TENINO: Karen Bodine and Nancy Moyer
Today’s episode is focused on two separate cases and I interview two daughters, who are not related. One is Sam Moyer, who’s mother Nancy went missing in Tenino, Washington in 2009. The other is Karlee Bodine, who’s mother Karen was murdered in Rochester, Washington in 2007. While Nancy and Karen may have never known each other, their children Sam and Karlee have bonded over a shared fight - for justice. This is Washed Away.
Sources for this episode include: Chronline 1 and 2, CrimeCon, Uncovered, Q13, Disappeared, Oxygen, and The Charley Project.
Huge thank you to Karlee and Sam for talking to me for this episode. They’re both working so hard to bring more attention to their mother’s cases and I’m rooting for them. They deserve justice and I have a feeling they won’t give up until they get it. You can find Karen’s Facebook page here and Nancy’s Facebook page here. And this is Karlee’s Venmo for billboard donations.
Feel free to save and share these flyers. If you have any information about an older model brown Datsun hatchback car that would have belonged to someone near Olympia, Washington or Rochester, Washington in 2007 - please call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS, that’s 18002228477. And if you have any information about Nancy’s disappearance reach out to the Thurston County Sheriff's Office at 360-786-5279. You can also reach out to Detective Mickey Hamilton, who is handling both cases. By the way, there are rewards available for tips that lead to an arrest in each case.
Transcript-
Ashley: Today's episode is focused on two separate cases instead of just one. And I interview two daughters, who are not related. One is Sam Moyer, whose mother Nancy went missing in Tenino, Washington in 2009. The other is Karlee Bodine, whose mother Karen was murdered in Rochester, Washington in 2007. While Nancy and Karen may have never known each other. Their children have now bonded over a shared fight for justice. This is Washed Away.
Ashley: On a cold January morning in 2007, a mother of three was found on the side of the road in Rochester, Washington. There were no obvious signs of how she died, but someone had left her body in a gravel pit with her head propped up on an abandoned car seat, and a suspicious car was spotted near the scene. But later the description changed to a truck, local newspapers at the time reported this woman was transient, when she was anything but. There’s a lot of misinformation revolving around the unsolved murder of Karen Bodine. So let's clear some things up. Karen was born on March 11th, 1969 in Olympia, Washington, where she lived all her life. She was 37 years old when she passed away and has been described by friends and family as passionate, creative, and fun. She had three children: Tanner, Taylor, and Karlee.
Karlee: The general public really just has not cared. They'd wrote “corpse found on the side of road”, not murder victim, not body. They said she was transient, which was never true. She got kicked out of her boyfriends that Friday, walked right down the street to her friend's house and was staying there the whole weekend. That's not transient. And they wrote her off as a drug addict.
Ashley: Karlee's talking about a local newspaper here in Washington called The Olympian who actually had to release a follow-up article, explaining their choice of the word corpse when they originally ran the story about Karen's body being found. Here's a quote from that follow-up: “Words matter. No one should understand that more keenly than journalists, language written and spoken is our toolbox. But words chosen for a couple of recent front page headlines have generated a response that was not intended. In one instance, a headline on a story about a woman found dead by the side of a road referred to the body as a corpse. Technically that's correct. Readers felt that that was disrespectful and let us know in no uncertain terms. Was that the best word choice for that headline? Probably not considering the way it was interpreted. Will they use the word again? Only with more careful consideration.” End quote. I'm honestly shocked they didn't publish an apology with that explanation since clearly the public and the family were offended. Nowhere in their follow-up article did it say “we're sorry.”
Ashley: As for Karen's living situation at the time Karlee explained that pretty well. Her mother was briefly in between permanent residences and she was staying with a friend, but another sore spot for Karlee about how Karen's murder was reported on - involves how much focus was given to her struggles with drugs. And that's not to say that that wasn't true, but of course there's a lot more to Karen than just that detail.
Karlee: The struggles my mom had, uh, now that I'm being an adult, I really, really feel for her more and really understand the place she was in more. I really do, but I could not ask for a better mother in the whole entire world. I mean, my grandma gave her money to go buy shampoo for herself. What did she do? She gave it to us kids, you know, like I found a lipstick in her purse that I just liked, I knew it was her favorite color. “Karlee keep that instead!” We’d go for walks, we’d go get candy bars. She taught me how to curl my hair properly. Everyone comments on my nails everyone asks if I have fake nails, no, my mother taught me my secret. She’s the epitome of the mom. Of course all moms have issues, not every mother was perfect, but she went above and beyond and she wasn't just, you know, a girly girl. I mean, she can ride horses and do soccer. Yeah. She… she was amazing.
