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Suicide or Setup? The Google Searches That Exposed a Deadly Lie · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep Dive. I've got a stack
• 0:02
  of documents here today that are well, honestly, they're heavy,
• 0:07
  and I don't just mean the paperweight, although the police
• 0:10
  affiderts alone are thick enough to stop a door. We
• 0:13
  are heading to a specific zip code today. We are
• 0:17
  going to Huntersville, North Carolina.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this one sticks with you. It's one of those
• 0:21
  cases where the setting is almost a character in the story.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: It really is. So it's November tenth, twenty twenty five.
• 0:28
  We're looking at a place that feels familiar to almost
• 0:31
  all of us, even if you've never set foot in
• 0:33
  the Carolinas. You know the vibe I'm talking.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: About absolutely, the suburban dream.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: It's suburban peace. It's got those well manicured lawns that
• 0:40
  people obsess over on weekends. The American flags fluttering on
• 0:43
  the front porches, the two car garages, the whole nine yard,
• 0:47
  the whole thing. It's right near Lake Norman. It's the
• 0:49
  kind of place people move to specifically because they want
• 0:51
  to escape the noise and the grit of the city.
• 0:54
  It is the definition of safe. It is the definition
• 0:57
  of normal.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Which is exactly why it's the perfect setting for a
• 1:01
  horror story. That veneer of suburban peace is often what
• 1:05
  makes these stories so jarring when they break. We have
• 1:07
  the psychological expectation that crime happens in dark alleyways or
• 1:11
  gritty city centers. We don't expect to see crime scene
• 1:14
  tape on a cul de sac in a place like
• 1:16
  Hunter's Village, just it violates our sense of.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Order exactly, and that is exactly where we find ourselves. Monday,
• 1:22
  just before one PM, a call comes into nine to
• 1:25
  one one frantic call, a frantic call. It's a woman
• 1:28
  named Susan Michelle Perry. She's fifty four years old, and
• 1:32
  she tells the dispatcher something that sadly first responders here
• 1:35
  way way too often. She says, her husband, Joe Perry,
• 1:38
  has attempted suicide.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: And initially, looking at the surface, you can see why
• 1:43
  the system would treat it that way. You have a
• 1:45
  frantic spouse, a gunshot wound, a tragic ending to a.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Life seems straightforward enough.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Joe Perry was fifty eight. By all accounts, looking
• 1:54
  at the background checks and the neighbor statements we have here,
• 1:56
  he's a regular guy, hard working kind, no criminal record,
• 2:01
  just a man in his home office on a Monday.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: But and you knew there was a butt coming, or
• 2:06
  we wouldn't be doing a deep dive on this. What
• 2:08
  looked like a tragedy of mental health very quickly unraveled.
• 2:12
  And we aren't just talking about a little loose thread here. No,
• 2:15
  the whole sweater fell apart.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: It revealed something much much darker than a moment of despair,
• 2:20
  because as the police started to look closer, the suicide
• 2:24
  theory just didn't fit the physics of the room. And
• 2:26
  then when they looked at the digital evidence, the suicide
• 2:30
  theory didn't fit the psychology of the wife.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: And that's the core of what we're unpacking today. This
• 2:35
  isn't just a true crime story but a bad marriage.
• 2:37
  This is a story about our digital shadows. It's about
• 2:40
  how in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six, you
• 2:43
  cannot hide your intentions when you are carrying a device
• 2:46
  that literally tracks your every thought. We are going to
• 2:49
  look at how a Google search history became the new
• 2:51
  smoking gun.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: It really is the modern fingerprint. It's wild to think about.
• 2:55
  We used to look for physical print loops and worlds
• 2:58
  on a weapon to places us.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: A scene, right the classic stuff.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: Now, investigators look for the cognitive fingerprints left on a server.
• 3:05
  They look at what you are thinking days or you know,
• 3:07
  even weeks before the event, and in the case of
• 3:10
  Susan Perry, those fingerprints were incredibly distinct.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: So we are pulling from police affidavits, court records that
• 3:17
  have just been released, autopsy reports, and the local media
• 3:22
  coverage from right there in Huntersville. We are going to
• 3:24
  piece together exactly what happened between that nine one one
• 3:27
  call and November twenty twenty five and the arrest that
• 3:30
  just happened in February twenty twenty six.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: It's a short timeline, but a lot happened.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: A ton because spoiler alert for those who haven't seen
• 3:37
  the headlines, Susan Perry isn't facing charges for assisting a suicide.
