Carl:  Someone got smoked last night, and you’ve been named as a person of interest.

Bobby:  Me?

Carl:  As a person that we should come talk to. And this person who got smoked last night is actually associated with the people that you were talking about.

Bobby:  It’s all about my kids now, dude. All that other weird fucking gangbang and shit, I didn’t know. I see how people look at me when I walk around here, all my tattoos and stuff. I can understand with somebody like, “Oh, maybe he’s fucking guilty, whatever happened, because look at him.” I understand that, dude.

Carl:  Yeah. Well, I can tell you, we didn’t just come to you, because we decided there was a guy with a tat. It was having to do that this person is actually a relative of those folks that you were talking about. I’m not going to say how or who, because I don’t want to cause problems, but–

Bobby:  I don’t really need to care.

Carl:  Yeah. But somebody said, “Hey, we need to go talk to you.”

Bobby:  My door’s open, dude.

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.

Dave:  While we realize that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we hope you’ll join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved out of respect for what they’ve been through. Thank you.

[music]

Yeardley:  Today on Small Town Dicks, we are so pleased to welcome back Deputy DA Erik.

Erik:  Good afternoon.

Zibby:  And Sergeant Carl.

Carl:  Hello, there.

Yeardley:  And our usual suspects,

Dan:  Detective Dan.

Dave:  Detective Dave.

Yeardley:  So, gentlemen, please tell us how this case came to you.

Carl:  Well, this case actually came to us on Friday the 13th. I remember this pretty well, because I was actually working on a different homicide case, where a body had been found up in the woods. We’d worked on that all day. I had been home for about 20 minutes when I got a phone call that we had a fresh homicide in a very rural part of our county, where somebody had kicked in the front door, did a home invasion robbery, went inside the house and shot our victim, Toby.

911 Dispatcher:  911, what’s your emergency?

George:  I had some guy break in the house and shot my son.

911 Dispatcher:  Okay. Are you at [beep]?

George:  Yes.

911 Dispatcher: : Okay. We do have officers and medics in route. I have a couple more questions if you have the answers. Did you have a vehicle description, anything, what those men were in?

George:  No, we don’t. They broke in the door, and then yelled for the money, then they caught him and then they shot him.

911 Dispatcher:  Okay. And it was just two masked men? Do you have no other description?

George:  No, they were big guys.

911 Dispatcher:  Okay.

Carl:  I responded down there with a bunch of other cops. What I find is that our victim, Toby, and four other people were inside the residence when this home invasion robbery happened, and they were having a family meeting, so to speak, with Toby, his dad, George and some other relatives to include Toby’s girlfriend, and her daughter and George’s wife when the front door got kicked in and Toby got shot.

Yeardley:  That seems incredibly bold. Usually, a home invasion robbery happens when you think nobody’s home, not when the whole family is sitting around.

Carl:  Well, Toby and George had a long history of being pretty good at growing large marijuana crops.

Zibby:  This is son and father.

Carl:  Yes. They both had their own independent marijuana farms and grows, which, especially at that time before it was legal, it was a significant cash cow. It was a way to make a lot of money in a hurry. What’s interesting is, both Toby and George, about four months earlier, had been the recipients of a search warrant that we had done on both of their places, at which point we took all their marijuana away, and collected guns and money and all those kind of things.

 Toby had already restocked the pond and already had a new grow going. They were both known in the area as guys who made a lot of marijuana. So, that was our first thought process, “Okay, we have people who are involved in the drug world. Let’s track that down.”

Zibby:  Sure. That makes sense.

Carl:  So, George tells us this story of how his property, which is different than Toby’s property, had a bunch of people who lived there and helped take care of the marijuana farm. One of them was a gal named Michelle. Michelle had been helping with the marijuana grow, and was part of the bust that happened months earlier and actually had been charged with part of that cultivation of that marijuana farm at that time.

 And her boyfriend, who is a big-time con, Aryan Nation guy, came up from another state.

Zibby:  To be with Michelle and help out on the marijuana farm?

Carl:  Correct. And George just had a really bad feeling about this guy.

Yeardley:  Is George saying, he thinks maybe this Aryan ex-con is responsible?

