Before we jump into the episode, I have a quick announcement to make.

I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re actually coming up on the one-year anniversary

of The Deck.

And I’ve been kind of working on something kind of in secret in the background.

You see, in the middle of investigating all of these cases that we’ve told you over

the last year, our reporter Emily and I stumbled across a case right here in Indiana that was

so wild, there was no way we could tell it in just one episode.

And there was no way we could leave it alone.

We became engrossed in this case and determined to try and solve it for the family.

So for the last year almost, we have been on the ground.

And I want to bring you that story in a special way, in a live documentary-style experience.

That’s right.

I am hitting the road and going on tour for what I’m calling The Deck Investigates.

There is so much to unpack and I promise I am going to blow you away.

Pre-sale for The Deck Investigates tour starts December 8th.

So if you want all the details, be sure to follow The Deck Podcast on Facebook, Instagram,

and Twitter.

And you can even text me at 317-733-7485 and I’ll keep you up to date.

I also have all the tour dates on my website, ashleyflowers.com.

So stay in the know.

Hopefully I’m coming to a city near you and I’ll see you soon.

All right, now let’s get to this week’s episode.

Our card this week is Dale Williams, the Jack of Hearts from Colorado.

In the spring of 1999, a small town was rattled by the disappearance of a dedicated father

and husband who seemed to vanish into thin air, inspiring an investigation by four law

enforcement agencies spanning more than 20 years.

While it’s still cold today, investigators remain determined to find answers as new theories

and possible leads emerge from the decades of rumors surrounding the case.

I’m Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.

It was the evening of May 27, 1999, when a woman named Diana Williams started to get

worried because she hadn’t been able to contact her husband all day.

42-year-old Dale Williams was working at the auto body repair shop that he owned in the

rural town of Nucla, Colorado, and she had called him shortly after noon to see if he

had something to eat for lunch.

The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer.

And initially, this didn’t make her panic because she figured that he was just busy

with a customer or the sounds of his tools drowned out her call.

Besides, she knew that she’d get to talk to him when he got home for dinner that night.

But evening had come and Diana and their youngest daughter, 17-year-old Sarah, were still waiting

for Dale to come home.

So Diana tried to call the shop again, but again, Dale didn’t pick up.

Now she’s thinking maybe he just got caught up working on a car and was just running late.

So just to be sure, detectives told our reporter that Diana decided to let Sarah stay at home

while she went out to drive by the shop.

Now there is a slight discrepancy here.

Some other source material says that she didn’t actually visit the shop until the next morning.

And there’s also some confusion on how the shop looked as well.

Now official reports from the investigation say that the shop was closed, lights off,

no cars around.

But people in Dale’s family say that it looked like Dale had just walked away and was about

to come right back to work at any moment.

But one thing every source does agree on is that Diana didn’t find any sign of Dale

or his 1994 white Ford pickup truck.

And that truck would have been hard to miss because it had the company’s name and logo

on the side of it.

Diana was worried, but there was a thousand places Dale could have been and she knew she’d

see him in the morning, if nothing else.

So she went home to her daughter and the two of them went to bed.

But morning came and went on Friday the 28th, and there were still no signs of Dale anywhere.

Diana was super worried at this point.

So a bit after noon, she decided to go look for him at the auto body shop one more time.

But again, he wasn’t there.

So next, Diana went to Dale’s mother’s house, her name’s Ida, to see if maybe she’d seen

him.

But Ida hadn’t.

She hadn’t even heard from him, which was actually even more concerning because Dale

pretty much talked to his mom on the phone every day.

Together, Diana and Ida started searching the town for Dale.

They called other family, other friends, and even drove around to local junkyards, all

while in the back of their minds wondering if maybe he had some kind of accident.

They searched high and low in the small town that towed the line of 1,000 residents.

And as they did, word was spreading fast.

Within hours, pretty much everyone knew Dale was missing, but no one knew where he was.

