Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Assisted Living Employee Kidnaps, Kills Resident in Crawl Space

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Assisted Living Employee Kidnaps, Kills Resident in Crawl Space · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to just close your eyes for a second.
• 0:02
  Picture the absolute edge of the world. You're standing in Homer, Alaska,
• 0:07
  and I mean it's literally the end of the road.
• 0:10
  A sterling highway just stops there, It just ends, It
• 0:14
  just ends. To your left, you have these jagged, snow
• 0:18
  capped mountains that look like they've been carved out of glass.
• 0:20
  To your right, the icy, dark waters of Catchmac Bay.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: It's stunningly beautiful.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: It is aggressively beautiful, that's the word. They call it
• 0:28
  the Halibut fishing capital of the world. And it really
• 0:31
  has this reputation as a kind of sanctuary, right.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: It's where people go to get away from it.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: All, exactly. Artists, fishermen, people who just want to be
• 0:40
  left alone, feel safe, you know, because it feels so
• 0:43
  removed from the chaos of the Lower forty eight.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: That isolation is the primary selling point of a place
• 0:48
  like Homer, isn't it. But you know, in criminology we
• 0:51
  often talk about the paradox of isolation.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: The paradox of isolation.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: What do you mean by that, Well, the very geography
• 0:56
  that keeps the noise of the world out, it also
• 0:59
  locks secrets in. It creates this kind of closed loop
• 1:01
  where everyone knows everyone, which paradoxically can make it harder,
• 1:06
  not easier, to spot a predator.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Because you assume you know everyone.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: You assume you know them, you trust them. And when
• 1:13
  you look at the crime statistics and some remote Alaskan towns,
• 1:16
  the per capita rates of violence, especially sexual violence, are
• 1:20
  often just staggering compared to major cities. The mechanism for
• 1:24
  accountability is just so far removed.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: That is the uneasy reality we're walking into today. We're
• 1:31
  looking at a case that just tore the veneer right
• 1:33
  off that picturesque image of Homer. We're talking about the
• 1:37
  disappearance and murder of Anisha Murnine, known to everyone there
• 1:41
  as Duffy.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: A story that started way back in October twenty nineteen.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: Way back, but we're covering it now because as of
• 1:48
  February twenty twenty six, I mean just a few weeks ago,
• 1:51
  we finally finally reached a legal conclusion.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: It's a conclusion that honestly leaves us with as many
• 1:57
  questions about the system as it does answers about the crime.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: I agree, this is.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: A case that touches on so many things. The vulnerability
• 2:04
  of adults and assisted living, the absolute nightmare of a
• 2:07
  nobody homicide investigation.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: And just the sheer persistence required forensically to pull the
• 2:13
  truth out of a crawl space six years after the fact.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: It's incredible.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: So we're basing this deep dive today on the comprehensive
• 2:20
  report titled Shadows in Homer the Murder of a Nusher Mornaine,
• 2:25
  And we've also got court documents from the Keenai Superior Court.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: And our mission here isn't just to you know, recount
• 2:31
  a tragedy.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: No, we need to understand how a system that was
• 2:35
  designed to protect vulnerable adults failed so completely, how a
• 2:39
  predator exploited a very specific.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Kind of trust, and how you prove murder when the
• 2:44
  physical evidence is I mean it's microscopic. It's really a
• 2:47
  study in what we call circumstantial integrity. How do you
• 2:50
  build a wall of evidence, you know, brick by brick
• 2:53
  when you don't have the smoking gun or in this case,
• 2:56
  the body, you don't have the body. It's a heavy one,
• 2:58
  for sure, but it's such a necessary examination of how
• 3:02
  justice has to work in these extreme margins.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's start with the person who matters most
• 3:06
  in all of this Aniche Duffy murname Duffy. In all
• 3:11
  the photos I've seen of her, she just has this
• 3:13
  incredibly gentle presence. She was thirty eight years old when
• 3:17
  she vanished, born and raised in Alaska, a local.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: And to understand the victimology here, and I use that
• 3:23
  term to mean the study of why a specific person
• 3:26
  is targeted, we have to look at her standing in
• 3:28
  that community. Okay, Duffy was a local. She wasn't some
• 3:32
  transient worker or tourists passing through. She was like woven
• 3:36
  into the fabric of Homer right. People knew her, people
• 3:39
  knew her. The reports all describe her as kind hearted, warm,
• 3:43
  just the sort of person who disarmed you with her gentleness.
