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Buried in the Backyard Season 6 Episode 15
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00:15I had received a phone call about a missing person.
00:22We checked the house for any evidence of a body.
00:27We found nothing.
00:31It's a cameraman.
00:32It's a colleague.
00:33We gotta find him.
00:39I have a message from Linda.
00:42She feels that you'd probably be best to stay out of here.
00:45It could be very dangerous.
00:47She said the zombies will get me if I leave the protection of this group.
00:55I thought, what is happening?
00:58He had become part of a cult.
01:02I found out she shot the neighbor's dog claiming that it was satanic.
01:12In the basement, there was a new strip of fresh concrete.
01:19Well, you'll be looking a long time for him.
01:23It's not pretty.
01:26History is full of people for whom the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
01:31He killed him and then he said he would kill me and my son if I opened my mouth.
01:50Cheyenne, Wyoming.
01:54It's near the Colorado border.
01:58The surrounding community is primarily ranches.
02:04Wide open country.
02:07Out in the middle of Prairie.
02:11Original Cheyenne.
02:12The houses date back to the 1800s.
02:18The majority of the residents in that part of town are all senior citizens.
02:24Their houses are well kept.
02:26People are friendly to each other.
02:29It is a good place to live.
02:32And so to receive the phone call about a homicide in that part of town is just out in left
02:41field.
02:46On July 17th of 2000, we received the call that there may be a body buried in the basement of
02:52a house in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
02:59The basement was concrete walls, concrete floor, several steps down.
03:07The detectives saw the crawl space.
03:11Once inside, he found a section of dirt that appeared to be disturbed.
03:18Off to the right was some concrete.
03:23And then he saw tennis shoes sticking up out of the ground.
03:40That tennis shoe was attached to the body, which at that point had been essentially mummified.
03:52At that point in time, the detectives decided to call in the Wyoming State Crime Lab.
04:03They started very meticulously removing the cement that was over the body.
04:15Once the body was removed, we saw indications of bludgeoning, a gunshot.
04:21There was evidence of the castration.
04:23It was a pretty gruesome scene.
04:27When I look at that kind of damage that was done to the body, what comes to mind, that's a
04:33psychopathic action.
04:36Why did this happen?
04:39What would motivate a person to do that?
04:42We need to figure out who is responsible.
05:04April is about 40 miles away from Chicago west.
05:09It was really a great place to grow up.
05:14My dad was an analytical chemist at Argonne National Laboratory.
05:21My mom was a social worker.
05:24They were great parents.
05:26Alan Ross was my twin brother.
05:29Al was always very studious, very introverted.
05:33I was more the extrovert.
05:35We had a great childhood.
05:38Dad was great with photography.
05:42Dad would do a slideshow or a movie show.
05:46I think that's where Al's love to film really started to blossom then.
05:51And then in high school, Al got into a film program and he started shooting with Super 8.
06:06In the early 80s, Chicago artistically, it was very exciting.
06:11I first met Alan Ross at Chicago Filmmakers, which he had started a few years earlier.
06:19Chicago Filmmakers had editing facilities and they offered film classes.
06:26Just the community that they formed, I wanted to be part of it.
06:32Alan was this tall, lanky guy and funny and sarcastic and witty and he just had such a great energy.
06:43Alan was a city boy with his loft right on Maxwell Street and just hanging out at gritty Chicago.
06:54Locations, bars, restaurants, White Sox games.
07:00There would be years where I might see Alan two or three times because he was always off filming documentaries.
07:08Filmmaking was everything for him.
07:10As a cinematographer, nothing else existed.
07:12He was married to his camera, but in 1986, his mother died of lung cancer.
07:20That spurred his spiritual interest.
07:25In 1993, Alan and a girlfriend had attended a workshop of the Samaritan Foundation at a local hotel.
07:34And he had become interested in the use of spiritual energy in the body.
07:38The Samaritan Foundation was founded originally as a charitable organization to do Samaritan things and to help people.
07:47At its height, there were about 350 members.
07:51They were located in a communal house in Guthrie, Oklahoma, which is on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.
