Cold Case Chronicles: The Trash Crusader Murder & Other Unsolved ’71 Fort Worth Mysteries

Well, well, well, what have we here? Why it looks like a YDC remote podcast about to break out. That's what it looks like to you, then you have made the correct guess because that's exactly what it is. And it is about to happen. Hello to one and all. We are live today in crazy Fort Worth at Bronx Tack Room. Now this is located at 115 West Exchange Avenue. You know, over here in crazy Fort Worth, when you start getting down into Exchange Avenue and all that, that tells you you are in one place and one place only, and that is in the Stockyards. And that is where we are today. Now, we are inside here at Bronx Tack Room. This is a relatively new place down here, and they would love it if you would come in here and check it out. We would love it if you would come in here and check it and us out because we're gonna be rolling for the next few hours with many, many various luminaries from our podcast realm. And hell, who knows what might happen? Who knows who might walk in? Who knows who we might see that we just have to get up here and talk to them a little bit. Now right now, let me introduce these distinguished fellows that we have up here. On my right, your left as we look at it, these are the guys on the signal 51 chronicles podcast that you will hear right on Stolen Water Media. Go to stolenwatermedia.com. You will find their podcast. You will find ours. You will find every other podcast we have here at Stolen Water all there on one place. These guys do true crime. On my immediate right here, this is John Henry. On his immediate ride, that's Jake White. Did I get all that right? You did. Alright. We need to get a microphone turned up here. Yeah. Just like just like that. Say something, Jake. Is that better? That's better. Alright. Great. That's better. We can hear you. Alright. So We have important things to say. Yeah. That's right. You can hear us. But wait. But wait. There's more. There's so much more. Because on my immediate left, we have a guy that you've heard on YDC a time or two. You hear him in the music realm in this part of the world. He has been around for a long, long time. He has provided greatness for a long, long time because that is routinely what he's about. That's routinely what he does. He is the great Steve Helms with us once again. Thanks for having me. Well, thank you for doing this, man. I'm just kinda curious why I'm with these guys. Is something happen to me and nobody's told me yet? Oh, could be. This is weird. Hey. Look. I'm a little bit leery of them too. Is that buzzard you see flying around out there? Don't worry about it. It's it doesn't know anything. It doesn't know any better. You know, it's an odd force that we have here, though. Me from the podcast realm, him from music, these guys from true crime. I mean, it all it all kinda comes together. I guess it does in some obtuse way or another. Maybe before the day is over, we'll have that all figured out. People pay me to sing, and that is a crime. I promise. Yeah. Well, then they've been committing crimes for many, many years because you've been doing it for a hot minute or two Yes, sir. And making your way through this world at it. So I'd say you've won the game. Let's let's don't end it yet, though. Yeah. No. No. I'm not I'm not pronouncing it over anything. Now as for you guys Yep. How's the podcast realm suiting you? Join the heck out of it. Yeah. Quite well. Loving it. Had you done something like this prior to linking up with us here? Yeah. We started early twenty two, maybe somewhere around that time frame. Right? Yeah. Oh, so time runs together. You're old hands at this. Well, well, I don't know about that. I do. If you've been able to keep it, you know, going for that long, that's pretty good. We had a we had a sweetest hiatus. We had a hiatus. Yeah. We had a little break. Yeah. And then got back together again. Brought the band back together. Yeah. As it always goes. There there's there's plenty of content. We're not we're never short of any content. So we got stories to tell. Alright. So take us through that. Take us through how you find these stories and and what you do with them once you get them. Well, we're we're lucky to have a retired sergeant on the fourth police department right here. And so, yeah, we thank you for your service, Jake. Thank you. Thank you. He's had a he's had a had a tough tough career at times, I tell you. A fun career. Come on. But no. So, you know, we we we have his experience. I am a history nut. So I'm on the newspaper archives in Dallas and Fort Worth all the time. So I'm finding stuff all the time. So that's the we we've got a full well of stuff. Yeah. So he comes from police. Yeah. What did you do before this? Or what I'm a journal. I'm a journalist. Oh, really? Yeah. So I worked in Swartz for the for the the Star Telegram once the once the local authority on news. I don't know about that anymore. Mhmm. And now I work for I'm the editor for fourth Inc. Magazine, the business lifestyle magazine, which we have two titles there. The other is fourth magazine, and I work on both. So I've been doing that for thirty years. So tell so storytelling is kind of kind of Kinda your bag. Only thing I can do Yeah. Quite frankly. Yeah. They're putting a facade up here. I'm that's not my thing. I'm