Carl:  Yes, though he really couldn’t explain a lot of why. He did say that these Aryan Nation guys had been doing a series of robberies that I actually was investigating.

Erik:  The mushroom robberies.

Carl:  Right.

Zibby:  The mushroom robberies?

Yeardley:  What were those?

Erik:  That’s the time of the year that’s biggest for these mushroom pickers. They go out and pick their mushrooms in the woods. They set up a shop, or they’ll sell them to mushroom buyers, who then sell them to grocery stores and restaurants, things like that.

Yeardley:  One wouldn’t think that selling actual mushrooms, like Shiitake mushrooms you put into your sauté, would be huge money makers. That seems like an odd bunch of people to rob.

Erik:  It’s a big cash business, and it’s all cash because all these growers, they’re independent contractors. They go out in the woods, they collect what they can, they bring it in and then they sell it per pound.

Carl:  They actually did this pretty smartly. So, the mushroom buyers actually stock up heavy on cash on Fridays, because they know they have to go through the weekend supplying cash to the mushroom pickers that come in. And so, the robberies actually happened after they had done their big cash stock up too. It’s not like a name and receipt business either, if you know what I mean.

Zibby:  Yeah. Yeah, of course.

Carl:  So, multiple mushroom shops had been hit by a series of robbery, one, twice. It all appeared like it was the same suspects. They’d come in, do a takeover style robbery with guns, actually cut to money belt off the victims, the buyers of the mushrooms, and then split. So, that’s interesting that George even knows about that, because we hadn’t publicized it wasn’t something that was widely known. To complicate things though, Toby’s girlfriend was a hot mess.

Yeardley:  Toby was the victim.

Carl:  Yes. She was married to another man, even though she was living with Toby, who had recently made threats about her living with Toby, and had come up and caused a confrontation there on that rural property recently within the last couple weeks. So, we had two different angles that we had to float out and figure out, is it this probably not likely skinhead Aryan Nation connection, or is it more likely? Okay, this is a domestic violence thing.

Zibby:  Was Toby’s girlfriend there when he was killed?

Carl:  She was present for the robbery. All the victims, George and his wife and Toby’s girlfriend and her daughter, all say that these two guys come in, start demanding money, hit Toby in the head with a gun, he goes to the ground, and then they shoot him and run away. They’re all pretty consistent in that story.

Yeardley:  They shoot him in front of the family?

Carl:  Yes.

Yeardley: : [gasps]

Zibby:  Shoot him where?

Carl:  They shot him in the chest.

Erik:  While he was laying on the floor. He’d actually been knocked down.

Carl:  Yeah. He started to get up, and they pistol whipped him. He went to the ground, and then they shot him and then ran out of the house.

Erik:  So, of course, the motive was a bit suspicious. We couldn’t rule out the domestic aspect of this, because they said it was going to be a robbery. But then they immediately execute somebody and run away without taking anything. And so, we’re thinking, was that just a ruse to cover up what the real intent was, which was maybe as some retribution for Toby living with this other man’s wife. So, as Sergeant Carl said, we’re going different directions on this.

Yeardley:  Right.

Dave:  It was really an execution, not a robbery.

Zibby:  But wouldn’t Toby’s girlfriend recognize her husband if he was one of them?

Erik:  Both of them are wearing masks.

Yeardley:  Oh, right. 

Zibby:  Right.

Erik:  The surviving witnesses were able to describe that both men were masked up. They had their faces covered.

Carl:  They told us, the suspect is big. The main suspect, the shooter, is six foot plus, and he’s pretty big. The other guy’s probably 5’10”, 5’11”, but smaller with blue eyes.

Erik:  And that one was carrying, what appeared to be, a small caliber semi-automatic handgun. The other had a larger caliber revolver.

Yeardley:  How would you even assume that they were part of the Aryan Nation where they’re identifying tattoos or something that George would have been familiar with?

Carl:  When I interview him, he’s very big about talking to these Aryan Nations. These are skinhead guys. They’re up from a different state, out of prison. They are tattooed up, and are loud and proud about their particular racist beliefs.

Yeardley:  All right. So, now, you have two possible leads, but they’re both very different. Do you find anything at the scene that helps you narrow it down?

