The Rumor Mill (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

22:37It's suggested that whoever did this, they likely were relatively familiar with the layout of the house and had probably been there before. So maybe this is somebody that they all knew. Faust pointed to the blood that was on Candace and Brandon's shirts and he asked them where it came from. And Candace would admit that before she called 911, she and her brother had desperately gone looking for their mom in the room, in this horrible bloody bedroom. But they couldn't find her, and in their efforts to find her, they had gotten blood on themselves. Now, of course, Faust understood that these kids had been through this horribly traumatic thing, and they were just looking for their mom.

23:14But he also now knew that very likely their crime scene was contaminated now because the kids went in there and touched a bunch of stuff. But of course, he did not tell the kids that he was in any way annoyed with them or that they had done anything wrong. Instead, he just told the kids to go inside and change their clothes and then give the clothes that had blood on them to the forensics techs because they needed to collect them as evidence. And he also told the kids to not go anywhere near their mother's bedroom. Candace nodded and stood up and grabbed her little brother by the hand. And as they walked back towards the house, a sheriff's deputy came up to Faust and told the detective that he should also make sure to talk to Bonnie's oldest child.

23:52She had a 15-year-old son whose name was Bradley. That evening, Detective Faust paced down the hallway of the Pima County Juvenile Court Center, holding a file folder in his hand. When he opened the door to a small office, a teenage boy was already there waiting, and Faust recognized him from the mugshot in the folder he had as Bradley Sanborn, Bonnie's oldest child. Faust walked in, and as gently as he could, he told Bradley that his mother was missing. And based on the blood and the knife they'd found in her bedroom, she'd likely been viciously attacked, kidnapped, and she could even be dead.

24:27So Faust knew that Bradley could not have attacked his mother, because he'd been here, in the juvenile detention center, the whole time the attack took place. But Faust had done some digging on Bradley's friends. He slapped the file folder he was carrying down onto the desk in front of Bradley and began flipping through it, showing Bradley the information he'd found about, in particular, his friend Jason Horbachevsky. Jason was a known gang member, and according to several informants, he was known for carrying a knife around. And sometimes, apparently, he would pull that knife out and stab himself in the side of the head.

25:02And so Faust wondered out loud if the knife they'd found in Bonnie's bedroom was Bradley's friend Jason's. And maybe the attack on her was retribution for his mother calling the cops on Jason and Bradley that morning. But when Faust looked at Bradley for his reaction, he saw there were all these tears rolling down his cheeks, and Bradley choked out that he really didn't know anything. And as much as he argued with his mom, he would never hurt her. To Faust, Bradley's reaction actually seemed really genuine, and so he immediately figured that if the gang Jason was a part of, you know, was responsible for whatever happened to Bonnie, Bradley appeared out of the loop.

25:41And so to get a better read on this situation, Faust felt like, you know, trying to ask Bradley questions was not going to go very far. Instead, he would just go to Jason and talk to him. Later that same night, Faust sat in the station with a cup of coffee, combing through records on Bradley and also on Jason and Jason's gang. After speaking to Bradley earlier, Faust had immediately tried to locate and interview Jason, which proved to be much more difficult than he'd anticipated. He knew Jason was not in police custody since he'd been released pretty much immediately after the payphone debacle.

26:15But Jason also was not at any addresses that he'd been associated with in the past, so it was hard to tell where he even was. So, a few hours ago, Faust had sent out officers to speak to as many members of Jason's gang as possible to see if they knew where he was, and also to see if they knew anything about Bonnie. Now, so far, they had not located Jason, and nobody had brought anything up about Bonnie, but just then, Faust's office door opened, and a deputy told him there was someone he really ought to speak to that was out in the lobby. And so Faust got up, he went in the lobby, and who was waiting for him but none other than Jason.

26:51When Faust walked out there, Jason stood up from his chair, acting cocky and confident, and told Faust that he'd heard the sheriff's department was looking for him, and he was there to prove he had nothing to hide. And Faust, he didn't even bother asking where Jason had been. Instead, he just led him into an interrogation room, and when he sat down across from his newest suspect, he noticed the buttons on Jason's shirt. They were small and brown, just like the button that was found on Bonnie's bedroom floor. And also, a few of the buttons on his shirt appeared to be missing. Now, Faust controlled his excitement and didn't show it, and decided pretty much right away that he was not going to ask about the button, at least not at first.