• 3:41
  She's charged with first degree murder.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: And that charge implies premeditation, it implies malice. It changes
• 3:47
  the entire narrative from a tragedy to a cold blooded crime.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to that day, November tenth, twenty twenty five,
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  the eighty five hundred block of New Oak Lane. Paint
• 3:57
  the scene for us. What are the officers walking into
• 4:01
  when they pull up to that house.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: So police arrive at this modest, two story home. It's
• 4:06
  valued around four hundred thousand dollars. Ye, very very typical
• 4:10
  for the area. It's a standard suburban layout. Inside they
• 4:13
  find Joe Perry in his home office. The home office, okay,
• 4:16
  and the positioning here is crucial for everything that comes later.
• 4:20
  Joe is lying on his back. Sue Pine is the
• 4:22
  medical term. He has a single gunshot wound to the
• 4:25
  chest center mass, right center mass. And we will absolutely
• 4:28
  come back to that phrase because it is vital to
• 4:30
  the prosecution's case.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: It's everything, it's huge.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: But just visually the officers walk in, Susan is kneeling nearby.
• 4:37
  She's acting the part of the grieving widow. She's frantic,
• 4:40
  she's crying, she's distressed. But then the officers look at
• 4:43
  the gun.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: The gun. This is the first thing that really made
• 4:45
  the responding officer's pause.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: It is it's a point three to eight caliber revolver
• 4:49
  or something similar based on the reports we have. And
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  here's the problem. It's not in Joe's hand. It's not
• 4:55
  on the floor next to his hand, as if he
• 4:57
  dropped it after the recoil, or is his muscles relaxed.
• 5:00
  It is resting on a nearby table.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: On a table. Okay, let's pause there, because even I
• 5:05
  with my limited knowledge of forensics basically what I've learned
• 5:09
  from TV and these deep dives, No, that's weird.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: It's more than weird.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: If I shoot myself, gravity takes over the muscles relax instantly,
• 5:17
  or they might spasm. But gravity is the law. The
• 5:20
  gun falls. I don't shoot myself in the heart and
• 5:23
  then neatly place the weapon on a side table before
• 5:25
  I collapse. It doesn't make any sense.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Precisely, that is the first immediate red flag. It looks staged.
• 5:32
  That is the exact word the police used in the Athenevist.
• 5:35
  In genuine suicide cases involving firearms, the weapon is almost
• 5:38
  always found in the grip of the victim, sometimes due
• 5:41
  to something called cadaverck spasm, which is a rare form
• 5:44
  of instant rigor mortis oh wow. Or more commonly, it's
• 5:47
  just immediately adjacent to the body where it would naturally fall.
• 5:51
  Finding it on a table implies a secondary action. It
• 5:54
  implies someone else handled that weapon after the shot was fired.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: That's low cards exchange principle. Isn't it. Every contact leaves
• 6:00
  a trace someone moved that object, and dead men don't
• 6:03
  move evidence exactly.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: And then there's the blood evidence. This is another key detail.
• 6:09
  There were blood droplets on a stool in the room.
• 6:12
  On a stool, this suggests Joe was seated when he
• 6:15
  was shot. So picture this. He is sitting on a stool,
• 6:19
  he gets shot in the chest, and then he ends
• 6:21
  upon his back on the floor, but the gun ends
• 6:24
  up on a table.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Geometry doesn't work.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: The physics of that sequence of events are incredibly difficult
• 6:30
  to reconcile with a self inflicted wound. If he shot
• 6:33
  himself while sitting, the gun would likely fall to the
• 6:35
  floor or land in his lap. For it to end
• 6:38
  up on a table requires a conscious.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Placement And susan, how is she acting while the police
• 6:44
  are looking at this table, on this stool and probably
• 6:46
  thinking this is not right?
