Latest / Scary Paranormal Stories / Thanksgiving Dinner: The Brake Lines Were Cut
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: On the afternoon of November twenty seventh, two thousand one,
- 0:07Speaker 1: Rob Andrews drove to his ex wife's house in Oklahoma
- 0:11Speaker 1: to pick up his children for Thanksgiving. He knocked, he
- 0:15Speaker 1: walked in. He asked if she was going to turn
- 0:18Speaker 1: on the oven. She asked him to help her with it.
- 0:21Speaker 1: That was the last thing Rob Andrews ever did for
- 0:24Speaker 1: Brende Evers. There is something specific about this case that
- 0:28Speaker 1: stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Not
- 0:32Speaker 1: the crime itself, but the month before it. Rob Andrews
- 0:36Speaker 1: knew someone had tried to kill him. He had a name,
- 0:40Speaker 1: he had evidence. He had been told exactly what to do,
- 0:44Speaker 1: and he did none of it. What happened in that
- 0:47Speaker 1: house on Thanksgiving was not a surprise that came from nowhere.
- 0:52Speaker 1: It was the end of a story that Grob could
- 0:55Speaker 1: see coming and somehow could not bring himself to believe.
- 1:00Speaker 1: Six weeks before Thanksgiving, Rob walked out to his car
- 1:04Speaker 1: and noticed something wrong with the brake lines. They had
- 1:07Speaker 1: been cut, not worn through, not corroded. Cut. He had
- 1:13Speaker 1: not been in an accident, he had not driven into anything.
- 1:16Speaker 1: Some one had gone underneath his car and done that
- 1:19Speaker 1: deliberately and Rob Andrews understood exactly what that meant. He
- 1:23Speaker 1: did not call the police. Instead, he went to the
- 1:27Speaker 1: insurance company where a man named James Bullard worked, a
- 1:32Speaker 1: man Rob considered a friend, a man who had sold
- 1:35Speaker 1: him a life insurance policy worth eight hundred thousand dollars,
- 1:39Speaker 1: a man who had convinced him to name Brenda as
- 1:42Speaker 1: the beneficiary. Rob sat across from Bullard's supervisor and laid
- 1:47Speaker 1: out everything he knew, the cut brake lines, the suspicious
- 1:51Speaker 1: phone call, the name. The supervisor listened and told him
- 1:55Speaker 1: the same thing any one would say in that situation,
- 2:00Speaker 1: go to the police. Rob nodded, He left the office.
- 2:04Speaker 1: He never went to the police. That detail, that specific,
- 2:08Speaker 1: irreversible silence, is the center of gravity in this story.
- 2:14Speaker 1: Everything before it is explanation, everything after it is consequence.
- 2:18Speaker 1: Brenda Evers was born on December sixteenth, nineteen sixty three,
- 2:23Speaker 1: in a town called Edith, Oklahoma. If you are trying
- 2:28Speaker 1: to picture a place called Edith, Oklahoma in the early
- 2:32Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, picture something small and certain, a community where
- 2:38Speaker 1: the calendar revolved around the church, where children were quiet
- 2:44Speaker 1: by expectation and modest by design, where the borders of
- 2:48Speaker 1: acceptable behavior were drawn early and reinforced constantly. Brenda fit
- 2:53Speaker 1: inside those borders without apparent effort. She was described by
- 2:58Speaker 1: people who knew her then as shy, reserved, the kind
- 3:02Speaker 1: of girl who didn't cause problems because she didn't seem
- 3:06Speaker 1: to want anything beyond what was already there. Whether that
- 3:10Speaker 1: was contentment or suppression, no one seems to have thought
- 3:14Speaker 1: to ask. She married Rob Andrews on June second, nineteen
- 3:19Speaker 1: eighty four. She was twenty years old. Rob worked in advertising.
- 3:24Speaker 1: He was sociable, professionally successful, the kind of man who
- 3:28Speaker 1: moved through rooms easily. For a period, the time line
- 3:32Speaker 1: is not precise. The couple lived in Texas. That detail
- 3:36Speaker 1: matters more than it might seem. In Texas, something shifted
- 3:40Speaker 1: in Brenda. She started wearing different clothes, She started going out.