So after a few hours, they went to the Nucla Marshal’s office to file a missing persons

report.

It was extremely rare for Nucla to have any missing people, so the Marshal’s office put

in a request for help from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

But that’s not a request that would get processed right away, especially because they were coming

up on Memorial Day weekend, so most of their offices were already closed.

So in order to not lose too much time while they waited for the CBI, the Marshal started

investigating throughout the weekend.

In any investigation, the first thing you want to do is get to know your victim.

And that was easy, because Dale was so well known around the small community.

Here’s his oldest daughter, Toni, who was 19 years old and attending college out of

town when her father went missing.

He did a lot for the community.

He would help anybody that he could with anything from, like, jobs, car work.

He would deliver presents dressed up as Santa Claus to kids in the community.

He just did a lot.

He would do, like, auctioneer stuff for fundraising.

He drove the homecoming queens every year in the parade and out on the field.

And he was just a really fun dad.

We had a lot of really good times with him.

Dale wasn’t just there for his community, but for his family as well.

Diana, Toni, and Sarah were extremely close to their dad, and he doted on them.

So everyone knew he wouldn’t just leave them without a word.

Growing up, my dad, or my sister and I, were just pretty much everything for my dad.

We did a lot of, like, picnics and, like, four-wheel drive adventures that I can still

remember.

But he was a really incredible dad.

As the investigation kicked off, the community that Dale loved and supported for so long

was now stepping up to support his family and to help in the search for him.

Meanwhile, officers were checking out the body shop and talking to the people who came

forward with information.

The first man investigators talked to was a friend of Dale’s and a local pastor, this

guy named Tom Ross.

He and his son, who was only a little kid at the time, were at Dale’s body shop like

mid-morning on Thursday, the day that Dale disappeared.

Tom told officers that Dale had time for a break, so the two men played a game of darts

and just kind of caught up with one another.

And while they were hanging out, the shop phone rang at maybe around noon.

He said it was a call from someone who was stranded with a broken-down vehicle near Bedrock,

right outside of Paradox, Colorado.

This is about 40 minutes from Nucla.

Tom said that he overheard Dale say the location and mentioned bringing the tow truck before

he hung up.

He then told Tom he had to go, so they both left the shop and went their separate ways.

Now, the second person who came forward to police was a woman named Tammy Lorenz.

She told officers that Dale came to her work just after noon that day and said that he

needed to reschedule her appointment to replace her windshield from later that afternoon to

the next week.

She said he seemed like he was in a hurry and he left fairly quickly after they spoke.

This version of events continued to look legit when yet another witness told investigators

that they saw Dale’s truck leaving town, heading towards the town of Natarita, which

is only a few miles south on the way to Bedrock.

But what really caught investigators’ attention is that this person saw Dale’s white Ford,

but his tow truck, which he mentioned on the call that he would need to bring and which

anyone would need to bring for a broken down car.

While officers couldn’t find any evidence of Dale’s exact destination in Bedrock,

or if he ever made it there safely, they got another tip from a witness who said that they

saw him at a local grocery store in Natarita hours later, like around 6 p.m. on the 27th.

They were going in as he was leaving, and they exchanged a brief hello as they passed.

He said he appeared to be alone, and nothing in investigators’ reports indicated that

he had any belongings with him.

Now, a lot of people were quick to question this sighting.

They’re thinking that this witness had their days mixed up, because why would Dale disappear

from Nucla, stop at this store hours later, and then just disappear again?

But investigators actually confirmed that the witness was at the store that very evening

through a check that they had written to pay for their items.

Investigators had a lot of questions after this timeline came together.

The first was that Dale’s shop was focused on bodywork, not necessarily mechanical issues.

So why would he be the one to go help someone having mechanical problems?

But his family has the answer to that question.

I think that a lot of people who aren’t familiar with Nucla or small town communities kind

of misconstrue this information a lot.

So in Nucla, in any small town, there are people who have many talents and offer their

abilities and services to anybody that they can possibly help.

