Zibby:  Monster is a case we cover over two episodes. This marks Part 1 of 2. Please be warned that the details of this case are graphic and often difficult to hear. It is not an episode for young listeners.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Erik:  Monsters don’t just exist in children’s fairy tales and nightmares. This really was as monstrous as somebody’s conduct could get.

Yeardley:  I’m Yeardley.

Zibby:  And I’m Zibby. And we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley:  So, we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby:  To sit down with us, and share their most interesting cases.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  And I’m Dave.

Dan:  We’re identical twins.

Dave:  And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan:  Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave:  Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse and child abuse.

Dan:  Names, locations and certain details of these cases have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.

[music]

Yeardley:  It was a quiet afternoon in August of 2008, when this Small Town police department began to field multiple 911 calls from alarmed residents. The callers told dispatch, they had just witnessed what appeared to be the kidnapping of a 10-year-old neighborhood girl as she rode her bike. This triggered multiple agencies from the area to come together in a frantic effort to catch the kidnapper before he vanished with the girl.

 Today on Small Town Dicks, we have Sergeant Carl.

Carl:  Hello there.

Zibby:  And Deputy DA Erik.

Erik:  Yes. Hi.

Yeardley:  And our usual suspects.

Dave:  Detective Dave. Good to see you guys again.

Dan:  Detective Dan, and I don’t know how you can see him, it’s a podcast.

[laughter]

Zibby:  Oh, cheeky.

Yeardley:  Okay. I’m re-steering the ship here. Carl and Erik, please tell us how this case began.

Carl:  So, in 2008, because of some budget issues, my agency actually laid off about 50% of its employees. So, we went from having seven detectives to two. When this case happened, there were only two detectives working. Myself and my partner, Detective Dean, we were pretty much handling only the most serious cases that happened in our jurisdiction. It was actually, at the end of the day, we heard that there were several calls coming in to the 911 center that a child had just been abducted. Obviously, this is one of those cases where it really doesn’t matter who you work for. If you hear that call, everybody’s going to start going.

Zibby:  Right. And what were the details people were giving?

Carl:  We started getting multiple calls that the bad guy had been following a little girl, and then actually struck the little girl who was riding her bike with his car, and then grabbed her by the hair, and then dragged her back to the car and then threw her in the backseat and took off.

Zibby:  What?

Yeardley:  How do you strike a little girl on a bike without smushing her? Did he just literally, with the car, just gently enough knock her off her bike, which is diabolical unto itself?

Carl:  I wouldn’t say it was gentle. But it was gentle enough that it didn’t smash her or drive over her or anything. He isn’t enough forced with the car to literally knock her down.

Yeardley:  Was she alone?

Carl:  She was by herself at that point.

Yeardley:  How old is she?

Carl:  She was 10 years old.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Carl:  This was in a residential neighborhood. So, the little girl started screaming, “Bloody murder.” Everybody started coming outside to see what was going on. So, this was witnessed by multiple people who all started calling 911.

Male Neighbor:  I just witnessed a man driving a vehicle, intoxicated.

911 Operator:  So, were they swerving and speeding?

Male Neighbor 1:  Swerving, going really slow, looking at everybody and everything. There are a lot of people on the sidewalks. When I pulled up alongside him, I rolled down my window to tell him that he was in a bad spot and that it was creating a hazard, because he was in the intersection of [beep]

 He smiled at me, and grinned, and he had a cigarette in his hand and he waved, and then it pulled out right in front of me, and went really slow, heading west, swerving, looking at all these people. Both sidewalks had a lot of folks on. I think school had just gotten out. And so, I thought, “Well, first, maybe he’s just looking for his kid.” And then I’m watching him, and he’s really going all over the road, and then swerved in at the intersection there and darted into that one street. At that point, I decided that I needed to get his license plate.

Male Neighbor 2:  In front of my house, a little girl was coming over to play with my daughter. I heard a scream, and I looked out the front door as my dogs were barking. A man, I’m guessing in his late 20s, early 30s, real thin, baseball cap, dark hair, dark beard.

