00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode contains graphic descriptions of crime scene details involving sexual violence and murder. It also deals with suicide. Listener discretion is advised if you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call her text nine to eight eight to reach the suicide and Crisis lifeline.
00:00:22
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six, a fifteen year old girl was raped, drowned, and left for dead along the banks of the Gallatin River. Her murderer turned out to be a hunter and a BLM biologist. He was brought to justice nearly thirty years later, but not in the way that anyone expected. That’s next on Blood Trails. How well do you know the people you hunt with? You know their names, what they do, where they live. If you went with family, you know a whole lot more. But when you venture into the wilderness to spend days, sometimes weeks alone with another person, do you ever wonder do I really know this guy?
00:01:15
Speaker 3: I think they just thought he was a pretty normal dude.
00:01:18
Speaker 4: We thought he was a kind of a quirky guy.
00:01:19
Speaker 5: But he was ex military and had a fisheries bo just wildlife ball, just background, so we just always thought he was kind of a different guy.
00:01:29
Speaker 6: We went way back out in the mountains by ourselves. I didn’t have any clue where we were and spent the whole day and it was horrible.
00:01:40
Speaker 7: It was the worst day ever.
00:01:42
Speaker 3: He was so mean.
00:01:43
Speaker 8: I shot my first year ever with him when I was nine years old, and I mean, he’s always was always there, and he was always the person who pushed me to get more involved with the outdoor activities.
00:01:57
Speaker 9: Nobody had any idea, And thinking back on it, I remembered that he had been kind of reserved and stuff been like, yeah, I couldn’t think of anything that I was never like uncomfortable.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: The voices you just heard are the relatives, coworkers and hunting partners of a man named Paul Hutchinson. Hutchinson was born in New Hampshire in nineteen sixty nine, but moved out to Montana in the late nineties to attend Montana State University. He earned a degree in fishery science and enjoyed a long and award winning career as a biologist with the Bureau of Land Management. He had a wife, two kids, and a house in Dylan, Montana. He was also a big time outdoorsman. He hunted elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and waterfowl, but most of all, he loved turkeys. He traveled to twenty states chasing gobblers, and he aimed to kill a turkey in all forty nine states where they live.
00:02:52
Speaker 4: Most of Hutchinson’s.
00:02:53
Speaker 2: Social media accounts no longer exist, but his son posted a video in twenty twenty of Hutchinson calling to a group of turkeys from his truck. From the outside, he seemed like a normal guy, maybe a little off putting at times, maybe a little arrogant, but on the whole, not a bad dude to go hunting with. Then last year, that facade came crashing down night.
00:03:21
Speaker 6: After nearly three decades, a cold case murder in Gallatin County is closed.
00:03:25
Speaker 10: In nineteen ninety six, fifteen year old Danny Houchins disappeared after going for a walk by a river.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Hours later, her body was found in a swampy area.
00:03:33
Speaker 6: Forensic evidence has determined Paul Hutchinson murdered Daniel Howchins at the Cameron Bridge fishing access.
00:03:40
Speaker 2: Hutchinson was accused of raping and murdering a fifteen year old girl in a community just down the road from where he lived worked and raised a family. Investigators used cutting edge forensic technology to pin him for the crime, and they confronted him in a high pressure interview you’ll hear at the end of this episode. The story rocked the small town of Dylan. Hutchinson’s family, friends, coworkers, and hunting buddies ask themselves how they missed the giant, festering atrocity in Paul Hutchinson’s past. How could a person so outwardly normal be capable of something so evil? Who was Paul Hutchinson? How did he escape detection for so long? Was anyone else in on his secret? And do his family and friends believe he did what he’s been accused of doing.
00:04:26
Speaker 3: I don’t think any of us know what happened.
00:04:27
Speaker 8: Obviously, something really terrible and provable happened, and there’s no like denying it or justifying it or rationalizing it. It’s completely crazy. I mean, you hear about the stuff on TV. You never think you’re going to be on the villain side of the story.
00:04:42
Speaker 2: And that story might not be over. Hutchinson traveled the country hunting turkeys, and now investigators are wondering if he used those trips to commit other crimes. Is it possible someone could rape a fifteen year old girl, kill her and then go on to live a crime free life. Right now, no one knows for sure, but still it makes you wonder what else could be hiding in the hearts of those we think we know best. On Jordan Siller’s and this is blood Trails a Monster among Us Part one Danny. On September twenty first to nineteen ninety six, Danielle Houchens needed to clear her head. She’d had a disagreement with her parents, as fifteen year olds tend to do, so, she asked her mom if she could drive down to the Cameron Bridge Fishing Access site just outside of Belgrade, Montana. Danny had recently earned her driver’s license, so it was a quick ten minute ride in her truck. It was peaceful down by the banks of the Gallatin River, and she’d been there before with friends and family. Stephanie, her younger sister, was twelve years old at the time. Her memory of Danny is colored by the genuine admiration most girls have for their older teenage sister.