• 3:46
  But she also had to navigate the world with a
• 3:49
  significant vulnerability.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And I think
• 3:53
  it's really important we pause on that for a second
• 3:55
  because there's such a wide spectrum to these diagnoses, a.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: Very wide spectrum. For Duffy. It wasn't just about, you know,
• 4:02
  mood swings. It was a condition that required real structural
• 4:05
  support in her life.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So what did that look like day to day?
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: Well, the clinical term that's often used in these kinds
• 4:10
  of care scenarios is activities of daily living or ADLs.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: ADLs.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: Right, Duffy was competent in so many ways, but she
• 4:19
  needed assistance with the basic framework of life, things like
• 4:23
  medication management, maintaining a consistent routine, emotional regulation.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: And that's why she was living in a designated assisted
• 4:31
  living facility exactly. And don't want to be clear about
• 4:34
  what that looks like, because I think when people here
• 4:36
  assisted living they immediately picture a nursing home with elderly
• 4:40
  people in beds. This wasn't that at all.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: No, And that's a vital distinction to make. This is
• 4:45
  support of housing. It's designed to maximize a person's independence
• 4:49
  while still providing a crucial safety.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: Net so she could come and go, oh yeah.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Residents like Duffy have their own lives, they can walk
• 4:55
  into town, they can meet friends for coffee, but there's
• 4:59
  a layer of over staffer there to make sure medications
• 5:02
  are taken on time, to make sure residents return home
• 5:04
  safely at night.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: It's a balance then, between autonomy and security.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: It's a constant balancing act in.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: That structure, that routine. That's actually what ends up creating
• 5:13
  the baseline for the investigation later on.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Absolutely because Duffy wasn't erratic in her movements, she wasn't
• 5:19
  unpredictablet a pattern precisely in any missing person's case. The
• 5:24
  very first question we ask is is this behavior anomalous?
• 5:27
  Is it out of character? Sure, if someone is known
• 5:30
  to just go off grid for weeks at a time,
• 5:33
  a disappearance isn't immediately suspicious. But Duffy her life had
• 5:38
  a rhythm, a clear rhythm. She had specific check in times,
• 5:42
  she had a medication schedule she had to.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Follow, so deviating from that wasn't a choice she would
• 5:46
  typically make on her own.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: It just wasn't. So let's go to that day, October seventeen,
• 5:50
  twenty nineteen. The rhythm breaks. Okay, Duffy leaves her apartment complex,
• 5:55
  the Main Tree Apartments in downtown Homer, for a medical.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Appointment, and she just evaporates.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: She evaporates. The timeline is incredibly tight. She was seen
• 6:03
  on security footage leaving the building. She was on foot walking.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: And then nothing and then just silence.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: She missed her appointment, she missed her evening check in
• 6:13
  at the facility, and in.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: The context of her care plan. A miss check in
• 6:18
  is a big deal.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: It's an immediate red flag. It triggers an escalation protocol
• 6:22
  right away. So the staff knew within hours that something
• 6:25
  was very, very wrong.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: They notify her family, they notify the Homer police. And
• 6:30
  this is where that geography we talked about at the
• 6:32
  top becomes an absolute nightmare for an investigation.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Total nightmare.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you disappear in Manhattan, you're on a
• 6:38
  thousand cameras, you pass hundreds of people.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: But in Homer, in Homer, you have the last scene
• 6:42
  point and then you just have wilderness, vast empty wilderness.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: So what's the first theory police are working with?
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: The initial working theory in a case like this with
• 6:52
  a vulnerable adult in rural Alaska is almost always exposure.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: She got lost, did she.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Have a manic episode? Did she get confused and just
• 7:00
  walk into the woods. Did she fall off a trail somewhere?
