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The Disappearance of Jade Colvin · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: You know, usually when we talk about a medical diagnosis,
0:03
there's this like underlying expectation of absolute.
0:06
Speaker 2: Precision, right exactly.
0:08
Speaker 1: It feels almost like engineering. Yeah, I mean, you fall
0:10
off a bike, you break your arm, and you go
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to the hospital. The X ray machine hums, It spits
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out that crisp, black and white image, and the doctor
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just points to a jagged white line on the film
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and says, there it is. Yeah, that's the problem.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. We crave that kind of binary reality. We really do,
0:28
broken or not broken, sick or healthy. It provides this
0:33
immense psychological comfort because we fundamentally want the chaos of
0:37
the world to be visible. We want it to be
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quantifiable and neatly categorized into actionable boxes.
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Speaker 1: But then you step out of the hospital and into
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the world of missing persons, specifically the terrifyingly opaque world
0:50
of missing youth and the foster care system.
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Speaker 2: Which is a completely different landscape entirely.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and suddenly you realize that comforting X ray machine
0:57
is completely shattered. We find ourselves looking at a diagnostic
1:00
landscape that isn't just murky, it's actively working against our
1:04
ability to see the truth. So today we are bringing
1:07
you a deep dive into a massive stack of source material.
1:11
I'm looking at in depth investigative reporting from CBS's forty
1:14
eight hours, hundreds of pages of Winnishee County court transcripts,
1:18
detailed press releases from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,
1:22
and extensive on the ground coverage from local Iowa journalists.
1:26
Speaker 2: It is a staggering amount of documentation.
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Speaker 1: It really is, and we are synthesizing all of this
1:31
to examine the heartbreaking, incredibly complex case of fifteen year
1:35
old Jade Colvin. And I want to be perfectly clear,
1:38
right up front about our mission for you today.
1:40
Speaker 2: Let's lay it out.
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Speaker 1: We're going to unpack the specific systemic gaps that swallow
1:46
Foster Youth whole without anyone noticing. We're going to examine
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the fascinating modern digital forensics that finally cracked a five
1:54
year cold case, and perhaps most profoundly, we're going to
1:57
explore how silence, absolutely sudden digital silence, can actually become
2:02
the most damning piece of physical evidence in a murder trial.
2:05
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that this narrative extends far beyond
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the parameters of a standard true crime story. It operates
2:11
as a profound, incredibly revealing mirror reflecting how society handles runaways. Specifically,
2:18
we are forced to look at how the legal system
2:20
and the public treat youth who, well in the administrative
2:24
eyes of the state, want to be.
2:25
Speaker 3: Missing, which is such a dangerous.
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Speaker 2: Label, it really is. It demands that we confront our
2:30
own implicit biases about why people disappear. And on top
2:33
of that, it underscores the undeniable, terrifying permanence of our
2:37
digital footprints. Oh. Absolutely, the data we generate is immortal,
2:41
even the digital whispers we are absolutely certain we have erased.
2:45
Speaker 1: Because here's the central mystery we're asking you to unravel
2:47
with us today. You have a teenager who vanishes into
2:50
thin air from a sprawling, four hundred acre remote farm
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in Iowa in twenty seventeen.
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Speaker 2: Just completely gone right.
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Speaker 1: And for five agonizing years, she is essentially reduced to
3:01
just another runaway statistic gathering dust in a filing cabinet.
3:05
The assumption is simply that she chose to leave.
3:07
Speaker 2: Which is what everyone wanted to believe exactly.
3:11
Speaker 1: But justice in this specific case doesn't come from a
3:14
search party finding a body in the woods. It arrives
3:17
through an abandoned flip phone left behind in a dusty
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barn containing pictures of a room that was simply too clean.
3:24
Speaker 2: Wow. And you know, before we can even begin to
3:27
understand the forensic turning point at the end of Jade's life,
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or how that digital footprint ultimately unraveled at killer's alibi,
3:33
we must start at the very beginning.
3:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have to go back.
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Speaker 2: We have to meticulously examine the revolving bower of a
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child welfare system that failed her from the moment she
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was entered into it. Understanding the specific mechanisms of her
3:46
vulnerability is well, it's the only way to comprehend how
3:49
the crime was even possible.
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Speaker 1: Okay, So let's pull from the background files and look
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at who Jade was. She was born on March sixteen,
3:56
two thousand and two, in Iowa, and when you read
3:58
through the personal accounts from her friends, from the teachers
4:01
and relatives who actually interacted with her daily, a very
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distinct portrait emergence.
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Speaker 2: It really paints a picture.
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Speaker 1: They described her as CBS's forty eight Hours reporters as
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a sweet little ray of sunshine. They emphasized that she
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was bubbly, resilient and relentlessly upbeat. And the reason those
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adjectives are so incredibly striking is that they existed in
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stark contrast to her reality.
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Speaker 2: Right, because her home life was incredibly dark.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it was entirely defined by severe chronic substance abuse.
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Both her mother Ladawn and her father Kevin struggled deeply
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with crippling addiction.
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Speaker 2: And growing up in an environment dictated by the unpredictable
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tides of severe addiction creates a baseline of profound instability
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for a developing brain.
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Speaker 3: I can't even imagine a child in.
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Speaker 2: That setting doesn't get to experience a normal developmental trajectory. Instead,
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they are forced to cultivate sophisticated survival tactics far earlier
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than any human beings should, right. I mean, they learned
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to read the emotional temperature of a room instantly, they
5:01
learn how to become invisible when necessary, and they learn
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how to navigate systems of authority that are constantly intervening
5:07
in their family dynamic.
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Speaker 1: And you actually see those survival tactics physically manifesting. And
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how Jade presented herself to the world. The files describe
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her as about five foot four, weighing anywhere from one
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hundred and twenty seven to one hundred and fifty pounds
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with bright blue eyes. But her hair color was constantly shifting.
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He was always changing it always. She dyed it blonde,
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then brown, altering her appearance regularly. She sometimes wore reading
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glasses just to change her look. But the detail from
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the investigative reporting that really forces you to stop and
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think is her use of names.
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Speaker 2: This part is wild.
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Speaker 3: She didn't just.
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Speaker 1: Change her hair dye. This teenager utilized a rotating roster
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of aliases. She used first names like Kara, Jenny, or Samantha,
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and she paired them with fake last names like Hollis,
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Murphy or Stevens.
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Speaker 2: Utilizing a matrix of false identities is a classic, highly
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evolved survival mechanism for a youth who is actively trying
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to navigate completely outside the grid.
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Speaker 1: It's not normal teenage behavior, not at all.
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Speaker 2: A typical high school student doesn't cycle through three different
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first names and three different last names for amusement. They
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adopt that kind of intense operational security because they are
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actively evading detection from multiple fronts. Yeah, from everyone exactly,
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both the child welfare system trying to institutionalize them and
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law enforcement trying to enforce custody orders. It requires a
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staggering amount of mental bandwidth for a child to keep
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those identities straight.
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Speaker 1: We see the need for that evasion solidified very early on.
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Let's look at the timeline from the court records. In
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September twenty fifteen, when Jade is just thirteen years old,
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the situation at home hits a breaking point.
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Speaker 2: Thirteen just a kid, right.
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Speaker 1: The Iowa Department of Human Services legally intervenes. They remove
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her from her mother, La Dawn's custody, citing the severe
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ongoing addiction and the dangerous instability to household, and they
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place Jade into the state foster.
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Speaker 2: Care system, which is supposed to be the safety net
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supposed to be.
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Speaker 1: But this intervention isn't the end of her trauma. It
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merely shifts the geography of it. She immediately becomes what
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the system labels a chronic runaway.
