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Tales of True Crime, episode 22: The New Coldest Case Solved with Genealogy

Fargo, ND, USA / The Mighty 790 KFGO | KFGO
Troy Larson
Aug 29, 2020 | 1:11 PM

Peggy Beck was 16 years old on August 17th, 1963, a counselor at a youth camp at the Flying G Ranch in the Pike National Forest southwest of Denver. Having dropped names like that, Flying G Ranch and Pike National Forest, you can visualize the landscape… rugged mountains and serene lakes surrounded by Douglas Firs and majestic Ponderosa and Lodgepole pines. Peggy had attended as a camper in previous years, but the summer of 1963 marked the first time she would be a counselor.

That night, she took part in a campfire singalong… the kind of gathering for which a youth camp is intended… kids, their young counselors, and a few adult chaperones gather round a crackling bonfire, sing “Jesus Loves Me” and “Kum By Yah” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low,” and enjoy each other’s company. Maybe they told scary campfire stories based on embellished urban legends, cautionary tales like “The Hook” or “The Hitchhiker” or “Don’t Turn on the Light.” And if they told stories, they likely told them enthusiastically, with changes of volume and inflection, because, as any good camp counselor knows, the first trick to telling a good story is to not be embarrassed that you’re telling it.

Nobody could know that they were hours away from having to tell their own, real-life tale of terror.

Tales of True Crime, episode 022
The New Coldest Case Solved with Genealogy

Peggy Beck’s real name was Margaret, but she preferred her nickname, and everybody called her Peggy. She was a student at North Denver High, enjoying the last weeks of her summer vacation before she had to head back to sch ool. It was a Sunday night, and everybody would be packing up and heading home the following day.

As the bonfire singalong wrapped up and the young campers tucked themselves into their sleeping bags, Peggy returned to her tent. The re were 24 campers and three adults in the group, but Peggy’s tent was reportedly 30 feet from the rest of the group. Normally she would have had a tent mate, her friend Claudia Shride, but Claudia wasn’t feeling well and decided to spend the night in the infirmary.

The next morning, Peggy didn’t show up for breakfast, so Claudia went to rouse her… but Peggy couldn’t be awakened. She was dead. Initially they thought she had died of natural causes, but, according to a story published in the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman on August 21, 1963, the coroner said Peggy had finger marks on her throat that weren’t visible until later in the day. The coroner determined she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

A Predator Vanishes

In the initial investigation, the authorities had no reason to suspect anyone affiliated with the camp. The case seemed to be perpetrated by an unknown assailant.

If you ponder that for a moment, the circumstances under which Peggy Beck was murdered are terrifying.

How did the killer know she was alone in her tent?

He must have been watching.

Had he been a short distance away, watching from the cover of the forest as she entered her tent alone, shortly after midnight? A predator, lingering, watching, waiting for the perfect opportunity to kill. Did he just appear in her tent as she slept? Put a hand over her mouth to keep her from alerting the others who slept just 30 feet away?

We know Peggy put up a ferocious fight, and she must have had significant tissue under her fingernails because within days the newspapers reported investigators sought a suspect with scratches on his face.

Police reportedly questioned a man in Canon City, Colorado a few days later because he had scratches on his face. According to a story published by Fox23 Tulsa in 2020, the police questioned others as well in the months that followed, including James Sherbondy. He had served 25 years in prison for killing a sheriff’s deputy and stopped meeting with his parole officer about the same time Peggy Beck was murdered. Police questioned another potential perpetrator who was also a suspect in a murder in Arizona in 1963. That suspect was cleared of any involvement in the murder of Peggy Beck.

That, my friends, is where the trail went cold for Peggy Beck’s murderer.

A Similar Crime in Oklahoma

Police kept the case on the front burner for as long as they could, but there was just nothing to go on. Peggy’s mom, Merna, lived another 11 years and passed away in 1974, never knowing who had murdered her eldest daughter.

In 1977, Peggy’s name showed up in the press, in the context of a murder investigation in which three girls scouts were killed at a place called Camp Scott in Oklahoma.

From the Greeley Daily Tribune, June 16th, 1977:

The rape-slaying of three young girl scouts in Oklahoma this week bears some similarities to the still-unsolved assault-murder of a Denver Girl Scout while on an outing in suburban Jefferson County in 1963, officials say.

Margaret Elizabeth Beck, 16, was found strangled to death in her zipped-up sleeping bag during a girl scout outing, August 18th, 1963.

While more than 300 persons were questioned in the case, no evidence was ever found to bring any of them to trial.

