Latest / Haunted Horror Stories / cutting tool matching wound patterns found at scene
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: He liked reading, but he didn't like stories without happy endings.
- 0:08Speaker 1: That detail about nine-year-old Jimmy Rice stayed with the people
- 0:11Speaker 1: who knew him, the kind of small, specific thing a
- 0:15Speaker 1: child says that you don't realize you'll be repeating for
- 0:18Speaker 1: the rest of your life. On September 9th, 1995, Jimmy
- 0:23Speaker 1: stepped off his school bus in Redland. a quiet agricultural
- 0:27Speaker 1: stretch in southwest Miami-Dade County. He had approximately 250 meters
- 0:33Speaker 1: to walk. His house was visible from the stop. He
- 0:37Speaker 1: never arrived. What investigators would eventually find? Not in a field,
- 0:42Speaker 1: not in a canal. not anywhere the hundreds of search
- 0:45Speaker 1: volunteers thought to look. We wrote what a case like
- 0:49Speaker 1: this could look like, and what it could cost a family.
- 0:53Speaker 1: There's something in this case that hasn't left me since
- 0:56Speaker 1: I first read the file. It isn't just what happened
- 0:59Speaker 1: to Jimmy, it's the distance, 250 meters, and everything that
- 1:04Speaker 1: was already waiting inside that distance. On the afternoon Jimmy disappeared,
- 1:10Speaker 1: The search began within hours. The FBI deployed more than
- 1:14Speaker 1: 20 agents. Volunteers spread across the grove land and canal
- 1:18Speaker 1: edges of Redland. Tracking dogs, including the same animals used
- 1:23Speaker 1: after the Oklahoma City bombing, worked the area in expanding grids.
- 1:28Speaker 1: Helicopters passed overhead. A reward of $ 10, 000 was posted. The
- 1:34Speaker 1: search continued for three months and found nothing. What investigators
- 1:38Speaker 1: did not know was that Jimmy had never left the
- 1:42Speaker 1: property at all. Redland in 1995 was a working agricultural community.
- 1:49Speaker 1: Avocado groves, horse ranches, long flat roads with no sidewalks.
- 1:54Speaker 1: Children rode the score bus and walked the last stretch home,
- 1:59Speaker 1: because that was simply how it was done. The nearest
- 2:01Speaker 1: neighbor might be a quarter mile away. The air smelled
- 2:05Speaker 1: like grass and diesel. It was the kind of place
- 2:09Speaker 1: where people left their doors unlocked and assumed their children
- 2:14Speaker 1: were safe in the time it took to walk 250 meters.
- 2:18Speaker 1: The Schoenhaus Ranch sat along that same stretch of road.
- 2:22Speaker 1: It was a working property. Stables, equipment, outbuildings, land enough
- 2:28Speaker 1: that a person could move around it without being visible
- 2:31Speaker 1: from the road. A mechanic and ranch hand named Juan
- 2:34Speaker 1: Carlos Chavez lived on the property in a trailer, paying
- 2:38Speaker 1: reduced rent to a woman named Sophia in exchange for work.
