Searching for Allen

It was a desperate search across the country, clue after clue, year after year, for a man who seemed to have vanished. Allen Ross was a talented artist, a beloved twin brother and a quirky filmmaker. When police came up with no answers, his friends and family went looking for their own. Their plan was to make a movie to solve the mystery. It became a chilling real-life drama, captured on camera. It's the story of a family who refused to give up -- and pieced together an incredible life-and-death puzzle.

The 42-year-old Ross vanished in late 1995. The last years of his life, while seemingly filled with romance, spiritual growth, and an American-Gothic style existence, had more truthfully been cloaked in mystery, intrigue and danger, in the grasp of a shadowy group few could even begin to understand. His friends from the film world, helpless, decided to try to find their friend by making a film, called "Missing Allen."

Ross and German filmmaker Christian Bauer worked on seven films together, exploring their shared fascination with life on the fringe. But in this production, directed by Bauer, Allen would not be the cameraman, he would be the subject. That’s because Allen had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.

Dennis Murphy: “Why make a film about your missing friend?”

Christian Bauer: “Because I wanted to find out. On a gut level I had been afraid of approaching this project for a long time and I think this kind of fear accompanied us through the whole project.”

Joining Christian was Gaylon Emerzian. She'd also known Allen as a colleague, beloved by many in Chicago's hardscrabble but tightly-knit film community.

Gaylon Emerzian: “It could've been like simply a couple weeks worth of work. Who knew? I mean I had no idea where this all was going to go… Allen was witty and charming. He did all of us favors. He'd be there with his camera, working long hours, working hard.”

Allen was an artist. He'd first picked up a film camera as a teenager in the suburbs of Chicago, and soon made his mark with the acclaimed "Grandfather Trilogy," chronicling the last few months of his grandfather's life. As an adult, he'd moved into a loft downtown and lived the bohemian life, barely scraping by and driving a cab when he needed cash. Pursuing his art, Allen met Christian and their collaboration began, working on films that touched on their mutual interest in the odd and unexplained -- from a Wall Street broker turned monk, to UFO abductees.

Only one thing, it seemed, could compare with Allen's love for film. It was his love for the city, for Chicago, its people, its action, its blues. But in 1993, Allen found a love that seemed to match his love of film and his city. Her name was Linda.

Bauer: “Allen told me she was a nurse, that she now was writing books, one of those books he had illustrated, and he told me he was very happy.”

What surprised everyone was not that Allen was in love, but that he was leaving Chicago. Allen's twin brother Brad was as shocked as anyone to hear Allen was leaving the town he loved. And for rural Oklahoma!

Brad Ross: “He says Brad I've never been happier. And what do you say to your brother then after he says I've never been happier in my life? I just said, you know, I'm happy for you. If you're that happy, Al, then go for it.”

Murphy: “If it's Oklahoma, so be it.”

Brad Ross: “If it's Alaska I don't care. If you're that happy Al, that's all I care about.”

So Allen and Linda left for Oklahoma, settling in Guthrie, a small town about 30 miles outside Oklahoma City. As was his custom, Allen kept in touch with family and friends by postcard. The trouble was, this time, the postcards that started arriving from Oklahoma were a little odd. Even for Allen.

Bauer: “He's sending me little notes like, ‘I seized the opportunity to seek answers for questions I had not been able to ask.’"

Murphy: “Sound like Allen?”

Bauer: “Very much.”

Murphy: “Not surprising, huh?”

Bauer: “That's why I liked him, because he could be so unusual and quirky.”

Murphy: “There are some other cards though, some postcards that made you wonder what was going on with your friend?”

Bauer: “Yeah, like 'The masters will shut you up in a pen with others, then it will be up to you to find a house to enter.’”

By 1995, two years after moving to Oklahoma, it seemed all but certain that this time Allen was not coming back. In fact, Allen and Linda had found a new home in Cheyenne, Wy. Yet, Allen continued working with Christian, making films like this documentary on the Mississippi River.

In the fall of 1995, just as filming on that documentary was wrapping up in New Orleans, guess who showed up unannounced? It was the mystery woman, Linda, who'd whisked Allen out of town before his family and friends had even met her.

Bauer: “She was not what I had expected her to be.”

Murphy: “What was her demeanor at that appearance?”