• 7:03
  The weather there in October is unforgiving. Hypothermia can set
• 7:07
  in within hours.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: So the initial search is a rescue mission. They're looking
• 7:11
  for someone who's alive.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: It's a rescue mission, not a criminal manhunt at.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: First, and the community mobilized immediately I remember reading about
• 7:19
  it at the time. The search dogs, the flyers everywhere,
• 7:22
  volunteers combing the beaches and trails.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: The whole town came out.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: But there was just nothing. No scent trail for the dogs,
• 7:30
  no discarded coat, no phone pings, just gone.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: And that nothing. This is so significant, that's what started
• 7:38
  to shift the whole perspective of the case from a
• 7:41
  lost person to foul play. Why is the nothingness so
• 7:44
  important because search and rescue dogs are incredibly proficient. If
• 7:48
  she had simply walked into the woods near her apartment,
• 7:51
  they likely would have found a track, some sign, but
• 7:54
  they didn't. The fact that her scent just essentially vanished
• 7:57
  from the street suggests.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: One thing into a vehicle.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: She got into a vehicle, and the second you introduce
• 8:03
  a vehicle, you're no longer looking for a lost person.
• 8:06
  You're looking for an abductor.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: And this brings us to the stranger danger myth right.
• 8:10
  The whole town was terrified. People are locking their doors
• 8:13
  looking for suspicious out of state vans, which.
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: Is a natural reaction, but the reality was so much
• 8:18
  more insidious. Usually is it usually is? Statistically abductions of
• 8:24
  adults by total strangers are exceedingly rare. So investigators they
• 8:28
  start looking at the circle of trust. Who had access
• 8:32
  to her, who knew her routine, and most importantly, who
• 8:35
  could get her into a car without a struggle, without
• 8:38
  anyone even noticing.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Enter Kirby Calderwood.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: Enter Kurtie Calderwood. And he fits a terrifyingly specific profile.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: At the time of the crime. He's in his late.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: Twenties, right, But it's not his age that matters. Look
• 8:51
  at his resume, his work history.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: He was a former employee of the very assisted living
• 8:56
  facility where Duffy lived. He worked there in twenty eighteen.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: So he wasn't some guy she knew from town.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: No, he was a former caregiver.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Think about the psychological weight of that. Yeah, the role
• 9:06
  of a caregiver is to help. Thisis with hygiene, they
• 9:09
  provide food, they offer transportation. It's a relationship designed to
• 9:13
  break down the natural social barriers we have with strangers.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: So Duffy was already conditioned to see him as.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: A safe person, absolutely, even though he wasn't employed there
• 9:21
  at that exact moment in twenty nineteen. The dynamic remains,
• 9:25
  that history is there.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: It's almost a form of pre grooming, isn't it. He
• 9:29
  didn't have to build trust in that moment on the street.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: He didn't have to. We just had to cash in
• 9:33
  on it. He was banking the trust he'd built the
• 9:35
  year prior. We call this exploiting a pre existing.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Trust reservoir a trust reservoir.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if a total stranger in a van pulls up
• 9:44
  and says, hey, get in, all the alarm bells in
• 9:46
  your head go off, right. But if Kirby, the nice
• 9:49
  guy who used to bring you your dinner, pulls up
• 9:51
  and says, hey, Duffy, I'm heading your way hop in,
• 9:55
  the barrier to entry is almost non existent.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: It just completely bypasses the fight or flo response entirely.
• 10:01
  And then you look at his behavior after she went missing.
• 10:04
  I mean he didn't stick around to help with the
• 10:06
  search parties.
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: No, he didn't. He moved. He relocated to Utah not
• 10:11
  long after.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: She disappeared, which is suspicious.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Well, in isolation, moving isn't a crime. People move for jobs,
• 10:17
  for family, But in a homicide investigation we look for
• 10:21
  what's called flight behavior. Was the move planned months in
• 10:24
  advance or was it sudden precipitous. It looks very much
• 10:31
  like he was trying to create a geographic buffer between
• 10:34
  himself and the scene of the crime.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: Let's move into the anatomy of the crime itself. Yeah,
• 10:38
  because once the truth finally started to come out years later,
• 10:42
  we learned this wasn't a crime of passion, This wasn't
• 10:44
  an argument that went wrong.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: No, this was I mean, this was architectural in its cruelty,
• 10:50
  deeply humanitating, deeply. And that's the distinction that matters so
• 10:54
  much legally. Based on the charging documents and the later confession,
• 10:57
  Calderwood didn't just stumble upon Duffy and have a bad idea.
• 11:01
  He had prepared a location, the crawl space. Yes, he
• 11:04
  took her to the home of his then girlfriend's parents.
