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Speaker 1: This episode contains graphic content and discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know need support, call or text nine eight eight.
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Speaker 2: When an eighty year old archaeologist and lifelong hunter was found dead inside his burned out home, the fire marshal called it a possible homicide, but suspicions weren’t enough for the family of doctor John Young. They needed more, and yet the story of their father and grandfather was lost, forgotten, and in some cases ignored altogether. In this episode of Blood Trails that changes. On January seventh, twenty nineteen, Kevin Young picked up his phone and took a call that would change his life.
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Speaker 3: As I remember, it was probably around two three o’clock in the afternoon. I received a call from my brother stating that he got a call from the Shurf’s farm at Towos that my father’s house was on fire and they didn’t know where he was at, but that is suburban was parked in front of the garage doors.
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Speaker 2: This was concerning, but it was also strange. Kevin’s father, doctor John Young, lived in an adobe house in the town of Taos, New Mexico. Doctor Young had been an accomplished archaeologist before he retired in the early two thousands. He had built his adobe home in part to pay homage to the native people and cultures he’d spent his career studying in the American Southwest. He knew and he taught his sons that adobe homes are highly fire resistant. They almost never burn. But Kevin’s brother reported that their father’s home was engulfed in flames. Kevin was living in Arizona at the time, so he packed up his truck and made the six hour drive up to Taos.
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Speaker 3: The fire was just still smoldering at the time, and the fire marshall was there in his vehicle, and so I met with them and talked to him a little bit, and they said that they still hadn’t determined where my father was at.
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Speaker 2: Doctor young Chevy Suburban was parked outside, and the fire investigator mentioned that the driver’s side door of the car and the front door of the home had been open when the firefighters arrived.
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Speaker 3: So they said they couldn’t go in and check for him until in the morning when the fire was down enough and they could determine that it was safe to enter the building enter his house. And so I stayed my truck overnight there.
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Speaker 2: For the next twelve hours, all Kevin could do was sit in his truck and watch the flames consume the house he and his father had built by hand.
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Speaker 3: They started searching the house probably around ten o’clock in the morning, and then he came out a little bit later, and.
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Speaker 4: They said they had found some remains in the house.
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Speaker 2: The body had been burned beyond recognition, but Kevin confirmed that, like so many old men, his father always carried a small part pocket knife. They found that pocket knife beside the corpse in the garage.
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Speaker 3: They’re fairly certain, but they wouldn’t say that it was his remains until they could do an autopsy.
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Speaker 2: That initial autopsy confirmed that Kevin’s father had died in the fire. The medical examiner found soot in his lungs, which indicated that he’d been breathing while the fire was burning. But they also found something else.
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Speaker 4: When they did do the autopsy.
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Speaker 3: There was a hole in a skull that looked like a bullet hole entry going in, not coming out.
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Speaker 2: It looked like Kevin’s father had been shot near his ear on the left side of his head. What’s more, the fire investigator, a guy named Jimmy vee Hill found that the fire had likely not been an accident.
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Speaker 3: Jimmy, during his investigation later that day, said that.
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Speaker 4: He had determined that there was at least.
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Speaker 3: Five areas of acceleration and possibly seven.
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Speaker 2: In other words, someone had dumped gasoline or lighter fluid, or or something else around the inside of doctor Young’s house. The fire had started in the master bedroom and then spread to consume the entire structure. It was so hot and so intense that it took firefighters the better part of twenty four hours to put it out, even before the medical examiner found what looked like a bullet hole in doctor Young’s skull. These findings convinced the fire investigator that what happened to the eighty year old had been intentional. Jimmy wrote in a sworn affidavit that he believed quote, this incident and the sequence of events are highly suspicious, making this death a possible homicide.
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Speaker 3: There’s just too much evidence in my mind that’s leaning towards somebody else did this.
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Speaker 2: Of course, it’s one thing to be suspicious. It’s another thing to prove a crime was committed and then prove who did it. It was tough to imagine why anyone would want to murder an elderly man living by himself. Doctor Young didn’t have any enemies, at least none that Kevin knew about. But he did have a forty five year career as an archaeologist, a career that allowed him to collect enough rare and interesting artifacts to fill his house. Ceramic items, copper pots, and even ancient crystals were proudly displayed throughout the Adobe home. Kevin couldn’t help but wonder if some of those artifacts became the spark that lit a flame of animosity towards his father and eventually led to his horrific, fiery death. It was a mystery Kevin dedicated himself to solving, but as the days and weeks dragged on, he had the sinking feeling that, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he was the only one still seeking justice for his father. I’m Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails the Mysterious Death of John Young, Part one, A Modern day Indie. John Young grew up in Florence, Arizona, in the nineteen forties and fifties and earned a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Arizona in nineteen ten sixty seven. But even before his formal training, Kevin says his father had a knack for finding lost things in the dirt.
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Speaker 3: My uncle tells a story about how they used to walk around out in the desert all the time, and my dad had a knack for finding artifacts, you know, arrowheads and stuff, and he talks about them. They go out hunting, they shoot their twenty two’s, and my dad saw something in the distance and shot at it, and when they went over to check it out, it.
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Speaker 4: Was a pot. And as they dug up the pot, it was a whole pot.
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Speaker 3: And my uncle still has that pot on his fireplace in a New River where he lives, and they’s sitting on a shelf with a bullet hole in it. And so he tells stories about how they could go out in the desert and he could take a shovel and throw it in the air, and when it landed he could go dig it up and there’d be an arrowhead or pottery or something.
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Speaker 2: You can see why when I first heard about doctor Young and his case, I thought he sounded like a modern day Indiana Jones. And while I don’t think the real life archaeologist ever had to evade a runaway boulder or fight Ninja’s in Cairo. He nonetheless led a fascinating.
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Speaker 4: Life, primarily Southwestern history.