So even though my dad was an auto body man and would only work on the outside of cars

technically, he could also do some engine repair or things like that.

My dad would, just because, God, it’s so annoying.

People are like, why didn’t they just call AAA?

Because they’re in the armpit of America.

But if he really was just being a good Samaritan, why not take his tow truck?

And why in the world was he gone for so long?

I mean, remember, he allegedly left Nucla around 1230 in the afternoon, but the last

sighting of him was at 6 p.m.

Also, did he stay in Natarita the whole time and never even make it to bedrock?

Or was he in bedrock for hours and hours and then stopped in Natarita on his way home?

And more importantly, where did he go after?

These questions left investigators’ heads spinning.

But luckily, the CBI was preparing to help and hopefully uncover some answers.

By the time CBI started processing the marshal’s office request on Monday, May 31st, CBI cold

case unit analyst Audrey Simkin said the process moved fairly quickly.

So once the call came in from Nucla, it was run kind of through our process at the time

to determine if assistance could be provided.

And then ultimately it was determined that we could assist in the case.

And so an agent from our office went out to meet with the Nucla marshal’s office and

kind of talk with them about the case.

The CBI agent arrived in Nucla on Wednesday, June 2nd, and immediately began catching up.

By the end of the week, they, along with local officers, had interviewed anyone who was even

slightly associated with Dale, which, again, was almost the entire town.

And at this point in the case, a few rumors were starting to pop up around town.

Some people were even saying that Dale may have been involved in illegal activity like

drug trafficking and was having financial problems.

But Audrey said that those were just rumors.

There were no legitimate signs that Dale was involved in anything suspicious.

It seemed like they interviewed people who were acquaintances of him and who may have

been involved in shady activity, but nothing indicated that he too was involved in that

shady activity, only that they knew each other.

Now if they were really tight or if it’s a small town and they just knew of each other,

that’s kind of the question.

But just to cover all their bases, officers also looked into the Williams’ financials.

But again, they didn’t find anything suspicious.

They also looked at different properties in town that he owned, like his wife and him,

you know, worked at the video shop and kind of had that.

He had the body shop.

I think he had a couple of rental properties, but I didn’t see any red flags that would

indicate the money transaction.

Also, it didn’t seem like they were really well outside of their means as far as, you

know what I mean, with debts and that kind of thing.

So ultimately, the rumors were yet another dead end for investigators.

And throughout the rest of June, the case really started to cool off.

Police weren’t getting any new leads, even with the investigators’ dedication and the

formation of a task force made up of the marshal’s office, the CBI, Montrose County Sheriff’s

office and the FBI.

But then on July 4th, they finally caught a huge break.

A local family called in and said they were out celebrating the holiday at this popular

spot where two rivers connect, the San Miguel and the Dolores rivers.

The family said they were swimming in this part because it’s the deepest.

It’s like 10 feet there.

And when they were there, they noticed something in the water, something really big sitting

at the bottom.

They swam around to investigate, and that’s when they realized that it was a truck completely

submerged under the water.

Now, this area that they’re in, this is like 20 miles from Nucla and Natarita, where Dale

was last seen.

But authorities rushed to check it out.

They couldn’t tell much from their vantage point other than that the truck was white,

which was another checkmark ticked off for reasons that it could be Dale’s.

But they needed to pull it out of the water to be sure.

Investigators called for backup from forensic teams and pulled the truck from the current.

And they were met with mixed emotions when they saw the logo running down the side.

There was no doubt this was Dale’s truck.

There didn’t seem to be any damage on the outside of the vehicle that wasn’t caused

by the river, like nothing from an accident or anything like that.

But they noticed right away that his toolbox was missing.

Now, this wasn’t like a little tin one that you carry around.

This was one of those long metal containers that went along the back of a truck and attached

to the bed.

It wouldn’t have been knocked off easily.

When they looked inside the truck, they saw that the keys were still in the ignition and

turned to the on position.