• 11:06
  The parents were out of town, the house was empty,
• 11:09
  he had.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Access, But he didn't just use the house.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: No, he had prepared a crawl space beneath the home.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, when I read prepared a crawl space, my stomach
• 11:16
  just dropped. We're not talking about just opening a hatch.
• 11:20
  What does preparing a site like that actually imply?
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: It implies fantasy and ritual. A crawl space isn't a
• 11:28
  living area, It's a utility space. Dirt floors, pipes, insulation,
• 11:35
  it's dark, it's confined, and it's relatively soundproof to the
• 11:38
  outside world.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Sort of prepare it.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: He means he likely spent time down there beforehand, clearing
• 11:44
  a specific space, maybe setting up restraints or some kind
• 11:47
  of lighting, anticipating the violence he was about to inflict.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: He was building a kill room.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: In essence, Yes, he was building his own private kill room.
• 11:56
  And that just moves us squarely into first degree murder territory,
• 11:59
  doesn't it. The planning, the premeditation.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, it shows that the intent to kill, or at
• 12:05
  least to inflict this severe, horrific violence existed long before
• 12:09
  he ever made contact with Duffy on the street that day.
• 12:12
  He created what we call a site for violence.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: It's chilling.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: We have to touch on what happened in that space.
• 12:17
  The report is clear it mentions sexual assault and torture.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: We do, and we have to be unflinching here to
• 12:22
  really understand the gravity of what happened and why the
• 12:24
  sentencing later is so important. Duffy was subjected to extreme.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Violence and the crawl space allowed for that.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: The confinement in that crawl space allowed Calderwood to exert
• 12:33
  total absolute dominance. This aligns with the profile of a
• 12:37
  sexual sadist. The pleasure isn't just derived from the sexual
• 12:40
  act itself, but from the prolonged suffering and the control
• 12:44
  over the victim.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: And then we get to the nobody aspect of the case.
• 12:47
  He didn't just leave.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Her there, No, he engaged in extensive forensic countermeasures. The
• 12:53
  report state he disfigured the body to prevent or hinder identification,
• 12:59
  and then he disposed of her remains. And to this
• 13:01
  day a nation, Renaine's body has not been found.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: And that's all deliberate.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: It is a deliberate act to strip the victim of
• 13:08
  their identity and crucially, to strip the prosecution of its
• 13:11
  primary piece of evidence.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: But he kept something. He made a mistake. He kept
• 13:15
  the watch, the trophy.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: The trophy. Duffy wore a very distinctive black wristwatch that
• 13:20
  lit up. Calderwood kept it.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Okay, help me understand the psychology there. The risk reward
• 13:25
  calculation seems insane. Yeah, you commit what you think is
• 13:29
  the perfect crime, you get rid of the body, you
• 13:31
  move to another state. Why in the world would you
• 13:34
  keep the one piece of plastic in metal that links
• 13:37
  you directly to your victim.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: Because for this type of offender, the crime is a high,
• 13:42
  it's a peak experience, but the high fades the trophy,
• 13:46
  the watch, it's a memento. It allows him to relive
• 13:50
  the event in his mind. It's a tangible bridge back
• 13:52
  to that feeling of godlike power he felt in that
• 13:55
  crawl space.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: So the psychological need for that token overrides the logical
• 13:59
  need to destroy evidence.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: It completely overrides it. It's a hallmark of many serial offenders,
• 14:04
  and frankly, it is very often their undoing.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: So we have the crime committed in October twenty nineteen,
• 14:11
  Calderwood is now in Utah, Duffy is officially a missing person,
• 14:14
  and we enter the.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: Cold face right, twenty nineteen passes twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, nothing.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: And this is what the value of death for investigations.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it. The solvability factors
• 14:23
  degrade with every single day that passes.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: What are solvability factors.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: Things like witness memory, It fades, CCTV footage gets overwritten,
• 14:32
  physical evidence. If there is any decays. The Homer police
• 14:37
  were working it. They never closed the file, but they
• 14:40
  had nothing to work with.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: No crime scene, no body, no witnesses, said nothing.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: It felt like one of those tragic cases that would
• 14:46
  just be a mystery forever. You know, the lady who
• 14:49
  vanished in Homer.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: And statistically it probably should have stayed that way.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: It likely would have if not for the human element.