Carl:  We find one shell case inside the house. Besides the dead victim, that’s our evidence. There’s a shoe print on the front door where the door got kicked in. We find a knife outside that appears to be out of place and a shell casing. That’s what we have for evidence.

Erik:  Actually, that folding knife becomes pretty important down the line. It looked out of place. because this was a winter night, this Friday the 13th, and it had been wet outside and cold. This knife looked relatively dry, and just sitting on top of the gravel on this driveway.

Yeardley:  Not to mention a knife in the driveway would seem out of place anyway, no?

Erik:  No. Not in our county.

[laughter]

Zibby:  Is a shell casing, a shoe print and an out of place knife considered strong and useful evidence or not really so much?

Carl:  Well, ultimately, I knew if we found a gun, we can compare the shell casing to it. The shoe print was actually pretty good. If we could find the shoes, we could potentially compare that, and maybe we could track down where the knife was purchased or something. Those are my initial thoughts.

Erik:  Or, fingerprints or DNA.

Carl:  Fingerprints or DNA or something like that on the knife.

Yeardley:  Okay, let’s just press pause for one second, because there are a lot of players in this case. I want to make sure that I have everybody straight, yeah?

Zibby:  Yeah. I need a recap.

Yeardley:  So, we have Toby, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s daughter and Toby’s dad, George and his wife all sitting around together one Friday afternoon when two masked gunmen kick in the door and kill Toby in front of everyone. Then they leave without hurting anyone else or taking anything from the residents.

Zibby:  Yeah. So, on one hand, you’re thinking this could very well be the jealous husband of Toby’s girlfriend. However, George, Toby’s dad, suspects that maybe it’s Michelle and her boyfriend, the skinhead Aryan Nation ex-con and his cronies who were out committing these mushroom robberies that the public didn’t really know about, but somehow George knew a lot about, yeah?

Yeardley:  Which seems really suspicious. Yeah.

Carl:  Yes.

Erik:  Well done.

Zibby:  And what is Michelle’s boyfriend’s name?

Carl:  Bobby.

Dan:  So, you guys go looking for Michelle and Bobby now?

Carl:  Right. So, we’re able to track them down later that day. Before we do that though, we wanted to put some surveillance on them. We were watching their residents after we figured out where the residence was and we saw them drive away. We see them drive to a local high school, where they coyly park and then get out and walk to a track.

Yeardley:  A track? Like the thing you run around in track and field?

Carl:  Right. As we’re watching them, we see another person go to the track and then have this little huddle conference together, which is suspicious all by itself. After the little huddle breaks, we decide, “Well, let’s just contact these guys at traffic stop.” We end up talking to Michelle and Bobby. We say, “Hey, you know what? We had this homicide last night. Your name’s been brought up. Why don’t you come down to the police station and talk to us?”

 They’re actually both pretty easy, and he said, “Oh, okay. Well, we have our kids with us. Can we call somebody?” I’m like, “Go ahead.” So, they called the lady that we just saw them at the track with, and that turns out to be Michelle’s sister.

Zibby:  Oh, so the woman who was at the track with them was already gone after you initiated that traffic stop to talk to Michelle and Bobby?

Carl:  Yes. She picks up the kids, and we take them to the police department where we interview him for a long time. What I can tell you though is that Bobby’s cool as ice.

Carl:  Can you tell me from the second you got up to the second you put your face on the pillow what your day consisted of yesterday?

Bobby:  When I woke up in the morning, I got up with my kids, I fed my kids.

Carl:  Do you have any idea about what time you got up [unintelligible ?

Bobby:  Oh. 08:30.

Carl:  Okay.

Bobby:  I got up, I fed the kids, then we all went back and took a nap. Kids watched the movie.

Carl:  I’m assuming that you guys were up at your house.

Bobby:  Huh?

Carl:  Okay.

Bobby:  Yeah, we’re in our back room. We woke up, then the wife went and got us from Jack in the Box for lunch, we came back and we need firewood.

Carl:  Do you know what time do you guys rolled up there, approximate times?

Bobby:  Well, it was before my son got out of school. He gets home around 03:30.

Carl:  Okay.

Bobby:  So, we went up there probably about 01:00.

