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The Dry Shoe That Cracked a Wrongful Conviction

The Dry Shoe That Cracked a Wrongful Conviction

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The Dry Shoe That Cracked a Wrongful Conviction

A single size-seven burgundy leather dress shoe sat bone dry inside a concrete culvert while six inches of snowmelt ran around it - even though the pipe was open at both ends and the shoe was sole-down on the floor. That single impossible detail stayed officially "unexplained" in the medical examiner's addendum and would become the hinge that later overturned a murder conviction; but who noticed it, and why did it sit forgotten in a file for years?

In this episode, we lay out the sequence of events from Sandra Pelham's disappearance to the discovery in the culvert and the early investigative decisions, and we follow how one logged but overlooked detail would later change everything. How did a dry shoe, a replaced padlock, and a missed connection shift the course of a murder case?

Person: Sandra Pelham
Date: January 9, 2011
Location: culvert near Pelham Access Road, Crestfield
Status: body found 40 yards from culvert; single shoe recovered
Person: Gloria Owens

- A size-seven burgundy leather dress shoe was found sole-down and dry inside a concrete culvert while six inches of snowmelt flowed on either side.
- Sandra Pelham, age 38, was head bookkeeper at Harwick Grain Cooperative and had worked there six years.
- Sandra's husband, Phil Pelham, discovered her car at the cooperative with the driver's door unlocked and engine cold on the evening of January 6, 2011, and called the sheriff at 7:58 p.m.
- The cooperative's loading dock padlocked service entrance had its original lock replaced with a visually identical lock sometime in early December 2010, noted in a work order written in the handwriting of Marvin Novak.
- The medical examiner's final report addendum marked the condition of the dry shoe and its placement as "officially unexplained."

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