27:32He didn't want to overplay his hand. Instead, he started the interview by asking Jason some standard questions about his relationship with Bradley, and also by extension, his relationship with Bonnie, Bradley's mom, and also where Jason was at the time of the attack. And Jason would admit that he was mad about Bonnie calling the police on him and Bradley. But he didn't have some big plan to get revenge. He insisted that he didn't know where Bonnie was or what had happened to her, and he'd been at home asleep on the night she was attacked. And at the end of the interview, he agreed to give Faust a DNA sample, and he even turned over his shirt with the missing brown buttons for forensic analysis.

28:12And so after that, Faust released Jason and decided it was time to call it a day.

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30:49The next morning, Sunday, December 10th, so a day after Bonnie went missing, Faust sat in his office and sorted through all the information his team had collected the day before. While Faust had interviewed Bradley and Jason, other members of his team had spoken to Bonnie's friends, family, and neighbors. But so far, it looked like nobody knew anything that was helpful. A few neighbors had mentioned that the Sanborns had family problems, but apart from that, they all said Bonnie seemed nice and they had no idea who would want to hurt her. Faust continued reading, looking for some kind of clue in all the interviews, when his office phone rang.

31:23He picked it up and the man on the line sounded terrified, and he said he had a tip in the Bonnie Sanborn case. The man explained that earlier that morning, he'd seen a news report about Bonnie's disappearance and how the detectives were looking for her car, which the police had learned was a light blue Chrysler. And he said that just the day before, he and his wife had actually passed a car just like that on their morning run. It was abandoned on the side of the road in the desert just outside of town. He said at the time, he and his wife had not gotten too close to the car, and they really hadn't thought much of it until they had seen this news report.

31:58And so after seeing the report just a few minutes ago, he and his wife had gone back to the desert to see if the car was still there. And he said not only was the car still there, but when they walked up close, they could see in the back seat what appeared to be a woman's body. Faust immediately wrote down the car's location, and when he looked at a map, he realized it was only about a half mile away from Bonnie's house. He thanked the man, hung up the phone, and then he got in his car and he raced out toward the desert. And when he got past the edge of town into the open desert, he saw right up ahead a light blue Chrysler parked in the sand.

32:32He stopped his car on the shoulder near the car, he got out, and he approached the Chrysler, and he peered through the window, and almost immediately, he did see a woman's body. It was Bonnie's body, and she was slumped over in the back seat, just as the man had said. Bonnie's arms were bound behind her back, and there was a socks stuffed in her mouth and the lower half of her body was naked. And for Faust, you know, in seeing this, he wasn't surprised, but at the same time, he had held out hope that maybe Bonnie was alive. You know, just seeing her dead in such a horrible way in the back of this car was just, it was heartbreaking.

33:07And so Faust went back to his car, he radioed the station, and he waited until a forensics team arrived. And then at that point, he went back over to the Chrysler and he began to examine the body. Faust put on gloves and he leaned into the car and he lifted up Bonnie's head and he found there were wounds all over her skull as if she'd been repeatedly struck in the head with something very sharp and her partial nudity made it seem likely that she was also sexually assaulted. There were also clear defensive wounds on her hands and forearms which suggested she had fought back hard against her killer.

33:39One of the forensics officers pulled out a blacklight and began running it across the back seat of the car to check for potential DNA evidence. And Faust watched as the forensics officer ran the light over Bonnie's leg and it lit up a spot. And the officer told Faust that almost definitely that spot was the killer's semen. And so he swabbed the area and put the swab into an evidence bag and told Faust that in a matter of maybe a few weeks, they should get the DNA profile back from the lab and maybe they'd know who their killer was.

34:14In the meantime, the fingerprints found in Bonnie's bedroom were analyzed, and they had come back with a match that really surprised Detective Faust. All the fingerprints and that bloody handprint on the pillow belonged to Bonnie's 13-year-old daughter, Candace. And even though Faust really did not want to consider that a 13-year-old girl had in some way helped with a plot to kill her own mother, he now had to consider it, not only because of the handprint and fingerprints, but also because there was a long record of family problems inside of the Sanborn house. Now, obviously, Candace could not have committed this crime on her own, but she certainly could have helped whoever did.

34:53So Faust confronted Candace, and when he did, she just broke down sobbing. She said she had just been really scared and confused and was just looking in the bedroom for her mom and just didn't realize what she was doing by getting her prints everywhere. And looking at this scared teenager, Faust knew that Candace really didn't make sense as a potential suspect here. But he still felt like Bonnie's killer had to be somebody who knew Bonnie personally and had been in her house before. And there was one person who still had not been ruled out. Bonnie's husband, Robert. Later that day, Faust was sitting at his desk with the phone pressed to his ear.

