Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is one that I was dead set on telling because I have seen bits and pieces of it before. But when I actually dug in, it was one of those cases where the story reported is not the real story. And I couldn't understand how it got so twisted. So if you think that you know this

case, you probably don't. This is the story of Robin Benedict.

Thank you. I'm going to be. I'm going to be I'm

the March 6, 1983 is a cold spring morning in Mansfield, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts,

the kind that makes you feel like winter's never going to end.

But instead of using his Sunday to sleep in, a man named Joseph braves the freezing weather to

collect bottles along I-95.

Around 9 a.m., he meets up with his friend, and they go to this rest stop to rummage through some

trash barrels.

They split up.

Joseph takes the left side of the lot.

His friend takes the right.

And when Joseph reaches inside the first barrel, he pulls out this heavy brown plastic garbage bag. And he's excited because a heavy bag means lots of bottles. Lots of bottles means a big payday. But instead of a payday, he nearly gets a heart attack. Because when he tears open the bag, he sees a tan corduroy jacket spattered with blood.

The scent of expensive perfume wafts up from the jacket,

creating this weird dissonance between what he's smelling versus like what he's seeing.

Now the jacket is wrapped around something hard and lumpy.

And as he peels back the layers, he sees a man's bloodied blue shirt,

then a small two and a half pound sledgehammer, also with blood on it.

And stuck to the blood on the sledgehammer is a long strand of dark hair.

Joseph calls his friend over, wondering if they should call the police, but the friend is like,

no, we need to stay out of whatever this is. It's not like we found a body here. Plus, he's like,

I get that it looks like blood, but it doesn't mean it actually is blood. And listen, if you want too bad enough, you can convince yourself of anything. So they put the trash bag back in the can and they move along, just determined to not get involved. I cannot relate to anything less. As a crime turkey, no, I know. I would want to get the most involved.

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