One year later, in June of 1978, a man named Gene Leroy Hart had been arrested for the murders of the Oklahoma Girl Scouts. In coverage for Hart’s trial, the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman relayed a rumor going ‘round in Gene Hart’s hometown, Locust Grove, about whether a certain Camp Scott employee might have once worked at the Colorado camp where Peggy Beck had been murdered in 1963. From The Daily Oklahoman, June 25th, 1978:

There is talk of another girl scout, this one a 16-year-old, who was strangled in her sleeping bag at a camp in Colorado. 

Prosecutor Sidney Wise said they found no evidence to connect the two cases. 

It is true that Margaret Elizabeth Beck was slain August 18th, 1963 at a camp near Denver, and Wise says his investigation turned up no Camp Scott employees who were working at the Colorado Camp then, as townspeople suggest.

No one was ever charged in that crime.

Not only did they never find a connection between Gene Leroy Hart and the murder of Peggy Beck in 1963, they weren’t even able to pin the murders of the three Camp Scott girl scouts on him. He was acquitted at trial on March 20th, 1979. Today, the murder of the girl scouts in Oklahoma is still unsolved.

DNA Provides a Suspect

You can imagine after decades of no activity, Peggy’s family, her father and three surviving sisters, likely assumed they would never get answers.

In 2007, the biological evidence recovered from Peggy’s body was tested and processed for DNA, and a profile was developed. They had the DNA of the person who killed Peggy.

Investigators submitted the DNA to the FBI’s CODIS Database. If the perpetrator had ever been arrested and had his DNA sampled, he would show up in the search.

The effort came up empty, and in 2007, that was the extent of DNA’s usefulness. Without a match in the CODIS Database, the DNA profile remained unidentified.

In 2009, Peggy’s father passed away at the age of 88. He never found out who killed his daughter.

Finally, in June of 2019, detectives in Colorado went back to the well and developed a more comprehensive DNA profile and sent it to be analyzed genealogically, in an attempt to locate the killer through family-tree research. 

They got a match.

Investigators found an ancestor of Peggy Beck’s killer, and they proceeded to build out a family tree until they had a small pool of potential suspects. Detectives met with a member of the family, asked a few questions about the person’s relatives, and the information led them to a promising suspect.

James Raymond Taylor.

Investigators confirmed Taylor had lived in Colorado in the early 1960s. At the time of Peggy Beck’s murder, he had been a married TV repairman, just 23 years old.

In a press conference to announce their findings, Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Schrader apologized to Peggy’s surviving sisters for reopening an old wound after so many decades:

[soundclip :20 — Sheriff Jeff Schrader]

Her three sisters are alive, and this is a painful time for them. To have this… this wound reopened, and we acknowledge that. And our sympathies on behalf of the entire sheriff’s office go out to them.

The evidence was strong enough that the authorities issued an arrest warrant for Taylor and dove into his background. He had a rap sheet in Las Vegas that went back as far as the early 70s. They were also able to determine Taylor lived in Edgewater, Colorado in the early 60s, at the same time, and in the same town, where Peggy and her family lived. However, they  were unable to determine if Taylor knew the Becks or if he had targeted Peggy specifically. One theory contended that Taylor simply ran across the youth scout camp at random while out testing radios he was known to build.

You might be wondering, why don’t they just ask him? 

Maybe we should just ask him, right? We’ll just cruise down to the prison, get a visitor pass, and pop-in with Taylor to ask him some questions. Hey, James, why did you target Peggy and how did you know about the camp?

Unfortunately, we can’t ask him, because the authorities can’t find him. Yes, they issued an arrest warrant for him, for the murder of Peggy Beck in 1963, but James Raymond Taylor is missing, and according to his family, has been missing since the seventies. 

Detectives have encountered roadblock after roadblock in the search for James Raymond Taylor. Number one obstacle that hits me right away is, his name is as common as it gets. James Raymond Taylor. He could be Jim Taylor. He could be Ray Taylor. He could be James Taylor. He has the same name as ten thousand regular guys and one famous one. Or he might have changed his name altogether under the pressure of his guilty conscience.

They looked for him. 

The last anybody knew, he was alive and living in Las Vegas in 1976. 

Then, nothing.

If he is still alive, at the time of this recording, he would be 80 years old.

The Coldest Case

If you listened to season one, you know about a year ago, in episode 15, I covered the murder of Susan Galvin in Seattle in 1967. At the time I produced that, it was the oldest cold case ever solved with genetic genealogy–Susan Galvin’s killer was identified just short of 52 years after her murder. 

In that episode, I asked:

“How far back can we go with forensic genealogy? Susan Galvin’s murder took place in 1967 and despite some question about whether the DNA would be viable after half a century in an evidence locker, police were able to identify the killer.”