35:29He was on hold and had been for some time. And as he tried to tune out the awful music that was playing on the line, he looked down at the handwritten list of airline names and flight numbers that were on his desk. Bonnie's husband, Robert, had been working in Maryland for the past couple of months, and he had not been scheduled to come back home to Tucson on the weekend his wife was killed. But just because he claimed that, that he had been in Maryland that whole weekend, didn't mean he actually was. There were multiple flights from Maryland back to Tucson that, in theory, he could have secretly taken to come home, kill his wife, and then go back to work in time for his next shift.

36:06So Faust had compiled a list of every single flight Robert could have theoretically taken, and one by one he was calling the airlines to check the passenger manifests. And so far there hadn't been a Robert Sanborn on any of the flights he had checked, and now he'd made it to the very last flight on that list. And just then, the on-hold music suddenly cut out, and the woman on the line told Faust that she had triple-checked, and there was no Robert Sanborn on that flight either, the one from Maryland to Tucson. And he thanked her, hung up, and sighed. Now, keep in mind, this took place before the events that happened on 9-11.

36:41Since 9-11, air travel has been much more rigidly controlled, especially in the United States. I mean, security is so, so much higher. But pre-9-11, that really wasn't the case. I mean, people didn't even necessarily have to show their ID to get on a domestic flight. And so Faust knew right now, even though he's being told that Robert's name didn't show up on the manifest of any of these flights, it didn't really rule him out because he could have theoretically been traveling under a fake name. But there was a next step that would show if Robert had something to do with this, and that would be to ask Robert for a DNA sample and hope that when the evidence came back from the lab, it would be conclusive enough to give a clear answer.

37:34One morning in early January of 1996, so about a month after Bonnie was murdered, Faust answered his office phone and he heard a tech from the crime lab on the other end. In the past few weeks, there had been five more murders in the Tucson area that Faust and his team were now dealing with. So when the lab tech said he had results in the Bonnie Sanborn case, it actually took Faust a few seconds to remember which murder that was for. But once he remembered, he quickly sat down at his desk and he grabbed a pen to take notes. And he held his breath as the lab tech told him that they had tested the sample found on Bonnie's leg, and it was not a match for her husband Robert, nor was it a match for her son's friend, Jason Horbachevsky.

38:17Those brown buttons on Jason's shirt also didn't come back as matching the button that was found in Bonnie's bedroom. So it really was just a coincidence that they looked alike to the naked eye. Faust was disappointed, but he knew this was going to be a possibility. And he had a backup plan. He asked the lab tech to run the DNA sample against the DNA of every sex offender on the state registry to see if there was a match there. But as the crime lab slowly began doing that, they kept calling Faust to update him that they had not found a match yet. And eventually, the search for a DNA match ultimately just stalled, and Faust was pulled onto other cases.

38:53And so by that summer, it was looking like Bonnie's murder case might go cold. Then, after nine months without any progress, an anonymous tip came in. That summer, in September of 1996, Detective Faust sat inside of an interrogation room at the sheriff's department across from a 40-year-old drug dealer named Lyle Winstead. The anonymous tipster had said that Lyle had sold drugs to several people in Bonnie's neighborhood, and he'd said some things about the case that the tipster thought were very concerning. And when Faust had dug through Lyle's records, he'd found that Lyle had a history of violent crimes involving knives.

39:32Sitting inside the interrogation room, Lyle seemed obviously nervous and very jumpy. And when Faust started asking him questions about Bonnie's murder, Lyle made excuses for the killer, saying that maybe the killer wasn't such a bad guy. Maybe he was just, quote, on a bad trip. Now, Faust thought this was incredibly suspicious to be talking that way. So he asked Lyle for a DNA sample, and he got one and he sent it off to the crime lab. and Faust had to wait several weeks for the results. And when they finally came in, Lyle Winstead was not a match. And at that point, Faust was feeling really frustrated.

40:09I mean, they'd already put in so much work with really nothing to show for it, and he didn't want the momentum on the case to die again. So before he put Bonnie's file back on the shelf, he decided to go back to square one and make sure there wasn't anything he just plain missed. The next month, between all the other cases he was working on, Faust found time to go literally door-to-door through Bonnie's neighborhood and re-interview everybody his team had already spoken to almost a year ago. Faust knew how gossip spread in quiet communities like this one, and even though nobody had been able to offer any leads the first time around, he wondered if maybe anything unusual might have surfaced since then.