• 14:55
  The weak link in Kirby Calderwood's armor wasn't his forensic cleanup.
• 14:59
  It was his ego, or maybe his need to brag
• 15:03
  the wife, the wife or by that point, the ex wife.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, he confessed he told his wife
• 15:08
  what he did.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: He reportedly did.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Yes. I always struggle with this part of these stories.
• 15:12
  Why tell anyone ever? Why create a witness?
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: It's so complex. Sometimes it's a way to terrorize their partner.
• 15:18
  Look what I did. Imagine what I could do to you.
• 15:20
  It creates this bond of fear, a form of control,
• 15:23
  a form of control. Sometimes it's just the burden of
• 15:26
  the secret. Though a true psychopath rarely feels burdened by guilt.
• 15:31
  It's more likely a form of what we call narcissistic Supply,
• 15:34
  he wanted credit for his genius, but.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: She didn't run to the police right away. In twenty
• 15:38
  twenty one, when he told.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Her, no, she didn't, and we have to be so
• 15:41
  careful not to judge that delay without knowing the dynamics
• 15:44
  of that marriage. Of course, if you are living with
• 15:47
  a man who calmly tells you that he tortured and
• 15:50
  butchered a vulnerable woman in a crawl space, your primary
• 15:54
  emotion is likely abject terror. You're in survival mode.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: You're thinking about your own safety.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Safety, your family's safety.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: But in twenty twenty two, the damn breaks A tip
• 16:04
  comes into the Keyenni Peninsula Crime Stoppers.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: This is the pivotal moment, the turning point of the
• 16:09
  entire investigation, and the tip was specific. It wasn't just
• 16:13
  a rumor.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: What did it say?
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: It named Kirby Calderwood, It named Duffy Murnaine, and it
• 16:18
  alleged he kidnapped and murdered her.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: So this gave the investigators the leverage they needed.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: The leverage they needed to go back and approach the
• 16:26
  now ex wife and crucially to get a search warrant
• 16:29
  for a property that wasn't even his, the ex girlfriend's
• 16:32
  parents' house.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about spousal privilege. We see it on
• 16:36
  TV legal dramas all the time, I can't testify against
• 16:39
  my husband, but that didn't stop this case. Why not.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a common misconception from TV. There are actually
• 16:46
  two main types of privilege. One is testimonial privilege, which
• 16:49
  means you generally can't force a spouse to stand against
• 16:52
  the other, but usually the witnessing spouse holds that privilege,
• 16:56
  so if she wants to testify, she can. The other
• 16:59
  is marital communications privilege, which protects private conversations during the marriage.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: But there are exceptions.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, there are massive exceptions. If the communication was made
• 17:08
  to enable a future crime, or in many jurisdictions, if
• 17:11
  it involves severe felonies like this, the privilege can be pierced,
• 17:15
  and once a marriage is dissolved, the dynamic changes. Anyway,
• 17:19
  in this case, she chose to cooperate, so they.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Have her statement. She tells them everything, the luring, the house.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: The crawl space, a detailed, horrifying account.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: But a statement isn't physical proof, right A defense lawyer
• 17:31
  would just destroy that in court. She's a bitter ex wife.
• 17:35
  She's lying to get back at him. They needed the.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Science, They needed the corpus to li likety. It's a
• 17:40
  legal principle, you generally need to prove that a death
• 17:42
  occurred to charge someone with murder without a body, you
• 17:46
  need overwhelming circumstantial evidence to prove that.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: So they went back to that house in Homer.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: They went back to the house three years after the murder.
• 17:53
  Three years later, they go into that crawl space. Now,
• 17:56
  remember this is a dirt floor environment. It's exposed to
• 18:00
  elements in.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: A way, not a clean lamp setting, not at all.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: But they found it. The DNA trace DNA.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, explain trace DNA versus you know, regular DNA evidence.
