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A Skull in the Mail and DNA That Solved Murder · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine a police chief. He's frustrated. It's the end of
• 0:04
  a really long, exhausting day, and he's standing on the
• 0:08
  edge of this dense patch of woods in Louisiana, right
• 0:11
  so the sun is setting. He and his team they've
• 0:13
  spent hours combing through the brush looking for a body
• 0:16
  they aren't even sure as actually there. It's all based
• 0:19
  on this anonymous tip that they barely trust.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Which happens a lot, honestly.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Exactly, so they're ready to call it quits. The chief
• 0:27
  takes a final drag of a cigar and just casually
• 0:30
  flicks it into the scrub. He watches it land, and
• 0:33
  then he just completely freezes because of where it landed,
• 0:36
  Because that glowing ember has landed near inches from a
• 0:39
  human skull, just half buried right there in the dirts.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: It's incredible.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: It is a cinematic moment that completely blows the lid
• 0:46
  off a murder case an entire town had frankly completely misjudged.
• 0:51
  And if you've ever wondered why it takes years or
• 0:53
  i mean sometimes decades to solve a crime, it is
• 0:55
  rarely just about a lack of clues.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: No, it's really about the anatomy of a cold case,
• 1:00
  the terrifying, fragile anatomy of it.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Right, it's about how science and human memory and honestly
• 1:06
  the sheer arrogance of killers all kind of collide. So
• 1:10
  welcome to the deep dive. We have a massive stack
• 1:12
  of investigative transcripts in front of us today. We're covering
• 1:15
  three distinct, highly complex homicides spanning from the early nineteen
• 1:19
  eighties through the two thousands.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: And what we are going to see as we trace
• 1:23
  these transcripts for you is that cases do not just
• 1:25
  go cold by accident. There's a distinct mechanical and psychological
• 1:31
  failure that causes an investigation to just freeze solid.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Like what kind of failures?
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Well, sometimes it's the catastrophic failure of primitive science, or
• 1:40
  sometimes it is the cognitive blind spots of the investigators themselves,
• 1:43
  and sometimes, you know, it is the deliberate theatrical staging
• 1:46
  by a perpetrator who genuinely believes they are simply smarter
• 1:49
  than the system.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Oh wow.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: But equally important are the catalysts that eventually thaw these
• 1:53
  cases out, because the mechanisms of resolution are often just
• 1:56
  as bizarre as the crimes themselves, which.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Brings us to the first transcript in our stack. I
• 2:01
  want to set the scene for you here. It's December
• 2:03
  of nineteen eighty two. We are in Hickory Hills, Illinois.
• 2:07
  So it's a suburb of Chicago, and it's the week before.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Christmas, right in the thick of winter.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Exactly. The weather is exactly what you would expect. It's
• 2:14
  bitterly cold, there's snow on the ground, and the local
• 2:17
  fire department and the EMTs they're mostly dealing with holiday hazards,
• 2:22
  just running from one minor crisis to another. But then
• 2:25
  a call comes in for an ambulance at a duplex
• 2:27
  on ninety third in Roberts Road. A young woman is
• 2:30
  out in the freezing cold, screaming that her neighbor is
• 2:33
  hirk So. Paramedic Paul Pascarella is the first to.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Arrive and he rushes inside the duplex.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: But yeah, there is no medical intervention to be made.
• 2:41
  He finds twenty five year old Suit Chaff She is
• 2:43
  already dead.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: The scene Pascorilla walks into is one of just overwhelming,
• 2:48
  frenzied violence. When the medical examiner conducts the autopsy, the
• 2:52
  sheer brutality of the attack becomes horribly clear.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The transcript notes there are more than forty five
• 2:58
  stab wounds.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, distribute across her face, her neck, her back, and
• 3:02
  her arms. Her throat had been slashed, and the evidence
• 3:06
  also indicates a sexual assault. But from a behavioral analysis standpoint,
• 3:11
  what investigator al of Udiga immediately hones in on are
• 3:14
  the leadature marks on her wrists and the extensive defensive
• 3:17
  wounds on her hands and arms.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Because defensive wings tell a story, right, I mean it
• 3:22
  means she wasn't ambushed in her sleep or knocked unconscious immediately,
• 3:26
  she fought back precisely.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Ligature marks indicate the killer attempted to control her, to
• 3:31
  bind her physically, but the defensive wounds tell us she
• 3:34
  fought fiercely, likely for an extended period of time. Why so,
• 3:37
  this wasn't a quick, clinical assassination. This was a messy,
• 3:41
  highly emotional, and disorganized attack. It's just a killer operating
• 3:45
  in a state of extreme rage or panic.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: So when investigators start trying to build a victimology profile,
• 3:50
  they go talk to Sue's sister, Karen, and Karen paints
• 3:54
  a picture of a woman who is the exact opposite
• 3:56
  of someone who would invite this kind of chaos into
• 3:58
  her life. Right, Sue was described is very simple, very traditional.
• 4:02
  She had no massive social circle or dangerous hobbies. She
• 4:05
  had actually just married her high school sweetheart, a guy
• 4:08
  named Bill, like three months prior to the murder.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Just a normal life, yeah.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Her entire goal in life was just to have kids,
• 4:15
  raise a family, live quietly. Now. Naturally, in any domestic homicide,
• 4:20
  the husband is the very first person you look at always,
• 4:23
  But Bill Chaff was at work. His alibi is ironclad.
• 4:26
  It's verified by multiple co workers and time cards, so
• 4:29
  he is cleared almost immediately, and the police have to
• 4:32
  start looking outward. They go back to the neighbor who
• 4:34
  found the body, and this.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Neighbor provides what should have been the golden key to
• 4:38
  the whole case. She tells detectives that on the morning
• 4:41
  of the murder, a man knocked on her back door.
• 4:44
  She describes a white male wearing a blue parka. Specifically,
• 4:48
  the parka had a fur lined snorkel hood that was
• 4:51
  drawn tight around his face, which obscures his peripheral features.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Right, so you can barely see him exactly.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: And the man looked at her and asked very directly
• 5:01
  is Sue here. The neighbor, who was assuming he was
• 5:05
  just a confused friend or delivery person, said no, Sue
• 5:09
  lives next door, which is.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: An absolutely chilling detail because it means he wasn't just
• 5:13
  wandering the neighborhood looking for an open door. Yeah, he
• 5:16
  was actively hunting Sue Chaff. He knew her name, He
• 5:20
  just had the wrong half of the duplex exactly.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: This indicates premeditation and a specific target. So the police
• 5:27
  immediately bring in a sketch artist to work with the neighbor.
• 5:30
  They sit down and they try to build a composite
• 5:32
  of the man in the blue parka, and they release
• 5:35
  the sketch to the public, plastering it across the Chicago suburbs,
• 5:39
  putting it on the evening news.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: But the source material highlights a massive roadblock here. The
• 5:44
  sketch actually hurts the investigation way more than it helps.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: From reading through the police logs, it seems the drawing
• 5:50
  was just too generic because the hood was pulled tight
• 5:53
  in the neighbor's memory, the sketch just looked like a
• 5:55
  standard guy with a mustache and a heavy coat.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: Right, which in Chicago in December is half the population exactly.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: The police station switchboard lights up, but it's entirely noise.
• 6:05
  People are calling in saying, oh, that's my male manner,
• 6:08
  that looks like the guy who works at the hardware store.
• 6:10
  They are just chasing ghosts.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: This is a classic vulnerability in early investigative stages. A
• 6:16
  generic composite sketch acts like a worse shock test for
• 6:20
  the public. You know, people project whoever they already find
• 6:22
  suspicious onto the drawing interesting. So the flood of false
• 6:26
  leads overwhelms the detective bureaus resources. They spend weeks running
• 6:31
  down dead ends, and as the physical trail goes cold,
• 6:34
  the momentum of the investigation completely collapses.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: And a full year passes. We arrive at the one
• 6:40
  year anniversary of Sue Chaff's murder in December nineteen eighty three, and.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: This is where the detectives try to force a break
• 6:46
  in the case using behavioral psychology. Detectives Mike Tardy and
• 6:50
  Alva Diga decide to set up a stakeout at Sue's gravesite.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this for a second, because I have
• 6:56
  to ask, is that a real thing? It sounds like
• 6:58
  something out of anuir movie actually visit the graves of
• 7:01
  their victims.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: It is surprisingly common, actually, though the motivations very wildly.
• 7:07
  Sometimes it's a manifestation of extreme guilt. Sometimes it's a
• 7:11
  desire to relive the crime. It's a psychological phenomenon where
• 7:15
  the killer uses the physical location of the victim's remains
• 7:18
  as a sort of focal point to recreate the feeling
• 7:21
  of power they had during the murder.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Wow, that is dark.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: It is. And sometimes, if the killer knew the victim,
• 7:27
  they visit the grave to maintain the facade of a
• 7:29
  grieving friend or family member. Detectives Tardy and Vodiga understood
• 7:34
  this behavioral quirk. They knew that the one year anniversary
• 7:38
  is a significant psychological trigger.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Date, so they commit to it. It's late December in Chicago.
• 7:43
  The windchill is absolutely brutal. The cemetery is covered in snow.
• 7:47
  These two detectives park their unmarked vehicles at a distance
• 7:50
  and they just sit there.
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: For a full twenty four hours.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and just after one point zero zero PM on
• 7:55
  the anniversary, when the cemetery is practically desolate, alone, car
• 7:59
  pulls in, A man gets out, walks directly to sue
• 8:02
  Chaff's headstone, stands there completely alone in the snow for
• 8:05
  a few minutes, and then turns to.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: Head back to his car, and the detectives intercept him
• 8:10
  before he can drive away. The man identifies himself as
• 8:13
  thirty year old Glensim Cunis, and the connection is immediate
• 8:17
  and deeply alarming. Glensim Cunis is the ex boyfriend of
• 8:20
  Sue's sister, Karen, the.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Same sister who provided the victim profile.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, very same. And when Detective Tarti asks Simcunus why
• 8:29
  he is standing at this grave on this specific day,
• 8:32
  Simcunus replies, and this is a direct quote from the
• 8:35
  interrogation transcript, that he loved Susan in a special way
• 8:39
  and felt compelled to pay his respects.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Loved Susan in the special way. Yeah, I mean that
• 8:44
  is the kind of phrasing that makes the hair on
• 8:45
  the back of your neck stand up.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: It immediately sets off every alarm bell in a detective's head.