911 Operator:  Okay, I’m trying to get everything you said. So, slow down just a little bit. Late 20s to early 30s.

Male Neighbor 2:  Late 20s, early 30s, slim build. I’m guessing 5’10” to 6 foot, dark hair, dark beard. Driving a goldish color Chevrolet, I’m guessing an Aveo, some kind of small compact car. As soon as he saw me coming out, he took off. I couldn’t get the plate number.

911 Operator:  Okay. So, did he throw her in the back of his car?

Male Neighbor 2:  He grabbed her by the hair, threw her in the back of his car and took off. By the time he had her in the car, I’d ran out front and he was gone around the corner. I just thought I got the license plate, but I just couldn’t see the numbers.

Female Neighbor:  Oh, my God.

911 Operator:  So, did you see any of this or were you just told about it?

Female Neighbor:  Yes, I was at home, [unintelligible  friend’s house and it was right across the street from the friend.

911 Operator:  Okay. Okay. We have somebody checking the area. Is there any like a strange dad or anything that might want access to her?

Female Neighbor 1:  There’s nobody that I would even guess.

Male Neighbor 3:  I just came out of my house, and my next door neighbor was on the road. Colin, his daughter was a friend of that girl’s, I think.

911 Operator:  Okay. So, do you have information?

Male Neighbor 3:  Well, he said it stuck off in a brown Chevy.

911 Operator:  A brown Chevy?

Male Neighbor 3:  Anyway, I went and headed off, and I took off and went to [beep]

911 Operator:  Yeah.

Male Neighbor 3:  And before I got there, this car shot out of there.

Female Neighbor 2:  My daughter saw the child, the girl screaming and running and the car chasing after.

911 Operator:  Really?

Female Neighbor 2:  The bike is laying in the road across from my home.

Yeardley:  I’m really impressed by how much detail these callers tried to give to the 911 dispatchers.

Carl:  Yeah. And I’ve talked to most of these people. They were all very concerned. I think sometimes people just don’t respond. I think that’s why we have police officers, is because some people have the ability to respond and some people don’t.

Yeardley:  Sure. You just freeze.

Zibby:  Still. I’m surprised nobody ran out to stop him.

Carl:  Well, one person in particular though actually called 911, got in the car and then tried following him to give a play by play where he was going. But he immediately took off and then she lost him.

Yeardley:  What’s the kidnapper’s name?

Carl:  Michael. We didn’t know that at that point, obviously. So, as I mentioned, every cop in the world now is trying to flood this area, because that’s probably the worst call you can imagine. It’s a little girl just got abducted. He’s last seen heading north. So, basically, all of our resources, besides those people who are going on the scene, are trying to find this car.

 What I didn’t mention is, prior to this call coming in, we actually had a couple other calls saying, “Hey, this guy’s suspicious. He’s watching people.” In those earlier calls, they were able to give a license plate number. Our dispatchers were able to associate those calls pretty quickly. So, we had a license plate, but it turned out that that car had been stolen. So, the stolen vehicle, so it probably didn’t relate back to the suspect.

Zibby:  You mean the license plate doesn’t help you identify the suspect, because it’s not his car?

Carl:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  And this is the same day these calls have come in, the suspicious guy as he abducts the little girl?

Carl:  Yes. So, these came in within the 20 minutes, if I remember correctly, of the abduction.

Dave:  In the same general neighborhood.

Carl:  Same general area. Yeah.

Zibby:  Were these calls that were placed prior to the abduction saying, “There’s a guy who looks suspicious,” as in, he’s checking out other children or he looks like he’s doing drugs? What was suspicious about his behavior that had people calling in?

Carl:  So, I think he just pegged people’s creep meter. At one point, he was stopped in the street. When I interviewed a guy after the fact, he was just stopped in the street, blocking traffic. He just looked like he was watching people. I don’t recall anybody saying that he was specifically watching children or anything, but he just pegged people’s creep meter. They were like, “This guy’s creepy, and we don’t know what he’s doing.”

Zibby:  And he wasn’t familiar to anybody. He was just a complete stranger to the neighborhood.

Carl:  Yes.

Zibby:  So, now, you have a stranger abduction, which is very unusual, and he’s heading out of town in a stolen car. What do you do?