- 3:45Speaker 1: She started talking to people outside the small circle she
- 3:48Speaker 1: had always inhabited. By every account from that period, she
- 3:52Speaker 1: was becoming someone she had not been allowed to be before.
- 3:56Speaker 1: Then Rob moved them back to Oklahoma. What happened and
- 4:00Speaker 1: after that is the kind of thing that looks in
- 4:03Speaker 1: retrospect like a clear line from cause to effect. At
- 4:08Speaker 1: the time, it probably looked like a marriage getting complicated
- 4:12Speaker 1: in ordinary ways. Brenda began an affair with a man
- 4:16Speaker 1: named Rick Noolly, the husband of a co worker. It
- 4:20Speaker 1: was brief, they kept in contact afterward. Then she began
- 4:24Speaker 1: a second affair with a man named James Higgins, who
- 4:28Speaker 1: worked at a grocery store and was also married. That
- 4:31Speaker 1: relationship lasted approximately two years. She ended it around this
- 4:38Speaker 1: same period. Rob confided in their local pastor. He described
- 4:42Speaker 1: the marriage as abusive, not in the direction one might assume.
- 4:47Speaker 1: He said Brenda screamed at him. He said she hit him.
- 4:51Speaker 1: The pastor heard this, and as far as the record shows,
- 4:54Speaker 1: the information went nowhere. Then James Bullard arrived at the church.
- 5:02Speaker 1: Bullard was a Sunday school teacher, an experienced insurance salesman. Unmarried.
- 5:08Speaker 1: He became friends with Rob first, which is the part
- 5:11Speaker 1: of this story that is genuinely difficult to absorb. Rob
- 5:16Speaker 1: trusted him, They socialized, and somewhere in that overlap of
- 5:21Speaker 1: church and friendship and proximity to Brenda, an affair began
- 5:26Speaker 1: between Bulood and Brenda, but was eventually visible enough that
- 5:30Speaker 1: the two of them were removed from teaching at the
- 5:33Speaker 1: Sunday school. Rooved from the same Sunday School, where Brenda
- 5:37Speaker 1: had grown up, in front of the same community that
- 5:40Speaker 1: had shaped everything she believed about who she was supposed
- 5:43Speaker 1: to be. Bullard then did something that, in the context
- 5:46Speaker 1: of everything that followed reads, is either very calculated or
- 5:50Speaker 1: simply opportunistic. He sat down with Rob Andrews, his friend,
- 5:56Speaker 1: the husband of the woman he was sleeping with, and
- 5:59Speaker 1: convinced him to take out a life insurance policy eight
- 6:02Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars beneficiary Brenda Evers Andrews. Rob signed the paperwork.
- 6:09Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where that moment
- 6:13Speaker 1: is the moment everything became inevitable. There is another version
- 6:17Speaker 1: where Rob could still have walked away from all of
- 6:20Speaker 1: it intact at almost any point in the months that followed.
- 6:24Speaker 1: Both versions are true. That is what makes this so
- 6:28Speaker 1: hard to look at directly. The brake lines were cut
- 6:31Speaker 1: on October twenty sixth, two thousand one. Rob Andrews discovered
- 6:36Speaker 1: them himself, before any mechanic, before any explanation. He got
- 6:41Speaker 1: under the car, saw what had been done, and understood
- 6:44Speaker 1: immediately that this was not an accident. What he did
- 6:48Speaker 1: next is the detail that changes everything about this case.
