Latest / Crime Night / Unlocking the Vault: FOIA and the Search for Truth

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Unlocking the Vault: FOIA and the Search for Truth · Crime Night

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Picture a cold, totally windowless archives room, right. The only
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: sound is just the low, relentless hum of those fluorescent
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: lights overhead. And you walk past rows of endless gray
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: shelving until you find it.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: The file cabinet.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Exactly, a massive, dusty, completely forgotten steel file cabinet. It's
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: just been sitting there for years, I mean maybe even decades.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: You reach out, grab that cold metal handle and pull. Yeah,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: with this heavy metal screech, the drawer slides open and
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: staring back at you. You aren't just papers. You're looking
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: at secrets, fabricated alibis, devastated lives, all just waiting in
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the dark for someone to finally read them.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: It's a heavy thought, it really is.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Today we are looking at the legal tool that forces
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: those steel drawers open. We're doing a deep dive into
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: And we really need to emphasize what FOIA request actually entails,
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: you know, because this is not a simple email where
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: you ask a police department to just nicely summarize a
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: case for.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: You Wikipedia summary.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: No, not at all. It is a legal battering ram.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: When you file a FOIA request, you are demanding to
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: see the original unedited police records, the raw notes, the
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: crime scene logs.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: All the dirty laundry.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the forensic lab requests that were either approved or
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: in some cases mysteriously denied. It is a grueling bureaucratic process.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: I mean you often have to fight through government lawyers
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: and appeals.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you get pages just covered in heavy black
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: redaction marker just to get a single document exactly. Okay,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: let's unpack this because to me, successfully pulling a FOIA
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: file is well, it's like walking into what looks like
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: a pristine, perfectly clean hotel room and then flicking on
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: a heavy duty ultraviolet light.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, that's a vivid image.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Right. Suddenly you aren't looking at a clean room anymore.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: The invisible skeines, the wiped away fingerprints, the hidden truth,
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: they are all glowing right in front of your face.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't unsee it.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Exactly. And we are going to examine three distinct, truly
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: chilling mystery today where the simple act of pulling the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: files fundamentally altered the entire investigation.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that FOIA completely shifts the balance
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: of power. Normally, you know, the authorities hold all the
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: cards right.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: They control the narrative.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: They do, they investigate, they tell the public a story,
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: and the public just has to accept that narrative as
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: objective truth. But the FOIA request forces the system to
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: show its work.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: And sometimes the math doesn't add up.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: It really doesn't. As we'll see in these specific cases,
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: when the system is forced to show its work, it
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: sometimes reveals that the people in charge have failed terribly. Yeah,
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: let's start by looking at a case where the file
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: actually protected a wealth of shocking evidence that the public
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: never even knew existed.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's travel back to June twenty sixth, nineteen eighty one.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: We are in rural Idaho. It is a beautiful, deeply
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: human summer day. Twenty two year old college student Kristen
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: David sets off on a thirty mile.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Bike ride, just normal afternoon.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Right. She's going down Highway ninety five, traveling from Moscow,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Idaho to Lewiston. And if you picture this stretch of highway,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: it's mostly downhill. It's scenic, very picturesque it is. It's
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: an easy, breezy ride for a young active woman just
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: enjoying the summer weather. But she never made it home.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: And the timeline of that afternoon is incredibly ominous, mostly
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: because of what the eyewitnesses reported.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Right, people actually saw her, they did.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Multiple people driving along Highway ninety five actually remembered seeing
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Kristin riding her bike, but some of those witnesses reported
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: seeing a shadow to her sunny afternoon. The van, yes,
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: a brown van with Oregan plates, specifically plates ending in
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: thirty seven or seven thirty seven.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: That is so specific it is.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: They described the driver as a bearded man, and most
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: terrifying of all, one witness reported seeing a scene that
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: honestly haunts this case to this day. Yeah, they saw
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: Kristin loading her bicycle into the back of that exact
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: brown van.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Which completely shifts the atmosphere from a and missing person's
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: case to an act of abduction.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: A little over a week goes by. It's July fourth
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Independence Day. A fisherman is out on the Snake River,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: just looking for a quiet place to cast a line