- 2:43Speaker 1: He was 28 years old. He had arrived in the
- 2:46Speaker 1: United States from Cuba in 1991. He had access to
- 2:50Speaker 1: a Ford pickup. Jimmy Rice was nine years old. Blue eyes,
- 2:56Speaker 1: red hair. He was enrolled in the gifted program at
- 2:59Speaker 1: his school, fifth grade. His favorite subject was reading. His father,
- 3:05Speaker 1: Don Rice, was a labor relations attorney. His mother, Claudine
- 3:11Speaker 1: was the kind of woman whose later work on his
- 3:13Speaker 1: behalf would earn her a place in the Florida Women's
- 3:16Speaker 1: Hall of Fame, though she would not live to see
- 3:19Speaker 1: the case fully closed. At approximately 3.30 in the afternoon
- 3:24Speaker 1: on September 11th, Jimmy stepped off the bus. Chavez was
- 3:28Speaker 1: already there. He blocked the road with the pickup, forced
- 3:31Speaker 1: Jimmy at gunpoint into the vehicle, and drove him back
- 3:35Speaker 1: to the trailer on the ranch property. What happened inside
- 3:38Speaker 1: that trailer would later be established through physical evidence. Blood
- 3:43Speaker 1: on the mattress, blood on a cushion, a water-based lubricant
- 3:47Speaker 1: on a shelf that matched a specific detail in Chava's
- 3:50Speaker 1: eventual confession. A poster with Jimmy's photograph was found on
- 3:54Speaker 1: the trailer wall. Investigators would later note that detail without
- 3:58Speaker 1: being able to fully account for it. The poster was
- 4:02Speaker 1: already there. At some point, a helicopter passed overhead. Jimmy
- 4:07Speaker 1: moved toward the door. Chavez shot him with a stolen
- 4:10Speaker 1: Taurus 38 revolver. The bullet entered Jimmy's right sixth rib,
- 4:15Speaker 1: traversed his lung and his heart, and exited through the
- 4:19Speaker 1: upper left side of his chest. The flattened projectile casing
- 4:23Speaker 1: was visible on x-ray, lodged in the region of the heart.
- 4:28Speaker 1: Chavez held him until he stopped moving. The ranch was
- 4:32Speaker 1: large enough and quiet enough that no one heard anything.
- 4:36Speaker 1: For three months, searchers walked that same land. They used
- 4:41Speaker 1: air TVs and horses, and tracking dogs trained for disaster zones.
- 4:46Speaker 1: Jimmy's remains were on the property the entire time. First
- 4:49Speaker 1: stored in a metal barrel near the stables. Then, two
- 4:53Speaker 1: or three days after the shooting, moved again. Chavez had
- 4:57Speaker 1: attempted to dig a grave with a backhoe. It failed.
- 5:01Speaker 1: What he did next, and where Jimmy was ultimately found,
- 5:05Speaker 1: is the detail that changes the shape of this entire case.
- 5:09Speaker 1: The search wasn't looking in the wrong county. It wasn't
- 5:13Speaker 1: following a false trail to another state. It was walking
- 5:16Speaker 1: past the answer. Day after day, for 90 days. For
- 5:21Speaker 1: three months, the search for Jimmy Rice became one of
- 5:24Speaker 1: the largest missing child operations in Florida history. More than
- 5:29Speaker 1: 20 FBI agents worked the case, Volunteers combed the fields
- 5:35Speaker 1: and drainage canals of Redland on foot, on horseback, on ATVs,
- 5:40Speaker 1: tracking dogs flown in from Oklahoma. The same animals that
- 5:44Speaker 1: had worked the rubble after the federal building bombing were
- 5:47Speaker 1: brought to Redland and given Jimmy's scent. Helicopters swept the
- 5:52Speaker 1: avocado groves in grid patterns. A $ 10, 000 reward went unclaimed,
- 5:58Speaker 1: and still nothing. The Rice family held press conferences. They
- 6:03Speaker 1: put Jimmy's face on flyers, on news segments, on the
- 6:07Speaker 1: walls of post offices and grocery stores. Claudine Rice, his mother,
- 6:12Speaker 1: became the face of the search, composed in front of
- 6:15Speaker 1: cameras in a way that must have cost her everything.
- 6:18Speaker 1: Don Rice, his father, coordinated with law enforcement while managing
- 6:23Speaker 1: the particular cruelty of not knowing. Every day was a
- 6:27Speaker 1: version of the same unbearable question. The searchers kept returning
- 6:32Speaker 1: to the canals. That was where the evidence seemed to point.
- 6:36Speaker 1: A child abducted, near a road. A perpetrator wanting distance.
- 6:41Speaker 1: Investigators worked through drainage systems that cut through the farmland.
- 6:46Speaker 1: Divers went into the water. Divers went into the water.
- 6:50Speaker 1: They found nothing that belonged to Jimmy. What no one
- 6:53Speaker 1: knew yet was that Jimmy had never left the property.