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Speaker 3: Is very interested in a Native American culture and history, and so he spent a lot of time doing that. I remember when we were really young they did it. My mom and dad did a dig and globe. He used to do summer digs and teach summer digs over in Fort berg One in Taos in Mexico.
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Speaker 4: So we go there for the summer.
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Speaker 3: I remember our playpen was a kiva that they had accavated, and then they put Sean and my brother and I in there, and we’d just scrushed around the walls and my brother found a bone flute in the wall at one time.
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Speaker 2: Doctor Young moved to Taos full time in nineteen seventy with his wife, who was also an anthropologist, and his two sons. He worked as a director for the Kit Carson Memorial Foundation and then as an staff archaeologist for the Carson National Forest.
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Speaker 3: And part of his job was to whenever they’re going to put in a road or logging road or something like that, it was his job to walk that and make sure that they weren’t gonna go through any ruins or just you know, destroy any sites or anything like that.
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Speaker 2: He spent countless hours in the deserts of the American Southwest searching for and trying to preserve artifacts of the people who lived there long before the Europeans. But he also spent time on those arid landscapes just enjoying the great outdoors.
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Speaker 3: He loved to take us duck hunting and quail hunting, and he’s he and his brother, my uncle Rob Young was actually he retired from game and fish and they used to go avelina hunting and we used to as kids follow them around. We’d go, I’d go with them, and when they shoot some ducks and they’re out middle of one of those stock tanks or something, we’d have to swim out there and get the ducks and bring them back. If we couldn’t splash them back and the wind wasn’t blowing. Surprised I’m still alive after going into some of those tanks.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you’re pretending like you didn’t make me do it.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
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Speaker 2: That other voice you hear is Austin Young, Kevin’s son and doctor Young’s grandson, Austin is now a fishing and hunting guide in Charleston, South Carolina, but he grew up hunting the same patch of public land his great grandmother hunted before him.
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Speaker 5: Our family has hunted the same blm land out there for I mean up to his mother, Grandma Betty, she was hunting. I got her twenty gage, so she passed that down to me when she passed away. And that’s John Young’s mother. But she was out there in the desert hunting the same land that Grandpa John would hunt, and then he showed us how to hunt it.
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Speaker 3: And yeah, you’re the fourth generation hunting those tanks.
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Speaker 2: The Young’s love for hunting and fishing started in the field, but as we at meat eater always appreciate, it continued into the kitchen or in this case, the barbecue pit.
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Speaker 3: We always did a pit barbecue, and it started out in in Florence and grew so big that we had media there and all kinds of people we didn’t even know, you know, that would show up to barbecue. But we’ve they’d always have like aveline, We’ve had mountain lion, rattlesnake, you know, ell dear. Obviously, all kinds of different game that we cook in the pit barbecue. So that’s one thing that both my uncle and my dad just loved to do and host. And I was part of the family and the growing up, and Austin even got to partake in a little bit of that.
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Speaker 4: But later in the years.
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Speaker 2: The Young family was close and doctor Young included Kevin and his brother in his work, his hunting and his construction projects.
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Speaker 3: The house he’s talking about that burnt down and it was a true mud adobe house. So every single adobe that was in that house was made by hand by my mom and my dad.
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Speaker 4: Myself, my brother.
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Speaker 3: All the vegas in the ceiling where we skimmed them with drawn knives. Then he had split ceedar up there. All that seater was split by hand, so it was quite a chore. It it was adventurous. It took us about about a year to build it. When we moved into it, it wasn’t complete yet, so there was there wasn’t any plaster on the mud adobe’s And the first night that we spent in the house, my brother and I, they had a bedroom set up in the garage and wood burning stove that was made out of a fifty gallon drum, and you had to keep that burning all night long because otherwise you wake up and it’s.
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Speaker 4: You know, five degrees out.
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Speaker 3: Well, the first night we slept there, it snowed and we woke up and we had snow on her bids because it blew in through the cracks and the walls and stuff.
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Speaker 4: So it was quite an adventure.
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Speaker 2: That garage Kevin and his brother slept in was the same garage their father died in four decades later. That house was a fixture in the Young family, and its destruction added an extra note of tragedy to doctor Young’s death. But what was even more disturbing is that something about that fire didn’t make sense, and Austin could sense it right away.
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Speaker 5: My dad called me while the fire was going on to tell me, you know, Grandpa’s house is on fire, and I said, well, how bad? And he said, it’s fully involved. And so my first thought at that point was that there was something wrong.
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Speaker 4: You know, an adobe house shouldn’t be burning like that.
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Speaker 5: It would take a really long time someone should notice or something, you know, And then as it started going on, I realized, you know, there was definitely something wrong.
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Speaker 4: If his truck was parked there.
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Speaker 5: All the details that my dubt is able to give to me, just everything seemed wrong.
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Speaker 2: Austin had this feeling before he knew anything about accelerants or bullet holes. But once the fire investigator began looking more closely at the burned out scene, he confirmed that the archaeologist father and grandfather almost certainly didn’t die in a tragic accident. The problem was no one knew who was responsible for the fire or the investigation into who started it, Part two, Falling through the Cracks. The first person I wanted to talk to about this case was the fire investigator, Jimmy Vee Hill, and I’m going to spend some time here explaining what happened because it’s important to the story, and what I’m about to say became an unfortunate theme in reporting this episode. Jimmy told me he’d be willing to do an interview, but he first had to get permission from a public Information officer or PIO at the New Mexico State Fire Marshall’s office. In this case, that was a woman named Danielle Silva. I first texted Danielle on Friday, January twenty third of this year. She called me back four days later and said she’d be willing to help, but first wanted to get in touch with local law enforcement in Taos. Jimmy had given an interview to the media back in twenty nineteen, so his suspicions about the fire were already public knowledge. But I’ve learned that public information officers are, in general a paranoid bunch, so I wasn’t surprised at her caution. But when I tried calling and texting Danielle over the subsequent weeks, she usually didn’t respond. On the rare occasion she did, it was just to say she was still working on it and needed more time. Finally, on April twenty eighth, which if you’re counting, is three months after my initial contact, she said via text, quote, I still don’t see enough info on our end to feel comfortable with the interview.