Carl:  Now, everybody’s trying to find this car. All our resources are heading north out of town, because that’s the last direction we saw him going. And then one of our deputies, who was assigned to another small town west of where we are, decided, “Well, everybody else is heading north. I’m going to just leave my area of responsibility and just start floating that way. That way, if I find him or something like that, I can be available.”

 So, this is a pretty significant distance, actually. It’s probably15 to 20 miles west of where this abduction site was. Good for him for making that decision, because as he’s traveling north, he actually sees the car heading south towards him. So, he turns around and starts following this car.

 The time in between abduction and this point is actually relatively quick. I think we were within about a 40-minute window. So, we’re pretty excited about that, because at that point in time, we’re thinking that he’s probably just abducted her. That’s like I said, it’s like 15 miles away, that’s drive time, so there’s probably not too much that’s happened yet. He’s probably just abducted her and drove away.

Zibby:  Is it true that in abduction cases, the first 24-hour window is the most important to law enforcement? If you don’t find the child in that time, the odds of finding them at all or even finding them alive are slim to nothing?

Carl:  Well, I can tell you that in this case in particular, he was heading into a pretty rural area. It’s my belief that he was probably traveling to kill her and dump her somewhere.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Carl:  This is not a known area to him. He’s just heading out to the rural area. So, fortunately, our deputy found him. And then it almost immediately turns into a pretty significant car chase. The other police officers are trying to catch up to get into the pursuit. Fortunately, one of our neighboring agencies had a K9 officer on duty who started heading that way. He’s passing people, he’s almost hitting people, he’s not following any safety rules. One of our supervisors at that point makes the decision, “Well, we can’t let this guy get away. If this guy gets away, this little girl’s dead. We have to stop him.”

 So, he actually gets in front of Michael, who’s driving the stolen car, and tries to do like a serpentine fashion thing, driving in front of him back and forth in the roadway, trying to slow him down. It does cause him to slow down. But then Michael gunned the car and actually went past him and hit our supervisor’s patrol vehicle.

Zibby:  Oh, shit.

Carl:  And at that point, the supervisor’s like, “Look, ram him. Let’s just get him off the road. We have to stop him. If we don’t stop him, this little girl’s dead.”

Zibby:  When you ram a car to stop it, do you do that with another car, or do you have a specific ram vehicle? [laughs]

Carl:  Well, I can tell you, we don’t have the resources to have a specific ram vehicle.

Yeardley:  Do those exist, specific ram vehicles?

Carl:  No.

Yeardley:  No.

Carl:  No, they’re called police cars.

Yeardley:  Uh.

Zibby:  Oh.

[laughter]

Carl:  Now, a deputy was able to get out ahead of him and actually put out spike strips, so strips to try to pop his tires. That was successful on at least one tire. So, that slowed him down some more. So, that got him in a position where the K9 officer, who’s actually trained in what we call TVI, it’s where they bump a car to cause it to spin out.

Yeardley:  What does TVI specifically mean?

Carl:  Tactical vehicle intervention. We don’t want to just pull on, ram this car either because we don’t want to hurt the little girl.

Zibby:  Right.

Carl:  And the K9 officer was unable to do this TVI. It actually spins the car out, and the car goes into the ditch and rolls up onto its side.

Zibby:  Oh, dear.

Yeardley:  Oh.

[Break 1]

Carl:  So, now, the stolen vehicle is up on its passenger side, so the driver side door is now facing up in the air. The deputies and officers who were there immediately confront them. They bash out a window, get him taken into custody, stuff him in a police car, and then they go in and un-seatbelt the little girl and carry her to another car.

Yeardley:  So he put her in a seatbelt.

Carl:  She put her own seatbelt on.

Yeardley:  Oh, good girl.

Zibby:  Good job. And her name is Ashley.

Carl:  Her name is Ashley. So, she immediately says, “Oh, I think I broke my arm.” And she goes sits in the K9 officer’s car. And at this point, I was trying to catch up to the pursuit myself, so I wasn’t that far out. I show up pretty quickly. I make contact with Michael, who’s sitting in the back of a police car, and he immediately says, “Oh, how’s little girl? Is she okay?”

