Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / AUTOPSY - Jackson Man Was Alive When His Head Was Cut Off

Transcript

AUTOPSY - Jackson Man Was Alive When His Head Was Cut Off · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So I want you to imagine waking up on just
• 0:05
  a typical Saturday morning.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Right, just a totally normal weekend.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You're in your neighborhood, maybe you're making coffee, and
• 0:11
  you walk outside only to discover a scene that, well,
• 0:15
  it literally belongs in a horror movie.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's the kind of thing that completely shatters your reality.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: It really does, and it permanently changes the psychological fabric
• 0:25
  of your city forever. So today we are doing a
• 0:28
  deep dive into the unsolved twenty seventeen murder of thirty
• 0:31
  year old Jeremy Jerome Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: And you know, the goal here isn't just to recount
• 0:38
  a true crime story for shock value, No, not at all.
• 0:40
  We really want to dissect the sources. We have to
• 0:42
  understand the forensics, the sociology of extreme violence, and the
• 0:47
  human tragedy behind this completely unprecedented event.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Right because we have a pretty massive stack of source
• 0:52
  material to go through. Today, we're looking at news excerpts,
• 0:56
  detailed police timelines, forensic reports, and some really heartbreaking family
• 1:01
  interviews that span from twenty seventeen all the way up
• 1:04
  to twenty nineteen.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: And setting the tone here is crucial. I mean, when
• 1:08
  we look at Jackson, Mississippi, it's a city that has
• 1:11
  undeniably struggled with violent crime.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he has a history there, but.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: This specific event, it bypassed all the usual statistics. It
• 1:20
  drew immediate federal attention because it just shattered all precedents.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: It really did. Okay, let's unpack this because we need
• 1:27
  to start by looking at who Jeremy was before this
• 1:31
  tragedy happened.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, the victimology is so important here.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: It is so looking at the sources. Jerry Jerome Jackson
• 1:39
  was thirty years old, right, He was a father to
• 1:41
  three kids, and he came from this really large, close
• 1:44
  knit family.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: He was one of nine siblings, right, Yeah.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: One of nine, and at the time he was living
• 1:49
  with his brother Johnny. But what really stands out to
• 1:52
  me is how hard he was striving for a better life.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: He was a student at Jackson State University JSU exactly.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: And not just a student. I mean, he was maintaining
• 2:01
  a three point zero gpa.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: That it's a lot of focus.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: He already had an associate's degree and he was actively
• 2:06
  working toward his masters.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: Which is incredible when you're also raising three.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Kids, right, and his family universally described him as a
• 2:13
  non confrontational guy, someone who quote didn't bother anyone.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: So when we analyze this profile in the context of victimology,
• 2:22
  it really stands out how so well Jeremy just doesn't
• 2:26
  fit the typical profile of someone engaged in high risk,
• 2:30
  violent criminal underworld activity.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: He's not running with gangs or anything exactly.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: To be a thirty year old father doing a master's
• 2:38
  track with a three point zero GPA that requires immense discipline.
• 2:42
  His focus was entirely on his education and his.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Kids, which makes his final day so bizarre and haunting.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: It was a Friday, right, Yeah.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Friday, June ninth, twenty seventeen, and the normalcy of this
• 2:54
  day is just staggering. He was in good spirits, hanging
• 2:57
  out at home.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Just a totally regular day.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: He literally got a hair cut from a family member
• 3:01
  right there in the house. Wow, And he was getting
• 3:03
  ready to go to a job interview at local restaurant.
• 3:06
  He walked out the door, told his family he'd be
• 3:08
  right back, and that was it.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: He just vanished.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: He vanished, And like I think about your own mundane
• 3:13
  end of the week routines, you know, getting a haircut,
• 3:15
  going to an interview.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: It's so aggressively ordinary exactly.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: So when a victim is this deeply embedded in a normal,
• 3:24
  positive family life, how does an investigation even begin to
• 3:29
  look for enemies?
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Honestly, it's an absolute nightmare for investigators. I bet when
• 3:34
  you have a genuinely low risk victim, police have to
• 3:37
  look closely at the inner circle, but they also have
• 3:39
  to consider completely random, disorganized acts of.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Violence, right, like being in the wrong place at the
• 3:44
  wrong time, exactly. But the contrast between his peaceful life
• 3:49
  and what happened next, it totally shatters that random violence theory.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Because of the timeline of the discovery.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Yes, let's walk through the events of Saturday, June time,
• 4:00
  twenty seventeen.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: The next morning, the very next morning, it's.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Around nine to nineteen am. We are in a residential
• 4:05
  area on deer Park Street in West Jackson, broad daylight,
• 4:08
  broad daylight. Kids are playing outside and they find a
• 4:11
  severed human head deliberately placed on the front porch steps
• 4:15
  of a house.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: It was fifteen thirty six deer Park Street.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then the horror doesn't stop there, No, it doesn't.
