I don't even get where the suicide narrative is coming from. Like, she's telling police her mom wasn't suicidal. The scene isn't reading a suicide. Did they just pull this out of thin air? Not exactly. I don't know what conclusions they came to on their own. but there was someone pushing a suicide narrative. And that was Don. In his own written police statement, he said that the couple had been talking about divorce, but Marianne didn't want one. He's the one who told them about her threatening suicide over it.

17:00And that seems to have bled into Robin's statement, even though she never said that. And in a later conversation with police, when they asked him if he had had sex with his wife recently, he said he didn't recall 100%, but more than likely they did. which could explain away anything they may have found when testing the vaginal swabs. So I believe everything they learned from him played a huge role in how this case shook out. Maybe they assumed that if they found any DNA, it just would have been her husband's. And he's saying she was suicidal because he was going to leave her. She's been a mess since after her son committed suicide.

17:40What a dark, sad family. So they never ended up testing the evidence that they collected. And the M.E. ruled Marianne's death suicide by self-strangulation. And with that, the case closed. But according to Robin, Don, who seems to be the basis for their ruling, should not be considered the most reliable narrator when it comes to their relationship. The couple had been together for 28 years, but it sounds like their marriage was always pretty rocky. Robin says that Dawn was controlling and verbally and emotionally abusive. And she said that, yeah, they had talked about divorce, like Dawn said, but her mom was actually happy about it.

18:22According to a letter that Marianne had written her son Brian, Dawn offered to buy her out of their house in Northfield and then give her a condo that they had in Florida. And in the year leading up to her death, she spent months fixing that condo up. She was jazzed and ready for a new chapter. But just a few months before she died, something happened. Marianne moved back into their Northfield home where Don was. But according to Robin, it's not like they were back together. They were still separated. They slept in different bedrooms. And Robin says that Don took back the condo offer. But listen, put all the divorce stuff aside.

19:01It could be considered like a he said, she said, right? and people might argue that a mother might not share the realities of her marriage with her daughter, even if her daughter was grown and in her 30s at that time. Fine, whatever. There was something else that always bothered Robin about the idea of ruling her mother's death self-strangulation, something she even told police back in 1996. Robin says that sometime in the eight weeks before Marianne's death, Her mom had tripped and shattered both of her wrists so badly that one wrist required bone grafts. And she was still healing from that. That is just eight weeks before.

19:42Yeah. Shattered. So in her mind, she always felt like it would have been super hard for her mom to even pull the cords tight enough around her neck on her own.

19:52Ashley Flowers:Was that even mentioned in the report or did they leave that out too? Oh, it was in there. But officers framed that as just another bad thing in Marianne's life that could have contributed to her suicide. Like, it's so odd. But listen, by the time Robin is done reading everything, she's no longer just suspicious about her mom's death. She is convinced that her mom's suicide was actually a murder. So Robin reaches out to Northfield PD in 2018. And luckily, she finds someone at least willing to listen. And she lays out everything that doesn't add up. And she requests that they reopen her mom's case.

20:29I mean, at minimum, they should still have the physical evidence that they could test and see what comes of that. And it seems like, at first, Northfield PD actually does take her seriously. Nearly 22 years after Mary Ann's death, they decide to reexamine the evidence. the vaginal swabs, the broken fingernail, and the stains from the cord. It's all resubmitted to the Northeastern Illinois Regional Crime Lab.

20:53Ashley Flowers:Like, I've been doing this long enough. I'm honestly kind of still surprised that they had the evidence. Oh, yeah, same. Now, it takes a little bit of time, but when the results come back, there's not, like, much that's new because even though they tested a lot of things, the cord didn't yield anything. Now, they did get a DNA sample from underneath Marianne's broken fingernail, which would have been great. But there wasn't enough DNA for profiling on that one. And then her vaginal swab, they just got the same unknown male profile like they did the first time. They tested it back in like the 90s.

21:26Ashley Flowers:And if it's Don's, he's just going to say they had sex before she died, even though he's not, what was it, 100 % sure? Yeah, I assume that he is the first one that they're going to want to at least test so they can say he's in or out. Right. Because if he's in, complicated, right? Right. If he's out, very black and white. Cut and dry, yeah. Now, is he the person that they go to first? I don't know. We have the files that show after they get these results, they bring someone in for questioning. And they ask them, that person, to provide a DNA sample. This person initially said yes, but then they asked to speak with a lawyer.

22:01And when that happened, they end up refusing to give a sample.

22:05Ashley Flowers:Okay, so... The problem is I can't tell you who the person is because the name is redacted. Does Robin know who it is? I mean, so she's seen the redacted file. She believes she knows who it is. I'm told by our lawyers I shouldn't say who she thinks because it's not proof. It's just her opinion. I've also got an opinion. There's only so many people it could be, right? Yeah. I cannot speculate. But when this person refuses to cooperate, police don't go looking for anyone else. I mean, I know that much because the very next sentence in the report is that the case will remain closed. So our subpoena is not a thing anymore.