00:06:10
Speaker 1: She was my hero.
00:06:11
Speaker 10: She was cool and tough, you know she. It was the grunge era, and it was the nineties, and like she wore cool, baggy flannels and listened to awesome music like Pearl Jam and Dirvana and all this angsty, you know kind of music. And so there was that cool factor, and she was adventurous and you know, seemingly unafraid to do things. But she excelled in a lot other ways too. She was very, very very smart and did really well in school. But she wasn’t just studious smart. She had this really dry sense of humor and sarcasm that she would point to the people around her, but would also like turn that on herself and be sarcastic and self deprecating their humor. You know, just kind of that hilarious, snarky, sassy, angsty fifteen year old girl.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: In the nineties, the Houchins didn’t do much hunting and fishing, but they did pretty much everything else in the outdoors. They especially liked to skip. Stephanie’s parents were both ski patrollers in Big Sky, Montana, and Stephanie remembers doing everything she could to keep up with her older sister on the slopes.
00:07:32
Speaker 10: She was always the person I looked up to on anything that we were doing as a family, and so there was that innat desire to be like her, to be able to accomplish the kinds of things that she was able to accomplish, to push myself to be tougher, whether it be on the mountain in the winter time, or up hiking and kind of pushing through that last mile of the tree trail before you got to the top, or whatever it was that we were doing out in the woods. She was my motivator to be able to continue doing that when it sucked right and when I’m like a little kid and want to give up. And so it sounds too simple to say that she was my hero, but she was my hero because she was my older sister, and everything I measured myself against was measuring towards her.
00:08:31
Speaker 2: That Saturday in nineteen ninety six, the town of Belgrade was celebrating a yearly fall festival. The festivities were taking place right across the street from the Houchin’s home, and Stephanie was there at the park playing with her friends.
00:08:44
Speaker 10: And I remember my dad coming over to the park and telling me that Danny was missing, and that you know, they were going to try to look for her, but that she was missing and I needed to come home and so I I kind of ran back home.
00:09:02
Speaker 2: Danny had left that morning, so when she didn’t come home by the early afternoon, her parents started to become concerned. But that concern turned to panic when Stephanie’s mom drove down to the Cameron Park Bridge and found Danny’s truck but no sign of.
00:09:21
Speaker 10: Danny, and then pretty quickly there found her keys and water bottle on a trail leading back into kind of the marshy area of that fishing access. That was really I think what set off all the explosive worry for my mom.
00:09:38
Speaker 2: Stephanie’s mom called Danny’s name and looked around the fishing access site, but still she couldn’t find her. That’s when she called her husband and they recruited family and friends to start the search. Stephanie remembers driving around town with a photo of Danny, asking if anyone had seen her sister.
00:09:57
Speaker 10: My friend’s mom drove me around and I went to the different bars, restaurants in Belgrade gas stations. I went to the high school girls’ basketball game and just asked folks if they had seen her and tried to create some awareness. I guess it was kind of really all hands on.
00:10:12
Speaker 2: Deck that day, finding Danny’s truck and keys convinced law enforcement that something had happened to the fifteen year old girl. The Galatin County Sheriff’s office scoured the swampy area near the fishing access until it got too dark. They didn’t find anything, but two brothers who were friends of the family kept searching. They noticed a footprint and a broken cattail the searchers had missed and followed the trail over a creek until they saw what they at first thought was a dead deer lying in the mud.
00:10:48
Speaker 10: And then I was home that night after Danny’s body was found, and I heard my dad tell my mom that she had died.
00:11:03
Speaker 4: Part two. The crime scene.
00:11:08
Speaker 2: Danny’s body was found face down in about eight inches of muddy water. Her body had been dragged twenty feet and her watch had been pulled over her hand. One of her sandals was missing, but she was still wearing a leg brace due to recently torn ligaments.
00:11:24
Speaker 4: In her knee.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: That brace and that injury, would have made it more difficult to run away. Her face was scratched and bruised, and the bruising on the back of her neck indicated that her head had been forcefully held under the mud. Even more disturbingly, if that’s possible, her bra had been rolled under her shirt and her underwear had been pulled down. Later analysis found seamen and male hairs in her underwear and in her genitals, along with mud in her lungs. All of this was found and recorded by the sheriff’s and the medical examiner, and yet, for reasons that remain unclear, coroner Robert Myers did not rule Danny’s death as a homicide. The death certificate lists the cause of death as drowning, but in a box where Myers was supposed to describe how the injury occurred, he simply wrote undetermined. In fact, according to Stephanie, investigators told the Houchens that their daughter may have drowned accidentally. Stephanie wouldn’t see the case file until twenty years later, but even in the days and months following Danny’s death, they questioned whether the sheriff was being honest with them.
