Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Shades of the Truth - The Hunt for William Reece

Transcript

Shades of the Truth - The Hunt for William Reece · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine for a second that you're holding a spare key
• 0:04
  to your car. You know, the kind one of those
• 0:06
  little magnetic Hida key boxes you stick under the wheel
• 0:08
  well or behind the bumper.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think everybody used to have them on those.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Right, exactly. So you test it on a Monday night,
• 0:14
  and it works perfectly. You slip it back into the car.
• 0:17
  You know, completely satisfy that you have a safety net.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: You feel totally secure, exactly.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: But then the very next afternoon, you're standing in a
• 0:27
  sunny parking lot, right, you reach for that box, you
• 0:31
  pull out the key, you slide it into the lock,
• 0:34
  and well, it just doesn't.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Turn, which is, you know, just a minor inconvenience, Right.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: It's the kind of tiny, frustrating malfunction that happens to
• 0:42
  all of us. You probably sigh, shake your head and
• 0:45
  walk over to a payphone to call for a ride.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't even think twice about it.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: But what you don't realize, what you couldn't possibly fathom
• 0:52
  in that moment, is that this tiny mechanical failure has
• 0:57
  just intersected with something unimaginably dark.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: It really has.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: That jammed lock is the difference between going home and
• 1:05
  vanishing completely off the face of the earth.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: And that that is the terrifying reality of the material
• 1:11
  we are analyzing today. We negotiate our safety every single
• 1:15
  day based on a set of unspoken.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Rules, right like an internal checklist exactly.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: We assess risk based on context. So a dark alley
• 1:23
  at three in the morning that registers as high risk, sure,
• 1:26
  But a busy parking lot outside of law enforcement building
• 1:29
  in the middle of a Tuesday that registers as zero risk.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Zero. You wouldn't even blink, right.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: And when those parameters fail, the psychological impact is profound.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the deep dive. Our mission today is
• 1:43
  to unravel a twenty four year long mystery that's spanned
• 1:46
  across Texas and Oklahoma.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: It's a massive story.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: It really is. We're pulling from a highly detailed documentary
• 1:52
  transcript covering the summer of nineteen ninety seven. We're looking
• 1:56
  at the disappearances of four young women, the devastating ripple
• 1:59
  effects on their community, and ultimately the unmasking of a
• 2:02
  serial predator who managed to hide in plain sight for
• 2:05
  decades dechead. But as I was reading through these sources,
• 2:09
  it struck me that this isn't just a true crime timeline.
• 2:12
  It's so much more than that.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Oh far from it. I mean, the material presents a
• 2:15
  profound study in a few distinct areas. First, we're going
• 2:18
  to examine the incredible evolution of forensic science.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Which is wild to see over that timeframe.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: It is specifically how investigators bridge the massive technological gap
• 2:29
  between you know, nineteen nineties papal phone cards and advanced
• 2:34
  twenty fifteen DNA profiling. We're also going to dissect the
• 2:38
  psychology of a killer whose transient lifestyle created this nearly
• 2:44
  impenetrable jurisdictional nightmare.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: For local police because he was just constantly crossing borders exactly.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: And perhaps most importantly, we're going to look at the
• 2:51
  unyielding tenacity of grieving families, people who simply refuse to
• 2:55
  let the justice system file their daughters away in a
• 2:57
  cold case box.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that resilience is incredible, and I want to promise
• 3:01
  you up front, this is a story that balances the
• 3:03
  absolute darkest corners of human behavior with an incredible testament
• 3:08
  to the human spirit.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: It really challenges how you think about things.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: It does by the time we finish our analysis today,
• 3:13
  your understanding of concepts like closure and justice. Well, it's
• 3:18
  going to be deeply challenged, absolutely, So let's start by
• 3:20
  understanding the landscape of that summer. The transcript focuses heavily
• 3:25
  on four specific victims and understand the void they left behind.
• 3:30
  We need to know who they were, So walk me
• 3:33
  through what happened starting in April of nineteen ninety seven.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: Okay, so we begin in Friendswood, Texas with a twelve
• 3:39
  year old girl named Laura Smither and friends.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: That's a Houston suburb, right.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It's known for being very tight knit, very
• 3:47
  family oriented. Laura is homeschooled by her parents, Bob and
• 3:51
  Gay Smither, and the sources describe her as exceptionally gifted,
• 3:54
  particularly in dance.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Right, She was a ballerina.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: She was an aspiring ballerina, and she had actually just
• 4:00
  achieved a major milestone. She was accepted into the Houston
• 4:03
  Ballet Academy.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: Which requires an intense amount of discipline for a twelve
• 4:07
  year old. I mean, you don't get into that academy
• 4:10
  without being incredibly focused.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: You really don't. And her mother noted that Laura was
• 4:14
  so focused on improving her endurance for ballet that she
• 4:17
  decided to start jogging, even.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Though she didn't really like running right right.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: She didn't even particularly enjoy it, but she viewed it
• 4:24
  as necessary cross training. So on the morning of April third,
• 4:28
  nineteen ninety seven, which was a Thursday, she asks her
• 4:32
  mother if she can go for a quick run in
• 4:34
  their neighborhood, and.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Her mother thinks, what any parent would think in that scenario.
• 4:37
  I mean, it's their own neighborhoods exactly, it's daylight, it's
• 4:39
  a quick loop. But Laura doesn't come back.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: No, she doesn't.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: The transcript says her parents were out looking for her
• 4:47
  within ten minutes of realizing she was overdue. Like, they
• 4:51
  didn't wait around.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they knew immediately something was wrong.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: They check her route, nothing, They called the police, and
• 4:57
  the community response detailed and the sources is just it's staggering.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: The scale of the search is difficult to fully conceptualize. Honestly,
• 5:05
  we are talking about an estimated six thousand volunteers descending
• 5:09
  on friends.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Would six thousand people, Yes, this.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: Wasn't just a few neighbors handing out flyers. The Coast
• 5:15
  Guard arrived, the National Guard was deployed. Wow, the FBI
• 5:20
  was brought in to assist local law enforcement. People from
• 5:23
  all over the region essentially hit pause on their own.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Lives, just total strangers, right.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Volunteers who had never met the Smither family were
• 5:30
  organizing complex search grids, coordinating helicopters, and walking shoulder to
• 5:35
  shoulder through dense fields and brush.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And they kept that up for seventeen days. Seventeen days
• 5:42
  of people holding their breath every time a phone rang.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: It's agonizing.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: And then there's a town hall meeting. It's packed with
• 5:49
  volunteers at Friendswood High School. The police chief is at
• 5:52
  the front of the room and his pager goes off.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. A search leader who was sitting next to the
• 5:57
  chief later recalled that exact moment. I saw the chief
• 6:00
  look down at the pager, his face completely drop, and
• 6:03
  he just muttered, I gotta go, oh man, And the
• 6:06
  entire room felt the air get sucked out.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: They knew because they knew what that meant.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: A man walking his dog found Laura's body near a
• 6:14
  retention pond in Pasadena, Texas, which is about twelve miles
• 6:18
  away from where she vanished. Just twelve mile She was
• 6:21
  found with only a pair of sogs on The autopsy
• 6:24
  showed she'd been beaten and strangled twelve years old.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: It's just horrific, it is.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: And while Friendswood is reeling from this, the timeline in
• 6:32
  our sources moves forward to July fifteenth, nineteen ninety seven.
