Accused

Chapter 1 - The crime

Three days after Christmas in 1978, Elizabeth Andes was one of the few students on Miami University’s Oxford campus. Most students were home for winter break, but Beth – a recent graduate – was in town packing up her apartment so she could move to Cincinnati for her first big job.
That day, she treated herself by buying a fancy pair of leather boots to celebrate her successes. But she never got to wear them.
Instead, her boyfriend, Bob Young, reported finding her lifeless body in the apartment they had shared during their last semester of college together.
Police and prosecutors considered the death an open-and-shut case, zeroing in immediately on Young. But Beth’s friends never thought things were quite so simple.
Through this podcast, The Enquirer will lay out its investigation into the cold case in hopes of finally figuring out who got it wrong nearly 40 years ago – police or the jury?

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Binge all of Season 4 early and ad-free by subscribing to Wondery+. Season 4: When Rhoda Nathan's lifeless body was discovered in her hotel room, it was assumed she'd had a heart attack. The autopsy proved otherwise: Nathan, 67, had been viciously beaten to death, punched so hard by her assailant that two of her teeth had been knocked out. Days later, a hotel employee went to the hospital to be treated for an infection in his hand, which was teeming with a bacteria most often found in human mouths. That, plus a pendant an officer said was discovered in the trunk of his car, sealed the fate of Elwood Jones, who awaits execution on Ohio's death row. For nearly 30 years, Jones has maintained his innocence -- and accused police of straight-up framing him. The journalists of Accused are reexamining the case to learn if Jones truly belongs on death row, or if a botched investigation let someone else get away with murder.Season 3: In 1984, a father of three disappeared while working at a mysterious Cincinnati plant. It turned out he’d met a gruesome fate: Pieces of bone, his eyeglasses and walkie-talkie were uncovered inside a vat that reached 1350 degrees Fahrenheit. Two months later, the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center was revealed to have been processing uranium – and polluting the region. The dead man’s children believe their father was murdered because he intended to expose how the plant had been releasing millions of pounds of uranium dust into the atmosphere. We’re hoping to figure out: Did 39-year-old David Bocks kill himself, as Fernald officials alleged, or was he more likely killed? Season 2: A soft-hearted prison minister was found killed in her Kentucky apartment, and Newport police zeroed in on an ex-convict she’d counseled. Thirty years later, the conviction is overturned and the case is once again unsolved. The Cincinnati Enquirer investigates: Was William Virgil wrongly convicted for murder? Season 1: When Elizabeth Andes was found murdered in her Ohio apartment in 1978, police and prosecutors decided within hours it was an open-and-shut case. Two juries disagreed. The Cincinnati Enquirer investigates: Was the right guy charged, or did a killer walk free?