• 4:21
  Later that afternoon, somewhere between three and four pm, A
• 4:24
  badly burned, headless torso is found in a wooded area
• 4:28
  near Green Avenue and Grand.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: Avenue, which is less than a mile away from the house.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Less than a mile.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: The geography of this is so critical. The physical separation
• 4:38
  of the head and the body indicates a highly mobile perpetrator.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Right, someone who had transportation and wasn't afraid.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: To move around exactly. And it's incredibly brazen. But what
• 4:48
  really stands out is the tragedy of children making that
• 4:51
  initial discovery.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: It's unimaginable.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: It emphasizes this massive collateral trauma to the community.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: But here's where it gets really interesting to me, and
• 5:01
  I have to push back a bit on how some
• 5:02
  people might view this.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, go ahead, placing a.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Head on a front porch isn't a simple body dumping,
• 5:09
  Oh absolutely not, right, Like, this isn't hiding a crime.
• 5:12
  This is publishing it. It's theatrical.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: It is a broadcast. You don't put evidence on a
• 5:17
  residential stoop unless you specifically want it to be found
• 5:20
  immediately by the public, exactly.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: So the identification of the victim happened pretty quickly.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: It did by Monday, June twelve, there was a major
• 5:29
  press conference with.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: The JPD, the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF like
• 5:34
  everyone was there.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the heavy hitters, and they identified Jeremy. Threw fingerprints
• 5:40
  from an unburned finger on the torso and through facial.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Recognition they didn't even need DNA.
• 5:46
  Speaker 2: They considered it, but the physical identifiers were conclusive enough
• 5:50
  that they didn't have to wait for the lab results.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Wow. So that deliberate placement of the head, it really
• 5:54
  forces us to look closer at how this was done.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: The forensic evidence, yes.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Which is definitely the darkest and most revealing part of
• 6:02
  our source material today.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: It is truly a forensic nightmare.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: So on Tuesday, June thirteenth, the JPD released an update
• 6:08
  on Twitter with the autopsy results. Right, the official cause
• 6:11
  of death was decapitation.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: But the detail that changes everything. What's fascinating here is
• 6:16
  that he was alive when his head was severed.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, just saying that out loud is chilling.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: It is Decapitation is incredibly rare in US homicides.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: To begin with, because most homicides involve.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Firearms right exactly, we see ballistic violence primarily, but close
• 6:32
  quarters decapitation of a living victim. That is almost unheard
• 6:35
  of outside of active war zones.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: The source is also mentioned he suffered a non fatal
• 6:39
  gunshot wound to the leg.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, and that is a key detail.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: It seems like that had to be intentional, right, not
• 6:45
  meant to kill him, but to stop him.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: It was almost certainly tactical. If you want to kill
• 6:50
  someone with a gun, you aim for center mass. Shooting
• 6:53
  someone in the leg is designed to incapacitate them so
• 6:56
  they can't run or fight back, which.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Means the decapitation was the main event.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Sadly.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: Yes, his brother Corey gave an interview where he talked
• 7:05
  about the nature of the wound. He noted that it
• 7:07
  was a remarkably clean cut.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: He said it went straight through the skin and the spinal.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: Column quote, just one slice, not ragged at all, and
• 7:16
  that detail points to something really specific.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: About the perpetrator.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: Blackwood Well.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Criminal psychologist Caitlin Hampshire has some notes on this in
• 7:23
  the sources. She emphasizes just how physically difficult it is
• 7:27
  to make a single slice.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Like that because of the bone and muscle.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: Exactly the cervical vertebrae are thick. To do that in
• 7:34
  one clean sweep while the victim is alive suggests a
• 7:38
  large heavy blade, look a machete, a machete or a
• 7:41
  heady cleaver, and it points to deep personal rage or
• 7:45
  a highly practiced executioner.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Wow, somebody who actually has skill or experience doing this.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: It takes immense force and commitment.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: So I have to wonder about the burning at the
• 7:55
  Torso then, was that just a practical thing to destroy
• 7:58
  evidence like the killer's DNA or was it a further
• 8:01
  desecration of the body to maximize the horror.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: It's likely both. Fire is a great forensic countermeasure, but
• 8:08
  considering the head was left intact for display, burning the
• 8:11
  body denies the family in intact burial.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: It's pure desecration, it is, So what does this all
• 8:17
  mean for the investigation? If the killer had the physical
• 8:21
  strength and the psychological detachment to do this in one
• 8:24
  clean sweep, are police looking for a monster or a professional?