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Shifting This is something seasoned investigators look for. It's called
• 6:50
  labile affect. She's oscillating rapidly between extreme grief, wailing, crying,
• 6:56
  and then sudden defensiveness when questions are asked. It wasn't
• 6:59
  a consistent emotional state. If you ask a genuinely grieving
• 7:03
  person what happened. They usually just tell you through the tears.
• 7:07
  If you ask a guilty person what happened, they might
• 7:10
  perceive it as an accusation and snap back with what
• 7:13
  do you mean what happened? It's a different energy.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: And was there a note? A suicide note?
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: No, there was no suicide note. Now, I want to
• 7:21
  be careful here. Not every suicide has a note. In fact,
• 7:24
  statistically many don't. It's kind of a myth that everyone
• 7:27
  leaves a final letter.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: That's a good point.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: But the absence of one, combined with a stage gun,
• 7:33
  combined with the weird behavior, the responding officers knew something
• 7:38
  was wrong immediately. The puzzle pieces weren't fitting the picture
• 7:41
  on the box.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: But they didn't arrest her right then and there, right,
• 7:44
  I mean they couldn't.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: No, and that standard procedure. You don't arrest for murder
• 7:48
  on a hunch in the first hour unless you have
• 7:50
  a confession or a literal smoking gun in the suspect's hand.
• 7:54
  They treated it as a suspicious death. They needed the
• 7:57
  medical examiner to confirm the ballistics, to determine the trajectory
• 8:01
  of the bullet, and more importantly, they needed to see
• 8:04
  what was going on behind the scenes. They needed to
• 8:06
  build the context of the life that.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Was lost, which brings us to the marriage itself, because
• 8:12
  you don't just wake up one Monday and decide to
• 8:14
  stage a suicide or commit a murder without some kind
• 8:17
  of build up. This isn't a crime of passion in
• 8:19
  the moment. If it's staged, there's some calculation. What do
• 8:22
  we know about Susan and Joe.
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  Speaker 2: They had been married for over thirty years.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Wow, a lifetime.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: A lifetime. They have two adult children. To the outside world,
• 8:33
  they were the quiet couple. Neighbors said they were unassuming.
• 8:37
  They didn't have the cops called on them for domestic
• 8:40
  disputes every weekend. They weren't the noisy neighbors.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: There are the people you wave to when you're getting
• 8:44
  the mail, exactly that, which makes it scarier in a way.
• 8:48
  It's always the ones you don't expect. It feeds into
• 8:50
  that whole suburban paranoia we talked about at the start.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: It absolutely does. But inside that house the pressure was building.
• 8:57
  We know now from Susan's later admissions and some witness
• 9:00
  statements that the night before the shooting, that would be
• 9:03
  Sunday November nine, twenty twenty five. There was a massive blowout.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Argument and what was it about?
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Divorce? Joe wanted out?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Oh, after thirty years, that's devastating.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: After thirty years, he told her he wanted to end
• 9:16
  the marriage. Yes, and Susan was reportedly reeling from this,
• 9:20
  But we have to look at why she was reeling.
• 9:22
  It wasn't just heartbreak. It wasn't just the emotional loss
• 9:25
  of the partner.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It was economics, right, Because Susan didn't have a job,
• 9:29
  did she no.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: Personal income, no significant savings of her own. She was
• 9:33
  entirely financially dependent on Joe. And this brings in a
• 9:37
  very very powerful psychological motivator called loss of version.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. I've heard the term
• 9:43
  in economics, usually regarding the stock market, but how does
• 9:46
  it apply to murder.
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  Speaker 2: Loss of version is a concept popularized by the psychologist
• 9:50
  Daniel Koneman and Ams Travirski. It's the idea that human
• 9:54
  beings feel the pain of losing something about twice as
• 9:57
  powerfully as they feel the pleasure of gaining something. So
• 10:00
  if you find one hundred dollars on the street, you
• 10:02
  feel good. If you lose one hundred dollars from your wallet.
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  You feel terrible, and that terrible feeling is about twice
• 10:08
  as strong as the joy of finding it. We are
• 10:13
  wired to avoid loss.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, So apply that to Susan Perry.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: Susan is facing the loss of everything she knows, her home,
• 10:20
  her status in the community, her financial security, her her
• 10:25
  very identity as a wife. That fear is primal. It
• 10:29
  can override logic. She isn't thinking, Okay, I can rebuild.