40:48So he knocked on one door after another, and eventually, at a house down the street, a woman told him that she didn't know anything personally, but there was a rumor circulating around the neighborhood that he might want to look into. So Faust did. And after so many frustrating dead ends to this point, it was ultimately this rumor that did allow him to solve the case.

41:17Based on that rumor, and also DNA and other evidence that was later uncovered, this is what police believe happened to Bonnie Sanborn on December 9, 1995.

41:34Around 2.30 in the morning, Bonnie's killer watched her house from a hiding spot where nobody could see them. The killer knew the Sanborns had been trying to move to Maryland, but the killer felt like before they did go to Maryland, if they did that, there was something the killer had to do. Around 3 a.m., as the killer was watching the house, they saw the light in Bonnie's living room finally go dark, and then the killer saw some movement behind the curtains in one of the bedroom windows, and then that lamp went out, leaving the entire house completely dark. The killer had intentionally waited for this moment.

42:07They wanted to make sure that not just Bonnie, but her children were asleep by the time they went inside. And so now that the lights were off and that it seemed like the coast was clear, the killer grabbed their flex ties and also their chipping hammer and then began making their way towards the home. A chipping hammer is a very particular type of hammer that has a sort of typical one side that you would use to strike something, but the back of that hammer is sharp, almost like a pickaxe. And so with this barbaric tool they were about to use in hand, they slowly crept their way across Bonnie's backyard right up to the sliding glass door at the back of the house.

42:45And they found it was unlocked, just like they thought it would be. After all, they'd been to this house before. They sort of understood this one typically stayed unlocked. And they also knew what was on the other side of this door. It was Bonnie's bedroom. After sliding open the door, the killer stepped in and they found Bonnie asleep under the covers in her bed. And so thinking here was their chance, the killer began moving towards the bed. But as they stepped closer, a floorboard creaked and Bonnie stirred awake. And she rolled over and looked in the direction of the creaking sound and made eye contact with the killer.

43:21And the killer knew they had to strike. So they grabbed a sock on the ground, jumped on top of Bonnie, and before she could scream, they jammed the sock into her mouth. They held her head, and then with that chipping hammer, they began striking her head over and over again, spraying blood all over the walls. Once Bonnie stopped struggling, but before she stopped breathing, the killer used those flex ties to bind her hands behind her back. Then, as she was laying there, unable to defend herself, they searched around for her purse. And when they found it, they dumped it out on the bed, and after they had emptied it, they found her car keys.

43:57And so they grabbed the keys, and then the killer picked up Bonnie, still very much alive, and they carried her out that sliding door into the backyard and then out into the garage. There, they used her car keys to unlock Bonnie's car, the blue Chrysler, and they put Bonnie in the back seat. Then they hopped in the driver's seat, and they drove the car out into the desert where they parked on the side of the road. Then they climbed into the back seat where Bonnie was still very much alive, but mortally wounded and bound and couldn't go anywhere, and they sexually assaulted her literally as she died.

44:30When the killer was done with Bonnie, they simply got out of the car and left it where it was and walked back into town. And as the sun began to rise, the killer wandered right back down Bonnie Street in the direction of the Sanborn house. It would turn out Detective Faust had been so focused on finding the killer amongst Bonnie's immediate family and friends that he really hadn't even considered somebody else who was literally physically closest to the Sanborns, her across-the-street neighbor, 22-year-old Freddie Roivill. Now, Freddie was not actually, you know, emotionally close with the Sanborns, but he and his dad had, in the past, gone out of their way to help Bonnie, you know, by doing some repair work at her house.

45:16But what Faust had learned when he had gone back and re-interviewed all the people on the street to see if he had missed something, one of the other neighbors, who was not remotely involved in what happened to Bonnie, told Faust that there was actually a rumor that Freddy had found Bonnie attractive. And there was also another rumor floating around that Faust learned that previously a woman had been assaulted by a younger man in this neighborhood and that maybe it was Freddy. Now, it's unknown if Freddy actually was the subject of that second rumor. But it was enough for Faust and the police to go collect DNA samples from every young man on the block, and wouldn't you know it, Freddy's DNA came back as a match.

45:59Freddy Roivole was arrested in January of 1997, a little over a year after Bonnie's murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

46:18A quick note about our stories. They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

46:32The Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone. This episode was written by Kate Gallagher. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille Callahan. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacasio and Cole Lacasio. Additional audio editing by Jordan Stidham. Production coordination by Samantha Collins. Production support by Antonio Minata and Delana Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner.

47:10Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballin Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

47:47So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.

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