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He Tried to Bury His Ex-Wife Alive · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Picture this. It is a Sunday afternoon, October sixteenth, twenty
0:03
twenty two. You are in a quiet, meticulously manicured suburban
0:10
neighborhood in Lacey, Washington. If you were walking down the street,
0:14
you know, you'd probably see people doing yard work, washing
0:16
their cars. This a normal weekend stay exactly, maybe getting
0:19
their kids ready for the upcoming school week. It is
0:21
the picture of idyllic American stability. It feels incredibly.
0:25
Speaker 2: Safe, well on the surface, yes, right, But.
0:28
Speaker 1: Then an emergency dispatcher's headset crackles to life and that
0:32
pristine suburban illusion completely shatters. And here is the terrifying part. Yeah,
0:38
the dispatcher doesn't hear a frantic plea for help. They
0:41
don't hear a coherent description of a fire or a
0:44
medical emergency.
0:45
Speaker 2: No, it's much worse than that.
0:46
Speaker 1: It is. Instead, they hear muffled, desperate sounds. They hear
0:50
the undeniable acoustic signature of a violent physical struggle. Wow,
0:54
Because the caller at the other end of the line
0:55
is bound and gagged with duct tape and they are
0:58
broadcasting this nightmare to nine one one through an Apple Watch.
1:01
Speaker 2: It is a profoundly jarring juxtaposition, you have the absolute
1:06
banality of a Sunday afternoon in the suburbs crashing headfirst
1:11
into a scenario of unimaginable primal terror. Yeah, and that
1:16
tension between the surface level appearance of a situation and
1:20
the dark, violent reality underneath is exactly what we are
1:24
dissecting today, right.
1:25
Speaker 1: And if you're listening to this custom deep dive, you
1:28
know our mission. We are pulling directly from a highly
1:30
detailed law and crime network transcript. Today we are we're
1:34
diving into the harrowing true case of Cha and Jenny Kyoung.
1:39
But we aren't just going to give you a timeline
1:41
of a crime.
1:42
Speaker 2: No, we really want to get into the mechanics of this.
1:44
Speaker 1: Yes, we are going to deconstruct the exact mechanics of
1:47
how a domestic crisis escalates to lethality. We are going
1:51
to explore the psychology of the hidden lives people can
1:54
lead right under.
1:54
Speaker 2: Our noses, and the survival aspect too.
1:56
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we are ultimately going to examine one of the
1:59
most readible stories of human survival against literal physical burial
2:03
that you will ever hear. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's
2:06
do it, starting right at that nine on one call.
2:08
Speaker 2: To really understand the gravity of this case, you have
2:11
to place yourself in the shoes of law enforcement arriving
2:13
at the physical scene. At ten zero two pm, police
2:17
pull up to this house in Lacey, Right, based on
2:20
that muffled Apple Watch call, which by design leaves an
2:23
open microphone transmitting the ambient audio of an assault, they
2:27
are expecting to walk into absolute chaos. They're bracing for
2:30
the worse exactly, they are expecting a live, dynamic threat.
2:35
But what they find is silence.
2:38
Speaker 1: Eerie, absolute silence. The house is completely empty. The caller,
2:42
a forty two year old woman we were referring to
2:44
as Jenny to protect her identity.
2:46
Speaker 2: Is gone and her husband is gone too, Right, Yeah.
2:47
Speaker 1: Her husband, fifty three year old Chae Kyong, whose name
2:50
is on the mortgage, is also gone. When the police
2:53
breached the house through the garage, there is no screaming disquiet,
2:56
but there are the distinct, chilling ghosts of a violent
3:00
In the dining room, sitting in plain sight, they find
3:03
a torn strip of duct tape.
3:05
Speaker 2: On the floor, and this is where the forensic reality
3:07
of a crime scene begins to tell a story. The
3:08
occupants cannot, they find a cell phone left sitting on
3:11
the dining table. When the officers dial the number associated
3:14
with that nine to one to one Apple Watch ping,
3:17
the phone on the table immediately starts ringing, and then
3:21
from upstairs in one of the bedrooms, a second phone
3:24
starts ringing in unison.
3:25
Speaker 1: Both devices belong to Jenny. It's wild how a completely
3:30
normal suburban house can instantly turn into a crime scene
3:33
based entirely on a muffled audio stream from a piece
3:37
of wearable tech.
3:38
Speaker 2: The technology is literally faster than the physical response.
3:41
Speaker 1: It is By the time the officers follow the ringing upstairs,
3:45
the picture becomes horrifyingly clear. They find more duct tape,
3:49
they find blood spatter on the carpet.
3:51
Speaker 2: And crucially, they find the rugs in the hallway bunched
3:53
up and disturbed.
3:54
Speaker 1: Right, which tells a whole other story.
3:56
Speaker 2: It does. From a crime scene and reconstruction standpoint, those
3:59
bunch up rugs are incredibly significant. Blood spatter can sometimes
4:03
indicate a static assault, like someone being struck while standing still. Oh,
4:07
I see, but disturbed flooring, specifically heavy rugs that have
4:10
been kicked up and folded over, indicates a prolonged dynamic struggle.
4:15
Speaker 1: So they were fighting back.
4:16
Speaker 2: Yes, It tells investigators that the victim fought back, that
4:21
they were dragged, and that the violence moved through the
4:23
physical space of the home. It is the physical residue
4:28
of a kidnapping.
4:29
Speaker 1: It's like a puzzle where the most crucial pieces are missing.
4:32
And while the officers are processing this, literally standing amidst
4:36
the blood induct tape, trying to make sense of the
4:37
voy left behind, a twenty year old woman arrives at
4:41
the house.
4:42
Speaker 2: This is Jenny and Jay's daughter. Correct.
4:44
Speaker 1: Yes, she sees the police, she sees the scene, and
4:47
she casually provides a detail that changes everything. She mentions,
4:51
almost in passing, that her parents are going through.
4:53
Speaker 2: Divorce, which is a massive red flag for investigators.
4:56
Speaker 1: Huge. She says there is a court order in place.
5:00
Vade doesn't even live there anymore, but he still comes
5:02
around to do his laundry. In fact, his van was
5:04
parked in the driveway that morning when she and her
5:06
mom got back from church.
5:08
Speaker 2: That detail about the laundry is insidious. Also, it sounds harmless,
5:13
but in the context of domestic abuse, it represents a lingering,
5:17
normalized access to the victim's safe.
5:20
Speaker 1: Space, like he's keeping a foot in the door.