• 8:50
  It implies a fixation and inappropriate, perhaps unrequited attachment to
• 8:55
  his ex girlfriend's sister. It provides a potential motive for
• 8:58
  an emotionally driven, highly violent attack, So they immediately ask
• 9:02
  him to come down to the station for questioning, and
• 9:04
  as soon as they get him into the interrogation room,
• 9:07
  his demeanor completely fractures.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: Because the transcript notes he goes from being relatively calm
• 9:12
  and cooperative at the cemetery to being a total wreck
• 9:16
  in the room. He's sweating, he's guarded, he's contradicting himself.
• 9:20
  He actually breaks down crying on several occasions during the interview.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: The stress of the interrogation environment is breaking his baseline behavior.
• 9:28
  And then Detective Tardy employs a classic pressure tactic. He
• 9:33
  pulls out the composite sketch of the killer, the.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Guy in the fur lined snorkel hood exactly.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: He pulls it out and slides it across the metal table.
• 9:41
  He looks some coonies in the eye and asks.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Who is that, and some cunis looks at it and says,
• 9:46
  that's me.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: It is a moment of immense psychological tension in the
• 9:49
  minds of the detectives. This is the climax of the
• 9:52
  entire investigation. The man at the grave, who admits to
• 9:56
  a bizarre attachment to the victim, has just identified himself
• 9:59
  as the prime suspect. In the police.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Sketch, but he doesn't formally confess to the murder. The
• 10:04
  second he says that's me, he seems to realize what
• 10:07
  he's just done. He scrambles backward. He regains a fraction
• 10:11
  of his composure and starts spitting this entirely new narrative.
• 10:15
  He tells the detectives, well, my ex girlfriend Karen saw
• 10:19
  this sketch newspaper and she told me it looked like me,
• 10:21
  So that's why I said it's me. I'm just agreeing
• 10:23
  with what she said.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: It's a desperate attempt at cognitive damage control. He slipped up,
• 10:28
  revealed too much, and then tried to instantly recontextualize his
• 10:32
  admission to make it sound like secondhand information.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: But for the detectives, the blood is in the water.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. They know they have their guy.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: But knowing it and proving it in court are two
• 10:42
  different universes. They don't have the murder weapon, they don't
• 10:45
  have fingerprints. What they need is an eyewitness, so they
• 10:48
  arrange a physical lineup. They bring in the neighbor, the
• 10:51
  woman who answered her door to the man in the
• 10:53
  blue parka, and they put Glen some coonies behind the
• 10:56
  two way glass.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: This is where human memory becomes the most fragile piece
• 11:00
  of evidence in the justice system. The neighbor looks at
• 11:03
  the lineup. She zeros in on Simcuness, but she hesitates go.
• 11:08
  She tells the police that he closely resembles the man
• 11:11
  at her door.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: And legally speaking, closely resembles is not enough to charge
• 11:16
  a man with a brutal homicide. The state's attorney won't
• 11:20
  touch it. They need her to say that is unequivocally
• 11:23
  the man exactly, so incredibly, the police have to let
• 11:27
  him go. Glens Cunis walks out of the station. The
• 11:31
  detectives are furious. They're forced to bide their time just
• 11:34
  keeping tabs on him, waiting for a mistake. They wait three.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: Full years, three years of a completely frozen investigation. But
• 11:41
  you know, the psychological toll of witnessing a crime doesn't
• 11:45
  just fade. Sometimes it ferments. So in nineteen eighty six,
• 11:48
  detective Tarti decides to reinterview the neighbor. He wants to
• 11:52
  see if time has given her any clarity, or perhaps
• 11:55
  reduce the fear that might have been holding her back.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And it absolutely did, because when Tarti sits down with her,
• 12:00
  time her entire story shifts. She recants her previous hesitation.
• 12:04
  She says it was absolutely cleansed. Some Cunis at her door.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: Then she drops a bombshell. She admits that she didn't
• 12:09
  just see a man asking for Sue. She says she
• 12:11
  actually witnessed the beginning of the attack.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: She reveals a deeply traumatic memory that she had suppressed
• 12:17
  or withheld out of sheer terror. She tells Tarty that
• 12:21
  after she closed her door, she looked out a window
• 12:23
  and saw some Cunis grab Sue Chaff by the arms.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: She saw him physically force Sue backward down the hallway
• 12:29
  of the duplex, both of them screaming at each other.
• 12:32
  She admits that she was so paralyzed by fear that
• 12:35
  she ran away and hid in her own home, too
• 12:37
  terrified to intervene or even call the police until it
• 12:40
  was too late.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Armed with this explicit direct eyewitness testimony, the police finally move.
• 12:46
  In September of nineteen eighty six, they arrest Glenn some
• 12:49
  Cunis for the murder of Sue Chaff. Detective Tarti is elated.
• 12:53
  He tells reporters he would have bet his entire career,
• 12:56
  his badge his pension that Simcunis was the guy.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: The whole town breathes a massive sigh of relief. A
• 13:02
  monster is behind.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Bars, but the victory is entirely.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: Hollow because human memory is not a video recording. It
• 13:08
  is malleable, It's subjective and highly susceptible to pressure. Just
• 13:12
  a few months after the arrest, as the trial date
• 13:14
  looms in December nineteen eighty six, the defense attorneys start
• 13:17
  deposing the star witness, and under the intense pressure of
• 13:20
  a legal cross examination, the neighbors resolve just disintegrates. She
• 13:24
  begins hedging her statements, she backtracks. Finally, she completely recants
• 13:29
  her testimony again, stating she is actually not sure if
• 13:32
  she saw anything clearly at all.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: She just completely folds, and without her the prosecution has
• 13:37
  no case. In February nineteen eighty seven, the state drops
• 13:41
  all charges. Glenn sim Kunz walks free again. The case
• 13:44
  is back to square one, and Detective Tarty is devastated.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: Completely back to square one.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: But before Tarti can even figure out his next move,
• 13:52
  the entire narrative violently shifts gears.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: We move five months forward to July of nineteen eighty seven.
• 13:59
  And we movely just four miles away to the neighboring
• 14:02
  jurisdiction of Burbank, Illinois.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: A thirty year old roofing contractor named John Meyer comes
• 14:07
  home from work. He walks into his house and immediately
• 14:09
  dials nine to one one. He tells the dispatcher he
• 14:12
  has just found his wife, Donna Meyer dead.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: When Burbank police arrive, they find a gruesome scene. Donna
• 14:17
  is in the bathroom, submerged in water in the bathtub.
• 14:20
  She has been severely beaten around the face and head.
• 14:23
  She's been strangled, and she has a single stab wound
• 14:25
  in her back.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: And the Burbank police arrived to find a highly chaotic
• 14:29
  physical environment, but John Meyer is remarkably composed in offering
• 14:33
  them a theory.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: Extremely composed, he immediately directs the responding officers to a
• 14:38
  back bedroom. He points out a window where the screen
• 14:40
  has been pushed out. He then walks them through the house,
• 14:43
  pointing out that jewelry, cash, and credit cards are missing
• 14:46
  from the bedroom dressers right, he is handing the detectives
• 14:50
  a neatly packaged linear narrative. An unknown intruder forced entry
• 14:55
  through the back window, encountered Donna killed her, stole the valuables,
• 14:59
  and fled.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: But the crime scene analyst for Burbank, a twenty year
• 15:03
  veteran named mel Trojanovsky, walks into the house and immediately
• 15:07
  feels that something is fundamentally wrong. Yes, Trichinowski's a guy
• 15:10
  who has seen hundreds of burglaries and home invasions. He
• 15:14
  knows what a house looks like when someone is frantically
• 15:16
  tearing it apart looking for valuables while a dead body
• 15:19
  is in the next room, and he notes that this
• 15:21
  house is just too neat.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: And this introduces a critical concept in forensic criminology known
• 15:27
  as staging.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, unpack that.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Staging occurs when an offender consciously alters the physical evidence
• 15:34
  that a crime scene prior to the arrival of law enforcement.
• 15:37
  The goal is entirely deceptive. It's to redirect the investigation
• 15:41
  away from the most logical suspect and point it toward
• 15:45
  an imaginary third party, which usually.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Means the person staging it is the real killer.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: In domestic homicides, the statistical probability is overwhelmingly that the
• 15:54
  spouse or intimate partner is the perpetrator. Staging is a
• 15:58
  psychological signature. It demonstrates premeditation, a degree of cold calculation,
• 16:04
  and an arrogant desire to control the narrative of the investigation.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: And John Meyer's attempt to control the narrative was incredibly flawed.
• 16:10
  Right gave lawed because Trozhanovsky goes into that back bedroom
• 16:14
  to examine the supposedly forced window. He starts dusting for prints,
• 16:18
  and right there on the windowsill, right next to the
• 16:20
  locking mechanism, his powder catches a pristine, perfect fingerprint.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: A single fingerprint on a point of entry is often
• 16:27
  the holy grail for a crime scene tech. But the
• 16:30
  orientation of this print is what destroys John Myers's carefully
• 16:34
  crafted illusion.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Right because I want to explain exactly how this works mechanically.
• 16:39
  If you're standing outside a house trying to break in
• 16:42
  and you push a window screen in, your fingers would
• 16:44
  be pointing downward against the glass or the sill as
• 16:47
  you apply pressure.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: But this print was pointing upward. It was located on
• 16:52
  the inside of the window frame, oriented in a way
• 16:55
  that meant someone standing inside the bedroom had contorted their
• 16:57
  hand reaching down to push the screen outward into the yard.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: It is a profound mechanical error born out of sheer arrogance.
• 17:06
  Meyer believed he was outsmarting the forensic technicians. He thought, well,
• 17:10
  I'll push the screen out to make it look broken,
• 17:13
  but he fundamentally failed to understand the physics of a
• 17:16
  forced entry.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: He didn't think it through exactly.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: The physical evidence completely contradicts his verbal narrative. And of
• 17:22
  course when they run the print, it belongs to John Meyer.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: So they know he faked the break in. But you
• 17:28
  still need a motive. Why did he kill his wife
• 17:31
  on that specific Tuesday.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: In July, right, you need the why.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: The Burbank detectives start interviewing friends and family, and they
• 17:38
  quickly learned the marriage was incredibly toxic. Donna was actively
• 17:43
  planning to leave John. But the specific catalyst for the
• 17:46
  murder turns out to be tied to a completely separate,
• 17:49
  bizarre crime that happened the day before.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: This is where the behavioral timeline becomes essential. The detective
• 17:55
  speak to Donna's brother, Pat Mariner. Pat provides a seemingly
• 18:00
  unrelated anecdote that suddenly locks the entire case into focus.