Bauer: “She was very demanding. She was very controlling. She was not the caring kind of woman I had imagined her to be when I saw her on the picture the first time.”

In fact, Allen seemed embarrassed by her presence. When she mugged for his camera, Allen panned away.

Bauer: “He's telling her, stay away from us but she follows the camera and she dances. He wants to get away from it, and he continues his pan and she just disappears out of the frame.”

Two years into their partnership, was the bloom coming off the romance between Allen and Linda? Christian would never get the chance to ask his friend about it. He would never see Allen again.

For Allen's brother too, after the shoot in New Orleans, something suddenly changed. Allen had stopped sending postcards or returning Brad's phone calls.

Brad Ross: “He would never miss a holiday, never miss a birthday. So when Thanksgiving came and we didn't hear from him, that was just like, unbelievable.”

Murphy: “Weeks later, Christmas.”

Brad Ross: “Yeah, Christmas was the real turning point because we knew Al wouldn't miss Christmas.”

What had happened to Allen? His family and film world friends were about to discover that Allen's life had in fact, taken a far more sinister turn than any a scriptwriter could imagine.

By early 1996, it had been weeks since filmmaker Allen Ross had spoken to his friends or family, or been seen in Cheyenne, Wy. His friends in the film world, Christian Bauer and Gaylon Emerzian, tried unsuccessfully to reach him. But they also remembered Allen chit-chatting once about how easy it would be to simply vanish and establish a new life and identity. Maybe that's what this was all about.

Emerzian: “I was hoping that by some bizarre chance I might get a phone call and he'd say, you know, I don't want you to find me, just lay off.”

Allen's twin brother, Brad, in Chicago had also attempted to reach Allen. He'd also called the Cheyenne Police, looking for some reasonable explanation why his brother had seemingly disappeared from the home that Allen had shared with the mysterious Linda, the nurse and author who was his common-law-wife.

Murphy: “Did you ask the police to go over to the house and ask some questions?”

Brad Ross: “Yes.”

Murphy: “What'd they say to that?”

Brad Ross: “Well they didn't really take me too seriously.”

But Cheyenne Police finally did make a move three months after Allen's disappearance. They'd received a call out of the blue from a man who said he was Linda's ex-husband, a man named Denis Greene. He made the stunning claim that Allen wasn't missing but dead, murdered by Linda and buried, he told police, in the basement of the couple's home.

When the police found nothing, Allen's family and friends breathed a sigh of relief. They couldn't bring themselves to believe that he was truly dead. They couldn't find his common-law-wife, Linda. So they asked themselves, had they somehow missed a message in those cryptic postcards that Allen used to send? Maybe he had he vanished on purpose, gone undercover perhaps, to shoot a film? The family hired a private detective, even psychics, but still, no answers. In hindsight, there's almost universal regret that they didn't do more, that they didn't come out to Wyoming to look for him. But they didn't.

In fact it wasn't until 1999, four years after Allen's disappearance, that the filmmakers friends' and family formed a partnership to try to find Allen, with the family doing the research, the filmmakers, the legwork. The project would take a form that Allen would have loved, a film that would be part mystery, part ode to the man they all missed.

Murphy: ”So you're using your documentary camera almost as a searchlight to show into some dark places?”

Bauer: “I had been missing him for four years. And there was no way it was going to be an official investigation. The case was closed more or less. The only way to find out something about him, about his disappearance, about his fate, was to mount this documentary and to start looking for him with the camera.”

Almost as soon as their work began, their fax machine was jammed with documents, including a letter, it seemed, written by Linda herself:

The mysterious Linda, it appeared, was now confirming that Allen was dead. But in her version, she turned the tables on the man who'd accused her of murdering Allen. Linda said the real killer was in fact, her ex-husband, Denis Greene. It turns out that the Cheyenne police had received the information by fax from Linda as well. The filmmakers knew now that they not only had to reach her; they had to learn as much as they could about this perplexing woman Allen loved.

They discovered her legal name was Linda Greene. In the 1980s she was a registered nurse, featured in a 1980s news story about an innovative Oklahoma hospice where she worked. Linda had also been married not just twice, but five times, and she was not just writing books. She was a sometimes actress and poet, and when she met Allen she was leading an esoteric group that Allen had only dropped hints about -- a group known as the Samaritan Foundation.

