ArchiveFM

Crime Junkie

MURDERED: Robin Benedict

A discovery in a rest stop trash can leads police to suspect a young artist and sex worker has been brutally murdered by someone close to her. But without a body, will she ever get the justice she deserves?
Duration
1h 20m
Broadcast on
23 Dec 2024
Audio Format
other

A discovery in a rest stop trash can leads police to suspect a young artist and sex worker has been brutally murdered by someone close to her. But without a body, will she ever get the justice she deserves?

  • If you have any information on the disappearance of Robin Benedict in 1983 in Massachusetts, please contact the Massachusetts State Police at 508-820-2300.
     

If you or someone you know is a victim of stalking, you can reach out to the VictimConnect Resource Center by phone or text at 1-855-484-2846, or you can chat online at victimconnect.org. You can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or RAINN’s National Sexual Abuse Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.

For more resources and information about stalking & stalking awareness, especially for those not directly impacted by stalking, please visit the Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center (SPARC) website.

 

Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-robin-benedict/

 

Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit crimejunkie.app/library/ to view the current membership options and policies.

 

Don’t miss out on all things Crime Junkie!


Crime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. 


Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Let's face it, if student loans are slowing down your financial goals, it might be time for a smarter strategy. That's where today's sponsor, SoFi, comes in. SoFi is helping you tackle student debt by refinancing your loans with flexible monthly payments that fit your budget. We're talking about the potential to lower your interest rate, reduce your monthly payment, or even pay off your loan sooner, depending on the term you choose. You can also consolidate your student loans into one simple monthly payment, so you could save more each month and work towards achieving your long-term financial ambitions. SoFi offers competitive, fixed and variable rates, and no origination fees, prepayment fees, or late fees required. It takes just two minutes to check your rate with SoFi, and they have already helped over 500,000 members refinance more than 50 billion in student loans. Visit sofi.com/crimejunkie to see how much you can save. That's sofi.com/crimejunkie and start making smarter money moves with SoFi. SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank, NA member FDIC, additional terms and conditions apply, NMLS696891. Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flower. 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. [Music] March 6, 1983 is a cold spring morning in Mansfield, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, the kind that makes you feel like winter is 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 law 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 like 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 junkie. No, I know. I would want to get the most involved. I would make this my whole personality. Yeah. Like, but we are not Joseph. We are crime junkies. But he is human, and he does find himself like thinking about this bag, even after he gets home. What if it really was blood? What if someone out there is hurt? He can't just sit with it anymore. So he does end up calling police that same day. It's state trooper Paul Landry who gets sent to check this out. And when he finds the trash bag and sees everything with his own eyes, he is not as quick to dismiss it. He knows blood when he sees it, and this blood is still sticky, which means that it's pretty fresh. Whatever happened to whoever it happened to, probably happened around sometime like the night before. So trooper Landry collects the items and sends them to the state crime lab for testing while he puts out feelers for any crimes in the area that this might be related to assaults, homicides, missing people. Nothing pops up right away. But about a week later, trooper Landry gets word that there is in fact a missing girl. Someone had apparently heard someone else talking about a newscast that they saw about this missing person. So he literally doesn't even have a name or even a place, but it has to be somewhat regional,

Transcription truncated.

A discovery in a rest stop trash can leads police to suspect a young artist and sex worker has been brutally murdered by someone close to her. But without a body, will she ever get the justice she deserves?