• 18:04
  He tells the police that the evening before Donna was murdered,
• 18:07
  he and his fiance Wendy, had returned to Wendy's house
• 18:10
  to find it completely ransacked.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: But Pat notes it wasn't a standard Burglory. Frenshire was
• 18:15
  shoved around, drawers were pulled out, but nothing of high
• 18:18
  value is actually missing. The TV was still there, the stereo.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Was still there, so it wasn't a theft. It was
• 18:24
  a targeted search. The intruder was looking for something specific,
• 18:27
  likely documents, cash stashes, or something highly personal.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Right, and as Pat and Wendy are standing in the
• 18:32
  wreckage of the house, a neighbor walks over. This neighbor
• 18:36
  is the classic neighborhood watch type, he tells Pat, Hey,
• 18:40
  I saw a suspicious truck parked across the street earlier
• 18:42
  today and I wrote down the license plate.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: A very helpful neighbor.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Pat, completely unsuspecting, mentions this break in and
• 18:50
  the license plate to his brother in law John Meyer.
• 18:52
  Later that night. John x incredibly helpful. He says, Oh,
• 18:56
  give me the plate numbers. I know a guy at
• 18:58
  the DMV. I'll run them for you and find out
• 18:59
  who broke into Wendy's house. Pat hands over the numbers
• 19:02
  and thinks nothing.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: More of it until the next day when his sister
• 19:06
  Donna is found murdered. When Pat relays this story to
• 19:10
  the Burbank detective, they don't need a guy at the DMV,
• 19:13
  They run the plates themselves. The suspicious truck parked outside
• 19:17
  the ransacked house belonged to John Meyer's roofing company Wow,
• 19:20
  and John Meyer had signed that specific truck out on
• 19:23
  the day of the break in.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: It is an incredible web of lies collapsing analyst Trojanovsky
• 19:30
  goes over to Wendy's house, dusts for prints in the
• 19:33
  wreckage and finds John Meyer's fingerprints perfectly preserved on a
• 19:37
  large glass jar of loose change in the bedroom. Amazing,
• 19:41
  so the detectives pieced together the timeline John Meyer broke
• 19:44
  into his soon to be sister in law's house for
• 19:46
  reasons unknown. The next evening, Pat Mariner inadvertently tells John
• 19:52
  that they have his license plate. John realizes it's only
• 19:55
  a matter of hours or days before the police trace
• 19:58
  the truck back to him.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: He knows he's caught right The next.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Morning, Donna Meyer comes home. The detectives theorized she confronted
• 20:05
  John about the impending divorce, or perhaps discovered his role
• 20:08
  in the burglary. The pressure boiled over. John violently murdered
• 20:12
  her in the bathroom and then clumsily attempted to stage
• 20:15
  the house to look like a random robbery.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: This circumstantial trap has completely closed around John Meyer. The
• 20:21
  Burbank police bring him in for formal interrogation, and this
• 20:24
  is where we see Meyer's psychological manipulation at its absolute peak.
• 20:28
  The detectives don't start with the murder. They start by
• 20:31
  meticulously breaking down his alibi, pressing him on his failing marriage,
• 20:35
  the financial stress, and.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Meyer starts to crack. He starts crying. He admits that
• 20:39
  Donna was unhappy and wanted a divorce. Then the detectives
• 20:43
  push harder. They bring up the upside down fingerprint, they
• 20:45
  bring up the license plate at the burglary. They start
• 20:48
  inching him toward the bathtub.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: The stress becomes unbearable for Meyer. He realizes he is cornered,
• 20:54
  so he makes a calculated emotional plea. He tells the detectives,
• 20:59
  please just let me see my young son, let me
• 21:01
  say goodbye to my kid, and then I will tell
• 21:03
  you exactly how it happened.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: The detectives think they have the confession on the hook.
• 21:08
  They agree, they halt the interrogation. They bring his young
• 21:11
  son into the station, and they let Meyer have five
• 21:14
  minutes alone in a room with the boy. Yeah. When
• 21:16
  the time is up, Meyer walks back into the interrogation room,
• 21:20
  the tears are gone. His posture is rigid. He looks
• 21:23
  at the detectives and tells them to quote pound sand.
• 21:27
  He demands a lawyer and refuses to say another word.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: He brilliantly weaponized their own empathy against them.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: It's disgusting.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: It is he used the prospect of a full confession
• 21:37
  as a bargaining chip to manipulate the detectives into granting
• 21:40
  him access to his child. Once he achieved his goal
• 21:43
  and reregulated his emotional state during that brief visit, he
• 21:47
  slammed the door shut. It demonstrates a highly manipulative personality,
• 21:51
  an individual who thrives on maintaining absolute control in a
• 21:55
  power dynamic, even when facing a murder charge.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: And his gamble pays off because without the confession. The
• 22:01
  Cook County State's Attorney looks at the file. They see
• 22:04
  the upside down print, They see the prior burglary, but
• 22:06
  they view it as entirely circumstantial. They decide it's not
• 22:09
  strong enough to guarantee a conviction in front of a jury.
• 22:12
  They refuse to approve the murder charges. John Meyer walks
• 22:16
  out of the police station of Freeman.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Two horrific murders four miles apart, both prime suspects walking free.
• 22:23
  But this is where the investigations collide in a way
• 22:25
  that almost defies belief.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this part is wild.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: The detectives from Hickory Hills and Burbank are sharing information
• 22:31
  across jurisdictions, as is standard practice with unsolved homicides, and
• 22:36
  they uncover a staggering biographical overlap.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Back in the early nineteen eighties, Sioux Chaff, our victim
• 22:42
  from the first case with the forty five stab wounds,
• 22:44
  was actually close friends with John and Donna Meyer. In fact,
• 22:47
  John Meyer and Sioux chaff used to work the exact
• 22:49
  same shifts together at a local Denny's restaurant.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: For detective Mike Tardy and Hickory Hills. This is a
• 22:55
  seismic revelation. He has been agonizing over the Sioux chaff
• 22:58
  case for five years. He watched his prime suspect, Glensim
• 23:02
  Kunis walk away after the witness recanted. Now suddenly a
• 23:06
  new suspect emerges right in his backyard, a highly violent,
• 23:11
  highly manipulative man who staged a crime scene to cover
• 23:14
  up his wife's murder and who had a direct pre
• 23:16
  existing relationship with Suechah.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: So Tardi pivots the entire investigation. He looks at John
• 23:21
  Meyer as the potential killer of Sue Chash, but how
• 23:24
  do you prove it? He needs physical evidence linking Meyer
• 23:27
  to the nineteen eighty two crime scene, and he remembers
• 23:29
  the most crucial piece of evidence collected during Sue's autopsy,
• 23:32
  seminal fluid left by the killer. Yes, Tarti decides he's
• 23:36
  going to use a brand new, cutting edge technology that
• 23:38
  is just starting to make headlines in the late nineteen eighties.
• 23:42
  He's going to use forensic DNA profiling.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: We have to understand the historical context of nineteen eighty
• 23:48
  eight here, DNA testing was not the streamlined, robotic process
• 23:52
  we see on television today. It was a painstaking, highly
• 23:55
  complex procedure known as RFLP or restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, I really need you to explain how that works,
• 24:03
  because this is where the case hits a massive wall,
• 24:05
  and I want to understand the mechanics.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Of the failure, let's break down RFLP. Imagine DNA as
• 24:11
  a massive, continuous encyclopedic text. To read it, RFLP testing
• 24:16
  required large intact paragraphs of that text. The scientist uses
• 24:20
  an enzyme like a pair of chemical scissors to cut
• 24:23
  the DNA at specific sequences. They then measure the lengths
• 24:27
  of these cut fragments to create a unique barcode for
• 24:29
  the individual. Okay, that makes sense, But the critical imitation
• 24:33
  of RFLP is that it requires a massive amount of
• 24:35
  pristine biological material. You needed a blood or seaman stain
• 24:39
  roughly the size of a quarter.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's a lot.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: It is. If the sample was small, or if it
• 24:44
  had been degraded by time, heat, or bacteria, which the
• 24:47
  nineteen eighty two evidence certainly had been, the chemical scissors
• 24:51
  couldn't find those intact paragraphs. The fragments would be too
• 24:54
  small to measure accurately, leading to inconclusive or completely erroneous results.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: So detective Tarti sends these degraded nineteen eighty two seamen
• 25:03
  samples to one of the only two private laboratories in
• 25:06
  the entire United States performing this kind of forensic work
• 25:09
  at the time. He asked the lab to compare the
• 25:11
  sample against the DNA of his original suspect, Glenn Simcunis
• 25:16
  and his new prime suspect, John Meyer. He waits an
• 25:19
  entire year for the results.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: The whole year in.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Nineteen eighty nine, the report finally arrives on his desk,
• 25:23
  and the lab concludes that the DNA test definitively eliminates
• 25:26
  both Glenn Simcunis and John Meyer as sources of the
• 25:29
  seminal fluid. The science clears them both.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: The psychological blow to Detective Tarti it was absolute. He
• 25:35
  had spent years building two incredibly compelling, behavioral and circumstantial profiles,
• 25:39
  Simcunis confessing to the sketch and stalking the grave, Meyer
• 25:42
  staging a crime scene and having a direct link to
• 25:44
  the victim. But the authority of the laboratory told him
• 25:47
  he was entirely wrong.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. Why did this primitive nineteen eighty
• 25:52
  eight science completely derail the entire legal process. Why couldn't
• 25:56
  the police just say the DNA test is probably flawed
• 25:59
  and with the overwhelming circumstantial evidence against John Meyer in
• 26:03
  his wife's case, or the gravestalking evidence in Simcunas's case.
