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[Music] [Music] Sonya Yvonne McCaskey was born on the 19th of February 1939 in Elgin, Murray, Scotland, to Thomas McCaskey, a shoemaker, and Dorothy Willock. Abbotsford, Malvern.
Not long after Sonya was born, her father unexpectedly passed away, and as a result, Sonya's mother took her to the United States to live. They initially relocated to Long Beach, California, before settling in Tahoe City, Nevada, in 1954. When Sonya was 15 years old, Tonya attended Tahoe Truckee High School, where she started developing a passion for alpine skiing. She joined the school team and spent much of her free time on the local slopes with her family.
After leaving school, Sonia attended Sierra College in Auburn, California, before moving to 2640 Yori Avenue, Reno, Nevada. Upon hearing the news that the Winter Olympics were coming to California in 1960, Sonia wrote a letter to the Ski Club of Great Britain to ask if she could try out for the Olympic team. And even though she didn't expect to hear anything back, her request paid off. Upon Team GB's arrival in the US, McCaskey tried out for a spot on the team and was successful. Unfortunately, when participating in the slalom events at the games, McCaskey fell and ended up placing last.
Following her Olympic challenge, McCaskey managed to gain employment as a secretary at a meatpacking company located three miles away from her home in Sparks, but also became a part-time skiing instructor at Slide Mountain Ski School in Reno. Sonia adored being an instructor and was very well liked by those she taught.
When it came to her personal life, Sonia married a man named Jeff Schmidt and had a child, but unfortunately, her relationship with her husband didn't last, and the two ended up divorcing. Following the split, Sonja fell pregnant again by another man and gave birth to another child, a son named Kim, in June 1962, and raised both of her children alone.
In 1963, 24-year-old Sonja was chosen to partake in the European Skiing Championships. The following year, in 1964, and she was elated by the news, especially after such a disappointing finish to her Olympic campaign in 1960. But unbeknownst to her at the time, she would never make it.
On the 5th of April 1963, a babysitter became increasingly concerned after Sonja failed to collect her 10-month-old son from her. Sonja's other child is believed to have been with her mother, Dorothy, at the time. This was extremely out of the ordinary for the single mother, and as a result, the babysitter contacted authorities, voicing her concerns for Sonja's whereabouts. Unbeknownst to the babysitter, Sonja had also failed to show up at work at the meatworks company that Friday morning, which once again was completely out of character.
Last time that Sonja was seen alive was at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, the 4th of April, when she arrived back home to her apartment after a day of work. Police officers were dispatched to McCaskey's residence on Yori Avenue, and what they found was a gruesome scene. Upon entering the bedroom, police found a cedar chest, and inside it lay the mutilated, nude body of 24-year-old Sonia McCaskey. She had been tortured, raped, strangled, and mutilated. Three kitchen knives were still plunged into her torso, and her decapitated head was underneath, wrapped in white undergarments and a lace tablecloth. Authorities ruled out a blanket found on the living room floor, and both of Sonia's dismembered feet fell out. Some blood-stained razor blades and knives were found in the kitchen, and even more gut-wrenchingly, the 24-year-old's heart had been ripped out of her chest and placed two feet away from the unlocked front door of the apartment. Reno police described it as the worst ever murder scene they had fallen upon.
A bloody footprint, which was found on Sonja's apartment floor, was a significant piece of forensic evidence and would eventually help aid police in their investigations to catch the killer. But at this very early stage of the investigation, there were no suspects in the case. Reno police came to the conclusion that because there appeared to be no forced entry, that the perpetrator was someone Sonya knew. Therefore, she willingly let them into the apartment, either that or someone came in through any unlocked doors. Reno was a place where the locals didn't feel a need to lock their doors at night. However, after Sonia's death, this changed drastically. Families ended up placing double locks for extra safety measures, and others replaced their locks completely with better ones. The community were terrified, especially during the week that followed Sonya's murder when police didn't have a suspect and the killer was still at large.
Neighbors were questioned by police and reported to have not heard any screams or out of the ordinary noises coming from McCaskey's apartment on the night in question. Something which police also believed in the initial investigation was that due to the precision of the mutilations to Sonja's body, that the killer must have had some sort of experience as a surgeon or butcher, or at least had advanced knowledge regarding anatomy. But this wasn't the case, and their predictions about Sonya's killer being known to her and being a butcher of some kind could not have been more wrong.
Before any significant developments occurred in regards to suspects, authorities looked into Sonja herself. She was a quiet person who always kept to herself. She always kept diaries regarding her day-to-day life, and police believed that the entries could have held the key to finding her killer. They did find a number of poems written by Sonja in her diary, mainly themed around death and love, which led to some questioning her "complex personality," something which was denied by those who knew Sonja. But nothing of major significance was found within the diary.
Authorities followed up on all intimate relationships that McCaskey had written about in her diary, but these hit dead ends. Her ex-husband, Jeff Schmidt, was cleared of having any involvement in Sonia's death and was the potential father of her month-old son. 24-year-old David C. Conrad, whom Sonja had brought a paternity suit against in the months prior to her murder, Conrad claimed that baby Kim was not his child and claimed that Sonja was involved with another person at the time of his conception. David was questioned by police and even offered to take a lie detector test, and he was cleared of any involvement shortly after.