Murphy: “When did you first hear the name, Samaritans?”

Brad Ross: “We heard it when he left.”

Murphy: “Did you have a sense of what it was? What they were about?”

Brad Ross: “We always knew Al would do different things, but he would always go and come back.”

Linda's Samaritan Foundation had perhaps 50 to 60 followers from all walks of life. What held them together was the belief that Linda could answer the great mysteries of life by “dowsing,” using swaying pendulums to give them answers.

This was more than the dowsing that might come to mind, like a person using a forked twig to locate water. This kind of dowsing involved moving a pendulum over objects, and the pendulum gave the Samaritans guidance in the biggest and smallest of decisions. They used the pendulum to decide to relocate from Oklahoma to Wyoming. They dowzed a road map and packed up. But Linda was more than a simple believer. She was writing books the Samaritans were sure would revolutionize the world to their way of thinking.

Murphy: “Can you see your friend Allen drawn into this insane obsessiveness?”

Emerzian: “At one point Allen sat me down and showed me a pendulum and I just didn't get it. I didn't see what the attraction was for him.”

Murphy: “This wasn't just a parlor game the way he was treating it.”

Emerzian: “He definitely gave me the impression that he thought this meant something.”

And the bits and pieces that filmmakers learned about Linda's group were becoming more troubling. It turned out that dowsing was just one element of their beliefs. There was also an obsessive fear of telephones and government agents. Obscure teachings about zombies. Far out stuff.

Murphy: “Linda, the nurse, the wife posing by their little hours was the leader of a cult!”

Bauer: “I had absolutely no clue. And I wondered, why did my friend not tell me about it?”

Murphy: “What was the lure of the cult to the followers?”

Bauer: “What is the lure of any cult might be a good question. I think we have people who are looking for a meaning in life and they don't have any answers. I think that was what was happening with Allen, too.”

Murphy: “And Linda had answers and texts, and the path to go?”

Bauer: “And she chose him as her mate.”

Could Allen's mate have murdered him? The filmmakers didn't know where Linda had gone and the Samaritans she'd led from Oklahoma to Wyoming had scattered to the wind. The filmmakers weren't learning much from the followers they had been able to find.

Murphy: “How sensitive a task was it to try and find out who the Samaritans were and what they knew?”

Emerzian: “Well sensitive isn't the word. It was difficult because people just didn't want to talk.”

But the filmmakers soon found evidence that raised more questions. The Cult Awareness Network told them if Allen was with the Samaritans, he was in serious danger. The friends learned that just months after Allen vanished, another member of the group had thrown herself in front of a train at a crossing in Oklahoma. Linda, they were told, had declared the woman to be evil.

Bauer: “There was this feeling that something evil was surrounding us.”

Murphy: “Did you have reason to be afraid as you went along in this?”

Bauer: “Sometimes you don't need a real reason to be afraid.”

Despite their fears, the filmmakers pressed on. To find out what had happened to Allen, they would have to return to the places where Allen and Linda had lived as man and wife -- and Oklahoma would quickly bring a major discovery.

The filmmakers found the first tangible trace of Allen in the spring of 2000. His film camera and other belongings were discovered in a garage near a home in Oklahoma City. The people next door, strangers, had simply dropped it off without explanations. The woman who had the camera, also had an important detail. She said a short blonde lady from next door had given it to her.

The woman in the photos was Linda. She'd lived next door for a short time after Allen's disappearance. But the discovery of Allen's camera was troubling. His friends said he'd never be willingly separated from it. It was just the first ominous sign they found in Oklahoma.

In an old building that was once the Samaritans Headquarters, the filmmakers found more indications that Allen was almost certainly dead. Including his abandoned car. They called Brad and told him what we found. Within days, Brad arrived, hoping to finally find his brother's body. Holding his breath, he searched the car, but found nothing.

Then, inside the headquarters, Brad and Christian searched the basement, where one of the rooms had been suspiciously covered with fresh concrete.

Murphy: “What were you expecting?”

Brad Ross: “I want to find him and bring him home. It's what I want to do… it's what people need to do.”

But Brad would not find his brother there. The filmmakers then followed Brad as he scoured the town for any sign of Allen. The emotional search had been fruitless. All the evidence seemed to indicate not only that Allen was dead, but that Linda had to know what happened. They simply had to find her. And when they did, this story of "Missing Allen" would take another bizarre turn.