- 6:53Speaker 1: He did not call the police Instead, he went to
- 6:56Speaker 1: the insurance company where James Bullard worked. He sat across
- 7:00Speaker 1: from Bullard's supervisor and explained what had happened, the cut lines,
- 7:06Speaker 1: the fear, the name he suspected. The supervisor listened, then
- 7:11Speaker 1: gave him a single piece of advice. Go to the police,
- 7:16Speaker 1: file a report, protect yourself. Rob thanked him, walked out
- 7:21Speaker 1: of that office, and did nothing of the kind. The
- 7:24Speaker 1: next day, October twenty seventh, a call came in from
- 7:29Speaker 1: an untraceable number. A voice on the line told Rob
- 7:32Speaker 1: that Brenda had been rushed to a hospital in Oklahoma
- 7:36Speaker 1: and was in serious condition. Rob had already survived one
- 7:40Speaker 1: attempt on his life, He had already sat in front
- 7:43Speaker 1: of a man who confirmed his suspicions were credible, and still,
- 7:49Speaker 1: when that call came, something in him moved toward it.
- 7:53Speaker 1: He drove toward the hospital. Then he stopped. Something made
- 7:56Speaker 1: him verify first, and when he checked had never been
- 8:00Speaker 1: admitted anywhere. She wasn't sick, she wasn't in danger. The
- 8:04Speaker 1: call was fabricated, and Rob knew it the moment the
- 8:08Speaker 1: hospital confirmed she wasn't there. He had the cutbrake lines,
- 8:12Speaker 1: He had a false emergency call, traced to an untraceable number.
- 8:17Speaker 1: He had a supervisor who told him explicitly to go
- 8:20Speaker 1: to the police. He had everything except whatever it takes
- 8:24Speaker 1: to believe that someone you once loved has decided you
- 8:28Speaker 1: need to die. The call had been placed by Janna,
- 8:31Speaker 1: James Bullard's teenage daughter. She didn't know what she was
- 8:34Speaker 1: part of. Her father had handed her a phone and
- 8:37Speaker 1: a script, and she had read it. She was an instrument,
- 8:42Speaker 1: borrowed and returned without explanation. A week before the murder,
- 8:47Speaker 1: James had also borrowed her car, told her it needed
- 8:51Speaker 1: a routine mechanical check, though nothing was wrong with it.
- 8:55Speaker 1: When she got it back, everything looked fine, everything except
- 8:59Speaker 1: the single shot gun shell she found sitting inside. James
- 9:04Speaker 1: told her to throw it away and forget she'd seen it.
- 9:08Speaker 1: Janner was not yet ready to go to the police, either,
- 9:12Speaker 1: but she held on to what she knew. Meanwhile, the
- 9:14Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand dollar policy was fracturing. Rob had gone
- 9:19Speaker 1: back to the insurance company after the failed calls. He
- 9:23Speaker 1: changed the beneficiary. Brenda's name came off the policy. His
- 9:27Speaker 1: younger brother's name went on. The mechanism that Bullet had
- 9:31Speaker 1: spent months constructing the policy he had personally convinced Rob
- 9:35Speaker 1: to sign with Brenda's name on it under the guise
- 9:38Speaker 1: of financial planning, had been dismantled by the very man
- 9:42Speaker 1: it was designed to kill. Bullard's response was to attempt
- 9:47Speaker 1: to undo it. He and Brenda try to forge Rob's
- 9:50Speaker 1: signature on the paperwork that would reverse the change. The
- 9:54Speaker 1: insurance company did not accept it. Bullart then confronted Rob directly,
- 9:59Speaker 1: tell ing him the policy really belonged to Brenda. Rob
- 10:03Speaker 1: went back to the supervisor. The supervisor confirmed it did not.
- 10:07Speaker 1: The forgery had failed, the money was gone. By the
- 10:10Speaker 1: time Thanksgiving week arrived, the plan had already collapsed financially.
- 10:15Speaker 1: The eight hundred thousand dollars that were supposed to justify
- 10:18Speaker 1: everything the affair conducted in plain sight, the expulsion from
- 10:23Speaker 1: the church, the cut brake lines, the false emergency call.
- 10:28Speaker 1: None of it was reachable. The beneficiary change was legal
- 10:31Speaker 1: and documented. Brenda would collect nothing. Rob came to the
- 10:35Speaker 1: house on approximately November twenty seventh to pick up his
- 10:39Speaker 1: children for the holiday. He walked up the driveway of
- 10:42Speaker 1: the house he no longer lived in, carrying the full
- 10:45Speaker 1: knowledge of the last month. He knew about the brake lines,
- 10:50Speaker 1: he knew about the call, he knew about the policy dispute.