- 6:57Speaker 1: He was there the entire time. While the dogs worked,
- 7:01Speaker 1: the fields, while the helicopters passed overhead, while volunteers walked
- 7:06Speaker 1: within sight of the ranch, the metal barrel near the stables,
- 7:10Speaker 1: the broken-down truck, the three concrete-sealed planters sitting in plain
- 7:15Speaker 1: view on the grounds, none of it triggered the search.
- 7:19Speaker 1: The rational framework that guided the investigation, a child taken,
- 7:24Speaker 1: a body moved, distance created, had pointed everyone in exactly
- 7:28Speaker 1: the wrong direction. That framework collapsed in December of 1995,
- 7:32Speaker 1: and it collapsed because of a woman named Susan Shenhouse.
- 7:38Speaker 1: Susan ran the ranch where Chavez rented a room from
- 7:41Speaker 1: a woman named Sophia and worked as a mechanic and
- 7:44Speaker 1: ranch hand. Her son, Ed Shenhouse, had been placed under
- 7:48Speaker 1: house arrest with electronic monitoring, a detail that would matter later.
- 7:54Speaker 1: In December, Susan grew suspicious of Chavez. She called a locksmith.
- 8:00Speaker 1: She opened his trailer. Inside, she found a stolen Taurus,.
- 8:04Speaker 1: 38 revolver, she found a box of bullets, and she
- 8:09Speaker 1: found Jimmy's backpack, the one he had been carrying. The
- 8:12Speaker 1: afternoon he stepped off the school bus, with his name
- 8:16Speaker 1: sticker still on it, she called the FBI. When agents
- 8:20Speaker 1: arrived the following day and Chavez returned to the ranch,
- 8:24Speaker 1: they arrested him on the property where Jimmy had died.
- 8:27Speaker 1: The interrogation that followed lasted more than 55 hours. Chavez
- 8:33Speaker 1: did not break easily. His first account sent divers back
- 8:37Speaker 1: into the canals. He claimed he had struck Jimmy accidentally
- 8:41Speaker 1: with the truck and disposed of the body in the water.
- 8:44Speaker 1: The divers found nothing. The story had no physical support.
- 8:49Speaker 1: It was the second lie in a sequence designed to
- 8:52Speaker 1: send investigators as far from the ranch as possible. The
- 8:56Speaker 1: rational explanation stopped working here. Everything Chavez offered pointed outward,
- 9:02Speaker 1: away from the property, away from the trailer, away from himself,
- 9:07Speaker 1: and everything investigators found pointed back. The fingerprint on the revolver,
- 9:13Speaker 1: the backpack with Jimmy's name, blood on the mattress. blood
- 9:19Speaker 1: on a cushion, a cut section of the trailer floor
- 9:22Speaker 1: at the threshold, the threshold where the bullet trajectory later
- 9:26Speaker 1: confirmed Jimmy had fallen. Chavez also tried to implicate Ed Shenhouse.
- 9:33Speaker 1: He suggested Ed had been involved. Investigators pooled the electronic
- 9:38Speaker 1: monitoring records. On September 11th, 1995, Ed Shenhouse had not
- 9:44Speaker 1: left the premises of house arrest. The alibi mechanical, time-stamped,
- 9:50Speaker 1: and irrefutable. That door closed immediately. On December 8th, 1995,
- 9:54Speaker 1: at 10.50pm, Chavez signed a sworn confession. The confession directed
- 10:03Speaker 1: investigators to the planters, three of them on the ranch property,
- 10:08Speaker 1: sealed with cement. Chavez had used bags of cement mix
- 10:12Speaker 1: found on the grounds, He had used a backhoe first,
- 10:16Speaker 1: attempting to dig a grave deep enough in the soil
- 10:19Speaker 1: of the avocado grove. But the attempt had failed, the
- 10:22Speaker 1: ground resisting or the equipment inadequate for what he needed.