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: That's the trioge problem law enforcement faced disorganized killers leave
• 8:32
  messy scenes. This was theatrical and methodical.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Which means it was orchestrated. It was a message driven killing, absolutely,
• 8:39
  which naturally leads us to ask who was the message
• 8:42
  meant for?
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: And how did law enforcement react to that?
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Well, the reaction was unprecedented. Police, chiefly Vans, called it shocking, bizarre, brutal,
• 8:52
  and unacceptable.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Even the FBI Special Agent Christopher Freese, said he had
• 8:57
  never seen anything like it in his entire career.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Offered a twenty thousand dollars reward.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Which is a substantial amount of money.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: It is. But the family had their own theory from
• 9:07
  the very beginning.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, his brother Johnny Jackson gave a really tearful interview.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: He speculated that it was a targeted hit. He said,
• 9:14
  and I'm quoting here, a message sent from somebody or
• 9:18
  to the city, because you just don't kill somebody in
• 9:20
  the bushes then take their head and put it on display.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Johnny hit the nail on the head. From a criminological standpoint.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: He did. But by twenty nineteen, the family was just
• 9:29
  incredibly frustrated.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: They weren't getting any real answers none.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: They were only hearing rumors in the community about quote,
• 9:36
  mafia type stuff.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: We really need to unpack the concept of message crimes here.
• 9:41
  Let's do it, because leaving that head on a porch
• 9:43
  that was highly visible from the street, that is a
• 9:46
  public billboard for terror. Right in the criminal underworld, extreme
• 9:52
  violence is used as a tool to enforce silence. It
• 9:56
  signals absolute dominance.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: It's like a mafia movie trope, honestly, but when you
• 10:00
  ground it in the terrifying reality for the people living there.
• 10:04
  I mean, it's the difference between leaving a threatening note
• 10:07
  on someone's door and leaving definitive, inescapable proof of absolute power.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It paralyzes the community.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: And if this was a message, we have to understand
• 10:16
  the environment in which it was sent.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: The socioeconomic context is crucial.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Let's look at Jackson, Mississippi in twenty seventeen.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: It was a city in a lot of pain.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It really was. The city was suffering this severe wave
• 10:28
  of violent crime. There were dozens of homicides that year.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: The baseline anxiety was incredibly high.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Just the day for Jeremy Vanished, a local barber named
• 10:36
  Johnny Brown was shot to death in broad daylight.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: So the community is already on edge, highly on edge.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: And this is where the gang speculation and the sources
• 10:44
  comes into play.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: Right, the rumors about MS thirteen Exactly.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: MS thirteen is a transnational gang and they are notorious
• 10:51
  for using machete attacks.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: And decapitations and burning bodies.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: Which lines up exactly with what happened to Jeremy. They
• 10:58
  use these tactics for intimidation or internal discipline.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: And if we connect this to the bigger picture, the
• 11:03
  geography of Mississippi plays a role. By highways, yeah, I
• 11:07
  twenty and I fifty five, these are known interstate transit
• 11:10
  routes for Cartel's moving illicit goods.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: So it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility
• 11:17
  that Cartel elements passed through, not at all. But and
• 11:20
  I want to make this explicitly clear to you listening.