By the spring of 2000, it had been more than four years since cameraman Allen Ross had last been seen in in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Had he been killed, as the evidence seemed to indicate, by his common-law wife, Linda, or her followers in the cult-like Samaritan Foundation?

To the filmmakers, Allen's friends who'd set out to find him, it seemed that Linda was on the run. They tried unsuccessfully for months to reach her -- until one day she found them. Linda, it turned out, the former nurse, amateur actress, and author, had reinvented herself again. Calling from an unknown location, she now called herself Genevieve. And although she'd sent out faxes claiming that Allen was murdered by this man, her ex-husband, in a series of conversations with the filmmakers, Linda changed her story again:

Bauer: “The whole thing doesn't make much sense. You hear the story Allen is subject of a mind control experiment. And that the mind control experiment went out of hand. And that the specialists had to kill Allen because he was not longer under control.”

The new story she told was odd, but maybe not so odd for her. It turned out that Linda's family had her committed to a mental hospital for a few weeks shortly after Allen disappeared.

Bauer: “She warned us to stay away from the whole story because who was involved -- the government, the CIA.”

Murphy: “So this conspiracy theory?”

Bauer: “And after that point, we were not able to get a hold of Linda anymore.”

The filmmakers were devastated. After months of work, they hadn't found Allen at all, only his camera, his abandoned car, and a few possessions. With little hard evidence in hand, the filmmakers returned to the last place Allen was seen, Cheyenne and met with the police.

Bauer: “We tried to give them everything we found, all the information we have.”

Murphy: “Found his camera, undisturbed bank account? Relationship with this woman, the odd group that she's shepherding?”

Bauer: “They listened to us intently, but they also told us that what we had brought to them would not be enough to take any further steps.”

Murphy: “To a prosecutor? To a jury?”

Bauer: “And for us it was important to get them back to the house. We wanted them to take the house apart to look for evidence.”

But Cheyenne police had already searched the house where Allen, Linda and the Samaritans lived four years before. So the filmmakers left Wyoming and headed back to begin to put their documentary together, with hope once again fading that the mystery of “Missing Allen” might be solved.

That is, until Allen's brother, Brad, stepped in and made one last desperate plea to a Cheyenne detective.

Brad Ross: “He said, I'll go into the house one more time. He told us later… basically that was it. If we would've gone in the second time and found nothing, the case was going to be pretty much closed.”

Murphy: “What did the detective see in the house?”

Brad Ross: “He said he saw something just sticking out of the ground in the crawl space. He said by the grace of God, it was just by luck.”

Unbelievably, it was a black sneaker, a Converse high top, footwear of choice for mavericks and non-conformists like Allen Ross. When police chipped away a thin layer of concrete they found the body. Allen was no longer missing.

Brad Ross: “You really do want to find part of your family. You know you really want them back. I really feel for the soldiers that are missing in action that they can't go bring them back. It's a real sense about being able to bury your family.”

Brad Ross would finally be able to lay to rest his twin brother. An autopsy showed that Allen had died from a gunshot wound to the head and that his body had apparently never left this house -- found where it had been concealed more than four years before, in this crawl space. Police who'd searched the house earlier had inexplicably missed it.

Murphy: “What do you think about the professionalism or the intensity of the Wyoming investigation?”

Bauer: “I think about all the evidence, what we might have been able to find if police had found the body in 1996. We might have the person who killed Allen Ross now in jail.”

The search for justice put the filmmakers back on the trail of Allen's common-law-wife Linda. In the spring of 2001, they finally caught up with her in New Orleans, and she agreed to her first on-camera interview.

Linda: “It's beyond my framework of reality, how somebody could do something so terrible.”

No longer the vibrant, charismatic leader, the years were now showing on Linda. She returned to the story that Allen had been murdered on the day before Thanksgiving 1995 by her ex-husband Denis, during an argument in the house where the body had been found.

Linda: “He killed Allen Ross! He killed him and then he said he would kill me and my son if I opened my mouth!”

While Linda's tenuous grasp of reality made it hard to hang a murder charge on her word, some detectives thought her theory of the motive for the murder did make a certain amount of sense. People who commit murder usually kill for love, money or revenge. In this case, Linda accused her ex-husband of killing Allen in an argument over money made from selling Linda's books.