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Speaker 2: And the terminology there is so important.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's crucial to clarify her motivation here. She
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isn't running away to go to parties or rebel in
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a typical teenage fashion. She is driven by this fierce, overwhelming,
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desperate longing to just get.
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Speaker 2: Back to her mother, because the public perception of child
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removal often relies on a deeply flawed assumption as well.
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We tend to assume that when a child is physically
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extracted from a toxic, dangerous environment, they will immediately feel
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relief or at the very least logically recognize the safety
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of their new foster placement.
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Speaker 3: Like they should be grateful.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, But human attachment doesn't operate on pure logic. The
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psychological bond between a child and a parent, even a
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deeply flawed parent who is actively suffering from severe addiction
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and incapable of providing basic care, is incredibly powerful.
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Speaker 3: It's primal.
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Speaker 2: It is primal. Jade wasn't rejecting the physical safety of
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a foster bed. She was desperately seeking out the only
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primary attachment figure she had ever known, regardless of how
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broken that figure was.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this for a second. Think of the
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state foster system when dealing with a chronic runaway like
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a leaky bucket.
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Speaker 2: I like that analogy.
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Speaker 1: The state can hold the child physically for a brief
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fleeting moment. You can mandate a placement. You can assign
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them to a group shelter, you can literally lock a
8:31
door and put a roof over their heads. Sure, but
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the bureaucratic system completely lacks the emotional sealant required to
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protect that child from the immense invisible gravity pulling them
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right back to that toxic home environment.
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Speaker 2: Framing it as an absence of emotional sealant perfectly captures
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the systemic failure. A government agency can requisition a mattress
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and allocate food stipends, but it cannot legislate a child's
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emotional detachment from their mother.
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Speaker 3: No, it can't.
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Speaker 2: She he compounds when you look at Ladawn's actions, Ladawan,
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battling her own severe internal demons, actively and consistently subverted
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the state's efforts. Instead of letting the system help right,
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instead of recognizing her inability to parent and encouraging Jade
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to accept the stability of foster care, Laddan actively hid
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her daughter from the authorities. She would orchestrate these complex
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logistical maneuvers, shuttling Jade between various friends, distant relatives, and
9:27
temporary safehouses across multiple state lines.
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Speaker 1: Just doing absolutely whatever it took to avoid returning her
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trial to the custody of the state. Whatever it took,
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and this constant shuffling creates an absolute logistical nightmare for
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law enforcement and social workers. Jee's footprint was scattered everywhere.
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The public record show she had ties all over the map.
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Speaker 2: She was incredibly hard to track.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, she was traced to Des Moines and Dubuque in Iowa,
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down to Phoenix and Arizona, over to Texas at one
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point before the chaotic current dragged her back to the Midwest.
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This relentless cycle leads us to a critical inflection point
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in June twenty sixteen. Jade is fourteen years old. Now,
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the authorities catch up with her and she is placed
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in a designated shelter for troubled youth in Des Moines.
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Speaker 2: But placing a highly motivated flight risk teenager in a
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standard youth shelter is often just hitting the reset button
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on the evasion cycle.
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Speaker 1: Oh and the cycle accelerates immediately. She runs away from
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that demind shelter almost the second she gets the chance,
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of course, she does, but the authorities are highly mobilized
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this time. The US Marshals actually managed to track her
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down to a local gas station. Two days later, they
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apprehend her. They bring her back to the facility.
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Speaker 2: And what happens next.
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Speaker 1: What is the results of that massive expenditure of law
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enforcement resources. On June tenth, twenty sixteen, she bolts again.
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The very same day, law enforcement is forced to file
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yet another missing person's report, tossing another piece of paper
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onto an already towering stack.
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Speaker 2: However, the June twenty sixteen disappear vents must be analyzed
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differently than her previous flights. There is a distinct behavioral
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shift in how she manages her absence.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, she didn't just vanish into the ether this time
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and cut all ties. The reporting shows she maintained sporadic
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but consistent contact with her loved one.
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Speaker 2: Right the digital trail.
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Speaker 1: She was messaging people, dropping these tiny, agonizing glimpses of hope.
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When you dive into the source material, you see her
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family and friends clinging to these digital breadcrumbs. They're posting
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relentlessly on social media.
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Speaker 2: Just begging her to come back.
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Speaker 1: You can read the please things like happy birthday, Jade,
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please call me, We still love her. It doesn't matter
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what kind of trouble you got yourself into. Just come home.
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Speaker 2: The psychological toll of that specific dynamic is incredibly taxing
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on every single party involved. For the law enforcement agency's
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tasked with finding her, it presents an immense operational paradox.
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Speaker 3: What do you mean?
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Speaker 2: Searching for a missing person who is actively intelligently evading
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you is hard enough. But searching for a missing person
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when the very family members pleading for her return on
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Facebook are simultaneously hiding her or lying to you about
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her whereabouts.
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Speaker 3: Oh man, that's impossible.
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Speaker 2: It drains resources and severely damages the investigative drive you
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have detectives expending hundreds of hours to locate a teenager
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who does not want to be found stonewalled by the
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people who know her best.
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Speaker 1: I really want you, the listener, to stop and consider
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the pervasive myth of stranger danger for a moment. Culturally,
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we are trained from childhood to fear the unknown boogeyman
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hiding in the bushes or driving the unmarked.
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Speaker 2: White van right the random attacker.
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Speaker 1: But when you look at the empirical data surrounding vulnerable
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youth like Jade, the greatest, most lethal danger.
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Speaker 3: Rarely complament.
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Speaker 1: Made by the exact people they love and trust the
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most in the world.
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Speaker 2: Grasping that tragic irony is essential to understanding the remainder
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of Jade's life. John's frantic, illegal attempts to protect her
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daughter from the bureaucracy of the state foster system were
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precisely the actions that stripped away every single institutional protection
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Jade had left.
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Speaker 3: By trying to save her, she.
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Speaker 2: Doomed her exactly. By pulling Jade completely off the grid
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and enabling her life as a fugitive Ladawan inadvertently dismantled
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the safety net. She isolated her daughter from social workers, teachers,
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mandated reporters, and the police, leaving her completely exposed.
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Speaker 1: This relentless cycle of flight, fueled by an incredibly desperate
13:31
mother daughter bond that drove them to evade the authorities
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at absolutely all costs, didn't just lead them in circles.
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Speaker 2: No, it escalated.
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Speaker 1: It directly paved the way for a catastrophic fatal plan,
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a plan that was genuinely conceived to offer Jade permanent sanctuary,
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but which instead delivered her completely unprotected, directly into the
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hands of a predator.
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Speaker 2: The systemic isolation they fought so hard to achieve became
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the exact environment a predator requires to operate without compact sequence.
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Speaker 1: So let's move the timeline forward into early twenty seventeen.
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Jade has been living off the radar with relatives down
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in Arizona for several months following that June twenty sixteen
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escape from Des Moines. She eventually reaches out to Ladawn again. Okay,
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and Ladawn, operating from that place of desperate paranoia, device
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is a new strategy. The grand idea is to secretly
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transport Jade back up to Iowa and physically hide her
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in a secure location until March twenty.
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Speaker 2: Twenty, because that's the magic date.
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Speaker 1: Yes, that is the date when Jade turns eighteen, legally
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aging out of the child welfare system entirely. Once she's eighteen,
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the state can't force her into a shelter, and Ladawn
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won't be charged with harboring a runaway.
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Speaker 2: But executing a multi year concealment plan requires a highly
14:43
specific type of location. You cannot hide a vibrant social
14:48
teenager in a crowded apartment complex for three years.
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Speaker 3: People would notice.