• 18:10
  I think people picture a pool of blood.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: We are not talking about a pool of blood. We're
• 18:14
  talking about something invisible to the naked eye, skin cells,
• 18:18
  maybe a hair follicle, microscopic biological transfer. Wow, there's a
• 18:23
  core principle in forensics called low cards exchange principle. It
• 18:27
  basically states that every contact leaves a trace.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Every contact leaves a trace.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: So even after three years, even after any attempts to
• 18:35
  clean up, tiny biological markers from Duffy mornane remained in
• 18:40
  the soil or on the wooden structure of that crawl space.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: And that DNA was a match to Duffy.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: That is the checkmate, that's the moment, because.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: There's no innocent explanation.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: There is zero innocent explanation for her genetic material to
• 18:54
  be in the dirt under a stranger's house. She didn't
• 18:57
  know the homeowners, she didn't lived there.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: So that physical link, the DNA, it corroborated every single
• 19:03
  word the ex wife said.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: It turned her testimony from a he said, she said
• 19:07
  into a scientifically backed fact.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: And they also found a way to link the watch
• 19:11
  to him.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: Yes, the investigation was able to connect the specific make
• 19:15
  and model of the watch found in his possession, or
• 19:17
  at least linked to him, to the one that Duffy
• 19:20
  was known to wear.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: So you have the triangle of evidence.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: A perfect triangle of evidence. You have the confession to
• 19:25
  the wife, which is testimonial evidence, you have the DNA
• 19:29
  in the call space, which is forensic evidence, and you
• 19:31
  have the watch, which is circumstantial or trophy evidence.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Is a strong case.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: It's an incredibly strong case, especially for a nobody homicide.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: So they swoop in. It's twenty twenty two. They arrest
• 19:42
  him in Utah, they extradite him back to Alaska, and
• 19:45
  he's charged with first degree murder and kidnapping.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: And we're all bracing for the trial of the decade
• 19:50
  in Homer. It's going to be a huge national news
• 19:53
  level trial.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: So silence.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: For four years.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: Pre trial, motion delays, legal wrangling. This is actually pretty
• 20:03
  standard in complex homicide cases like this.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: What was the defense doing all that time?
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: They were likely trying to suppress everything, Suppress the DNA evidence,
• 20:11
  suppress the wife's statement, trying to chip away at the
• 20:14
  pillars of the prosecution's case.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Until February five, twenty twenty six, just a few weeks ago,
• 20:20
  he walks into the Kenai Superior Court and takes a
• 20:23
  plea deal.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: He pleads guilty to the second degree murder.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, I have to play the role of the outraged
• 20:28
  public here for a minute. I know people hearing this
• 20:30
  are just screaming inside. Right, dam you have DNA, you
• 20:33
  have a confession to a third party, you have the trophy.
• 20:35
  Watch Why on earth would you let him plead down?
• 20:39
  Why drop the kidnapping charge, Why drop first degree murder?
• 20:42
  It feels like he won something.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: I completely understand that visceral reaction. I do, but we
• 20:48
  have to look at this through the eyes of a
• 20:50
  prosecutor who is still facing one massive, terrifying hurdle.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Nobody nobody, But is the nobody factor really that dangerous
• 20:59
  in court when you have all this other evidence?
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: It is the single biggest risk factor in a homicide
• 21:04
  trial period, even with Duffy's DNA. In that crawl space,
• 21:08
  a skilled defense attorney can spin a narrative for the jury,
• 21:12
  like what they could say, Yes, my client was with
• 21:15
  her there, they hooked up, it was consensual, and then
• 21:18
  she left alive, and well, we don't know what happened
• 21:20
  to her after that.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Or they could say he panicked, or they.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Could say she died of an accidental overdose while she
• 21:24
  was with him, and he panicked and hid.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: The body, and panicking isn't murder Exactly.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: If the jury believes he panicked and hit a body
• 21:31
  after an accidental death, that's not murder, that's manslaughter, or
• 21:35
  maybe just tampering with evidence. That's a sentence of maybe
• 21:37
  five or ten years, not ninety nine.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: So you're risking him getting a light sentence.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Or worse, or you get just one juror on that
• 21:45
  panel of twelve who thinks, you know what, I have
• 21:47
  a reasonable doubt. I can't convict a man of murder.
• 21:51
  If I don't know for sure how she died, and.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: That one juror creates a hung jury.
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: A hung jury, he walks free. The state might try
• 21:59
  him again, but the odds get worse each time. It's
• 22:01
  a huge gamble.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: So the plea deal is it's an insurance policy.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: It's a guarantee. It's one hundred percent certainty of a
• 22:08
  conviction for murder. And it does something else, something really important.