- 10:27Speaker 1: What he did next required a bush hook, a cutting
- 10:31Speaker 1: tool found at the scene. The forensic examiner, Teresa Merritt,
- 10:35Speaker 1: would later match wound patterns to that tool. The remains
- 10:39Speaker 1: were in an advanced state of decomposition. Identification could not
- 10:43Speaker 1: rely on the DNA evidence alone. The samples from Jimmy's
- 10:47Speaker 1: body were insufficient in quality for direct genetic profiling. Instead,
- 10:52Speaker 1: investigators used dental records and a parental DNA comparison. Swabs
- 10:57Speaker 1: from Don and Claudine Rice were sent to the North
- 11:00Speaker 1: Carolina forensic lab, where a subdirector compared them to blood
- 11:05Speaker 1: recovered from the trailer floor. The conclusion was that the
- 11:08Speaker 1: blood was very likely from a biological child of the
- 11:12Speaker 1: Rice couple. The dental records confirmed what the blood had suggested.
- 11:17Speaker 1: Jimmy had been on that ranch for three months. The
- 11:20Speaker 1: searchers had been looking in the water. There is a
- 11:23Speaker 1: particular quality to the evidence inside that trailer that doesn't
- 11:27Speaker 1: settle easily. A poster with Jimmy's face on it was
- 11:31Speaker 1: found in Chavez's living space. This was not a missing
- 11:34Speaker 1: child flyer that had been handed to him or posted nearby.
- 11:38Speaker 1: It was in his trailer. His personal space. The same
- 11:42Speaker 1: space where the backpack sat. The same space where the
- 11:45Speaker 1: blood had soaked into the mattress and the cushion. Investigators
- 11:49Speaker 1: also found a water-based lubricant on the shelf. which matched
- 11:52Speaker 1: a specific detail in Chavez's confession regarding the sexual assault.
- 11:57Speaker 1: Chavez's fingerprints were on Jimmy's notebook cover and on his
- 12:01Speaker 1: science book, nine identification points confirmed by the lab. The
- 12:06Speaker 1: spent bullet casing was recovered. Ballistic analysis traced the trajectory.
- 12:12Speaker 1: It had entered through the right sixth rib, passed through
- 12:15Speaker 1: the lung and the heart, and exited the upper left thorax.
- 12:19Speaker 1: A flattened projectile was found in the heart region on x-ray.
- 12:23Speaker 1: He had fired when Jimmy tried to run. The helicopter
- 12:26Speaker 1: was overhead. Jimmy had moved toward the trailer door, toward
- 12:30Speaker 1: the outside, toward the sound, toward any chance of being found.
- 12:35Speaker 1: The shot dropped him at the threshold. That detail does
- 12:38Speaker 1: not leave you. The question that remains, the one that
- 12:41Speaker 1: no verdict fully answers, is not whether Chavez did it.
- 12:46Speaker 1: That was resolved. It is something harder and more specific.
- 12:51Speaker 1: It is about the 250 meters between a school bus
- 12:55Speaker 1: stop and a front door, and what it means that
- 12:58Speaker 1: a child can travel that distance 10,000 times safely and
- 13:03Speaker 1: then once not come home Chavez had no documented violent
- 13:08Speaker 1: criminal history against children in the United States. Before 9-11, 1995,
- 13:15Speaker 1: he had been in the country since 1991. He had
- 13:20Speaker 1: a prior criminal record from Cuba. He worked on a
- 13:24Speaker 1: ranch less than a quarter mile from the route Jimmy
- 13:27Speaker 1: walked every afternoon. He drove a Ford pickup. He had
- 13:31Speaker 1: a stolen gun. The proximity was not coincident It was selection.
- 13:37Speaker 1: He knew the road. He knew the timing. The ambush
- 13:41Speaker 1: at the pickup was not impulsive. It required waiting at
- 13:45Speaker 1: a specific point, at a specific time. With a weapon
- 13:48Speaker 1: already in hand, whatever calculus preceded that moment had been
- 13:53Speaker 1: running before Jimmy stepped off the bus. The jury took
- 13:56Speaker 1: less than seven hours to reach a verdict on September 18th, 1998.
- 13:59Speaker 1: Three counts, sexual assault, kidnapping, first degree murder, all guilty.
- 14:09Speaker 1: On October 29th, the same jury voted 12 to zero
- 14:14Speaker 1: for the death penalty. Judge Juan Ramirez imposed the sentence
- 14:19Speaker 1: on November 23rd. The appeals ran for 16 years. The
- 14:23Speaker 1: Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction in May of 2002.