00:12:39
Speaker 10: It never made sense what law enforcement was saying to us. How could she have just gone down there and accidentally died, How could there have been no marks on her? How could this just be such a mystery and I think that they had all of that really innate guts to suspicions that what they were being told couldn’t possibly be accurate.
00:13:06
Speaker 2: The sheriff at the time was a man named Bill Slaughter. He has admitted to not telling the family everything about their daughter’s death, but he has denied lying to them. It’s sometimes important to withhold information to protect the integrity of an investigation, and the Houchens aren’t the only family to be frustrated by a lack of information from law enforcement. It’s also true that in the months following Danny’s death, Slaughter told local media that he was investigating her death as a homicide. In a nineteen ninety seven article published in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, he said, quote, We’ve always worked it as a homicide. He reiterated that position to the Montana Free Press in twenty twenty four and said he was frustrated the coroner and medical examiner listed the cause of death as undetermined, But in that same article from nineteen ninety seven, Slaughter also claimed that the evidence was not quote conclusive. What’s more, Gallatin County Coroner Rob Myers told the media things at the time that contradicted the actual reports. Meyers said there was no visible bruising to indicate that Danny had been held under the water. He also said there were no signs of a struggle, even though she did have what appeared to be defensive wounds on her hands. Slaughter also suggested that they hadn’t collected any foreign hairs from Danny’s body, but that wasn’t true either. They had collected four hairs that didn’t belong to Danny, which would end up being crucial pieces of evidence in identifying her killer. The decision not to list Danny’s death as a homicide or tell the family anything about her sexual assault had far reaching effects both on the investigation of the case and the Houchin’s family.
00:14:54
Speaker 10: It’s pretty likely that family members who suddenly lose such someone to murder, and then you add in a complexity of learning leader that there was a sexual assault incorporated into that penus crime probably deal with a lot of very real trauma throughout their entire lives.
00:15:16
Speaker 2: Once Stephanie began looking into her sister’s case, the decision by the coroner to not list Danny’s death as a homicide made it impossible for Stephanie to enter Danny’s case into cold case databases. It also, she believes, solidified the notion that Danny’s death wasn’t worth investigating seriously.
00:15:35
Speaker 10: The failure in nineteen ninety six sat up, in my opinion, a culture of not taking her case seriously in the Sheriff’s office, because they listed undetermined on her death certificate.
00:15:58
Speaker 4: Part three the investigation.
00:16:03
Speaker 2: The Sheriff’s department did continue to investigate Danny’s case. Former detective Cindy Botek began reinvestigating the murder in the early two thousands when she joined the detective squad, and I’ve been told she took the case file out on a regular basis to see if she’d missed anything. She told the Montana Free Press that the mud in Danny’s lungs proved the teen didn’t drown in an accident, and she was as frustrated as anyone about the lack of progress in the case. But the fact is, for any detective, it’s tough to justify spending your very limited time and resources on a cold case when there are active investigations in the here and now. So the case remained cold until twenty nineteen, when Stephanie decided it was time she found out what happened to her sister.
00:16:51
Speaker 10: Many times over five years, you know, kind of repeated this mantra to my sister, like I’m coming for you, Danny, I’m coming for you, Like no, we have not forgotten you, and I’m coming and I will not give up until I do this for you.
00:17:07
Speaker 4: At first, she hit a brick wall.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: The Gallatin County Deputies assured her they were working on the case, but told her they couldn’t release any information about an active investigation. But she didn’t give up, and eventually her persistence earned her a call from Sergeant Matt Boxmeyer. Boxmeyer was in charge of Danny’s case, and he told her he planned to review and digitize the entire case file.
00:17:29
Speaker 1: That was the turning point for me.
00:17:31
Speaker 10: I was like, okay, jumping in head first, let’s go, because I thought I was going to have to work a lot harder to get collaboration. And I was pretty excited when I heard from Matt.
00:17:41
Speaker 2: The sheriff at the time, Brian Goodkin, worked with Stephanie in the County Attorney’s office to get approval for Stephanie to see that file. That experience, Stephanie says, was both heartbreaking and.
00:17:54
Speaker 10: Infuriating looking at her case file and looking at autopsy photos and crime scene photos, and she and I look a lot alike, and that was really terrible having to do that. What happened to my sister was so much worse than anyone had ever shared with us, and so all my worst suspicions about the way her life ended and what she endured leading up to her death and then what killed her was awful. Awful.
00:18:38
Speaker 2: Stephanie and Sergeant Boxmeyer stayed in touch over the next few years, but the case didn’t really get off the ground until Tom Elfmont came on the scene.