• 22:11
  It spares the family. I thought about that a trial
• 22:14
  would have required showing graphic crime scene photos of the
• 22:17
  crawl space. It would have meant detailing the torture allegations
• 22:20
  in open court. It would have meant cross examining Duffy's
• 22:24
  family about her mental health. It would have been a
• 22:26
  month long trauma parade for them.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: And the plea deal avoids all of that.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: The police skips all of that. It provides certainty and
• 22:34
  a measure of peace.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: So what does second degree murder actually mean in Alaska?
• 22:38
  What kind of time is he looking at?
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: Well? In Alaska's second degree murder generally means you intended
• 22:43
  to cause serious physical injury and that resulted in death,
• 22:47
  or that you engaged in conduct that manifested an extreme
• 22:51
  indifference to the value of human life.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: That seems to fit.
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: It fits perfectly. The sentencing range is typically fifteen to
• 22:57
  ninety nine years.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Fifteen to ninety nine is a huge rain.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: It is a huge range. But given all the aggravating
• 23:02
  factors here, the vulnerability of the victim, the sexual assault,
• 23:06
  the concealment of the body, the torture, the prosecution is
• 23:09
  going to argue for the absolute ceiling. They will push
• 23:12
  hard for ninety nine years, essentially a life sentence. Essentially
• 23:17
  a life sentence without the risk of a jury letting
• 23:19
  him walk.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: And he had to admit it in open court. He
• 23:23
  had to say the words I'm guilty.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: That's a crucial point. This wasn't an Alfred plea. That's
• 23:27
  where you maintain your innocence but acknowledge the state has
• 23:30
  enough evidence to convict you anyway. No, he pled guilty.
• 23:33
  He admitted the act, and that provides a level of
• 23:36
  historical truth that can never be rewritten or appealed away later.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: I want to zoom out. Now we have the legal conclusion,
• 23:44
  but you know, this is the deep dive, and we
• 23:47
  need to look at the systems that were operating beneath
• 23:49
  this whole story. Absolutely, we talked about Duffy's vulnerability. This
• 23:53
  happened in a system in industry that was designed specifically
• 23:57
  to care for her.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: This is the really uncomfortable convert station we have to
• 24:00
  have about the care industrial complex. We have an aging
• 24:03
  population in this country. We have many adults with cognitive
• 24:07
  or mental health disabilities.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: And we can't just warehouse some, No.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: We can't. They deserve to live in the community with dignity.
• 24:14
  That's a concept called the dignity of risk. But that
• 24:17
  entire model relies on the integrity of the often low
• 24:21
  wage staff who are hired to support them.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: And we know the turnover in those jobs is just
• 24:25
  incredibly high.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: It's a revolving door. The pay is low, the stress
• 24:30
  is high, and what that means is that facilities are
• 24:32
  constantly desperately hiring.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: And when you're desperate, when you're.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Desperate for bodies to fill shifts, vetting can become a
• 24:40
  checkbox exercise. You run the standard background check. Does he
• 24:44
  have a criminal record? No, Okay, you're hired.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: But Calderwood didn't have a record.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Before this, And that's the fallacy of the background check. Yeah,
• 24:52
  it only tells you what someone has been caught doing
• 24:54
  in the past. It doesn't tell you what they will do.
• 24:57
  It doesn't screen for narcissistic pred.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: So what's the solution. Yeah, you can't just lock the
• 25:03
  residence up for their own safety.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: No, of course not. That would be a massive violation
• 25:07
  of their civil rights. The solution, I think lies in
• 25:10
  stronger supervision and monitoring of the staff, not the residence.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: So watching the watchers, watching the watchers.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: We need to actively monitor for grooming behaviors. If a
• 25:22
  staff member is spending too much off the clock time
• 25:25
  with a particular resident, that's a red flag. If they're
• 25:28
  offering personal rides in their own car, that's a red flag.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: And you need a culture where reporting those small boundary
• 25:34
  violations is mandatory, not.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Optional, exactly, And we need to empower the residents themselves.
• 25:40
  We teach children about stranger danger and good touch bad touch.