• 6:37
  We shift from South Texas to North Texas, Denton. Tell
• 6:41
  me about Kelly Cox.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: So, Kelly's profile is very different from Laura's. She is
• 6:45
  twenty years old, a student at the University of North
• 6:48
  Texas UNT right. She is majoring in psychology with a
• 6:51
  minor in criminal justice. She's described as incredibly driven, focused
• 6:56
  on her academic goals. And she is also a young.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Mother, nineteen month old daughter named Alexis.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, she had her life meticulously planned out. She was
• 7:06
  aiming to graduate with honors and pursue a master's degree.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: And on July fifteenth, she is on a field trip
• 7:11
  with her criminology class. And the location of this field trip,
• 7:14
  it's a detail, just stops you.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: In your tracks, it really is. She is taking the
• 7:18
  tour of the Denton Jail. She vanishes from the parking
• 7:21
  lot of a law enforcement facility in broad daylight.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: It's unbelievable because the class.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: Was touring the interior of the jail. The instructor had
• 7:28
  told the students not to bring their purses or personal
• 7:31
  belongings inside.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: So she leaves everything in the.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: Car exactly and she used that magnetic height of keybox
• 7:36
  we talked about earlier. She leaves her keys in the box,
• 7:39
  takes the tour, and comes back out to the parking lot,
• 7:42
  and the.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Key won't work. She walks over to a nearby pay
• 7:45
  phone and calls her boyfriend Eddie. Her exact words, according
• 7:49
  to the transcript, were, the key won't work. Right, Eddie
• 7:53
  says he's on his way to help her.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: And the tragic part is they had tested that specific
• 7:58
  key the night before. Right functioned perfectly, but in that
• 8:02
  crucial moment, it jammed. So when Eddie arrives at the
• 8:05
  parking lot a short time later, Kelly's car is sitting there,
• 8:09
  the doors are locked.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: That Kelly is completely gone.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Completely gone. Investigators later scour the area, but they never
• 8:15
  find the key, and they never find the magnetic box.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: She's just erased from the map in the middle of
• 8:19
  the day and before the shock that could even settle
• 8:23
  the sources force us to look at another event hackening
• 8:26
  roughly at the exact.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: Same time, literally the same day, the.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Very same day, July fifteenth, but we moved from Texas
• 8:33
  up to Bethany, Oklahoma, which is a suburb of Oklahoma City.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: Right here we are introduced to Tiffany Johnston. She is
• 8:39
  nineteen years old in a newlywed She had married her
• 8:42
  husband Ryan just three months prior, still on the honeymoon
• 8:45
  phase absolutely, and they had specifically chosen to live in
• 8:49
  Bethany because of its reputation for safety and low crime rates.
• 8:52
  Tiffany is described as deeply attached to her family. Her
• 8:56
  mother Kathy actually called her her shadows gardening and landscaping.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So that day she works as shift at a restaurant,
• 9:04
  then she goes to a second job at a video store.
• 9:07
  She finishes up, goes home, gets cleaned up, and decides
• 9:11
  to wash her car before meeting Ryan to celebrate their
• 9:13
  three month anniversary.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: And the car wash was a busy public location, it
• 9:17
  wasn't isolated. But that evening, when she doesn't show up
• 9:20
  to meet Ryan, he and her family start paging.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: Her like on a physical pager, yeah pager.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: They use the code nine to one one, signaling her
• 9:27
  to call immediately. They get no response. Around midnight, the
• 9:30
  Bethany police contact the family. They have found Tiffany's car
• 9:34
  abandoned in one of the bays at the car.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Wash, and the state of her car is so alarming.
• 9:40
  The doors are wide open, her floor mats are literally
• 9:43
  hanging on the metal clips on the brick wall, waiting
• 9:46
  to be sprayed.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: Down right in the middle of the test exactly.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Her pager, her recently cash paycheck, her id her money.
• 9:53
  It's all sitting inside the open vehicle.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Which tells you immediately that whoever took her had zero
• 9:59
  interest in Rocker none. The cash was right there, left
• 10:01
  in plain sight. The vehicle was left running, or at
• 10:04
  least open. It paints a vivid forensic picture of a sudden, forceful,
• 10:09
  and highly targeted interruption, and tragically, the very next day,
• 10:13
  her body is discovered dumped in a ditch off Interstate
• 10:16
  forty near Yukon, Oklahoma, which is roughly ten miles from
• 10:19
  the car wash. She had been strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: The summer of nineteen ninety seven just continues this horrific trajectory.
• 10:27
  We moved to August seventeenth, back down to the Texas
• 10:30
  Gulf Coast, specifically Teaky Island in Lamar, Texas. We look
• 10:33
  at the fourth victim in the transcript, Jessica Kane.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Jessica is seventeen years old. She is heavily involved in
• 10:39
  the arts and community theater. She had just finished performing
• 10:43
  in a production of the musical Oklahoma at the Harbor Playhouse.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: So she just a high school kid.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: She is on the precipice of adulthood, only a week
• 10:51
  away from leaving home to start her freshman year at
• 10:54
  sam Houston State University. Wow, her bedroom was already packed
• 10:58
  in boxes.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: That's her breaking. So she attends a cast party at
• 11:02
  a Benagin's restaurant around one thirty in the morning. Her
• 11:06
  friend's watch her get into her pickup truck and pull
• 11:09
  onto the feeder road for Interstate forty five to head home,
• 11:12
  but she never makes it. No, her mother wakes up
• 11:14
  in the middle of the night, sees Jessica isn't home
• 11:16
  and wakes up her husband. He goes out driving her
• 11:19
  route and finds her pickup truck abandoned on the dark
• 11:22
  shoulder of Interstate forty five, and.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: The scene really echoes Tiffany Johnston's disappearance. Jessica's truck is there,
• 11:28
  her wallet is still inside. There are no immediate signs
• 11:31
  of a violent struggle in the dirt or on the pavement,
• 11:33
  but there is no sign of Jessica. They vanish, yeah,
• 11:36
  and unlike the other three cases, Jessica's rains were not
• 11:39
  found the next day or even weeks later. She remained
• 11:42
  a missing person.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Listening to you detail these four scenarios, Laura on a
• 11:48
  morning jog, Kelly locked out of her car, Tiffany washing
• 11:51
  her floor, Mats, Jessica driving home from a party. Well,
• 11:55
  it feels less like they wandered into a dangerous situation
• 11:58
  and more like a trapdoor just open up under their feet.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it feels like.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: They're doing the most remarkably ordinary things.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: And the suddenness, the mundane nature of these environments is
• 12:07
  what makes this series of crimes so psychologically devastating to
• 12:12
  the public.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: If it could happen to anyone exactly.
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: In behavioral psychology, there is a concept called the just
• 12:17
  world hypothesis. It is a cognitive bias that almost all
• 12:21
  of us carry around. It's the underlying belief that actions
• 12:25
  have predictable, morally appropriate consequences. It's that voice in our
• 12:29
  head that says you know, if I do the right things,
• 12:32
  if I lock my doors, if I stay in nice neighborhoods,
• 12:34
  if I wash my car at a busy, well lit facility,
• 12:38
  I will remain safe.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: We tell ourselves that bad things only happen to people
• 12:42
  who take bad risks.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Precisely, it's a defense mechanism. If we didn't believe that
• 12:46
  to some extent, we'd never leave our houses.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: It's true. But when a twelve year old child is
• 12:52
  snatched from a quiet suburban street or a mother is
• 12:55
  taken from the shadow of a county jail, that just
• 12:59
  world high apothesis completely collapses.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: It shatters. The community is forced to confront the reality
• 13:06
  that the predator does not respect their unspoken rules right
• 13:09
  and what compounded the investigative difficulty in nineteen ninety seven
• 13:13
  was the extreme geographic spread. You have South Texas, North Texas,
• 13:18
  Central Oklahoma, and the Gulf Coast.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: That's hundreds of miles of highway between these locations.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Right to the local detectives working in Friendswood or Bethany,
• 13:26
  these appeared to be singular, isolated tragedies within their own jurisdictions.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: They didn't see the pattern.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: They did not initially see the broader pattern because the
• 13:34
  geography masked the fact that they were dealing with a single,
• 13:37
  highly mobile individual.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: I keep coming back to that idea of a moving
• 13:41
  trap door, like, how did police even begin to track
• 13:45
  an offender who can strike in one state and be
• 13:48
  three hundred miles away by nightfall, Especially in an era
• 13:51
  before you know ubiquitous cell phone location tracking and intersection cameras.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: It's incredibly difficult.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Based on the transcript, the break doesn't actually come from
• 14:00
  forensic evidence. Initially, it comes from the sheer survival instinct
• 14:04
  of the women who fought back.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, the entire trajectory of this twenty four year investigation
• 14:09
  shifts because of a few survivors. A few weeks after
• 14:12
  Jessica Kane vanishes, we are introduced to Sandra sappaw Right.