Murphy: “Did you think she was telling you the truth, what she was saying?

Emerzian: “It’s hard for me to fathom what the truth is as far as Linda's concerned, because she had so many different versions she rattled off during the course of the interview.”

Although authorities in Cheyenne questioned Linda, her statements led to no charges. And a year later, in 2002, the actress, author, cult leader and murder suspect died of liver failure. Her family says she died from excessive drinking to quiet the voices in her head.

Linda's death, it seemed, threatened the investigation. With no physical evidence that her ex-husband had killed Allen, would the case die? Not yet. Because after Linda's death, a new mystery woman came forward.

Her name is Julia Williams. For years, she was one of Linda's most dedicated friends and a follower. In the years after Allen's disappearance, she, like Linda, was repeatedly questioned by police. She told odd and often conflicting stories pointing to various suspects, but never to Linda. She claimed to have knowledge of where the gun was buried, but no gun was ever located. When Dateline found Julia in Cheyenne, she was ready for the first time to give what she says is an eyewitness account to the events surrounding Allen's killing and to publicly acknowledge her role in the cover-up after.

Julia Williams: “Sometimes at night I lie in bed and I just say I'm sorry.”

Murphy: “Julia do you know who killed Allen Ross?”

Williams: “Yes, sir.”

Murphy: “Who was it?”

Williams: “It was Denis Greene.”

Murphy: “And what happened that day Julia?”

Williams: “I was upstairs when I heard the first shot and I came downstairs and I heard the second shot. And then I went into the room.”

Murphy: “Denis Greene had a gun and shot to death Allen Ross?”

Williams: “Yes, sir. I went into the room and he was there with the gun and Allen.”

Murphy: “Over the body?”

Williams: “Yes, sir. He said if I reported the murder that I would be the one to be accused.”

Murphy: “He made a direct threat to you that you would be implicated?”

Williams: “Yes, sir.”

First Linda, now Julia was accusing Denis Greene of the murder. And Julia says she's willing to take the witness stand against him. While Cheyenne police have publicly identified Greene as a suspect, saying they can put him in the house on the day of the murder -- and Dateline has obtained documents showing that Greene has failed a lie detector test -- Greene has denied to Cheyenne police any involvement in the murder.

When Dateline caught up with Denis Greene in May 2004, he was unwilling to speak with us. But in November 2004, almost nine years to the day after Allen's disappearance, authorities in Cheyenne would finally take someone to court in the case -- and it was not Denis Greene.

By 2004, authorities in Wyoming had come to believe that on the day that cameraman Allen Ross was shot, killed and buried in the basement of this Cheyenne home, three adults had been in the house: Allen's wife, Samaritan Foundation leader Linda Greene, now dead herself, Linda's ex-husband, Denis Greene, and Linda's best friend and follower, Julia Williams.

In this tangled web of a case, you'll recall Linda and Julia had accused Denis Greene of the murder, while Denis Greene had said he believed Linda was the killer.

But when the trial finally began in Cheyenne, only Julia Williams sat in the defendant’s chair.

It turns out that Julia Williams had come forward to police after Linda's death in 2002, telling essentially the same story she told Dateline, but with more detail, not only naming Denis Greene as the killer, but also admitting that she helped carry Allen Ross's body to the basement for burial and cleaned up blood to conceal the murder. Now Julia found herself in the odd position of being charged as an accessory, even though no one had been charged with the murder itself.

And as Cheyenne's prosecutor began his case, watching from the gallery were the two men still feeling Allen's loss most intensely, his filmmaking partner Christian Bauer and twin brother, Brad. The two who had waited years for answers, were, for the first time in the same room with a defendant whom prosecutors claimed was intimately involved with Allen's murder.

Bauer: “When I'm in the courtroom, I'm only seeing the back of her head. And I want to crawl into that head and find out what's in here, find out what she knows. See the images. I'm frightened of the images but I want to know the truth. And she knows what happened. And I want to make her tell us the real story here.”

The story that prosecutors had settled on was stunning to many who had followed the case: that Julia Williams was still protecting the real killer, whom the DA had concluded after years of investigation, was not-Denis Greene, but in fact, his ex-wife, cult leader Linda. The turn of events caught Allen's brother off guard.