5:22
Speaker 2: Exactly. It is a way for an abuser to maintain
5:26
a physical presence, to monitor the environment, and to exert
5:30
psychological pressure under the guise of something entirely mundane. It
5:35
blurs the boundary of the restraining order.
5:37
Speaker 1: I have to stop you there, though, if you're listening
5:39
to this and wondering, well, why on earth would she
5:41
let him in to do laundry if there's a court order. Oh.
5:44
Speaker 2: People always ask that.
5:45
Speaker 1: We have to remember the context of coercive control. It's
5:48
not always black and white, right, It's often this murky
5:51
gray area where keeping the piece feel safer than enforcing
5:55
a boundary. That is so true, But this time it
5:58
wasn't about laundry. The time the police put these pieces together,
6:02
request a cell tower ping for Chay's phone, and put
6:05
out an urgent missing persons alert, they are ours behind
6:08
a man who has kidnapped his wife.
6:10
Speaker 2: Exactly. Given the blood spatter and the specific use of
6:13
duct tape, which is almost exclusively used in crimes to
6:17
bind in silence, the police operate on the assumption that
6:20
they are looking for a murder victim.
6:22
Speaker 1: It's just a terrifying realization.
6:24
Speaker 2: But this physical evidence only tells us the mechanics of
6:27
how the kidnapping began on that specific Sunday. To understand
6:32
why a father of two decided to buy a roll
6:34
of duct tape in Ambush's wife, we have to rewind
6:37
the clock.
6:38
Speaker 1: We have to go back to the beginning.
6:39
Speaker 2: Yes, we had to look at the psychological foundation of
6:42
this marriage, and.
6:43
Speaker 1: That foundation was a meticulously maintained facade. Jenny and Shay
6:47
had been married for decades. They shared two kids, a
6:50
twenty year old and an eleven.
6:51
Speaker 2: Year old, a long term commitment.
6:53
Speaker 1: Right. They lived this transient global life between the United
6:56
States and Korea completely dictated by Chay's highly successful military career.
7:01
He had been serving in both the Navy and the
7:03
Army since nineteen.
7:04
Speaker 2: Eighty eight, so he was very established, very.
7:07
Speaker 1: From the outside looking in. If you were their neighbor.
7:09
This is the American dream, a respected military family, world travelers,
7:13
a long stable marriage.
7:15
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the intense level of compartmentalization required
7:20
to maintain that public.
7:21
Speaker 1: Image, because it wasn't real, not at all.
7:24
Speaker 2: In the military, an officer like Chay is a figure
7:27
of extreme discipline, structure, authority and public respect. He is
7:32
trained in operational security, the practice of protecting critical.
7:36
Speaker 1: Information, and he brought that home with him.
7:38
Speaker 2: He weaponized it. He created a reality that was starkly different.
7:42
Juse described a marriage characterized by profound, suffocating isolation. Yeah.
7:48
Speaker 1: She testified that even when he was physically in the house,
7:50
he wasn't really there.
7:52
Speaker 2: Hem.
7:52
Speaker 1: He would spend his Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights locked
7:55
in a separate room, completely ignoring his family, consumed by
8:00
weekend long internet chatting and pornography, just entirely checked out,
8:03
And sometimes he would just vanish for two or three
8:05
weeks at a time, without a single word, no phone call,
8:08
no text, just gone.
8:10
Speaker 2: In psychological terms, this is a hallmark of a covert
8:13
double life. The family isn't viewed as a partnership. They
8:17
are a prop a prop wow. They are a socially
8:20
acceptable cover story that provides him with a veneer of normalcy,
8:24
allowing him to operate in the shadows without drawing suspicion.
8:27
And his shadows were extensive.
8:29
Speaker 1: Yeah. Jenny eventually uncovered that Shay was having secret, ongoing
8:33
affairs with men.
8:34
Speaker 2: Which completely shatters that public facade.
8:36
Speaker 1: Totally and the way she uncovers this is just staggering.
8:40
They are on a trip to Korea. He tells her
8:42
he has to go on a business trip to the
8:44
city of Busan.
8:45
Speaker 2: Okay.
8:46
Speaker 1: When he gets back to their accommodation, he makes a
8:48
fatal operational error. He carelessly leaves a chat window open
8:53
on a laptop screen. Oh no, Jenny looks at it.
8:56
He had invited male friends to his hotel in Busan,
9:00
and it wasn't just physical infidelity. The chats were deeply
9:03
degrading toward Jenny. He was telling these men he didn't
9:06
want to be intimate with his wife anymore.
9:08
Speaker 2: The clinical term for this behavior involves a high degree
9:11
of narcissistic entitlement. Oh. He was actively using his military
9:15
positioning and his travel schedule to facilitate a completely separate
9:19
sexual and emotional.
9:20
Speaker 1: Existence, and he was bold about it.
9:22
Speaker 2: Very Jenny noted that he even escorted a man onto
9:25
a restricted army base hotel. There were text messages where
9:28
he explicitly promised a boyfriend that he would return to
9:31
Korea to be with him.
9:32
Speaker 1: Just living two totally different lives.
9:34
Speaker 2: He had walled off his reality and Jenny was just
9:37
an unwitting tenant in the house he built.
9:39
Speaker 1: But the secrets didn't stop at infidelity. And this next
9:43
detail is where the sheer audacity of his deception becomes terrifying.
9:47
Speaker 2: This part is unbelievable.
9:49
Speaker 1: Imagine this scenario. It's twenty ten. Jenny is sitting in
9:52
a federal building going through her United States citizenship interview, a.
9:56
Speaker 2: Very stressful situation for.
9:58
Speaker 1: Anyone, highly stressful if you know anything about the immigration process.
10:02
This is a monumental moment. The government examiner is going
10:05
over her paperwork. Now, Chay had prepared this specific paperwork,
10:10
sealed it in a Manila envelope, and explicitly ordered Jenny
10:14
do not open this.
10:16
Speaker 2: He told her not to look at her own paperwork.
10:18
Speaker 1: Right, he said, hand this directly to the examiner.
10:20
Speaker 2: Which fundamentally is an incredible exertion of dominance. By forbidding
10:25
her from seeing her own legal filings, he is positioning
10:28
himself as the absolute gatekeeper of her legal status and
10:31
her future in a foreign country. Right.
10:33
Speaker 1: So she sits there, She hands over the envelope. The
10:36
government examiner opens it, reads through the forums, and then
10:39
casually looks across the desk and asks Jenny did you
10:43
know your husband was divorced once before?
10:45
Speaker 2: And she had absolutely no idea none.