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  She is thinking, I am about to lose everything I
• 10:35
  have ever had.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Oh wait a minute, this is North Carolina. They have
• 10:38
  equitable distribution laws. She wouldn't be destined to right, she'd
• 10:41
  get half the assets, maybe alimony. I mean, it's not
• 10:43
  the nineteen fifty.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Legally, you are absolutely correct. North Carolina is an equitable
• 10:47
  distribution state. The court would divide the marital property fairly.
• 10:50
  She wouldn't have been left on the street with absolutely zero.
• 10:52
  But perception is reality. She likely feared a massive downgrade
• 10:57
  in lifestyle. She saw a future where her security completely evaporated.
• 11:01
  And for someone who hasn't worked in decades, the prospect
• 11:05
  of entering the workforce at fifty four, that is terrifying.
• 11:09
  It's the difference between being comfortable and just surviving.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: So you have a woman who is fifty four looking
• 11:16
  at a divorce she doesn't want, with no money of
• 11:18
  her own, and a husband who is determined to leave.
• 11:21
  That is a powder keg.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: It is a classic motive, financial desperation coupled with emotional
• 11:25
  rejections of very dangerous cocktail. It turns a partner into
• 11:29
  an obstacle, and in the mind of someone who's desperate,
• 11:32
  obstacles are things you remove.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: So the police have their suspicions, they have a motive
• 11:36
  of this huge divorce argument, but they need proof. They
• 11:39
  need to know what was in her head. And this
• 11:41
  is where the story pivots to technology. This is the
• 11:44
  part that blows my mind every time I read the file,
• 11:47
  because we all think we are private, but we really aren't.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: The digital pivot. This is becoming the standard in modern investigations.
• 11:54
  Detectives maintained a warrant to download the data from Susan's smartphone.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: How do they even do that?
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: They likely use something like a great key or Celebrate device.
• 12:02
  These are specialized tools that can bypass locks and essentially
• 12:06
  dump the entire final system of a phone, texts, photos,
• 12:09
  location data, and crucially, search history. And this is where
• 12:14
  the aha moment happens.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: It's not just an aha moment, it's a jaw dropping
• 12:18
  moment because usually people are a little bit subtle, or
• 12:21
  they try to be. But the search history here, it
• 12:24
  reads like a confession. It reads like a checklist for murder.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: It really does. They found specific Google searches made in
• 12:31
  the days leading up to the death and even immediately after.
• 12:34
  Let's go through them because the order and the content
• 12:37
  they tell the story of her intent.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, hey me with the first one, search.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Number one, what to do if your husband wants a
• 12:42
  divorce and you have no money?
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, that that establishes the motive we just talked about perfectly.
• 12:48
  She is panicking about the finances. That verifies the argument
• 12:52
  on November nine. It shows she is actively looking for
• 12:55
  a solution to a problem exactly.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: It confirms she was in a state of financial terror.
• 13:00
  Provides the why. But then we get to the second search,
• 13:03
  and this one, this one is cold. It shifts from
• 13:07
  panic to profit. Go on, how much is my husband's
• 13:10
  wedding ring worth? Oo? Just let that sink in for
• 13:15
  a second. Her husband is either dead or about to
• 13:18
  be dead. The exact timing relative to the shot is
• 13:20
  a bit fuzzy in the unredacted parts, but it's in
• 13:23
  that immediate cluster of events, and she is researching the
• 13:26
  liquidation value of his personal effect.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: That isn't grief, that isn't panic. That is calculation, that
• 13:33
  is pure agreed. It is that is someone looking at
• 13:36
  a human being and seeing a pawn shop ticket, gise
• 13:39
  meat chills.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: How much is his ring worth? It's so transactional. It's
• 13:42
  like she's already liquidating the estate before the body is
• 13:44
  even cold.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: It speaks to a complete objectification of her husband. He
• 13:48
  ceased to be a partner and became an asset to
• 13:50
  be stripped. The third search, the third search is the
• 13:54
  one that moved this from a suspicious death to a
• 13:56
  murder charge. This is the smoking gun.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: This is the phrase we meant earlier.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: She searched for center mass shots, center mass shots. Now,
• 14:04
  I really want to dig into this because if I'm
• 14:07
  a layperson, does that term even come to mind? If
• 14:10
  I'm just a suburban mom from Huntersville, do I use
• 14:13
  that phrase?