- 10:54Speaker 1: He had been told to go to the police by
- 10:56Speaker 1: more than one person, and he still came to that door.
- 11:00Speaker 1: There is a question in this case that does not
- 11:02Speaker 1: get easier with time. It is not about Brenda, and
- 11:06Speaker 1: it is not about Bullard. It is about a man
- 11:10Speaker 1: standing on a driveway, knowing what he knew, and walking
- 11:15Speaker 1: up to that door. Anyway. Rob asked if Brenda was
- 11:19Speaker 1: going to turn on the oven. It was Thanksgiving, the
- 11:23Speaker 1: question was ordinary. Brenda said she needed help with it.
- 11:27Speaker 1: Would he come inside? He went inside. According to the
- 11:31Speaker 1: reconstruction presented a trial, James Bullard was already in the house.
- 11:37Speaker 1: As Rob bent down to reach the oven. Bullard fired
- 11:41Speaker 1: a sixteen caliber shot gun at close range. Then he
- 11:45Speaker 1: handed the weapon to Brenda for a second shot. The
- 11:48Speaker 1: children were in their room. The television was on volume
- 11:52Speaker 1: high enough that they heard nothing. They had not packed
- 11:55Speaker 1: bags for the holiday. That detail the unpacked bag was
- 12:01Speaker 1: one of the first things investigators noticed. Children who were
- 12:05Speaker 1: supposed to leave with their father for Thanksgiving had not
- 12:08Speaker 1: prepared to go anywhere. They had been kept in place
- 12:12Speaker 1: in that room with the sound turned up. To complete
- 12:15Speaker 1: the cover story, Bullet fired a second, shallow shot into
- 12:19Speaker 1: Brenda's arm. The wound was superficial, calibrated to look like
- 12:23Speaker 1: a victim's injury rather than a participants. The plan was
- 12:26Speaker 1: to say that two men dressed in black had broken in,
- 12:30Speaker 1: shot Rob, wounded Brenda, and fled. Brenda and Bullard called
- 12:35Speaker 1: the police together and delivered this account. Investigators noted that
- 12:40Speaker 1: the wound on Brenda's arm did not match the claim
- 12:43Speaker 1: sequence of events. The children had not packed the house,
- 12:48Speaker 1: showed no signs of forced entry consistent with the story,
- 12:52Speaker 1: and neither Brenda, nor Bullet, nor the children attended Rob's
- 12:56Speaker 1: wake or his funeral. That last detail is the one
- 12:59Speaker 1: that does not find a comfortable explanation. Grief takes many forms,
- 13:05Speaker 1: but a mother choosing not to bring her children to
- 13:08Speaker 1: their father's funeral, a father they had been waiting to
- 13:11Speaker 1: spend the holiday with, is not a detail that disappears
- 13:16Speaker 1: quietly into ambiguity. The couple left Oklahoma before investigators formally
- 13:21Speaker 1: named them as suspects. They crossed into Mexico with whatever
- 13:25Speaker 1: money they had between them. Jana held two things simultaneously.
- 13:30Speaker 1: The memory of her father's voice telling her to throw
- 13:32Speaker 1: away a shotgun shell she had never been meant to find,
- 13:36Speaker 1: and the accumulating weight of calls from Mexico asking for
- 13:40Speaker 1: more money. She sent what she could for a while.
- 13:45Speaker 1: Then she stopped. Then she walked into a police station
- 13:49Speaker 1: and told them what she knew. The shell she'd found
- 13:52Speaker 1: in her car matched the gauge of the weapon used
- 13:56Speaker 1: to kill Rob Andrew's. In the attic of the house
- 14:00Speaker 1: where the murder occurred, investigators found multiple firearms, the caliber
- 14:06Speaker 1: of one corresponded to the crime. The man who had
- 14:09Speaker 1: sold Bullet that weapon came forward on his own and
- 14:14Speaker 1: told police that Bullet had said he needed it to
- 14:17Speaker 1: protect his home. There is a version of this case
- 14:20Speaker 1: where the eight hundred thousand dollars explains everything, where the
- 14:25Speaker 1: motive is legible, economic, and almost logical in its ugliness.