- 14:29Speaker 1: The United States Supreme Court declined review In July of 2003,
- 14:34Speaker 1: a later claim by a prior attorney that Chavez had
- 14:38Speaker 1: been impaired and poorly represented was denied in 2007. Every
- 14:44Speaker 1: legal door closed in sequence. On February 12th, 2014, at 8.17
- 14:49Speaker 1: in the evening, Juan Carlos Chavez... was executed by lethal
- 14:58Speaker 1: injection at Florida Correctional Prison. A physician confirmed death at 8.17 p.m.
- 15:05Speaker 1: He left no final oral statement. His written note expressed
- 15:10Speaker 1: no remorse. It said that no person could judge another's sins,
- 15:15Speaker 1: and that he had sought and received religious forgiveness, and
- 15:18Speaker 1: that he was not afraid. The Rice family never had
- 15:22Speaker 1: a single witness in that courtroom who could describe what
- 15:25Speaker 1: Jimmy's last afternoon had been like from his perspective, what
- 15:29Speaker 1: he saw when the truck blocked the road, what he
- 15:32Speaker 1: understood in the seconds that followed. That knowledge went with Chavez.
- 15:37Speaker 1: and Chavez offered nothing back. What the case left behind
- 15:42Speaker 1: was something different from closure. It left legislation. The Jimmy
- 15:47Speaker 1: Rice Law, passed in 1998-8 and effective January of 1999,
- 15:53Speaker 1: created civil commitment provisions for convicted sexual predators, indefinite confinement
- 15:59Speaker 1: after sentence completion. until rehabilitation is demonstrated, plus mandatory community notification,
- 16:07Speaker 1: when a convicted predator relocates nearby. The Jimmy Rice Assistance Act,
- 16:12Speaker 1: signed in January of 1996, required missing children's photographs to
- 16:18Speaker 1: be displayed in federal buildings within 24 hours of a
- 16:22Speaker 1: reported disappearance. The Jimmy Rice Center for Victims of Predatory
- 16:26Speaker 1: Abduction trained law enforcement personnel, and donated more than 400
- 16:32Speaker 1: tracking dogs to departments across the country. The body of
- 16:36Speaker 1: law that bears his name has touched cases in every state.
- 16:40Speaker 1: None of it brings him back. All of it is
- 16:43Speaker 1: the shape of what his parents chose to do with
- 16:45Speaker 1: the years they had after the planters were opened. The
- 16:48Speaker 1: trial lasted three years after the arrest. Three years in
- 16:54Speaker 1: which Don and Claudine Rice sat inside a courtroom in Orlando,
- 16:59Speaker 1: moved there, because no jury pool in Miami could be
- 17:02Speaker 1: called impartial, and listened to evidence that most parents never
- 17:07Speaker 1: have to hear, described in legal language. On September 18th, 1998,
- 17:13Speaker 1: after fewer than seven hours of deliberation, the jury returned
- 17:18Speaker 1: guilty verdicts on all three counts. sexual assault, kidnapping, and
- 17:24Speaker 1: first-degree murder. The deliberation was shorter than the school day
- 17:28Speaker 1: Jimmy never finished. 41 days later, the same jury voted
- 17:33Speaker 1: 12 to 0 for death. Judge Juan Ramirez imposed the
- 17:37Speaker 1: sentence on November 23rd, 1998. 1998. Juan Carlos Chavez stood
- 17:46Speaker 1: and said nothing. There was no outburst, no collapse. No
- 17:50Speaker 1: visible acknowledgement of what had just been decided. He was
- 17:54Speaker 1: 31 years old. He would spend the next 16 years
- 17:58Speaker 1: inside Florida's appeals system, filing motions, requesting reviews, arguing procedural errors,
- 18:05Speaker 1: and ineffective counsel. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction
- 18:10Speaker 1: on May 30th, 2002. The United States Supreme Court declined
- 18:15Speaker 1: to review the case on July 9th, 2003. Every subsequent
- 18:21Speaker 1: motion was denied. Claudine Rice did not live to see