• 25:44
  We rarely provide that same kind of detailed, repetitive safety
• 25:48
  training to vulnerable adults.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: That's a really good point.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: We need to teach them explicitly that just because someone
• 25:54
  wears a name tag from your facility, it doesn't mean
• 25:57
  they're allowed to take you to a second location without authorization.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: And then there's the whole rural justice aspect of this.
• 26:03
  Homer is a wealthy town in some ways, but the
• 26:06
  police department is.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: Still small, and small departments face really unique hurdles. They
• 26:11
  don't have a dedicated CSI lab down the hall. They
• 26:13
  have to send evidence to the state crime lab in
• 26:16
  Anchorage or sometimes even out of.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: State, and that causes huge delays.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: Huge delays. They also don't have fifty detectives to canvass
• 26:23
  a neighborhood, and socially, it can be really hard to
• 26:26
  investigate your own neighbor.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: The good guy bias.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: The good guy bias exactly, Oh, I play softball with Kirby.
• 26:32
  He's a nice guy. He couldn't have done this. That
• 26:34
  kind of bias can slow down the critical pivot from
• 26:37
  treating it as a missing person case to a homicide
• 26:40
  with a suspect case. It's a psychological hurdle that rural
• 26:44
  detectives have to consciously jump over.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: I test. I keep thinking about Duffy's family. Seven years
• 26:50
  from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty six, seven years of
• 26:54
  waking up every single day not knowing where she is
• 26:57
  or what happened, and.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: That is a part of the tragedy that the plea
• 26:59
  deal cannot fix. We have a term for it in psychology, ambiguous.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Loss, ambiguous loss.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: Without a body, the grieving process is arrested. It can't
• 27:09
  complete its cycle. There is no grave to visit, there
• 27:12
  is no final resting place. The legal system has finished
• 27:14
  its job, but the emotional work for that family is
• 27:17
  ongoing and it's immense.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: But there is a takeaway here about community too, a
• 27:21
  more positive.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: One there is. We started by talking about the isolation
• 27:24
  of Homer, but the flip side of that everyone knows,
• 27:26
  everyone dynamic is that people cared deeply.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: They didn't forget her.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: They did not let Duffy become just another cold case statistic.
• 27:35
  They kept her face on the bulletin boards, they kept
• 27:37
  asking questions, and ultimately it was a human tip, someone
• 27:42
  in the community speaking up that broke this entire case
• 27:45
  wide open.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: It really validates the see something, say something cliche.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: It's not a cliche. It's an absolute necessity. In twenty
• 27:52
  twenty two, someone made a choice to pick up the
• 27:54
  phone and call crime stoppers. That one phone call was
• 27:58
  the difference between Kirby Cood living a free life in
• 28:01
  Utah and him spending what will likely be the rest
• 28:04
  of his life in an Alaskan prison.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: Justice is a participatory act, it has to be. We
• 28:09
  have covered a massive amount of ground today, the biography
• 28:12
  of a gentlewoman named Duffy, the psychology of a predator
• 28:15
  who used his caregiver status as a weapon, the forensic
• 28:19
  miracle of finding trace DNA in a dirt caral's base
• 28:22
  after three.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Years, and the cold hard calculus of a plea deal
• 28:25
  in a new body case.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: It's a comprehensive look at how modern justice works. It's messy,
• 28:29
  it's slow, it's imperfect, but in this case, it ultimately
• 28:32
  landed on the truth. I want to leave our listeners
• 28:34
  with the final thought to Mulover. We are genetically wired
• 28:38
  to fear the dark. We fear the stranger in the alley,
• 28:42
  We fear the unknown. But the case of a nation
• 28:44
  renamee teaches us something much much more unsettling.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: The danger wasn't in the woods.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: No, the danger was a familiar face. It was a
• 28:52
  person who probably had a key to the building at
• 28:54
  one point. It was someone she likely smiled at. So
• 28:57
  how do we reconcile our absolute need to trust the
• 29:01
  people who care for us. Our doctors, our teachers, are
• 29:04
  caregivers with the terrifying reality that monsters don't always look
• 29:09
  like monsters.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: That is the question, isn't it. How do we stay
• 29:12
  safe in plain sight?
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: It's a question without an easy answer, but when we
• 29:15
  absolutely have to keep asking. Thanks for listening to this
• 29:19
  deep dive. Stay safe out there.