08:02As the leader of the Samaritan Foundation, Linda Green was very charming, very affable.
08:09I think Alan Ross was enticed by the Samaritan Foundation because of his own vulnerability with his mother's death and
08:20his curiosity as a filmmaker.
08:24He called me, we talked, and he said he was leaving.
08:28And I said, where are you going?
08:29And he said, Oklahoma.
08:31And I said, Oklahoma?
08:33I said, what?
08:37Oklahoma City is not Chicago.
08:42Alan left and went to Guthrie.
08:45And after several months, he came back to Chicago to get his stuff.
08:54He was with another friend.
08:57The two of them sat me down at a little table and put out this chart in front of me.
09:03And they were, oh, we have to show you something.
09:07And they started swinging this pendulum over this chart.
09:10And I didn't get it.
09:12I was like, I didn't understand what they were so excited about.
09:15I didn't see anything happening there.
09:18As part of their ideas for the group, you could use this dousing pendulum to answer questions about your life.
09:26Alan was definitely immersed in the Samaritan Foundation.
09:30I thought, this is really strange.
09:34He had a very critical, sharp mind.
09:38When you open yourself up for a spiritual journey, you don't know if the spiritual forces you're dealing with are
09:44good ones or bad ones.
09:48History is full of people for whom the road to hell is paid with good intentions.
09:54Shortly after he went back to Oklahoma, I got this postcard from him that said,
10:00Dear Robert, don't know if I told you I got married, moved to Oklahoma.
10:05P.S. By the way, I have retired from life.
10:09I highly recommend it.
10:10We were all flummoxed.
10:14Alan suddenly, one day, told his friends that he was married.
10:19I think that Alan had become, in some sense, infatuated or involved with Linda Green.
10:26I think that Linda had specific qualities that have satisfied needs that Alan had.
10:33Deeper than emotional needs, but spiritual needs.
10:36Linda had initiated a divorce with Dennis Green, who is Linda Green's husband at the time that she met Alan.
10:44He said to me, he goes, I've never been happier.
10:47He had a lot of different women along the way.
10:49I've never heard him say something like that.
10:51It was a twin brother. What, am I going to argue with him about it?
10:53I said, man, all right, you know, let's see where it goes.
11:02At this time, Linda Green decided to abandon Guthrie and move the Samaritan Foundation to Cheyenne,
11:08and so Alan went with them.
11:11The common denominator in many cults is social isolation.
11:16The group draws you in, and then they encourage you to cut your ties with family
11:23and friends, and you become isolated and embedded in the group.
11:34And then in 1995, I was assuming Alan would come back to Chicago for the holidays.
11:43Thanksgiving, he always would call on the house phone.
11:45So we all thought he might have been doing something or couldn't get to a phone.
11:50It was definitely a bit odd.
11:52And so then Christmas came about and nothing.
11:57Alan, when he would go off working on a project, we just kind of let him do his thing.
12:01It was before cell phones, so we weren't able to, like, text and do all that.
12:05But Alan always made a point to never miss a holiday or a birthday.
12:11No matter what Al was involved in, he never missed a date.
12:16Al was very consistent.
12:18The red flags did go off.
12:21You know, you get those gut feelings.
12:22This rush went through me like I've never felt before.
12:27And I knew right then, we all kind of look at each other like,
12:33there's something wrong.
12:36We started to get some bizarre faxes from Linda Green,
12:41saying how NASA was after her and the CIA was after her and the Russians were after her.
12:49I thought, what is happening?
12:53He had become part of a cult.
13:11In early 1995, Brad Ross was getting very uneasy
13:16because he never heard from his brother before the holidays.
13:20Alan disappears off of communications.
13:24Nothing in the new year.
13:28We started checking with people and nobody had seen him.
13:32I was extremely worried about my brother.
13:36When he moved to Guthrie, it was like I already knew it was not Al,
13:40because Al was a city guy.
13:42I just had a sense, you know, there was something wrong.