Ashley: The people Karen Bodine was hanging out with the night before she was found, have been referred to as a rough crowd. And none of them have done much talking about what happened to Karen. There have been a few persons of interest in her murder over the years, but due to a lack of witnesses and concrete evidence, no arrests have ever been made. Here's some more details on the crime scene: Karen was found about 15 feet from a county road in Rochester. Her body was unclothed and she was laying on her back with her head propped up on an old car seat. There were no obvious injuries and no evidence of sexual assault, but she did have a ligature around her neck. And her cause of death was eventually determined to be strangulation. Karen was discovered just after sunrise on January 22nd, 2007 and authorities believe she was killed not long before she was placed there. Who could do something like that? And why did they leave her body in such a public place? To me, it seems as though the killer not only knew Karen and the area, but wanted her to be found.
Karlee: They're still a family in agony and torture every day. And we know there's a murderer or murderers roaming, the greater Olympia [area] getting [off] scot-free with this. I mean, hopefully they're in jail for another minor misdemeanor, but of course they're not going to cop to murder while they’re there.
Ashley: That kind of sounds like, do you think you have a pretty good idea of who might have done this?
Karlee: I have major people of interest. Now the tricky part is, and I'm sure you guys all watch Law and Order and you know, the CSI, Criminal Minds and all that, you don't get DNA results in the next day. I mean, on a good day, it could take six months or a year. You know, it's a waiting game. It really is. And then by the time that test gets back, there might be a whole ‘nother one, so that one's invalid now and you've got to redo it. And the other scary thing about that is, you only have a certain limited amount of samples. Now you have to be really careful of the tests you run. What if you run a test, it doesn't come up with nothing. And two years later they have the test that cures all and we no longer have DNA to submit it to.
Ashley: Are the police looking for your okay, before they run those tests to make sure that it's going to count if they're going to use that DNA?
Karlee: Family has all consent. Yes. We are like “gung ho” get this guy, yes.
Ashley: So the good news as you just heard is that there is DNA available in this case, but what's tricky is that there's only so much of it available and there's so many possible tests to run and these tests keep getting better and better with time. So there's a real fear that all of the DNA will be used on tests in say 2021, that don't yield any results. And then in 2022, suddenly a new test comes along. That's far more advanced. I can't imagine the pressure and stress that must come with having to make those kinds of decisions. I really feel for Karlee. She has been her mom's biggest advocate these last 14 years. She's passed out flyers, created a Facebook group to share information and raise awareness. She's hired a private investigator, given countless interviews, and she recently held a vigil to honor her mother's life. But the latest tactic she's tried to get more attention on her mom's case is putting up a huge billboard on Martin Way in Olympia.
Karlee: I do have another billboard coming up at the… literally the block of the last house she was verified to be seen at. That's where the next one’s going up. What we need to do is, our main goal right now, or billboard money. Um, cause that is so close to being paid off. A thousand percent, including my own money, goes directly to the billboard, to like copying media flyers, to pass them out. And for the PI. Now, the PI went to school with my mom. She's saying she will do it pro bono. And I understand that and I appreciate that, but it costs money to run flyers and run tests and go investigate people. So I want to give her some type of money so she's not spending her own money.
Ashley: If you’d like to help Karlee with a donation I'll be sure to provide that information in my show notes. And another way you can help is by spreading the word about a key detail in this case: the vehicle that was spotted near the crime scene, there have been conflicting reports over the years about whether it was a car or a truck, and I'll let Karlee clear that up…
Karlee: In the original newspaper report and in the original, uh, cause I have all the crime scene records and all the crime scene records. It's a 1980s Datsun, probably dirty, car, like the hatchback car. And that's been going around forever, forever. I don't know how it got changed to truck. I don't know if someone wrote it down wrong. I wonder if there's a different witness who saw a different truck later in the day and there’s just confusing [them]? But there was a car, I can guarantee you. There was a brown Datsun, eighties style car with the hatchback.