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Speaker 1: Imagine discovering your spouse's secret marriage from a government examiner
10:52
who just casually opens an envelope.
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Speaker 2: It's devastating.
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Speaker 1: It's like finding out you're not in the movie you
10:57
thought you were in. You're just an extra in someone
10:59
else's seek double life. And what makes this so malicious
11:02
is that when they were dating, Jenny specifically asked him,
11:05
have you ever been married before?
11:07
Speaker 2: And he lied.
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Speaker 1: He looked her dead in the eye and said no,
11:10
and his family backed him up. They all said no.
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Speaker 2: This incident reveals a staggering capacity for coordinated deception. If
11:17
a person can lie to their partner's face about a
11:20
previous marriage, if they can collude with their own family
11:23
to maintain that lie for years, and if they can
11:26
hide their sexuality while carrying on multiple affairs, all while
11:30
demanding absolute obedience at home, it establishes a rigid psychological pattern.
11:35
Speaker 1: He needs absolute control exactly.
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Speaker 2: Jay is a man who firmly believes he is entitled
11:41
to total control over his narrative, and by extension, he
11:45
believes he owns total control over Jenny's reality.
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Speaker 1: But Here is the terrifying progression of domestic abuse, the
11:51
passive secrecy, the lying, the hidden internet chats that eventually mutates.
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Speaker 2: It rarely stays passive forever.
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Speaker 1: Right the moment Jenny decides she can no longer be
12:01
a prop in his play, the passive control turns into active,
12:05
terrifying coercion.
12:07
Speaker 2: Yes, the catalyst for lethal escalation in domestic violence cases
12:11
is almost universally a perceived loss of control by the abuser.
12:15
Speaker 1: She wanted out.
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Speaker 2: Jenny realizes she is trapped in a deeply unhealthy, fraudulent marriage.
12:21
She decides she wants a divorce, but she is an immigrant,
12:24
she has a young child, and she has limited financial independence.
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Speaker 1: She can't just pack a bag and leave.
12:29
Speaker 2: No, she knows she has to systematically bide her time
12:32
to gather resources to leave safely.
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Speaker 1: And Chay can feel the tectonic plate shifting. Initially, he
12:37
tries to act indifferent. He tells her flat out, I
12:39
will live my own life, so don't worry about me.
12:41
Do your life. But he didn't mean that, not at all,
12:44
because the minute she actually does that, the minute she
12:46
eventually starts dating someone else, his entire facade of indifference crumbles.
12:51
Speaker 2: He couldn't handle her moving on.
12:53
Speaker 1: He tracks down her new boyfriend, goes to the man's
12:56
house and threatens him, saying he's going to out the
12:58
relationship to the boyfriend, his family, and his workplace. It's pure,
13:03
unadulterated intimidation.
13:05
Speaker 2: It is intimidation, but it's also an attempt to shrink
13:08
her world back down. If he can scare away her
13:11
outside support system, he forces her back into isolation with him.
13:15
Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
13:16
Speaker 2: However, the ultimate trigger, the thing that strips away any
13:20
remaining pretense of civility, is the impending division of assets,
13:26
specifically his military retirement money.
13:28
Speaker 1: This is where the threats become explicitly lethal. When they
13:31
argue about the divorce proceedings, he repeatedly threatens her with
13:35
a very specific, highly calculated ultimatum.
13:38
Speaker 2: What did he say?
13:38
Speaker 1: He looks at her and says, if I have to
13:40
give you retirement money, I'll kill you, and he repeats it,
13:43
if I have to give you retirement money, I'll kill you.
13:45
Speaker 2: We have to analyze the profound intersection of financial control
13:48
and domestic violence here. For a covert abuser like Chay,
13:52
wealth isn't just about purchasing power or a comfortable retirement.
13:56
Speaker 1: It's deeper than that.
13:57
Speaker 2: It is inextricably linked to his ego, his status, and
14:01
his ability to fund and maintain his double life. By
14:04
seeking her legal fair share of the marital assets after
14:08
decades of marriage, Jenny is threatening the very architecture of
14:12
his power.
14:12
Speaker 1: He felt she had no right to it.
14:14
Speaker 2: He views the money as entirely, exclusively his. He told
14:18
her point blank, those are all my money. I don't
14:21
do the division of wealth.
14:22
Speaker 1: You know. It makes you think of a hostage situation.
14:25
He wasn't just protecting his wallet. He was holding her
14:27
future hostage. It forces us to ask, at what point
14:31
does a dispute over assets turn a former partner into
14:34
an active.
14:35
Speaker 2: Predator When the physical violence starts.
14:37
Speaker 1: Right because he didn't just stop at verbal threats, the
14:39
physical violence was escalating rapidly. Let's look at a specific
14:43
incident on August twenty eighth, twenty twenty one. This is
14:46
more than a year before the kidnapping.
14:48
Speaker 2: This incident is horrifying. They are in the garage arguing
14:52
about the divorce. Jenny has her cell phone in her
14:54
hand and during the struggle it falls to the floor.
14:58
Chay goes to a workbench, grabs a heavy axe, and
15:01
attempts to smash her phone to pieces an axe.
15:04
Speaker 1: Let's just pause on that. Why an axe for a
15:06
piece of glass and plastic.
15:08
Speaker 2: It's the sheer brutality of the gesture. He is aggressively,
15:12
violently destroying her only means of communication.
15:15
Speaker 1: Jenny is terrified, so she hits the button to open
15:18
the garage door, knowing the neighbors across the street have
15:21
a security camera. She's hoping that public exposure will act
15:24
as a shield.
15:25
Speaker 2: But it doesn't stop him. No.
15:27
Speaker 1: He grabs her, pushes her to the concrete floor, grabs
15:30
her by the ankles, and violently drags her.
15:33
Speaker 2: And here is where his psychology becomes incredibly transparent. He
15:37
is terrified of public exposure. In a previous horrifying incident,
15:41
he pushed Jenny into a wall so hard she suffered
15:43
a miscarriage.
15:44
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
15:45
Speaker 2: His immediate reaction wasn't to help her. He panicked about
15:48
what she would tell the hospital staff, screaming at her
15:51
that she almost got him fired from the military.
15:53
Speaker 1: He is obsessed with his reputation.
15:55
Speaker 2: Completely obsessed. But after this garage incident with the axe,
15:59
Jenny doesn't stay quiet. She manages to get to her
16:02
daughter's phone and she dials nine to one one.
16:04
Speaker 1: And his reaction to being arrested for domestic violence is
16:07
a masterclass in psychological abuse.