Brad Ross: “I was extremely shocked by it. The surprise was just that they had eliminated Denis completely.”

The surprises continued, when the state called its star witness. Denis Greene took the stand for the prosecution. The man named by both Linda and Julia as the killer. Once named as a suspect himself. But now prosecutors were asserting that the man on the stand was innocent, simply a person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Greene began by supplying a possible motive for Allen's murder, testifying that in the weeks before Allen disappeared, Julia had complained that money from a company set up to sell Linda's books was being embezzled and that she suspected Allen Ross.

Greene said that when he left the home in mid-afternoon on the day that Allen was killed, Nov. 22, 1995, Allen was still alive and well.  But in the following days and weeks, Greene said Linda began making ever-more bizarre excuses for Allen's absence: that he'd left town, that he'd run off with a new lover. But Greene said Linda soon made a new accusation when her family had her committed to a psychiatric ward.

Denis Greene: When she was in the mental hospital she had accused me via fax and via phone call of killing Allen. Which was horrifying to me. Scary. And at that point that's when I began to think perhaps Allen didn't run away, perhaps they had killed him, and that was a horrifying feeling.

Greene said Linda also once told him that Allen had been murdered and buried in the basement of their home. And he says that's when he contacted Cheyenne police to ask them to look for the body, a search as we know now, in which the body was simply missed.

Then, to bolster the state's claim that Linda, not Denis was the killer, the couple's son took the stand. A boy of nine at the time of the murder was now an adult of 18. He testified that Linda always carried a gun in her purse and once used it in front of him. He said he remembered that it was a 9 millimeter -- the same caliber of gun that killed Allen. Prosecutors were claiming that Linda had all the elements for murder in her possession: means, motive and opportunity.

Next, the prosecution played a video interview with Julia Williams in which she admitted carrying Allen's body to the basement for burial and cleaning up blood in the house.

But how did the murder actually occur? In closing, prosecutors presented evidence that suggested Allen was in fact planning to leave the group, to leave Linda and return to Chicago. That's why, they said, Linda made up the story that Allen was embezzling money and convinced Julia it was true. On the day of the murder, the state claimed that after Denis Greene left, while Julia was upstairs, Linda confronted Allen and demanded to know the truth. Was Allen staying or going? In court, the prosecution alleged that Linda shoots Allen, but doesn’t kill him, that Julia hears the shot and heads downstairs to the first floor area just as there’s a second shot – then they drag Allen’s body down to the crawl space and scoop out the dirt.

But if the prosecution's theory of the crime was a surprise to some, so was the case presented by Julia Williams's defense.

When prosecutors in Cheyenne rested their case against Julia Williams, all eyes turned to the defense table. Would Julia now tell her story from the witness stand? What evidence would her attorney offer to clear her client, charged as an accessory in the murder of Allen Ross?

The answers came quickly, because when Julia Williams' team was called upon, the defense elected to call no witnesses and to present no evidence. Instead, her attorney simply claimed that Julia had consistently told police that Denis Greene was the real killer, that prosecution theories were not proof, and that in the end, there were still no concrete answers in the case.

But when the jury returned after just an hour of deliberation, the news for the defense was dreadful.

Guilty! Julia Williams had been convicted of helping to cover up a murder for which no one, it appears, will ever be charged. The person authorities believe killed Allen Ross, his wife Linda, had already died. It was a relief for Denis Greene, who'd lived for years under a cloud of suspicion. As the defendant was led away, after the mistake by police, the futile years of investigation, the filmmakers were left with little satisfaction. Even though, as in a true crime movie, all the loose ends had apparently been tied up and the credits were ready to roll.

But while the story is now over for the filmmaker, Brad Ross isn't quite so sure. His heart still has questions. Knowing that answers may never come, he desperately yearns for the chance to speak to his twin brother Allen, the man behind the camera whose fascination with life on the fringe cost him his life.

Brad Ross: “I miss his love, because he let me be who I am, and in turn I had to let him be who he is.”

Murphy: “So you can't roll the movie backwards? He's always going to go to Oklahoma.”

Brad Ross: “I wish he hadn't. I don't know if you ever get over it.”

Julia Williams faces up to three years in prison for her involvement in the cover-up of Allen Ross's murder.