Carl:  So, we were up there and back before he got out of school? Right. Okay.

Bobby:  Right up there and back before he got out of school, then I stayed there at the house, and my wife went to the store to buy dinner, and she got some movies and she came back. My sister came over. She came over, we sat there and watched movies all night, dude and fuckin’– We watched Thor twice, and got drunk some vodka, and she went home and we went to bed two hours later.

Carl:  Did you guys go get the movies before you went, or did somebody bring them over or how did that work?

Bobby:  No, she went to the store to get food to buy dinner. She bought the movie, she goes to the Redbox, dude.

Carl:  Okay. So, you just stayed at home with the kids as she went and got the movies?

Bobby:  Mm-hmm.

Carl:  Okay.

Bobby:  And then, I think she went out last night to get cigarettes, dude.

Carl:  Did you go anywhere last night?

Bobby:  No, I was at home.

Carl:  Okay. Did you go on any kind of errands last night, whatsoever?

Bobby:  No.

Carl:  Stayed at home all the time?

Bobby:  Yeah.

Carl:  Who all was there?

Bobby:  It was my sister, my nephew, me, my son, my daughter.

Carl:  Somebody got smoked last night, and you’ve been named as a person of interest.

Bobby:  Me?

Carl:  As a person that we should come talk to. This person who got smoked last night is actually associated with the people that you were talking about that where you guys got wood.

Bobby:  Wow.

Carl:  So, I’m not going to bullshit you. That’s why we wanted to talk to you, because– [crosstalk].

Bobby:  [crosstalk] a fucking lights, and driver died and I knew? What do you you mean? Come on, I got tattoos, I’ve been in prison.

Carl:  Yeah, we don’t just do that for anything.

Bobby:  I understand. [crosstalk] That’s why I was asking, dude. [crosstalk] Come on, be honest with me. What’s up, dude?

Carl:  So, that’s what we’re about, dude.

Bobby:  Well, look, you can ask my children, dude. I mean, talk to my kids, dude.

Carl: Well, I hope we don’t have to do any of though. Everybody says the same thing, we’re good to go. Do you know anything about those folks up there? [unintelligible .

Bobby:  Honestly, no. And honestly, I don’t care to, dude.

Carl:  Why is that?

Bobby:  Because I don’t know, something happened up there before, and it has something to do with some arrest and fucking. My wife was involved in it and I could have lost my kids. So, what I do? I separate myself from all that. She’s going to leave us alone, dude, “If you want to go, get you fuck.” They’re cool people, I go, I went up there a few times and talked to one that dude [beep], whoever’s name is. No, but other than that, I don’t want to associate myself with nobody. My friends are like one person, and my sister and all. That’s it, dude.

Carl:  So, you’re just trying to just make sure that you’re just having the clean living– [crosstalk]  

Bobby:  I got a fucking trampoline in my front yard, dude. You know what I mean? Really. It’s all about my kids now, dude. All that other weird fucking gangbang and shit I did. I see how people look at me when I walk around here, dude, all my tattoos and stuff. I can understand with somebody like, “Oh, maybe he’s fucking guilty, whatever happened, because look at him.” You know what I mean? I understand that, dude.

Carl:  Yeah. Well, I can tell you, we didn’t just come to you, because we said there was a guy with a tat. It was having to do that this person is actually a relative of those folks that you were talking about. I’m not going to say how or who, because I don’t want to cause problems.

Bobby:  But I don’tneed to care.

Carl:  Yeah. But somebody said, “Hey, we need to go talk to you.” And that’s why–

Bobby:  My door’s open, dude.

Carl:  His level of cooperation at that point is really throwing me off. He tells me his whole life story. He tells me how he went to prison, and got in Aryan Nation, and that the Norse religion is his religion and the reason why Thor is his favorite movie, because it’s about his religion.

Zibby:  Really?

Carl:  Yeah. And so, he’s totally cooperative.

Zibby:  Is Michelle being cooperative as well?

Carl:  Yeah. My partner’s interviewing Michelle. She lets him do a cellular dump of her cell phone, so we can start getting information on it. But he notices that there’s a break that she has a bunch of messages and phone calls up until about 6 o’clock and then it stops until after 9 o’clock.

