B1. The Fort Myers Eight [Bonus Episode]

In March 2007, a land surveyor pushing through the thick palmetto scrub off Arcadia Street in Fort Myers made a chilling discovery a sun-bleached human skull. By the time the cadaver dogs and forensic anthropologists finished their work, the brush had yielded the skeletal remains of eight different men.

​In this special bonus companion episode of Homocidal Tendency, we return to the lethal Florida scrub to uncover the mass graveyard they missed. 

We break down the horrifying realization that Daniel Conahan didn't just abandon Fort Myers for the Hog Trails—he was managing two separate boneyards at the exact same time. We discuss the painstaking forensic work that gave four of these men their names back decades later, and the ongoing fight to identify the ghosts that are still waiting in the dark.

​⚠️ Listener Warning: This is a direct continuation of our deep dive into Daniel Conahan. If you have not yet listened to Episode 20: The Hog Trail Murders, we highly recommend pausing this track and playing that one first to understand the killer's M.O. and the tragic demographic he preyed upon.

​🎙️ In This Episode:

• ​The Excavation: The multi-day search that turned a routine call into the discovery of a serial killer's private graveyard.
• ​The Overlapping Timeline: How the bones completely rewrote the history of the Hog Trail Monster, proving he was commuting between slaughterhouses.
• ​Reclaiming the Names: The modern genetic genealogy breakthroughs that finally identified Eric Kohler, John Blevins, Jonathan Tihay, and Bobbie Soden.
• ​The Remaining Four: The systemic blind spots that allowed these marginalized men to vanish, and the cutting-edge forensic efforts to identify Victims A, B, F, and G.

​🩸 Support the Podcast & Help Identify the Fort Myers 8:

https://linktr.ee/HomocidalTendency

• ​View the Reconstructions: Head immediately to our Instagram and TikTok at @HomocidalTendency. We have posted the official 3D facial reconstructions for the four remaining John Does pulled from Arcadia Street. Look at their faces, share the post, and help us get these men their names back.
• ​Join the crew : If you appreciate these deep dives into true crime and the marginalized victims society left behind, hit that subscribe button.
• ​Rate & Review: Please take thirty seconds to drop a 5-star rating and a quick written review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is the best way to help the algorithm push the show to other weirdos like us.

​Until next time, stay out of the woods.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