16:09
Speaker 2: It really is.
16:10
Speaker 1: After he gets out, he drafts a completely fabricated legal
16:13
statement exonerating himself of the assault. But he doesn't just
16:17
ask Jenny to sign it.
16:18
Speaker 2: Who does he go to.
16:19
Speaker 1: He takes this fake document to their teenage daughter and
16:22
forces her to sign it, threatening the child that if
16:25
she doesn't, her father will go to prison and it
16:26
will be her fault.
16:27
Speaker 2: Wait, let's dissect the profound cruelty of that act. He
16:31
is weaponizing a child's love and fear to manufacture his
16:35
own legal defense.
16:36
Speaker 1: It's sickening.
16:37
Speaker 2: It is extreme parental alienation and course of control. He
16:41
forces a child to actively participate in the gaslighting of
16:44
her own mother. He also tries to force Jenny to
16:47
sign a similar face statement to send to his defense attorney,
16:50
but she refuses.
16:51
Speaker 1: Think of coercive control not as a sudden, violent explosion,
16:55
but like a python constricting its prey. Every time Jenny exhaled,
17:00
every time she tried to get a divorced, tried to
17:02
date tried to call the police. He rapped a little tighter.
17:05
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy.
17:06
Speaker 1: As we move into the summer of twenty twenty two,
17:08
when Jenny officially retains a divorce lawyer, the python squeezes
17:13
with everything it has. He physically removes the doors from
17:16
the bedrooms in the house, so she has no privacy.
17:18
Speaker 2: He's stripping away her basic rights within the home.
17:21
Speaker 1: He threatens to stop paying the mortgage to intentionally render
17:24
them all homeless. He threatens suicide to manipulate her guilt.
17:27
He even fabricates a fake one hundred and fifty thousand
17:30
dollars debt to his own mother, trying to legally and
17:33
financially suffocate Jenny in the divorce proceedings.
17:36
Speaker 2: He is systematically cutting off oxygen, and this brings us
17:39
to October eleventh, just five days before the kidnapping.
17:43
Speaker 1: The breaking point.
17:44
Speaker 2: Jenny comes home from work to find her personal space
17:46
completely violated. Yeah, her bedroom has been ransacked, closets are
17:50
torn apart, drawers or dumped upside down.
17:52
Speaker 1: She so a total invasion of privacy.
17:54
Speaker 2: Jay has stolen her expensive chanel bag, But much more importantly,
17:58
he has stolen two thousand dollars. There's an emergency cash
18:01
she had carefully hidden away. Furthermore, he contacts the banks
18:05
and blocks all of her credit cards.
18:07
Speaker 1: If you are listening to this, you have to understand
18:09
the sheer terror of this moment.
18:11
Speaker 2: For a victim.
18:12
Speaker 1: That emergency cash was her escape patch. It was her
18:15
safety net to.
18:16
Speaker 2: Flee, It was everything she had built up.
18:18
Speaker 1: By taking it and by freezing the cards, he is
18:21
sending a crystal clear message, you have absolutely nowhere to go,
18:24
and I control every single mechanism of your survival.
18:28
Speaker 2: It is financial asphyxiation. She calls him from her daughter's phone,
18:32
devastated and asks why he stole her emergency funds. His
18:36
response is chilling in its brevity.
18:38
Speaker 1: What did he say?
18:38
Speaker 2: He simply says, It's up to me what I do.
18:40
Speaker 1: It's up to me what I do. He has completely
18:42
shed the mask. He operates with total impunity, and that
18:46
desperate need for absolute control sets the terrifying stage for
18:50
the afternoon of October sixteenth. Yes, the financial threats, the
18:53
psychological torture, the isolation, it all finally boils over into
18:57
premeditated physical action.
18:59
Speaker 2: The timeline of that is critical. Jenny returns home from church.
19:04
She pulls up to her house and sees Chay's van
19:07
parked in the driveway.
19:08
Speaker 1: The laundry excuse again.
19:09
Speaker 2: Right, despite having an active restraining order in place from
19:12
the assault the previous year, he has used his laundry
19:16
access to wait for her inside her own home.
19:18
Speaker 1: Instinctively, she knows something is wrong. The air is too heavy.
19:22
She immediately tells her twenty year old daughter to leave
19:25
to go shopping, to just get away from the house.
19:27
Speaker 2: She was trying to protect her exactly.
19:29
Speaker 1: Jenny goes inside alone, attempting to de escalate. She tries
19:33
to keep the conversation civil and strictly focused on practicalities
19:36
like child support payments. But Chay isn't there to negotiate.
19:41
Speaker 2: He wants a fight.
19:41
Speaker 1: He starts bringing up past grievances, his voice rising, purposefully
19:46
escalating the situation into a volatile argument. Recognizing the danger,
19:50
Jenny retreats upstairs to her bedroom, and.
19:53
Speaker 2: This is where the trap snaps. Shit. From her bedroom,
19:56
she hears the garage door open and close. She hears
19:59
his footstep coming up the stairs. But they aren't normal footstep.
20:03
Speaker 1: They're aggressive.
20:04
Speaker 2: They are fast, heavy footfalls. He bursts into her bedroom
20:08
and without a word, he immediately begins punching her in
20:11
the face in the side of the head. The sheer
20:13
force knocks her to the ground, and he drops down,
20:16
using his entire body weight to pin her to the floor.
20:19
Speaker 1: As he's physically crushing her, he leans in and tells
20:22
her I will kill you. I don't need anything, and
20:25
then he initiates a sequence of binding her that is
20:29
so deeply premeditated it turns your stomach.
20:32
Speaker 2: It wasn't spontaneous at all.
20:33
Speaker 1: No, this wasn't a heat of the moment grab or
20:35
He just used whatever was lying around. He brought the
20:38
roll of heavy duty duct tape.
20:40
Speaker 2: With him, he had a plant.
20:42
Speaker 1: He meticulously tapes her ankles tightly together. Then he moves
20:45
up and tastes her thighs together. Then he rips another
20:48
piece and tapes her mouth shut, wrapping it all the
20:50
way around the back of her head so she can't scream,
20:52
and then the eyes right Finally, he places ductech directly
20:56
over her eyes, completely blinding her.
20:59
Speaker 2: We need to paw and examine the clinical psychology of
21:01
this specific method of binding. This is about absolute systemic subjugation.
21:07
Speaker 1: It's terrifying just to hear about.