Yeardley:  On Friday the 13th.

Carl:  On Friday the 13th, that time period where our homicide happened. And she says, “Well, sometimes I just delete stuff. I must have just deleted stuff.” But they’re still very cooperative.

 Old man like, “Hey, can we go back to your house and search it? He’s like, “Okay, go ahead.” So, we take a load of detectives back to his house. We’re searching away. He just walks in the front door, sits down on the couch and starts watching football game and says, “Hey, you want to grab me a beer?” Totally not caring that we’re literally digging through his house searching for stuff.

Yeardley:  Says to one of the detectives, “You want to grab me a beer”?

Carl:  Yeah. He says it to me, actually.

Zibby:  Did you grab him a beer? I just want to know.

Carl:  I did.

[laughter] [

]

[Break 1]

Yeardley:  And are you looking for something specific?

Carl:  I know that I’m looking for a specific shoe.

Yeardley:  Did you find it?

Carl:  We’re at his house searching for a long time, and we don’t find anything of evidence. We don’t find any gun evidence, we don’t find any bullets, we don’t find anything that’s significant. What we do see is a bunch of evidence that he’s criminally involved or had been criminally involved in a gang. He admits to me that he had been arrested for carjackings, and he got additional time while in prison for taking out a chomo to quote him.

Zibby:  What’s chomo?

Carl:  Child molester.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Zibby:  Oh. And at this point, in your heart of hearts, are you thinking, “Well, I guess maybe he’s not involved with this murder”?

Carl:  Yeah, I thought, well, George just assumed this guy, Bobby, he’s a big guy and a bad guy. He’s just jumping to that assumption. So, we leave them, and we have that other angle where Toby’s girlfriend is still married, and that spouse had come up and caused threats and stuff. So, we started putting our efforts into that angle, because the other one seemed like it fizzled out. We call Toby’s girlfriend’s husband, and he comes and meets with us and he gives us a statement.

 It’s real voluntary, and he seems to be really cooperative. But as soon as we start trying to corroborate his story, we find out he’s lying to us. Everything he’s saying is a lie. He gives a bunch of provable lies. We start checking cameras, and see he’s not on surveillance, where he says he is at certain times. We know he’s threatened Toby in the past. So, we’ve got to really dig into this guy.

 As I start looking more into this guy, I find out that he is living with some other people in another county that they’re actually into the drug culture down there. They’re actually suspects in a robbery.

Yeardley:  Is he part of the Aryan Nation as well?

Carl:  No, he has nothing to do with the Aryan Nation. He’s clean in that regard.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Carl:  So, they’re lying to us. We really start saying, “Look, we’re working on homicide, and we’re looking at you.” And the guy finally was like, “Oh, well, I was lying. I was actually in this other area buying drugs, and then we went and sold them to these people.” So, now, we have to put all the work into corroborate that.

Zibby:  And did his news story check out?

Carl:  Yes. Ultimately, we spend a couple weeks digging into these other people for no reason. If I spend two weeks over here chasing this lead, that’s nothing. I’m now losing the ability to–

Yeardley:  Prove the lead you were actually after.

Carl:  Right.

Yeardley : So, while you’ve been chasing down these false leads, is anything else surfacing that can help you make up for all this lost time?

Carl:  Well, some of our other detectives get a call from Michelle’s sister and says, “I’m really worried about Michelle and Bobby. They just split town. They left the kids with me. Didn’t say where they’re going. They’re gone.” She says, “I think that they’re involved in that homicide.” But she wouldn’t give us any additional information.

 Michelle’s sister now becomes really important. So, we start interviewing her, and we’re like, “Well, what happened at the huddle at the track?” And she’s like, “Nothing. They invited me to dinner.” That’s what they told us during their interviews. “Oh, yeah. We just wanted her to come dinner.” As we started digging, we started getting our cellular records back, because we subpoenaed Michelle’s cell phone records, and we start seeing phone numbers that are in that deleted time period where she deleted the numbers. One of them was to a guy named Lee.

 So, we track him down. And Lee says, “Yeah, they wanted drugs. And before Bobby got up here from out of state, I’d give Michelle money sometimes for gas. They wanted drugs, and so I was going to give him some marijuana. But what’s odd is they were asking me to watch their kids.” And I am like, “Well, why would they–? Have they ever asked you to watch their kids before?” “No, no, they never asked me how to watch the kids.”