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: Probably not think about it. If you're suicidal, or if
• 14:18
  you are genuinely researching suicide methods for yourself or for
• 14:21
  someone else. You might search for things like painless ways
• 14:24
  to die, or where to shoot for quick death.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Right. You're looking for an exit, you.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Are laying for an exit. You don't usually use the
• 14:30
  term center mass.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Center mass sounds like something a cop would say or
• 14:34
  a soldier. It sounds technical, it sounds efficient exactly.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Center mass is tactical jargon. It is used in police
• 14:41
  and military training. It refers to the torso the largest
• 14:44
  part of the target. You are trained to shoot center mass,
• 14:47
  not to kill instantly necessarily, but to stop the threat.
• 14:50
  It increases the probability of a hit.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: So it's about making sure you don't miss.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: It is about maximum stopping power. It implies she was
• 14:57
  researching how to effectively use a gun to take someone down.
• 15:01
  She wasn't looking for how to end pain. She was
• 15:04
  looking for how to ensure a kill.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: So she's not researching how to help him. She's not
• 15:08
  researching suicide prevention. She's researching how to make sure that
• 15:11
  when she pulls the trigger he doesn't get back up.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: That is the inference the prosecution is going to make. Yeah,
• 15:17
  and remember the autopsy, where was he shot center Mass.
• 15:21
  The search history predicted the injury. That is premeditation. That
• 15:25
  is the digital smoking gun. It links the thought process
• 15:28
  directly to the physical result. It's just incredibly hard to
• 15:33
  argue accident or suicide when you googled the specific tactical
• 15:38
  method used to kill him.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: And just to be absolutely clear, were there any searches
• 15:42
  for marriage counseling, suicide hotlines, anything like how to help
• 15:46
  a depressed spouse.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: None. The police looked for those, they always do. They
• 15:50
  call it exculpatory evidence evidence it might show she's innocent, right,
• 15:54
  They have to look for that. They look for anything
• 15:55
  that would support her story that she was a grieving
• 15:57
  wife trying to save a husband who was firaling. They
• 16:00
  found nothing. No searches for mental health support, just searches
• 16:04
  about divorce, money, pawning rings, and tactical shooting.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: That absence of evidence is evidence in itself.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. It paints a picture of a mind that was
• 16:12
  focused on termination, not salvation.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And there were timeline issues too, right with the phone, yes,
• 16:17
  the metadata, Yes.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: The metadata showed delays. She claimed in her nine on
• 16:22
  one call that she called immediately upon finding him. The
• 16:25
  phone data says otherwise there was a gap. How long
• 16:28
  a gap The records are a bit redacted, but it
• 16:30
  was significant, a gap where she was likely staging the gun,
• 16:33
  maybe composing herself, maybe checking that ring value. We don't
• 16:36
  know for sure, but the immediate call was a lie.
• 16:39
  The phone tracks activity. If the phone is being used
• 16:42
  for searches or is idle for twenty minutes when she
• 16:44
  says she was dialing nine one one, that's a huge discrepancy.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: So fast forward. It's February twenty twenty six, now February sixth,
• 16:51
  to be exact. The police have been quietly building this
• 16:54
  case for three months. They have the apopsy, they have
• 16:56
  the blood evidence, and they have this damning Google history.
• 17:00
  They bring Susan back in and this.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: Is a pivotal moment in any investigation. The confrontation. They
• 17:07
  sit her down in that interview room, you know, the
• 17:09
  one cinder block walls, weird carpet, one table, and they
• 17:13
  basically say, we know you're lying, we have your phone,
• 17:17
  we know what you searched.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: And what does she do? Does she double down on
• 17:20
  the suicide story? Does she say, oh, I was searching
• 17:22
  that for a book I'm writing. The old writer's defense.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: She abandons the suicide story completely, just drops it, drops it,
• 17:29
  and this is often a fatal error for a defense.
• 17:32
  Once you change your story, you admit that your first
• 17:35
  story was a lie. And if you lied about the
• 17:39
  most important event of your life, why should a jury
• 17:42
  ever believe the second story. Credibility is like a mirror.