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Speaker 4: Now.
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Speaker 2: I’ve been stuck in what I call pr purgatory before, but never to this degree. It was clear that either I was being stonewalled, Danielle wasn’t giving me the time of day, or both why I’m not sure. It’s not uncommon for law enforcement to be hesitant about talking to the media about a case that wasn’t solved, but as you’ve seen time and again on episodes of this podcast, they usually at least give some kind of statement. I was never able to speak to Jimmy on the record, but Kevin interacted with the fire investigator many times in twenty nineteen, and he was able to recall some of those conversations. I was also able to obtain Jimmy’s official report requesting a search warrant for doctor Young’s home. I compared that report to Kevin’s recollections to verify the details you’re about to hear.
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Speaker 3: In dealing with the with Jimmy. Over time, we spent a lot of time communicating back and forth. You know, Jimmy came to the same conclusion that he was ninety nine percent sure that it was homicide and not an accident.
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Speaker 2: You already heard why Jimmy believed the fire was set intentionally, but the details of that are a little more nuanced. They tested the walls for accelerants, but those tests came back negative. However, Jimmy concluded, based on his observations of the walls and ceiling, that the fire began in multiple locations almost simultaneously.
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Speaker 4: They could tell by the way.
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Speaker 3: The burn marks were on some of the walls that still were standing.
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Speaker 4: You got to remember the forger concrete. The flooring was salteel tile. The only room that had wood.
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Speaker 3: Flowing was my dad’s bedroom and our bedrooms on that side of the house.
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Speaker 4: The rest of the house was all concrete, salteel tile and so on. The walls are mud.
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Speaker 3: The only thing that could burn would be the vegas and the split seedar and the ceilings. But that fire went from one end of the house to the other within fifteen minutes.
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Speaker 2: The fire spread too quickly to be caused by an electrical short and Jimmy confirmed that the fire was not sparked by other mechanical failures or a natural event such as a lightning strike. What’s more, Kevin explained that if this fire had a less nefarious cause, his father likely would have been able to put it out.
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Speaker 3: He had fire extinguishers in almost every room of the house. He had a brand new fire extinguisher in the back of his suburban.
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Speaker 4: If he came.
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Speaker 3: Home and that house was on fire, he would have grabbed his fire extinguisher, and you know, things would have been a little differently.
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Speaker 2: The fire burned too hot and too fast to be anything other than arson, which was reinforced by the state of doctor Young’s body.
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Speaker 6: His body was very badly burned, meaning that his skin and soft tissues were charred. And specifically this is relevant to the questions about the case, is that his skull had been exposed.
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Speaker 2: That’s Lori pro, the medical investigator who conducted doctor Young’s autopsy. She explained that the fire was so intense that it burned away the skin and soft tissue on the man’s head, revealing what appeared to be a bullet hole.
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Speaker 6: So it was during the process of examining the body and removing workins that I came across this part of the skull that just looked really unusual to me. When I was examining the brain and the bits of the skull bone around it, I came across this area that was very curved, and you know, that’s unusual for a thermal fracture to appear like that. So I was worried. At that point. I thought maybe this person had had a gunshot.
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Speaker 2: Wound more after the break. Normally, a medical examiner can identify a gunshot wound to the head based on the injuries to the brain but the fire had decomposed doctor Young’s brain tissue, and Laurie wasn’t able to find any other injuries, such as an exit wound. To confirm that the archaeologist had been shot.
00:19:06
Speaker 6: We had a forensic anthropologist take a look at the skull, and what she did was, you know, clean tissue away from the skull bones and then reconstruct it. So she looked at the skull bones, put everything back together, and her opinion was that the unusual curved defect that I found in the skull was not consistent was a gunshot wound. I relied on her report and kind of backed off of my initial concerns about a shooting.
00:19:47
Speaker 2: I obtained this report from the University of New Mexico. In it, forensic anthropologist Heather Edgar explains that when she pieced the skull back together, she found a fragment that covers the circular defect in question. It’s unlikely that particular defect was caused by a bullet, but Laurie also noted that even after reconstruction, the skull wasn’t fully intact.
00:20:09
Speaker 6: I’m not sure if that defect that I identified, if that represented a gunshot wound. Right I’m not sure if it was an exitter entrance, and again the skull was not intact, so it’s certainly possible that if it was a gunshot wound that entered and exited, that one or the other could have been in a part of the skull that was not identified. It was no longer oh I see present to put back together.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: In other words, doctor Young could have been shot in a part of his skull that was never found by investigators. The fire had burned away definite conclusions, which is why in her official report Laurie listed the manner of death as undetermined. What was easier to say with confidence was that the location of doctor Young’s boy was highly suspicious.
00:21:02
Speaker 4: Oh, he was wiged between tools.
00:21:04
Speaker 3: He used to like to go and help with wildfire, so he had mo axes, he had other stuff, power tools and stuff.
00:21:10
Speaker 4: Like that, and he said that he was wedged in between some tools.
00:21:15
Speaker 2: That word wedged jumped out to me, and after reading Jimmy’s report, I understood why he said. Quote the location of the deceased was very unusual, as it appeared the deceased was stuffed in the far right corner of the garage in an upright position. This is speculation, but it seems like if doctor Young was conscious when the fire started, he wouldn’t have just stood there and allowed himself to be burned. He would have gotten on the ground to escape the smoke, or just open the garage door. Jimmy also noted in his report quote the angle and path the deceased took to get to the entrance of the residence from the garage did not make sense to this investigator, as the vehicle was parked on the outside of the garage. Now, I’m not totally clear what Jimmy meant by this, and if I had been allowed to talk to him, I would have asked. But remember how I said first responders found the front door open when they arrived on the scene. Jimmy seems to be suggesting that, given doctor Young’s location in the garage, he wasn’t the one who opened that front door. If that’s true, someone else was there that day, someone who may have been involved in the archaeologist’s death. That person would be difficult enough to find in good conditions. But according to Kevin, we don’t even have as much information as we should.