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: when he spots something bobbin in the current, just terrible
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: black garbage bags, five of them in total, and inside
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: those bags are Christen's remains.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: The forensic details of that discovery are grim, but they
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: are absolutely crucial for understanding the profile of the killer.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: The dismemberment of her body was described by medical examiners
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: as almost surgical.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: It wasn't rushed.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: No, it wasn't haphazard at all. It was precise and
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: highly methodical. Furthermore, there was this incredibly eerie, calculated detail
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: the newspapers. Yes, the remains were carefully wrapped in old
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: newspapers dating back to April nineteen eighty one before being
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: placed in the bags.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: That implies the killer didn't commit this crime in a panic,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: you know, on the side of the highway or deep
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: in the woods.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: They had a secure location. They had a place where
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: they could take their time with absolute privacy and access
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: to months old newspapers.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Precisely, behavioral analysts profiled the killer as highly intelligent, highly organized,
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: and likely narcissistic.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Which fits a certain type of profile.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: It does, and for decades, because of the brutal and
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: methodical nature of the crime, Kristen's case was quietly lumped
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: in with the victims of a suspected Pacific Northwest serial.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: Killer, the Lewiston Clark Valley murders.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Right exactly, It became a convenient narrative for law enforcement
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, a serial killer is a terrifying boogeyman, but
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: practically speaking, it gives a department a reason why a
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: case is so hard to crack.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: But that serial killer narrative gets completely upended when the
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: original case files are pulled from the archives through a
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: FOIA request.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: It totally changed everything.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Imagine you're a citizen reading this FOIA release. You turn
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the page expecting to find another dead end or a
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: vague suspect profile, and suddenly you are staring at a
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: forensic lab report or a bloody hotel room you've never
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: even heard of. It's jarring it is now. We are
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: keeping some of the detailed autopsy and injury reports we
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: found confidential to protect the active case, but we absolutely
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: must talk about the bombshell location hiding in these documents.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Buried deep in that FIA release was detailed documentation
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: of a potential, completely forgotten crime scene at a place
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: called the Sackage Away, a lodge unbelievable. According to the
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: original police files, a housekeeper at the lodge had reported
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: finding a blood soaked bath towel, a bloody suitcase stand,
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: and human hair in one of the rooms. Down the
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: hair when that hair was forensically tested back in the day.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: It was found to be consistent with Christen's And the.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Most incredible part, the room where all this bloody evidence
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: was found was rented to a man who gave the
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: name Pete.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: Madson, which is almost certainly a fake name.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: It was an alias that led investigators down a massive
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: rabbit hole that eventually just faded into obscurity.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? I have to push
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: back on the official timeline here. If the police possess
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: a blood soak towel, a bloody piece of furniture, a
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: specific hotel room, and a suspects alias, how on earth
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: did this case go cold?
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: It's a great question.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Was the whole serial killer narrative just an incredibly easy
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: way for the department to write off a difficult, messy investigation.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: It's much easier to blame a phantom serial killer than
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: to track down a ghost named Pete Madson.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: It's a very valid challenge and it really speaks to
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: the psychology of police tunnel vision. It is incredibly easy
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: for investigators to succumb to this, especially when a notorious
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: serial killer is known to be operating in the exact
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: same geographic.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Area, right, they see what they want to see exactly.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: You have an unsolved gruesome murder and you have a
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: famous boogeyman nearby. The human brain naturally wants to connect
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: those dots.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Makes sense.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: But what the FIA request proved in this instance is
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: that this case is absolutely not a dead end. The
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: release of this file confirmed that critical physical evidence still
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: exists in an evidence locker somewhere. Wow, the investigation isn't
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: just a cold, dusty folder. Investigators are actively working it today.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: FYA brought transparency, proving that the answers likely lie not
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: with a famous serial killer, but with whoever rented that
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: room under the name Pete Madson.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Finding a file full of active, ignored evidence is one thing,