• 14:16
  She is a nineteen year old woman in Webster, Texas.
• 14:19
  In the early morning hours, she pulls into a convenience store,
• 14:23
  makes a purchase, and then drives her car across the
• 14:25
  street to park at a waffle house. Okay, a man
• 14:28
  drives his truck up next to her and asks if
• 14:30
  she needs help. When she looks confused, he points out
• 14:33
  that her tire is flat.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Which the sources identify as a stage vulnerability. He intentionally
• 14:39
  flattened her tire while she was inside the convenience store
• 14:41
  to manufacture a crisis that he could step into solve.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: It is a classic predatory tactic. It lowers the victim's
• 14:48
  defenses because the predator is initially presenting as a good samaritan.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: I'm just here to help.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: Right, But the moment Sandra is out of her car
• 14:56
  looking at the tire, he produces a knife. He forces
• 14:59
  her into his truck and begins driving northbound on Interstate
• 15:03
  forty five.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Which is the exact same highway where Jessica Keane's truck
• 15:07
  was found abandoned.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, the very same highway, and he orders Sandra to
• 15:10
  begin taking her.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Clothes off, And this is where her situational awareness just
• 15:14
  becomes extraordinary. She pretends to comply, leaning down as if
• 15:18
  to untie her shoes, and while she's hunched over, she
• 15:21
  notices that the passenger side door is unlocked.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: You have to try and put yourself in her physiological
• 15:25
  state at that moment, the adrenaline, the sheer panic. She
• 15:28
  is trapped inside a moving vehicle with an armed man
• 15:32
  who has made his intentions abundantly clear. The highway pavement
• 15:36
  is rushing by underneath the door. She has seconds to
• 15:39
  make a calculation that goes against every self preservation instinct
• 15:42
  regarding physical injury, but she chooses.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: The pavement over the predator. She opens the door and
• 15:48
  tries to throw herself out. He grabs her arm. The
• 15:51
  transcript details that she is literally dragged along the concrete
• 15:55
  of Interstate forty five for miles as the truck continues moving.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: It's unbelieved.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: She is fighting, twisting, doing everything she can to break
• 16:03
  his grip while her body is taking immense damage from.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: The road yeah severe road rash.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: Finally she breaks free. She tumbles onto the highway. She's battered, bruised,
• 16:13
  and severely traumatized, but she is alive.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: And her decision to jump is the catalyst that eventually
• 16:18
  unravels the entire mystery. But the investigation immediately hits a
• 16:22
  roadblock regarding memory.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Right because of the trauma.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly because Sandra endured such extreme, sustained terror, her conscious
• 16:31
  mind was overwhelmed. When the Webster police attempt to interview
• 16:35
  her in the hospital, she can recall very few specific
• 16:37
  details about the man's face or the interior.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Of his truck, which leads the investigators to use a
• 16:43
  technique that I find absolutely fascinating, forensic hypnosis. The Webster
• 16:48
  police bring in a woman named Sue dietrich Nance, who
• 16:51
  is a former police chief and a trained forensic hypnotist.
• 16:54
  Can you explain how this actually works, because I think
• 16:57
  a lot of people associate hypnosis with like age tricks
• 17:00
  or swinging pocket watches. But this is a serious investigative tool, right, It's.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Not entertainment at all. Forensic hypnosis, particularly the cognitive interview
• 17:09
  techniques utilized in the nineteen nineties, is entirely different from
• 17:12
  stage hypnosis. Okay, The underlying psychological principle is based on
• 17:16
  how the brain processes trauma. When a person is subjected
• 17:20
  to a life threatening event, the amygdala, which is the
• 17:23
  brain's fear center, it basically hijacks the system.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: It goes into overdrives.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the conscious mind essentially throws up heavy blast doors.
• 17:31
  It locks away the granular sensory details of the traumatic
• 17:34
  event because processing all that data in real time while
• 17:37
  trying to survive is simply too overwhelming.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: So the brain records the information, but the witness just
• 17:43
  can't access it.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly the sensory data like the smells, the sounds, the
• 17:48
  visual details of the environment. They are stored in the
• 17:51
  subconscious memory banks. The conscious mind, however, is too hypervigilant
• 17:56
  and traumatized to retrieve them. So the goal of forensic
• 17:59
  hypnosis is to induce a state of profound physical and
• 18:03
  mental relaxation. By calming that hyper aroused conscious mind, the
• 18:07
  hypnotist can gently guide the witness to access those subconscious
• 18:11
  files without triggering a panic response.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: So soon Ants asks Sandra to mentally place herself back
• 18:18
  inside the cab with a moving truck. She asks her
• 18:20
  to visualize looking around the interior, and the details Sandra
• 18:24
  pulls from her subconscious are astonishing.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: They really are.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: She described the dashboard and then she focuses on the glovebox.
• 18:30
  She tells the hypnotist that there's a piece of paper
• 18:33
  resting on the glovebox with numbers written on it.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: And the level of specificity is what makes forensic hypnosis
• 18:38
  so valuable when it works. Sandra doesn't just see a
• 18:42
  piece of paper. She tells Sumantz that she can only
• 18:44
  read four or five of.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: The numbers, which is such a specific detail, right.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: And why? Because there are post it notes, overlapping the paper,
• 18:52
  partially obscuring the rest of the digits.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: That is not a detail. A traumatized brain just invents
• 18:58
  overlapping post notes. Soon, NaNs also hypnotizes the convenience store
• 19:04
  clerk who had seen the truck park next to Sandra's car,
• 19:08
  extracting a more detailed physical description of the driver, and this.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: Leads to a critical moment of cross jurisdictional communication. A
• 19:15
  few weeks later, soon NaNs happens to be speaking with
• 19:18
  the police chief of Friendswood.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: That's the department investigating the murder of twelve year old
• 19:22
  Lauris mother.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: Yes, the friends Would chief is discussing their prime suspect,
• 19:26
  an individual they believe is responsible but cannot definitively link
• 19:30
  to the crime. He describes the man and his vehicle.