00:22:29
Speaker 3: There was so many mistakes made, Like I think there was at least five fire departments that showed up.
00:22:37
Speaker 4: They thought it was a party.
00:22:38
Speaker 3: They had their families there, they had kids, They were eating.
00:22:43
Speaker 4: McDonald’s and throwing a trash on the ground.
00:22:45
Speaker 3: They trampled everywhere, so they destroyed any potential evidence of what could have helped us.
00:22:53
Speaker 4: Footprints in the snow, stuff like that.
00:22:56
Speaker 3: One thing that Jimmy told me talking with the different fire departments is they showed up.
00:23:01
Speaker 4: With all the equipment. They could have gone into that house and they could have searched for my dad. They didn’t do that. Jimmy said.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: They peered in through his bedroom windows, and her comment was, well, his beds made. He made his bed every morning. What’s that have to do with him being in the house or not being in the house.
00:23:20
Speaker 2: Remember, Kevin was unseen before the fire had been put out, so he saw with his own eyes how the firefighters were acting. But Jimmy’s statements are secondhand. So I reached out to the Taws County Fire Department to get their reaction. Unfortunately, much like with the new Mexico State Fire Marshal’s office, no one agreed to speak to me. If they had, they might have argued that they didn’t know the fire would end up being suspicious. They’re trained to put out fires, not collect evidence or preserve a crime scene. Normally, that would be a task for detectives with the Tows County Sheriff’s Office, But according to Kevin, that didn’t happen either.
00:23:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Sheriff’s department didn’t do anything. So I went to the Sheriff’s department.
00:23:58
Speaker 4: I talked to him.
00:24:00
Speaker 3: They you know, I said, one thing I was concerned about is I said, look, why didn’t you guys take control of the scene. And they said, we were only there to direct traffic traffic on a dirt road. Are you kidding me? And they said, oh no, the fire marshal was in charge. I told Jimmy that, I said, Jimmy, they’re blaming you.
00:24:19
Speaker 4: They said you should have taken control of the scene.
00:24:22
Speaker 3: And yeah, he was very shocked by that that the Sheriff’s department said all they were there to do was direct traffic.
00:24:32
Speaker 2: Really, if this strikes you as hard to believe given the evidence of foul play we’ve covered so far, join the club. I was sure Kevin was mistaken, so I reached out to Taos County Sheriff Steve Mira, Sheriff. Mira didn’t agree to a recorded interview, but we did have a brief phone conversation. Incredibly, he confirmed what Kevin told me. He said he never opened a case on doctor Young’s death. He said they were just unseen to direct traffic and the investigation was handled by Jimmy with the Fire Marshal’s office. I took what the sheriff said to Danielle Silva, the PIO for the State Fire Marshal. She said, via text quote, we only look for cause and origin of a fire, so we wouldn’t be the lead on a fatal fire without a law enforcement agency. When I reiterated what the sheriff said, she doubled down. She said the sheriff was mistaken, implying that they weren’t responsible for investigating doctor Young’s death. Regular listeners of this podcast know that I try to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. Most officers are competent professionals trying their best, and they’re sometimes unfairly criticized when a case goes cold. But this case never went cold because it was never opened in the first place. That’s why, seven years later, covering the story feels a bit like dealing with corporate customer service. Everything is someone else’s job, someone else’s department. But we’re not talking about a medical bill or a new phone plan. We’re talking about murder. The idea that a potential homicide could basically fall through the cracks is almost unbelievable. But as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what happened. Whatever or whoever killed John Young, the system that was supposed to answer that question chose not to ask it. This story might end here, but thanks to Kevin, it doesn’t. He had his own suspicions about what happened to his father, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. Part three. The Artifacts. Kevin couldn’t think of anyone who might have wanted to kill his father, but his mind kept going back to an interaction he had just a few weeks before doctor Young was killed.
00:26:43
Speaker 3: For Christmas, I got my dad two cores of firewood to burn this fireplace.
00:26:48
Speaker 4: I bought it from Hickory Apache family.
00:26:51
Speaker 2: The hickorya Apache are a federally recognized tribe whose territory comprises about eight hundred and eighty thousand acres in north central New Mexico. The tribal headquarters are two hour drive from Taos. But this family had relatives living in the pueblows just outside town.
00:27:07
Speaker 3: And my dad loves to talk about, you know, the artifacts and the things that he has, and the history and the digging and all that. So he took the wife and took her around, gave her to her stuff, and talked to her about everything. And she comes out and she starts helping me unload some of the wood, and eventually she tells me.
00:27:29
Speaker 4: She goes, you know, we’re not supposed to be here. I said, oh, really, why?
00:27:33
Speaker 3: And she goes, well, because some of the artifacts your dad has in his house have our ancestors spirits in him.
00:27:40
Speaker 4: Well, your dad’s an anthropologist, right, And I said yeah, And she.
00:27:43
Speaker 3: Goes, do you know how your dad is able to have some of that stuff and keep it?
00:27:48
Speaker 4: And I said no, you’d have to ask him.
00:27:50
Speaker 3: I know he used to do trips to Zunie and stuff, and he trade with the elders in Zuni. I know he did a lot of trading, but I didn’t know exactly how got him around.
00:28:00
Speaker 4: I was able to keep them.
00:28:01
Speaker 2: The implication of these questions was clear, but Kevin told me, this woman wasn’t acting aggressive or insulted.