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: but you know it makes a dark sort of sense.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: Sometimes clues just get lost in the shuffle.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, human error, right, But.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: What happens when the evidence isn't just ignored but completely
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: ceases to exist. We need to look at the emotional
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: toll of one family being struck by lightning twice.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: The story of the Altman family is one of the
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: most somber, frustrating, and scientifically baffling cases you will ever
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: encounter in the realm. Of forensic investigation.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: The nightmare starts in nineteen eighty four. Twenty one year
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: old Stephen Altman is just hanging out, a young guy
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: making plans for his future. He tells his friends, I'll
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: be right back, but he doesn't. He doesn't come back.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Later that at night, his body is found hanging from
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: a heavy cream hoist inside his stepfather Don's Chicago workshop.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Such a brutal scene.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the police arrived, they take a look at the scene,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: and they quickly rule it a suicide.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: Then we fast forward twelve years to nineteen ninety six.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: Stephen's mother, Maryanne Hayes, has recently separated from that exact
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: same stepfather.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Don Okay. Already a red flag, big.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: Red flag by all accounts. Marianne is excited about her future.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: She's actively fixing up a brand new condo, preparing for
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: a fresh chapter in her life.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: She wasn't acting like someone who is suicidal, not at all.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: But one afternoon she's found dead in her bedroom. The
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: scene shows an extension chord wrapped around her neck a
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: lot and just like her son twelve years prior, the
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: medical examiner rules it a suicide, specifically suicide by self. Strangulation.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Two bizarre suicides twelve years apart, both intimately connected to
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: the exact same family dynamic. Enter Robin Altman. She is
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Stephen's sister and mary Anne's daughter, and she never, for
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: one single second bought the official story of her family's demise.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: So in twenty thirteen, she takes matters into her own hands,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: which is so brave it is, she files FOIA requests
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: for both of her family member's cases.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: She wanted to see the math. She wanted to look
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: at the forensic logic and see exactly how the police
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: arrived at these conclusions that defied everything she fundamentally knew
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: about her mother and her brother.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. Think about what it
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: physically looks like to receive a FOIA response.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: It takes forever.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you wait, months, you battle clerks. You finally get
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: an envelope in the mall from the Chicago Police Department
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: regarding her brother Steven's nineteen eighty four violent death. She
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: opens it and she gets nothing, nothing at all. And
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: I don't mean a heavily redacted file covered in blacking.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: I mean absolutely nothing. No investigative file, no witness interviews,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: no crime scene photos, no forensic reports. It's showing a
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: young man dies violently hanging from a crane on a
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: commercial business property, and there is zero documentation.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: Which is basically impossible, right to.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Me, Pulling at FOIA and finding an empty folder is
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: like walking into a crime scene that has been inexplicably
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: bleached clean from floor to ceiling. Finding zero pages of
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: documentation is somehow louder and vastly more suspicious than finding
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: one thousand pages.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question about the fundamental integrity of
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: our record keeping. An absence of evidence is not evidence
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: of absence. It is undeniable evidence of a systemic failure.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: But if Stephen's nineteen eighty four file was a horrifying void,
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: Mari Anne's nineteen ninety six file from the Northfield Police
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: Department was the exact opposite.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: It was huge, right, It was.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: A massive, heavy file, bursting with untouched evidence. And as
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: Robin sat there reading through the pages detailing her mother's death,
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: the nightmare deepened. Oh Man she found her own police
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: interview transcribed in the file, and it completely contradicted what
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: she had actually said to the detectives in the room
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: that day.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: Wait, really they actively changed her words in the official
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: transcript to fit their suicide narrative.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: That is what the document strongly suggests.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: That is insane.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: But the manipulation of testimony was just the tip of
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: the iceberg.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Right in that file, Robin discovers what physical evidence had
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: just been sitting in a cardboard box in an evidence room.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: For decades, just gathering dust.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had the actual extension cord used in the strangulation.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: They had Marianne's broken fingernail, which clearly had blood on it,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: and they had vaginal swabs taken during the autopsy that
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: contained unknown male DNA.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: All that completely totally Untestifay, how does that even happen?