• 26:07
  I mean, why did a single piece of paper from
• 26:09
  a lab paralyze two separate murder investigations.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal question, and it speaks to a
• 26:15
  psychological phenomenon within the justice system that we often refer
• 26:19
  to as the CSI effect, though this occurred long before
• 26:23
  that television franchise existed. In the late nineteen eighties, DNA
• 26:26
  was introduced to courtrooms not just as a tool, but
• 26:29
  as a magic bullet. Prosecutors, judges, and juries were being
• 26:32
  educated by expert witnesses that this science was infallible, that
• 26:36
  it provided absolute mathematical certainty. I sure this is going
• 26:39
  The unintended consequence was that when this revered science provided
• 26:43
  a negative result, even a false negative caused by primitive
• 26:46
  RFLP technology failing on a degraded sample, it introduced an
• 26:50
  insurmountable wall of reasonable doubt.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: So a prosecutor looks at Tarti's file and says, I
• 26:54
  don't care about the upside down fingerprint, I don't care
• 26:56
  about the fake burglary. The defense attorney is going to
• 26:59
  hold up this lab report, tell the jury the science
• 27:02
  proves it was in him, and we will.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Lose exactly the definitive nature of a scientific no overrides
• 27:08
  human intuition, traditional detective work, and mountains of circumstantial evidence.
• 27:14
  The prosecutors were terrified of the science.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: That's incredibly frustrating.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: As a result, both the Sioux Chaff murder and the
• 27:20
  Donna Meyer murder are classified as unsolved. They go into
• 27:24
  the filing cabinets. The investigations freeze solid for over a decade.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: So we jump all the way to the spring of
• 27:30
  two thousand and three. Twenty one years have passed since
• 27:33
  Sue Chaff was murdered. Fourteen years have passed since that
• 27:36
  DNA tests supposedly cleared both suspects. Detective Mike Tarti is older,
• 27:41
  but he cannot shake this case.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: He just can't let it go no.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: He says in interviews that the brutal details, the slash throat,
• 27:48
  the forty five stab wounds are the kind of things
• 27:50
  that wake you up at three am, and his gut,
• 27:54
  his fundamental instinct as an investigator, has never stopped telling
• 27:57
  him that the nineteen eighty eight lab result was fundamentally wrong.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: It is Tarti's sheer refusal to accept the absolute authority
• 28:05
  of that flawed nineteen eighty eight science that becomes the
• 28:08
  catalyst for thawing the case. He realizes that technology has
• 28:12
  advanced light years since RFLP. He petitions to have the
• 28:15
  original evidence pulled from the archives and sent to the
• 28:18
  Illinois State Police Forensic Science Center.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: The evidence lands on the desk of an analyst named
• 28:23
  Kathleen Kaikok. She opens the sealed package from nineteen eighty
• 28:26
  eight and it is a disaster.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Total disaster.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: The previous private lab had been incredibly reckless. They've broken
• 28:32
  off the cotton tip of the swab to do their
• 28:33
  RFLP testing and apparently destroyed it. When Cake opens the box,
• 28:37
  all that is left is a single, broken, degraded wooden stick.
• 28:41
  There is no visible biological material left at all.
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: It serves as a stark physical metaphor for the entire investigation,
• 28:48
  honestly fragmented, mishandled with almost nothing left to hold on too.
• 28:51
  But Kock employs a completely different methodology. She uses an
• 28:56
  alternative light source shining specific wavelengths as light over the
• 29:00
  packaging and the stick itself. The cardboard box begins to fluoresce,
• 29:04
  indicating that a microscopic amount of the original stain had
• 29:07
  transferred onto the cardboard.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, she finds a nearly invisible trace of organic material
• 29:13
  embedded in the porous wood of the broken stick.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: And this is where the modern science steps in. Because
• 29:18
  COC doesn't use RFLP, she uses something called short tandem
• 29:22
  repeat or STR DNA testing.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: To go back to our encyclopedic text analogy from earlier.
• 29:28
  STR testing doesn't need whole paragraphs. STR looks for tiny,
• 29:32
  specific sequences of letters that repeat in unique patterns, say
• 29:37
  finding the word skr repeated seven times in a row
• 29:39
  on a torm scrap of paper.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: See By utilizing a process called PCR polymeriys chain reaction,
• 29:44
  STR acts like a biological photocopier. It takes that microscopic,
• 29:48
  degraded fragment from the wooden stick and copies it millions
• 29:52
  of times until the sample is large enough to read clearly.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: So it's basically a four K resolution image compared to
• 29:57
  the pixelated blur of nineteen eighty eight.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: It's a perfect way to describe it.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Despite how degraded the material is. Kathleen Kak manages to
• 30:04
  extract and amplify a full complete genetic profile. On November thirteen,
• 30:10
  two thousand and three, she picks up the phone and
• 30:12
  calls Detective Tarti. She tells him she has a match.
• 30:15
  The DNA found inside Sue chaff in nineteen eighty two
• 30:19
  belongs unequivocally to John.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Meyer, and when asked about the certainty of the match,
• 30:23
  Cake states the probability of it belonging to anyone other
• 30:26
  than John Meyer is more than one in twenty six quadrillion.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: One in twenty six quadrillion.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: Absolute mathematical certainty. The nineteen eighty eight test wasn't just
• 30:35
  slightly off. It was a catastrophic false negative caused by
• 30:39
  a primitive science failing to read a degraded sample.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: When Tarti hears one in twenty six quadrillion, he is
• 30:44
  so shocked he literally drops the phone. He cannot speak,
• 30:47
  and has to call her back ten minutes later. And
• 30:49
  his very next call is to Sue's sister Karen that
• 30:53
  a man whose ex boyfriends, Glenn Simcunis, had been the
• 30:55
  prime suspect for years.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Right, I can't imagine that conversation.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Tarti drives to her house, sits down at her kitchen
• 31:01
  table and says we were wrong for twenty years. Karen
• 31:05
  believes she had aided a monster for twenty years. The
• 31:08
  police treated Simkoony's like a killer in waiting, and the
• 31:11
  new science proved he was completely innocent to the murder.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: But the vindication is paired with a deeply bitter conclusion.
• 31:17
  Tarti finally has the ironclad evidence to arrest John Meyer
• 31:21
  for the murder of Sooux Chaff and by extension, build
• 31:24
  the momentum to finally prosecute him for the murder of
• 31:26
  Donna Meyer. But there will be no trial.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: No, because John Meyer outran the clock. He died of
• 31:32
  natural causes in his sleep three years earlier, in June
• 31:35
  of two thousand. He evaded the legal system entirely.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Tarti, in his interviews talks about the profound spiritual crisis
• 31:43
  this caused him. He says he had to learn to
• 31:45
  pray for those who cause the most pain. He keeps
• 31:48
  a literal prayer list, and despite his immense hatred for
• 31:51
  the man, he forces himself to add John Meyer's name
• 31:54
  to it.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: It is a devastating, complex conclusion. The truth was finally
• 31:59
  illuminated by the other of forensic technology, but the perpetrator
• 32:02
  had already escaped the reach of earthly justice. The science
• 32:05
  loved the puzzle, but it couldn't provide closure.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to our second transcript. We've just spent
• 32:12
  a long time dissecting how flawed laboratory science can freeze
• 32:15
  a case for decades. But not every cold case involves
• 32:18
  a microscope. Sometimes the roadblock isn't a limitation in a lab,
• 32:23
  it's a limitation in our own human biases. Yes, exactly,
• 32:26
  we are stepping away from the sterile environment of DNA
• 32:29
  testing and moving into the messy, volatile world of human dynamics,
• 32:33
  societal assumptions, and the oldest investigative tool in existence, a
• 32:38
  fractured relationship.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: We're looking at how the collective psychology of a police
• 32:41
  department can create a blind spot so massive that a
• 32:44
  killer can live comfortably right under their noses.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: So the year is nineteen ninety seven. We're traveling to Hainesville, Louisiana.
• 32:51
  It's a small town located just three mile shy at
• 32:53
  the Arkansas border, probably known as the butterfly Capital of Louisiana.
• 32:57
  But the source material paints a stark picture of a
• 32:59
  town of vieid by socioeconomics.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: A tale of two towns. Basically, yeah, the.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: South Side is idyllic, you know, neat lawns, picket fences,
• 33:07
  generational wealth. The North Side is characterized by prefab housing,
• 33:11
  broken asphalt, and systemic poverty. Thirteen year old Shannon Capers
• 33:16
  lives with their family in an apartment complex on the
• 33:19
  North Side. On March eighth, a Saturday afternoon, Shannon heads
• 33:23
  out of her apartment to walk into town, and she
• 33:25
  completely vanishes.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: When night falls and Shannon doesn't return, her family panics.
• 33:30
  They know her routines and they know she wouldn't just disappear.
• 33:34
  They call the Hansville Police Department. Detective Ben Booth is assigned.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: To take the report, and the department goes through the
• 33:40
  standard administrative motions. They put her picture on the local
• 33:43
  news broadcasts. They enter her physical description and details into
• 33:47
  the NCIC database. Right now, the NCIC, that's the National
• 33:51
  Crime Information Center right explain how that functions in a
• 33:54
  missing person's case.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: The NCIC is essentially a massive centralized digital bulletin boarded
• 34:00
  by the FBI. When a local department enters a missing person,
• 34:03
  that data becomes accessible to every law enforcement officer in
• 34:06
  the country.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: So it's nationwide.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, If a patrol cop in Texas pulls over a
• 34:11
  car or finds a teenager matching that description, they run
• 34:15
  the name through the terminal in their cruiser and the
• 34:18
  NCIC alerts them that the person is reported missing out
• 34:21
  of Louisiana. It is a vital tool for tracking movement
• 34:25
  across jurisdictions.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: So they do the paperwork. But the working theory the
• 34:29
  detective booth and the department develop a theory they hold
• 34:32
  on too rigidly for two entire years, is that thirteen
• 34:37
  year old Channing Capers simply ran.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: Away, which is hard to believe.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: Right. If you are sitting there listening to this, you
• 34:43
  have to be asking yourself, how does that happen if
• 34:44
  you use a thirteen year old child? What are the
• 34:47
  psychological blind spots that allow an entire police department to
• 34:50
  just assume a middle school er packed up and left
• 34:53
  town without a trace.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: Well, it is a deeply pervasive structural bias within law enforcement,
• 34:59
  and it disproport portionately affects teenagers from lower income neighborhoods,
• 35:02
  marginalized communities, or complex family dynamics. Administratively, the system favors
• 35:08
  the runaway classification. A runaway case is largely passive. You
• 35:12
  file the report, you wait for the teenager to get
• 35:14
  hungry or run out of money, and show up at
• 35:16
  a shelter or call home.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: It's the path of least resistance exactly.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: Conversely, classifying it as a kidnapping or a homicide requires
• 35:24
  a massive, immediate mobilization of resources. You need search dogs, helicopters,
• 35:31
  hundreds of man hours, and intense media scrutiny. Psychologically, investigators
• 35:36
  often look at the socioeconomic environment of the north side
• 35:38
  of town and make an assumption. They think, while the
• 35:41
  environment is troubled, therefore the child shows to flee it,
• 35:44
  that's terrible. They allow their perception of the neighborhood to
• 35:47
  dictate their interpretation of the disappearance. Detective Booth later admits,
• 35:51
  with commendable transparency that this specific case fundamentally shattered their
• 35:56
  department's thinking. Discovering the truth forced them to con front
• 36:00
  their own biases and permanently altered how they evaluate missing
• 36:03
  person's reports.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Because the truth was that Shannon Capers didn't run away.