The steering wheel was jammed all the way to one side, and there weren’t any signs

that the brakes had been used before it was submerged.

And there was something else off when they looked inside the truck.

There was no sign of Dale, no personal belongings or clothes, but also to their relief, no sign

of blood or injuries.

But then they noticed a detail that made some people close to Dale think that he wasn’t

in the car at all before it was put in the water.

See, the driver’s side window was only halfway down.

And to Toni, this detail is crucial.

My dad had this weird thing about him where he would drive with the window all the way

up or all the way down, and it wasn’t in between, you know, and that truck did not

have power windows.

It had the old roll down windows.

So when we found out that the window on the truck on the driver’s side, well, and the

passenger side, I believe, was open a little too.

When we found out that it was not all the way down, we definitely knew that it wasn’t

my dad driving.

That was just one of his little quirks.

Officers searched the scene both in and out of the water, and they eventually found tire

tracks on the side of the embankment that matched the truck’s tires.

Given that these tracks were still intact, investigators thought that the truck couldn’t

have been submerged the entire time Dale was missing, which was about six weeks at this

point.

They thought either the tracks would have been erased or someone else would have come

across the truck before then.

They didn’t find anything else helpful in the river, definitely not the toolbox that

was missing.

So they did a more thorough exam on the truck itself.

But with the water damage and the limited technology of the 90s, they didn’t find

anything else there either.

Throughout the rest of July 1999, investigators kept circling back to their initial leads.

They were sure that the answers were somewhere in the clues that they already had.

But there was another lead investigators were still having trouble fleshing out.

That phone call that Dale got on the 27th, just before he left the shop.

Reports from officers’ investigations are kind of all over the place about this.

And Brooks Bennett, another investigator with the CBI, who is actually the lead detective

on the case with Audrey, says that none of the scenarios that they explored were ever

proven.

Basically everything they have, all rumors.

Some said that the FBI tracked the cell phone to an unknown woman who was later cleared

of any involvement, while others said that the call came from a stolen cell phone.

Now Brooks said that this call was investigated, quote, nine ways to Sunday by a lot of different

people, end quote.

But in the end, even trying to track the call was, and continues to be, a dead end.

And part of this may be because in Nucla in 1999, cell service was basically non-existent.

So while cell phones did exist, Tony says that it would have been even more rare for

someone to have one in this area.

I bet you that they hadn’t had, like, real good cell coverage until, like, 2015, 16.

Where Paradox is located, it’s in a really deep valley between mountains.

I would certainly be surprised if there’s any cell coverage out there right now, really.

Now Tony says that the call actually came from a landline in the area, not a cell phone.

Now this theory hasn’t been proven either, but this was just as hard for investigators

to look into because of the technology they had.

And then in Nucla, Nucla and Natarita, the telephone service was provided by the local

telephone company, not, you know, AT&T and Grand Junction or anything like that.

We had our own little telephone company.

So from what I understand, talking to other investigators and stuff, that tracing the

call during that time in 1999 was a landline call, was nearly impossible.

And they wouldn’t keep the records.

It would take until the year 2000 before there was any movement in the case.

And it stemmed from something weird that had been happening in Nucla.

You see, throughout that year, investigators had worked with Dale’s family to absolutely

cover the town in missing persons flyers.

But as spring turned into summer, mysteriously, the flyers were disappearing.

They weren’t just like falling down randomly and floating around town.

They were straight up gone, like someone was ripping them down and tossing them out somewhere.

Officers decided to put up a surveillance camera at the local post office near one of

the flyers to figure out what was going on and maybe catch someone in the act.

And it worked.

A man was captured on video pulling the flyers down one by one.

Investigators didn’t know the man seen in the video, so they showed the footage to

Dale’s family.

And when Diana saw it, she had to catch her breath.

He was a friend of theirs, or at least he used to be.