March of two thousand seven. Four Mars, Florida. If you drive down Arcadia Street, it doesn't look like the setting of a horror movie. It's not a deep, endless wilderness. It's just a forgotten pocket of land. A heavily overgrown, trash-littered stretch of slash pine and thick palmetto scrub, sandwiched right between a residential neighborhood and commercial lots. It's the kind of scrub brush people drive past every single day without giving it a second glance. On a blistering afternoon, a land surveyor was out on that brush, pushing his way through the tangled undergrowth to map out the property lines. The humidity was choking. The ground was littered with illegal dumped tires, rustic cans, and discarded garbage. But as he looked down near the base of a tree, trying to find his footing, he saw something completely out of place. It was perfectly round, partially buried in the sandy dirt, and bleached dark white by the Florida sun. It was a human skull. The surveyor backed out of the woods and called the police. Within hours, the Fort Marshall Police Department had cordoned off the brush. They brought in crime screw tape, the forensic anthropologists, and the cadaver dogs. They thought they were dealing with a single tragic homicide, a body dump. But then the dogs alerted on a spot just a few yards away. They dug and they found a second set of human remains. Then the dogs poured towards another patch of palmettoes. They found a third. By the time the search teams finally stopped digging, they hadn't just uncovered a crime scene. They'd unearthed a massive rayar. Eight distinctive sets of skeletal remains were pulled from the dirt. The medical examiners took the bones back to the lab and made a terrifying discovery. These men hadn't died recently. They had been murdered and dumped in those woods between approximately 1987 and 1995. The demographic, the geography, and the brutal reality of how they were discarded all pointed towards one terrifying conclusion. In 1999, the state had locked Daniel Conahan in a cage for the hog trail murders. They patted themselves on the back and told the public the monster was gone. But they had absolutely no idea that the shadow was twice as large and his body count was potentially twice as high. Go listen and then come back here. For those of you who are all caught up, let's go through a little bit of housekeeping before we head back to the Florida brush. If you're loving the show, please hit that subscribe or follow button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on right now. If you want to help me out, take a few seconds and drop a five-star rating and a quick review. It's the absolute best way to help the algorithm push the show up to other TrueCon fans just like us. Finally, you're gonna want to check your social media for this episode. You can find us on Instagram and TikTok at Homocetotendency and also pretty much any major platform. It's at Homocetaltendency, with the exception being for X Twitter, it's Homo Cidal Pod. For this case specifically, I'm gonna be posting the 3D facial reconstructions. These men still need their names back, and getting those faces in front of as many people as possible is crucial. Alright, the housekeeping's out of the way. Make sure your doors are locked, keep your lights low, and let's jump back into it. When the first cruisers from the Fort Myers Police Department rolled up on that overgrown lot on Arcadia Street on March 23rd, 2007, they expected a grim but relatively straightforward afternoon. A surveyor had found a skull, and law enforcement terms that usually means a single homicide victim or a tragic missing person's case where the elements finally took their toll. The first officers on the scene pushed into the brush, confirming the presence of human remains, and immediately threw up Yellow's crime scene tape. They did exactly what you're supposed to do. They called the medical examiner and they brought in a forensic anthropologist. Specifically, they brought in Dr. Heather Walsh Haney from Florida Gulf Coast University, who will become a massive driving force in this investigation. Excavating a skeletonized body in the Florida brush is an absolute nightmare. The ground is tangled, you can't just dig, you have to meticulously shift every single handful of sand and hack through the roots to make sure you don't miss a tooth or a fractured fingerbone. Plus, the wildlife, the coyotes and the hogs usually scatter their manes over a wide radius. The team was painstakingly working the dirt around the first skull when the police decided to expand the perimeter just to be safe. They brought in canon unit, cadaver dogs, specifically trained to hit on the scent of human decomposition. The handlers let the dogs off the leads into the thick brush, and immediately the dog sat down and alerted on a patch of dirt just a few yards away from the primary scene. The dig team moved over, carefully peeling back the dead palmetto fawns and scraping the topsoil. They found a second skull. Before the shock of a double homicide could even fully sit in, another dog barked on the opposite side of the lot. Then another alert. Then another. Fort Marsh Police Department realized they weren't dealing with just a dumping ground. They were standing in the middle of a serial killer's private graveyard. The excavation turned into a massive multi-agency operation that dragged on for days. Under the brutal, suffocating Florida Sun, investigators practically lived in that brush. They set up sifting screens, slowly turning over hundreds of pounds of dirt. As they dug, the horrifying parallels to the Charlotte Killing Hog Trail murders started to scream at them. Just like the victims found up in the north in the 90s, these bodies were completely naked. There wasn't a single scrap of clothing, a bell buckle