Zibby:  Out of concern, like he had a genuine concern for her safety?

Carl:  This guy’s a monster, to be perfectly frank and we’ll get to those details of why he’s a monster here pretty soon.

Zibby:  It’s just so bizarre that he would ask if she’s okay.

Carl:  It’s an important detail though, later, actually.

Zibby:  Oh.

Carl:  So, I’m like, “Look, dude, do you have any injuries? Do we need to be concerned about you?” He complains a little bit, and so I’m like, “Oh, we’ll get back to you.” So, I went and talked to a little girl. She was pretty upset. She wanted to talk to her mommy. I knew at that point we had deputies in contact with her mother. And so, I just busted out my cell phone and called her mom and talked to her for a second and said, “Hey, we have her. She’s okay.” We’re within 40 minutes of the abduction. So, that’s actually an amazing time, right?

Zibby:  That’s incredible.

Carl:  So, everybody’s happy and sad all at the same time. And I’m like, “Okay, we’re going to get you to your mom, but we want you to go to the hospital, because you think you have a broken arm.” She calms down a little bit. We make arrangements. “Okay, bad guys got to go to the hospital, but we’re going to send them to the hospital where we want bad guys to go to.”

Yeardley:  [laughs]  

Zibby:  So, it’s a different hospital than the victim.

Carl:  Yes.

Zibby:  Is that standard procedure?

Dave:  We’re definitely not going to put them in the same area together.

Carl:  We knew that if we sent him to a particular hospital, that they would medically treat him and then release him back to us within a reasonable amount of time, so that we could do our investigation. We knew that if we sent her to the other hospital, she would be treated the way she was supposed to be treated as a victim.

Yeardley:  So, Erik, now that you have Michael in custody at the hospital, what more do you find out about him? Like, how old is this guy?

Erik:  He was 26 at the time, actually. Or, almost 26, 25. He came from out of state, an adjoining state to ours. Did not have much of a record in our jurisdiction at all. In fact, this was his first law enforcement contact with us. He had had some law enforcement contact in an adjoining county to the south of us, about an hour away, the county where it so happened, the stolen vehicle was from. His record actually though was not the type that would have lent itself to us looking at him as a predator. He’d had a stint in prison in that other state.

Yeardley:  How long ago?

Erik:  He had just got out of prison, was on parole within the year. He hadn’t been out very long. As we built this case together, essentially, we learned that he’d stolen a vehicle, driven it across the border and had been apprehended in that vehicle in our state. After that, he was released after a very short period of time, because they weren’t holding car thieves for very long. Much to the chagrin of one of their residents, he grabbed one of their cars that was warming up in a driveway one morning, and took off and came to, apparently, our jurisdiction.

 So, it looked like he’d only spent a week in that other county before he came up to us. It looked like he may have only been in our town a day before he started trolling neighborhoods. It was reported as this slow trolling, suspicious behavior. And then ultimately found this young girl by herself riding a bike and decided he was going to kidnap her.

Zibby:  God, growing up as a kid, the concept of a kidnapper was so ingrained in me as something to always be cautious of. Remember McGruff, the detective dog?

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Zibby:  I remember him warning me of suspicious men in vehicles trolling neighborhoods, looking for little kids to snatch up. This scenario is exactly what my biggest childhood nightmare was.

Erik:  It was as bad as it gets. What I think he didn’t mention yet that was in the process of occurring was an AMBER Alert was going out for this child. We have learned from the 1980s and 1990s and some of the past about how we can do things better. We had some vehicle description information, we had a color, we had a make and model.

Yeardley:  And a license plate.

Erik:  Right. And the witnesses at the scene, I think, if I remember correctly, had given a partial plate. That’s why the dispatchers were able to so quickly put it together with that prior suspicious vehicle call was because they’d had a full plate in that one. And the partials matched that full plate from the concerned citizens that called him in as a suspicious subject.

Yeardley:  So, if not for that info, that officer wouldn’t have known to turn around and follow Michael’s car out of town, right? What was that officer’s name?

Carl:  That’s Deputy Scott.

Yeardley:  Scott.

Erik:  Yeah.