00:18:47
Speaker 11: Once I sat down with the sheriff and they told me about the case and that it was this really wonderful fifteen year old girl who basically got ambushed out at the Gallatin River, I said, you know, it’s a case I definitely would be very interested in investigating.
00:19:05
Speaker 2: Tom had been a captain with the Los Angeles Police Department, but he had since retired and moved to Montana. Dan Springer, who’d been elected as Gallatin County Sheriff in twenty twenty one, had been reaching out to his contacts for someone who might be able to help with Danny’s case. He’d heard about Tom through a network of retired LAPD officers, and Tom agreed.
00:19:25
Speaker 4: To work the case free of charge.
00:19:28
Speaker 2: He began his investigation by reading the case file and familiarizing himself with witness testimony and available evidence. I asked him if he agrees with Stephanie’s assessment that the crime scene evidence clearly pointed to rape and murder.
00:19:42
Speaker 4: She didn’t drown.
00:19:44
Speaker 11: She was actually suffocated to death while he held her head down, and she had small contusions on the back of her head and also the front of her head, so it was clear to me it was a clear cut homicide from day one.
00:19:59
Speaker 2: Next, Tom conducts did his own interviews of the various parties involved. He ruled out the brothers who found Danny’s body, as well as another potential suspect investigators had identified in twenty ten. He didn’t believe any of these men were capable of this crime, so he turned his attention to the physical evidence that had been collected at the scene. He started with a semen that had been found in Danny’s underwear. A DNA profile had never been extracted from that semen, partly because the Montana State Crime Lab is underfunded and partly because the underwear had been misfiled in the archives.
00:20:32
Speaker 11: So I actually drove up to the lab and I met with the people at the lab and I said, look, you have to test the saman and you have to get a DNA profile.
00:20:42
Speaker 2: Previous investigators had asked the lab to conduct that testing, but it had never been completed. But this time, thanks to Tom’s efforts, the DNA profile was done and submitted to the FBI’s DNA database. If Danny’s killer had committed a felony since about the year two thousand, it would pop up in that system. But nothing appeared, and the genetic information wasn’t robust enough to complete another kind of advanced genetic analysis, the same kind of analysis that had caught the Golden Gate killer in twenty eighteen, a case that had inspired Stephanie to begin the hunt for Danny’s murderer. By now, you’ve probably heard of forensic genetic genealogy. If you haven’t, the concept is actually simpler than it sounds. If you’re trying to identify someone from a DNA sample, but that information isn’t in any law enforcement databases, you can look for relatives of the person you’re trying to find in one of those genetic testing services like twenty three and meters or ancestry dot com. If you can find, say the cousin or the father of the suspect, you can narrow down the search to people related to those cousins or fathers who were in the area around the time the crime was committed. The semen wasn’t enough to do this analysis, but fortunately that was a the only physical evidence collected.
00:22:02
Speaker 11: In all the evidence that they had from twenty eight years ago, there were four hairs, and the four hairs were actually preserved fairly well.
00:22:13
Speaker 2: Tom got in touch with an expert in forensic DNA analysis who connected him with a lab called Astria Forensics in San Francisco. According to Tom, this is the only lab in the country that can extract enough genetic material from a hair to perform genetic genealogy. This technology is so new that it didn’t even exist just a few years ago. He sent the first two hairs to Astria, but they were too degraded to extract a DNA sequence. Tom only had two hairs left. If those didn’t produce the results he was looking for, he’d have exhausted the best evidence from the crime scene.
00:22:50
Speaker 11: I submitted the third and fourth hairs, and with the third and fourth hairs on the fourth hair, they got a lot of DNA and it was only the seventh case in the United States involving a hare and DNA that was solved with.
00:23:07
Speaker 4: A DNA profile in hands.
00:23:08
Speaker 2: Tom then went to one of the best genetic genealogists in the country, a woman named C. C. Moore, whose website calls her the DNA Detective. She was able to find two brothers and a first cousin who were related to the DNA that came from the hares. These brothers and cousin were from New Hampshire, but Tom discovered that one of the brothers had moved to Bozeman, Montana, a month before Danny was killed.
00:23:33
Speaker 11: So then we knew he was in the area where the crime occurred, and then we zeroed in on him.
00:23:40
Speaker 2: The man they identified was Paul Hutchinson, a fifty five year old fisheries biologist with the Bureau of Land Management. Stephanie was given Hutchinson’s name long before it was announced to the public. I asked her what it was like after five years of searching and nearly thirty years of wondering to finally put a name and a face to the man who killed her sister.
00:24:05
Speaker 10: Man, it was a pretty complex feelings.
00:24:13
Speaker 1: It was relieving.
00:24:16
Speaker 10: And knowing that we were going to solve this.
00:24:20
Speaker 3: It was.