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Speaker 2: Exactly Ladan needed a fortress somewhere entirely off the societal radar.
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Speaker 1: Entered James David Buckmerski Senior at this point in early
15:01
twenty seventeen. He is a man in his late fifties
15:04
or early sixties. According to the case files, Laddan, who
15:07
lives about three hours away from him, has been dating
15:09
him for several months.
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Speaker 2: So a relatively new relationship.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, they maintain this somewhat volatile on again, off again
15:15
online romance and she stays at his place occasionally, and
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Buckmirsky possesses the one thing Laddan desperately needs, property, an
15:24
enormous amount of.
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Speaker 2: It, the fortress she was looking for.
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Speaker 1: Right, he owns a sprawling four hundred acre estate comprised
15:31
of dense woodland and working farmland on Skyline Drive. Is
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located south of Decora in Winnischek County, an incredibly rural,
15:39
quiet part of northeast Iowa. He even operates a public
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attraction on the property during the fall, a massive setup
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called the Tranquility Corn Maze.
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Speaker 2: If you attempt to view this through the distorted lens
15:51
of a desperate mother trying to hide a run away
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from state authorities, a four hundred acre remote farm positioned
15:57
at the end of a long gravel road sounds like
15:59
the Altar Sanctuary.
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Speaker 3: It sounds perfect to her right.
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Speaker 2: It offers physical isolation, vast acreage to disappear into and
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a proprietor willing to circumvent the law.
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Speaker 1: The logistics are set into motion, and Jade arrives at
16:12
this massive skyline drive farm around March twenty three, twenty seventeen.
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And initially, if you only look at the surface level documentation,
16:19
it actually appears as though Ladawn's misguided plan is success.
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Speaker 2: It looks like it's working.
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Speaker 1: It looks like Jade has finally found a safe harbor.
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Because she has no cell phone service of her own
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out in the rural hills, she relies entirely on Bakmirsky's
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phone to communicate with the outside world. The early days
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are marked by these trips into town. Bakmersky takes her
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to the walmart into Cora. He purchases new clothes for her,
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new undergarments, basic necessities for a long term stay.
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Speaker 2: And that purposeful documentation of domestic normalcy is a critical phase.
16:51
They are establishing a baseline of comfort and routine.
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Speaker 1: You look at the photos recovered from those first few
16:57
days and it breaks your heart. Smiling and I don't
17:01
mean a forced polite smile.
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Speaker 3: For the camera.
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Speaker 1: She looks genuinely happy, relaxed, even goofy she looks safe.
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She really does. There are pictures of her grabbing food
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at a local pizza ranch with Bachmersky's nineteen year old son, Brian,
17:13
who lived there. There are photos of her standing around
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a bonfire at night, roasting hot dogs, looking like a
17:19
totally normal teenager on a camping trip.
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Speaker 2: But appearances can be so deceiving.
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Speaker 1: Well yeah, and I have to stop and push back
17:25
on this narrative of well intentioned, naive mother when you
17:29
really break it down, how could Ladon possibly convince herself
17:33
that sending her highly vulnerable fifteen year old daughter, a
17:36
girl with a history of severe trauma, to live on
17:39
an isolated, massive farm with a much older man she
17:43
had only been dating for a few months was a
17:45
safe haven. That's hard to reconcile Realistically, she barely knew
17:49
Backmersky's true character. It defies all basic maternal logic.
17:52
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of systemic
17:56
failure and generational trauma, we have to analyze the devis
18:00
stating blind spots created by a life of addiction. Okay,
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Laddan's primary overwhelming fear, the single motivation driving every decision
18:08
she made, was keeping Jade out of the hands of
18:10
the Department of Human Services. In her mind, the state
18:13
wasn't a protector. The state was the enemy agency that
18:16
had forcibly removed her child from her home right.
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Speaker 1: They were the villain in her story.
18:20
Speaker 2: Exactly when a parent is operating from a place of active,
18:23
severe addiction combined with a profound, almost pathological paranoia regarding
18:28
government authorities, their internal risk assessment matrix is completely shattered.
18:34
Speaker 3: They can't judge actual risk anymore right.
18:36
Speaker 2: They stop evaluating the dangers of individuals and only evaluate
18:40
the danger of institutions. Bachmirsky offered unlimited land, complete isolation,
18:45
and a stated willingness to defy law enforcement. To Ladan's
18:50
distorted worldview, those traits read as safety and loyalty. She
18:55
legitimately believed she was shielding Jade from the ultimate threat.
18:58
Speaker 1: But she wasn't shielding her at all. She was delivering
19:01
her into a far more insidious trap. And this is
19:03
where the Wenny Sheet County Court documents reveal a details
19:06
so deeply sinister, so thoroughly calculated, that it completely rewrites
19:10
how you view those happy, innocent pizza ranch photos.
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Speaker 2: The grooming aspect.
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Speaker 1: Yes back, Mrsky hadn't just passively agreed to do his
19:17
girlfriend a favor and let her daughter occupy a spare bedroom.
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Speaker 2: Far from passive acceptance. The intensive digital investigation later uncovered
19:25
that James Bochmersky had actively cultivated a secret one on
19:29
one electronic relationship with fifteen year old Jade for an
19:33
entire month prior to her ever arriving at the Decora Farm.
19:37
Speaker 1: This was happening completely unbeknownst to La Dawn during the
19:39
planning phase.
19:40
Speaker 2: Yes, he bypassed the mother entirely to communicate directly with
19:45
a highly vulnerable child. Furthermore, the financial records indicated he
19:49
used his own personal funds to help facilitate her transport
19:52
from her hiding spot in Arizona all the way to Iowa.
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Speaker 3: Oh my god.
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Speaker 2: When you analyze that behavior forensically, it destroys the near
20:00
arrative of a passive sanctuary. This was calculated, methodical predatory grooming.
20:05
He recognized her extreme vulnerability, her desire for stability, and
20:08
her need to stay hidden, and he weaponized all of it.
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Speaker 3: It's terrifying.
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Speaker 2: He was establishing a private, secret channel of communication and
20:15
financial dependency with a chronic runaway before she ever set
20:19
foot on his isolated four hundred acre property.
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Speaker 1: It genuinely makes my blood run cold to think about it, because,
20:25
on the surface, to her mother and her friends receiving
20:28
text updates, Jade seemed to have finally found a place
20:31
to catch her breath. She's leaving this comforting digital trail
20:35
of smiling photos, eating pizza, enjoying bonfires.
20:39
Speaker 2: But it was an illusion.
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Speaker 1: Underneath that tranquil rural facade. The steel jaws of the
20:45
trap had already snap shut around her, and within just
20:48
a few days of her arrival, that peaceful illusion would
20:51
violently shatter, leaving behind absolutely nothing but an echoing, terrifying
20:56
digital silence.
20:57
Speaker 2: The escalation from that perceived safety to total, irreversible disappearance
21:02
happens with staggering velocity.
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Speaker 1: It's incredibly fast. We have to narrow our focus to
21:07
a very specific, highly critical window of time. We are
21:10
looking at the late hours of March twenty nine, stretching
21:13
into the early morning of March thirty at twenty seventeen.
21:15
Speaker 2: Okay, let's track the timeline.
21:17
Speaker 1: Jade has been at the farm for roughly a week.
21:19
As we noticed, she doesn't have her own cell service
21:21
out there, so she is entirely reliant on using bog
21:23
Mersky's phone to text.
21:24
Speaker 2: Anyone, which is a vital detail regarding coercive control. Her
21:27
only lifeline to the outside world, her only means of
21:30
signaling for help, is routed directly through the physical device
21:34
owned by the much older man who spent a month
21:36
grooming her. He controls the flow of information.