Carl:  In reviewing his report last night, I saw that he was like, “That’s the right color. That’s the right numbers. I know I got to turn on that car.”

Erik:  Yeah. And so, there was a lot of positive things that came together to save this girl’s life.

Dan:  I was working the day that this abduction happened in my city. I was listening to the radio, and I hear this call come out and automatically send a message to my dispatch, “Don’t dispatch me to anything. I’m looking for this car.” I did probably the same thing that Deputy Scott did. You go to an area you think might be a likely route of egress for this guy to wherever he’s going, and you sit there and you wait and you just pray that he drives by.

 That’s what I did. I went to a spot, I sat there, I waited, I waited, I waited. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to sit. Our whole department coordinated that way. “Hey, I’m at this area. I’m at this area.” We basically cordoned off all the routes into our city, hoping that this car would go by because we want to find this little girl. And thank God, Deputy Scott was in the right place at the right time.

Yeardley:  Because one of the advantages I should think of being in a smaller town is that there are only a certain number of ways out and/or in. So, presumably, if you have a guy at each of those spots, he’s going to drive by at some point.

Dan:  Yeah.

Dave:  And you look at just the land area that our sheriff’s office has to cover and the amount of bodies they have, coupled with these layoffs, it’s an enormous area that they have to cover. To be that fortunate that he drove by is some kind of luck.

Carl:  He really didn’t even have to. He made the right decision. He was so far out of position–

Yeardley:  Who? Scott was?

Carl:  Yeah. He was so far out of position, you wouldn’t actually have thought he did something wrong if you would have just chose to stay in his assigned area, because everybody was heading the opposite direction. He just had the right thought process and I think it’s a miracle.

Yeardley:  That is a miracle.

Zibby:  Wow. So, Michael is at one hospital, Ashley is at another. She’s alive? She’s okay?

Dave:  Or, so, they thought.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Carl:  We’re thinking, “Okay, we got this. It’s quick. It’s 40 minutes.” Like I said, it’s 15 to 20 miles away. So, just in drive time alone.

Zibby:  Like, what can happen in that amount of time?

Carl:  Yes. Plus, the pursuit time and all that stuff, it’s a short amount of time. So, Michael gets taken into the emergency room, the hospital staff starts treating him. About that time is when the shoe drops.

Dan:  Right. Because you hadn’t been there very long before you get a call from the detective who’s interviewing Ashley at the other hospital.

Yeardley:  What’s that detective’s name?

Carl:  That would be Detective Les. He calls me and says that, “Michael, he raped a little girl.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? There’s no time. How did it happen?” And he’s like, “No, she’s got significant injuries. She’s saying that he raped her.”

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Yeardley:  That’s horrific.

Carl:  It just drops. This happy feeling that we recover the little girl, 40 minutes, “This couldn’t have happened. How the hell did that happen?”

Yeardley:  Do you ever find out how he did it and where?

Carl:  Yeah. Well, we never really did figure out where. We have a suspicion of a couple places based on her description. But in essence, she later says that she gets grabbed, he drives a short distance to another pretty rural area where all she sees is, she describes as ropes and trees. And so, I think she actually ended up in maybe like a boat landing where she was seeing the metal wires that separate the parking area from the rest of the park. There’s one that’s fairly close or a couple that are actually very close to that area that match that description. We never really determine where exactly it happened. But in essence, she says that she gets driven almost directly there. He gets out, he tells her to get naked. She’s very concerned at this point, she’s going to get killed. At 10, she’s-

Zibby:  At 10.

Carl:  -ardent, she’s understanding that.

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Carl:  She says he pulls down his pants and crawls in the backseat with her and sexually assaults her.

Yeardley:  I can’t stand it.

Zibby:  Jesus Christ.

[Break 2]

[

Dave:  So, Carl, even just listening to that, when you mentioned the shoe drops, you’re sitting there with suspect in the hospital. You’re feeling good about the outcome of the case so far, and somebody drops that info on you, and I’m sitting here having a reaction to it, like, I got a knot in my stomach. I can imagine you standing or sitting next to him, and what that would make me feel. How does that interaction go after you hear that information?

Erik:  As a lawyer, I advise you not to answer that question.