After eight days of looking into various clues, lines of inquiry, and persons of interest, mainly local men and ex-lovers, police found a camera manual in Sonia's apartment, but no camera. It had been stolen. After some digging, authorities managed to trace the rare German-made camera back to a pawn shop, where the proprietor managed to identify a youth who he had paid ten dollars to for the camera. The youth was Thomas Lee Bean, an 18-year-old Worcester High School student. He had given his real name to the pawn shop but a fake address. Regardless, authorities managed to trace him down.
Thomas "Tom" Bean was born in Reno but had a very unsteady childhood. According to some sources, in his 18 years of life, he had moved home 18 times. He didn't have good relationships with his family members, especially his father, who preferred his seven-year-old brother, and was reportedly a very introverted teenager. He got into quite a bit of trouble in his youth and spent much of his time prowling the streets of Reno at night, allegedly looking for women's underwear on washing lines.
After comparing the bloody footprint found in Sonia's apartment to Bean's and tracing the camera back to the 18-year-old, police took a nervous Thomas into their headquarters. However, he tried to flee after realizing he had been caught out. He managed to run two blocks before being recaptured. Thomas admitted to killing Sonja without hesitation and then revealed the macabre details of how he killed the 24-year-old Olympian.
It came to light that Thomas slipped into Sonia's apartment through the unlocked back door at around midnight of April 4th, going into April 5th, barefoot and armed with a 10-inch blade and a length of twine. He apparently crawled across the floor of the apartment in a bid to confirm that Sonja was alone before entering her room and strangling her. During the time in which he asphyxiated her, Sonja awoke and begged for her life. She told Thomas not to kill her because she had children to support, but he didn't listen. Minutes later, Sonja passed away.
Following the murder, Thomas dragged her out of the bedroom, turned on Sonja's stereo, and listened to music as he chopped her body up into pieces, slicing her body open from her crotch to her neck before ripping her heart out. Just to note, it is unclear whether Thomas sexually assaulted Sonja post-mortem or while she was still alive. He openly admitted to authorities that it was his "childhood dream to rape a girl." Thomas also confessed, "I don't know why I cut her up. I don't. I just shoved the knife in and started to cut. That's all."
After leaving Sonia's apartment after five and a half hours, Thomas drove away in her sports car to dispose of his bloodstained shirt on a desolate road. Bean later reenacted his movements that night to police. Bean's motive was questioned by the police. Why did he kill Sonja? Quite disturbingly, it came to light during questioning the teen that he had long fantasized of murdering the very first person he engaged in sex with. From a young age, his mother would bring back a number of different men to the family home to have sexual relations with, and this was where Thomas's fantasy began.
Whilst driving around the neighborhood the night prior to the murder, Thomas saw Sonia's Triumph sports car parked outside her apartment and her laundry hanging out, and it was at this point that he randomly selected her as his victim. He checked her back door and found it was unlocked. He entered the apartment and then killed her.
Authorities soon discovered after placing Bean in custody that the 18-year-old had actually tried to strangle a 15-year-old girl from Salt Lake City just two years prior to killing Sonia McCaskey. In 1961, the girl was sleeping on her porch when Thomas struck. However, she dug her nails into him, and he fled. After this incident, it is reported that Bean requested he go under psychiatric evaluation before asking if he could go to a reformatory, and he did for a few months. He was committed to the Elko institution in September of that year before being released on parole in May of 1962.
Bean showed no remorse whatsoever when he admitted to police what he had done to the 24-year-old. And on the 8th of July 1963, just three months after Sonia's murder, Thomas Bean was found guilty of first-degree murder by a Washoe District Court jury, taking only 70 minutes to reach their verdict. As the guilty verdict was read out, Thomas Bean smiled and, with a sarcastic manner, simply said, "Thanks to the jury." The sentence of death was passed, and Bean was told that he would die in the Nevada gas chambers. However, Thomas's attorney entered an innocent plea in the hopes that they could prove insanity. They were unsuccessful.
In 1972, following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn all death penalty sentences in the United States, Thomas Bean's sentence was downgraded to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He remains in a Nevada prison to this day, and after 56 years incarcerated, he is the state's longest-serving prisoner.
This case made international headlines and shocked thousands across the globe. One of the most famous front pages from this case came from the National Enquirer, which simply read a sentence from the killer: "I cut out her heart and stomped on it." The public became outraged after various press outlets released graphic images in their publications of the brutal crime scene, including images of a bloody-faced Sonja, her heart, and severed foot. Backlash to these image publications was extremely severe. According to those who worked on the case, the images that were printed in the press weren't even the most graphic ones from the crime scene. This really gave an idea of how horrific and brutal the murder really was.
Sonia McCaskey was laid to rest in Trails End Cemetery, Tahoe City, California, shortly after her death. What came of the McCaskey family, more specifically her two children, is unknown. However, one thing is for certain: Sonia McCaskey was a beautiful and talented young woman who was taken from this world far too soon. So you.