• 19:33
  Sue goes home and in the middle of the night,
• 19:35
  she wakes up with a realization it just clicks. The
• 19:38
  description of the Friendswood suspect perfectly aligns with the man
• 19:41
  Sandra Sapah described under hypnosis.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: She contacts the Webster police. Immediately, they locate the suspect,
• 19:47
  They impound his truck, and they place him in a
• 19:49
  live lineup, Sandra s Paul looks through the glass and
• 19:53
  immediately identifies.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Him just zero hesitation.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: And when the crime scene investigators search the interior of
• 19:59
  his truck, what do they find resting on the glovedocks.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: A piece of paper with a phone number written on it,
• 20:05
  partially covered by overlapping post it notes, leaving exactly four
• 20:10
  or five digits visible. Wow, it was a perfect match
• 20:13
  to the subconscious memory retrieved during the hypnosis session.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: The man they arrest is William Lewis Reese. The transcript
• 20:20
  provides a lot of background on him, and he represents
• 20:23
  a terrifying archetype. He isn't a social outcast living in
• 20:27
  a dark basement, not at all.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Reese is thirty eight years old at the time of
• 20:31
  his arrest. He is a heavy equipment operator and occasionally
• 20:34
  shoes horses, but the most critical aspect of his background
• 20:37
  is his profession. Right he drives a heavy duty commercial
• 20:41
  truck hauling a low boy trailer. Those are those massive
• 20:45
  flatbed trailers used to transport bulldozers, excavators, and other heavy construction.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Machinery, which means his entire life is transient. By design.
• 20:53
  He is paid to drive back and forth across Texas,
• 20:56
  crossing state lines into Oklahoma, moving massive equipment from jobs
• 21:00
  to job site. He has a perfectly legitimate, built in
• 21:03
  reason to be moving constantly along the interstate corridors.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: And his criminal history is a massive red flag that
• 21:10
  highlights systemic failures. He was not a first time offender
• 21:13
  in nineteen ninety seven. Back in nineteen eighty six, Reese
• 21:16
  was convicted of two separate violent rapes in Oklahoma.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, so he's already a known violent offender.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Yes, he was handed a twenty five year prison sentence. However,
• 21:27
  due to various parole guidelines and prison crowding issues prevalent
• 21:31
  at the time, he only served nine and a.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Half years out of twenty five.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: He was released in nineteen ninety six.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: He serves less than ten years for two violent sexual assaults,
• 21:40
  gets out, and immediately blends back into society. The investigators
• 21:45
  in the documentary describe him as the kind of guy
• 21:47
  you'd sit next to at a bar and drink a
• 21:48
  beer with.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Very unassuming.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: He was polite to the jail guards. He offered to
• 21:52
  paint the jail showers so he could have access to
• 21:54
  warm water. He was a highly calculating manipulator who understood
• 21:58
  exactly how to wear the mask of normals.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: There was also a second survivor mentioned in the sources.
• 22:03
  An unnamed twenty two year old woman was at a
• 22:06
  gas station in North Houston late at night. Shortly after
• 22:09
  pulling out, she felt her car driving strangely.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Another suspected stage flat.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: Tire exactly a truck pulled up behind her. A man
• 22:19
  she later identified as William Reese approached her vehicle. She
• 22:23
  was dragged into a nearby wooded area, severely beaten, strangled,
• 22:27
  and sexually assaulted. She told investigators she believed he only
• 22:31
  stopped the attack because her body went limp and he
• 22:33
  assumed she was dead. She survived, escaped, and also identified
• 22:37
  him in a lineup.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: So because of these incredible survivors, William Reese goes on
• 22:41
  trial in nineteen ninety eight for the kidnapping of Sandra Sapaw.
• 22:45
  He is convicted. The judge sentences him to sixty years
• 22:48
  in a Texas prison. The transcript notes that when the
• 22:51
  sixty year sentence was read aloud in court, Rhes stood
• 22:54
  there completely cold.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: He didn't flinch, no reaction at all. But he is
• 22:58
  removed from society. The imtiate, the threat of his transient
• 23:01
  hunting is neutralized.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, So I struggle to understand this next part, and
• 23:04
  I'm sure anyone listening is wondering the exact same thing.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: It's the big question, right.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: If William Reese is identified as a violent serial predator
• 23:12
  in nineteen ninety eight, if he is the prime suspect
• 23:14
  in Laura Smithers murder and friends would and if he
• 23:17
  is physically locked in a cage serving a sixty year sentence,
• 23:21
  how do the murders of Laura, Kelly, Tiffany and Jessica
• 23:24
  remain officially unsolved for almost twenty more years. Why didn't
• 23:28
  the system connect the dots while he was in prison?
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: It is arguably the most frustrating question in this entire narrative,
• 23:35
  but answering it requires us to look at the realities
• 23:38
  of law enforcement infrastructure in the late nineteen nineties. Okay, Today,
• 23:42
  we assume that if a person is arrested for a
• 23:44
  violent crime in Texas, a detective in Oklahoma can just
• 23:47
  type a name into a centralized database and instantly see
• 23:50
  his modus operandi, his vehicle descriptions, his known associates, right
• 23:54
  like on TV, exactly but that level of instantaneous, interconnected
• 23:59
  data sharing it simply did not exist in nineteen ninety seven,
• 24:01
  so it's.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: A structural bottleneck. Databases were siloed.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: Highly siloed. The National Crime Information Center or NCIC existed,
• 24:10
  but it was often limited to basic warrant information and
• 24:13
  criminal history, not the nuanced behavioral profiling required to link
• 24:18
  disparate cold cases. Furthermore, the burden of proof required to
• 24:22
  formally charge someone with capital murder is exceptionally high.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: But Friendswood police knew he was a strong suspect for Laura.
• 24:30
  The transcript says they had eyewitnesses placing his specific truck
• 24:34
  in her neighborhood on the morning she fanished. They did. Furthermore,
• 24:38
  he was working a construction job in that very neighborhood,
• 24:41
  but his boss had sent him home early that day
• 24:43
  because of the rain. He had the opportunity, He had
• 24:46
  the proximity.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: But proximity and opportunity are circumstantial right, They do not
• 24:50
  equate to a convention beyond a reasonable doubt in a
• 24:53
  court of law. Investigators had no physical evidence linking him
• 24:57
  directly to Laura's body. They didn't have his DNA on
• 24:59
  her and have a confession, so their hands were tied,
• 25:02
  and the same evidentiary hurdles existed for the other jurisdictions.
• 25:06
  Denton Police meticulously processed Kelly Cox's abandoned vehicle. They lifted fingerprints,
• 25:12
  They compared those prints to William Reese.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: They found no match because he was careful.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: He was highly disciplined in his forensic countermeasures. He didn't
• 25:21
  leave the kind of biological breadcrumbs that nineteen nineties technology
• 25:24
  could definitively trace. Add to that his transient profession hauling bulldozers,
• 25:30
  and you have absolute jurisdictional chaos.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: Yes, in nightmare for detectives.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: He would hunt in Dent and dump evidence miles away
• 25:37
  and be working a construction site in Houston the next day.
• 25:40
  For local detectives, it's like trying to assemble a puzzle
• 25:43
  when you only hold three pieces and the other pieces
• 25:45
  are sitting in evidence lockers in three different departments across
• 25:48
  two states, and.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: None of those departments know the other pieces even exist exactly,
• 25:53
  So the investigation effectively stalls. The calendar turns. Yeah, nineteen
• 25:56
  ninety eight becomes two thousand, then two thousand and five,
• 25:59
  then two thousy ten. Reese is sitting in a Texas
• 26:02
  prison cell, painting walls, fixing showers, getting older. Meanwhile, four
• 26:07
  families are frozen in time.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Just waiting.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: They have no answers. Jessica Kaine's family doesn't even have
• 26:12
  a body to bury. They just have an empty bedroom.
• 26:15
  But what William Rees didn't account for is the relentless,
• 26:19
  immovable force of a grieving mother. The case eventually thaws,
• 26:24
  and it starts in Oklahoma.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: If we are discussing tenacity, we have to look at
• 26:28
  Kathy Debris, the mother of Tiffany Johnstone.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Oh. She is incredible.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: She is described as a force of nature. She absolutely
• 26:35
  refused to let her daughter's murder become just another dusty
• 26:39
  file in an archive. She stated this mama wasn't going
• 26:42
  to give up.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: And she didn't.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Year after year, On every single anniversary of Tiffany's disappearance,
• 26:48
  Kathy would mobilize. She would contact local news stations to
• 26:51
  keep the story in the press. She would call the
• 26:54
  Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation the OSBI. She would demand
• 26:58
  to speak to supervisors. She would add, are you getting
• 27:00
  any leads who is currently assigned to this case.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: She became a permanent fixture in the conscience of the agency.