or a wallet in the dirt with them. The killer had stripped them completely. And because of the severe decomposition and the animal activity, identifying any ligature marks on the surrounding trees was nearly impossible. But the isolation of the lot perfectly matched Daniel Conahan's need for an invisible wooded trap. By the time that Dr. Walshaney and the crime scene technicians finally packed up their equipment and played the lot on Acadia Street, the final body count was staggering. They hadn't found two bodies, they hadn't found four. They had pulled the distinct skeletonized remains of eight different men out of dirt. Eight men who had simply vanished off the face of the earth, swallowed by the palmetto scrub while the rest of the world just drove by. Now, we need to pause and clear up a massive misconception about this bone guard. When the news broke in 2007, the media kept using the words like excavated, unearthed, and mass grave. When you hear that, you naturally picture a killer sweating in the dark with a shovel, carefully burying his victims to hide the evidence. But the chilling truth is Conahan didn't bury them. His hunting signature never changed. Just like the victims up on the hog trails, Conahan left the Fort Myers Aid completely naked and exposed on the surface of the dirt. He didn't dig a single hole. He just walked away. The reason the police had to excavate the slide wasn't because of the killer's MO, it was because of time. If you leave remains on the surface of the Florida scrub for 10 to 20 years, the environment naturally swallows them. Think about it, two decades of torrential summer storms, hurricane flooding, falling pine needles, and shifting sand, the earth simply took them back. The bones sank into the soft, swampy ground and were naturally covered by thick layers of decomposing plant matter. So when the cadaver dogs hit on these spots, investigators absolutely had to dig and meticulously sift the earth, but they weren't digging up graves. They're scraping away 20 years of time, uncovering men who were discarded like garbage and left her nature to erase. When you pull eight skeletonized bodies out of a patch of Florida scrub, the immediate question isn't just who are they, it's when did they die. The remains were transported to the medical examiner's office where Dr. Heather Walsh Haney and her team began the painstaking process of analyzing the bones. They looked at the level of decay, the sun bleaching, the root growth woven through the skeleton structure, and the soil composition. When they finally established the postmortem interval, the window of time when these men were murdered, the blood drained from the faces of the coal case defectives. The forensic timeline estimated that these eight men were killed and dumped on Arcadia Street between 1987 and 1995. Specific window of time sent shockwaves to the department. You have to look at the timeline of Daniel Conahan. Remember the hog trail murders up in Charlotte County, the crimes Conahan was actually caught for. These victims were found between 1994 and 1996. For a long time, investigators assumed that was the entirety of his active period. They thought his violent urges simply erupted in the mid-90s and after he moved back with his parents. But the Fort Myers 8 timeline completely shattered that theory. It rewrote the entire history of the monster. Let's look at Conhan's timeline. After being kicked out of the Navy in the late 70s, he bounced around, but but by 1993, he had moved back to southwest Florida permanently. When the metal examiners first looked at the Fort Myers 8 bones in 2007, they estimated the murders happened between 1987 and 1995. For a long time, the prevailing theory was that Conahan used Arcadia Street as his primary dumping ground, but after a victim named Stanley Burton miraculously survived the attack in Fort Myers in 1994, Conaghan got spooked, abandoned the lot, and moved his operation 30 minutes north to Charlotte County at the Hog Trails. It makes sense on paper. But these victims finally started getting their names back. It shattered that theory. Eric Kohler and John Belvins vanished in 1995. Jonathan Ty disappeared in October 1995. Bobby Sotden was last heard from in 1996. Do you know what else was happening in late 95 and early 96? That's right, the Hog Trail murders. Gerald Lombard, Richard Montgomery, Bill Melodegrano. They were all being killed up in Charlotte County during that exact same window. Conahan didn't just abandon Fort Myers. He didn't just shift his hunting ground because it got too hot. He expanded it. During the mid-90s, Daniel Conahan was actively operating multiple slaughterhouses across county lines. He was hunting transient men, tying them to trees, and bouncing between the dense palmetto scrub of Charlotte County and the hidden trash littered boneyard on Arcadia Street. He was managing two separate graveyards concurrently, right under the noses of multiple police departments. The physical evidence in Fort Myers was virtually non-existent because the bodies had been exposed to the brutal flora elements for over a decade, but the behavioral evidence was screaming his name. It was the same exact demographic. It was the same method of stripping the victims and happening at the same exact time he was killing up north. The task force knew they were staring at Conan's shadow. Now they just had to figure out who the hell these men were. When a community finds out there's a mass graveyard in the backyard, the immediate panic question is always, how do we not know there were eight people missing? If eight bankers or eight college students or eight suburban fathers vanished from Fort Mars within a year of each other, it would have triggered national media coverage. The FBI would have set up command posts. But these men weren't suburban fathers. We have to talk about the demographic tragedy of this case, and we have to bring back that terrible term, the less dead. Just like the victims we discussed in the Hog Trail murders, the men buried on Arcadia Street were actively pushed to the margins of society. They were transient, they were struggling, or they were estranged from their families. When you live off the grid, rather out of necessity, addiction, or because you've been rejected by your family for being queer, your absence doesn't set off alarms. For several of these men, missing person reports were never filed. Their families just assumed they had moved on to a new state or lost touch. The system didn't fail them when they weren't found, the system failed them by not even realizing they were gone. But investigators were determined not to let the Arcadius Street lot be their final story. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the forensic teams began chipping away at their anonymity. The first to get his name back was 21-year-old Eric Kohler. Eric had been living with his grandparents in nearby Port Charlotte. He walked out of the house one day in 1995 and completely vanished. Because his grandparents did report him missing. Investigators were eventually able to use dental records to confirm that one of the skulls pulled from the dirt belonged to him. Shortly after, they identified 26-year-old John Belvins. He disappeared from Fort Myers in 1995. I have to say there's also a reporting discrepancy that says he may have been 38, but both accounts agreed he disappeared in 1995. And then they identified 23-year-old Jonathan Thay, who had less was last seen alive in October of that same year. For both Glevins and Thay, the heartbreaking reality of Conahan's haunting strategy was put on full display. Neither men had been reported missing by their families. They were identified through sheer forensic persistence and family DNA comparisons, decades after the world had forgotten to look for them. Three men down, three names reclaimed, five John Does left. For over a decade, the case went completely cold. The DNA profiles for the remaining five men were loaded into a national database, but without missing persons' reports or direct family members searching for them, there were no matches. They sat in evidence boxes labeled only by letters, but forensic science didn't stand still. Fast forward to 2022, coal case detectives in Fort Myers decided to utilize the absolute cutting edge of modern forensics and investigative genetic genealogy. This is the same incredible technology that caught the Golden Gate stake killer. They took the skull of a man known for 15 years simply as Victim H and sent it off to a specialized lab. The scientists managed to extract a viable DNA profile from the heavily degraded bone. They ran that profile through genealogy databases, finding distant cousins. From there, the genealogists acted like forensic historians. They built massive, complex family trees, tracing lineages back through census records, narrowing the branches down to generation by generation until they landed on the single unaccounted for leaf. They found a brother. They asked him for a DNA swab, they compared it to the bones from Arcadia Street, and they got a direct hit. After more than 25 years of being invisible, Victim H has finally got his name back. He was Robert Ronald Bobby Sot. He was 30 years old when he was murdered in 1996. He had been last seen in the Fort Myers area, and once again, no one had ever reported him missing. Four men identified. Four men rescued from the void. But as we move into the final act of the story, we still have to face the heavy reality that half of the Fort Myers eight are still waiting in the dark. Four men rescued from the void. But sitting in the evidence lockers of the Fort Myers Police Department, there's still four boxes containing the skeletal remains of men whose families have no idea that anything happened to them. They're officially designated victims A, B, F, and G. And the fight to get their names back is far from over. Law enforcement knows that as time tresses on, the chances of someone organically remembering a missing transient man from the early 90s drops to almost zero. So they have to get aggressive. In 2019, the Fort Morris Police Department partnered with specialized forensic artists to create cutting-edge, 3D facial reconstructions for the remaining four John Doe's. They took the heavily weathered skulls, mapped the bone scruthers, and meticulously rebuilt the tissue, the muscle, and the skin to generate incredibly lifelike portraits of these men, of what they looked like before they stepped into the woods. These reconstructions were blasted across the local news and national databases, with investigators begging the public to look closely. Do you recognize this drawline? Do you remember this guy passing through town looking for day labor? Anyone who looked like this? But pushing out the images is only half the battle. Behind the scenes, cold case detectives are continuing to lean heavily on the same exact science that identified Bobby Soden in 2022. They're working with labs like Carbon Nano Labs and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is attempting to extract viable microscopic amounts of DNA from bones that were baked in the Florida sun for two decades. If they can get a clean profile, the genetic genealogists will start to build those massive family trees all over again. They're fighting for every single inch, every single scrap of evidence to make these men visible again. So, where does a story like this actually end? If you're looking for that clean cinematic true crime wrap-up where the monster explains himself and the system works perfectly, and everyone gets their closure, you're not gonna find it here. The