Zibby:  This is Lee saying this.

Carl:  This is Lee saying this.

Yeardley:  And how old are the kids?

Carl:  Kids were about 10 and 6 at that time.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Carl:  So, he’s not the babysitter. And so, that’s weird. We did hundreds of interviews on this case. But started talking to other people, said, “Yeah, I don’t know Michelle and Bobby very well, but they called me that day and asked me to watch the kids.” So, we’re now starting thinking we are calling these people, because they need to go do something, right?

Zibby:  So, on the day of the murder, Michelle and Bobby are asking everyone and anyone to look after the kids for them. They’re clearly suspects.

Carl:  But what’s odd is we know it’s two guys at one of the house. So, who’s the other person?

Zibby and Yeardley:  Right.

Carl:  So, as we’re working to track them down, we actually search their residence again. The only treasure we really find, is that we find a couple boxes for some burner phones, and we figure out what the phone numbers for those are. So, that’s really the only treasure we get out of that. But then, we find out that they gave one of those phones to Bobby’s son, little Bobby, there’s big Bobby and little Bobby.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Carl:  And they’re using that, so they can continue to communicate with him, even though they’ve just split.

Yeardley:  And little Bobby is like the 10-year-old or the–

Carl:  Mm-hmm.

Yeardley:  Yes. Okay.

Zibby:  And Michelle and Bobby are self-identified members of the Aryan Nation, right? So, full on white supremacy?

Carl:  To give you some idea of how much they’re into this Aryan Nation thing, they would make sure no matter what position little Bobby played in Pop Warner football, that his number was 88. So, even though he was a running back, he wore 88, because 88 is-

Yeardley:  Heil Hitler.

Zibby:  Oh, my God, that is so dark.

Carl:  They’re totally doing this indoctrination thing of their kids.

Yeardley:  Do they have a particular group affiliation, or clan, or chapter or whatever that they associate with?

Carl:  Yeah, the War Skins.

Yeardley:  War Skins?

Carl:  Yes.

Yeardley:  Ahh.

Zibby:  Okay. So, you know who you’re hunting down now, Bobby and Michelle, the War Skins.

Carl:  Right.We knew that Bobby actually had a warrant issued for him, because he fled the state he was in– We’re talking to where he came from, their probation officers, their detectives, some of their gang task force people, because they’re familiar with them.

 So, we are now starting to get fed information from some of these other detectives from other areas and task force that they’ve got a line on them. They know they’ve been bouncing from place to place, and that they are saying they’re on the run because of robberies.

 So, what’s interesting about that though is we still didn’t really know if that was good information about the mushroom buyer’s robberies or was this having to do with our homicide. As far as we could tell, Bobby had been out of prison and in our area for such a short time that he really didn’t develop a relationship where we thought that somebody said, “Hey, let’s go kick in our door and kill somebody.” We didn’t think that he had picked up a relationship like that.

 However, Bobby had a prison mate that had left the state and came up to stay with Bobby during the timeframe where these robberies were occurring. So, then we’re like, “Oh, that’s who our other guy is.”

Zibby:  Also, Aryan Nation?

Carl:  Also, Aryan Nation. So, we go back to Michelle’s sister and we’re like, “Who’s this guy?” She’s like, “Oh, that’s Freddie.” “Was he here?” “Yeah, he was here.” And then, she’s like, “Oh, and I have this picture.” She shows us a picture of Bobby, Michelle and Freddie together. In the back of the picture, it read, the three of us after a lick. Lick is common language for doing a robbery.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Carl:  And so, we’re pretty damn sure, based on some other information during the mushroom robberies, we knew that there was a female driver. We knew that it was a big guy and a smaller guy, which matched up with Bobby and Freddie, and that they were driving a white car with out of state plates. So, we think we have them on that for sure. They’re admitting to robberies to other people, so we’re feeling like we’re heading the right direction for that. Still fuzzy about the murder.

Zibby:  Is Michelle’s sister a part of the Aryan Nation?