That man and his wife, who I’ll just refer to as the Joneses, were both friends with

Dale and Diana until like 1998, when Mrs. Jones decided that she wanted out of her marriage.

I don’t think there’s any like specific abuse related here, just that maybe the relationship

was rocky, which I think was probably why she was seeking to move on.

So like any good friends would do, Dale and Diana supported Mrs. Jones through the divorce

and then secretly helped her leave the state that year.

They wouldn’t tell Mr. Jones where she went, so this guy was angry to say the least.

According to an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Diana said that he let them know just how

angry about a month later when Dale found torn up photos of the couples together, along

with .22 caliber bullets scattered outside of his shop.

Diana said that this was even more concerning than it seemed on the surface because the

pictures and Dale’s .22 caliber revolver had actually been stolen from his shop just

a couple of weeks prior.

Now, to be fair, they don’t know for sure if Mr. Jones was behind this, but all signs

kind of pointed to him, and the harassment just continued.

A few days later, someone put Dale’s revolver in the drop box of the video store that Diana

managed.

She was freaked out, but Dale assured her that everything would be okay.

But now, now that he was missing, nothing was okay.

Investigators started looking into Mr. Jones and eventually interviewed him.

And this is where my timeline gets a little hazy.

My sources say that Mr. Jones was interviewed a total of four times throughout this investigation,

including one interview that was part of their initial efforts to talk to everyone in town.

But of course, that was before he had displayed any shady behavior like pulling the posters

down.

I don’t have a lot of details from the interviews following the flyer incidents.

I know that he denied being involved in any of those threatening actions from before Dale

disappeared.

Of course, he couldn’t deny tearing down the missing person flyers.

I mean, they had him on camera.

But it isn’t tough to deduce it’s probably because he was still mad at Dale.

Eventually, he provided an alibi for when Dale went missing.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what that alibi was.

Audrey and Brooks can’t share that information as this is still an ongoing investigation

and some information has to be protected.

In my mind, though, this guy is super suspicious.

And thankfully, officers don’t just like forget about him after this.

Remember, I said that he was interviewed a total of four times.

They did a little more digging on him and finally contacted the former Mrs. Jones.

But she pretty much just confirmed everything Diana had told them and that was that.

It’s at this point that the case officially went cold.

For years, Dale’s case sat on the shelf just collecting dust.

There were a few glimmers of hope here and there.

Like human skeletal remains were found in 2003 near Natarita.

But testing proved that they weren’t Dale’s.

And in 2006, someone found an empty toolbox off the side of the highway around the areas

that Dale would have been driving the day he went missing.

But it’s important to note that the toolbox that was found was like a handheld toolbox,

not the one missing from the back of his truck.

But either way, they showed it to Dale’s brother.

And he actually said, yes, this was Dale’s.

So they turned it over to police, but nothing came of that.

And it’s still just sitting in evidence today.

Two years prior in July of 2004, Diana had Dale declared legally dead.

It was a heartbreaking decision, but something that was necessary for the family to clear

up some legal matters with bills and things like that.

Over the years, occasional tips and sightings came trickling in.

And although none of them ever panned out, it did make people wonder, had Dale just left?

To be sure that wasn’t the case, investigators looked into his social security number in 2007.

Not for his case specifically, but in general, you can look to see like if anybody’s used

a specific social security number.

So in some of the open source databases, you can kind of look to see if there’s any connection

and who those people might be.

Oftentimes they’re family members, right, who have a connection there.

But then you can also reach out and just see if there’s been any wage report under that

social security number, which it looks like in 2007, maybe a tip came in saying, hey,

we saw him wherever.

And then as part of that, the analyst dug in a little deeper and noticed that the social

security number somehow was tied in that whatever she was looking at, but then was able to go

back and confirm that there was no employment and that whatever address or whatever she

was looking at was actually tied back to Diana and the girls, which, you know, maybe

there was something after the death certificate or whatever with that, which wouldn’t be uncommon.

The next big push in the case came two years later.