• 36:08
  She was dead before the sun went down on March eighth.
• 36:11
  The case sits completely frozen, filed away as a runaway
• 36:14
  team for two.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: Years, two long years.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: We arrive at May fifth, nineteen ninety nine. Detective Chris
• 36:21
  Smith is sitting at his desk when the phone rings.
• 36:23
  It's an anonymous call. The voice on the other end
• 36:26
  is a female. She doesn't give her name, but she
• 36:28
  says she knows exactly where Shannon Capers is. She tells
• 36:31
  Smith that Shannon is dead, that her body is buried
• 36:33
  in the dense woods directly behind the apartment complex where
• 36:36
  she lived, and she names.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: The killer, a twenty one year old local drug dealer
• 36:40
  named Maurice Tate.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: A specific location and a name suspect. The police instantly mobilize.
• 36:46
  They assemble a search team and fan out across ten
• 36:48
  acres of thick forest and overgrown field behind the apartments.
• 36:52
  They spend the entire day sweeping the grid, and they
• 36:55
  find absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. The dogs pick up
• 36:57
  no cent, the ground shows no obvious signs of dis urbans. Frustrated,
• 37:01
  they abandon the search, assuming it was a malicious prank call.
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: But two days later, the phone rings again. It's the
• 37:06
  same anonymous female caller, and this time she is agitated.
• 37:11
  She tells Detective Smith, you didn't look hard enough. I
• 37:14
  am not guessing. I know she is there, and.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: The insistence in her voice convinces them to try one
• 37:20
  more time. They head back out into the woods. The
• 37:23
  hours drag on, they are tired, they're sweating through their uniforms,
• 37:28
  and the general consensus is that they are on a
• 37:30
  wild goose chase. And this brings us to that cinematic
• 37:34
  moment I mentioned at the very beginning.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: It is late in the day. The search team leaders
• 37:38
  and the county's chief of police are standing in a clearing, exhausted,
• 37:41
  preparing to call off the search for the final time.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: The chief is smoking a cigar. He takes his last drag,
• 37:48
  pinches it, and casually tosses it into the scrub brush
• 37:51
  at his feet. He looks down at where the cigar landed,
• 37:53
  and he stops.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: Dead because the glowing ember eliminates a patch of dirt
• 37:57
  that looks slightly concave. Truing from that mere inches from
• 38:01
  the cigar is the unmistakable dome of a human skull.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: He points to the ground and asks another officer, do
• 38:07
  you see what I see? They drop to their knees
• 38:10
  and begin carefully brushing away the leaves and top soil.
• 38:14
  The visual conformation is immediate and horrific. Yes, the skull
• 38:19
  has a distinct, jagged bullet hole in the side of it. Furthermore,
• 38:23
  there is massive blunt force trauma to the front I
• 38:26
  mean the forehead bone is visibly cracked. As they expand
• 38:30
  the excavation, they uncover hair braids, the remnants of the
• 38:33
  clothing Shannon was wearing the day she vanished, and finally
• 38:36
  sifted from the dirt directly underneath where the head lay,
• 38:39
  they find a single, deformed nine millimeter slug.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: The physical evidence that the scene allows the state police
• 38:46
  forensic team to reconstruct the final moments of the murder.
• 38:49
  The severe blunt trauma to the forehead suggests Shannon was
• 38:52
  struck violently, likely incapacitating her and knocking her to the ground.
• 38:57
  The position of the bullet hole and the recovery of
• 38:59
  the slug directly beneath the skull indicate she was lying
• 39:02
  flat on the earth when the killer stood over her
• 39:04
  and executed her with a single shot to the head.
• 39:06
  God The dental records in DNA quickly confirmed the remains
• 39:10
  belong to Shannon Caper's The runaway theory is instantly vaporized.
• 39:14
  It is a homicide investigation and they are two years
• 39:16
  behind the killer.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: But they have one massive advantage. They have the name
• 39:20
  Maurice Tate courtesy of the anonymous caller. They just have
• 39:24
  to figure out who that caller is to build a case.
• 39:27
  So they brainstorm the psychology of an informant who would
• 39:31
  know the intimate, buried secrets of a violent drug dealer.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: The most logical answer is a romantic partner, specifically an
• 39:38
  ex partner who has a compelling reason to burn him.
• 39:41
  They start pulling hospital and police records looking for women
• 39:44
  associated with Tate who had reported domestic violence.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: And they strike gold. At the local emergency room, they
• 39:50
  locate medical records for a young woman named Scherise McKnight.
• 39:53
  The chart show she had been treated for severe facial trauma,
• 39:56
  a black eye, and a broken nose, injuries she suffered at.
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: The hands of Tate, and the detectives discovered Teres has
• 40:02
  fled Hainesville. She moved five hundred miles away to San Antonio, Texas,
• 40:08
  desperate to escape Tate's abuse. She believes she had built
• 40:11
  a wall of anonymity around herself, but one afternoon Louisiana
• 40:16
  cold case detectives knock on her door in Texas.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: When she opens the door and sees the badges, the
• 40:21
  facade crumbles. She realizes immediately why they're there. She invites
• 40:25
  them in and confesses everything. She admits she made the
• 40:28
  anonymous phone calls.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: She explains the toxic dynamic. She and Tate shared a
• 40:33
  young child, and she'd endured years of physical beatings. The
• 40:36
  broken nose was her psychological breaking point. She realized he
• 40:40
  was going to kill her eventually, so she decided it
• 40:42
  was time to end his freedom before he ended her life.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: And then she reveals the motive for Shannon's murder, and
• 40:47
  it is stomach turning. She tells the detectives that the
• 40:50
  twenty one year old Tate had been sleeping with the
• 40:52
  thirteen year old Shannon and he had gotten her pregnant.
• 40:55
  Tate was furious. He didn't want the responsibility and he
• 40:58
  didn't want the legal exposure sure of statutory rape, so
• 41:02
  under the guise of going for a walk, he lured
• 41:05
  Shannon into the woods, struck her in the head, shot her,
• 41:08
  and dumped her into a shallow hole he had already prepared.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: It is a chilling calculation of human worth. Tate viewed
• 41:14
  a thirteen year old girl and his own potential unborn child,
• 41:18
  not as human beings, but simply as liabilities to be liquidated. Yeah,
• 41:23
  Cherius's verbal testimony aligns flawlessly with the physical evidence recovered
• 41:27
  from the clandestine grave. You know, the blunt force trauma,
• 41:30
  the execution style bullet hole, the precise location behind the apartments.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: But as any prosecutor will tell you, a scorned ex
• 41:37
  girlfriend's testimony is a very fragile foundation for a murder trial.
• 41:41
  The defense attorney will stand in front of a jury
• 41:43
  and paint thereis is a jealous, vindictive liar with an
• 41:46
  axe to grind who's just trying to frame her X
• 41:49
  out of spite exactly. The police know they need corroboration,
• 41:52
  they need Maurice take to implicate himself.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: They attempt a controlled operation. First, They have Cherise place
• 41:57
  a recorded phone call to Tate from the police. She
• 42:00
  tries to agitate him, telling him the police or asking
• 42:03
  questions about the woods, hoping he will say something incriminating
• 42:07
  about the body or the gun.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: Does it work.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: No. Because Tate is a seasoned drug dealer, he operates
• 42:13
  with a baseline level of paranoia. He is entirely too
• 42:16
  careful over the phone, offering vague, non committal answers. He
• 42:20
  refuses to take the.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: Bait, so the detectives realize they aren't going to catch
• 42:25
  him remotely. They need to strip away his comfort zone.
• 42:27
  They eat him in an interrogation room in July nineteen
• 42:30
  ninety nine, they find a presext. They arrest Tate on
• 42:33
  a minor unrelated drug violation and bring him into the station.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: Detective Daryl Mill steps into the small, windowless room. He
• 42:41
  casually processes the drug paperwork, lowers the temperature of the room,
• 42:45
  and then abruptly pivots the conversation to the murder of
• 42:48
  Shannon Caper's.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: The transcript of this interrogation is a masterclass in psychological warfare.
• 42:54
  Tate is immediately on high alert, but he thinks he
• 42:56
  is the smartest person in the room. He freely admits
• 42:59
  that he met on a back road near the woods
• 43:01
  on the day she disappeared.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: Which seems crazy, right, Why would he admit to being
• 43:05
  with her right before she died?
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Why?
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: Because he is preemptively building a firewall. He knows it's
• 43:10
  a small town. He suspects someone might have seen them
• 43:13
  walking together. If a witness comes forward later, he can
• 43:16
  say I already told you I saw her. He is
• 43:18
  trying to insulate himself by controlling the narrative of their
• 43:21
  final interaction.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: Detective Mills sees exactly what Tate is doing and decides
• 43:26
  to apply direct pressure. He leans in and says, Maurice,
• 43:30
  you did go into those whiz with her, and you
• 43:32
  did kill her.
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: Tate's response is a classic deflection tactic. Instead of a
• 43:36
  strong denial, he answers a question with a question. He says,
• 43:40
  is that what y'all saying? He is probing to find
• 43:42
  out exactly how much evidence the police actually possess, But then.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: Tate gets overly confident. He decides he needs to construct
• 43:50
  an ironclad alibi to shut the detective down. He says,
• 43:53
  and I want to read this direct quote from the
• 43:55
  transcript carefully. He says, I can't be taking a bath
• 43:59
  and on the back at the same time.
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: That's impossible, And in that single sentence, Maurice Tate accidentally
• 44:05
  seals his own fate. Detective Mills is a brilliant active listener.
