Episode 218:

Good Shabbos

The Murder of Yara Gambirasio

Georgia

The Crimes of Herb Coddington

Karen

Episode 218: Good Shabbos

Karen and Georgia cover the murders of Yara Gambirasio, and the crimes of Herb Coddington.

The Murder of Yara Gambirasio

The Murder of Yara Gambirasio Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Nienke Witteveen Fleuren on Unsplash

Other Images Not Pictured:

Yara Gambirasio (via Wikipedia)

Yara Gravesite (via TheGuardian.com)

Massimo Bossetti (via TheGuardian.com)

"Yara Gambirasio should only have been gone a short while. On Friday 26 November 2010, at 5.15pm, she left home to go to the gym, just a few hundred metres from her home. Yara, who was 13 and wore train-track braces, was preparing for her rhythmic gymnastics display the following Sunday. All she needed to do was drop off a stereo with her instructor. She said goodbye to her family, who knew where she was going, and left the house.

By 7pm, Yara had still not come home and her parents were becoming increasingly anxious. The town where they lived, Brembate di Sopra, was a sedate place, on the so-called “Bergamask island” between the rivers Brembo and Adda. An hour north of Milan, and just south of the Bergamo Alps, it has a population of 8,000. From its quiet streets, lined with poplars and cypresses, you can see the wooded mountains in the distance, the peaks turning blue-grey. At 7.11pm, Yara’s mother phoned her daughter, but the call went straight to voicemail. Twenty minutes later, Yara’s father called the police..."

— Source: The Guardian article by Tobias Jones

The Crimes of Herb Coddington

The Crimes of Herb Coddington Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Daniel Corneschi on Unsplash

Other Images Not Pictured:

Herbert Coddington (via Murderpedia)

Series of photos in court (via mtdemocrat.com)

Maybelle and Dottie (via Murderpedia)

"On May 16, 1987, two teenaged models and their elderly female chaperones were reported missing after they failed to return from a trip to Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border, for production of an anti-drug video program.

Missing were: Maybelle Martin, 69, operator of the Showcase Finishing and Modeling School in Reno, Nevada; her friend Dorothy Walsh, 67; model Alecia Thoma, 14, of Reno; and model Monica Berge, age 12, from nearby Sparks.

A three-day search by fifty law enforcement officers, including agents of the FBI, centered on Lake Tahoe, where local girls had complained of a "weird" man who tried to recruit them for anti-drug video projects.

One of the girls was suspicious enough to record the man's license plate number, a detail which led investigators to the rural home of Herbert Coddington.

The name was a familiar one to officers throughout Nevada. Coddington had worked at two casinos in Las Vegas during 1980, and a warrant filed in Douglas County charged him with a cheating scam in April 1984. Arrested in Las Vegas, he had been released on $500 bail and the case was still pending.

On May 18, 1987, federal agents armed with warrants raided Coddington's mobile home, freeing Thoma and Berge from a boarded-up bedroom where they were held captive. The bodies of Maybelle Martin and Dorothy Walsh were found in an adjoining room, bound up in plastic garbage bags.

On May 20, Coddington was arraigned on two counts of murder, with five other counts charging rape and acts of deviate sexual abuse against the teenaged victims. With their man in custody, authorities began to search his background, and they soon discovered links with yet another crime.

In August 1981, 12-year-old Sheila Keister had been kidnapped, raped and strangled in Las Vegas, her body discarded beside an unpaved road on Sunrise Mountain, east of town.

Upon examination, prosecutors charged that dental casts obtained from Coddington matched bite marks on the dead girls body, and another charge of homicide was filed on July 22, 1987..."

— Source: Herbert James Coddington Murderpedia