I also said:

“I wouldn’t be surprised one bit to see the technology advance quickly to identifying killers from much further back, a century, maybe two. Anywhere DNA can be obtained and tested, killers will be identified.”

I should be clear… I’ve been throwing around this word “solved” a lot, and technically, some may or may not consider this case solved because we don’t know what happened to the perpetrator, or if he’s alive or dead. However, I’d quantify the murder of Peggy Beck as solved since an arrest warrant has been issued. Some people might have a different opinion.

At any rate, in the span of twelve months, the oldest cold case we’ve been able to resolve has been pushed back from 1967 to 1963. A 56-year-old crime, the murder of Peggy Beck. We know who killed her in 1963, we just need to find out what happened to him and bring him to justice if possible.

If we check back in another year, how much further into the past will it have gone? Honestly, the other day, I caught myself wondering, when did detectives start collecting blood and tissue at crime scenes? The answer is the 1800s, and some of those crimes are gonna get solved. Not every crime of course, but some of them.

Here’s another prediction. By the end of 2021, we are going to have a century-old case solved by genetic genealogy. A case from the 1910s or 1920s will be cleared up thr ough the use of genealogical analysis, granted, without a perpetrator in cuffs since he would be, like, a 130-years-old. And that brings to mind an observation. 

As the cases we attempt to resolve through genealogy get older and colder, an obstacle arises. Extremely old cases don’t benefit from a justice motivation, because the perpetrator is certainly dead. You’ll never see the villain in handcuffs because he long ago passed from this world to hell. Perhaps the first century old murder will be solved through a genetic genealogy investigation with some other motivation… like historical accuracy, for example. Strictly speculation here… if you could prove Jesse James wasn’t shot by the coward Robert Ford and that he survived another 30 years, you’d take that chance, right? If you’re a young DA and you can make a name for yourself by proving once and for all that Lizzie Borden’s family was killed by an intruder, that would be the kind of motivation that might serve as an impetus to solving century and older cases. 

At any rate, it’s an amazing time to be alive in the field of criminal investigation. Let’s see where it goes.

Lock Your Doors

So, this week in the Larson house, we had some workers show up unexpectedly. We live in a wooded neighborhood where, every couple years, the city contracts a company to come over and trim the trees. The last time, the tree trimming crew dropped some branches on our fence and broke it, then left without saying anything about it or offering any compensation. Real standup guys. But that was last time.

So, this time, they showed up while my wife and daughter were home alone and went to work on the trees. When I got home for lunch they were working in the backyard, and my wife told me one of the guys on the crew noticed our security cameras, and our neighbor’s security cameras, too,  and started questioning her about crime in our neighborhood.

Now, as an avid true crime consumer, does that raise any flags with you?

Before I left to go back to work, I told her “Make sure you go around and check the doors and windows to make sure they’re still locked.” She reacted like I was asking too much. Of course, in my barley and rye polluted brain, all I could think of was Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. He installed security systems and used his knowledge of the inside of people’s homes to come back later and kill them.

And our tree trimmer guy commented on our cameras, too, you know… like, unsolicited. He noticed them. Noticed our neighbor had them, too. Mentioned it.

I remember reading a “Keep Yourself Safe from Crime”-type article one time recommending that any time you have an unknown worker in your home, you should make a round afterward and check the perimeter. It would be too easy for a predator working as a plumber or a painter to simply unlock the side door or the basement window to make entry easier when they come back at 4 am to murder you in your sleep.

My wife’s reluctance bothered me. I’m like, if people can share those “Applebees is giving everyone a free bloomin’ onion and 50 dollar gift card if you share this” posts with the justification “just in case this is real” then it’s not too much to ask to check the doors and windows to protect your family. Better safe than sorry.

At any rate, I went to Twitter (at True Crime Troy) and ran a poll, posed as a hypothetical: Workers were at your house today. One of them commented on your security cameras. Is it an overreaction to check the windows and doors and make sure they’re still locked?

By an overwhelming majority “No. It is not an overreaction” won the poll with a devastating 88-percent win.

So, how long has it been since you checked the doors and windows at your place? Why not make a round right now? Lock your doors… because James Raymond Taylor could still be out there, in a walker, waiting for a chance to shuffle up on you when you’re not paying attention. If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll talk to you again, soon.

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For transcripts, sources, credits, and some occasional cat pictures, follow me on Twitter at True Crime Troy. I’m giving away a hardcover Sherlock Holmes compendium on Twitter next week, so hit that button right now.

Additional Voices by Bonnie Amistadi and Amy Kaye

[feature photo by Loupy via Pexels.com]

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Additional Music used via Extended License

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