The Trail Went Cold - Episode 220 - Ralph Sigler

The Trail Went Cold

Robin Warder

True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

April 13, 1976. Jessup, Maryland. Ralph Sigler, a 47-year old Chief Warrant Officer with the United States Army, is found dead inside a motel room after an apparent suicide in which he electrocuted himself. For the past decade, Ralph had been working as a counterintelligence agent who provided classified information to spies from the Soviet Union, but since he had fallen under suspicion for failing several polygraph tests, the Army concludes that Ralph elected to take his own life. However, Ralph’s family discovers a number of discrepancies, including some unexplained injuries on his body, to make them suspect Ralph was tortured before someone murdered him. Was Ralph Sigler’s death an elaborate suicide or was he a victim of foul play? On this week’s episode of “The Trail Went Cold”, we explore a controversial Cold War-era mystery involving spies and espionage. Additional Reading: https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Ralph_Sigler https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/02/08/an-agents-suicide/24147cde-632c-4d11-97e2-f0517315db42/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/485/185/1377158/ https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/28/world/failings-reported-at-fbi-and-cia.html https://www.newspapers.com/image/435314686/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/434670125/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/434670936/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/434671715/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/434672452/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/161100945/ “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 going to be appearing on podcast row at “Crimecon UK” at the Leonardo Royal Hotel & Spa in London on September 25-26, 2021. To get a 10 % discount on the purchase of tickets to either event, please use our specialized promo code, “COLD21”, by visiting https://www.crimecon.co.uk. “The Trail Went Cold” is now doing a weekly livestream show on GetVokl every Thursday from 7:00-8:00 PM ET as part of their “True Crime Thursday” line-up. For more information, please visit their website. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

Transcript

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0:00.0	April 13th, 1976.
0:03.6	Jessup, Maryland.
0:05.6	Ralph Sigler, a 47-year-old chief warrant officer with the U.S. Army, is found
0:10.7	inside a motel room after an apparent suicide, and it is believed that he electrocuted himself.
0:16.0	For years, Ralph had been working in espionage as a counterintelligence agent who provided classified information to the Soviet Union, but since he has fallen under suspicion for failing several polygraph tests, the Army concludes that Ralph elected to take his own life.
0:31.0	However, Ralph's family discovers a number of discrepancies,
0:34.6	including some unexplained injuries on his body to make them suspect Ralph was
0:39.1	tortured before he was murdered, but the actual truth about what happened remained shrouded in controversy.
0:45.5	After that, the trail went cold. Oh, uh, yeah. Oh, uh,
0:54.0	uh,
0:55.0	uh, uh, uh, uh,
0:57.0	uh,
0:58.0	uh, uh, uh, I'm not. Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.
1:26.1	I'm your host Robin Warder and today we're going to be covering a unique story
1:30.5	involving spies and espionage the unexplained
1:33.7	1976 death of Ralph Sigler. You might be familiar with this case from
1:38.5	Unsaw Mysteries as it involves a chief warrant officer from the Army who spent several years working as a double agent by intentionally providing disinformation to spies from the Soviet Union.
1:50.0	However, things eventually reached the point where the army began to suspect that Ralph had been supplying secrets to the Russians that he wasn't supposed to, and just as they were about to start investigating him as a possible traitor, he was found dead inside a motel room of an apparent suicide.
2:05.0	But Ralph's method of suicide, which involved wrapping wire around his arms and
2:09.7	electrocuting himself, was so unusual that his family doubted the official cover story and believed there were enough discrepancies to show that he was actually the victim of foul play.
2:20.0	Rouse's wife and daughter would spend years attempting to uncover the truth about what happened to him,
2:25.0	not only to seek justice for his death, but to restore his reputation and to spell all notions that he betrayed his country.
	...

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