you don't want me with a hammer. No. No. Me neither. Me neither. I do this. Or or or with a with a guitar. You I would No one wants to see that either. I would like to see you try both. Be interested I have, in recent months, been an old hand at karaoke, and nobody wants Nice. That either. What's your big karaoke song? Whichever one I can stumble over with six vodkas on my on my liver. That's about that's the one I that's the one I try. So so it sounds like you do a lot of Steve Helm's stuff. I do the same thing. It's crazy. You've got a little stand up comedy in you as well. Yeah. Well, I've done some I've done impromptu stand up. One joke? Yeah. And we're not telling it. But Come on. Come on. No. We're done. Yes. It's it's fine. It's fine. It's a good one. It's funny. Alright. Come on. You you got to now. Why did the feminist cross the road? No. I don't know. Why did the feminist cross the road? The guy looking in the tree, John. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I wanna know the answer to that one first. The guy wakes up the guy wakes up one morning to pour himself a cup of coffee. And as he's fixing it up, he looks out and sees a gorilla in his tree. Okay. And he's like, damn, I got a gorilla in my tree. So this tells you how old his joke is. He goes to his yellow pages, starts flipping through it, look for gorilla removal service. Right. Finds it, gets on the gets on the line. The guy says, you know what? I don't have anything going on today. So, yeah, I can come out there in about fifteen minutes. So he shows up and the homeowner comes out there and meets him out. Guy says, where's that what do you got? He takes me back there, looks around. He goes, there it is. He goes, yep. You got a grill in your tree. Goes back out. Out of the back of his truck, he pulls a baseball bat, handcuffs, a chihuahua, and a shotgun. Baseball bat, handcuffs, chihuahua, shotgun. Yeah. Okay. Gathers it all up, takes it to the back backyard, lays it down. He tells the homeowner, okay. This is what I'm gonna do. He says, I'm gonna climb up in that tree with his baseball bat, and I'm gonna knock that gorilla out of the tree. When he falls to the tree when he falls to the ground, this chihuahua is specially trained to clamp down on his testicles. And when he does that, that grill is gonna get in the defensive posture like this, and I need you to slap those cuffs on him. Guy says, okay. He goes, what's to do with this shotgun? And the guy says, well, if I go open that tree and something doesn't go exactly right and that gorilla knocks me out of the tree, I need you to shoot that dog. Told you. That's a good one, John Henry. Yes. John Henry, ladies and gentlemen. Yes. Wow. It's a I gotta retrench for a second here. Is that what what he turns out pretty regularly, Jake? That is a common occurrence. It's a regular. When he's got six vodkas on his liver, I suppose. Yeah. I've heard that a few times. Okay. That's a good one. Yeah. Alright. That's a good one. I like it. Alright. So where do you guys go for your stuff these days? The true crime aspect of what you do. Well, typically try to stay within our vicinity, our locale of Dallas Fort Worth. We don't need to go much further than that. One of the biggest metros in town, there's a lot of crime. Mhmm. Mhmm. And there's plenty plenty plenty of documentation on it. And we're like I said, we're lucky because we have Jake, and we kinda borrow his expertise as an analysis and as an analyst. And and then, you know, he's got a well of people that we we call on for for stuff. This is a good one, though. This is a good example of where we go. So this one, there was a retired this so this guy, Oliver Ball, he's a lieutenant. He runs a homicide unit in the late sixties and seventies here at fourth place. And he retires, and right after he retires, he and he was well liked by the Star Telegram, places like that. And he says there's three cases that bother me. So we dug into all three of those cases. The one we're gonna talk about today happens to be one of those. And Oliver Ball was around for he was probably a homicide detective for thirty years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He'd been around a long time. Maybe longer? Mhmm. Yeah. One of those old guys where, you know, they didn't have the great public pensions like they got now. No. No. And, you know, those guys had to work for forty years to you you work and you died. Yeah. Pretty much. But, yeah, this is one of those cases. As long as you could work, you did work back then. Exactly. Yep. Exactly. Alright. Now it's story time with the boys from the Signal 51 Chronicles. Here's Jake. Here's John. So the yeah. So this story, as Jake alluded to, was one of Oliver Ball's stories from the late sick early early seventies. And it involves a guy named Jay Harry Wynn. And you guys you guys might I know, Mike, you were we were talking earlier. You know the Wynn's from Six Flags. Yeah. Angus Wynn Junior was was the who built Six Flags Yes. In the early nineteen sixties. And did you also know that the winds is, little known fact, introduced Tex Mex to Texas with El Chico. I probably did, but I hadn't thought of that in a long time. So Yeah. For the story, we'll say no. I did not. It's really inconsequential, but it's a it's a little known fact as Cliff Klabin would say. But so when Jay Harry Wynn was part