13:47In March 1996, Brad Ross contacts the Cheyenne Police Department
13:53to do a welfare check at a communal house of the Samaritan Foundation.
13:57That's the last place he knew Alan was.
14:06When they arrived, residents let the Cheyenne Police Department know
14:10that Alan Ross had gone off to a film job
14:15and no one was really quite sure when he would be back.
14:19They corroborated that yes,
14:22Mr. Ross is in and out all of the time for work.
14:27There's nothing illegal about leaving town and not telling people where you went.
14:31So there's nothing really suspicious about that.
14:39March 28th, 1996.
14:43Four months after Alan went missing,
14:47we had gotten some bizarre faxes
14:51from Julia and Samaritan Group leader Linda Green.
14:55Julia Williams is a member of the Samaritan Foundation.
14:57She is wealthy and she does a lot of funding what Linda does.
15:04They were saying how NASA was after her and the CIA was after her
15:11and the Russians were after her.
15:14They made some pretty outlandish statements.
15:17There's obviously no credibility talking about things that are just crazy.
15:24At this time, there was something happening with the Samaritan Foundation
15:28that caused some members to leave.
15:31There was a growing disenchantment
15:33and a feeling that there was something not right about Linda Green.
15:41The day after we had received a phone call from Linda's ex, Dennis Green,
15:49Dennis said that Ellen Ross had been shot and he was buried in the basement.
15:56It knocked me back a couple of steps.
16:02New tenants had occupied the house.
16:06The Samaritan Foundation no longer lived there.
16:10We went to the house.
16:13We checked the living room for any evidence of the homicide.
16:18Like a hole in a wall caused from a bullet, hole in a ceiling, blood splatter.
16:25We found nothing.
16:29We went to the basement.
16:32We walked down five or six steps.
16:35And then off to the right was a piece of pegboard that was screwed to the wall.
16:41We took the pegboard off, which gave us access to the crawl space.
16:46You could smell dust.
16:49Based on my experience with dead bodies, there was always an unforgettable smell.
16:58That was not present.
17:01Once inside the crawl space, we found a section of dirt relatively small,
17:08like maybe two feet in diameter, that appeared to be disturbed.
17:13We didn't have any shovels.
17:15So we used our hands, some lumber.
17:18We used whatever we could.
17:19And I think we dug down maybe 12 to 18 inches and didn't find anything out of the ordinary.
17:31We checked the remainder of the crawl space with our flashlight and the only dead thing we saw down there
17:38was a dead cat.
17:43At that point, we returned to the office and I started making phone calls.
17:52I spoke with Dennis Green, who was living somewhere in Colorado at the time.
17:57And he said that Linda had told him she committed the homicide and that Julia was an accomplice.
18:06Dennis Green told me that Linda had a brother that was a homicide detective with the Oklahoma City Police Department.
18:13I reached out to him.
18:18During my conversation with Linda's brother, he told me that Linda had mental issues.
18:26He said Linda had gone after one of her brothers with a knife, shot the neighbor's dog, claiming that it
18:34was satanic.
18:37So we didn't give Linda's Dennis' and Julia stories really any credence at that time.
18:44And really all the folks in the Samaritan Foundation.
18:48At this point in time, I'm thinking that with Dennis pointing the finger at Linda,
18:53it isn't uncommon for ex-spouses to have a vendetta against their ex.
19:00because I know from first-hand knowledge that I didn't see a body in that cross-space.
19:25Alan had been missing since November 1995.
19:30I think that the police just thought that Alan had this crazy wife.
19:35She was nuts, but I felt like there was something really odd going on.
19:42The Chicago film community, or at least the members I knew, were concerned.
19:46There was a lot of speculation about what happened.
19:50This is not like Alan to disappear this long.
19:53He must be dead or he must be alive, but hiding.
19:57And if he's hiding, that he was hiding from them.
20:01His friend, Christian Bauer, who was a German filmmaker,
20:05it really bugged him.
20:07It really kept him awake.
20:11Christian decided to do a documentary to investigate and find Alan.
20:20I came on as a producer.
20:24Galen called me.