21:39
Speaker 1: That night, bog Merski's nineteen year old son Brian is
21:43
scheduled for a night shift working at the Decora Walmart.
21:46
While he's at work, Jade begins texting him from Buck
21:49
Mursky's phone, And because of the digital forensics we'll discuss later,
21:53
we have the exact transcripts of these final communications.
21:56
Speaker 2: What do they say?
21:56
Speaker 1: At exactly twelve more three am on March thirty, she
22:00
sends a text, Hey, Brian, it's JD. Is it going okay?
22:04
Tired yet?
22:05
Speaker 2: Analyzing the syntax in tone, it's highly casual, friendly, very
22:08
typical teenage communication. She's bored. She's reaching out to the
22:11
only person close to her age for a chat.
22:13
Speaker 1: Ten minutes pass Then, at twelve thirteen am, she sends
22:17
another completely normal message, if you want to call on
22:20
your hour break, we.
22:21
Speaker 2: Still can if you want again. She is actively establishing
22:24
future plans. She expects continuous interaction throughout the night. She's
22:27
anticipating a phone call in.
22:28
Speaker 1: An hour, but then just two minutes later, the entire
22:32
narrative violently derails. At exactly twelve fifteen am, she sends
22:36
her final message. In this text, she abruptly promises to
22:40
update Brian whenever buck Mirsky takes her to a new
22:43
place and gives her a new identity to stay hidden.
22:46
Speaker 2: From an investigative standpoint, that is a massive, jarring, totally
22:50
illogical shift in tone and content within a one hundred
22:54
and twenty second window.
22:55
Speaker 3: It makes no sense.
22:55
Speaker 2: You don't go from asking a friend to call you
22:57
on their lunch break to suddenly announcing a covert relocation
23:00
and an identity change two minutes later.
23:02
Speaker 1: And the most chilling part after that twelve to fifteen
23:05
am text about a new identity she never follows through,
23:09
no updates on where this new place is, no phone
23:11
calls during his break, nothing from twelve sixteen am onward,
23:15
fifteen year old Jade Colvin ceases to exist in the
23:18
digital world.
23:19
Speaker 2: The abruptness of that silence immediately brings us to James
23:22
Bockmersky's explanation of events, an explanation which immediately begins to
23:26
fracture under the slightest scrutiny.
23:28
Speaker 1: Let's lay out his official alibi. Buck Mirski claims that
23:31
late that night he last saw Jay doing laundry in
23:34
the house. He states that he then decided to leave
23:37
the four hundred acre farm to run a quick errand
23:40
at a local convenience store called Norby's.
23:43
Speaker 2: In the middle of the night.
23:44
Speaker 3: Right.
23:45
Speaker 1: He claims that his errand took a brief amount of time,
23:47
and when he returned to the farmhouse, she had simply
23:50
vanished into thin air, walked right off the property.
23:53
Speaker 3: Into the dark.
23:54
Speaker 2: There's a glaring physical contradiction to that story. Her suitcase,
23:58
containing the new clothes he had just purchase for her,
24:01
was still sitting at the farm exactly. One of his
24:04
sons specifically noted its presence. A seasoned runaway, a girl
24:09
who has successfully navigated across state lines for years, who
24:13
is allegedly embarking on a highly secretive move to a
24:16
new place with a new identity, does not abandon her
24:19
only physical possessions.
24:21
Speaker 1: Adding another layer to that absurdity. Bockmersky's story to his
24:24
own family members refuses to stay consistent, he begins actively
24:28
seating the environment with disinformation.
24:31
Speaker 2: Throwing out red herrings.
24:32
Speaker 1: He starts a rumor that she suddenly decided to hitchhike
24:35
all the way to Tennessee. When that doesn't stick, he
24:38
shifts tactics and tells people he heard she became a
24:41
cam girl or entered the pornographic film industry. But the
24:45
single most telling detail of his entire post disappearance behavior
24:50
What's that He never once contacts the police to report
24:53
a fifteen year old girl missing from his property in
24:56
the middle of the night. When questioned later, he claims
24:59
he was terrified to facing legal consequences for harboring a runaway.
25:03
Speaker 2: Claiming fear of prosecution for a minor harboring charge is
25:06
a highly convenient excuse that layers perfectly over a far
25:10
more sinister reality. It provides a plausible, self serving reason
25:14
for his absolute lack of action.
25:16
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, and I want you
25:18
to think about this in the context of your own life.
25:20
If you consider the reality of a modern teenager, their
25:24
digital communication isn't just a hobby. It is a constant,
25:27
unbroken stream of consciousness.
25:29
Speaker 2: It's how they live.
25:30
Speaker 3: It is the literal.
25:31
Speaker 1: Pulse of their social existence. Stopping all texts, abandoning all
25:36
social media accounts, ceasing all online interaction abruptly.
25:40
Speaker 3: It is the digital.
25:41
Speaker 1: Equivalent of a medical heart monitor flatlining in an ICU.
25:45
Speaker 2: That's a powerful way to put it.
25:46
Speaker 1: In our modern, hyperconnected era, a teenager choosing to permanently
25:50
cease all digital communication isn't just mildly suspicious behavior. It
25:55
is an immediate, screaming red flag indicating a catastrophic, likely
26:00
fatal event has occurred.
26:02
Speaker 2: The tragedy of Jade's case is that the screaming red
26:04
flag was completely muffled by the systemic context of who
26:08
she was Backmerski was incredibly manipulative. He brilliantly, albeit maliciously,
26:14
weaponized Jade's own complex history against her.
26:17
Speaker 3: He used her past.
26:18
Speaker 2: Yes, because her file was explicitly flagged as a chronic runaway,
26:22
her sudden disappearance from the farm was seamlessly absorbed into
26:25
that existing narrative. Her friends, her extended family, and initially
26:28
even the Des Moines Police Department viewed her vanishing entirely
26:31
through the biased lens of her past behavior.
26:33
Speaker 1: They looked at her history of escaping shelters and thought
26:37
she ran away from the marshals before and popped back
26:39
up in Arizona. So when she vanished this from a
26:41
farm in Dicora, she just ran away again. The past dictated.
26:45
Speaker 2: The prison precisely. Bachmerski didn't have to go through the
26:48
grueling intellectual exercise of inventing a complex, airtight cover story
26:54
to throw off the authorities, because the authorities already possessed
26:58
a pre written narrative for Jade Wow. He simply had
27:01
to gently lean into their assumptions by planting those seeds
27:05
that she moved to Tennessee or entered sex work. He
27:08
provided plausible, stereotypical narratives that align perfectly with societal expectations
27:13
for a troubled youth on the run. He gave them
27:16
the answers they already expected to hear, and.
27:18
Speaker 1: The emotional devastation caused by that assumption is unbearable when
27:22
you look at the family left behind. Laddan, the mother
27:25
who orchestrated this disastrous fatal hiding plan, thinking she was
27:28
saving her daughter, spent years drowning in guilt and confusion.
27:32
Speaker 2: It had to destroy her.
27:33
Speaker 1: She continued to post these agonizing desperate pleas on her
27:37
Facebook page for years after March twenty seventeen. You look
27:41
at the records from September twenty eighteen, a year and
27:43
a half after Jade vanished, and Laddan is still posting
27:47
messages to the void. It's hurting all of us so much.
27:50
Please call someone, Jade. I'm seriously physically dying of a
27:53
broken heart.
27:54
Speaker 2: It is the absolute definition of ambiguous loss. It is
27:58
a psychological torture, or the grieving process can never begin
28:02
because the brain refuses to let go of the possibility
28:04
of return.