00:28:08
Speaker 4: No, she wasn’t angry or upset.
00:28:10
Speaker 3: It was just explaining that this is something we shouldn’t see or that we shouldn’t be around. It’s not like she immediately rushed out or anything, because he even came in the house after we were done unloading the wood and stayed with us for another hour talking.
00:28:26
Speaker 2: Doctor Young invited the couple and their kids to share some refreshments.
00:28:30
Speaker 4: We’re all sitting around his table talking and having a good time.
00:28:34
Speaker 3: And then when they got ready to leave, my dad said, you know, hey, you guys ever come back into town.
00:28:40
Speaker 4: I want to.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: I want you to come and eat with me. So they all said, oh, yeah, we’d love to, and everything was fine.
00:28:49
Speaker 2: The interaction was largely positive, but for Kevin it was also unsettling, and the timing of it, just two weeks before doctor Young’s Adobe home burned down, nagged at the back of Kevin’s mind. When he started doing more research into the history and beliefs of the Hikaria Apache, he came across something that he believed connected those beliefs to his father’s death.
00:29:10
Speaker 3: One of their biggest fears is, and I don’t know if it’s a fear or just a belief or whatever is. When somebody dies, they will burn down their house with all the contents in it, including their favorite horse.
00:29:26
Speaker 2: Kevin didn’t think that the couple who delivered the firewood was responsible for the fire. At the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder if they had told others of the artifacts in his father’s home and those people had decided to take action. Kevin didn’t have any proof that this happened. It was just a theory, and one that relied on knowledge of a culture that can easily be misunderstood from the outside. So I reached out to doctor Jeff Blythe, a historic preservation officer for the Hickoria Apache Nation. Doctor Blythe declined to sit down for a recorded interview, but he did comment on the record. He told me that while he sympathizes with the Young’s position, he cautioned against drawing definite conclusions from the Apache woman’s comments. He said it is common in the archaeological record for homes and possessions to be burned upon abandonment or death, but he pointed out that the practice is far less common today. It’s also not done until after a person has already died and the deceased isn’t inside the home. He did acknowledge, however, that artifacts are intrinsically related to the place they come from. He said, quote, there is concern about things following the artifacts when they’re taken that are unhealthy. Modern archaeologists are supposed to take this concern into account, and many do analysis in the field and then rebury those items. We don’t know where doctor Young acquired the artifacts in his home, but seeing them in that location could have surprised and potentially upset his Apache visitors. Of course, there’s a huge gap between upset and homicidal. Vivan isn’t totally sure what to make of his theory, and frankly, neither am I. I’ve visited Taos many times. It’s a popular summer destination for folks here in Texas, but the opinion of a tourist doesn’t mean much. So if you live in this area, I’d be curious to hear what you think. Whatever the truth is, Kevin’s interaction remains one of the only leads that was actually followed. Kevin said that Jimmy took it seriously and he even interviewed the couple in question, but he didn’t get anywhere, so Kevin decided to hire more help.
00:31:29
Speaker 1: I got called in on this a little bit after the police had been over there and had done whatever they were doing, and so I kind of got in a little bit late.
00:31:41
Speaker 2: That’s David Frazy, a private investigator Kevin hired to look into his father’s death. David spent a career as a professional investigator, first as a lieutenant with the Bernolio County Sheriff’s Department, where he retired after twenty seven years. Then he trained police in the Middle East for seven years, and today he’s running to be sheriff of Torrance County, New Mexico. I say all this to explain that David isn’t what you might call a mall coop private eye. He’s investigated his share of homicides, and he’d been working as a PI for three years when Kevin called him. His first task was to find the couple who had delivered firewood and asked them to sit down for an interview. I asked David how the pair seemed when they finally spoke to him at the Hikoria Apache Police station in Dulse New Mexico.
00:32:26
Speaker 1: The male was not very talkative. He just wanted to keep quiet, and it was almost like he didn’t want his wife to talk. But she was being a little more voiceful, and she would answer my questions, but would offer nothing more than just whatever I asked for. And it was like, we’re not afraid of anything, you know. It’s kind of like they knew that it was not going to go anywhere. We weren’t going to find anything. They were very they felt confident in themselves that, you know, they could just give me a little tidbit of information and send me on my way, and it would be it would be forgotten.
00:33:11
Speaker 2: David asked the pair about their visit to doctor Young’s house, and the woman readily acknowledged touring the home and seeing copper pots that reminded her of those in her grandmother’s house. She said she could tell they were ancient by the way they were made. She also noticed a crystal that doctor Young had displayed on some sheepskin.
00:33:29
Speaker 1: There was just one specific piece of crystal, is what they were very, very concerned with. That it was the one thing that the medicine man had to have in order to heal people.
00:33:46
Speaker 2: According to David, the woman stated that the crystal was the most powerful item in the home, and medicine men used similar items to see the spirits of ancestors who are causing medical problems. She also mentioned that these crystals must always day in the possession of those healers. I read the report David prepared for Kevin, which included some contact information for the couple in question. I sent multiple emails to the address provided, but haven’t heard back as of this recording. I’m not naming them because they’ve never been accused of a crime and there isn’t any hard evidence that they were involved at all. They denied telling anyone about what they saw in doctor Young’s home, but like Kevin believes, they told someone else who was responsible for the fire. I think Kevin and Austin recognized how these accusations might be perceived, and they understand that telling this story exposes their father and grandfather to criticism. But they insist that doctor Young possessed the artifacts in his home not with a sense of entitlement, but with a sense of deep appreciation for what they represented.
00:34:49
Speaker 4: He was very much in appreciation of the culture.
00:34:52
Speaker 5: And everything that they did and their connection to the outdoors and how they lived, and I think he tried to actually emulated in his own life by living way out there in Towson in an adobe house that felt made right out of the earth too, and surround himself with the things that he really appreciated, so he’d not just like sharing it with people, but it’s built over into his home and everyday life too.
