Unsolved with Steve Gregory KFI AM 640 (KFI-AM)

In this episode we look back at cases featured during season 6. This season had us at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Upland Police Department, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Each segment includes the introduction to each case followed by the episode number for easy reference to hear the complete case/episode on the iHeartRadio app.

Case #1: On July 24th, 2022, Malik McGee had just finished performing at a hookah lounge in Upland, CA. As he drove away someone opened fire hitting Malik twice through the side of his car. Just an hour before that, surveillance video shows a guy scoping out the best positions to shoot from, including methodically practicing how he was going to aim and shoot. Malik had graduated with a degree in biology and was headed to medical school. He performed music, taught dance at his high school alma mater, and gave back to his community. Case #2: On January 27th, 1996, a body of an unidentified woman was found near some trash in a hilly area next to Gilman Springs Road and Highway 60 near the city of Beaumont, CA. A forensic pathologist found the woman had a surgical cesarean scar indicating she had given birth. The woman was wearing jewelry, was well kept, and had undergone expensive dental work. All these years later, detectives have no idea who she is and who wanted her dead.

Case #1 – August 30th, 1992, a woman was found hidden under some brush along highway 95 just north of Blythe, CA. Her body was mummified and severely decomposed. In 1994, a long-haul trucker admitted to killing the woman and a number of other women. He was nicknamed the ‘Happy Face Killer’. We speak with an investigator from the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office who is asking for help to identify the murdered woman from 1992; Case #2 – The partially clothed body of Sherri Herrera was found near a freeway onramp east of Palm Springs. She was known as a prostitute who frequented truck stops. Investigators use forensic Genealogy to form a suspect profile; Case #3 – On Christmas night of 2016, 3 men approached a car in the city of Riverside and opened fire. Miraculously, the driver and her companion escaped. New surveillance video was released.

In 1979 a 19-year-old woman was found brutally beaten and stabbed to death near what was then the old “El Rancho Hotel” near the Las Vegas Strip. For decades she remained a ‘Jane Doe’ or as detectives nicknamed her, ‘Sahara Sue Doe’. In December of 2023 new DNA technology allowed a cold case detective with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department to contact a probable relative in California. The call paid off and Sahara Sue Doe became Gwenn Marie Story, a teenager from Cincinnati, Ohio who had initially planned a trip to California to find her real father. But the stop in Las Vegas with two male friends would prove deadly. Case #2, Detective Eric Ogaz with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department talks about Scott Echols, an 8-year-old boy who, in 1992, answered the door at his home late one night and mysteriously disappeared.

On January 15th, 1947, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short was found in Leimert Park, a public space located in South Los Angeles. Someone had performed an hemicorporectomy, the act of cutting a body in half at a specific point of the body. The woman who first spotted the body out in the open thought it was a mannequin, mostly because the skin color was so pale, a result of Short’s fluids and blood being completely drained from her body. In this Anniversary edition we speak with case expert Steve Hodel, a retired detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. Not only is Hodel entrenched in the case, he also has a personal connection.

On October 28th, 2006, in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, a man was shot and killed at a birthday party over an older, long-standing personal grudge. Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau quickly identified a suspect. A few days later, November 2nd, more than two dozen deputies, along with detectives, were serving a search warrant at a house in the Willowbrook area. A number of men were inside the home and as deputies detained them on the porch to wait, three men appeared from across the street and opened fire. Miraculously, none of the deputies, detectives, or detainees were hit. But a 12-year-old girl watching the commotion from her driveway next door was struck through her chest by a round from an AK-47. She died on scene. Her 15-year-old friend was injured and the shooter(s) are still at large.