00:24:22
Speaker 10: A validation that we were about to go have years of a court battle ahead of us. But it was also really weird knowing that that person, who is truly a monster in my eyes, had like like I could look him up online, and he had a life and he had a career, and that introduces all sorts of weird, just things to wrap your head around that I was not ready for. But at the end of the day, I knew that I had done everything I could for my sister and that we were going to be successful finally finding justice for her murder.
00:25:16
Speaker 2: After the break, Tom catches up with Hutchinson at the BLM Field office in Dylan and we hear the voice of Danny’s killer. Does he admit to knowing Danny or being in the area, how does he react to seeing Danny’s face in a photograph, and what is Hutchinson’s next move After being confronted about his crime for the first time in nearly thirty years. That’s next on Blood Trails, Part four the interview. At this point, Tom knew he had to tread carefully. The DNA evidence was convincing, and it would become even more convincing once they compared the hair on Danny’s body with a current sample from Hutchinson. But even with that forensic evidence, the case would be difficult to prosecute.
00:26:14
Speaker 11: The first thing a defense attorney would have said, is okay, your honor. For twenty seven years, this woman’s death was listed as an accident. Why are we here charging my client with murder? Tom wanted to sit down with Hutchinson and ask him questions about where he was and what he was doing in nineteen ninety six. If he had those kinds of statements, along with the physical evidence, prosecutors would have an easier time convicting him. I really wanted him to either lie to us or tell us things about where he was, because you know, he could have always used the.
00:26:52
Speaker 4: Alibi that a lot of criminals use.
00:26:56
Speaker 11: Well, I met her there and we had sex, but when I left, she was fine, and I didn’t want him to have any kind of an alibi.
00:27:05
Speaker 2: Tom also knew that if he conducted a formal interview with Hutchinson about Danny’s case, he would have to read Hutchinson his Miranda rights, and Tom’s experience when a suspect is read his miranda rights, he almost always clams up and asks for a lawyer. So Tom consulted with a criminal attorney to develop a plan that would let Tom interview Hutchinson without reading him his rights.
00:27:28
Speaker 11: It was agreed that if I could interview him in a public place where he could get up and just walk away any time he wasn’t under arrest, he was free to go. That would be okay with the courts in Montana and the federal courts.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: Tom and another volunteer investigator, Sergeant court de Puigue, of the Newport Beach Police, approached Hutchinson as he was getting out of his truck in the parking lot of the Dylan Blm Field office. Normally, we would have to rely on Tom’s account and police statements to learn about what happened next, but Sergeant Dupuige was carrying a camera and we were able to obtain the footage.
00:28:06
Speaker 3: Hey, Paul, how you doing good? Good?
00:28:09
Speaker 7: My name’s Tom Elfmont.
00:28:10
Speaker 11: Well, you’ve got your hands full, so that’s okay. I’ll just give you a touch there with the Gallatin.
00:28:16
Speaker 3: County Sheriff’s Office.
00:28:17
Speaker 11: Uh huh, guess, and we wanted to talk to you.
00:28:21
Speaker 3: We’ve been asking around.
00:28:23
Speaker 11: We were over in Ennis and we’ve been talking to some fisheries people about some things that have been going on here at the rivers in southwest Montana.
00:28:32
Speaker 2: Well, Tom didn’t tell Paul the real reason they wanted to talk to him. He was concerned that if he did that, Paul would end the interview then and there. So as a pretext for speaking with Hutchinson, Tom found other cases of women who have been found dead along rivers in Montana. He and Sergeant to Pwig told Hutchinson that as a fisheries biologist who spent a lot of time on the river, he would have valuable insight into these cases.
00:28:56
Speaker 7: We’re working a couple of vescations involving the water and your name came up as somebody that’s been around a long time that that could probably help us. We gotta we got a we got a couple of names. You might even know these guys, but we when we asked BLM, obviously you guys were working the waterways all the time, they said, Hey, these guys have been around forever. They know they know the inside, inside out of everything that’s going on. So but that’s why, that’s why we’re I’ll talking to you today. So appreciate you sitting down with us to help.
00:29:24
Speaker 2: Paul doesn’t seem overly nervous in the initial minutes of the interview. When Sergeant Apuigue asked to use the restroom, Paul takes out his phone and sends a message to one of his texts. While fielding questions from Tom about his time at Montana State University, I went.
00:29:37
Speaker 5: To school in New Hampshire for a year. That was a terrible student in high school. I was really lazy, and then you know, military straightened j out.
00:29:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I.
00:29:46
Speaker 5: Applied to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana over again. I got accepted all of them. And I think it was a cost benefit. M s U was had a good program and it wasn’t stupid expensive.
00:30:05
Speaker 2: This might seem like mundane small talk, but remember the investigators believed that Paul killed Danny during his first year at Montana State, and Tom and Sergeant de Puigue are trying to get more information about that time or catch Paul in a lie.