Carl:  Nope. In fact, she tells us that she’s an outsider, because her kids are half black, and so they refer to her as a “[beep] lover.”

Zibby:  Yet, in a pinch, they’ll leave their kids with her.

Carl:  Yes. So, she’s clearly still withholding information though. It couldn’t be more clear to us that she knows something that she’s not telling us.

Zibby:  What gives you that sense? Is that a sixth sense as a detective or there’s a clear cue?

Carl:  In this case, there was probably some of that sense part of it, but there was just stuff that were just holes in our stories, that is, no matter how many times we hit her and ask her to explain something, she couldn’t do it.

Erik:  Well, and the whole meeting clandestinely at a running track behind a school, so you could get invited to dinner, didn’t really shake out?

Carl:  We’re thinking this, is so you guys can get your story straight. But we hit all three of them so many different ways, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, we went to the house, we had tacos, we had drinks, and we watched this movie, and this movie and this movie.” They were all able to say that.

Zibby:  I still don’t understand why, even if they got their story straight and they all knew exactly what they were going to say, if ever asked, why Michelle’s sister would go so far as to say, “Well, Michelle and Bobby, I think, are up to no good, and they’re related to this murder, but she won’t talk about the story.”

Carl:  I think, to be perfectly honest with you, all of these people grew up in the rough streets. She had previously been hooked up with gang banger type guys. She had that we’re not narcs, we’re not ratting to the police philosophy. Even though she had gotten out of that lifestyle, she was actually starting a new life. She had a job. She was trying to take care of her kids. She actually had a normal life going. I think this threw a wrench in her whole plans is because things were going great between Michelle and her sister prior to Bobby getting here.

Zibby:  I see.

[Break 2]

Yeardley:  So, at this point, how much time has passed since the murder?

Carl:  This has now moved us out probably like six to eight weeks from the murder.

Zibby:  That’s a long time.

Carl:  Yeah. We’re well into march at this time. In fact, I go on vacation to the coast with my family during spring break. We’re going to have a nice spring break away. And I get a phone call from my boss at the time. He’s like, “Hey, things just broke. We have informants down there who are saying they’re running, because this murder. You got to come home.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” He’s like, “No, you’re going to another state.” So, that was an awesome conversation with my wife. Okay–

Yeardley:  [laughs] Once again,

Carl:  I’m going to take the car. [Yeardley laughs]

Zibby:  That’s a whole other episode.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Wow.

Zibby:  We’re going to interview all the wives.

Yeardley:  That’s right.

Carl:  “I’m going to take the car leave you stranded here, and I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” which is the conversation we’ve had a lot of times, actually, over the-

Yeardley:  I bet.

Carl:  -last 20 years.

Zibby:  So, just to be clear, your boss calls and says, “They have information coming out of a different state, that Michelle and Bobby are there, and they’re talking about having committed this murder”?

Carl:  We don’t have any usable statements that we could use, like saying, “This guy said that they told him that they did this.” But we started getting a bunch of street rumors and stuff that they had been running their mouths, running from the murder. But we couldn’t get anybody on record to be like, “Yeah, they told me this. It was all. Oh, I heard that they said this. Oh, I heard they said this.” So, we were actually talking to people in multiple states, because when they fled our location, they did this cross-country tour hitting various Aryan camps.

Zibby:  Aryan camps. That’s a thing?

Carl:  Yes. Part of the information they had is they believed Michelle’s sister was seen down there giving them a ride. So, I had to determine whether she was still local or not. She was still in town, but I hit her again, like, “We have to talk.” This is probably the sixth interview I had with her now. And she finally says, “Look, I know more. I’m not telling you more. That’s as far as I’m telling you. So, we’re done.”

Yeardley:  And this has to do with, “I won’t be a snitch,” this mantra that she’s grown up with.

Carl:  That’s correct.

Dave:  This is what I love about that culture, is they’ll give you the address, what they drive, what their date of birth is, what their social is, but they won’t name their name.

Erik:  Plausible deniability. I never told him who it was.

Zibby:  Is there a legal move you can make after that? Like, “Oh, you have more information now we force you to tell.” I mean, how do you–

Erik:  Well, in fact, there is, but it’s only as good as the threat behind it. We have a grand jury process that we can actually subpoena somebody in and compel them to testify. But again, all they have to say is, “I don’t remember. I have no recollection of that. We can’t whip out the waterboard, nor would we want to.”

