Show: 48 Hours Mystery, Vol. 3
Episode Title: The Long Road
Duration: 41:22
Release Date:
Date added to iTunes: Mar 8, 2008
Network: CBS
Episode description: The 1986 wedding pictures of Dyke and Karen Rhoads show a predictably joyous young couple, ready for a wonderful life together in the small town of Paris, Ill. Karen was 24 when they married, and had a job as an office assistant at a factory; Dyke worked in landscaping. There was no hint that just months after their wedding their lives would come to a violent end. As correspondent Susan Spencer reports, in the early morning hours of July 6, 1986, a fire engulfed their home. "My dad came over at 6 o'clock in the morning. I never will forget that. And he told me they had been killed," remembers Dyke's brother Tony. "He told me about their house burning. So we just naturally assumed they died in the fire, and it wasn't until two o'clock that afternoon that we found out they had been stabbed or murdered." Justice moved quickly. Within a year, two men were arrested and convicted of the crime: 41-year-old Herb Whitlock, a part-time construction worker and small-time drug dealer, and his pal, Randy Steidl, 35, who also worked in construction and had several convictions for assault. Prosecutors said the motive for the killing was a drug deal gone bad. Both men said they were innocent, but no one was listening. That is until 1999, when journalism professor David Protess of Northwestern University gave his students the Rhoads murder as a class project. He told them to re-investigate the crime. To him, at least, the case didn't add up.
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