Proof: A True Crime Podcast · Red Marble Media

Murder at the Bike Shop | Ep. 2 – Kalamazoo Cycle

·54 min·3 clips

The medical examiner wrote that Earl O'Byrne was essentially 'tortured' in an attempt to find hidden money.

1. Proof: A True Crime Podcast Season 3, Episode 2, 'Kalamazoo Cycle,' revisits the June 3, 1988 killing of 83-year-old Earl O'Byrne inside his Kalamazoo bike shop. 2. Susan Simpson is the attorney-investigator and Jacinda Davis is the true crime producer, and Olivia Vigiletti appears as Scott Baldwin's attorney with the Michigan Innocence Clinic. 3. The episode asks how Scott Baldwin's conviction fits the evidence from the bike shop, the locked doors, and the eyewitness accounts. 4. Earl O'Byrne was found beaten to death in a shop that had been locked with three deadbolts, three more deadbolts, and a steel sliding bar. 5. The Kalamazoo Cold Case Team reopened the unsolved case in 2000 and concluded that 31-year-old father of four Scott Baldwin had killed Earl after going back to rob the shop. 6. Detective Rich Madison says there was no sign of a break-in, which makes the entry method a central question throughout the investigation. 7. Karen Raymond says Earl trusted only a small circle of employees and that Scott Baldwin would not have been someone Earl would have opened the door for. 8. Karen describes Earl and his brother Johnny O'Byrne as men who lived and worked at the bike shop for more than 60 years. 9. Employees describe the shop as cluttered, with Earl's living space packed floor to ceiling and his bedroom covered in papers. 10. Lori Scott says thieves had targeted the shop before, and Earl had once been beaten in 1984 by a fired teenager who used a pool cue. 11. After that 1984 assault, Earl installed an alarm system and reinforced the windows with security bars. 12. Karen says the rumor of hidden cash mattered because she saw Earl come out with money and the bike shop had bank bags and coin boxes missing. 13. The medical examiner's report says death came from blunt force injury to the head and loss of blood from multiple scalp lacerations. 14. The report also speculates that Earl was 'essentially tortured' in an attempt to find money, while the narration notes that this is not direct proof. 15. Officer Harold West says he drove past the bike shop at about 12:45 a.m. and saw Earl standing in the doorway with a blonde man nearby. 16. West also describes a tan or beige car with square headlights and says the man was walking north away from the building. 17. Karen Raymond, Laurie Scott, and James Long are named as the three employees who had keys to the building. 18. All three were fingerprinted and polygraphed, and the clip says they all passed with no deception indicated. 19. The episode is an investigative true-crime narrative with interview segments, scene reconstruction, and repeated calls back to witness statements and records. 20. People interested in Kalamazoo cold cases, locked-door mysteries, and post-conviction investigation will get the most from it.

As heard by us

A locked shop, a morning discovery, and a killing that turns on how anyone got inside.

The episode turns a killing at a bike shop into a careful account of how the morning unfolded. The shop is shown as difficult to get into, with three deadbolts on the front door, a steel sliding bar, and an attached house where Earl slept at night.

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Why you'd press play

You get a locked-shop murder puzzle from one June morning in 1988.

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