Patrice Endres

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2:20Listener discretion is advised. My name is Sarah Turney and this is Voices for Justice.

2:31Today I'm discussing the case of Patrice Endres. When Patrice goes missing in just a 13-minute window from her salon in 2004, the community rushes to help with the search. And as details continue to develop in her case, it leaves the public wondering if what happened to her could be at the hands of a serial killer or someone closer to home. This is the case of Patrice Andres. Early in the morning on Thursday, April 15, 2004, in Cherokee County, Georgia, 38-year-old Patrice Andres is starting her day like a lot of us aspire to, with a solid workout. Her 15-year-old son, D.W., or Pistol as he's more affectionately known, remembers waking up to the familiar sound of his mom's feet pounding away on the treadmill.

3:21Patrice had a pretty solid routine. She'd wake up, work out, get ready for work, take Pistol to school, pick him up, maybe work some more, and repeat. She was the proud owner of Tambor's Trim and Tan in Forsyth, Georgia, and was really, truly loved by her community. When you read and hear statements from her friends and family, she is the definition of the she lights up a room trope. And it truly seems earned. One story I really loved was Patrice helping with a late night home color disaster. I think we've all been there. This was for her longtime client, Rami Tucker. Basically, Rami had her senior pictures the next day, and she was freaking out.

4:01But Patrice came to the rescue. Rami says Patrice was actually the only person that had ever cut her hair. And eventually, she earned the nickname Saint Patrice. She and her friends later booked Patrice for basically an all-day glam session before prom. She says Patrice just kind of felt like a cool older sister. Her salon was just off a two-lane highway that I assume wasn't insanely busy in 2004 because people would slow down and honk and wave at Patrice through the screen door. And her friend Anne would stop by nearly every afternoon just to catch up. She remembers her last conversation with Patrice.

4:37Patrice said, woman, are you coming back tomorrow? And Anne said, of course. When you look at this case, it's just clear that Patrice had found her community, her calling, and she just loved making people feel beautiful. But Patrice wasn't all sugar. People loved hanging around the salon and talking to Patrice, and after a while she'd put them to work washing towels. When she was asked if she was ever concerned about working late at night alone, She'd joke that she always carried a pair of scissors. It really does seem that Patrice built this beautiful life for herself and Pistol. Though Pistol and his stepfather, Rob Endres, both admit that there was tension in the home.

5:18Pistol was born in 1988. His father is Patrice's ex-boyfriend, Don Black. Don is 24 years older than Patrice, and according to Patrice's sister, Kylene, Now, in the statement that I found, she's pretty vague, but she alludes to basically Dawn using drugs. She says she didn't approve of Patrice's lifestyle, and they drifted apart by the late 1980s. But Kylene says everything changed when Patrice got pregnant with Pistol. She went to school to pursue her dream of making people feel beautiful. She and Dawn broke up, but they did stay friends, and according to Pistol, were great co-parents. And then she met Rob Endres when he walked in for a haircut at her salon one day.

5:58She was 30, he was 50, and they fell in love. Together, they opened Tambor's Trimentan in 1996. Tambor is Patrice's maiden name. The next March, they got married, and spent their honeymoon at Bike Week in Daytona Beach. They'd go back each year on a Harley. And according to Rob, they had plans to open up a bed and breakfast in Flagler Beach, Florida in a few years. Rob says Patrice would even match their outfit sometimes. times. This image he paints, outside of the tension with Pistol, is basically perfect. And the morning of April 15th seemed to fit that familiar pattern, at least at first. Patrice runs on the treadmill, waking up Pistol.

6:39Pistol is rushing Patrice out the door so he can steal a few minutes with his crush before school, but Patrice pauses to leave a note on Rob's car before they head to Pistol's school. At drop-off, they exchange I love yous, then Patrice heads to work. At 8.50am, her first client, Pam Shepard, arrives for her 9am appointment. According to reporting by Marsha Lang Henry for the Atlanta Constitution, customers recall Patrice being upbeat that morning, but Pam reports that Patrice seemed oddly distracted, and really just not as attentive as she usually was. But Pam gets her service and leaves the salon at 11.05am.