• 44:09
  He doesn't argue the alibi. He simply echoes it back
• 44:12
  to define the parameters. Mills says, okay, so at the
• 44:15
  time she was murdered, you were taking a bath.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: Tate just stares at him because he suddenly realizes the
• 44:21
  trap he just walked into. By claiming he was in
• 44:23
  his bathtub at the exact time of the murder, he
• 44:26
  inadvertently confessed to knowing when the murder took place precisely.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: Shannon Capers had been a missing person for two years.
• 44:32
  The police had no timeline, the medical examiner couldn't pinpoint
• 44:36
  a time of death from skeletal remains. The only person
• 44:39
  on the entire planet who knew the exact hour Shannon
• 44:42
  Capers was killed was the person who proed the trigger.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: So the trap slam shut.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: Yes, Tate thought his bathtub alibi was an impenetrable shield,
• 44:50
  but the specificity of his phrasing was an absolute confession
• 44:54
  of guilt. He tried to outsmart the room, and his
• 44:56
  own arrogance betrayed him.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Armed with that devastating slip up, the prosecutor, Danny Knull,
• 45:02
  takes the case to trial. He puts Jerise McKnight on
• 45:05
  the stand to lay out the motive, and the confession
• 45:08
  tape made to her. The defense attorney attempts exactly what
• 45:12
  the police feared. He tries to paint Cherise as a
• 45:15
  jealous rival, suggesting she might have killed Channon.
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: Herself, classic defense move right.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: But the prosecutor produces undeniable documentation proving Teres was living
• 45:24
  hundreds of miles away in San Antonio at the time
• 45:26
  of the murder. Her alibi is real, takes was a trap.
• 45:30
  It takes a jury less than thirty minutes of deliberation
• 45:32
  to find Maurice Tate guilty of second degree murder. The
• 45:35
  judge hands down a mandatory life sentence. Four years after
• 45:38
  her family thought she simply ran away, they finally get
• 45:41
  to bury their daughter with the truth.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is it is a profound demonstration that
• 45:46
  the most advanced forensic technology in the world is often
• 45:49
  secondary to the slow, agonizing dissolution of loyalty between abusers
• 45:54
  and their victims. The truth survived in the terrified conscience
• 45:59
  of Cherrys McKnight until she simply couldn't carry it anymore.
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the final transcript in our stack.
• 46:04
  We have seen how degraded biological evidence can eventually thaw
• 46:08
  a case and We've seen how a fractured relationship can
• 46:11
  crack a wall of silence. But this third case is entirely.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: Different, completely different.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: It involves a criminal web so tangled, so completely chaotic,
• 46:21
  that the induction of a child is only solved because
• 46:23
  of a bank robbery and the tragic murder of an
• 46:25
  elderly fruit vendor.
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: If a screenwriter submitted the sequence of events as a script,
• 46:30
  a producer would reject it for being too contrived. The
• 46:33
  domino effect, how one completely unrelated crime structurally collapses into another,
• 46:37
  is genuinely staggering to analyze.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: I think the best way to visualize this case actually
• 46:42
  is to think of the criminal underworld as a massive
• 46:45
  game of Jenga. The investigators pull out one block at
• 46:48
  the very top, a seemingly minor, unrelated piece of evidence,
• 46:53
  and suddenly an entirely different tower of horrific crimes crashes
• 46:56
  down on the table.
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: So we begin in Tyler, Texas. It was October nineteen
• 47:03
  ninety one. Eight year old Chad Choice is asleep in
• 47:06
  his bed. It's roughly two do rows am. While the
• 47:09
  house is quiet, An intruder slips inside navigates to the
• 47:13
  boy's bedroom, gathers the sleeping child up and carries him
• 47:16
  out into the night without making a sound.
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: The discovery the next morning is heart wrenching. It happens
• 47:21
  to be a Sunday, which is also Chad's mother's birthday.
• 47:24
  Karen Choice leaves early to attend church services, leaving Chad
• 47:27
  and his siblings asleep. When she returns, she's informed they
• 47:30
  cannot find Chad anywhere.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: She immediately calls the Tyler Police Department. Sergeant Bill Geking
• 47:36
  is the first on the scene. He walks the perimeter
• 47:38
  of the house and notes the absence of physical evidence,
• 47:41
  no broken windows, no four doors, no blood, no signs
• 47:43
  of a struggle in the bedroom.
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: Getting briefly floats the standard administrative theory we just discussed
• 47:48
  in the previous case. Could the eight year old have
• 47:50
  wandered off or run away? But Karen Choice shuts that
• 47:53
  down with absolute certainty. She tells the police Chad was
• 47:57
  a mama's baby, a timid kid who is afraid of
• 48:00
  the dark and would never leave the house alone in
• 48:02
  the middle of the night.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: And her maternal intuition is validated almost immediately because a
• 48:08
  ransom letter is discovered, But The placement of the letter
• 48:11
  is highly unusual. It isn't mailed to the house. It
• 48:14
  is found resting on the front steps of a local
• 48:16
  funeral home right and that funeral home is owned and
• 48:20
  operated by Karen's brother, Chad's uncle, a man named Greg Sterling.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: The note is constructed with cutout magazine letters like a
• 48:27
  cliche movie prop. It demands ten thousand dollars in cash,
• 48:30
  instructing the family to deliver the money to a specific
• 48:33
  bench at the local Greyhound bus station. But the PostScript
• 48:36
  at the bottom of the note changes the entire trajectory
• 48:39
  of the investigation.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: The ps reads, if we don't show that means we
• 48:43
  heard something from our inside contact, could even be your
• 48:46
  own family. Be careful.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: That PostScript is a masterclass in psychological terrorism. The kidnappers
• 48:52
  are deliberately injecting a pathogen of paranoia directly into the
• 48:56
  grieving family's dynamic. When the FBI is brought into a
• 49:00
  agent Jeff Block analyzes the note and the crime scene,
• 49:04
  and what does he find. He synthesizes the lack of
• 49:06
  forced entry with the inside contact claim in the letter,
• 49:10
  and he theorizes that the kidnapper's threat might actually be true.
• 49:15
  Someone close to the family who had a key or
• 49:17
  knew the layout of the house facilitated the.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Abduction, and the investigative spotlight swings violently toward the man
• 49:24
  who found the note, the uncle, Greg Sterling. Detectives dig
• 49:28
  into his background and discover he has a documented history
• 49:31
  in the local drug.
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: Scene, which builds a theory quickly right.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: The working theory forms rapidly act Sterling owes a massive
• 49:38
  debt to a cartel or a local gang, and he
• 49:41
  orchestrated the kidnapping of his own nephew to extort the
• 49:43
  ten thousand dollars from his family to pay it off.
• 49:46
  The police decide to force a confrontation. They arrange a
• 49:49
  massive sting operation at the Greyhound bus station.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: They transform the station into a fortress. Undercover officers are
• 49:55
  disguised as travelers reading newspapers. Tactical teams are positioned in
• 49:59
  an unmarked vans in the parking lot. Snipers are on
• 50:01
  the rooftops. Greg Sterling is sent in carrying a briefcase
• 50:05
  loaded with ten thousand dollars in marked bills. He walks
• 50:08
  into the terminal, places the briefcase on the designated bench
• 50:12
  and walks away.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: And then the police wait for the trap.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: To spring, but the trap remains empty.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: Hours pass people come and go, buses arrive and depart,
• 50:20
  but no one approaches the bench. The kidnappers never show up.
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: This is where the paranoia sewn by the ransom note
• 50:27
  turns back on the investigators. As the sting operation fails,
• 50:31
  the detectives start looking at Greg Sterling, who is sitting
• 50:34
  right there with them. They wonder is Sterling the inside contact?
• 50:37
  Did he walk into the station, realize it was crawling
• 50:40
  with undercover cops and somehow signal his accomplices to a board.
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: To break the deadlock, the FBI polygrafts the entire extended family.
• 50:47
  Everyone passes the light detector tests with flying colors except
• 50:51
  Greg Sterling. The machine registers massive deception on multiple questions
• 50:54
  regarding his knowledge of the kidnapping.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: So he looks incredibly guilty.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the police heavily suspect him, but a failed polygraph
• 51:01
  isn't physical evidence, and it isn't admissible in court. They
• 51:05
  have nothing to arrest him on. The critical forty eight
• 51:07
  hour window, the most vital period in any child abduction
• 51:10
  closes that a week passes, that a month.
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: A full year elapses, the family is living in a
• 51:16
  state of suspended animation, and then on the one year
• 51:19
  anniversary of the abduction, a second note appears. This one
• 51:23
  is found tucked under the windshield wiper of Karen Choice's car.
• 51:27
  It demands six thousand dollars this time, and the language
• 51:31
  is steeped in sheer cruelty.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: It reads, even though he misses you a lot, he
• 51:35
  will never see you again unless you cooperate. Last time,
• 51:39
  death came close upon your son because of your stupidity.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: It's purely sadistic. Agent Block notes that this isn't just
• 51:45
  about money anymore. The kidnapper is actively taunting the mother,
• 51:48
  reopening a massive emotional wound right as she was beginning
• 51:51
  to process the grief.
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: But despite the new note, the physical evidence is zero.
• 51:55
  No fingerprints on the paper, no follow up call, no
• 51:58
  instructions on how to deliver the money. The case goes
• 52:00
  utterly cold for two more.
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: Years until we reach nineteen ninety four. This is where
• 52:05
  we pull the first block from the Jenga tower, and
• 52:08
  it happens in a completely unrelated venue, the United Heritage
• 52:12
  Federal Credit Union in Tyler, Texas. The bank is aggressively
• 52:16
  robbed by two masked men brandishing firearms. They scream at
• 52:20
  the tellers, vault the counter, empty the drawers, and flee
• 52:23
  in a getaway vehicle.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: The police respond, but they only managed to secure a
• 52:28
  partial license plate number that matches over four hundred vehicles
• 52:31
  in the county. It's an investigative dead end.
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: But three and a half months later, the exact same
• 52:36
  credit union gets hit again. The modus operati is identical.
• 52:40
  Two black males wearing masks, guns drawn, executing a hyper
• 52:45
  aggressive takeover robbery. But this time the bank had learned
• 52:48
  its lesson. They had upgraded their surveillance system. The new
• 52:51
  cameras capture high resolution footage of the robbery. While the
• 52:55
  faces are covered, the tape captures a highly distinctive piece
• 52:57
  of clothing worn by one of the gunmen, a heavy
• 53:00
  plaid jacket where the hood itself is a solid contrast
• 53:03
  in gray color. It's a very unique, easily identifiable garment.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: The Tyler police take that surveillance footage and broadcast it
• 53:10
  on the local five point zero zero PM evening news,
• 53:13
  hoping someone recognizes the jacket. And here is where the
• 53:17
  luckiest break in the history of law enforcement occurs.