Ashley: If you have any information about an older model brown Datsun hatchback car that would have belonged to someone near Olympia or Rochester, Washington in 2007, please call Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS, That's 1-800-222-8477. And if you’re not sure if what you might know is important, Karlee wants you to know those kinds of details matter the most.
Karlee: Let's say you saw someone get car jacked, but you thought I'm sure someone called the police. I'm sure something happened. What if no one did call the police? What if you are the only person that was a witness to that crime, but you assume somebody else called and people think, oh my information so small it won’t mean anything. It's like, no! That's what breaks the case, is the smallest details like that.
Ashley: Just a little over two years after Karen Bodine was found in Rochester, a 36 year old woman named Nancy Moyer went missing less than 20 minutes away in Tenino, Washington. She's a mother of two, a financial analyst for the state department of ecology, and she had an unmistakable smile. In 2009 Nancy and her husband, Bill had been separated for a while. And on March 6th of that year, Nancy's daughters went to stay with him for the weekend, which is what they usually did. So that day Nancy left work, dropped off a coworker at their own home, and then was seen buying some groceries at the Thriftway Market around 6:45 PM.
Sam: I was super young. So I can't like describe her the way that older people would. But my mom was a really kind, trustworthy person. Um, she didn't make enemies. She loved everyone. She was friends with a bunch of people and she was just amazing. Um, she was a really great mom too. She made sure that my sister and I were always happy. She made the holidays and the birthdays and everything super special. And she just was wonderful and goofy and… mom things.
Ashley: That's Sam, Nancy's youngest daughter. She was only nine when her mom went missing. So here's what happened: On March 8th, two days after Nancy had last been seen at the Thriftway, Bill brought their daughters back home and Nancy was nowhere to be found. Her car was parked out front so she had made it home from the store. Her purse was inside the house, but oddly the front door was left open, like ajar. Some lights and the TV were on, a glass of wine was sitting on the coffee table and there were no signs of a struggle. It was like, Nancy just stepped out for a minute. But in reality, she vanished.
Sam: She had two, what people are calling wine glasses on the coffee table when we went to her house to be dropped off the day that we found out she had gone missing and they said, one of them was full and one of them was empty, but one of them was actually a glass mug that wasn't a wine glass and people have just called it a wine glass. I don't know why, not that that's really important or not, but I dunno, it might be.
Ashley: It could be, if people are saying that there were two wine glasses, like two people were sitting there drinking, but it was just another glass on the table.
Sam: Yeah. If she was expecting someone or something.
Ashley: Nancy didn't own a cell phone so that couldn't be tracked or traced and her credit cards still haven't been used to this day. She was a reliable worker and a great mom who would never leave her job or of course her children without telling someone, so disappearing like this was incredibly out of character for her. When she didn’t show up, Bill took the girls back to his house and officially reported Nancy as missing the next morning.
When someone goes missing for a really long time, there's no sightings of them. It's been years, there's been no activity on their bank accounts. There's no evidence to support the idea that, you know, they just left and started a new life. Especially if there are suspicious circumstances in how they went missing. Well, then they go from a missing person to a no body homicide case. And that's what happened here. Nancy Moyer's case would remain cold for over a decade until July 2019. When a neighbor and coworker of hers randomly called 911 and confessed to murdering her.
Sam: Eric Roberts, the guy that confessed and recanted, a lot of people don't know that they actually did dig up his fire pit. They tore the whole thing apart. Cause a lot of people didn't know that they had searched the fire pit. Um, and they did, and there was no concrete slab at his house, which he's been talking about building a concrete slab and he had bags of concrete there, but he had never built it so there was no way she was in the concrete or anything. So he was three houses down from our family house in Rochester at the time, it was just, um, my dad's house because my mom moved to Tenino, but yeah he was three houses down.
Ashley: Eric allegedly claimed that he had killed Nancy during sex and strangled her with a scarf. He told police he burned that scarf and that they should search his basement and backyard fire pit. He also reportedly told people that he had poured a concrete slab on his property. But as you heard from Sam, that doesn't all seem to be true. Eric Lee Roberts was arrested for second degree murder, but a few days later he recanted his confession claiming that he didn't remember making it. And without enough evidence to hold him, he was released. I just don't get why someone would confess to something that they didn't do. And he didn't confess because he was in police custody and, and they forced a confession out of him, he voluntarily called 911 and confessed.