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Because the moment a lead detective walks into a bedroom,
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: looks at a chord and labels a death of suicide,
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: the massive machinery of forensic science grinds to a complete halt.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: It just stops.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Yes, the crime lab actually left a note in the
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: file recommending that investigators compare that unknown male DNA to
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: a potential suspect, But the detectives just.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Ignored it until Robin forced their hand. Armed with this
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: foia bombshell, She went back to the police in twenty
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: eighteen and demanded they reopen.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: The case, and they actually did.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: They did. They tested the DNA on the swabs and
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: guess what, the genetic profile was still there. The police
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: even brought in a suspect. They sat him down and
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: asked him for a DNA sample to compare against.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: The swabs and he agreed.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: He initially agreed, then immediately lawyered up and refused to
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: provide his DNA. And what did the police do They
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: closed the.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: Case again, unbelievable. This entire saga demands we look at
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: the actual physics of how we classify debts in this country.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get into that.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: After the FIA release, independent forensic pathologist reviewed Marianne's original autopsy.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: They did not mince words. They called the original investigation
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: a cataclysmic failure. Wow, we need to talk about the
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: mechanics of cell strangulation. When a human body is deprived
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: of oxygen, the autonomic nervous system violently kicks in.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: It's an involuntary reaction.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly, is a primal survival instinct. If you are strangling
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: your with a simple extension chord, the moment you lose consciousness,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: your voluntary muscles relax, your hands would simply let go
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: of the chord.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: The tension would immediately release, and blood flow would resume.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly the biological reality without some sort of complex locking mechanism,
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: anot or a tie off point to hold the tension
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: of the chord after the person passes out. Suicide by
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: self strangulation with a loose chord is practically a mechanical
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: and physiological impossibility.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: So it literally could not have been a suicide.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: The physics of the bedroom scene did not match a suicide.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: This is what forensic experts refer to as a hidden.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Homicide, a staged seem yes.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: A murder deliberately staged by the killer to look like
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: a suicide, relying on lazy police work to serve as
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: their ultimate alibi. And without Robin filing that single legal document,
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Marianne's death would have remained an unquestioned statistic.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Finding an empty folder in nineteen eighty four is horrifying,
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: But you know paper is easy to lose or destroy. True,
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: But when you fast forward to the digital age, losing
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: evidence requires entirely different kind of blindness, which brings us
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: to the Tacoma and Narra's Bridge in Washington State on
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: March twentieth, twenty twenty.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: A date that carries its own heavy atmosphere.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it really does.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: This was the exact moment the entire world was shutting
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: down due to the COVID nineteen pandemic. The streets were
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: completely empty. There was this eerie, apocalyptic silence covering the
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: entire country.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Right in the middle of that lockdown night, a Washington
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: State trooper is patrolling the massive expanse of the Tacoma
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: and Narrows Bridge. He comes across a wrecked mini van
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: abandoned on the roadway.
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: Just sitting there.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. All four doors are wide open to the wind.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: The passenger side windows are completely shattered, and there is
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: thick broken safety glass covering the pavement.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: And someone was there right Yeah.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Standing near this wrecked empty van is a strange man
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: named Demetrius Jackson. He's just standing on a bridge in
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: a global lockdown, holding a beer. Bizarre completely and when
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: the trooper questions him, his story keeps wildly changing about
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: how he got the van from a woman named Gwen.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: That woman was Gwen Hasselquist, a mother of two, and
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: the digital timeline of her disappearance that night is where
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: the FYA documents really start to unravel the official police narrative.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: The timeline is wild.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: It is according to a ring doorbell camera at her home.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: Gwen left her house at ten nineteen pm. The wrecked
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: van was found on the bridge at twelve twenty am.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: But the drive from her house to the koman Arraws
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: Bridge only takes twenty minutes. Right where was Gwen and
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: where was that minivan for the other hour and forty minutes.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: A glaring, massive gap in the timeline. At two am,
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Gwen's husband Eric calls nine to one one to report her.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: Missing, and then they find her.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: The very next afternoon, Gwen's body is found washed up
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: in the Puget Sound, a full seven miles away from
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: the bridge. The autopsy reveals she is missing a tooth,
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: she has multiple severe rib fractures, and the toxicology report
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: shows a significant amount of the anxiety medication klonazepam in
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: her system.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: So how did they rule it?
