Buried Bones - a historical true crime podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes · Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

The Haystack Murder

February 4, 2026·1 hr 6 min·11 clips

A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene, indicating this was deliberate murder made to look like accident.

The episode opens on a burned scene. The fire has already done its damage, so the story turns to the traces that remain and the careful work of reading them. A doctor comes in. He is there for a more advanced autopsy, with attention on stomach contents and on whatever the body can still reveal after the ashes have settled. Buttons from overalls show up in the ashes the next day. That detail hangs over the case because Alex is described as very successful, with a lot of money, and not a man who wore overalls. The mismatch matters. It is the kind of clue that seems small until every other explanation has to bend around it. The investigators are left confused. They have a body, a burned site, and a strange set of buttons, and none of those things settles neatly with the others yet. The episode stays inside that confusion. It keeps asking what the buttons are doing there and why they ended up underneath the body at the time. The forensic angle stays close. The autopsy is not a side note here, because the search for stomach contents is part of the same effort to make the dead scene speak. Alex remains central. His wealth and his usual clothes form the plain, stubborn contrast that keeps the case from becoming simple. The ashes matter. So do the buttons, because they are the one odd physical fact that refuses to fit the rest of the picture. The episode is patient. It stays with the evidence until the oddness of the scene has room to land.

As heard by us

A burned scene, a strange clue, and an autopsy that makes the ashes speak.

A burned scene, a more advanced autopsy, and the search for stomach contents give the case its shape. The strongest detail is the overalls buttons found in the ashes the next day, because that clue does not fit Alex, who is presented as successful, wealthy, and unlike a man who…

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Why you'd press play

You get one burned scene and a clue that refuses to behave.

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