• 27:06
  She wouldn't let them look away, and finally, in twenty twelve,
• 27:09
  her sheer persistence yields a major result. She calls the
• 27:13
  new director at the OSBI, and his response is, I've
• 27:17
  been waiting on you. I have an agent that I'm
• 27:19
  going to assign to work exclusively on Tiffany's case.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: And that agent is Lynn Williams. He pulls out every
• 27:25
  single box of physical evidence and starts building the profile
• 27:28
  from scratch.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: As Agent Williams is meticulously reconstructing the timeline, the OSBI
• 27:33
  receives a tip suggesting they look closely at William Reese,
• 27:36
  who is serving his time in Texas. And this is
• 27:39
  where the documentary transcript reveals a detail so deeply disturbing
• 27:43
  it feels like a plot point from a thriller. It
• 27:45
  really does, but it is entirely factual. Kathy Daubry, the
• 27:49
  mother of the victim, actually knew William Reese's mother.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: The proximity is just staggering. In their small Oklahoma town,
• 27:56
  Reese's mother took in ironing to make extra money. He
• 28:00
  had actually hired Reese's mother to iron her work uniforms
• 28:02
  to help save money to pay for Tiffany's wedding.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: It's so unsettling.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: The transcript states that Reese's mother even ironed the clothes
• 28:09
  that Tiffany was ultimately buried in.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: The psychological intrusion of that detail is horrific. The mother
• 28:15
  of the killer is physically preparing the burial garments for
• 28:19
  the victim. It's awful. And it gets even more twisted.
• 28:22
  Cathy had been introduced to William Reese by his mother
• 28:25
  shortly after he was released from prison in nineteen ninety six.
• 28:29
  The family had completely brushed off his previous rate convictions
• 28:33
  as if they were minor misunderstanding.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they downplayed it.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Then, a few days after Tiffany's murdered, while Kathy's house
• 28:40
  is overflowing with grieving relatives and friends, the phone rings
• 28:45
  and it's William Reese.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: And keep in mind, at this point, he is not
• 28:48
  a public suspect. His name has not been connected to
• 28:51
  the murder in the press whatsoever.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Unprompted, he calls Kathy. He offers his condolences regarding Tiffany,
• 28:58
  and then explicitly tells her, I just want you to
• 29:00
  know I didn't do it.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: It's chilling.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: He claimed his mother had called him to tell him
• 29:03
  the news, and he just felt the need to reach
• 29:05
  out and deny involvement. Kathy was in such a state
• 29:09
  of shock from planning the funeral that the bizarre nature
• 29:12
  of the call didn't fully register her until much later.
• 29:15
  But looking back at it, well, the audacity is staggering.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: It is pure malignant narcissism.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: He inserted himself into the center of her grief just
• 29:23
  to test the waters, to gauge with the family or
• 29:26
  the police might.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: Know exactly, and Kathy later mentioned her belief that Reese's
• 29:31
  mother likely suspected her son was responsible. For years, on
• 29:35
  the anniversary of Tiffany's death, Reese's mother would visit the
• 29:38
  cemetery and leave small trinkets on Tiffany's grave. Wow, when
• 29:42
  Reese's mother passed away, the trinkets stopped appearing. It really
• 29:46
  highlights the invisible, toxic connections that tethered the predator to
• 29:49
  the very community he preyed upon.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: While the OSBI is looking hard at these connections, they
• 29:54
  still face the same problem they had in nineteen ninety seven.
• 29:57
  They need physical evidence, and this is where the passage
• 30:00
  of time, which had been the enemy of the investigation
• 30:02
  for nearly two decades finally becomes its greatest asset. We
• 30:07
  reached the year twenty fifteen.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: Eighteen years after the murders, eighteen years of quiet exponential
• 30:13
  leaps in forensic science.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Agent Lynn Williams takes the physical evidence that has been
• 30:18
  sitting at a temperature controlled locker since nineteen ninety seven. Specifically,
• 30:22
  he takes the autopsy swabs collected from Tiffany's body by
• 30:25
  the medical examiner, and he submits them to the modern
• 30:27
  crime lab. Walk me through why this works in twenty
• 30:30
  fifteen when it failed in nineteen ninety seven, what exactly
• 30:34
  changed in the science.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety seven, DNA profiling often relied on techniques.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: Like RFLP okay, RFLP right.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: And that required relatively large, pristine samples of biological material,
• 30:45
  like a visible pool of blood or a large amount
• 30:48
  of semen. If a sample was degraded by the elements,
• 30:51
  or if it was just microscopic trace cells transferred by touch,
• 30:54
  the nineteen ninety seven technology simply couldn't extract a readable profile.
• 30:58
  The result would come back inconclusive.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: But by twenty fifteen the lab is using different methods precisely.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: By twenty fifteen, forensic scientists are utilizing advanced polymerase chain
• 31:06
  reaction or PCR, combined with short ten and repeat analysis.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, PCR, I've heard of that.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. PCR acts like a molecular photocopier. It allows scientists
• 31:16
  to take a heavily degraded microscopic fragment of DNA, perhaps
• 31:20
  just a few skin cells left behind during a struggle,
• 31:23
  and amplify it millions of times until they have a
• 31:25
  sample large enough to test.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: That's incredible.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: When the OSBI lab applied these modern techniques to the
• 31:30
  nineteen ninety seven autopsy swabs, they isolated a clear male
• 31:34
  DNA profile.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: They run that profile, and they get a definitive match
• 31:38
  to William lws Ree's. The science finally anchors him to
• 31:42
  the scene of the crime. The biological truth of what
• 31:44
  happened in that horse trailer is undeniable, and.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: The beauty of this investigation is the synergy. While the
• 31:50
  OSBI is cracking the genetic code in Oklahoma, detectives in
• 31:53
  Texas are simultaneously tearing apart the physical paper.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: Trail, which is such a contrast.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: It is friends with police led by their own cold
• 32:01
  case reviewers are reevaluating Lauras mothers case. They open up
• 32:05
  a box of evidence that was gathered during a consent
• 32:07
  surge of Reese's truck and residence way back in nineteen
• 32:10
  ninety seven.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: Inside that box they find his physical telephone calling card records. Now,
• 32:16
  how did the calling card actually function back then, because
• 32:19
  it's crucial to how they track him.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: Before cell phones were ubiquitous, if you were a transient
• 32:24
  worker like Reese, and you needed to make a call
• 32:27
  from the road, you used a plastic calling card issued
• 32:30
  by your telecom company. It functioned essentially like a credit card.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Right, You'd punch in the numbers at a.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Payphone exactly, you pick up a public payphone, dial a
• 32:38
  toll free routing number, punch in your unique account pin,
• 32:42
  and then dial your destination number. The telecom company would
• 32:46
  then bild the cost of that call to your home
• 32:48
  phone account.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: It was a convenience system, but for a serial killer
• 32:52
  trying to remain a ghost, it was a massive vulnerability
• 32:56
  because the phone company log the exact time, the duration,
• 33:00
  and the precise physical location of the payphone every single
• 33:04
  time that peon was entered.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: Friends would police examine these dusty, eighteen year old paper records,
• 33:10
  and they literally map his hunting route across the country.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: This is like a GPS track. I made it paper.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The phone company's routing data shows Reese using public
• 33:18
  payphones in Oklahoma the day before Tiffany Johnston vanishes, placing
• 33:22
  him squarely in the vicinity of her abduction. Then the
• 33:25
  very next day, the records track his pin being used
• 33:28
  at payphones, moving rapidly south along the interstate back into Texas.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: It is the ultimate fusion of investigative eras you have
• 33:36
  advanced space age DNA profiling locking down the biological reality
• 33:41
  on a microscopic level, and simultaneously you have detectives manually
• 33:45
  tracing a route using a dusty box of nineteen nineties
• 33:48
  payphone receipts to prove his physical geographic movements.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: The trap finally snaps shut in.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: September twenty fifteen, the state of Oklahoma officially charges William
• 33:58
  Reese with the kidnapping and murder of Tiffany Johnston, and
• 34:01
  because of his prior felony convictions in the extreme brutality
• 34:04
  of the crime, Oklahoma prosecutors announced they are seeking the
• 34:07
  death penalty.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: That single legal strategy, putting the needle on the table
• 34:11
  changes the entire psychological dynamic of the case. For twenty years,
• 34:14
  Rees operated with the belief that he was in complete control,
• 34:17
  But when he realizes that Oklahoma intends to execute him,
• 34:21
  his primary instinct shifts to self preservation. He is sitting
• 34:24
  in his Texas prison cell and he decides to use
• 34:27
  the only leverage he has left to negotiate his way
• 34:30
  off death row.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: His leverage is the location of the bodies and the
• 34:33
  unclosed cases. In February twenty sixteen, Texas Ranger James Holland
• 34:38
  visits Reese at the Huntsville Prison. The transcript describes this
• 34:42
  encounter perfectly. Ranger Holland doesn't walk in and start interrogating him.