00:35:20
Speaker 2: Kevin might be right about the Apache family who delivered firewood to his father’s home, or maybe not. Whatever actually happened, part of the reason we don’t know is the lack of action from local law enforcement. I asked David about his interactions with the Taos County Sheriff’s office, and he spoke from his decades of law enforcement experience.
00:35:39
Speaker 1: Their investigation was almost nonexistent. I thought they would put somebody on it as an investigator. I didn’t see that. Why they did not want to get involved. I don’t know. If it’s a lack of resources, if they don’t have the expertise, why they didn’t call the state police to come in. Those are questions I cannot answer.
00:36:02
Speaker 2: In his report, David says that the deputy he spoke with made it sound like Jimmy and the State Fire Marshal’s office insisted on taking the case. When I spoke to Sheriff Mira, he implied the same thing. The Fire Marshals had the case, he said, and they didn’t want assistance from the Sheriff’s office. The problem is, as the spokesperson for the marshals told me, which you heard just a few minutes ago, the agency doesn’t investigate homicides without law enforcement involvement. When I relayed this information to the sheriff, he didn’t.
00:36:32
Speaker 1: Respond, only, it’s not Jimmy’s job. His job is investigate the fire. It boggles my mind how a sheriff would not put a detective on a homicide. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Why. And for them to say it’s a crime saying, but it’s a fire clime scene. We give it to the fire department. To do that just doesn’t make any sense to me.
00:36:59
Speaker 2: Is even more egregious because there were leads a detective could have tracked down. As a private investigator, David was limited in what he could do. He couldn’t arrest people or charge them with a crime, but his investigations still revealed several potential threads that could have been pulled. Doctor Young had neighbors. Neighbors who saw the fire called it in and told David about the individuals hanging around the house in the minutes before the blaze ignited.
00:37:28
Speaker 4: We’ll be right back.
00:37:34
Speaker 2: Part four, the burglar. In what is the most basic first step of any investigation, David began by knocking on the doors of all the homes around doctor Young’s and asking the residents if they saw anything. One woman who will call Stacy, lived down the street from doctor Young. Around four fifteen on the afternoon of the fire, she saw four or five men in a white pickup truck parked across the street from house. She thought they might be construction workers, but they didn’t appear to be doing a job at her neighbor’s house, and it didn’t look like anyone was home. One of the men got out of the truck and began talking on a cell phone. According to David, he told Stacy that quote John’s house is on fire and that he quote used to work with doctor John. This man could have been calling the fire department, but a sheriff’s deputy told David that the fire was first reported by an unidentified girl, and then by two employees with a kit Carson Electric co op. The neighbor said that these employees went to doctor Young’s house and yelled, quote, is anyone there? She told David they may have been there prior to the house catching fire, and might know if the men in the truck were also there earlier that day. I asked David whether he was able to track down any of these individuals.
00:38:49
Speaker 1: Of course, there’s limited information what she saw. I mean, we didn’t have anything to go on as far as you know, even a partial plate number or you know, we just and I don’t think they were even positive on The color was a light maybe a white or maybe a silver or something, but a light colored vehicle.
00:39:08
Speaker 2: Finding four guys in a light colored pickup might be a challenge for a private investigator, but it seems like the kind of thing local law enforcement would be able to handle, especially if they started the investigation immediately. Those Kit Carson Electric employees might have been an even more promising lead. The company could have identified them easily enough, and maybe their statements would have led investigators to someone else who saw the person who started the fire. But as far as I’m aware, none of these leads were tracked down, and believe it or not, they weren’t the only ones. Jimmy told David that he believed a thief could have been responsible for doctor Young’s death. Eduardo Rivera was a serial burglar and well known criminal in the Taos area. In twenty seventeen, he was charged with breaking and entering, residential burglary, burglary of a motor vehicle, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. Then in twenty nineteen, Rivera tried to burglarize another home. When the homeowner confronted him, he pulled out a handgun and fled. Two days after doctor Young’s house burned down, he was located by state police at his home but refused to come out. He was eventually arrested, but only after a five hour standoff with the SWAT team. Jimmy thought that maybe doctor Young had challenged Rivera while he was robbing his home, but rather than flee the scene, Rivera had attacked the elderly man, robbed him, and then burned the house down to hide evidence of his crime. It was a reasonable theory, but it had a flaw.
00:40:36
Speaker 3: Not one thing could I determine what was missing that had been taken from the house.
00:40:42
Speaker 4: It looks like everything was here.
00:40:44
Speaker 2: Doctor Young had a house full of priceless artifacts. But even if someone like Rivera didn’t understand the value of a copper pot or a piece of crystal, there were other items in the home he would have identified as valuable.
00:40:56
Speaker 3: He had an AK forty seven that was a hundred round cliff he hung over his fireplace in his bedroom with pride. He had Remington rifles, he had shotguns, he had, you know, everything, Nothing was stolen, nothing was taken, So why would you murder somebody and not take anything?
00:41:18
Speaker 2: Right, The fire made it difficult to verify that absolutely nothing was taken, But those firearms, or at least parts of them, survived the blaze, and they would have been attempting target for a violent, convicted felon. When I spoke to David about this case, he reiterated what Kevin told me.
00:41:35
Speaker 1: Nothing else was stolen. I mean most of the things that were in the house. They sifted through all of the stuff and they were able to find most of the artifacts in the house. They found other things that was in the house that were, you know, very valuable. That there wasn’t any evidence of a burglary, there was no evidence of mystic property.
