September 13, 1991. Burbank, California. 37-year old Tom Roche makes plans to meet his spouse, Barbara Rondeau, for lunch, but never shows up. When Barbara returns to their apartment, she discovers that the front door is unlocked and Tom is missing. Six days later, Barbara receives an envelope containing some of Tom’s personal items, along with an anonymous confession letter to his murder. While there is some speculation that Tom could have staged his own disappearance, some of his skeletal remains and personal possessions are eventually discovered in a remote area 500 miles away. Tom’s cause of death is determined to be a gunshot wound, but the circumstances of how he wound up dead remain unclear. Was Tom Roche abducted and murdered? Was the anonymous confession letter actually written by his killer? We will explore a number of these unanswered questions as we cover a very baffling case on this week’s episode of “The Trail Went Cold”.

Additional Reading:

https://unsolved.com/gallery/tom-roche/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-19-me-4840-story.html

“The Trail Went Cold” will be appearing on podcast row at CrimeCon 2019 from June 7th-9th at the Hilton Riverside hotel in New Orleans. Listeners can receive a 10% discount on the purchase of a standard badge by using the promo code “COLD19”.

“The Trail Went Cold” will also be appearing at True Crime Podcast Festival 2019 on July 13th at the Marriott Downtown in Chicago. Please visit their website for more details.

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The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote.

All music is composed by Vince Nitro.