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: No, he's very strategic.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: He walks into the interview room, sits down at the table,
• 34:49
  and remains completely silent. He simply lays four photographs face
• 34:53
  up on the table Laura Smither, Kelly Cox, Tiffany Johnston,
• 34:58
  Jessica Kane. Holland looks at Reas and says, Bill, if
• 35:00
  you want to help yourself, I need to know who
• 35:02
  I need to go talk to, meaning which district attorneys
• 35:05
  do I need to contact to arrange a plea deal
• 35:07
  for you.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Reese's physical reaction to those photographs is incredibly revealing. He
• 35:12
  doesn't point to one or two of them. He places
• 35:14
  his hand completely over all four photographs.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: Ranger Holland asks him to clarify, what does that mean?
• 35:21
  And Reee simply replies all of them, all of them
• 35:24
  in a single gesture. He acknowledges responsibility for two decades
• 35:29
  of unimaginable agony.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Reese agrees to cooperate and lead investigators to the remains
• 35:34
  of the girls who were never found. He is temporarily
• 35:37
  transferred out of prison into the custody of the Friendswood
• 35:40
  City Jail. He directs a massive convoy of law enforcement
• 35:45
  to Brazoria County, Texas, to an open field where he
• 35:48
  claims he buried Kelly Cox. They bring in excavators, they
• 35:52
  start digging massive trenches. Days go by and they find
• 35:55
  absolutely nothing.
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: And you can imagine what the police are thinking.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: Right. Investigators begin to suspect he is playing a psychological
• 36:02
  game just to get a change of scenery from his cell.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: However, one investigator noted that Reese appeared genuinely anxious when
• 36:08
  the excavations turned up empty. He wasn't smirking, He wasn't
• 36:11
  enjoying it. No, he needed the police to find those
• 36:14
  bodies because producing the remains was the currency he needed
• 36:17
  to buy his way out of a lethal injection.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: So they pivot the search. Reese gives them a second location,
• 36:23
  a massive field in southeast Houston near Hobby Airport, where
• 36:27
  he says he buried Jessica Kane. They move the heavy equipment.
• 36:31
  Reese is standing out in the Texas heat and shackles
• 36:34
  watching the excavators dig. They tear down an old barn.
• 36:37
  They go seven feet deep, Still nothing.
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: And the tension is just building.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Re starts getting visibly frustrated. He looks at the search
• 36:45
  grid map, curses and tells the detective they're wasting their time.
• 36:50
  He points toward a specific fence line and says, look,
• 36:53
  I could not have driven my bulldozer through that fence
• 36:55
  line if I wanted to.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: And that spontaneous complaint is the slip of the tongue
• 36:59
  that breaks the search up. Really, yes, The investigator looks
• 37:02
  at the fence line Reese's pointing to and realizes it
• 37:05
  is incredibly flimsy. A bulldozer could easily drive right through it.
• 37:09
  The investigator instantly understands the cognitive error Reese's making. His
• 37:13
  memory is overlaying the current landscape with the landscape as
• 37:16
  it existed in nineteen ninety seven.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, he's looking at the wrong fence.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: He is looking at the wrong fence line.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: They adjust the entire search grid based on that slip up.
• 37:25
  They dig for a couple more hours, and they finally
• 37:28
  unearthed the remains of Jessica Kane. One of the investigators
• 37:32
  looked up at the sky and felt a profound sense
• 37:35
  of relief. He actually turned to William Reese and said thank.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: You, and Reese's reaction Reese.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Just stared back with a dead, emotionless expression. A week later,
• 37:47
  they returned to the first site in Brasoria County, expand
• 37:50
  their parameters, and they find the remains of Kelly Cox.
• 37:53
  The definitive confirmation at the site was finding her gold
• 37:56
  rope bracelet mixed in the dirt.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: Bringing those young women home was a monumental logistical achievement
• 38:02
  and a necessary agonizing step toward reality for the families.
• 38:05
  But as the legal proceedings move forward, the transcript gives
• 38:08
  us access to the audio recordings of Riese's confessions to
• 38:11
  Ranger Holland as a psychological profile. Listening to his explanations
• 38:14
  is profoundly disturbing.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: The narcissism on display in those tapes is off the charts.
• 38:20
  He gives what you could call a half confession. He
• 38:23
  admits that the women are dead, and he admits that
• 38:25
  his hands cause their deaths, but he heavily sanitizes the
• 38:29
  sequence of events to frame himself as a victim of circumstance.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: He takes no real accountability none.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: He completely denies committing sexual assault against any of the
• 38:38
  Texas victims, claiming he only assaulted Tiffany. And listen to
• 38:42
  how he describes the murders themselves.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: He projects the instigation of violence entirely onto the victims.
• 38:48
  In the case of Kelly Cox, he tells Ranger Holland
• 38:51
  that he was at a grocery store, opened to truck
• 38:53
  door too fast and accidentally bumped into her, causing her
• 38:56
  to spill a soda.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: A spilled soda.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: He claims that Kelly, a young mother and psychology student,
• 39:01
  became enraged, started cursing at him, and hit him with
• 39:04
  a plastic bottle, which caused him to quote unquote, snap.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: It's absurd and with Jessica Kane. He claims he was
• 39:11
  eating at Bennegin's, heard people arguing in the parking lot,
• 39:14
  and that Jessica supposedly slammed her car door into his jeep.
• 39:19
  He claims they got into a shouting match, she flipped
• 39:22
  him off, he drove away onto Interstate forty five, and
• 39:25
  this seventeen year old high school girl supposedly tailed his
• 39:28
  massive truck, pulled over behind him on a dark highway,
• 39:31
  and got out to continue yelling at him, and that's
• 39:34
  when he struck her.
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: And his narrative regarding Tiffany Johnston is equally detached from reality.