• 17:46
  Once it's cracked, it's broken forever.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: So what's the new story. What's version two point zero
• 17:50
  of the death of Joe Perry.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: Version two point zero is the accident theory. She tells
• 17:55
  police that, yes, there was an argument. Joe went at
• 17:57
  the office and grabbed the gun. She says he was
• 17:59
  holding it normally, not pointing it at her, but just
• 18:01
  holding it. She said, she got scared that you might
• 18:04
  use it, so she lunged for it. She claims. They
• 18:06
  wrestled for the gun, and in the tussle it just
• 18:09
  went off.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: It just went off, the classic accidental discharge defense. We
• 18:13
  see this all the time.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: Right, It's a common pivot when this suicide theory is disproven.
• 18:18
  But let's apply some critical thinking to this new version.
• 18:21
  If it was an accident, a tragic accident where a
• 18:24
  wife tries to save her husband and the gun goes off.
• 18:27
  Why did she stage the scene to look like a.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Suicide exactly, that's the question. If it's an accident, you
• 18:33
  call nine one one screaming it was an accident. We
• 18:35
  were fighting over the gun. Please help him. You don't
• 18:38
  wipe your prints, place the gun on a table, and
• 18:41
  then tell the cops he did it himself.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: That's the logic gap that she cannot bridge. The staging
• 18:46
  of the scene proves consciousness of guilt. Innocent people involved
• 18:50
  in accidents don't stage crime scenes. Mechanic, yes, but they
• 18:54
  don't engage in cold calculated deception to frame the victim
• 18:58
  for their own death.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: And then there's the thhysical evidence again, remember the stool.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: The blood on the stool. This is where forensics just
• 19:04
  destroys the struggle narrative.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Walk us through that. Why is that so important?
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: Well, if they are wrestling for a gun, they're standing up,
• 19:12
  moving around, lunging, twisting, it's a dynamic event. The blood
• 19:16
  spatter would be dynamic, it would be cast off in
• 19:18
  different directions. We would see smears, drops on the floor,
• 19:22
  indicating movement.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: A chaotic scene.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: A chaotic scene. But the blood on the stool suggests
• 19:27
  he was sitting down when he was shot.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: He was stationary, so he's sitting on the stool. She
• 19:31
  shoots him, he falls back. That matches the blood evidence.
• 19:35
  A frantic wrestling match.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Does not exactly. The physics of a struggle don't match
• 19:40
  the stationary nature or the blood evidence. You can't wrestle
• 19:44
  a man who is sitting calmly on a stool. Just
• 19:47
  the story falls apart.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: So the accident's story falls apart just as fast as
• 19:51
  the suicide story did, and.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: That's why they charged her with first degree murder. The
• 19:55
  center master proves she planned it, the ring value surge
• 19:58
  proves she was looking asked his death to the financial gain,
• 20:02
  and the changing stories prove she's trying to cover her tracks.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: It is terrifying to think about the coldness required to
• 20:08
  pivot like that, Oh you caught me, okay, well, actually
• 20:10
  it was an accident. It's so calculated. It feels like
• 20:13
  she's treating the investigation like a game of chess where
• 20:16
  she can just take back a bad move.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: It's desperate, but it also shows how trap she is
• 20:21
  by that digital trail. She can't explain away Center mass shots.
• 20:25
  There is no accidental explanation for typing that into a
• 20:29
  search bar, you know, accidentally google tactical shooting terms while
• 20:32
  you're baking cookies.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: I want to zoom out for a second here, because
• 20:36
  this case, the Susan Perry case, it feels like it's
• 20:39
  part of a bigger pattern. We are seeing this more
• 20:41
  and more and more. The smartphone is playing a bigger
• 20:44
  role in the courtroom than the eyewitness we are.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: The smartphone is the new eyewitness. It's the witness that
• 20:49
  never blinks, never forgets, and can't be intimidated. It records
• 20:53
  our impulses. It records the questions we are too afraid
• 20:56
  to ask another human being.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: You mentioned Corey rich And earlier in our prep Remind
• 21:01
  the listeners about that one, because it's startlingly similar.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: Corey Richins, the Utah author, this is huge news. A
• 21:08
  little while back, she wrote a children's book about grief.