28:05
Speaker 3: And it wasn't just La Dawn.
28:07
Speaker 1: Jade's aunt, Tondra Bruce, and a network of Jade's friends
28:10
held out this very specific, desperate hope that Jade was
28:13
simply waiting.
28:14
Speaker 2: Out the clock, waiting for that eighteenth birthday exactly.
28:17
Speaker 1: They believed with every fiber of their being that Jade
28:20
was just biting her time until she aged out of
28:23
the foster system. They circled March twenty twenty on their
28:25
calendars her eighteenth birthday, firmly believing she would finally resurface.
28:29
Because the state of Iowa couldn't legally touch her anymore.
28:32
Speaker 2: But March twenty twenty arrived and the silence remained absolute,
28:35
not a single digital whisper.
28:37
Speaker 1: Because society and the legal system inherently expect runaways go missing,
28:42
Jade's official file did nothing but gathered dust in a
28:45
drawer in Des Moines. For five long, agonizing years, from
28:49
twenty seventeen to twenty twenty two, she was administratively classified
28:53
as a missing runaway.
28:54
Speaker 2: Just a piece of paper and a file.
28:56
Speaker 1: It was viewed as a tragedy, certainly, but it was
28:59
absolutely not treated as an active, fluid crime scene. It
29:02
would require a massive statewide paradigm shift in how law
29:06
enforcement viewed missing youth to finally look at Jade's five
29:09
years of silence not as a successful escape, but as
29:12
the echoing aftermath of a murder.
29:14
Speaker 2: Which perfectly illustrates what happens when you finally introduce relentless
29:17
fresh eyes to stagnant assumed data.
29:20
Speaker 1: This brings us to a major turning point. In twenty
29:22
twenty two, the US Marshall Service launches a massive, highly
29:25
coordinated initiative called Operation Homecoming.
29:28
Speaker 2: Okay, what was the goal there?
29:30
Speaker 1: This isn't a standard patrol operation. It is a statewide
29:33
push specifically aggressively designed to locate missing children across Iowa
29:38
and forcibly revive dozens of cold cases that had slipped
29:42
through the bureaucratic cracks, and Jade Colvin's Dusty File is
29:46
one of the cases pulled from the cabinets.
29:48
Speaker 2: To tackle an operation of this magnitude, they assemble a
29:51
very specific kind of multi agency task force. You cannot
29:55
solve these cases within isolated jurisdictional silos.
29:59
Speaker 1: They build an ap absolute powerhouse of a team. You
30:02
have Detective Cheryl Nablo from the Des Moines Police Department,
30:05
an investigator who specializes in the nuances of missing kids.
30:08
You bring in Deputy US Marshal Justin Wallace providing federal
30:11
reach and resources excellent. You loop in Winnishee County Sheriff's
30:15
Detective Chris Webker, providing the vital local geography and context
30:19
of Decora, and you anchor it with Iowa Division of
30:21
Criminal Investigation Special Agent John Turbott.
30:24
Speaker 2: That is quite the roster.
30:25
Speaker 1: When you read the after action reports and quotes from
30:28
this team, Deputy Wallace lays out their operating philosophy perfectly.
30:32
He stated, you got to start at the beginning, you
30:35
got to know who the person is, their friends, their family,
30:38
their whole background.
30:39
Speaker 2: That philosophy is crucial because the entire original twenty seventeen
30:43
investigation was fatally poisoned by the assumption that she ran away.
30:47
So this new twenty twenty two task force has to
30:50
completely demolish the existing timeline and rebuild it from scratch,
30:54
actively refusing to accept the runaway label as an explanation
30:58
for her disappearance.
31:00
Speaker 1: They start the grueling process of chasing down every single
31:02
lead that had been called in over five years, spanning
31:05
all over the country. The source materials detail how these
31:08
leads stretched from sightings in Massachusetts to rumors in Oklahoma,
31:12
all the way down to Texas, and beyond.
31:14
Speaker 2: Just chasing ghosts.
31:15
Speaker 1: The task force runs aggressive new social media campaigns and
31:19
tips start pouring in from the public. There was even
31:22
one highly compelling tip regarding a patient at a Minnesota
31:24
hospital that seemed incredibly promising. It offered a real glimmer
31:29
of hope oh wow, But they had to meticulously, painfully
31:33
rule it out. They couldn't just make a phone call.
31:35
They had to physically obtain the hospital's security video footage,
31:39
painstakingly review the frames and definitively confirmed that the girl
31:43
in the bed wasn't jade.
31:45
Speaker 2: That process encapsulates the grueling, deeply unglamorous reality of cold
31:50
case work. You are expending massive amounts of energy and
31:54
hope chasing shadows, specifically to definitively prove to the family
31:58
that they are in fact just shadows. It requires immense
32:02
emotional discipline.
32:03
Speaker 1: I have to ask you about the logistics of this, though.
32:05
How do investigators practically approach a cold case where the
32:08
physical trail has literally been cold for half a decade.
32:11
How do you begin to find a needle in a
32:13
haystack when the haystack itself has been dismantled, moved across
32:17
state lines, and scattered to the wind over five years.
32:20
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the evolution of methodology
32:23
and modern cold case investigations. In the digital age, you
32:26
don't start by looking for the physical person. You start
32:29
by hunting the data they left behind. The administrative and
32:33
intellectual will power required by this specific task force was
32:36
staggering because they had to actively fight against five years
32:40
of ingrained systemic bias. They had to force fully break
32:43
down jurisdictional walls because it wasn't just one city exactly.
32:47
Think about the geography. You have a missing girl officially
32:51
reported out of Des Moines who was physically hiding in Arizona,
32:55
who was then secretly transported to rural Decora. Normally, those
32:59
low police departments do not possess the infrastructure to communicate
33:03
efficiently across those vast lines. The task Force served as
33:07
the central processor, synthesizing fragments of data from three different
33:11
regions of the country into one compesive narrative.
33:14
Speaker 1: And the major case altering breakthrough didn't come from a
33:17
boot on the ground physical sighting. It came from the cloud.
33:20
The task Force executed comprehensive digital search warrants on Jade's
33:24
old Instagram account and Ladan's historical Facebook messages.
33:27
Speaker 2: Executing warrants on social media data that is half a
33:30
decade old is incredibly legally and technically complex, but it
33:34
is often the only untainted evidence.
33:36
Speaker 1: Left, and the effort paid out massive dividends. Diving into
33:40
those archived messages revealed the hidden, unvarnished truth of Laddan's
33:45
twenty seventeen plan. They found the exact messages from Laddan
33:48
laying out the timeline saying things like you're going to
33:51
live here until you are probably eighteen and able to
33:54
get out of this system, and you'll have a good life.
33:56
Speaker 3: Baby.
33:56
Speaker 2: It's so sad to hear those words now.
33:59
Speaker 1: And crucially, by tracing the IP addresses and the context
34:02
of these digital warrants, the specific location of Decorah, Iowa
34:05
and the full name of James David Bochmersky finally surfaced
34:09
in connection to Jade's final days.
34:11
Speaker 2: The abstract digital breadcrumbs finally coalesced to provide a concrete,
34:15
physical destination on a map.
34:17
Speaker 1: Exactly these warrants pulled the investigators out of the ethereal
34:21
cloud of social media metadata and pointed their vehicles directly
34:24
toward a physical location, the sprawling four hundred acre farm
34:29
on Skyline Drive in Winnischeek County.
34:31
Speaker 2: But, as any investigator knows, a five year gap means
34:34
the physical world has mutated just as much as the
34:36
digital one time does not stand still at a crime scene.