• 11:23
  While these details sparked massive rumors, no definitive link to
• 11:27
  MS thirteen or any cartel was ever proven in Jeremy's case.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: That's a very important disclaimer. It remains speculation.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: It did. But it makes me wonder is attributing this
• 11:37
  crime to a notorious international gang actually a psychological defense
• 11:42
  mechanism for the community. What do you mean, Like, is
• 11:45
  it easier to believe that a phantom transnational cartel blew
• 11:49
  into town, did this and left, rather than accepting that
• 11:54
  the monster who did this is a neighbor living down
• 11:57
  the street.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. It's a profound copinganism. It's a way of
• 12:01
  othering the threat. Right, if a cartel did it, it's
• 12:04
  a terrifying external anomaly. But if the guy at the
• 12:06
  grocery store did it, your foundational trust in your community
• 12:09
  is completely destroyed.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: That makes total sense, And that lack of trust ties
• 12:13
  directly into the systemic factors plaguing the.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: City poverty, economic decline.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Yes, and heavily under resource policing. The historically high homicide
• 12:23
  rates meant that, according to some analyzes in the sources,
• 12:26
  there was a one in twenty five chance of violent
• 12:28
  victimization in some areas.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: Which is an astronomical statistic.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: It is, and low clearance rates for complex cases are
• 12:34
  a known hurdle there well.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Systemic failures create a vacuum exactly. Extreme violence can occur
• 12:40
  unchecked when a police department lacks the resources, the manpower,
• 12:44
  or the specialized forensic funding to keep up with the caseload.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: And when you have community distrust on top of that,
• 12:51
  gathering tips becomes incredibly difficult.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Even with a twenty thousand dollars reward on the table.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Right, you would think twenty grand would get someone talking.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: But if the community doesn't trust the police to protect
• 13:01
  them from a killer who leaves heads on porches. No
• 13:05
  amount of money will buy a witness statement.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: The tear tactic worked perfectly.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: It did. It enforced total silence.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Which brings us back tragically to the micro level issue here,
• 13:15
  the human.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Cost the family left behind.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a cold case. No arrets have been made.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: It faded from the national headlines.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: So fast it did, but it absolutely haunts the local memory.
• 13:27
  Jeremy's three kids are growing up without.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: A father, and his nine siblings are still out there
• 13:32
  advocating for him.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: They are the authorities in the family continue to ask
• 13:36
  for public help. They emphasize that tips could still bring justice.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: They urge anyone to contact the JPD at six to
• 13:42
  zero one nine, six zero one two three four or
• 13:46
  call crime stoppers.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: And from a psychological standpoint, the sources talk about what
• 13:50
  this waiting does to the family.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: Yes, the concept of ambiguous.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: Loss, right, can you unpack that?
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: Sure? So? Ambiguous loss usually refers to when someone goes
• 14:00
  missing and you don't know if they are alive or dead.
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: The brain gets stuck exactly.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: The brain is a pattern seeking machine without an ending.
• 14:09
  The grief process freezes.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: But they know Jeremy is dead, right, But.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: The ambiguity here is the motive and the perpetrator, the why,
• 14:17
  and the who I see, And this frozen grief is
• 14:20
  severely compounded by the trauma of the desecration.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Because they know exactly how he suffered.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: Yes, they aren't just grieving a murder. They are grieving
• 14:29
  the horrific physical manner of the murder and the public
• 14:32
  humiliation of the display.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: It's just so heavy.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: It is a compounding generational trauma. They need community engagement,
• 14:39
  economic opportunity, and serious policing reform to break these cycles
• 14:43
  of violence.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I look at the tragic irony of this whole situation. Yeah,
• 14:47
  Jeremy was doing everything society asks a person to do
• 14:50
  to improve their life. You know, he really was going
• 14:53
  to school, raising his kids, getting a degree, and he
• 14:57
  became a terrifying statistic. Anyway, it just shout.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Out, there's the illusion that doing the right thing makes
• 15:02
  you safe.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: It really does. So to wrap this up, the key
• 15:06
  takeaways from our deep dive today are just staggering.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: The juxtaposition of his quiet life with that brutal end.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Yes, the completely unprecedented forensic realities, the single slice, the
• 15:20
  tactical incapacitation.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: And the systemic vulnerabilities of Jackson that allowed this to
• 15:25
  happen and go unsolved.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Right, And I want to remind you listening, we don't
• 15:29
  examine these dark corners for sensationalism, No, definitely not. We
• 15:32
  do it to understand the real human cost of unchecked
• 15:36
  violence and the absolute necessity of community vigilance.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Because knowledge and critical thinking about these systemic issues, well,
• 15:43
  that's the first step toward demanding better resources and prevention
• 15:46
  in our own communities.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. And I want to leave you
• 15:49
  with a final lingering thought to mull Over, building on
• 15:52
  the geography of the crime we discussed earlier. Think about
• 15:55
  the physical space of a neighborhood, the architecture of it
• 15:58
  exactly Georch Steppespy. A place that is literally meant for
• 16:02
  welcoming neighbors, drinking your morning coffee or watching your kids play.
• 16:06
  When that is transformed into a stage for a severed head,
• 16:10
  how does a community ever reclaim that space?
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: That's a profound question.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: The physical blood might be washed away, but for the
• 16:17
  people who walk past fifteen thirty six Deer Park Street
• 16:19
  every single day, that invisible monument to unsolved terror remains.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: It never really leaves, no, doesn't.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: How does a city rebuild its sense of home when
• 16:27
  the very architecture of a neighborhood has been weaponized against
• 16:31
  it