7:17Five minutes later, at 11.10am, Paul Cantor arrives for his scheduled appointment. And this time, Patrice is fast. Phone records confirm that Paul is out the door in just 17 minutes. He leaves at 11.27am. At 11.35, Patrice speaks to a client over the phone who wants to change their appointment. And they report that Patrice was unusually short with them, and just didn't seem like herself. This call lasts two minutes, ending at 11.37. At 11.50, another call came into the shop. But this time, Patrice didn't answer. A few minutes later, her next client arrives at the shop for their 12 o 'clock appointment.

7:58The door is unlocked and the lights are on. But Patrice and all the money in the cash register are gone. The client immediately calls 911. This episode of Voices for Justice is brought to you by Quince. I love giving gifts, and Quince really does make that so easy. They have something for everyone, from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters for$50 that look and feel like designer pieces, silk tops and skirts for dressing up, perfectly cut denim for everyday wear, and outerwear that actually keeps you warm. And of course, what I love is that every piece is made with premium materials from ethical, trusted factories, and it's all priced far below what other luxury brands charge.

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9:28Pistols pulled from his biology class by a school resource officer. They ask if he has any way to get a hold of his mom. He calls her cell phone three times, but there's no answer. When her friend Anne calls, it goes straight to voicemail. Now, Pistol doesn't really know what's going on at this point. In his interview with Unsolved Mysteries, he explained that it really wasn't until law enforcement took him to his mom's salon that he realized what was going on. And he says he just breaks down at the scene. But also at the same time, he keeps telling himself that surely there's just something wrong with her phone.

10:05She'll call, she'll explain everything any minute now. I don't know what time Pistol gets to the salon, but according to Patrice's sister, Kylene, it was a chaotic scene. There were helicopters and police scrambling to find Patrice as soon as possible, and investigators from the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office were trying to piece together exactly what happened here. In the shop, there are no signs of a struggle. But of course, we know that money was taken from the register. Also, Patrice's car keys and purse were sitting right there on the counter. Now, it did look like her purse was gone through because her wallet was sitting there open on the counter right next to it.

10:44I couldn't find any information about whether or not her ID was in there, but her credit cards were all still there. And they also found$270 in this, like, secret compartment of the wallet. So, I don't know if they got rifled through, they didn't see the money, or they just didn't want to take it. I don't know why they wouldn't just grab the entire wallet, but as investigators make their way to the back of the shop, they see what appears to be Patrice's uneaten lunch sitting next to the microwave. The rest of the shop was tidy just as Patrice always kept it, and there was nothing to point them to where Patrice may be.

11:19But people who knew Patrice were quick to point out that her car was out of place. They found her black Chevy Tahoe parked in front of the main door to the shop, but those who knew Patrice say that she is always, without fail, backed in on the side of the shop and entered through the side door. It was all just very odd. Almost like she was making lunch, and then something happened. Teams search for Patrice all night, but they don't find anything. The next day, officers conduct a four-hour road check, stopping motorists to see if they've seen Patrice. They also use a reverse 911 system to send out these pre-recorded messages about her to landlines in the area.

12:00They searched abandoned houses, empty barns, unpaved roads, and a lot of woods. The salon's actually next to quite a few different patches of wood, so it took some time to get through them all. And Pistol says that he spent hours walking through the woods just calling his mom's name. I can't make this episode without acknowledging how heartbreaking everything Pistol went through it was. In that interview with Unsolved Mysteries, you can't help but feel for him. Especially after learning what he goes through immediately after Patrice is gone. The same day, day two of the search, Friday, maybe 24 hours after finding out that his mom is missing, Rob changes all the locks on their house and doesn't let Pistol back in.

12:49In his interview with Unsolved Mysteries, Rob says that he changed the locks as a precautionary measure, for safety. But as to why he locks out Pistol, he says he just doesn't like him. He'd rather Pistol go somewhere safe and avoid the quote, mental drag, end quote, from Pistol. Funny enough, in an early 2004 interview with the Atlanta Constitution, he says that he just couldn't balance caring for Pistol and searching for Patrice. While it seems Rob and Pistol got along for the first year of his marriage to Patrice, after that things got rocky. Now, in that interview, Pistol says, like, especially after his mom was gone, he got in a lot of trouble at school.