34:39
Speaker 1: When the task force finally descends on the Skyline Drive
34:42
property in twenty twenty two, ready to confront the man
34:45
who hosted Jade, they find the suspect has vanished and
34:48
the landscape is totally altered. The farm had been entirely
34:51
sold off and heavily renovated by new owners.
34:53
Speaker 2: He didn't just stick around.
34:55
Speaker 1: No, Bakmuski hadn't just moved into town. He had fled
34:58
the state of Iowa completely. Around twenty The investigators track
35:02
his movements and discover he moved hundreds of miles away
35:05
to Georgia and he was actively living under the assumed
35:07
alias Bob Sage.
35:09
Speaker 2: Adopting an alias and fleeing a jurisdiction across state lines
35:13
shortly after a disappearance is textbook consciousness of guilt. It
35:16
is the behavioral equivalent of a waving red flag.
35:19
Speaker 1: Undecurred by his absence. The task course tracks down Bachmersky's
35:23
adult sons, Brian and James Junior, to subject them to
35:26
rigorous interviews. They need to forensically verify every single detail
35:30
of the timeline from that chaotic week in March twenty seventeen.
35:33
Speaker 2: I need to rule them out right.
35:35
Speaker 1: Brian, who you'll remember was nineteen when Jade stayed at
35:38
the farm, confirms the foundational facts. He confirms she arrived
35:43
from Arizona. He confirms the shopping trip to the Decora
35:46
Walmart and then the investigators ruthlessly pressure test his alibi
35:51
for the night Jade vanished.
35:53
Speaker 2: How did it hold out?
35:54
Speaker 1: They don't just take his word for it. They pull
35:56
his historical employment timesheets from the Decora Walmart. They cross
35:59
referred his clock in times with the timestamps on the
36:02
texts he received from Jade. His alibi holds up flawlessly.
36:06
He was exactly where he said he was. His brother,
36:09
James Junior, is subsequently cleared of any involvement as well.
36:12
Speaker 2: Systematically clearing the suns is a vital step because it
36:14
effectively narrows the suspect pooled down to one single isolated individual,
36:19
the patriarch, who is conveniently relocated across the country under
36:22
a fake name.
36:23
Speaker 1: They have their suspect narrowed down, but they are still
36:25
facing a massive hurdle. They don't have a single shred
36:28
of physical evidence cruling a crime occurred. They have suspicious behavior,
36:33
but no proof of murder.
36:35
Speaker 2: So what breaks the case?
36:36
Speaker 1: A local neighbor provides a tip that blows the case
36:39
wide open. The neighbor mentions that when Bachmirsky hastily moved
36:43
away and sold the massive farm, he left some boxes
36:46
of random belongings behind stored in an old, dusty barn
36:49
on the edge of the property. Investigators obtained permission to
36:52
search this barn, and digging through the forgotten junk, they
36:55
find it an old, discarded cell phone, a basic flip phone, the.
37:00
Speaker 2: Exact physical device Jade used to send those final frantic
37:03
text messages to Brian on March thirty.
37:06
Speaker 1: They managed to power this archaic device up, and what
37:09
the digital forensics team extracts from its memory is nothing
37:12
short of explosive. It contains the heartbreaking deleted messages from
37:16
frantic family members trying to reach Jade in the days.
37:19
Speaker 2: After she vanished once he tried to erase Yeah.
37:21
Speaker 1: It contains Ladawn's increasingly desperate, panicked please. It holds the
37:26
last known photographs of Jade alive, pictures of her standing
37:29
with Laddawn when she was originally dropped off, and those
37:31
seemingly happy photos with Brian roasting hotdogs at the bonfire.
37:34
Speaker 2: It's all right there.
37:35
Speaker 1: I have to stop and push back on the sheer
37:38
audacity of this, though. It absolutely blows my mind. Why
37:42
would a captivated killer go through all the immense logistical
37:46
trouble of fleeing the state abandoning a four hundred acre property,
37:50
moving to Georgia and literally changing his legal name to
37:54
Bob Sage to hide his identity, only to leave the
37:57
literal confession machine, the phone that ties every single thread
38:01
of the murder together, just sitting at a cardboard box
38:03
in a barn for a neighbor to stumble upon.
38:05
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem to make sense.
38:07
Speaker 1: From a criminal mastermind perspective. How does that make any
38:09
logical sense?
38:10
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant question. And what's fascinating here is how
38:14
deeply it highlights the psychology of criminals regarding digital evidence,
38:18
particularly older offenders who didn't grow up as digital natives.
38:22
We see this specific catastrophic error constantly in criminal investigations.
38:26
Speaker 3: You just don't get technology.
38:28
Speaker 2: Abusers and killers often severely fundamentally misjudge how technology actually operates.
38:34
They operate under this naive false assumption that pressing the
38:37
delete button on a basic flip phone permanently and physically
38:41
erases the data from existence, like burning a piece of paper.
38:45
Buckmersky likely sat in that farmhouse, scrolled through the text
38:48
from Ladawn, hit delete on the immediate evidence of his
38:51
communications with Jade, tossed the phone into a junk box
38:55
in the barn and genuinely considered the problem permanently solved.
38:58
Speaker 1: He didn't realize that deleting a file just removes the
39:01
shortcut to it. The actual metadata, the deleted files, the
39:05
location pings, they all still live, buried deep in the
39:08
device's flash memory until they're overwritten by.
39:11
Speaker 2: New data, precisely to his analog mindset. Once the little
39:14
screen said no messages, it reverted to being a useless
39:17
piece of plastic. But to a modern forensic investigator armed
39:20
with extraction software like Celebrate, that old phone acted as
39:23
a perfectly preserved or medically sealed time capsule because it
39:27
just sat there. Because it was shut in a dark barn,
39:30
powered down, and completely untouched for five years, no new
39:34
data ever overwrote the old data. It held the victim's
39:38
final days in absolute digital stasis, just waiting for someone
39:42
with the right algorithm to unlock it and pull the
39:44
ghosts out of the unallocated space.
39:47
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the deleted text and the happy
39:49
bonfire photos. The extraction software recovered The photos of Jade
39:53
confirmed she was physically present on the farm, which destroyed
39:56
any potential lie that she never arrived. But the single
39:59
most this damning piece of evidence found buried deep in
40:02
the memory of that abandoned flip phone wasn't a picture
40:05
of a person at all.
40:06
Speaker 2: No, the case was broken open by a picture of
40:09
empty space.
40:10
Speaker 1: This brings us to the absolute core of the forensic breakthrough.
40:13
Deep in the recovered memory files of that flip phone,
40:16
the DCI investigators found two explosive, high resolution photos and
40:20
the metadata attached to these photos dated them to exactly
40:23
April first, twenty seventeen.
40:25
Speaker 2: Which is an incredibly significant damning timeline.
40:29
Speaker 1: It's exactly April first, is just two days, roughly forty
40:32
eight hours after Jade sent that final abrupt twelve to
40:35
fifteen am text message about a new identity on March thirty.
40:39
And what do these two photos depict. One is a
40:42
picture of a spotlessly clean, completely decluttered, seemingly sterilized kitchen,
40:48
every surface is gleaning and organized. And the other one,
40:50
the second photo, is of a pristine bedroom showing freshly clean,
40:54
shiny floors without a speck of dust or debris.
40:57
Speaker 2: To understand the power of these images, we have I
41:00
have to contextualize them against the environmental reality of the
41:02
rest of the property right.
41:04
Speaker 1: When investigators interviewed people familiar with the farm, they unanimously
41:08
noted that bok Mirski's house was typically incredibly messy. It
41:11
was cluttered, dirty, highly lived in, typical of an aging
41:14
bachelor managing a massive farm alone.