21:09
Speaker 2: By binding the legs at both the ankles and thighs,
21:12
you entirely eliminate the biological flight response. By taping the mouth,
21:17
you eliminate the victim's voice and their ability to summon
21:20
a rescue the eyes. Covering the eyes is particularly insidious.
21:24
By removing her sight, he induces sensory deprivation. This causes
21:28
profound spatial disorientation and intense psychological terror. He is methodically
21:34
reducing a human being, his wife of decades, into a
21:37
helpless object that he can easily transport and dispose of.
21:41
Speaker 1: But what Chay fatally underestimated is that Jenny had seen
21:44
this coming. She had anticipated that a piece of paper,
21:47
a no contact order wouldn't physically stop a man who
21:50
had already promised to kill her over his retirement fund.
21:53
Speaker 2: She was prepared.
21:54
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting and where Jenny's brilliance
21:56
shines through. She was so hyper aware for daily danger
22:00
that she had studied her Apple Watch like a covert
22:02
survival manual.
22:03
Speaker 2: Yes, the technological aspect of her survival is astounding.
22:07
Speaker 1: She knew that if she was attacked, she wouldn't be
22:08
able to reach her phone, so she had secretly practiced
22:11
exactly how to trigger the SOS emergency call function and
22:15
send out automated emergency contact notifications using only the tactile
22:19
side buttons on the watch, without ever needing to look
22:22
at the screen.
22:22
Speaker 2: That is incredible presence of mind.
22:24
Speaker 1: While Jay briefly steps away from her pinned body to
22:27
go open the doors to his van, Jenny, blinded, bound
22:31
and bleeding, feels for the buttons on her wrist and
22:34
initiates that nine one one call. She effectively laid a
22:37
digital trap for her own kidnapper.
22:39
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of domestic violence,
22:43
it highlights an incredible shift in power dynamics. How So, historically,
22:48
and abuser could isolate a victim behind closed doors and
22:51
it would be their word against the victims. But modern
22:54
wearable technology acts as an invisible, silent witness. It functions
22:59
as a critical lifeline that can slightly offset the immense
23:02
physical imbalance of power in these life or death moments.
23:05
Speaker 1: But the danger in that bedroom is far from over.
23:07
Chay walks back into the room to carry her out,
23:10
and he hears the watch.
23:11
Speaker 2: He realizes she called for help.
23:13
Speaker 1: He realizes she is actively connected to a nine to
23:16
one to one dispatcher. Now, a normal person whose crime
23:19
was just interrupted by the police might panic and flee,
23:23
but Chay doesn't run.
23:25
Speaker 2: He is terrifyingly calm.
23:27
Speaker 1: He cammonly walks down to the garage, fetches a metal hammer,
23:30
walks back upstairs, and violently smashes the watch right off
23:34
her wrist, striking her arm, and wrists several times with
23:37
the hammer in the process to silence the device.
23:39
Speaker 2: Brutal.
23:40
Speaker 1: Then he scoops up her bound, blinded body and carries
23:43
her out to his van.
23:45
Speaker 2: This creates an agonizing timeline for law enforcement. They drive
23:49
away from the house, likely passing within a mile of
23:51
the very police cruisers that are speeding toward their address
23:54
with lights and sirens responding to that muffled nine.
23:57
Speaker 1: One one pin sparely missing it.
24:00
Speaker 2: The technology worked flawlessly. The authorities were alerted instantly, but
24:04
the raw physical reality of the situation meant the police
24:07
were just minutes too late to intercept.
24:09
Speaker 1: The vehicle, which plunges Jenny into an absolute, literal nightmare.
24:13
She is lying in the back of a moving van.
24:15
She has no idea what direction they are traveling.
24:17
Speaker 2: She's completely disoriented.
24:18
Speaker 1: She is bleeding, from the hammer strikes and the punches.
24:21
She is entirely blind and she cannot move her legs.
24:25
When the van finally comes to a halt after a
24:27
long drive, the true sickening horror of Chay's premeditated plan
24:32
is finally revealed.
24:33
Speaker 2: He pulls the van into a remote, deeply wooded area,
24:36
far from any main roads or houses. He opens the doors,
24:40
grabs her, pulls her out of the vehicle, and begins
24:43
violently dragging her across the rough forest floor.
24:46
Speaker 1: Jenny described the physical humiliation of this. Because her legs
24:50
are taped together, she can't walk or scramble.
24:53
Speaker 2: So she's just being pulled across the ground.
24:55
Speaker 1: As he drags her by her arms, her blouse in
24:57
her underwear roll up, dragging her bare skin ou across
25:00
rocks and dirt. He's cursing at her, spitting vitriol, and
25:04
then he stops.
25:05
Speaker 2: What does he do?
25:06
Speaker 1: He takes out a sharp object, likely a bladed utility
25:09
tool the police later found, and he repeatedly stabs and
25:12
pokes her in both of her breasts, right through her clothing.
25:15
She testified that she could feel the warm blood pooling
25:17
on her chest.
25:18
Speaker 2: I want to address the psychology of this specific act
25:21
of violence. Stabbing the breasts is not just about inflicting
25:25
physical pain. It is a highly intimate, deeply degrading form
25:30
of assault.
25:30
Speaker 1: It feels very intentional.
25:32
Speaker 2: In the literature of criminology, this is viewed as a
25:35
targeted desecration of the female body. It is an act
25:39
of supreme humiliation, meant to strip her of her humanity
25:42
right before the final act of the murder.
25:45
Speaker 1: And the final act is well, it's hard to even conceptualize.
25:49
He drags her body a few more feet and drops
25:51
her into a hole. But let's be very clear about
25:53
this detail.
25:54
Speaker 2: Yes, the timing here is crucial, based.
25:56
Speaker 1: On the tight timeline of the afternoon. He didn't dig
25:59
this hole while she was lying there bleeding. This grave
26:01
was already waiting for her.
26:02
Speaker 2: He had been out there before.
26:04
Speaker 1: He had to have driven out to these woods days prior,
26:06
selected the site and pre dug a shallow grave. He
26:10
planned her burial before he ever showed up to do
26:12
his laundry.
26:13
Speaker 2: He drops her into this predug ditch in the freezing cold,
26:16
and then she can hear the sounds of heavy objects
26:18
being dragged over to the edge of the hole. Tree lambs,
26:21
they cover the grave, and then comes the most terrifying
26:24
sound a human being can possibly experience, the heavy, dull
26:29
thud of dirt hitting her body. He is standing on
26:32
the edge of the grave, literally using a shovel or
26:36
his hands to pour heavy forest soil directly over her face.