aftermath of Daniel Conahan and the 4 Marzid is a massive gaping wound of injustice. Let's start with the monster himself. Today, Daniel Conahan is in his early 70s. He spent the last quarter century sitting in a concrete cell on Florida's death row. His hair is turning gray, his life is shrinking down to a few square feet. But here is the infuriating reality. He sits on death row for one murder, just one, Richard Montgomery. From a purely bureaucratic standpoint, the state of Florida got what they wanted in 1999. They got a death sentence, and because capital trials are incredibly expensive and time-consuming, prosecutors looked at the uncharged victims in the Charlotte County and later the mass grave of the former 8, and decided it simply wasn't worth the taxpayer money to take him to trial again. The state has his lethal injection queued up, and the rest of the victims were effectively written off as a rounding era. That cold legal math means there never has to be a trial, a conviction, or an official Dan Court for Gerald Lombard, Bill Milograno, Keith Lee Smith, Bobby Soden, Eric Kohler, John Velvins, Jonathan Ty, or the John Doe's that are still sitting in evidence boxes. Jonathan Conahan gets to sit in his cell knowing that the justice system quite literally didn't think those men were worth the paperwork. And because he was never put on trial for the rest, and because the state doesn't need anything else from him, we're left with a massive, terrifying black hole where the truth should be. We don't have a why. When you look at the brutality of what he did, The mutilations, the torture, but the deeply sadistic way he erases men. It screams of a profound internalized hatred. But Canahan never cracks. He never gave a confession. He has never written a manifesto. And he's never sat down with a profiler to explain the demons in his head. He maintains his innocence to this day. He has completely robbed the families of any answers, according to final terrifying moments of his victims, like a six even here. Which brings us to the final, absolute tragedy of this entire saga: the failure of the system. Daniel Conahan is a predator, but he is a predator who was allowed to operate because society around him built a perfect hunting ground. The men buried in Fort Myers and tied to trees in Charlotte County were pushed to the shadows by a world that criminalized their sexuality, ignored their poverty, and stigmatized their struggles. If we didn't treat transient men as disposable, if we if queer men in the 90s didn't have to hide in the deep brush just to find a connection, if Fort Myers Police Department had looked at Stanley Burden and Margala's high school dropout and treated his survival with the same urgency they would have given a wealthy tourist, Daniel Conahan's reign of terror would have ended in 1994. The blood of the Fort Myers 8 and the men who followed them on the hog trails isn't just on Conahan's hands. It's on the hands of every institution that looked the other way. But before we completely close the book on Daniel Conahan and the horrors of the Palmetto Scrub, we have to look at the sheer terrifying math of this case. Between the Hog Trail murders in Charlotte County and the boneyard we just explored on Arcadia Street, we're looking at 13 known victims. 13 men. But if you study the psychology of serial killers, that number should chill you to the bone. Because highly organized predators like Conehan don't just take breaks. If he was actively hunting, commuting between two slaughterhouses and perfecting his trap between 1987 and 1996, what are the chances he only left bodies in those two specific patches of woods? And what about the years before he moved back to Florida permanently? Are there victims buried in Chicago? The terrifying reality is that 13 is just the number of bodies we were lucky enough to find. But the true body count is likely much much higher. And that leaves us with one final haunting question. How can an American circular with a body count of 13 and potentially more be so underreported? How does Daniel Conahan not hold the same dark, infamous hustle name recognition as Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer? The answer is exactly what this entire episode is built around. It's because society didn't want to see it. When a killer targets the margins, when he preys on transient, unhoused, or queer men struggling to survive, the media doesn't launch a national panic. There's no primetime specials about the monster next door because society has already decided those men didn't belong next door in the first place. The reason Daniel Cunahan could kill 13 men and remain relatively unknown is because he explored a world that was perfectly comfortable looking the other way. He didn't just hide his victims in that thick flat of brush. He hid them in our apathy. And that's gonna do it for this episode of Homicidal Tendency. Thank you so much for waiting into the dark with me. If we want to dive deeper into the case we covered today, make sure you head over to our Instagram or TikTok at homocidal tendency. I'll be posting all the visual aids, the geography, and those critical 3D facial reconstructions for the unidentified victims. Come hang out with me in the comments, soak up the retro aesthetic, and let me know your thoughts on the case. Also, if you're enjoying the podcast, please make sure you hit the subscribe or follow button on whatever platform you're listening on right now, so you don't miss a drop. And if you have 30 seconds to spare, leave a 5-star rating and quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the absolute best way to help the show grow and reach more true crime fans, just like us. I'm your host, Matt. Until next time, stay out of the woods, or better yet, avoid Flutter altogether. It sucks.