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: The medical examiner looks at the scene, looks at the
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: anxiety meds, factors in the stress of the pandemic, and
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: rules her death a suicide by jumping off the bridge.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Case closed neatly wrapped up, so they thought, until the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Foia files were pulled by independent investigators. And this is
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: where the blind spots become so obvious they almost glow
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: in the dark. Let's start with the physical crash scene.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: The police officially stated the van hit the guardrail on
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the bridge, but.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: When we look at the Foia photos, there are dozens
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: of pictures of the damaged van, but zero photos of
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: the guardrail it supposedly hit. No no paint transfer, no
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: impact points, no scraped metal.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Wait pause right there forensic photography one to one dictates
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: you shoot the impact point. If there's no paint transfer
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: on the guardrail, the entire physical logic of the scene collapses.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: If the van didn't hit the guardrail hard enough to
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: leave paint, how did the physical impact shatter the passenger
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: windows and cover the road in glass? Are you saying
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the van was actually wrecked somewhere else entirely before it
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: was driven to the bridge and dumped.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: The lack of photographic evidence makes that a highly probable theory.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: That's terrifying, and the missing evidence didn't stop at the
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: photographs When investigators tried to fill in that missing hour
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: and forty minutes in the timeline. They hit walls, but
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: they were walls they seemingly accepted far too easily, Like
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: what well they learned that the bridge traffic cameras were
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: live feed only, nothing was saved to a server.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: But what about the toll booths. I mean, you have
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: to paid across that bridge, and those booths have high
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: definition cameras that take pictures of every single windshield and
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: license plate.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: They do. But the toll booth footage, which could have
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: definitively proved who was actually driving the van onto the bridge,
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: was deemed not public record.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: You're kidding me.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: No, This happens often when state infrastructure relies on third
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: party private vendors for surveillance. The private company claims proprietary exemptions,
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: the state claims privacy shielding, and suddenly crucial video evidence
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: is hidden behind a wall of corporate red tape.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: The police just gave up.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: The investigator simply abandoned that avenue.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: But here is the one detail that completely breaks my brain.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: The police built their entire initial timeline heavily on that
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: ring doorbell footage provided by Gwen's husband Eric, showing her
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: leaving the house.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: Right the ten point nineteen pm video.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but the FIA files revealed that the video file
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Eric provided had no embedded timestamp on the.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: Screen, which is a massive oversight.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: And when the police finally went back and asked Eric
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: for the original full video file from the cloud, he
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: claimed he had already deleted it, and the police never
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: even tried to secure it with a search warrant. Let
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: me guess they had already decided she jumped, So anything
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: that didn't neatly fit that story, like the missing hour
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: or the deleted footage, was just subconsciously discarded as irrelevant data.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, what we
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: are seeing here is textbook confirmation bias.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: It really is.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Think of confirmation bias like shooting an arrow into a
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: blank wall, walking up to it, and then painting a
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: bullseye around wherever the arrow landed.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: That is a great way to put it.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: The investigators walked into a highly stressful, unprecedented situation, a
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: global pandemic shutdown. They found a woman who had anxiety
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: medication in her system, They saw a bridge, they shot
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: their arrow, and they immediately painted the bull's eye of a.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Suicide because it's the easiest answer.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Exactly once that decision was locked in. They subconsciously ignored
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: the shattered glass that was miles outside their target. They
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: ignored the missing hour and forty minutes, and they completely
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: brushed off the deleted time. Stampless footage FOIA proved that
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: they didn't investigate a mystery, They just documented a predetermined conclusion.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: It's just staggering. When you put these three cases together,
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Kristin David's bloody hotel room, Marianne hayes Is untested DNA,
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: and Gwen Hasselquist's deleted timeline, you really start to view
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: those massive steel file cabinets in police basements differently.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: You absolutely do, because it reminds us that the truth
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: isn't always buried under some grand cinematic conspiracy orchestrated by
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: shadowy figures in smoke filled rooms.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Right, It's not a movie.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: No. More often than not, the truth is just gathering
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: dust in a Manila folder, sitting in a damp precinct basement,
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: simply waiting for someone to care enough to ask the
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: right question. The criminal justice system is made of people,
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: and people have deep seated biases. They get tired, they
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: take the path of least resistance, and they make catastrophic mistakes.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly why the Freedom of Information Act
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: is so unbelievably essential. I want to remind you listening
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: right now, this legal tool belongs to you.
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: It is your right.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: It is your right as a citizen to hold these
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: agencies accountable, to demand they show their work, and to
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: turn on that ultraviolet light to see what was left
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: behind in the room.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Knowledge is only powerful when it's applied. These documents are
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: public records. They are the public's fundamental right to know.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: I want you to think about the unsolved mysteries, the
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: tragic accidents, where the sudden disappearances that have happened in
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: your own hometown.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: They're everywhere.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: What dark secrets, what untested DNA swaves, or what completely empty,
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: bleached clean folders might be sitting in a heavy metal
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: file cabinet just a few miles from where you are
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: sitting right now, just waiting for a simple piece of
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: paper to drag them out of the dark.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: All it takes is someone willing to pull the handle
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: on that dusty steel drawer