Sam: So they [the police] had some items that they wanted to immediately test for DNA evidence that were found in his basement, I think. And then we didn't get any evidence off those that would convict him. So, we still have items being tested. It's just a really slow process because it’s a cold case.
Ashley: Oh, okay. So they're still kind of working through everything they collected from his house?
Sam: Yeah.
Ashley: I asked Sam what her gut feeling was about this situation and she didn’t hold back.
Sam: He had to have done it. There's no reason he would just make that up, especially out of the blue. And he completely denied knowing her, which was untrue because they worked together. And she dated his nephew. And I obviously want to know where she is, but I think it's more important to get the person behind bars first, if possible.
Ashley: Before the bizarre confession in July 2019, there were a couple of other suspects that folks had their eye on: a coworker of Nancy's that allegedly stopped by the house, noticed the open door and left that weekend that she went missing. And I guess they had a date planned. And then there was a door to door meat salesman that would later become a convicted murderer.
Sam: The coworker was a lot of people's main suspect until Eric confessed. He was supposed to go on a date with my mom, the weekend she went missing and he was kind of like a creepy guy who's kind of obsessed with her and she wasn't really into him. So it's kind of like, okay, fine. I'll go out with you. Quit asking me - thing. So, he was a big suspect. And the meat salesman is Bernard Howell. Before she went missing, he came to the house in a white truck with no label or anything on the side of it, um, my mom was outside smoking and I was out there with her and he asked if we wanted to buy meat from him and told us what he had and so my mom ended up buying meat from him. Um, and that was it. But then about a year later after my mom went missing, so in 2010, he was convicted of murdering a Tenino woman on the walking trail. So then he became a suspect in my mom's case, and I picked him out of a photo lineup and he also denies ever the meeting my mom. And that’s not true because his meat was in our fridge.
Ashley: Interesting. I mean, that's such an odd coincidence that a killer literally knocked on your door!? Sam: Yeah
Ashley: Just to be clear, none of these suspects have been convicted for doing something to Nancy. It’s all just speculation and we are by no means accusing anyone of anything, just pointing out persons of interest and why they were being looked at. In Eric Robert’s case, we’re discussing him at length because he at one point - actually confessed.
Ashley: So.. just like in Karen Bodine's case, it seems that Nancy Moyer's family is also waiting on DNA evidence to process, that will hopefully lead to something, anything that police and prosecutors can use to file charges against whoever actually is responsible for whatever happened to Nancy. But the odds of her leaving on her own are slim to none, in my opinion. While we wait for those results to come, you can actually help Sam and Karlee by just spreading the word about their mom's cases. You know, keeping the pressure on the police that, these cases need to be solved, the DNA needs to be processed, and you can do that by sharing photos and flyers and even this podcast episode, just keeping their stories in front of as many eyes and ears as possible. Something small like sharing a social media post can actually mean a lot to someone like Karlee or Sam.
Sam: Just spread the word on her case. Karlee and I have a bunch of plans to get the word out on both of our moms’ cases. So just word of mouth, and obviously, if they have any information, whether they think it's important or not to share that with the Thurston County Sheriff.
Ashley: The same detective is actually working both of these cases. His name is Mickey Hamilton and you can reach his office at 360-786-5279. Despite growing up around the same part of Washington, Sam and Karlee actually met at CrowdSolve, which was part of a CrimeCon convention that happened here in Seattle a couple years back. That’s where folks that are interested in true crime can get together to learn more about wrongful convictions and methodology or the latest in forensic science and Crowd Solve specifically shines a light on cold cases that could use some attention. The crowd worked with Karlee, Sam, and Detective Hamilton to try to come up with new ideas for these cold cases, but unfortunately not much came of it. But since then, these daughters have certainly bonded over their shared fight for justice for their moms and I sincerely hope they get it, sooner rather than later, especially because they've already waited so long.
Ashley: Washed Away is Cosmic Bigfoot Production. For transcripts, sources, and more visit washedawaypodcast.com or cosmicbigfoot.com. If you have a case suggestion, please send me an email to washedawaypodcast at gmail and follow the show on Instagram and Twitter @washedawaypod. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe, and I'll have another episode for you in a couple of weeks. Thanks for listening.