26:41
Speaker 1: I have to stop here because this infuriates me. If anyone,
26:45
any defense attorney or commentator ever tries to frame a
26:48
domestic homicide as a crime of passion or claims the
26:51
old Wizard's lost control in the heat of the moment,
26:53
they need to look at.
26:54
Speaker 2: This case absolutely.
26:55
Speaker 1: This isn't someone losing control. This is the exact opposite.
26:58
This is deliberate, cold blooded, methodical disposal. It's as if
27:03
Jay believed that by literally covering her with dirt, he
27:06
was burying the consequences of his own secret life out
27:09
of sight, out of mind. He wasn't acting out of passion.
27:11
He was doing yard work. He was hiding his mess
27:13
to protect his pension.
27:15
Speaker 2: Your analysis a spot on. In forensic psychology, burying a
27:18
victim alive is categorized as a highly specific, psychologically loaded
27:23
method of murder.
27:23
Speaker 1: Because it's so cruel.
27:25
Speaker 2: It isn't just about ending a biological life. It is
27:28
an act of total literal erasure. It is the ultimate
27:32
final expression of the objectification we discussed earlier. He is
27:36
treating his wife, the mother of his two children, like
27:40
household refuse, ewing her away. He is putting her in
27:43
the ground to silence her permanently, ensuring that his carefully
27:47
constructed public narrative and his bank accounts remain completely intact.
27:52
Speaker 1: As he's standing over this shallow grave, pouring dirt onto
27:55
her face, Jenny hears him pacing around the perimeter of
27:58
the whole, and she hears him muttering to himself.
28:01
Speaker 2: What is he saying?
28:02
Speaker 1: He says out loud to the empty woods. She's dead.
28:05
It's okay, she's dead.
28:06
Speaker 2: He's comforting himself.
28:08
Speaker 1: He has to verbalize it to soothe himself, to reassure
28:10
his own ego that his problem is finally solved. He
28:13
walks back to his van, gets in, sits there in
28:15
the silence for a while, and then turns the engine on.
28:18
Speaker 2: He sits in the driver's seat, believing the nightmare is over.
28:21
He believes he has executed his plan flawlessly and that
28:24
he has won.
28:25
Speaker 1: But he didn't.
28:26
Speaker 2: But what he fatally misunderstood was the physics of the
28:30
grave he dug, and much more importantly, he profoundly underestimated
28:34
the fierce, miraculous survival instinct of the woman he left
28:38
in the ground.
28:38
Speaker 1: How exactly does a human body survive under that weight
28:41
and cold? A cubic yard of soil weighs roughly two
28:45
thousand pounds. Even a few inches of heavy wet dirt
28:48
on a human chest makes expanding the lungs physically impossible. Right,
28:52
you suffocate from compression, So how does a human being
28:55
survive this?
28:56
Speaker 2: Mechanically and biologically? It required immense physical control and astonishing
29:00
psychological fortitude. Jenny stated that as the dirt was pouring
29:04
down onto her face, she didn't thrash wildly, which would
29:07
have exhausted her oxygen.
29:08
Speaker 1: Just what anyone would normally do in a panic.
29:10
Speaker 2: Instead, she instinctively and subtly maneuvered her head side to side,
29:15
actively fighting to keep the soil from completely packing into
29:17
her nose and mouth. Oh my god, she managed to
29:20
preserve a tiny microscopic pocket of air between the dirt
29:23
and her face, allowing her to take shallow micro.
29:26
Speaker 1: Breaths and psychologically, your body is screaming in terror. You
29:31
are blind, you are freezing, and you are buried. What
29:33
keeps the mind from just snapping?
29:36
Speaker 2: She focused on the only thing she had left for Jenny.
29:40
Speaker 1: She anchored herself to the only force on earth more
29:42
powerful than her immediate terror, her children. She later testified,
29:47
I was very cold, but then I was thinking about
29:49
my kids, and then I had the will to survive
29:51
from the situation.
29:52
Speaker 2: That is incredibly powerful.
29:54
Speaker 1: That mother's love literally kept her heart beating in a grave.
29:58
Speaker 2: It provided the cognitive anchors she needed to begin the
30:01
excruciating process of self rescue. In the pitch black, under
30:06
the crushing weight of the earth in tree branches, she
30:08
somehow managed to contort her body.
30:10
Speaker 1: Even tied up like that, She slowly.
30:12
Speaker 2: Clawed, rubbed, and twisted her wrists and ankles against each other,
30:16
using friction and sheer force to stretch and break the
30:18
heavy duct tape bindings.
30:20
Speaker 1: But here is where her tactical brilliance shines again. Even
30:23
after she manages to free her wrists, she doesn't just
30:25
burst out of the dirt like a movie zombie.
30:28
Speaker 2: She evaluates the threat.
30:29
Speaker 1: She possesses the incredible situational awareness to realize that she
30:33
can still hear the low hum of Chay's van engine.
30:36
She knows he hasn't driven away because.
30:38
Speaker 2: If he sees her, she's dead.
30:40
Speaker 1: She logically deduces that if she emerges from the grave
30:43
while he is awake and sitting right there, he will
30:46
easily overpower her and finish the job. So she waits
30:49
unbelievable patients, She waits inside her own grave. She forces
30:54
herself to stay perfectly still and completely quiet in the freezing,
30:57
wet dirt for hours until night falls.
31:00
Speaker 2: When it finally gets dark, she carefully pushes the branches
31:04
aside and breaches the surface of the grave. She looks
31:07
toward the van.
31:08
Speaker 1: Is he still there?
31:09
Speaker 2: She can see a faint light on inside the cabin,
31:12
But crucially, she notices a specific environmental clue. The windows
31:17
of the van have fogged up from the inside.
31:19
Speaker 1: It's the thermodynamics of his breath. The condensation on that
31:22
glass is essentially a biological timer. It tells her that
31:25
his body heat and respiration have created a micro environment
31:29
inside the cold van, which means he has likely entered
31:31
deep sleep.
31:32
Speaker 2: Exactly That fogged window is her starting gun. She climbs
31:36
completely out of the ditch and she runs, She just
31:38
takes off. She runs barefoot, battered and bleeding through the dark,
31:43
dense woods for an excruciatingly long time. She follows the
31:47
faint line of a road, hoping to find civilization, until
31:50
she finally spots a solitary porch light from.
31:53
Speaker 1: A remote house and she knocks on the door.
31:55
Speaker 2: Just after midnight on October seventeenth. The residents of that
31:59
house are jolted away by frantic, desperate banging on their
32:02
front door.