13:35But Rob says that Pistol was basically out of control. And he and Patrice would often fight about it. And Patrice always sided with Pistol. Obviously, Pistol doesn't get to go back home. He ends up bouncing around between some of his mother's relatives before finally going back to live with his biological father. Now, Don Black did fight for legal rights over Patrice's assets along with his rights to Pistol, but ultimately, Rob Endres did retain control over Patrice's estate. Of course, investigators begin to look at Patrice's inner circle and her husband, Rob, but he has an alibi. And according to the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office, they think it's pretty solid.

14:16Not foolproof, but solid. When all this was happening, he was 45 minutes away getting gas. And he has a receipt to show investigators. The time he got to work was also apparently physically logged and verified through a turnstile he went through. However, some point to the route that Rob took is just not making sense. The gas station he went to before work and got his receipt from wasn't really on the way to work. And Rob never explains this. Or if he did, it was left on the cutting room floor of the Unsolved Mysteries episode. That came out in 2020, and I didn't watch it at the time. But I know a lot of you guys probably did.

14:57And I found the social media storm around Rob Endrez after that episode aired. I think it's safe to say he may have been one of the most hated people on the internet at that time. I will get to that, but I want to stay in order because I found these early 2004 news reports that are really a stark contrast to what I saw in Unsolved Mysteries. Now, I will say that Patrice's family did verbalize their beliefs that Rob may be involved very early on. They say Patrice was unhappy and thinking of leaving him. That Rob was jealous and possessive. They also expressed their disappointment in Forsyth County for their investigation and lack of communication.

15:34Patrice's sister, Kylene, actually created and circulated a letter opposing the sheriff to be re-elected at the time. But his opponent was apparently indicted on federal charges right before the election, so the sheriff stayed. And Forsyth County Sheriff's Office pushed back against Kylene. They said, sorry, Rob is Patrice's husband and he has a right to be informed, whether you like it or not. In these early news articles, officers even praise Rob for garnering the attention of America's Most Wanted, and for holding car washes to raise money for Patrice's reward fund. Now, when Patrice first went missing, investigators rented out, like, this office space for a makeshift search headquarters.

16:16And they say that Rob would visit them every single day. He even sent flowers to investigators to put by Patrice's picture in the office. So while Patrice's family does express these suspicions early on, the sheriff's office just doesn't follow that line of thinking. Officially, investigators say that while they can't rule out Rob completely, they think it's unlikely that he was involved in Patrice's disappearance. From here, they move on to working all the new leads that are slowly piling up. This episode is brought to you by eBay. Before all the algorithm-fed blah and the endless sea of dupes, shopping used to feel more fun.

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17:16Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS! The first major lead in this case that was kind of everywhere in the media in 2004 was a tip from a woman who says she saw a white cargo van parked nose-to-nose with Patrice's Tahoe at the shop, and that she saw a man walking towards the front driver's side door.

18:03Forsyth County Sheriff Ted Paxton considered this tip to be extremely credible, saying that they were able to match cell phone records to the tipster. So they put a lot of work into this. They create a sketch, they circulate it, they circulate these photos of similar vans, but the woman later admitted that she made the whole thing up. She did receive some charges for this, but I just, every time this happens in a case, it just makes me want to scream. But of course, all they can do is move forward. Forsyth County did have help from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, or GBI, as well as the FBI, who was working to develop a psychological profile of the abductor.

18:46They also found foreign fingerprints on Patrice's Tahoe, but after a few rounds of testing, it was determined that the prints belonged to her mechanic. He'd changed her oil a few days before she went missing. Soon, someone said that they saw Patrice in South Carolina, and while the woman did look a lot like Patrice, Investigators said it just wasn't her. Now, I mentioned earlier that there were some concerns about Patrice's ex, Dawn Black, possibly using drugs or being involved in a bad scene. So investigators did dig into this, and they found some of her former co-workers from around that time as well, but it just didn't go anywhere.

19:23At this point, there are a ton of leads that just aren't materializing into anything. But luckily, pretty soon, not one, but two witnesses come forward with actual, credible information. And their stories are eerily similar. Now, it's very important to note that these witnesses are completely independent of each other. Both witness reports can be placed at just about before noon on April 15th, in that very short window between Patrice not answering the phone and her next client finding the shop empty. Witness 1, Tammy Fincher, says that she drove over the hill and saw Patrice's SUV, and what she thinks is a blue Chevy Lumina with a Georgia Quail wildlife tag parked in front of the shop.