• 39:40
  He claimed he accidentally sprayed her with water at the
• 39:42
  car wash, she yelled at him, they got into a
• 39:44
  physical altercation inside his horse trailer, and then inexplicably, she
• 39:48
  initiated consensual sex for suddenly hitting him in the head
• 39:51
  with a heavy iron horseshoe, which forced him to strangle
• 39:54
  her in self defense.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: What goes wrong in a human brain to construct a
• 39:58
  narrative like that? I mean, he's confised to murder, so
• 40:00
  he knows he's caught. Why lie about this? Build soda
• 40:03
  in the horseshoe?
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: What you are hearing in those interrogation tapes. Is the
• 40:06
  core architecture of psychopathy mixed with malignant narcissism. Even when
• 40:12
  he is completely cornered, even when he is actively attempting
• 40:15
  to negotiate for his own life, he is psychologically incapable
• 40:20
  of accepting full, unvarnished culpability.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: He have to be the victim.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: He must construct a scenario where the victim provoked the violence.
• 40:27
  He has to convince himself and the detective that the
• 40:31
  victim initiated the conflict. It is a deeply warped defense
• 40:35
  mechanism designed to preserve his internal self image. He cannot
• 40:39
  admit that he stalked and hunted them like prey.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: He minimizes the predatory nature exactly.
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: He reframes cold blooded, calculated murder as an unfortunate escalation
• 40:48
  of a mutual misunderstanding.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: It's all about maintaining control over the narrative. The most
• 40:53
  terrifying moment for me in the entire transcript occurred out
• 40:56
  in the field while they were digging for Jessica. One
• 40:59
  of the civilian searchers looked at Reese, who was surrounded
• 41:01
  by police and heavy machinery, and asked him a very
• 41:03
  human question. He asked, William, what is going on in
• 41:07
  your mind right now? Do you have any remorse? And
• 41:11
  Reese looked him dead in the eyes and said, in
• 41:13
  a perfectly flat conversational tone, mister, you probably won't understand this,
• 41:18
  but people like us, we don't have remorse.
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: That statement encapsulates the clinical reality of a psychopath.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: That quote just stops you in your tracks because society
• 41:28
  operates under the baseline assumption that deep down everybody has
• 41:32
  a conscience. We believe that if you do something horrific,
• 41:35
  the guilt will eventually eat away at you. We assume
• 41:38
  there is a moral floor that everyone eventually hits for him,
• 41:41
  But Reese is explicitly stating that the floor does not
• 41:44
  exist for him. He's fundamentally wired differently. He feels absolutely
• 41:48
  nothing for the lives he extinguished or the families he destroyed.
• 41:52
  To him, they were just objects that caused a temporary inconvenience.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: It's chilling.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: It is terrifying because it forces us to accept that
• 41:59
  monsters aren't hiding in the shadows. They're wearing work boots
• 42:01
  and drinking beer at the end of the lark.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: And that complete absence of remorse is precisely why the
• 42:06
  state of Oklahoma refused to play his game. While Reese
• 42:10
  was confessing in Texas, desperately hoping to secure a global
• 42:14
  plea deal that would guarantee life in prison, the Oklahoma
• 42:17
  County District attorney flat out refused to negotiated. They wanted
• 42:21
  a trial for the murder of Tiffany Johnston. They wanted
• 42:24
  a jury of his peers to hear the evidence. But
• 42:27
  the judicial process is excruciatingly slow.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it took five long years to finally get him
• 42:32
  into an Oklahoma courtroom.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: They cycled through six different judges, He went through five
• 42:37
  defense attorneys, one of whom quit just a week before
• 42:40
  the trial was scheduled to begin. Then the COVID nineteen
• 42:43
  pandemic shut down the court systems, delaying the process even further.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: For five years, Reese sat in the Oklahoma County jail
• 42:50
  awaiting trial, and incredibly, during that time, he managed to
• 42:54
  manipulate the system to get himself assigned to the medical
• 42:57
  floor as a trustee.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: This was a privileged position that allowed him to be
• 43:01
  out of his cell, walk the floor, and socialized with
• 43:04
  staff and other inmates. He absolutely hated the idea of
• 43:07
  solitary confinement. He wanted to be comfortable.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: Finally, in May of twenty twenty one, the capital murder
• 43:13
  trial begins, and this is where the prosecution utilizes a
• 43:17
  highly specific and fascinating facet of Oklahoma law to completely
• 43:21
  dismantle Reese's sanitize she provoked me defense narrative.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: Explain how this legal loophole works, because it seems to
• 43:29
  be the lynchpin of the prosecution's strategy.
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: In the vast majority of jurisdictions across the United States,
• 43:35
  a criminal trial is bifurcated into two phases. You have
• 43:39
  the guilt innocence phase and the penalty phase. Right during
• 43:42
  the guilt innocence phase, when the jury is strictly deciding
• 43:46
  if the defendant committed the crime in question, prosecutors are
• 43:49
  generally prohibited from introducing evidence of the defendant's prior unrelated crimes.
• 43:53
  The legal reasoning is that you do not want a
• 43:56
  jury convicting a man of murder simply because they hear
• 43:58
  he was a terrible person who committed assaults ten years ago.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: That's the specific crime.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: You saved the prior bad acts for the penalty phase
• 44:10
  to argue for a harsher sentence.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: But Oklahoma law provides an exception.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, Oklahoma has a legal provision that allows prosecutors to
• 44:17
  introduce testimony about previous similar crimes during the guilt innocence phase,
• 44:22
  specifically if that evidence establishes a clear pattern of predatory behavior, intent,
• 44:27
  or a signature modus operandi.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: And the prosecution used that provision to its absolute maximum
• 44:32
  effect for eight days. They paraded a steady stream of
• 44:36
  survivors and grieving family members before the jury. The women
• 44:39
  who had survived his violent raves back in nineteen eighty
• 44:42
  six took the stand. Sandra seppaal who jumped out of
• 44:45
  his moving truck in the interstate, testified that had to.
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: Be incredibly powerful.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: The families of Laura, Kelly, and Jessica sat in the gallery.
• 44:53
  The jury listened to hours of the interrogation tapes. They
• 44:56
  saw exactly how we operated across two decades. It completely
• 44:59
  destroyed his defense that Tiffany hitting him with a horseshoe
• 45:02
  caused an accidental death. The jury saw the calculated, repetitive,
• 45:05
  cold blooded nature of his hunting.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: One of the family members noted the incredible courage it
• 45:09
  took for the survivors to testify. Reliving that trauma on
• 45:13
  a public stand facing the man who tried to kill
• 45:15
  them is agonizing, but the survivors explicitly stated they did
• 45:20
  it for Laura. They did it for Kelly, Tiffany and Jessica,
• 45:24
  the women who could no longer speak for themselves.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: The strategy worked flawlessly. After three and a half weeks
• 45:30
  of trial, featuring over twenty witnesses, the jury retired to deliberate.
• 45:35
  The prosecution warned the families to brace themselves, suggesting it
• 45:38
  might take five or six hours to reach a verdict
• 45:40
  in a complex capital case. The families walked outside to
• 45:44
  get some fresh air.
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: But they didn't have to wait that long, did they.
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: Less than an hour later, their phone started ringing frantically.
• 45:51
  The jury was already back less than an hour, guilty
• 45:54
  on all counts.