- 14:31Speaker 1: That version is cleaner. It provides the structure of a plan,
- 14:35Speaker 1: a policy, a beneficiary, an execution, a payout. But Rob
- 14:40Speaker 1: Andrews changed the beneficiary before he was killed. Brenda was
- 14:45Speaker 1: no longer on the policy when the shotgun fired. The
- 14:48Speaker 1: money that was supposed to be the reason for all
- 14:51Speaker 1: of it had already been removed from the equation legally
- 14:55Speaker 1: and permanently. The prosecution argued, and the jury greed, that
- 15:01Speaker 1: the motive was not financial by the time of the murder.
- 15:04Speaker 1: It was something else, something that did not require a
- 15:08Speaker 1: payout to justify itself. The rational explanation, the one that
- 15:13Speaker 1: makes this a crime of calculation of greed, contained within
- 15:17Speaker 1: a recognizable human frame, stopped working the moment that beneficiary
- 15:21Speaker 1: change was confirmed. A calculated killer stops when the calculation fails.
- 15:26Speaker 1: The murder happened anyway. What remains is harder to name.
- 15:30Speaker 1: Not a plan that succeeded, not even a plan that
- 15:32Speaker 1: failed and was abandoned, a plan that failed completely economically
- 15:37Speaker 1: and operationally, and was carried out regardless. The brick line
- 15:42Speaker 1: attempt had failed, the false call had failed, the forgery
- 15:46Speaker 1: had failed, the policy was gone, and on Thanksgiving, Rob
- 15:50Speaker 1: Andrews still walked through that door when someone inside asked
- 15:55Speaker 1: him to come in and help with the oven. Janna's
- 15:58Speaker 1: decision to speak changed the outcome. Without her, the cover
- 16:03Speaker 1: story might have held long enough to matter. The men
- 16:07Speaker 1: in black who never existed might have remained the only
- 16:10Speaker 1: explanation any one could prove wrong. She carried that shotgun
- 16:14Speaker 1: shelf for days before she understood what it meant. By
- 16:17Speaker 1: the time she went to the police, the couple was
- 16:20Speaker 1: already in Mexico, running out of money, dependent on a
- 16:23Speaker 1: daughter her father had already used once without her knowmage.
- 16:28Speaker 1: When Jana stopped sending funds, they came back across the
- 16:32Speaker 1: border Hidolgo, Texas. That is where it ended. The trial
- 16:37Speaker 1: did not take long to reach its conclusion. The evidence
- 16:41Speaker 1: was layered, documented, and corroborated by the one person neither
- 16:46Speaker 1: Brenda nor James had accounted for, Jana, the daughter who
- 16:51Speaker 1: found a shotgun shell in her borrowed car and quietly
- 16:54Speaker 1: decided she could not stay silent. Jana's testimony dismantled the
- 16:59Speaker 1: cover story completely. The two men dressed in black never existed.
- 17:05Speaker 1: The superficial wound on Brenda's arm had been inflicted by
- 17:08Speaker 1: the man standing next to her. The children, who never
- 17:11Speaker 1: packed their bags had been left in a room with
- 17:14Speaker 1: the television turned up loud enough that they heard nothing
- 17:18Speaker 1: at all. Brenda Evers Andrews and James Bullard were convicted
- 17:22Speaker 1: of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Both
- 17:27Speaker 1: were sentenced to death in Oklahoma. The head fake built
- 17:31Speaker 1: across months of planning, finally resolved in the most brutal
- 17:35Speaker 1: terms possible the insurance policy of eight hundred thousand dollars.