• 21:13
  After allegedly poisoning our husband.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: With fentanyl, she went on TV.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: She went on TV to talk about helping kids deal
• 21:18
  with loss. But then the police looked at her search.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: History, and what did they find. Don't tell me.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: Luxury prisons for the rich.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: You have to be kidding me. Luxury prisons for the rich.
• 21:29
  That's almost comical if it weren't so tragic. It implies
• 21:32
  she was so confident she would get away with it,
• 21:35
  or that if she got caught, she wanted to make
• 21:37
  sure she'd be comfortable.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: I wish I were kidding.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: She also searched things like how long to die from fentanyl?
• 21:43
  And is the loosoone similar to mace? It's the same pattern.
• 21:48
  And then there's James Craig, the Colorado dentist. But the
• 21:50
  dentist right he's poisoning his wife's protein shakes his downfall.
• 21:55
  He was searching for undetectable poisons and how to buy
• 21:58
  them on his office computer.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: It seems like there is this massive disconnect. People know
• 22:01
  their phones track them. We all know about cookies and
• 22:04
  location data. We joke about the FDI agent in our webcam.
• 22:08
  But when people decide to commit a crime, they seem
• 22:10
  to forget that Why.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: I think it's cognitive dissonance, or maybe it's just that
• 22:15
  we have become so dependent on Google for every answer
• 22:18
  in our lives. What's the weather, who won the game?
• 22:22
  How do I fix a leaky faucet? How do I
• 22:24
  kill my husband? That the barrier to entry for that
• 22:27
  information feels nonexistent.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: It feels private.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: It feels private because you are doing it alone in
• 22:33
  a room. It feels ephemeral, like the thought just vanishes.
• 22:37
  But you aren't alone. You are shouting your questions into
• 22:40
  a server farm that keeps a permanent record. It's a
• 22:43
  false sense of intimacy with the device.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Your phone knows you better than you know yourself.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: It really does. Eighty five percent of Americans own smartphones.
• 22:50
  That creates a massive digital net. If you were planning
• 22:54
  a crime in the twenty first century, you are almost
• 22:56
  certainly generating evidence against yourself before you've even lift a finger.
• 23:00
  Call it the digital exhaust. You can't turn it off.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: There is another angle to this case that I think
• 23:04
  we need to touch on, and that is the victim.
• 23:08
  Joe Perry.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, and this is important. We need to talk about
• 23:12
  who he was and the demographics he represents.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: We often hear about domestic violence with female victims, and statistically,
• 23:19
  women are the majorities of victims. We know this, but
• 23:22
  men make up a significant portion too, don't they They do.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: About twenty five percent of domestic violence victims are men,
• 23:30
  But cases involving male victims often face a lot of hurdles.
• 23:34
  There is a huge stigma.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: A huge stigma.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: Men are less likely to report abuse. They are less
• 23:38
  likely to tell friends they are afraid of their wives.
• 23:41
  They're often told to man up or that no one
• 23:43
  will believe them.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: And in this case, if Susan hadn't made those searches,
• 23:47
  if she had been just a little bit smarter, this
• 23:49
  could have easily gone down as a suicide.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: That is the really scary part. Men have higher suicide
• 23:54
  rates than women, generally, especially men in that fifty to
• 23:58
  sixty age bracket. Age man is found dead with a gun.
• 24:02
  The suicide narrative is plausible to police. It fits a
• 24:05
  demographic trend.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: It fits the pattern it does.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: If she hadn't left that digital redcrumb trail, Joe Perry's
• 24:12
  death might have been permanently closed as a suicide. It
• 24:16
  highlights how vulnerable male victims can be to this kind
• 24:18
  of staged crime. The assumptions worked in her favor, at
• 24:21
  least initially.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder how many cases weren't solved
• 24:25
  because the killer didn't google how to do it beforehand.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: That is the dark number, isn't it. We only catch
• 24:31
  the ones who make mistakes. We only catch the ones
• 24:33
  who are bad at being criminals. The perfect crime is
• 24:36
  the one we think was an accident or a suicide.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: So where does this leave us now? It is February fifteenth,
• 24:42
  twenty twenty six. This is all happening right now. What
• 24:45
  is the current status of the case.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Susan Perry appeared in court on February tenth. Her defense
• 24:50
  is already trying to play the good citizen card. They argued,
• 24:54
  she has a clean record, she's been in the community
• 24:55
  for thirty years, a long marriage. They requested a mental
• 24:58
  health evaluation, which the judge granted.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: That seems standard.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: It is they're likely looking for some sort of diminished
• 25:04
  capacity defense, or maybe just trying to explain her radic behavior.