20:26She said, we're going to solve a missing persons case about a cameraman.
20:31And I was in.
20:33It's a cameraman.
20:34It's a colleague.
20:34Got to find him.
20:36I knew that Alan had lived in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
20:39So the investigation for the documentary started at square one.
20:47During the investigation, Christian and Galen found out that Linda asked Alan to be part
20:52of a sex ritual back in 1995.
20:56Dennis Green was Linda Green's husband at the time.
21:01Linda told Dennis that she needed to divorce him because she was dying of a neurological disease.
21:10To cure her involved Alan being involved in a sex act with another woman on the back of Linda Green.
21:19A sex act that would result in Alan being officially married to Linda.
21:26I thought, what is happening?
21:28I can't wrap my head around how he had become part of what felt like a cult.
21:36I knew that if I was going to find Alan, I needed to dig some more and see what we
21:43could find about the Samaritans.
21:48Before they moved out to Cheyenne, the Samaritans monastery was in Guthrie.
21:57I got in touch with the group that owned the building.
22:01And we needed to find something that would at least have the police department reopen the case and move it
22:10forward.
22:19That building took on almost an Edgar Allan Poe type persona.
22:25Never been more excited to be in there and to get out of there at the same time.
22:30It didn't feel right.
22:36The second floor, there was a storeroom that had three big green metal cabinets that Alan had had in his
22:46loft.
22:47Which I recognized.
22:49As a filmmaker, I knew I was looking at tons of production equipment.
22:53It's like five grand worth of lighting.
22:56He wouldn't have left this behind.
23:01In the basement, there was a new strip of fresh concrete,
23:05which made us suspicious that Alan could be buried in the basement.
23:11So Galen called Brad, his twin brother.
23:14And the next day, Brad showed up.
23:18We're examining the spots that are likely places where he might be.
23:23I dug about a four-foot hole that day.
23:28After six hours of digging, we were filthy jackhammers and digging all day.
23:36Unfortunately, there was no Alan.
23:38There's a need for closure.
23:40There's other places that we need to look now.
23:42But we wanted to just rule this one out.
23:49Although we didn't find him in Guthrie, the search continued.
23:54I was running down all these leads and one of the Samaritan group members said to me,
23:59you need to stop digging because somebody's going to get hurt.
24:03It struck me that I must be getting close to something.
24:07I knew that Alan and the Samaritans had lived in the house in Cheyenne.
24:12So Christian and the crew and I drove there.
24:18I sent Devin out to look for a house the Samaritans had lived at in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
24:28When I got there and looked through a window, I saw Alan's name on everything.
24:35So I broke in.
24:36I didn't care.
24:39And this neighbor comes up to me and says, what are you doing?
24:43And I just smiled at her and I said, do you know who Alan Ross is?
24:49She turned into a ghost.
24:53And I knew right then and there she knew something.
24:56She said, I have Alan's camera.
24:58Is he dead?
25:03Linda came to New Orleans.
25:06Her mission was to reestablish her control.
25:11She was absolutely unfazed by the news that his penis was missing
25:16and he's buried in her own crawl space covered in cement.
25:45In March of 2000, Alan Ross has been missing for almost five years.
25:51His filmmaker friends are determined to find out what happened to him.
25:55When they find Alan's prize camera with a neighbor, they fear he's dead.
26:03And I get the camera.
26:05Immediately called Christian and Galen.
26:08You know how I know it's Alan?
26:09There's a card inside that says Alan Ross.
26:12Seeing that camera just sent a chill through me.
26:17I knew how attached Alan was to that camera.
26:22The neighbor goes, this woman named Linda, she gave it to me and told me to do what I want
26:29with it, get rid of it.
26:34We took the camera to the Cheyenne, Wyoming Police Department and we showed it to the investigators and we told
26:44them that camera was the tool for Alan's livelihood
26:48and he would not have been separated from it unless something bad had happened.
26:56A person not having their belongings wouldn't probably be enough to open up an older case.
27:03But it seemed particularly odd that it was worth taking a look at.
27:08We found out that Alan's passport had not been renewed in 1998.