20:08Patrice's SUV is sideways, while the car is pointed towards the door. She says that she saw the door to the salon open, and two women in front of the car. One woman fits Patrice's description, a bit taller with dark hair. Tammy says this woman was in the middle of the car. Near the passenger side was an older woman. And she's not really sure what happens here. But she says that they put their hands on each other. She just can't be sure if they were fighting or if maybe one person was helping the other one up. She just said it was odd. The second witness was a male, who reports a very similar story.

20:46But he thinks the car was maybe a Ford Taurus or a Malibu. He believes the other person with Patrice was a male with shoulder-length hair, not a woman. While it doesn't give us all the answers, it definitely opens the case up to what I would consider one of the strongest theories. That someone stopped by the shop and asked Patrice for a jump. She moves her Tahoe into the odd position it was found in, and then something happens. I don't know if I can fully explain how much Patrice seemed to be so, so loved. Rami Tucker, the girl that Patrice helped with her hair dye emergency, and a group of her friends, not only passed out flyers for Patrice, but spent their own money to have more printed.

21:30Remember, these are teenagers. Patrice's sister Kylene turned to psychics for help. She submitted a photo and handwriting sample, and in return got a sketch of an area that she thought looked like nearby Beaufort Dam, sending her navigating this heavily wooded area in search for Patrice. but she wasn't there. Patrice's father, Richard Tambor Sr., says he was just angry. He'd wake up angry about Patrice. And when he tried to distract himself by watching some TV, he found his eyes drifting from the screen to a pair of windows that faced his deck, saying he knew it sounded crazy, but he was sure that one of these times when he glanced over, he'd see Patrice.

22:14Pistol says that in those early days of the investigation, he was sure he'd wake up one morning to find his mom was back. That all this time she'd been preparing for them to leave Rob, and she'd finally come back to get him. But, since we are here today, you guys know that that did not happen. Patrice's case sat and waited. In January 2005, investigators think they've finally gotten the break they've been waiting for. A confession. Then-suspected serial killer Jeremy Jones was passing by the salon that day and decided to go in. He asks Patrice for a jump, then abducts her at knife point. He says he sexually assaulted her, killed her, and threw her in Sweetwater Creek.

22:58Jones even drew a diagram that was accurate to how Patrice's Tahoe was found. At the time of this confession, Jones was facing charges for the rape and murder of Lisa Marie Nichols in Alabama, and was later convicted. He was also charged with the murder of his 16-year-old neighbor in April 2004. These statements do seem to make some sense for what may have happened to Patrice, but Jones confessed to killing over 20 women. And after searching the creek, investigators didn't find Patrice. Eventually, Jones recants this confession along with several others. And it appears that any knowledge he had of Patrice's case likely came from public news reports.

23:38And then, the news that no one wanted to hear in this case. Patrice's remains are found six miles away from her salon. On December 6, 2005, two volunteers at the Lebanon Baptist Church in Dawson County were working on the property, when one of them notices a large gathering of buzzards. This leads them to Patrice's skeletal remains. She was identified using dental records, and almost all her bones were recovered. Her cause and manner of death are unknown. At least to us. It's not really clear if law enforcement has this information, or if they're holding it back for a future prosecution. Once again, Pistol is pulled from class, and he's brought into the principal's office.

24:23He says at this point, it wasn't rare. After his mom was gone, his behavior got worse. But the principal and Pistol's dad explain that he's not in trouble. But his mom has been found. And Pistol has this moment of hope, asking where is she? And then they explain the situation. Pistol says he wasn't able to focus on much after this. In addition to Rob withholding childhood mementos and even photos of Patrice from Pistol, he kept her ashes too. It's just heartbreaking to think about what Pistol's gone through. But while Pistol is just trying to navigate this new life without his mom while also transitioning into adulthood, the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office has their eyes on another potential person of interest.

25:10Another serial killer. Gary Michael Hilton. Hilton is another terrible person who killed four hikers. He abducted a woman and her dog before killing her. Just trash. But they know this man spent some time in Forsyth County around the time that Patrice was presumably taken and murdered. They basically found a record of a traffic stop in the area. Now, I will say that there is some pieces of this that are pretty haunting. Apparently, Hilton enjoyed conning people out of money, specifically hair salons. He also had a habit of going in around lunchtime. But that's really it. The presumed motive by law enforcement is that this is what this guy does.