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: The brevity of that deliberation speaks volumes about the overwhelming
• 45:58
  weight of the forensic and behave evidence. Shortly after the
• 46:02
  guilty verdict, the jury recommended the death penalty. In August
• 46:06
  twenty twenty one, William Lewis Reese was formally sentenced to
• 46:09
  death by lethal injection by the state of Oklahoma. He
• 46:13
  was transported to the State Penitentiary in McAllister, where he
• 46:16
  now spends twenty two hours a day locked in a
• 46:19
  solitary cell on death row.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: His trustee privileges are.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: Gone, gone, socializing is over.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: The families finally got the verdict they had fought for,
• 46:27
  but the concept of closure is largely a myth. The
• 46:31
  trial ends, the galle falls, the cameras pack up, but
• 46:34
  the void left by these women remains. Yet what is
• 46:37
  so profoundly moving about the end of this transcript is
• 46:40
  how these families chose to fill that void. It's inspiring
• 46:43
  look at the legacy they built. Consider Kelly Cox's daughter, Alexis.
• 46:47
  She was nineteen months old when her mother was taken.
• 46:49
  She was raised by her grandparents. She actually ended up
• 46:52
  attending the University of North Texas, the exact same campus
• 46:54
  where mother vanished.
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: Alexis's journey is a testament to incredible fortitude. When the
• 46:59
  truth finally came out in twenty sixteen, when Reese confessed
• 47:03
  and they recovered Kelly's remains, Alexis was twenty years old.
• 47:07
  She was the exact same age her mother was when
• 47:09
  she was murdered.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: That has to be so heavy to process.
• 47:12
  Speaker 2: The revelation triggered a severe mental health crisis for her.
• 47:16
  It shattered her understanding of her own history, but she
• 47:19
  fought her way through that trauma with intensive therapy, and
• 47:22
  today she is a vocal advocate for mental health awareness.
• 47:25
  She refuses to let William Reese's darkness serve as the
• 47:28
  defining narrative of her.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: Life and look at Laura Smithers's parents, Bob and Gay.
• 47:33
  The sheer scale of the community response to Laura's disappearance
• 47:37
  inspired them to found the Laura Recovery Center. It is
• 47:40
  a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing child abductions and organizing massive,
• 47:45
  highly efficient community searches for missing children.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: They turn their pain into action.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: The specific protocols developed in the crucible of searching for
• 47:53
  Laura fundamentally changed how law enforcement agencies nationally respond to
• 47:57
  missing children cases. During those critical early.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: Hours, they took their grief and institutionalized it. They created
• 48:04
  a permanent, systemic shield for other families, and there are quieter,
• 48:09
  deeply personal legacies detailed in the sources as well. Michael Barker,
• 48:14
  who served as a volunteer director at the Laura Recovery Center,
• 48:18
  felt compelled to help search for Jessica Kane. He spent
• 48:21
  years pouring over Jessica's personal writings and journals, desperately looking
• 48:25
  for any clue regarding her state of mind.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: This detail gave me absolute chills. Michael reads an entry
• 48:32
  Jessica wrote less than two weeks before she disappeared. She
• 48:35
  was writing about sitting at a table looking at candlelight,
• 48:38
  and she described having a vision of horses, country crows,
• 48:41
  and being alone.
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: It's incredibly eerie.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: Less than two weeks later, she is murdered and buried
• 48:46
  by a man who shoot horses for a living in
• 48:48
  an isolated rural pasture, where she remained alone in the
• 48:51
  dirt for nineteen years.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: That passage haunted Michael Barker so deeply that he started
• 48:57
  waking up in the middle of the night with those
• 48:58
  words echoing in his head. He eventually channeled that profound
• 49:02
  emotional connection into songwriting. He wrote a song using those
• 49:06
  exact words, horses, country crows, and being alone. It became
• 49:11
  his method of processing the immense secondary trauma associated with
• 49:15
  the search.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: When we step back and look at the entirety of
• 49:18
  this twenty four year nightmare, what does it all mean?
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: It means that while the predator's singular goal was destruction, anonymity,
• 49:24
  and control, he ultimately failed to extinguish the light of
• 49:27
  the women he targeted. The families alchemized their unimaginable, paralyzing
• 49:32
  grief into systemic protection for others. Absolutely through nonprofit foundations,
• 49:37
  through mental health advocacy, through relentless decades long pressure on
• 49:41
  the justice system, they ensured that Laura, Kelly, Tiffany, and
• 49:45
  Jessica are remembered not just for the darkness of their
• 49:47
  final moments, but for the profound, lasting impact they had
• 49:51
  on the world. They forced the forensic and legal systems
• 49:54
  to evolve.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: We have covered a massive amount of ground today. We
• 49:58
  explored how forarenic hypnosis, I pass a traumatized conscious mind
• 50:02
  to unlock a subconscious memory of overlapping post it notes.
• 50:06
  We analyzed how the evolution of DNA extraction techniques finally
• 50:10
  caught up to degraded biological evidence left behind in a
• 50:13
  nineteen ninety seven horse trailer.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: It's amazing science.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: We saw how dusty telecom records mapped a killer's route
• 50:19
  across state lines, and we witness the relentless, unyielding advocacy
• 50:23
  of mothers like Kathy Doughbry, who simply refused to let
• 50:27
  her daughter be forgotten. It took a convergence of all
• 50:30
  these elements to finally put William Lewis Reese in the cage.
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: He is currently sitting on death row in Oklahoma pursuing
• 50:36
  his standard appeals, but the state of Texas still holds
• 50:40
  pending murder charges against him. For Laura, Kelly and Jessica,
• 50:43
  those jurisdictions are waiting, holding those charges like an insurance
• 50:47
  policy to ensure that no matter what happens in the
• 50:48
  appellate courts, he never walks free again.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: If there is one practical, everyday takeaway from the families
• 50:55
  who endured this ordeal, it is the vital importance of
• 50:59
  situation awareness. Kelly Cox's mother articulated it perfectly. She wants
• 51:04
  people to look at the memorial dedicated to Kelly on
• 51:07
  the university campus, realize that she was taken in broad
• 51:10
  daylight near a police station, and understand the danger does
• 51:13
  not always look dangerous. Live your life to the absolute fullest,
• 51:17
  but stay aware, keep your head on a swivel. Yeah,
• 51:20
  trust your instincts.
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: And if I can leave you with one final, perhaps
• 51:24
  haunting concept to consider as you go about your week.
• 51:27
  When you examine the mechanics of these four crimes, the
• 51:30
  terrifying role of sheer random chance becomes unavoidable.
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: Oh definitely, think about.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: The intersection of predator and prey in this narrative. Think
• 51:39
  about the magnetic high a key that functioned perfectly for
• 51:41
  Kelly Cox on a Monday night, but inexplicably jammed on
• 51:44
  the afternoon of July fifteenth, stranding her in that parking
• 51:48
  lot at the exact moment William Reese was hunting. Think
• 51:51
  about the morning rain shower in Friendswood that caused Reese's
• 51:54
  construction boss to send him home early, putting his heavy
• 51:57
  truck in Laura Smithers's quiet neighborhood at the exact hour
• 52:01
  she decided to go for an uncharacteristic job to improve
• 52:04
  her ballet endurance.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: It is a matter of minutes, sometimes just seconds.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: It makes you wonder about the trajectory of your own life.
• 52:12
  How many miner seemingly inconsequential inconveniences. A misplaced set of
• 52:17
  car keys getting stuck behind a slow driver, A sudden
• 52:21
  rain shower that delays your exit from a building by
• 52:24
  five minutes. How many of those tiny, frustrating events have
• 52:28
  slightly altered your timeline on any given day, keeping you
• 52:31
  entirely out of the path of someone else's darkness.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: It's a profound reminder.
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: It's a reminder of the invisible near misses we navigate
• 52:38
  every single day, completely unaware of the trap doors that
• 52:41
  were just inches from opening beneath our feet.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: The next time I can't get my key to turn
• 52:45
  in the walk, I don't think I'm going to complain.
• 52:48
  Thank you for taking this deep dive with us. Stay
• 52:50
  safe out there.