The CBI had been off the case for years since it went cold, but in 2010, they received a

grant specifically to fund the review of cold cases, including Dale’s.

So Audrey and Brooks both joined the case.

Now, with more time and resources, Brooks and Audrey got DNA swabs from Dale’s mother,

brother and one of his daughters in 2012.

They also got a hold of his dental records and uploaded all of that information to CODIS.

So given the record keeping that’s done with Dale’s case, I’m confident that if there’s

remains out there and those remains have been tested and gone through the necessary steps

to make sure that they’re complete, right, and uploaded to CODIS, that we would get a

notification that we found him.

Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet.

Those remains, I don’t believe, have been located.

Now, in 2013, Sarah and Tony were finally interviewed for the first time.

Brooks just wanted to start from scratch with the family, so he traveled to each of the

girls and talked with them.

But isn’t it bananas, or at least it was to me that they weren’t interviewed before?

I mean, yes, Tony wasn’t even in town when everything went down, but still, you’d think

they would have interviewed anyone and everyone who could have had even the smallest bit of

insight into Dale’s life.

Now, my sources say that investigators emailed back and forth with the family several times

in the early days of the case and even talked about scheduling formal interviews with every

member, but it just didn’t happen.

The media kept the case in the public eye, especially with that unsolved mysteries feature,

which surrounded it with lots of media buzz for a while.

As with a lot of cases, this exposure sparked an online rumor mill that kind of spiraled.

I mean, every single person suddenly had a theory on what had happened to Dale and thought

that their theory was the right theory.

One person who commented on the unsolved mysteries webpage claimed that they saw a man

experiencing homelessness who looked like Dale in Sacramento, California.

Others said that Dale’s body could have been thrown down some kind of abandoned mine shaft

that are scattered all throughout the region.

But Audrey says that they never had a concrete reason to believe that this was a viable theory

or any reason to search any mines.

So over the next few years, Audrey and Brooks spent their time raising awareness for Dale’s

case.

In 2014, Dale was featured in Colorado’s first cold case deck as the Jack of Hearts.

For the 20th anniversary of his disappearance, they put out media blasts and distributed

flyers in and around Nucla.

And in 2021, they even placed two billboards in Colorado with Dale’s picture and information.

But even with all of these efforts, not one new lead emerged.

Today, the case is as cold as ever.

But that doesn’t mean things are silent or that Audrey and Brooks are slowing down anytime

soon, even with more than 400 other cold cases on their plates.

So really, it’s going to be dependent on somebody coming forward now with new information

who, for whatever reason, feels more comfortable.

That probably blows this case open because, unfortunately, with us not having a lot of

physical evidence to tie anybody to anything, some of those new kind of traditional methods

that we’re used to seeing work probably aren’t applicable here.

I mean, I’m hopeful that someday someone will say something, even if we don’t find him,

that we find out what happened to him.

I mean, in the best world and the best circumstance, we’d find him as well.

But I don’t know.

It only takes one little tiny crack to break a case wide open.

And Audrey and Brooks are chiseling at every weak spot they can find.

In fact, during our reporter’s interview with Audrey, she came across a body found

on September 18, 2014, in one of the databases that could possibly be Dale.

But it was not in Colorado.

It’s just across state lines in Utah.

Now, I don’t want to blow this out of proportion because it looked like a lot of the John Doe’s

information hadn’t been uploaded yet.

But it opens up a new question.

Should the CBI be looking for matches and John Doe’s in Utah as well as Colorado,

or maybe even beyond that?

Another area in Dale’s case that Tony is really hoping will be explored is touch DNA

from Dale’s truck.

According to Scientific American, it’s named for the way it analyzes skin cells in places

where someone has touched a surface.

It’s a process that takes a few days, and seven or eight cells from the outermost layer

of skin must be collected and then tested to reveal a highly specific genetic portrait

of a person.

Seven or eight cells.

Can you even fathom that?

But here’s the problem.