27:14Okay, something's going on right now, something's wrong.
27:18He's actually not working.
27:20We're going to go back to the last place Alan was seen in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
27:27We got a search warrant and on July 17th of 2000, detectives went back to the address on East 17th
27:37Street in Cheyenne
27:38where Alan Ross lived with the Samaritan Group, retraced everything that I had done four years prior.
27:49The detectives began searching the home, which is now at this point abandoned.
27:56Upon entering the basement, it was dirty, there was trash.
28:02At that point they went to what's called a boiler room, which is nothing more than a 10 by 10
28:09room with a boiler to get to the crawl space.
28:13Four years prior when I did the other search, I didn't see anything in that crawl space.
28:20It was so short that you couldn't stand up straight in, difficult to get in, difficult to work in.
28:34The investigators found a section of dirt off to the right was some concrete that appeared to be disturbed.
28:42There was a crack in the cement and that is when they saw something.
28:55A high top tennis shoe peeked through a crack in the cement.
29:01That tennis shoe was attached to a body that had been essentially mummified.
29:12In the time the concrete that they had laid over the top of the body had settled, it caused the
29:19foot to come out of the ground.
29:23We immediately sealed the building off.
29:26The lieutenant at that point called in the Wyoming state crime lab and they started very meticulously removing the cement
29:36and the dirt that was over the body.
29:41Upon further search of the crawl space, they find a bullet casing from a nine millimeter handgun.
29:51It was pretty clear at this point that this was a homicide.
29:58The body was removed and sent to the crime lab for the autopsy.
30:08Law enforcement obtained DNA from Alan Ross's twin brother.
30:14They were able to match that DNA with the bones found in the crawl space and positively identify Alan Ross.
30:27Alan's death was just devastating for the Chicago filmmakers.
30:31He was robbed from us, from our lives, Alan met this tragic end.
30:47The autopsy report confirmed that Alan Ross was shot execution style to the back of his head and that was
30:55the ultimate cause of death.
30:56What they discovered next was he had been castrated.
31:05To do something that grotesque to a body that's just kind of the face of evil.
31:11Why was the damage so bad?
31:14Who did this?
31:27Who did this?
31:40Four years after going missing, the body of Alan Ross was discovered buried in the basement of a house in
31:49Cheyenne, Wyoming.
32:01We started to look at motivation because why did this happen?
32:06During the investigation, speaking with the filmmakers, we found out that Alan had been planning on leaving this apartment foundation.
32:16We told the police that back in 1995, within just a few months of Alan going missing, Christian Bauer contacted
32:27Alan to shoot a documentary about the Mississippi River.
32:35And they were going through the various towns along the Mississippi.
32:41When they got to Missouri, Linda and Julia showed up.
32:48Christian said he had no idea how they knew which hotel they were staying in because Alan said he hadn't
32:56told them.
32:56When the crew came into New Orleans, there was Linda and Julia waiting for them.
33:03Alan was very irritated.
33:07These two women were there to put their thumbs in the works.
33:16Bourbon Street is seen through Alan's eyes.
33:20The two women on the sidewalk are Linda and Julia.
33:23Linda steps in front of the camera.
33:25Alan is embarrassed.
33:27He pans away.
33:32There are some very evocative photos that Christian showed me of Alan staring off at the Mississippi.
33:39He seemed broken.
33:43We looked at motive.
33:45One impossibility was he was planning on leaving the foundation and that she couldn't let him go.
33:51I think when Alan Ross went back to what he loved, which was documentary making,
33:58he was completely outside of her control.
34:01So Linda came to New Orleans.
34:04Her mission was to reestablish her control over Alan Ross.
34:09Who had the passion to do this to Alan?
34:14When you look at the castration, it reinforces that this was personal.
34:21So at that point, Linda Green and Julia Williams became prime suspects.
34:30In July of 2000, investigators interviewed both Linda and Julia.
34:43The first day that they spoke with Linda and Julia was a seven-hour interview.
34:51Alan came to my room and he told me that the National Security Agency informed her that we were all
35:01to be killed.