00:41:55
Speaker 2: You might argue that Rivera or another burglar was in a rush to flee the scene. Maybe he broke into the home but was unexpectedly confronted by doctor Young. He then incapacitated the elderly man and decided to run rather than steal things on the way out. But that scenario doesn’t really account for the fire. Criminals often use fire to hide their crimes, but remember doctor Young was breathing after the blaze began. This would be burglar wasn’t hiding a murder, so why would he take the time to set the house on fire if he was in too much of a rush to steal anything. Jimmy mentioned Rivera as a possible suspect, and, according to David, so did one of the Taus County deputies. The serial burglar was on their radar, but when David asked if he could work alongside the sheriff on the investigation, they shut him down.
00:42:43
Speaker 1: I went up to talk to the sheriff. They said he wasn’t in, but they would let me speak with the under sheriff. And then here came a sergeant and said, I’m what you get take it or leap. And I started asking him questions about the case, and it was very noncommittal. You’re in my way. I wish you’d leave it. Blew me out of my socks. To be honest, I just can’t believe that. Hey, the sheriff himself wouldn’t come out and discuss it, nor would the under sheriff come out and discuss it. They send a sergeant out to get rid of me. So I got no information. I got no help out of their sheriff’s department.
00:43:26
Speaker 2: The sheriff didn’t mention Rivera in my brief conversation with him, but he did allude to another explanation for what happened to doctor Young. The agency that declined to investigate, had it turned out formed a theory anyway, maybe he said, rather than falling victim to an enemy or a violent felon, the eighty year old succumbed to something darker and more difficult to explain. Part five on his own terms.
00:43:56
Speaker 5: My grandfather is just the interesting and fun people you can meet. But he he must have got this from Grandma Betty. But he’s just like an ornery fella. He’s always been vocal about I’m going out on my own terms that if I’m not gonna be in a diaper, I’m not gonna be incapacitated, nothing like that. And so I just had a thought, you know, like, did Grandpa like feel like it was time or something.
00:44:23
Speaker 2: I hope you’ll forgive another movie reference, but I imagine doctor Young a bit like those old fellas in that movie Secondhand Lions. He lived a fascinating life, but it was nearing its twilight. Kevin didn’t mention anything about his father having a terminal illness, but Laurie’s report did indicate that he was suffering from maladies common to a man who’d taken eighty trips around the sun. He had multiple cysts on his left kidney, which was also significantly smaller than his right. Two of the vertebra and his neck refused together, which likely caused some pain and stiffness. He also had some narrowing of the middle right coronary artery, though likely not an enough to cause noticeable symptoms. None of these conditions are life threatening or even abnormal, but we also don’t have a great read on his mental state. He was living by himself, and it’s unclear how much interaction he had with the other members of his community. Jimmy believed doctor Young was the victim of a burglary gone wrong, but Kevin also mentioned that the fire investigator wondered whether doctor Young had died by suicide.
00:45:24
Speaker 3: He came to me at the very end and said, look, I can’t come up with any conclusions.
00:45:29
Speaker 4: You know, whether somebody came and started the fire or would rolled out.
00:45:35
Speaker 3: Could be that your dad tried to commit suicide and put accelerants in different places.
00:45:40
Speaker 2: If doctor Young decided to go out on his own terms, maybe he decided to make it a spectacle. Suicide by burning is extremely uncommon in Western countries, but attempted suicides account for two to six percent of all Burn Center admissions, according to a twenty thirteen report. As we covered in episode seven of season one, people suffer bring mental distress don’t always act in ways that make sense or choose the least painful method of ending their lives. But while Kevin acknowledges the possibility that his father took his own life, doctor Young’s actions that day cut against that theory.
00:46:15
Speaker 3: I got hold of his credit card statement and I started following everything he did that day and he had driven into town. He went to a restaurant called Hunan’s, and he loved their peaking duck, and so he got an order of peaking duck.
00:46:29
Speaker 4: And on his way home he always carried a pocket knife in his front pocket.
00:46:34
Speaker 3: He had opened up the knife and he was cutting pieces of the duck off and eating it. That was still inside a suburban, the knife and the food, the rest of his duck.
00:46:43
Speaker 4: Because he didn’t take it in with him. He didn’t go in. He stopped at the post office, he checked his mail. There was some food that stuff that he picked up at the grocery store.
00:46:53
Speaker 2: Kevin estimates that his father was gone from his home for about two hours and he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. He arrived home. Then he got out of his suburban, left his food and groceries inside, including a handgun, in the driver’s side door, and went into his house. He either left the door open on the way in, or maybe it was open when he arrived.
00:47:15
Speaker 5: Well, he’s walking around, he’s eating Chinese food and he’s getting groceries. He’s just fine, you know, He’s not going to just get groceries and Chinese food and half eat it and then decide to go out on his own terms with the doors open to everything.
00:47:31
Speaker 2: It’s an odd sequence of actions for someone who plans to set their house on fire with themselves inside. And that idea that the retired archaeologist would intentionally burn up a lifetime of memories, not to mention the house he built himself, is the toughest pill for Kevin to swallow.
00:47:48
Speaker 3: My dad, he spent his whole life collecting this stuff. He would not burn it up. He wouldn’t kill himself that one. Yeah, he’d want his family, as his kids, as grandkids to and even maybe even have some of that stuff given him back.
00:48:04
Speaker 4: To the different tribes or whatever. But he left no suicide note. There was no suicide note. He left no evidence.
00:48:12
Speaker 2: Whether doctor Young was killed by tribal members upset by his collection of artifacts, a burglar looking for an easy score, or someone else. Kevin believes his father arrived home and was ambushed.
00:48:25
Speaker 3: My belief is he came home and they were probably in his house starting the fire, and he went in didn’t unbeknownst. Maybe the front door was open, I don’t know. Maybe he saw it was open and he went to check and see what was going on. That’s why he didn’t take his fo That’s why he didn’t take his groceries.
00:48:43
Speaker 4: That’s you know.