[laughter]

Carl:  Let’s be perfectly honest, I wanted everybody to know that we weren’t just dealing with the abduction, which by itself, is horrible. I actually said, “Look, doc, this is the deal. He raped the little girl, and we’re not fucking around with this guy.” Everybody was pretty much on board with my thoughts at that point.

Dave:  Medical staff included?

Carl:  Yeah. And really, they changed from, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to treat this guy” to “We’re going to treat this guy and get him the hell out of here.” My emotions now are a little bit different. I go into evidence collection mode.

Zibby:  Did you tell him in that moment, you know what he did?

Carl:  No.

Zibby:  You didn’t?

Carl:  No. But he figured it out pretty quickly, because at that point, I go back to him. He’s strapped down to a backboard and stuff like that, because he’d been in a car crash.

Yeardley:  Did he have any significant injuries?

Carl:  No, he really didn’t have any injuries. I tell him, “Well, this is the deal, dude. We’re going to take swabs of your penis,” because I know that he just raped this little girl, that there’s going to be evidence there.

Yeardley:  Does he have to consent to that, or do you–

Carl:  I know that this just happened, that the evidence is likely going to be there, and that the ability for that evidence to be destroyed is very easy. Him using the restroom can destroy evidence. So, I know that I have to collect this evidence, otherwise it can be destroyed. So, I had that ability to say, “I’m doing this.”

 So, I yard down his pants, and he starts screaming at me, telling me that he doesn’t consent. I pull down his pants, and that emotion wave hit me again, because clearly, on his penis, there’s fecal matter and blood.

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Zibby:  I feel so sad.

Carl:  It actually had a pungent smell to it. Somewhere in this process, it’s almost like you see a light click in his brain. He’s caught red handed. At that point, he changes his whole demeanor, and he tells me, “Did I tell you I hear voices?”

Yeardley:  Oh, brother.

Zibby:  Oh, fuck off.

Carl:  Yup. That’s how my contact with him goes from there.

Yeardley:  Meanwhile, at any point, does he say, I want a lawyer, and therefore, you have to stop asking him questions?

Carl:  At some point, a couple hours down the road, he asked for a lawyer.

Yeardley:  Even right then, when you’re saying, “I’m going to take a sample from your penis,” he just says, “I don’t consent.”

Carl:  He said, “I don’t consent.” I do tell him, “Okay, this is the deal. After you’re treated, we’re going to my office, and we’re going to talk about this.”

Yeardley:  Meanwhile, were you getting any more information from Ashley’s camp?

Carl:  We start finding out a lot of information in a hurry, actually. We find out that they don’t know this guy, that this is not any custodial interference kind of situation. This is just truly a stranger-on-stranger abduction.

Zibby:  This poor family.

Carl:  Yeah. They were a solid family. This is not a situation where, let’s be perfectly frank, a lot of the people we deal with get involved in unfortunate situations based on decisions they make, and this is not one of those situations. In fact, we find out that she got a new bike. It’s the first time she’d been allowed to actually go anywhere with it. So, she was going to go to her little friend’s house, do some homework, and–

Zibby:  No.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Erik:  They actually were, as I recall, going to be practicing for a school skit that was coming up in the talent show, her and her girlfriend.

Yeardley:  Ah, jeez.

Carl:  Yeah, this is the first time she’s been allowed. They were pretty careful like, “No, we don’t like you just driving around.” But by the route she took, it’s actually probably like six, eight blocks away.

Zibby:  That has to be every parent’s worst nightmare about the moment where they let their kid take their bike down the road to their friend’s house for the first time without supervision.

Erik:  Right. All of us or almost all of us were parents out there, and I think that adds to that feeling Detective Dave was describing earlier. When you find out what actually did happen, this is the monster we’re all afraid of.

Zibby:  I can’t even imagine Ashley’s state of being at the hospital.

Yeardley:  Right. And I’m amazed that she could even talk to the detective about what happened to her. She must have had incredible presence of mind.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Carl:  When he was sexually assaulting her, she mentioned that, “She asked him, are you going to kill me?” And he said, “No”. And she’s like, “Am I going to see my mommy again?” He said, “Yes.” And she says, “I didn’t believe him.”