32:03
Speaker 1: What a terrifying thing for those homeowners to wake up to.
32:06
Speaker 2: They open it to find Jenny covered head to toe
32:08
in dirt and blood, with the torn remnants of duct
32:11
tapes still hanging around her neck like a horrifying necklace,
32:14
pleading for her life and telling these strangers that she
32:17
had just been buried alive.
32:19
Speaker 1: Because of her miraculous escape, the police finally have what
32:22
they've been missing for hours, a location and a trajectory.
32:26
Law enforcement swarms the area.
32:28
Speaker 2: They are on a massive manhunt. Now.
32:29
Speaker 1: At around seven thirty am that morning, officers spot a
32:32
suspicious vehicle parked on the Chihallis Western Trail, a wooded
32:36
area about a mile away from the house where Jenny
32:38
found help. It's Chay's van.
32:40
Speaker 2: Is he inside?
32:41
Speaker 1: The engine is still running and Chay is inside dozing
32:44
in the driver's seat.
32:45
Speaker 2: They surround the vehicle and arrest him without resistance. Officers
32:49
note he has a fresh injury to his hand, highly
32:52
likely sustained when he was violently smashing the apple watch
32:55
with the hammer.
32:56
Speaker 1: But it's what they find necks that really seals it, right, It's.
32:59
Speaker 2: What the crime scene in theators find when they search
33:01
his van and backtrack into the surrounding woods that solidifies
33:05
the chilling, undeniable premeditation of this crime.
33:08
Speaker 1: What did they find out there in the woods?
33:10
Speaker 2: They find the clearing, They find the freshly dug hole,
33:13
They find the heavy tree branches used to conceal it,
33:16
and inside the hole, embedded in the dirt, they find
33:19
the torn strips of duct tape that perfectly matched the
33:22
role left sitting on Jenny's dining room table.
33:25
Speaker 1: The physical evidence perfectly corroborates every single terrifying detail of
33:29
her survival story. And when they search the inside of
33:31
the van, the discoveries are incredibly disturbing. They find his
33:34
weapons hidden inside. They find a hatchet wrapped tightly in
33:38
a plastic bag, they find a bladed utility tool, They
33:42
find a heavily bloodstained pillowcase.
33:45
Speaker 2: And they also find his travel arrangements. Documents in the
33:49
van revealed he had recently booked a flight to Miami
33:52
for November seventeenth, exactly a month.
33:54
Speaker 1: Later, running away from the consequences.
33:56
Speaker 2: Was he planning to flee the country after the heat
33:59
died down, or considering the other evidence found, was he
34:02
planning something even darker? Because right alongside the finalized divorce papers,
34:07
the police find a torn, handwritten note addressed to his
34:10
two children.
34:11
Speaker 1: Let's read this note because it is a mind bending
34:14
study in manipulation.
34:15
Speaker 2: It really is.
34:16
Speaker 1: The note reads, in part, I'm so sorry that it
34:19
came down to this. Sorry that we caused you guys
34:21
so much pain and suffering since you were born. I
34:23
didn't want to do this, but I felt trapped. I
34:25
truly don't want to live anymore. I love you guys
34:28
so much. Goodbye Dad.
34:29
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the deeply fractured psychology
34:33
of this abuser. It is a textbook example of narcissistic victimhood.
34:37
Speaker 1: I mean, he writes this tender, loving apology note to
34:40
his kids, claiming they are his world. Yet he just
34:42
spent the last year actively traumatizing them, forcing his teenage
34:46
daughter to sign a fake legal document to keep him
34:49
out of jail, and he just literally poured dirt on
34:51
their mother's face in the.
34:52
Speaker 2: Woods, his solo gutridictor It's.
34:54
Speaker 1: An astonishing level of psychological whiplash. Which version of this
34:58
man is the real one?
35:00
Speaker 2: The terrifying clinical truth is that the loving father persona
35:03
is not real. It is a meticulously crafted tool of
35:06
self victimization. Look at the language. I felt trapped, Sorry
35:10
that we caused you.
35:10
Speaker 1: Pain, he sang, wee.
35:12
Speaker 2: He is actively shifting the blame, subtly implicating Jenny in
35:15
her own murder. He is framing his highly calculated, premeditated
35:19
attempted murder of his wife as some sort of tragic,
35:22
unavoidable circumstance that forced his hand, rather than a conscious,
35:26
cruel and selfish choice he made solely to protect his
35:29
wealth and his hidden life.
35:30
Speaker 1: Jenny survived the physical burial, She clawed her way out
35:34
of the earth. But as this case moves out of
35:37
the woods and into the justice system, it becomes painfully
35:41
clear that the emotional and psychological unearthing is just beginning.
35:45
Speaker 2: When Chay is brought into the interrogation room and read
35:48
his miranda rights, he immediately invokes the Fifth Amendment. He
35:52
refuses to speak a single word to the detectives, but.
35:55
Speaker 1: He doesn't need to speak because the evidence is screaming
35:58
beyond the physical forensics and Jenny's harrowing testimony. A neighbour's
36:02
CCTV camera captures his van arriving at the Lacey house
36:06
right around the time of the nine one one.
36:08
Speaker 2: Call, and witnesses start talking too.
36:10
Speaker 1: And civilian witnesses begin coming forward to fill in the
36:13
behavioral gaps. A friend of the couple tells police that
36:16
after Chay's initial domestic violence arrest the previous year, Jay
36:20
had explicitly verbally stated that he was not going down
36:23
alone and that he would take Jenny with him.
36:26
Speaker 2: At his preliminary bail. Hearing the raw terror Jenny lives
36:29
with is palpable. She submits a desperate written plea to
36:32
the court, stating, please no bail. I am really afraid
36:35
from my life.
36:35
Speaker 1: She knows what he's capable of, She writes.
36:38
Speaker 2: I just want to emphasize that I fear him so
36:40
much and he will kill me. Again if he is out.
36:42
The judge, recognizing the extreme lethality indicators in this case,
36:47
the strangulation equivalent of blinding and binding, the pre planning,
36:50
the access to weapons, rightfully denies bail.
36:54
Speaker 1: Eventually, facing a mountain of insurmountable physical and digital evidence,
36:58
Jay realizes he can not win a trial. He pleads
37:01
guilty to attempted murder.
37:03
Speaker 2: But he doesn't really take responsibility.
37:05
Speaker 1: But even in his guilty plea, he refuses to take
37:07
true accountability. His defense team claims that PTSD post traumatic
37:11
stress disorder stemming from his thirty year military career, led
37:15
to a sudden, uncontrollable mental break.
