Field of Bad Dreams

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

The following is a true story that happened in Vinton, Ohio, population 220, a town that is small, even by small-town standards.

Vicki Duncan (0:12)

Vinton is very small.

You have several power plants in the area, which brings in a lot of employment. People from different areas come in and they work in these plants.

SPEAKER_3 (0:25)

Three to four Maine families live in Vinton, and that's the ones that have settled there.

John Taylor (0:33)

There's only really one place in Vinton, and that's McCoy's One Stop. So other than that, gossip is about all they got.

SPEAKER_3 (0:45)

And this is such a great area, too, but bad things happen to good people.

Robert Markham (0:51)

The whole town was super tense when Betsy went missing.

Sharon Boster (0:55)

I thought that they were wrong. Couldn't be Betsy, she couldn't be gone.

Chris Gill (1:01)

Her shoes were under the car, her purse was in the back seat, just seemed very abnormal.

Zachary Green (1:06)

I'm not sure why anybody wanna do this to some nice lady.

Chris Gill (1:10)

Someone was involved with this that knew this family.

Sharon Boster (1:15)

The way Betsy's body had been posed.

Fred Workman (1:17)

It was almost like a trophy of what he had done.

Michael Johnson (1:20)

There were a lot of similarities to what happened in the BTK case. The strangulation, the sexual component to it.

Just really bizarre kind of stuff.

Fred Workman (1:34)

I thought, oh my God, we might have a serial killer on our hands.

SPEAKER_1 (1:42)

This is the story of Betsy Lee Ball, a woman who was one of just a few families that called Vinton home. In this town of God-fearing people, Betsy enjoyed a reputation as impeccable as her tiny home. So, when her husband came home one night to find Betsy missing, no one could imagine the unspeakable horrors that Betsy's unmade bed and empty wine glass for its old.

From ID and Ample Entertainment, this is Murder in the Heartland.

John Taylor (2:19)

The whole area of Vinton is frozen in time a little bit. Picture a one-horse town that someone shot the horse. It's very small. You can walk from one end of Vinton to the other in about the same amount of time it would take to walk a city block.

I was 35 years old when I lost my sight.

Betsy Lee Ball was my mother. And my mom and I were always super close, best friends. But then she became an extension, like anytime I went to town, it was because she took me. So it just made our relationship so much closer.

SPEAKER_1 (3:06)

On February 28th, 2012, at 2:30 p.m., John Taylor had lunch with his mother, Betsy.

John Taylor (3:13)

That day, we just went to lunch.

And when she dropped me off, she said that she was tired and she thought she'd just go home and lay down. So I told her, okay, I love you, you know, go get some rest. And then she told me that she loved me too. And she pulled out the driveway.

Later on, late in the evening, mom's husband, Dave, called me and he said, do you know where your mother is? And I was thinking she should be there at the house. He sounded worried, but he sounded worried like I thought he thought she had taken off. So I'm thinking that maybe she decided she wanted to go somewhere on her own. So I didn't have any worried, scared to death feelings.

SPEAKER_1 (4:02)

At 2 a.m. the next morning, it had been 12 hours since John was last with his mother. Betsy's husband, David Ball, calls 911 after he returns home and finds the house in an unusual state.

Chris Gill (4:14)

At that time, I had been a detective for four years and responded to all deaths and felonies. Our 911 center would have received a call from Mr. Ball.

SPEAKER_1 (4:23)

Detective Chris Gill of the Galia County Sheriff's Department is dispatched to the Ball home.

Chris Gill (4:29)

David told us he had left his job at the power plant around midnight. He got home shortly after and noticed that Betsy was not at the house. He also noticed that she usually left things in the house put away, but when he got home that night, there was a wine glass out with wine that had been drank and some pretzels and different things. The bed wasn't made like it normally was if she wasn't in it. In the garage, we noticed her shoes were under the car, her purse was in the back seat, there was all kinds of signs of things that could potentially have been wrong.