- 17:40Speaker 1: The motive everyone assumed had driven the killing was already
- 17:43Speaker 1: worthless to Brenda before rob died. She knew that when
- 17:48Speaker 1: she invited him inside. She knew it when she asked
- 17:51Speaker 1: for his help with the oven. The prosecution argued, and
- 17:54Speaker 1: the jury agreed, that the motive at the moment of
- 17:57Speaker 1: the killing was not money. It hatred, uncut by any
- 18:02Speaker 1: practical purpose whatsoever. The plan had failed economically, the murder
- 18:08Speaker 1: happened anyway. There is something in that detail that resists
- 18:12Speaker 1: easy interpretation. A calculated person stops when the calculation no
- 18:17Speaker 1: longer works. Whatever Brenda was by November of two thousand one,
- 18:22Speaker 1: she was no longer calculating. Brenda appealed. On June twenty first,
- 18:27Speaker 1: two thousand seven, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied
- 18:32Speaker 1: her petition four votes to one. On April fifteenth, two
- 18:37Speaker 1: thousand eight, the United States Supreme Court rejected her final
- 18:41Speaker 1: appeal without comment, no explanation given, no door left open
- 18:47Speaker 1: at the time. The case record closes. Brenda Andrews is
- 18:51Speaker 1: the only person on Oklahoma's death Row. She has never
- 18:55Speaker 1: expressed remorse. She has at various points declared herself completely innocent.
- 19:03Speaker 1: James Bullard was also sentenced to death. His subsequent legal
- 19:07Speaker 1: status is not part of the record. Rob Andrews drove
- 19:11Speaker 1: to that house to pick up his children for Thanksgiving.
- 19:15Speaker 1: He had spent the previous month knowing that some one
- 19:18Speaker 1: had cut his brake lines, but a phone call had
- 19:21Speaker 1: been placed in his name to draw him into harm
- 19:24Speaker 1: that the man who sold him his life insurance policy
- 19:28Speaker 1: was the man his ex wife was sleeping with. He
- 19:31Speaker 1: had a name, he had documentation, He had the explicit
- 19:35Speaker 1: advice of an insurance supervisor telling him to go to
- 19:38Speaker 1: the police. He did not go. Two children were in
- 19:43Speaker 1: a back bedroom with the television turned up. They did
- 19:46Speaker 1: not hear the shots. They had not packed their bags
- 19:49Speaker 1: for the holiday visit, which was the detail that made
- 19:52Speaker 1: investigators look twice. Investigators noticed because children always pack when
- 19:59Speaker 1: they know they are leaving. These two did not, which
- 20:03Speaker 1: means on some level they could not have articulated. They
- 20:07Speaker 1: may have known they were not going anywhere that night.
- 20:10Speaker 1: There is something about those two kids that has stayed
- 20:13Speaker 1: with me throughout this case, not the horror of what
- 20:17Speaker 1: happened in the other room, but the smaller, quieter fact
- 20:20Speaker 1: of what their lives became after they lost their father
- 20:24Speaker 1: to a shotgun in a doorway. The person who arranged
- 20:27Speaker 1: it was their mother. Nothing in the record tells us
- 20:31Speaker 1: what that weight looks like. Twenty years later. The case
- 20:35Speaker 1: does not follow them. It simply leaves them there in
- 20:39Speaker 1: that room, with the sound of the television covering everything.
- 20:43Speaker 1: Brenda andrew sits in a cell in Oklahoma, alone, on
- 20:47Speaker 1: the death row roster. No execution date in the record,
- 20:51Speaker 1: no apology in any document. She was born in Edith, Oklahoma,
- 20:55Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three, into a community that gave her
- 20:59Speaker 1: every boundary and no room. She married Rob Andrews in
- 21:03Speaker 1: June of nineteen eighty four. She outlived him for now
- 21:07Speaker 1: by more than twenty years. The last confirmed image of
- 21:11Speaker 1: Rob Andrews that the record gives us is ordinary to
- 21:15Speaker 1: the point of cruelty. A man at a front door
- 21:18Speaker 1: on a holiday asking a simple domestic question, asking if
- 21:22Speaker 1: the oven was on. He bent to help with it.
- 21:25Speaker 1: He did not stand back up. This show is made
- 21:28Speaker 1: by Obermedia.