00:30:20
Speaker 7: So you went to Montana and that was for how many years of school did you have to go to between?
00:30:26
Speaker 3: Oh?
00:30:26
Speaker 7: Really? And then what year did you start there?
00:30:29
Speaker 3: Ninety five? I think ninety six.
00:30:34
Speaker 7: Ninety five, somewhere around there.
00:30:37
Speaker 3: N ninety six, thinks ninety six.
00:30:42
Speaker 7: Do you think about nineteen ninety six? Okay? Do you do you remember when in ninety six that you came to Montana?
00:30:50
Speaker 3: I don’t. I mean, did you start the fall semester? Yes?
00:30:56
Speaker 7: Okay, so maybe August September, probably earlier than that, okay. And then did you was that your first femine in Montana?
00:31:09
Speaker 3: Yes?
00:31:09
Speaker 7: Okay, perfect. Yeah.
00:31:11
Speaker 2: Paul must have been wondering why these guys seem so interested in his biography. They’re over fifteen minutes into the interview and Tom and the sergeant still haven’t asked him a question about one of their cases. But if he’s starting to get suspicious, he doesn’t show it. He’s leaning back in his chair with his right leg crossed over his left and pressing against the edge of the table. When Tom or the sergeant asks him a question, he looks at them and furrows his brow as he thinks he puckers his mouth and moves it from side to side. But when Sergeant Tapuige finally mentions young women being killed near waterways, Paul’s body language starts to change.
00:31:47
Speaker 7: What we’re looking into is we’ve had some deaths that have popped up, females that have been popping up either in the water or near water. And one of the things is is the these cases are cold. Have you ever heard that term before? And what we’re trying to do is stimulate him, is try to figure out, you know, who may be responsible for him.
00:32:07
Speaker 2: Obviously, Paul leans forward in his chair, arms folded, and then immediately leans back. It’s like he can’t decide whether to lean forward and look more closely at the images in front of him, or lean back and act nonchalant. It ends up looking like he was hit with a small bolt of lightning. The sergeant shows Paul images of two women who were killed along rivers in Montana, and Paul says he doesn’t recognize them at one point, pushing the pictures farther away from him on the desk. Then Depuige poses the question they’re really there to ask.
00:32:40
Speaker 7: Okay, this is Daniel Houchins. She was she was killed in September ninety six, and she was found off the Gallatin River. Did you ever fish up there?
00:32:55
Speaker 2: By this point, Paul had likely figured out what was going on. Tom remembers noticing how difficult it was for the fisheries biologist to keep himself together.
00:33:03
Speaker 11: I mean, he was profusely sweating. Clearly, he was unbelievably agitated.
00:33:10
Speaker 2: Paul has a receding hairline, and even in the body cam video you can see a sheen of moisture on his forehead.
00:33:16
Speaker 5: I h I trapped on the Gallatin, but never fished the Allatan. Okay, I never fished. I don’t fish the big rivers. It’s always the strange, yeah, the little the backcountry stuff.
00:33:30
Speaker 7: Okay, So and do you have you ever heard of the Cameron Bridge Access? Have you been there before?
00:33:38
Speaker 3: Probably? Jack graviit lane?
00:33:42
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly? Is that where you trap?
00:33:44
Speaker 9: No?
00:33:46
Speaker 3: I trapped over Alberta Angus.
00:33:49
Speaker 7: I traveled back and forth, okay into a Loup right around that time. And where you was this back in ninety six, ninety seven eight before you shut down here?
00:34:01
Speaker 3: Oh?
00:34:02
Speaker 5: Yeah, I trapped up until three years ago. So yeah, I would have been in.
00:34:10
Speaker 7: That area then back in ninety six.
00:34:14
Speaker 5: I don’t know if I tropped the ninety six that was my first year of college.
00:34:17
Speaker 2: Again, this line of questioning isn’t random. They’re trying to get him to admit to being in the area around the time Danny was killed, and even though he equivocates a little, Tom believes his answer was close enough to an admission.
00:34:29
Speaker 11: He admitted going out having trap lines out there, which would have put him in the woods trapping whatever. He trapped bobcats, skunks, coyotes, and so he was creeping around the woods out there. So he put himself there, which was a big deal. That was a really big deal.
00:34:50
Speaker 2: As Paul’s this comfort grows, he excuses himself from the room for a third time during the course of the interview, which had only lasted about thirty minutes. At that point, he says one of his texts, it’s his help, and turns his phone towards the investigators to imply that he’s just received a text message. But as he does so, you can see in the video that he’s just opened the on x app. Maybe he had a sudden urge to do some online scouting, or maybe he wanted to delete some pins he’d have trouble explaining if investigators were to find them, But when he returns and the interview continues, he tries to play things as cool as he can.