• 25:09
  They need to create reasonable doubt. If they can argue
• 25:12
  she was in an associative state or had a psychotic break,
• 25:15
  maybe they can knock it down from murder one.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: And the bond, I'm surprised by this.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Bond was set at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: That feels low for first degree murder. I mean usually
• 25:25
  you see no bond or a million dollars something like that.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: It is on the lower end. Definitely okay, but judges
• 25:31
  look at flight risk, and the irony here is that
• 25:34
  the motive for the crime makes her a low flight risk.
• 25:38
  She has no money, remember that's the whole point. She
• 25:40
  has no passport handy, Her entire life is in Huntersville.
• 25:43
  She's probably not going to run.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: That is a dark irony, it is.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: But the judge did order the removal of all firearms
• 25:49
  from the.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Home, obviously, and the community Huntersville must be buzzing.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: Reeling is the word the local papers are using. WCNCWBTV.
• 25:57
  They're all over it because again it shatters the facade.
• 26:00
  The neighbors are being interviewed and they say all the
• 26:02
  classic lines, they were so quiet, we never saw this coming.
• 26:05
  Of course, it's a reminder that we never ever really
• 26:09
  know what is happening behind the closed doors of those
• 26:11
  nice houses with the manicured lawns.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: So she is due back in court soon.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: February twenty seventh is the next hearing. That will likely
• 26:19
  be procedural, but we might get more details on the accident,
• 26:22
  defense and how on earth they plan to justify that
• 26:25
  search history.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: It's going to be a very difficult hell to climb
• 26:28
  for her defense team. Your honor. My client accidentally shot
• 26:31
  him Center Mass after coincidentally googling Center Mass shots. Good
• 26:35
  luck with that.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: Indeed, the digital shadow is very long and very very dark.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: So to wrap this all up, we started with a
• 26:42
  frantic nine one one call about a suicide. We ended
• 26:45
  with a first degree murder charge fueled by a Google
• 26:48
  search history. It is a journey from deception to digital truth.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: It is a tragedy. A man is dead because ostensibly
• 26:55
  a woman couldn't handle the financial reality of a divorce,
• 26:59
  and instead of seeking legal council, she sought lethal solution online.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: And for you, the listener, I think the takeaway is
• 27:04
  pretty clear. First, check on your friends, even the ones
• 27:08
  in the quiet suburbs who seem perfectly fine. You never
• 27:12
  know what pressure cooker they are living in.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: Absolutely and secondly, understand that in the modern world, privacy
• 27:19
  is an illusion when it comes to intent. If you
• 27:22
  type it into that little white bar, you are telling
• 27:25
  the world.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: I want to leave you with one final thought, a
• 27:27
  provocative one. As Susan sits in that cell waiting for
• 27:31
  her February twenty seventh hearing, consider this. We caught her
• 27:34
  because she was frankly bad at being a criminal. She
• 27:37
  was sloppy, very sloppy. She used her own phone, she
• 27:40
  used obvious search terms. But technology is getting smarter. AI
• 27:44
  is getting smarter.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: And criminals are learning too.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Exactly what if Susan had used a burner phone, or
• 27:50
  if she had used a library computer, or if she
• 27:53
  simply hadn't searched for center mass and had just aimed
• 27:56
  for the chest. Would Joe Perry just be another statistic
• 28:00
  in the suicide column.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: It's very possible, and it.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Makes you wonder how many other suicides in the last
• 28:05
  ten years were actually murderers committed by someone who just
• 28:09
  knew better than to ask Jeeves how to do it.
• 28:11
  That is a haunting question, it is Thanks for listening
• 28:14
  to this deep dive. We'll see you on the next one.
• 28:16
  Stay safe and clear your browser history, or better yet,
• 28:20
  don't do anything you need to hide.