My sources say that while the truck is still in evidence, it’s actually been stored

outside since it was found in 1999.

It’s been exposed to decades of extreme weather and natural wear and tear.

And that’s after it was underwater for who knows how long.

So all of that makes it a lot harder to test.

Brooks did have the truck fully re-examined after he took over the case, but they didn’t

have any luck finding evidence inside or outside.

Tony, though, still hasn’t given up on hope that the truth about her father’s fate

will one day be revealed.

But she does believe that despite the online rumors, he isn’t out there alive somewhere.

I think that he may have put together some information that may have been, that may

have gotten somebody else in some serious trouble.

And then they conjured up a plan to, you know, eliminate that.

And I think that he walked into a gunfight.

And I think they dumped his body before they dumped his truck.

I think they hid the truck for a bit, but I think they got rid of the body immediately.

And that was it.

I just think that, I think that he might be in the toolbox somewhere, you know, also.

So, yeah, I think they may have put him in the toolbox and then, you know, discarded

the toolbox.

A lot of people still tag Sarah and Tony in a seemingly endless stream of tips online.

Some people on Reddit even claim that they were finding Dale’s tools in the woods

along roads in the area, almost like they had been thrown from a vehicle.

And Tony says that some of these tools, engraved by Dale with a large D on their

handles, have actually been returned to her mom, who still lives in Nucla.

Now, my other sources couldn’t confirm these claims.

But remember that toolbox that was found?

I mean, in my mind, it makes sense that if someone finds this empty container, the tools

that were inside had to turn up somewhere at some point, too, right?

Each spark of hope is just as bright for Tony and her family.

But each letdown just hits even harder.

But, I don’t know, I feel like it’s different because there hasn’t been any closure.

And so, you know, no closure for me or my sister or anybody, anybody that my dad was

associated with or made an impact in their life has had closure.

And so this when a lot of people cared about him.

So when whoever did whatever they did, they didn’t just affect his family.

You know, they affected a community.

So it’s been 23 years and it would be really nice to have some closure to this case.

Absolutely.

But I at this point, I I want to see justice 100 percent.

And there was a time where I was like, you know, I just want to have closure.

I don’t want justice.

I just want closure.

But the older I get, the angrier I get about it and more callous about it.

And I think that, boy, I just people got to meet their makers at one point.

And if you’re taking this to your grave, you’re not going where you want to go.

So, you know, if people believe that way, so and most of them do down there.

I just can’t believe that people have lived with this that long,

this secret, knowing the trauma that it has caused people.

Today, Toni has three kids of her own,

and she often wonders what her father would be like as a grandparent.

I can’t imagine him being a very boring grandpa because of the way that

my sister and I grew up.

So I think that they would have really enjoyed him.

But I have like, you know, I have little memories of the trinkets and stuff like that

of my dad around the house and stuff.

And but my kids are older.

My daughter’s 14 and then my boys are 20 and 21.

So, you know, the majority of their lifetime,

it’s really, that’s pretty, that’s pretty hard because you’re like,

since the case is still open and it’s been investigated for the last 23 years,

I mean, that’s my son’s entire life, you know?

At the end of the day, someone out there knows what happened to Dale.

Someone who’s been carrying the weight of that knowledge for more than two decades.

And Toni hopes that that person will come forward

and at least provide some resolution to the family that they stole from

all those years ago.

Well, the great thing is, is that they live in a small community

so they can physically see the pain and trauma that they have caused

in my family’s life and friends.

So I’m certainly glad that they enjoy their children and their grandchildren

because they have completely stolen that from our family.

Audrey and Brooks are looking for any remains that match Dale’s description.

A white male with brown hair, blue eyes,

and scars under his chin and on his jawbones.

He also had a birthmark under his left jaw.

So if you know anything about remains,

even about that phone call that came in the day he went missing,

don’t hesitate to call the CBI Grand Junction Regional Office

at 970-248-7500.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work,

visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?

Roar!