of that family. They were distant cousins. But Jay Harry Wynn grew up in Fort Worth, and he eventually became the president of the life insurance company of Virginia. Yeah. He was also kind of a renaissance guy. He was a great photographer, and photography is something that leads into this story. Mhmm. Star Telegram ran a bunch of his his pictures over the years, and one of his pictures that garnered so much attention was of the trash in Fort Worth, and specifically trash garbage pickup. And he became the face of garbage pickup reform in Fort Worth, Texas. Very, very much a hot potato issue. There was the the the the city council race, I think it was 1970. This was one of the main issues was what we're gonna do with garbage pickup. And his picture showed at the time, most residents were just using trash trash the silver aluminum trash cans. Yeah. Those things get knocked over. The critters get in them. Mhmm. The sanitation workers don't give a damn. They're just pouring it in there. And if if something falls out, it falls out. So he eventually was he was pushing for using just standard trash bags that you buy at the fire department, which eventually did become the the the protocol in Fort Worth. People were were pissed off about it because they thought it was gonna be more money, blah blah blah. Well, two months after this, they enact this new trash procedures. Jay Harry Wynn, the garbage crusader crusader goes missing. Indeed. So we're gonna go, I don't know, five, six miles due south of here off of Maine. So Wynn lives two story house on at 1108 Washington Avenue. So to put it in perspective on the map, it's near the intersection of South Henderson and West Rosedale. So a pretty busy area. Right now, there's a new fancy apartment complex down there. So his son, Robert, you know, Winn's 89 years old. He was set to turn 90 in just a mere few weeks after his disappearance. So his son, Robert, would go by the house and check on him daily. And on September 16 at about 12:15, he makes his normal run to dad's house. Hey. Is everything okay? So he goes upstairs, and when he goes upstairs, they have a back then, this is pre AC, you know, I you know, pre modern day HVAC in a house, if you will. They had a sleeping porch. So Breeze coming in and out. You can still see them in those houses over there today. A lot of them have been converted, so to speak. Yeah. So he goes upstairs and sees dad laying in bed, bludgeoned to death. His dad had been struck multiple, multiple times with a hammer that they found laying on the floor next to dad. See, isn't this fun? The these stories we tell. Yeah. They're so bright and airy. I mean, you know? They're very popular. They are. They are popular. I'll give you that. So that, you know, obviously or son obviously immediately calls the police. The police show up. When they get there, they quickly notice one thing. You know, they're they're already starting to think, hey, what's some motives? What's some reasons why this may have happened? So they see the back door and assume that the assailant had come in to the house via the back door because the screen had been cut. One of the other patrol officers that was on scene stated that there was when they went in the house, the only thing that was kind of out of the ordinary was a dresser drawer had been opened. Now they don't know Harry Wynn. They don't know what's normal for him to have in his house, what's abnormal for him to have in his house, but it wasn't the signs of a telltale burglary where things are strewn and missing. The way his body was found and some of the injuries, it was consistent with one of the of him making some defensive postures, throwing up his hands basically, probably to block blows. So they finished their investigation at the scene. Things were a lot different back then. Right? This is not CSI Miami or whatever it is where you got, you know, DNA and things like that. So they start interviewing witnesses, I. E, in this case, neighbors. One of the neighbors says, hey, we heard his car leave at 03:00 in the morning. We thought maybe it was some kind of medical emergency, something along something of the sorts because there was some kind of collision. The next day now here's why we're doing this story right here. So the next day, about twenty four hours later, Wynn's car, 90 a green 1966 Cadillac is discovered right outside of that window, maybe 20 feet down the sidewalk, parked on the curb line. And in his car, they find a car key and a torn up piece of paper. That's all they find. That's also it's also handy to remember that the stockyards in the late in the early seventies was a barren place. All the industry from the from the from the packing plants had left. There was nothing down here except except the dregs. It wasn't until Billy Bob's, you know, showed up in nineteen eighty, eighty one that some life started returning here. Yeah. Look at it now. Exactly. Yeah. There was no bronc bronc tac room. There was no bronc tac room. Nothing of the sorts. So they recover his car. Like I said, they found the car key that had a partial fingerprint. Again, procedures are different. A torn up piece of paper. So on the surface, it wouldn't seem like much, but family, going back to Winn's crusade, is trash. They said he was meticulous. There's no way he would have left a torn up piece of paper in his car. They