00:35:26
Speaker 7: Going back to Cameron Bridge access and obviously Danny was killed in what she was found in September of ninety six. Danielle, Yeah, houchinz Yeah, this one. Do you remember hearing about this murder or anything about about that? I don’t.
00:35:46
Speaker 3: I mean I might have.
00:35:48
Speaker 7: It was a big case just because she was so young, and obviously for Bozeman, that’s that’s big news, you know, especially in Montana. It wasn’t common obviously back in the day. I mean, do you remember this mayor or hearing her name?
00:36:05
Speaker 3: I don’t. I mean, what was that twenty thirty years ago?
00:36:13
Speaker 2: The investigators pressed Paul on whether he knows any fishing guides or local fishermen who might have been on the Gallatin around the time Danny was killed. Paul reiterates multiple times that he’s not much of a fisherman, and even though he is a big time outdoorsman, can’t think of a single angler who might be able to help them.
00:36:31
Speaker 7: No, I’m saying, like any local fishermen back in the day that you knew around Cameron Bridge that might have information for us back in ninety six, remember night, he SAIDs honestly, I don’t.
00:36:49
Speaker 2: I mean kind of Next Tom and the sergeant pressed Paul Harder on his interactions with Danny.
00:36:55
Speaker 7: Okay, and what about Danny Houches. Do you recognize that name?
00:37:00
Speaker 3: I don’t.
00:37:01
Speaker 7: Indeed, do you know if you do, you remember do you know her?
00:37:07
Speaker 3: Was she in school when I went to school?
00:37:09
Speaker 7: No, she was in she was over at Belgrade High School when you were when you were in school, I don’t think as well.
00:37:20
Speaker 3: I don’t know where what circle I would have ran into.
00:37:24
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean she’s a fifteen year old girl, That’s what I’m saying.
00:37:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:37:27
Speaker 7: So do you do you recall or does she look familiar to you at all?
00:37:32
Speaker 3: No, honestly, I don’t recognize any of them.
00:37:35
Speaker 5: But I mean if back then that would have been what on the news of the newspapers.
00:37:41
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, that was a big I mean this, especially this one because it was in Bozeman. Danny was would hang out at the Cameron Bridge access road. Do you remember seeing her there or a similar face?
00:37:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, I honestly don’t. I mean, I probably.
00:37:57
Speaker 5: I’ve been to a bunch of fishing access sites for one reason or another.
00:38:01
Speaker 3: I don’t one of them.
00:38:03
Speaker 7: She is, I mean, Danny does not look familiar.
00:38:06
Speaker 3: To you at all.
00:38:07
Speaker 7: You don’t know her?
00:38:10
Speaker 2: No, I.
00:38:11
Speaker 3: What’s the last name, Houchins? Houchins? Does she have an older brother?
00:38:17
Speaker 7: No?
00:38:18
Speaker 3: No.
00:38:19
Speaker 2: Paul maintains a baffled but concerned expression and shakes his head and blinks a lot. The rest of the interview circles around the same kinds of topics. Paul eventually admits that he may have tubed the Gallatin in nineteen ninety six, but he delivers most of his answers with a shrug. Tom and Sergeant to Pwiege never accuse him of anything directly, but they do come close, and at one point, Paul almost asks the question that’s likely been spinning around his mind throughout the interview.
00:38:48
Speaker 7: Is there any reason or do you think there’s any possibility that you could have been in the area when this happened? Do you remember a girl screaming or anything like that?
00:38:58
Speaker 3: I don’t.
00:39:01
Speaker 7: Is there a possibility that you were there when she was murdered? No, you don’t remember any screaming or anything like that. You weren’t trapping or anything during that.
00:39:09
Speaker 3: Time, not September that would have been Are you asking me?
00:39:15
Speaker 7: I mean, I’m just asking if you remember anything all during that time. Don’t no, nothing, okay.
00:39:27
Speaker 2: When the interview concludes after a little more than an hour, Paul seems relieved. He says he’ll try to think of someone who might be able to help them, and promises to call Tom if he remembers anything that might be useful.
00:39:39
Speaker 7: If there’s something I haven’t asked you that you think I should know this time, tell me now so that might be.
00:39:44
Speaker 3: More okay, Yeah, question ask grew So.
00:39:48
Speaker 7: I mean it’s what it’s part of the job.
00:39:50
Speaker 3: But yeah, I feel free to call me too.
00:39:52
Speaker 7: Man, all right, thank you, thank you.
00:39:58
Speaker 2: Tom told me they weren’t concerned that Paul would try to flee the country, but he still instructed detectives to follow their number one suspect. They wanted to keep track of him and see if where he went and what he did might implicate him further.
00:40:11
Speaker 11: But Dylan was a very very small town. It’s one way in, one way out, and it was just impossible, and he was driving like a crazy man. So I told the surveillance people back off and just sit on the north side of town and the south side of town and his house and just see where he comes and goes. And that’s what they did.