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: Truly.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: An off duty Tyler Patrol officer named Lewis Correa is
• 53:24
  sitting in his living room watching the news. Just minutes
• 53:27
  before he turned on the TV, Korea had been standing
• 53:30
  in his front yard. He had watched his next door neighbor,
• 53:33
  a young man named Chris Wells, walking down the street
• 53:35
  with a friend.
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: Korea's cop instincts had already been triggered before he even
• 53:39
  saw the broadcast. He had noted that Wells, who is tall,
• 53:42
  and his friend, who was remarkably short, perfectly matched the
• 53:45
  physical descriptions at the bank robbers. Furthermore, he observed that
• 53:49
  they were acting incredibly paranoid, constantly looking over their shoulders,
• 53:53
  flinching at passing cars.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, because as Korea watches
• 53:57
  the bank robbery footage on his television, he realizes that
• 54:01
  just ten minutes prior, he had watched his neighbor, Chris Wells,
• 54:05
  walking down the street wearing that exact same distinctive gray
• 54:09
  hooded plaid jacket.
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: Korea immediately calls his captain. Within the hour, a joint
• 54:14
  task force of FBI agents and Tyler police converge on
• 54:18
  Chris Wells's house. Well His brother answers the door. The
• 54:22
  detectives don't even have to look hard. They can see
• 54:24
  the hooded sweatshirt draped over a chair in the living room,
• 54:27
  just sitting right there, just sitting there. They show the
• 54:30
  brother a grainy printed still from the bank video, and
• 54:34
  the brother doesn't hesitate. He points and says, that's Chris.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: They bring Chris Wells into the interrogation room and he
• 54:40
  folds almost instantly. He confesses to executing both credit union robberies.
• 54:46
  He names his short accomplice as a man named Jean Lindsay,
• 54:50
  and he names the mastermind, the guy who planned the routes,
• 54:53
  supplied the weapons, and organized the stickups, as a local
• 54:56
  criminal named Pat Horn.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: So two days later, is sitting in the exact same
• 55:01
  interrogation room. He also confesses to the bank robberies. But
• 55:05
  this is where the criminal web rapidly expands. Jean Lindsay
• 55:09
  is looking at decades in federal prison for armed robbery.
• 55:12
  He decides he needs a bargaining chip to secure a
• 55:14
  better plea deal, so he volunteers information about a completely different,
• 55:18
  much more violent, unsolved crime. He asked the detectives if
• 55:22
  they want to know who murdered J. C. Lavassar.
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: If you aren't from Tyler, Texas, you need to understand
• 55:27
  who J. C. Lavassar was. He was an eighty year
• 55:30
  old man married to his wife for over sixty years.
• 55:33
  He made a modest living selling fresh produce out of
• 55:35
  the back of his truck on the side of Highway
• 55:37
  one fifty five.
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: Just a beloved, harmless fixture in the community.
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Five weeks prior to this interrogation, a patrol unit
• 55:45
  had found la Vassar's truck abandoned idling in the middle
• 55:48
  of a rural road. A short distance away in the woods,
• 55:51
  they found the eighty year old man lying face down
• 55:53
  in the dirt. He had been executed with a single
• 55:55
  gunshot to the back of the head.
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: The initial police theory was a carjacking gone wrong, but
• 56:00
  the forensics didn't make sense. Lavassar's wallet full of cash
• 56:04
  was still in his pocket. The police had absolutely no leads,
• 56:08
  save for a vague witness description of two young men
• 56:11
  struggling to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission. Away
• 56:14
  from the predy stand.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: And now sitting in the interrogation room, Jean Lindsay fills
• 56:20
  in the horrific blanks. He confesses that he, Chris Wells,
• 56:25
  and Pat Horn decided to steal a truck. They targeted
• 56:29
  the eighty year old Lavassar. They pulled guns on him,
• 56:32
  hijacked the truck, and drove him to a secluded area.
• 56:35
  Because none of them knew how to drive a stick
• 56:36
  shift properly, they literally forced the terrified elderly man to
• 56:40
  give them a driving lesson at gunpoint.
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: The callousness is difficult to comprehend. Lindsay claims that once
• 56:46
  they figured out the transmission, they forced Lavassar out of
• 56:48
  the vehicle. Lindsay alleges he tried to suggest they just
• 56:51
  leave him there, but Chris Wells looked at the old
• 56:53
  man and said, the old bastard's got to die. He's
• 56:55
  seen us. He knows who we are. Lavassar, begging for
• 56:58
  his life, offered them his money, his produced anything they wanted.
• 57:01
  He turned and tried to hobble away into the woods,
• 57:04
  and Chris Wells shot him in the back of the head.
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: As a result of this confession, all three men, Chris Wells,
• 57:10
  Jean Lindsay, and Pat Horn, are indicted on capital murder charges.
• 57:15
  They are locked in the county jail, all facing the
• 57:17
  death penalty for executing an eighty year old fruit vender.
• 57:20
  But if you are listening to this, you are probably wondering,
• 57:23
  what does any of this have to do with an
• 57:25
  eight year old boy named Chad Choice, who was kidnapped
• 57:28
  out of his bed four years earlier.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: Right, the connection remains entirely hidden until the fall of
• 57:32
  nineteen ninety five. Chad has now been missing for four
• 57:36
  agonizing years. The Tyler police have made zero progress.
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: One morning, Karen Choice walks out the front door of
• 57:43
  her house. Sitting right there on her porch is a
• 57:45
  brown paper grocery sack. She opens it. Inside the sack
• 57:49
  is a human skull. Resting on top of the skull
• 57:51
  is a handwritten note that reads, you only paid part,
• 57:54
  so here's a part.
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: Detective Bill Horton, who takes over the scene, analyzes the
• 57:59
  psychological motive behind this delivery. In a typical kidnapping for ransom,
• 58:03
  the paramount rule is to maintain the illusion that the
• 58:06
  victim is alive, because hope is the only leverage the
• 58:09
  kidnapper has to extract money.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Delivering a skull definitively destroys that hope.
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Which instantly eliminates the possibility of future ransom. Horton concludes
• 58:18
  that this act is not driven by financial gain. It
• 58:21
  is an act of pure, distilled malice, designed specifically to
• 58:25
  torture a grieving mother.
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: The police secure the skull and immediately send it to
• 58:28
  doctor Harold Gilking, a renowned forensic anthropologist at the University
• 58:32
  of North Texas. They need to know this is Chad.
• 58:35
  The problem is they don't have extensive dental records for
• 58:38
  an eight year old boy whose adult teeth had all
• 58:41
  come in right. So doctor Gilking utilizes a fascinating, highly
• 58:46
  complex procedure known as the video overlay technique or craniofacial superimposition.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: This is a brilliant intersection of anatomy and early digital imaging.
• 58:56
  Doctor Gilking takes the physical skull and mounts it securely
• 59:00
  in a sandbox to allow for precise microadjustments in its positioning.
• 59:04
  He sets up a high definition video camera on a
• 59:06
  tripod trained perfectly on the skull.
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: He then takes a smiling photograph of Chad Choice from
• 59:13
  before the kidnapping and places it under a second camera.
• 59:16
  Using a video mixer, he blends the two feeds onto
• 59:19
  a single monitor. He meticulously adjusts the angle, tilt, and
• 59:22
  distance of the skull until the anatomical landmarks the eye sockets,
• 59:26
  the nasal cavity, the alignment of the jaw perfectly map
• 59:29
  onto the features of the living boy's face in the photograph.
• 59:32
  The morphological match is exact. Gilkin confirms the skull belongs
• 59:36
  to Chad Choice.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: Karen Choice is completely devastated by the finality of the news,
• 59:41
  but that grief is immediately eclipsed by a burning fury.
• 59:45
  She demands to know who could be demonic enough to
• 59:47
  leave her child severed head on her front porch, and
• 59:50
  the answer to that question comes from the most unlikely
• 59:52
  place imaginable.
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: A maximum security cell in the Texas County Jail.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: Exactly where Pat Horn is currently sitting awaiting a possible
• 1:00:00
  death sentence for the murder of the fruit vendor.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: In April of nineteen ninety six, Pat Horn realizes the
• 1:00:06
  immense gravity of his legal situation. He decides he needs
• 1:00:10
  to manufacture a miracle to avoid the lethal injection gurney.
• 1:00:14
  He contacts the Tyler Detectives and casually drops the name
• 1:00:17
  Chad Choice. He claims he has information about the kidnapping.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: Horn spins an elaborate cinematic tale. He claims that Chad
• 1:00:25
  was abducted and murdered by two ruthless Colombian drug dealers
• 1:00:28
  who operate under the street names Paco and Carlos. He
• 1:00:32
  suggests these cartel hitters have a history of extreme violence
• 1:00:36
  and a loose connection to him, which is why he
• 1:00:38
  knows about the crime.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 2: The detectives listen, but they are intensely skeptical. They have
• 1:00:42
  dealt with Pat Horn for years. They know his behavioral profile.
• 1:00:45
  He is a chronic liar, a manipulator who constantly exaggerates
• 1:00:48
  his own importance in the criminal underworld. However, they are
• 1:00:51
  obligated to run down the lead.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: Do they find anyone.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: They identify two men matching the descriptions of Paco and
• 1:00:56
  Carlos and investigate them thoroughly. Discover both men have rock solid,
• 1:01:02
  verifiable alibis for the night of the kidnapping. The police
• 1:01:05
  prepared to dismiss Horn's story entirely as a desperate.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: Fiction, but then Horn executes what he believes is his
• 1:01:12
  masterstroke of deception. While sitting under twenty four hour lockdown
• 1:01:15
  in a maximum security facility, a package arrives in the
• 1:01:18
  mail addressed to Pat Horn, which is wild. The jailers
• 1:01:22
  routinely inspect all incoming mail. When they open this box,
• 1:01:26
  they find a human leg bone. Wrapped around the bone
• 1:01:29
  is a threatening note written in Spanish, explicitly warning Horn
• 1:01:33
  that if he gives the police any more information about
• 1:01:35
  Chad Choice, the cartel will murder him and slaughter his
• 1:01:38
  entire family.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: The jailers hand the bone over to forensics. DNA testing
• 1:01:42
  confirms the femur belongs to Chad Choice.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: Pad Horn calls the detectives to his cell and plays
• 1:01:48
  the terrified victim. He points at the evidence and says, see,
• 1:01:51
  I told you, Paco and Carlos are real and they
• 1:01:53
  are threatening me. He's attempting to validate his own fabricated
• 1:01:57
  story by introducing physical evidence into the narrative.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: This development brings Karen Choice directly to the jail, and
• 1:02:03
  this is a crucial detail. Karen has known Pat Horn
• 1:02:07
  since he was a five year old child playing in
• 1:02:09
  her living room with her own kits.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes it so much worse.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: She sits across from him in the sterile interrogation room.