41:17
Speaker 2: So the contract is jarring.
41:19
Speaker 1: A pristine, sparkling kitchen and a flawlessly clean bedroom were
41:23
highly uncharacteristic of the standard environment. And to compound this suspicion,
41:28
the forensics team found a later photo on the phone,
41:30
dated June twenty seventeen. They clearly showed a brand new,
41:34
notably smaller mattress had been purchased and placed in that
41:37
specific previously cleaned bedroom.
41:39
Speaker 2: That is just chilling.
41:42
Speaker 1: So what does this all.
41:42
Speaker 3: Mean for the jury?
41:43
Speaker 1: Think about it like this. Imagine you were walking into
41:47
a dilapidated, filthy, borderline hoarding situation of a house, trash everywhere,
41:52
stained carpets, and right in the center of the living
41:55
room you find a single perfectly bleached, freshly painted, pristine
41:59
white wall out Immediately, the cleanliness itself is the anomaly.
42:03
The absence of dirt is what draws your eye. It
42:05
is a screaming siren indicating that something horrific happened against
42:08
that specific wall, and a massive panic cover up took place.
42:11
Speaker 3: To hide it.
42:12
Speaker 2: You've just perfectly articulated a core, highly sophisticated concept in
42:16
modern forensics known as negative evidence. The general public, heavily
42:21
influenced by television procedurals, thinks of forensics almost exclusively as
42:26
finding things that are actively present, finding a bloody fingerprint
42:29
on a glass, finding a murder weapon hidden in a drain,
42:32
finding foreign DNA under a fingernail.
42:34
Speaker 3: Right the smoking gun.
42:36
Speaker 2: But elite investigators are equally trained to look for a void.
42:39
They look for what has been artificially forcefully removed from
42:43
an environment.
42:44
Speaker 1: The sudden absence of evidence becomes the most powerful evidence
42:47
of all.
42:47
Speaker 2: Exactly when a chaotic, messy rural farmhouse suddenly features two
42:52
specific rooms that look like they've been scrubbed and sterilized
42:56
by a hazardous materials response team, that is pure negative evidence.
43:01
DCI agent Turbot summarized it perfectly. When he first laid
43:03
eyes on those recovered photos, he bluntly stated, it screamed cleanup.
43:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't do that for no reason.
43:09
Speaker 2: The state of the house was, in the investigator's words,
43:11
way out a description of its usual baseline. Barmerski took
43:16
pictures of his handiwork, likely a psychological compulsion to assure
43:19
himself he had missed absolutely nothing, or perhaps to show
43:22
someone else the completed job, and those very images became
43:26
the circumstantial cornerstone of the entire murder prosecution. They proved
43:31
unequivocally a profound consciousness of guilt. You do not bleach
43:34
a bedroom floor. Because a keenager ran away to Tennessee.
43:38
Speaker 1: Armed with this undeniable photographic proof of a massive cover up,
43:41
the multi agency task force finally has the leverage they
43:44
need to go on the offensive. They pack up, travel
43:47
all the way down to Georgia, prepare to corner their suspect,
43:50
living under the name Bob Sage, and force the brutal
43:53
truth out of James David Beckmersky.
43:55
Speaker 2: The resulting interviews in Georgia are an absolute masterclass in
43:58
watching a fabricated alibi discender great in real time under
44:01
the pressure of hidden evidence.
44:03
Speaker 1: They conduct two separate interviews with him. In the first interview,
44:06
Backamersky tries to play the role of the innocent, well meaning,
44:10
slightly confused host. He readily admits he knew Ladawn. He
44:15
admits he hosts to Jade at the farm.
44:17
Speaker 2: Trying to seem cooperative.
44:18
Speaker 1: He tries to spin this wholesome, almost paternal narrative to
44:22
the detectives, telling them, you know what I thought was
44:24
going to happen. To be honest, I thought we were
44:26
going to be a fan family. He rigidly sticks to
44:29
his original twenty seventeen story that he went to the
44:32
local store for a brief errand and she just vanished
44:35
into the rural darkness while he was buying cigarettes.
44:38
Speaker 2: He's probing the investigators testing the waters to see exactly
44:41
what cards they hold. He assumes they have nothing but
44:44
a five year old missing person's report.
44:46
Speaker 1: But then comes the second interview and the dynamic violently shifts.
44:50
Bokbirsky shows up to the session appearing visibly intoxicated. He
44:55
suddenly claims he has severe amnesia and doesn't even remember
44:58
the details of the first chat they had just out prior.
45:00
Speaker 2: A classic evasion tactic, and this is.
45:02
Speaker 1: The exact moment when Agent Turbot decides to drop the hammer.
45:06
He reaches into his folder and slowly slides the recovered
45:10
photos across the interrogation table. He confronts Buck Mrsky directly
45:15
with the high resolution pictures of the spotless, bleached rooms
45:18
from his own abandoned flip phone, and.
45:20
Speaker 2: If you analyze the transcripts, you can see his arrogant
45:24
confidence completely shatter the second his eyes hit those photos.
45:28
Speaker 1: When forcefully pressed about why he was photographing a sterilized
45:31
room and whether he was cleaning up evidence of a crime,
45:34
Buck Mirsky waivers. The confident facade cracks. He stammers out, so,
45:39
I guess you're thinking that there was evidence there that
45:41
I tried to get rid of, and I'm telling you
45:43
right now, I'll guarantee you there.
45:45
Speaker 2: Isn't Notice the highly specific phrasing of his denial, he notes,
45:49
say I didn't clean up anything or nothing happened in
45:51
that room, he says, he guarantees there isn't any evidence left.
45:54
Oh wow, that is a massive, subconscious linguistic slip. He
45:58
is confirming the act of removal while denying the presence
46:01
of remaining evidence.
46:02
Speaker 1: And agent Turbot catches that slip instantly. Turbot stops circling
46:06
the perimeter of the case and goes straight for the throat.
46:09
He looks Bockmrski in the eye and directly accuses him
46:12
of physical involvement in Jade's death.
46:14
Speaker 2: What did he say to that?
46:15
Speaker 1: Bockmrski replies with a single feigned word of shock dead,
46:20
and then, realizing he is completely trapped by his own
46:23
digital hubris, he delivers what has to be one of
46:26
the most chilling, arrogant lines ever recorded in an interrogation room.
46:31
He leans back and says, a long time ago figured
46:34
I'd go to grave before I tell the truth.
46:36
Speaker 2: From an investigator's standpoint, that statement is the holy grail.
46:40
It is as close to a full, unvarnished confession as
46:43
you will ever extract from a psychopath who firmly believes
46:46
he is outsmarted the justice system. As agent Turbot later
46:49
commented to the press, any microscopic remaining doubt they held vanished.
46:53
In that exact second they knew with absolute certainty they
46:56
had their killer.
46:57
Speaker 1: This confrontation inevitably leads to the fire illegal reckoning. In
47:01
August twenty twenty four, James David Bachmersky, Senior is officially
47:05
extradited and charged with second degree murder in the state
47:08
of Iowa. Fast forward to the trial, which unfolds in
47:11
twenty twenty.
47:11
Speaker 2: Five, a long time coming.
47:13
Speaker 1: The court room atmosphere is tense. You have his own
47:15
flesh and blood. His son Brian taking the witness stand,
47:18
raising his right hand and testifying against his father. Brian
47:22
lays out for the jury how his dad's stories about
47:24
Jade's sudden disappearance kept shifting from week to week and were,
47:27
in his words, hard to keep straight.
47:29
Speaker 2: That has to be devastating for the defense.
