The Trail Went Cold - Episode 118 - Tom Roche

The Trail Went Cold

Robin Warder

True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2019

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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. “The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon! Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	September 13th, 1991. Burbank, California.
0:06.8	37 year old Tom Roach makes plans to meet his spouse Barbara Rondo for lunch but never shows up and when Barbara returns home she
0:15.1	discovers that Tom is missing. Six days later, Barbara receives an envelope
0:20.0	containing some of Tom's personal items along with an anonymous confession letter to his murder.
0:25.6	While there is some speculation that Tom staged his own disappearance,
0:29.3	his skeletal remains are eventually discovered in a remote area 500 miles away.
0:34.0	Tom's cause of death is determined to be a gunshot wound,
0:38.0	but the circumstances of how he wound up dead,
0:40.0	as well as the identity of the letter writer remain unknown.
0:44.0	After that, the trail went cold. Oh, uh, uh, and uh,
0:55.0	uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, for, uh, uh,
0:58.0	uh, uh, uh,
1:04.0	uh,
1:05.0	uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
1:08.0	uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
1:11.0	uh, Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the Trail went cold.
1:26.0	I'm your host Robin Warder and we've got a pretty mysterious cold case to cover today,
1:31.0	the unexplained 1991 death of Tom Roach. This story was featured on an
1:36.6	episode of Unsaw Mysteries and I consider it to be one of the more underrated segments featured
1:41.6	on the show. It doesn't get as much discussion as some of their other unsolved cases, but I think it's a real puzzler.
1:48.0	Tom Roach was a motorcycle enthusiast who seemed to have an ideal life as he was living with his girlfriend
1:54.4	of 16 years and was days away from starting a new job he seemed really excited
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Robin Warder, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Robin Warder and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.