• 1:02:15
  She gets down on her hands and knees on the
• 1:02:17
  concrete floor, weeping, begging him for answers. She tells him,
• 1:02:21
  I treated you like you are my own son. Please
• 1:02:24
  tell me where the rest of my boy is. And
• 1:02:26
  Pat Horn simply stares at the floor, devoid of any
• 1:02:29
  empathy and refuses to give her a single detail.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: But outside that room, the illusion is already starting to fracture.
• 1:02:36
  Detectives look at the timeline. The package containing the bone
• 1:02:39
  arrived at the jail with suspicious perfection, right exactly as
• 1:02:42
  the police were preparing to dismiss the Paco and Carlos theory. Right,
• 1:02:46
  The detectives realize this isn't the work of a Colombian cartel,
• 1:02:49
  this is an inside job. They stopped looking at international
• 1:02:53
  drug rings and start looking at Pat Horn's immediate circle
• 1:02:56
  of influence.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: They discover that Pat has a younger brother, Ethan Horn,
• 1:03:00
  who's conveniently locked up in a completely different county jail
• 1:03:03
  in Athens, Texas, serving time for a minor probation violation.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: The Tiler detectives drive to Athens. They pull Keithan into
• 1:03:11
  a room and absolutely put the cruise to him. They
• 1:03:14
  tell him he is going down for capital murder as
• 1:03:17
  an accessory to the kidnapping of Chad Choice, and Keithan
• 1:03:21
  completely breaks He admits the entire cartel story is a massive,
• 1:03:26
  coordinated lie.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: Keithan confesses that pat Horn, communicating from his jail cell,
• 1:03:31
  ordered him to go out to a specific location, dig
• 1:03:34
  up Chad's leg bone from a clandestine grave, draft a
• 1:03:38
  fake threatening note, acting as Pocco and Carlos, and mail
• 1:03:41
  the package to the jail.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: We really need to analyze the psychology of this, because
• 1:03:45
  it is staggering. Pat Horn wasn't just trying to throw
• 1:03:48
  the cops off his trail. He was choreographing an elaborate
• 1:03:50
  play where he was the star.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
• 1:03:54
  the absolute definition of malignant narcissism. Pat Horn had an
• 1:03:57
  insatiable need to cast himself as a high value player,
• 1:04:00
  a man so important that international cartels were tracking his
• 1:04:03
  movements and threatening his life. The audacity required to order
• 1:04:07
  the exhumation of a child's remains and then successfully mail
• 1:04:11
  those remains to himself inside a maximum security facility reveals
• 1:04:15
  a theatrical level of deception. He needed to feel intellectually
• 1:04:19
  superior to the FBI, more powerful than the local detectives
• 1:04:22
  that had failed right because his elaborate scheme collapsed under
• 1:04:26
  the weight of its own complexity. By attempting to manufacture
• 1:04:29
  physical evidence to validate a lie, he inadvertently provided the
• 1:04:33
  police with the exact witness testimony his own brother needed
• 1:04:37
  to tie him directly unequivocally to the burial of the victim.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: With a Paco and Carlos fantasy blown to pieces, the
• 1:04:44
  detectives confront pad Horn, he finally admits he knows where
• 1:04:47
  Chad is buried, though he still tries to minimize his role,
• 1:04:50
  claiming he just helped dig the hole. After the fact,
• 1:04:52
  he leads a massive convoy of FBI agents and Tyler
• 1:04:55
  police to his own property.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 2: And what do they find.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: They dig up a section of his backyard and with
• 1:05:00
  a plastic bag containing skeletal remains, remnants of the pajamas
• 1:05:03
  Chad was wearing, and several point three to eight zero
• 1:05:06
  caliber shellcasings. The physical evidence is undeniable. Pat Horn, the
• 1:05:11
  man who grew up eating snacks in Karen Choyce's kitchen,
• 1:05:14
  abducted her eight year old son, held him to ransom,
• 1:05:17
  murdered him, buried him in the backyard, and then years
• 1:05:20
  later dug up the child's bones to use his propted
• 1:05:23
  in a twisted psychological game to beat a bank robbery charge.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: And when you analyze the motive behind this mountain of carnage,
• 1:05:29
  it is breathtakingly hollow. Detectives concluded that Horn's primary driver
• 1:05:34
  was simply a desire to be recognized as a gangster.
• 1:05:37
  He wanted the localized notoriety, the perceived power, and the
• 1:05:40
  fast money. He viewed human life, whether it was an
• 1:05:43
  eighty year old man selling fruit or an eight year
• 1:05:45
  old boy sleeping in his bed, as completely disposable commodities
• 1:05:48
  in his quest for status.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: In September nineteen ninety nine, Pat Horn faces a jury.
• 1:05:54
  They find him guilty of capital murder, and the judge
• 1:05:57
  sentences him to death by lethal injection. It is an
• 1:06:00
  incredibly heavy conclusion to a case that started with a simple,
• 1:06:03
  confusing ransom note and ended with a sprawling web of
• 1:06:07
  bank robberies, carjackings, and buried secrets. It really is.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: But when we step back and synthesize the architecture of
• 1:06:13
  these three distinct cases, a very clear unifying theme emerges
• 1:06:17
  from the transcripts. The truth is wildly almost stubbornly resilient.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: Yes, that is exactly what I took away from this.
• 1:06:24
  Think about it. Whether that truth survives for twenty one
• 1:06:26
  years clinging to a tiny, degraded wooden swave stick inside
• 1:06:30
  a cardboard box and a forgotten evidence locker, or whether
• 1:06:33
  it survives festering in the guilty, terrified conscience of a
• 1:06:36
  battered girlfriend in Texas who finally decides he's had enough
• 1:06:39
  of the abuse right, Or whether it survives precisely because
• 1:06:42
  of the arrogant theatrical miscalculations of a narcissist trying to
• 1:06:45
  mail bones to a jail cell to frame imaginary drug dealers.
• 1:06:49
  The truth consistently outlasts the attempts to bury it.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: If you are wondering how cases frozen for decades suddenly thaw,
• 1:06:56
  this is the mechanism. It is a reminder that information
• 1:06:59
  byiological evidence and human memory are rarely ever truly destroyed.
• 1:07:04
  They are simply sitting in the dark, waiting for the
• 1:07:06
  right lens to interpret them exactly. Sometimes that lens is
• 1:07:10
  a technological breakthrough, like the advent of str DNA testing
• 1:07:14
  acting as a biological photocopier, And sometimes that lens is
• 1:07:18
  simply a human being, a detective like Mike Tardi, who
• 1:07:21
  refuses to accept a flawed premise and decides to look
• 1:07:25
  at a dusty file with fresh, critical eyes.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: And as we close this deep dive, I want to
• 1:07:30
  leave you with a final thought about what happens after
• 1:07:32
  the truth is finally dragged into the light. We talked
• 1:07:35
  earlier about precision, about the expectation that fixing a problem
• 1:07:38
  should be binary, like putting a cast on a broken arm.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: R It's not right.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: The legal system's version of fixing the problem. Their definition
• 1:07:46
  of closure is a conviction. You secure the guilty verdict,
• 1:07:49
  the cell door slam shut, the gavel falls, and the
• 1:07:52
  file is permanently marked closed. But the human version of
• 1:07:55
  closure is entirely different, and the water stay muddy long
• 1:07:58
  after the court adjourns.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, a guilty verdict does not act as a time machine.
• 1:08:03
  The legal system is designed to punish the offender, but
• 1:08:06
  it is fundamentally incapable of repairing the profound emotional destruction
• 1:08:10
  left in the wake of these crimes.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: Look at the people left behind in these transcripts. Look
• 1:08:15
  at the detective Mike Tarty. He spent decades fighting for
• 1:08:18
  the truth, and he finally got his one in twenty
• 1:08:21
  six quadrillion DNA match. He proved to the world he
• 1:08:25
  was right about John Meyer, but Meyer was already dead.
• 1:08:28
  Tarty didn't get the satisfaction of a trial. Instead, he
• 1:08:31
  got a prayer list where he had to actively force
• 1:08:33
  himself every single day to find a way to forgive
• 1:08:36
  a man he despised, just so he could sleep at night.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: That's a heavy burden.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: And look at Karen Choice. The state of Texas sentence
• 1:08:43
  Pat Horn to death for murdering her little boy. But Karen,
• 1:08:46
  who was fundamentally opposed to the death penalty, stood up
• 1:08:49
  and said that executing Pat Horn wouldn't bring Chad back
• 1:08:52
  to her right. Instead of letting the hatred consume her,
• 1:08:55
  she took her unimaginable grief and opened a community shelter
• 1:08:58
  in Tyler called Chad's House, a facility dedicated to helping
• 1:09:01
  people facing homelessness, substance abuse, and domestic violence.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: She made a conscious decision to transform a site of
• 1:09:08
  profound paralyzing trauma into an active mechanism for community healing.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: So I'll leave you to ponder this as we wrap up.
• 1:09:15
  When the justice system finishes its job, when the paperwork
• 1:09:19
  is filed and the detectives go home. What is the
• 1:09:21
  role of radical forgiveness in actually healing a fractured community.
• 1:09:26
  Does true justice require a conviction, a life sentence, a
• 1:09:29
  needle in a prison chamber, or does ultimately require the
• 1:09:31
  people left behind to create something good, something enduring, out
• 1:09:35
  of the tragedy. We like our solutions neat, but in
• 1:09:37
  the real world find the killer is often just the
• 1:09:40
  beginning of the work. Thanks for joining us on this
• 1:09:42
  deep dive.