00:40:32
Speaker 2: But whatever the plan was for the subsequent days and weeks, they never got the chance to put it into action.
00:40:38
Speaker 11: And then around four point thirty in the morning, I got a phone call. They told me that he called nine to one one and Dylan and he said officer needs assist and hung up.
00:40:51
Speaker 6: Just a day after their initial interview with Paul Hutchinson, Sheriff Springer found out that Paul Hutchinson had died by suicide, and he was dead.
00:41:04
Speaker 2: For most people, Hutchinson’s reaction to being interviewed about Danny is evidence enough of his guilt. But when they swabbed Hutchinson’s cheek for DNA and compared it to the hair they found on Danny’s body, there was no doubt in Tom’s mind.
00:41:18
Speaker 11: They turned it around really quickly and told us that it was ten point seven trillion to one that it was his DNA on Danny’s panties.
00:41:31
Speaker 4: So we knew we got the right guy.
00:41:34
Speaker 2: I asked Stephanie how she felt when Tom called her and told her that the man who killed her sister had committed suicide.
00:41:41
Speaker 10: My first thought was, you fucking coward, You fucking coward. I personally have had to put so much courage into an effort for driving justice from my sister, And how dare he decide that he gets to make that last choice? Unfathomable.
00:42:16
Speaker 1: I was so.
00:42:20
Speaker 10: Just aghast at that reality. I felt like he a selfish and as terrible as this sounds, because it’s not about It was never about me. It was always about justice for my sister. But I was looking forward to staring his ass down in court, and I was looking forward to delivering a victim impact statement and to testifying about the investigation. And I was looking forward to all of that, and he totally robbed that from me.
00:43:02
Speaker 2: Well, never know what Paul was thinking when he shot himself with a thirty eight caliber Darryner pistol. He could have been thinking about what Sergeant du Puig told him that they’d found male DNA on Danny’s body, and as Tom said, modern technology had finally allowed them to unlock its secrets.
00:43:20
Speaker 7: With the recent.
00:43:23
Speaker 11: Improvements in DNA technology, I think we’re getting to we’re getting.
00:43:28
Speaker 7: To the point where at some point, we’re going to be able to I think, don’t you agree, identify somebody. Yeah, yeah, I think we’re going to be able to identify somebody.
00:43:39
Speaker 2: Paul doesn’t react to this beyond nodding his head. But at that point he must have known he was cooked. He knew he would likely go to prison or worse, and as Stephanie says, he couldn’t face that prospect. But I also can’t help but wonder if he was thinking about this exchange with Sergeant du Puig just before the close of the interview, and wondering how he could face his own family when the world discovered what he’d done.
00:44:05
Speaker 7: They rocked this community. And obviously, you know, your dad, you would understand losing your daughter at fifteen, and you know, especially you know you have a girl who’s who you know, I’ll use an old school term innocent, right, and then somebody takes that innocence away and then murders her. I mean, as a dad, I mean, how would you feel, you know what I mean? I mean, you got a daughter, if that, if she was taking tomorrow by that, how would you feel about that?
00:44:34
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean, I mean who you didn’t even say it? I mean you have kids.
00:44:37
Speaker 7: I do, yeah, I mean I’d be I’d be absolutely devastated. I’d be pissed. I’d be pissed off to be honest with you, you know, and I want answers, and I want to know what man did that to my little girl. I mean, whether she’s eighteen, she’s thirty, she’s always going to be your little girl, right And that’s what we’re trying to answer for Danny’s dad right now and her mom. You know, who did that and why I did that? Just answer those questions. Why was it a mistake? Was it you know, was this a one off? Why did this happen to her being you know, fifteen years old?
00:45:11
Speaker 3: Man?
00:45:12
Speaker 7: You know, could you imagine I think an adult did it? And then for them to come in and absolutely just you know, you’re you’re sitting there as a dad thinking my daughters. You know, it’s probably screaming in his name, you know, asking for dad’s help. All if she wanted to probably do was go home to dad, you know, screaming for her dad to save her, and he couldn’t be there, you know, And that as a dad, you know of daughters, and you and me are in the same position.
00:45:42
Speaker 3: I mean, that just.
00:45:43
Speaker 7: Wrecks my heart out.
00:45:46
Speaker 2: Paul’s suicide brought Tom’s investigation to a close, but it’s hardly the end of the story. Once news got out about what happened, journalists, podcasters, and television personalities descended on Bozeman to try to figure out how a seemingly normal man could commit such a horrible atrocity and then hide it for nearly thirty years. They wanted to know who Paul Hutchinson was, how his family and friends were processing the tragedy, and whether Danny was Paul’s only victim. That’s next time on Blood Trails.
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