35:03She was obviously badly unstable.
35:06There were a lot of different stories.
35:08And just trying to make sense of the facts was extremely challenging.
35:15Linda Green was absolutely unfazed by the news that her spiritual husband was found murdered execution style.
35:23His penis was missing and he's buried in her own crawl space covered in cement.
35:32But both Linda and Julia pointed the finger at Dennis Green saying he was the one who actually committed the
35:38homicide.
35:39Dennis is an evil piece of .
35:42He killed him and then he said he would kill me and my son if I opened my mouth.
35:47They told law enforcement that Alan Ross had molested Linda and Dennis Green's minor child.
35:55And then she said Dennis Green was so angry that he shot Alan Ross and just castrated him right there.
36:04And that of course could be motive.
36:09So the question was, who killed Alan Ross?
36:33In July of 2000, after detectives found Alan Ross's body,
36:40Linda Green told law enforcement that Alan Ross had molested her and Dennis Green's minor child.
36:50And Dennis Green was so upset and so angry that he shot Alan Ross and just castrated him right there.
36:59Law enforcement interviewed Dennis Green and he adamantly denied that.
37:07After fact checking Dennis Green's statements, investigators were able to confirm at that time, Dennis Green was in fact in
37:16Colorado.
37:20So at this point in the investigation, Linda and Julia are the prime suspects.
37:24But we can't charge them at this point because we don't have any hard evidence pointing to them.
37:35The passage of time is the worst enemy of prosecutors and law enforcement.
37:43In 2002, Linda Green died of liver failure before charges could be filed.
37:58After Linda Green died, Julia Williams admitted to law enforcement that in 1995, around the end of November, she heard
38:08a gunshot.
38:11And she saw Alan Ross lying on the floor.
38:14She was very evasive regarding the details.
38:18She would never reveal who pulled the trigger that killed Alan Ross.
38:23Because of the confession, in March 2003, we were able to charge Julia with accessory to murder after the fact.
38:38From the investigation, we believe that around Thanksgiving of 1995, it was clear Alan wanted to escape the wrath of
38:47Linda Green.
38:49He was planning on leaving the foundation.
38:54And she couldn't put up with that.
38:59We believe the time that Julia told Alan they were going to get rid of all this filmed equipment.
39:07This was his life and Linda and Julia understood that.
39:14Alan Ross wanted to leave.
39:16He had lost his sense of loyalty to Linda Green.
39:21And I think that led to the death of Alan Ross.
39:26Our theory is that once he arrived at the house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Linda Green and Julia Williams shot Alan
39:36Ross in the head.
39:40He was castrated.
39:46Together, they dragged him down the stairs.
39:51Buried him in the unfinished crawl space.
39:56And then poured cement over him.
40:07During trial, Julia Williams' defense was that Dennis Green had killed Alan Ross and that she was forced to go
40:17along and participate because she was scared of him.
40:24The biggest challenge was that the case was largely circumstantial.
40:31We looked intensively and we never found the gun.
40:35We didn't know if we could get a conviction.
40:38With juries, you just never know.
40:43The jury deliberated for only an hour.
40:47On November 19, 2004, they found that 51-year-old Julia Williams was guilty of accessory after the fact to
40:56the murder of Alan Ross.
40:59The court sentenced Julia Williams to 24 to 34 months in prison with 109 days for credit for time served.
41:11We were relieved that she was brought to justice, but 34 months for a homicide, that seems low.
41:20It was a very small sentence, which was another shock for me.
41:25I don't feel like justice was served.
41:33I want Alan to be remembered as this kind of fun-loving, goofy guy who had a lot of curiosity
41:42about life.
41:46He was a great cameraman and he did great work.
41:51That's Alan to me.
41:54He saw life through his camera.
41:57What he saw in that camera was unlike what I saw with my two eyes.
42:04That was the beauty of what Al could do.
42:08His spirit was so inviting.
42:10He was always for me.
42:14You know, he was always for me.
42:17How could you not love that?
42:19I'm here.
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