00:48:43
Speaker 3: I don’t think he thought anything was going on, and they probably ambushed him as he walked in the door. Did they hit him over the head with something and create that hole that looked like a bullet hole? Maybe maybe it was a fire. I don’t know, but I never got an answered.
00:49:00
Speaker 2: There isn’t much hard evidence in this case, but there is one piece that backs up Kevin’s theory.
00:49:05
Speaker 3: And I was walking around I was trying to check different things out and see if I could find any evidence for Jimmy. I found what was the remaining of the pantry door and where the latch is. Somebody had tried to pry it open with a screwdriver.
00:49:23
Speaker 2: When Kevin says pantry, he isn’t talking about a closet where food is stored. He’s talking about an outside door that leads to a mudroom attached to the garage.
00:49:32
Speaker 3: I called Jimmy and said, hey, look I found his pantry door and it’s got prime marks from somebody working it with a screwdriver.
00:49:42
Speaker 4: And so Jimmy came out.
00:49:43
Speaker 3: Took a look at that took some photos, took that back, and he agreed that it looked like somebody had been working that door with a screwdriver.
00:49:51
Speaker 2: I haven’t seen these photos myself, but David noted in his report that he was also there when this discovery was made. As a longtime investigator, he agreed with kevin assessment it looked like someone had at one point tried to break into doctor Young’s home. That, combined with the evidence of accelerants and the hurriedly abandoned suv, has convinced almost everyone I spoke with that doctor Young’s death was no suicide. Part six, Asking for answers. I don’t know who killed doctor Young. I’m not sure anyone will ever know, and that’s in part because the people whose job it was to find out decided somewhere along the line that it wasn’t their problem. In some ways, that’s just as disturbing as the murder itself. Today, Kevin and Austen are the only ones actively looking for answers. Austin reached out to me about his grandfather’s case because he hopes bringing attention to it will move things forward.
00:50:50
Speaker 5: The goal with this might be to get word out again and hear people talking about it and maybe get someone to say something.
00:50:58
Speaker 2: This strategy is always a long shot, but it might be more fruitful than with other cold cases. Beyond a handful of local news articles, this case has garnered almost no media attention. As far as I know, neither the Sheriff’s office nor the fire Marshal put out a press release soliciting leads. There may well be people out there who know something or saw something, but don’t realize that this case hasn’t been solved. That’s why Kevin and Austin are speaking out.
00:51:23
Speaker 5: It would mean a lot to me, but mainly I’d like it for my dad, because I mean, we don’t know, you know, It’s just just imagine if this was your father, I do think, or whoever’s out there, this is something you don’t want to go to the grave with and just at the very least figure out how this fire got started and how my grandpa ended up into the garage where we’d just like to know some of those facts and there’s someone out there who could probably fill those gaps for us.
00:51:56
Speaker 2: Only about thirty five thousand people live in Taus County full time. It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody, and many are related by blood or marriage. It’s also a major tourist destination, and officials are hesitant to highlight issues that might scare away that revenue. Kevin understands how these factors make it less likely that someone will speak up, but he nonetheless pleaded for that someone to come forward.
00:52:20
Speaker 3: This could have been your father, This could have been your brother, this could have been your uncle. And if that happened to your family, you would want to know. You’d want to know what happened. That’s all I ain’t want to know. Is I want to have closure. I want to know what happened to my dad. I want to know was he tortured? Was he unconscious when he burned?
00:52:40
Speaker 2: There is nothing left of the house doctor Young and his family built just outside Taos, New Mexico. It’s just an empty lot, surrounded by the sagebrush and sand that make up the high desert plateau. Most of the artifacts he collected are gone, consumed by the same fire that ended his life. But while the physical remnant of his life, life and work is no more, his legacy lives on, and the people he taught, the record of his archaeological finds and his grandson, who now earns a living sharing his passion for the outdoors with others. Is that where you, Austen, got your love of hunting and your passion for it? Is you know, your grandfather and your father taking out and doing that stuff.
00:53:24
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, there’s no question. I don’t know how I slipped into the profession of guiding, but it just was kind of out of desperation and thinking what do I actually love doing, and it just came down to hunting and fishing. That’s what I really like doing, and that’s what they introduced me to. So I think about it quite often how lucky I am to have been introduced to something like that, and that’s probably the only way that I am doing what I’m doing. And and just so you know, stoked for what we got going on, very lucky.
00:54:05
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you have any information about this case, no matter how minor, send me an email at blood Trails at themeeeater dot com. I’ll make sure it gets to the right place. As a reminder, Doctor John Young’s house burned down on January seventh, twenty nineteen, on Merlow Road, about five miles north of Taos, New Mexico. If you’d like to see images of doctor Young, Kevin and Austin and the burned wreckage of that Adobe home, head on over to the meeeater dot com slash Blood Trails. I’m sorry to say that this is the last episode of season two. Thank you so much for listening and for all the positive feedback. I’m humbled to be able to share these stories, but I definitely don’t do it alone. I’ve seen quite a few comments praising the production quality of this season. For that, you have Jake Birch to thank for the sound design and Ben mcgonnelld to thank for the video. They do an incredible job and if you haven’t had a chance to watch the YouTube version of Blood Trails, you’re really missing Outriva Hanson continues to work wonders behind the scenes, making sure each episode comes out on time and managing the new Blood Trails account on Instagram. Give it a follow if you haven’t. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, this podcast would not be nearly as good without the feedback and encouragement of my wife, Hannah. If you like this podcast, you better hope we never get a divorce.
00:55:30
Speaker 4: Love you, babe.
00:55:31
Speaker 2: I’m already working on Season three, which we’ll be releasing this fall. I’m also working on a special mini series we’ll publish this summer, and if there are any major updates in the cases we’ve covered so far, we’ll release standalone episodes to make sure you’re notified whenever we post something new. Be sure to follow Blood Trails on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube. See you next time. Stay safe out there,
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