47:31
Speaker 1: After hearing all the evidence on September two, twenty twenty five,
47:34
the jury hands down a decisive guilty verdict for second
47:37
degree murder, and shortly after in October twenty twenty five,
47:41
the sixty six year old Bachmirski is sentenced to the
47:43
maximum allowable penalty of fifty years in prison, with a
47:46
mandatory minimum of thirty five years served before parole.
47:49
Speaker 2: Consideration, so he's never getting out.
47:52
Speaker 1: Mathematically, this means he won't even be eligible for a
47:54
parole board hearing until the year's twenty fifty nine or
47:57
twenty sixty, when he would be well over one hundred
48:00
years old. It is effectively and purposefully a life sentence
48:05
behind bars.
48:06
Speaker 2: Which is an incredible outcome given what they had to
48:08
work with.
48:08
Speaker 1: But looking at the entirety of this case, I have
48:12
to marvel at this incredible legal victory and ask you,
48:15
from a strictly legal and procedural standpoint, how do county
48:19
prosecutors successfully convince twelve skeptical jurors to hand down a
48:24
fifty year murder sentence when they do not possess a
48:27
physical body that you do not have a confirmed murder weapon,
48:29
and the actual physical crime scene no longer even exist
48:32
to be walked through.
48:33
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of advanced
48:36
courtroom strategy, it's about systematically deconstructing the persistent myth that
48:40
circumstantial evidence is inherently weak. The general public often equates
48:44
circumstantial evidence with flimsy evidence or guesswork.
48:48
Speaker 3: Right, like it's not enough to convict.
48:49
Speaker 2: It absolutely isn't flimsy when woven together correctly by a
48:53
skilled prosecutor. Circumstantial evidence is a steel.
48:55
Speaker 1: Cable, right because a single strand a wire might snap.
48:59
But when you braid dozens of strands together, each piece
49:02
reinforces the structural integrity of the others until it's unbreakable.
49:06
Speaker 2: Exactly, the prosecution didn't just present isolated facts. They built
49:09
an inescapable, interlocking web. Let's look at the strands. Strand
49:13
one the undeniable digital timeline. You have the sudden, violent
49:17
cessation of all typical teenage text messages mere minutes after
49:22
she mentions moving to a new identity, Okay.
49:24
Speaker 3: Strand one.
49:25
Speaker 2: Strand two the establishment of motive and predication. They prove
49:29
the hidden secret grooming via the electronic relationship that he
49:32
maliciously cultivated for a month before she even arrived in Iowa.
49:37
Stran three, his highly indicative post offense behavior.
49:40
Speaker 3: The shifting stories.
49:42
Speaker 2: Constantly shifting contradictory alibis fed to his own family, his
49:45
absolute failure to report a child missing from his property,
49:48
physically fleeing the state and adopting a fake name. And
49:51
the final unbreakable strand anchoring the entire case, the negative evidence,
49:56
the photo, the undeniable, time stamped photographic proof of a
50:00
a massive frantic cleanup effort in the exact location she
50:03
disappeared from. When you methodically weave those four strands together
50:07
in front of a jury, it creates a narrative reality
50:10
that no logical group of people could possibly ignore, even
50:13
in the complete absence of human remains.
50:16
Speaker 1: The judge's gavel finally came down, and James Buckmirsky was
50:19
locked away, effectively forever removing a predator from society. But
50:24
as we zoom out and look back at the rolling,
50:26
quiet hills of northeast Iowa where this entire tragedy began,
50:30
the legal resolution of this story leaves behind some incredibly dark, heavy,
50:35
lingering shadows.
50:36
Speaker 2: It is a profound, deeply bittersweet reality that no prison
50:39
sentence can fully.
50:40
Speaker 1: Erase, because despite the conviction and the fifty year sentence,
50:44
Jade Colvin's physical remains have never been recovered. She's still
50:47
out there somewhere. Her official missing person's record actually remains
50:51
fully active in the national databases to this day, waiting
50:54
silently for a positive identification that may never come.
50:57
Speaker 2: It's hard to process that lack of closure and the.
50:59
Speaker 1: Four hundre at Acre Farmhouse on Skyline Drive, the very
51:03
physical structure where those bleached rooms once stood. It eventually
51:06
burned down completely in a fire, permanently erasing any last
51:10
microscopic trace of a physical crime scene from the earth.
51:14
Speaker 2: The physical world has entirely violently consumed the evidence of
51:17
what he did to her that night, and.
51:19
Speaker 1: The collateral emotional damage inflicted on her family is simply
51:22
devastating to contemplate. Ldawn, the terrified mother whose desperate, deeply
51:27
slowed plan to save her daughter set this entire fatal
51:30
chain of events into motion, died a.
51:33
Speaker 3: Few years later.
51:33
Speaker 2: She never got answers.
51:35
Speaker 1: She went to her grave consumed by the agonizing torture
51:37
of ambiguous loss, never knowing the definitive truth of what
51:40
happened to her little girl, only knowing that she vanished
51:43
under her watch. Jade's aunt, Tandra Bruce, gave a heartbreaking
51:47
statement upon hearing the final guilty verdict. She described how
51:51
the conviction finally extinguished the tiny, stubborn slipper of hope
51:54
she had kept alive for.
51:55
Speaker 2: Eight years, because that conviction means it's real.
51:57
Speaker 1: Hearing the word guilty made her finally realie that Jade
52:00
is truly permanently gone. It is the ultimate sickening tragedy
52:05
of a vibrant fifteen year old girl whose innocence, whose potential,
52:09
and whose very life were stolen by the bureaucratic system
52:12
meant to protect her, and subsequently snuffed out by the
52:15
very people she was told to trust to hide her.
52:17
Speaker 2: It serves as a stark, horrifying reminder of the extreme
52:21
fatal vulnerabilities of youth existing on the margins of our society.
52:26
Speaker 1: I want to talk directly to you listening to this
52:28
right now. The details of this case are incredibly heavy,
52:32
but it also stands as a powerful testament to the
52:34
sheer impact of persistent, collaborative, obsessive investigative work. We have
52:39
to acknowledge people like Detective Nablo, Deputy Marshall Wallace, Detective
52:43
webcre and Agent Turbot, investigators who adamantly refuse to let
52:47
a cold case stay comfortably cold.
52:49
Speaker 2: They did incredible work.
52:50
Speaker 1: They refused to accept the lazy societal assumption that a
52:53
chronic runaway is simply someone who wanted to be missing
52:56
and therefore doesn't deserve a search party. They fought relentlessly
52:59
for Jade justice when the system had long ago stopped
53:02
looking for her.
53:03
Speaker 2: They dedicated years of their lives to bring absolute accountability
53:06
to a dark place where only a killer's silence reigned.
53:10
Speaker 1: That dedication changed history. And as we finally wrap up
53:14
this deep dive, we want to leave you with a
53:16
lingering thought that connects directly back to the forensic breakthrough.
53:20
Speaker 3: We started with.
53:21
Speaker 2: Think critically about the trail of digital artifacts you create
53:24
every single day of your life, every casual text message sent,
53:28
every random photo snapped, every passive location, paying your phone
53:33
registers as you drive. If you were to inexplicably vanish tomorrow,
53:37
what would your abrupt digital silence say about your final
53:41
state of mind?
53:42
Speaker 3: It's a scary thought.
53:43
Speaker 2: What story would your metadata tell investigators? And perhaps more
53:46
and settlingly, who among your outer circle or what forgotten
53:50
entity hidden in a dusty box somewhere might be holding
53:52
an old, discarded device that contains the hidden, buried truth
53:56
of your life, just waiting to be powered on.
53:58
Speaker 1: It's certainly something to think about the next time you
54:00
hit the lead.
54:01
Speaker 3: Until next time