Yeardley:  Oh, God.

Zibby:  Oh, my God. For a 10-year-old, she sounds so aware. Not to underestimate the intelligence or presence of a 10-year-old, but her recollection of both what was happening to her and what was going through her mind at the same time is just so clear, considering the circumstances.

Yeardley:  I agree.

Carl:  Right. She had a sheltered life too, so it’s not like she was a 10-year-old who was living like a 30-year-old. She had a pretty good family system set up for her.

Erik:  Although, if I remember correctly, I think she attributed her savviness-

Carl:  To watching CSI.

Erik:  -to watching CSI.

Zibby:  Did she actually?

Erik:  Yeah. As Sergeant Carl said at one point, the forensic interview, and it was just heart wrenching. Talks to her and says, “Well, what happened after the sexual assault?” And she said, “I asked if I was going to get to go home now, and he said yes.” “I asked if I was going to get to see my mom and dad again, and he said yes.” The interviewer said, “Did you believe him?” And she said, “No.” And he said, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?” And she said, “I thought he was going to take me to his house and kill me.”

Dave:  I just got tingles.

Erik:  Yeah.

Zibby:  To have that experience and to cognitively decipher, that kind of lie and mentally process the fact that you’re probably going to go get killed as a 10-year-old as anybody, just I can’t even–

Yeardley:  It’s too much.

Erik:  It was. But it’s the motivation that investigators and prosecutors need to bury somebody.

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Zibby:  Sure.

Yeardley:  So, tell us what you found out about him as you dug.

Carl:  Well, we went back to my office and we talked to him for a couple hours. Where I was leading earlier of, did I mention I hear voices? that’s where this went. I talked to him for a couple hours and he tells a very succinct story, that’s all crap. He talks about how he came up here, and he was getting mad because he saw a police officer and voices told him do this and that and the other thing. But it was crap, because he wouldn’t acknowledge that he’d even kidnap the little girl. He wouldn’t acknowledge it. I said, “The first thing you said to me was, how’s the little girl?”

Yeardley:  He wouldn’t even acknowledge that she was in the car with him?

Carl:  He wouldn’t even acknowledge that he was in a pursuit really.

Zibby:  Once, he was playing crazy.

Carl:  Yeah.

Dan:  And this is typical of what we encounter. I’ve had several interviews with people who are involved in pretty violent crimes. They fall asleep in the interview room. “Oh, I don’t remember.” You see these classic, like, it’s the same behaviors over and over again.

Erik:  This is a game. It’s a game we’re used to. There’s only a few varieties of the game. As I recall, amongst his interview with Sergeant Carl is he remembered what happened earlier in the day and he remembered what happened since his arrest, when the police woke him up. But there’s just this whole blackout of 40 minutes where he doesn’t remember any of that, because I’ve got problems with alcohol and substances and sometimes I forget things. So, it was the voice aspect of it claiming crazy. But there was also the other aspect of, “In case you don’t buy the voice, the voices are telling me to do what I did. I don’t even know what I did really, because I don’t really remember. I just conveniently blacked out for the part that is the 12 crimes that I committed.”

Yeardley:  Right.

Erik:  Again, that is not an uncommon dynamic, especially when you’ve got a case against someone, especially when a detective is swabbing a little girl’s fecal matter off your penis. It’s not going to be hard for us to put that two and two together to show what you’ve done. You were caught in the car with the girl after the police were chasing you. What is your defense? Well, my defense is it’s not my fault, because the voice has made me do it, or you can’t really punish me for what I did while I was blacked out. And so, of course, that was where the case moves from then. It’s disproving that either of those two circumstances are reasonable.

[music]

Yeardley:  Monster will be continued next week with Part 2.

Yeardley:  Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith, and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby:  This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley:  Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby:  If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com. And become our pal on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from our Small Town Fam. So, hit us up.

Yeardley:  Yeah. And also, we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes. And we’re part of Stitcher Premium now.

Zibby:  That’s right. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll be supporting our podcast. That way, we can keep going to small towns across the country and bringing you the finest in rare true crime cases, told, as always, by the detectives who investigated them. Thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley:  Nobody’s better than.

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