- 18:25Speaker 1: the execution. She died of a heart attack in January 2009,
- 18:31Speaker 1: five years before the date was set. She had spent
- 18:34Speaker 1: the years after Jimmy's death building something from wreckage, The
- 18:39Speaker 1: Jimmy Rice Center for Victims of Predatory Abduction, which trained
- 18:44Speaker 1: search and rescue personnel and donated more than 400 tracking
- 18:48Speaker 1: dogs to law enforcement agencies across the country. She had
- 18:52Speaker 1: also helped push two pieces of legislation through Florida and
- 18:56Speaker 1: then federal channels. The Jimmy Rice Assistance Act, signed in
- 19:00Speaker 1: January 1996. required missing children's photographs to be displayed in
- 19:05Speaker 1: federal buildings within 24 hours of a disappearance. The Jimmy
- 19:10Speaker 1: Rice Law passed in 1998. And effective January of 1999
- 19:17Speaker 1: established indefinite civil commitment for convicted sexual predators after their
- 19:22Speaker 1: prison sentences, until a court determined they no longer posed
- 19:26Speaker 1: a risk. It also required community notification when a convicted
- 19:31Speaker 1: predator moved into a neighborhood. Claudine turned her son's name
- 19:35Speaker 1: into a mechanism that could not be undone. There is
- 19:39Speaker 1: something in that specific fact that stayed with me long
- 19:42Speaker 1: after I finished going through this case. The idea that
- 19:45Speaker 1: she did all of it, knowing she might never see
- 19:49Speaker 1: Chavez face a lethal injection, and she didn't. Martha Rice,
- 19:54Speaker 1: Don's daughter, and Jimmy's half-sister died by suicide on December 30th, 2012.
- 20:02Speaker 1: She was 23 days short of the new year. On
- 20:06Speaker 1: February 12, 2014, at 8.17 in the evening, Juan Carlos
- 20:12Speaker 1: Chavez was executed by lethal injection at Florida Correctional Prison.
- 20:17Speaker 1: A physician confirmed death at 8.17. Chavez left no oral
- 20:23Speaker 1: final statement. He left a written note. In it, he
- 20:28Speaker 1: expressed no remorse. He wrote that no person can judge
- 20:32Speaker 1: another's sins. He claimed religious forgiveness. He said he was
- 20:36Speaker 1: not afraid. Don Rice was present. He had outlived his
- 20:41Speaker 1: son by nearly 19 years, his wife by five, and
- 20:45Speaker 1: his daughter by just over one. He died in October 2020.
- 20:49Speaker 1: Ted Rice, Don's son, Jimmy's half-brother, is the only member
- 20:54Speaker 1: of that family still living. He continues to run the
- 20:57Speaker 1: Jimmy Rice Foundation. Jimmy Rice was nine years old. He
- 21:02Speaker 1: had red hair and blue eyes, and he was enrolled
- 21:05Speaker 1: in a gifted program because he learned faster than most
- 21:10Speaker 1: children his age. He had a favorite subject, reading, but
- 21:14Speaker 1: he didn't like stories without happy endings. He was 250
- 21:18Speaker 1: meters from his front door when Chavez blocked his path.
- 21:22Speaker 1: The planters where his remains were found never left the
- 21:25Speaker 1: ranch property. The search had covered hundreds of square miles.
- 21:30Speaker 1: Dogs trained after the Oklahoma City bombing. Helicopters, ATVs, FBI agents, volunteers,
- 21:38Speaker 1: and the whole time. What they were looking for was
- 21:41Speaker 1: sealed in concrete, 50 meters from the stable, where Chavez
- 21:46Speaker 1: kept his trailer. The body was found, not because the
- 21:50Speaker 1: investigation broke through. But because a woman used a locksmith
- 21:54Speaker 1: to open a door and found a backpack with a
- 21:57Speaker 1: name sticker on it, 250 meters, the distance between the
- 22:01Speaker 1: bus stop and home, the distance that separates before from
- 22:06Speaker 1: after for everyone who was left, Ted Rice still answers
- 22:10Speaker 1: to that distance every day. This show is made by
- 22:14Speaker 1: Oba Media.