collect evidence. They hope, hey, maybe more witnesses will come forward. Maybe more information will come forward. Something will find a break in this case. Year goes by, no break in the case. Two years, three years, four years, to this day, this case has still not been solved. So one of the things that we found interesting was they could never pin down a motive. We did talk to his grandson or great grandson. I don't remember what- Grandson. Yeah, grandson several years ago about this. And he said in the house, Wynn was known to keep bars of gold, silver, and he had expensive photography equipment. The other thing of interest, at the same time that this case had happened, there was a lady named Emma Davis. She was an elderly female. She was also found, bludgeoned to death, in her home off of Randall Mill. Eastside. East Fort Worth. Mhmm. And another guy named Charles Patterson, he had a downtown office at the Sinclair Building. And one one day cleaning crew comes in early in the morning, same thing. They find him bludgeoned to death in the house. So, you know, when you look back at Fort Worth in that time, not just this case, but other cases, this whole serial concept where there were multiple victims, where these things were never solved, were pretty prevalent. Now with Wynn, you know, John talked about this trash reform, the city hated it. They were gonna lose somewhere to the tune of $1,800,000 over a two year period, and we're talking 1971. Lot of money back then. Yep. Citizens, for some reason, there was a big faction of residents that opposes this plan. Yeah. So And they were concerned about the cost as well. Yep. So with that being said, it's one of the ones where motive unknown, we do now live in a time where you have technology, pretty rare that that would happen today where there's just a complete, absolute mystery, right? I mean, with the technology now you have your license plate cameras, you've got the city's got cameras everywhere, witnesses, cell phones, etcetera. Whoever drove his car off, whoever drove his car Would have seen it. Yeah. You'd had it on camera. Right. Yep. So to this day, the murder of Jay Harry Wynn is still still a great unknown. Perhaps will probably always be that way. You know, they have solved a couple in the last few, the Carla Walker case, I was around the same time, they recently solved that. So I don't know if we'll ever see that outcome, but. And what year was this again? 'seventy one. 'seventy one. Yep. And then we also had that case recently with the UTA criminal justice class that solved them, that they thought they had solved a murder from 1984, forty years ago. Right. It turns out that they didn't. The DA Yeah. Whatever evidence they claim to have, the DA said, no, that's not gonna fly. But Yeah. There there was something to do. I think that had something to do with a a witness statement. I can't remember what it was. Something of the sorts to where that didn't work out. Yeah. So so the the the case of J Harry Winn sits amongst the boxes of the cold cases in the Fort Worth Police Department Homicide Department. Yep. And that was one that Oliver Ball, who had, you know, worked on dozens and dozens of cases over thirty years, forty years, whatever the case might be, said was one that troubled him till his till his dying day. How many cold cases do you think they have? You know Probably varies, you know, from one time to another time, but Well, you know, I don't know how good the records are of it, and I I don't say that in a disparaging way. I know that a lot that we've done that are not solved, they're still not listed on the website. I think if on the website from 70 to 80, there's maybe 20 or 30 of them. But you know, their clearance rate now today is 90%. Now that's incredibly high across the nation. Yeah. So the detectives in Fort Worth do one hell of a job at this. It's just rare now that they don't solve it. Right? I mean, all the technology and everything, which, you know. Yeah, I'm sure they have a lot more to work with and they probably have better training. And these guys are probably just a whole lot better at what they do than those guys back then were. No knock on those guys. They were doing the best they could, but Well, there's no There's a camera everywhere now. Yes. Everywhere. DNA. Yeah. All the forensic capabilities. And and I think the guys are more innate today because, you know, they grew up watching CSI. You know, Oliver Ball wasn't able to do that. CSI is not a bad thing. No. It has its place in this world. It does. I am good. I'm good. Six vodkas? No. No. No. Not today. Alright. Well, I have another one. Let's talk to Steve Helms here for a little bit. Can we do that? Yes, sir. I just wanna reiterate that I was five in '71, and I had nothing to do with that. Okay. We got you off the list. You're good. Thank you. Now, in '71, I was 20, so I was a very likely candidate. I was a very likely suspect. It could very well have been me except I was too meek and too mild at that time to do anything like that. And how often did you find yourself over here in Fort Worth back then? Not often. Yeah. Not often. My time of coming to crazy Fort Worth was a little down the line there. Yeah. When I started playing in bands and stuff and we came over here and played it, I got you in places like that. This is a Stolen Water Media production.