37:18
Speaker 2: I want to systematically dismantle this defense strategy because it
37:21
is deeply offensive to the medical reality of trauma. We
37:24
must evaluate the use of PTSD as an excuse for
37:27
premeditated course of control.
37:29
Speaker 1: How does that work? In forensic psychology?
37:31
Speaker 2: In forensic psychology, we look at executive functioning. A sudden
37:34
trauma response, a dissociative flashback, or a genuine mental break
37:38
is characterized by disorganized, chaotic, and reactive behavior.
37:42
Speaker 1: Which this was not.
37:43
Speaker 2: It does not account for retaining a lawyer to protect
37:45
financial assets extensively researching divorce laws, driving into the roots
37:49
to predig a grave, remembering to pack a specific role
37:53
of duct tape, systematically blinding a victim, and drafting a
37:56
carefully worded suicide note right, it's just too much plan Meticulous,
38:01
multi staged planning over a period of days or weeks
38:05
entirely contradicts the core neurobiological mechanics of a sudden psychological break.
38:11
He knew exactly what he was doing.
38:12
Speaker 1: Wait, I have to play Devil's advocate for a second.
38:15
As someone looking from the outside, thirty years in the
38:17
military is intense. He likely saw combat. Is it entirely
38:21
impossible that a combat veteran snaps and just goes into autopilot?
38:25
Speaker 2: That's a common defense argument.
38:27
Speaker 1: How does the court differentiate between a genuine PTSD fugue
38:30
state and calculated murder.
38:33
Speaker 2: It's a fair question, but the differentiation lies in the
38:35
goal oriented nature of the behavior. An autopilot trauma response
38:40
is usually defensive, reacting to a perceived immediate threat.
38:43
Speaker 1: Like lashing out if startled.
38:45
Speaker 2: Yes, Chay's actions were offensive and highly sequential. Buying tape,
38:50
digging a hole, lying in weight. These require high level
38:54
cognitive mapping and future planning. You do not accidentally or
38:57
subconsciously plan an itinerary for a murder. The court recognizes
39:01
this difference between a momentary loss of control and malice a.
39:04
Speaker 1: Forethought absolutely, and the lasting trauma he inflicted on Jenny
39:08
was evident right there in the courtroom during sentencing.
39:11
Speaker 2: That sentencing hearing was devastating.
39:13
Speaker 1: As Chase stood up to make his statement, Jenny began hyperventilating.
39:17
She had a severe panic attack right there in the
39:19
gallery and had to be actively attended to by paramedics.
39:22
Speaker 2: Just being near him was too much.
39:24
Speaker 1: The mere physical presence of her abuser, hearing his voice
39:27
was literally suffocating her all over again. The judge sentences
39:31
him to nearly fourteen years in prison. It is the
39:34
absolute maximum sentence allowed by the state guidelines for his
39:37
specific charges.
39:38
Speaker 2: Fourteen years. He will be in his late sixties upon release.
39:42
He will not be allowed to own a firearm, and
39:44
he's permanently forbidden from contacting Jenny.
39:47
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? We look at that
39:49
number fourteen years and it feels so heavy yet so
39:54
terrifyingly inadequate.
39:55
Speaker 2: It do those feel like a short time for what
39:57
he did?
39:57
Speaker 1: The maximum sentence is supposed to represent the pinnacle of justice,
40:01
but for Jenny, that's just a fourteen year tickn clock.
40:05
She has to carry the psychological scars, the night terrors,
40:08
the phantom feeling of cold dirt on her face for
40:11
the rest of her natural life, while the man who
40:13
intentionally put her in the ground gets a firm, guaranteed
40:16
release date.
40:17
Speaker 2: It highlights a tragic limitation within our legal framework. The
40:20
law is very adapted incarcerating the physical body for physical crimes,
40:25
but it struggles profoundly to adequately quantify and penalize the lifelong,
40:30
invisible psychological destruction caused by this sustained level of intimate
40:34
partner violence.
40:35
Speaker 1: As we synthesize the core takeaways from the law in
40:38
Crime transcript today, we are left looking at a devastating
40:41
high definition portrait of coercive control.
40:43
Speaker 2: We really see the mechanics of it.
40:45
Speaker 1: We see exactly how a victim's demand for basic financial
40:48
independence can trigger lethal violence in a partner who is
40:52
desperate to maintain their power. We see the terrifying duality
40:55
of hidden lives. How a highly decorated military veteran respected
40:59
by his peers can simultaneously operate as a cruel, calculating
41:03
predator in his own living room.
41:05
Speaker 2: But above all of that darkness, we see the astounding
41:09
power of the human survival instinct.
41:11
Speaker 1: Jenny's story is just incredible.
41:13
Speaker 2: Jenny's proactive foresight to learn the tactile ui of her
41:17
apple watch, her incredible physical endurance to regulate her breathing
41:20
under a crushing weight of earth, and her sheer force
41:23
of will fueled entirely by a mother's love for her children,
41:27
represent the absolute triumph of human resilience over calculated malice.
41:31
Speaker 1: It is a story that forces us to confront a
41:33
really chilling concept, the terrifying illusion of intimacy.
41:37
Speaker 2: What do you mean by that?
41:38
Speaker 1: Well, we walk past houses in our own neighborhoods every
41:41
single day, houses just like that quiet, manicured home in Lacey, Washington.
41:46
We see the lawns, the cars in the driveway, the
41:48
people waving hello as they get the mail, and we
41:51
assume we understand the lives inside. But how well can
41:55
you ever truly know the person sleeping right next to you?
41:58
Speaker 2: The facade of normalcy is incredibly robust, and abusers rely
42:02
on our collective assumption of safety to hide their crimes
42:05
in plain sight.
42:06
Speaker 1: It is. But conversely, and perhaps much more importantly, this
42:10
story asks you to consider the other side of that coin.
42:13
How do you know what latent, miraculous capacity for survival
42:16
exists inside you.
42:18
Speaker 2: It's hard to imagine what we're capable of until we're tested.
42:21
Speaker 1: We all hope to God we never have to find out.
42:23
But Jenny Keion cruz that when the unimaginable happens, when
42:26
you are literally pushed into the dark, bound and covered
42:28
with dirt, there is a reserve of strength within the
42:30
human heart that refuses to be erased, a strength that
42:33
can claw its way back to the light. Stay curious
42:36
out there, trust your instincts, and please check in on
42:39
your friends. You never truly know what's happening behind closed doors.