Zibby:  Right.

Yeardley:  So, if Michelle’s sister isn’t giving anything up, where do you go to get information on Michelle and Bobby?

Carl:  So, they start interviewing a whole bunch of gang bangers. They’re in and out of the prisons down there trying to get information. We’re now working on Freddie’s angle, because we now know who Freddie is. We’re working on Bobby’s angle, and we’re working on Michelle’s angle.

Ultimately, this hurts us. We find out that Freddie had come here from out of state, but he was gone. He was back in the other state that he originated from when the murder happened. And so, now, we’re like, “Well, who’s this guy again?” Because we’re certain it was Freddie was our guy, but we proved that he’s out of our area at that time. But we think he’s probably still good for these other mushroom robberies.

Zibby:  I mean–

Yeardley:  Oh, my God, the mushroom robberies.

Zibby:  The mushroom robberies.

Carl:  Yeah. While they’re down there, it leads us to now we have to start tracking a bunch of more cellular phone numbers. We have to start getting subpoenas for more records and we start going down that route. Erik and I start saying, “Okay, we’re not there. We can’t charge anybody with this case.” It’s not like we can extradite them for this case. “We’re not there. We don’t have the evidence. We know they’re involved. What can we do?”

Well, I mentioned early on that there was this bust that Michelle got busted on before Bobby came to our state. She was charged with basically a crime that we’re not going to extradite somebody from another state because of a marijuana production charge. The one good thing though is Michelle, she’s been arrested, Freddie’s been arrested and Bobby’s been arrested, because they all have outstanding warrants for their own stuff.

Michelle indicates, “You know what, I’d like to work with you, but I don’t want to work with you without knowing what it’s going to do for me.” So, we get that information, and Erik and I really start talking. “So, what do we have?” And so, we actually come up with this plan where we’re going to extradite Michelle from the other state for this marijuana charge. It’s not something we’ve ever done before. The way that normally works is the governor’s office says, “Okay, we’ll pay for you to go get that person,” because that’s a significant charge we’d like to prosecute them. So, we just had to just eat this bill. We’re just going to go get her.

Yeardley:  Because marijuana charge isn’t big enough for them to want to pay for that.

Erik:  No, but the sheriff’s office was willing to pick up the tab, because they’d put so many resources into this case already. We really thought our best chance is divide and conquer at this point, get Michelle separated from Bobby. We don’t know what Freddie’s connection is at this point. And then, once we got her here, we would start seeing how much we could put the screws to her for what we strongly suspected was her involvement in the mushroom robberies to leverage that information, her participation as the driver we thought she was, into cooperating with us about all of her boyfriend Bobby’s criminal activities, with or without Freddie.

Carl:  So, when I flew down to pick up Michelle, one of the good things that I did is I had already started receiving phone calls from the jurisdiction where she was housed in the jail down there, and started listening. I picked up that mom was encouraging her to dump Bobby, because the relationship between her and Bobby, even though that they have a 10-year-old son together, is basically after Michelle got pregnant, Bobby went to prison and stayed there. And so, even though they had this 10-year relationship, they’ve been physically together, like six months.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Zibby:  Jeez.

Yeardley:  Oh.

Dave:  The honeymoon stage.

Carl:  Yeah. I had been listening to Michelle’s mom say, “Hey, you need to dump this guy. You need to separate yourself. You need to figure out whatever you can do to get away from this guy.” So, I went and talked to Michelle’s mom while I was down there. I’m like, “Hey, so this is the deal.” I think that she cooperates with us. You know, the first person who talks usually gets the best deal, trying to play the good influences against her. That’s exactly what happened.

She’s like, “Hey, I like that detective. He seems sincere. You need to work with them, and maybe you can have a life in the future if you can get this behind you.”

Zibby:  So, you’re giving Michelle the chance to cooperate even though she fled the state with Bobby, and even though you’re certain that she was at least involved in the mushroom robberies?

Carl:  Yeah. And I was being honest. I really believed that if she worked with me, it would probably be to her advantage. We were thinking that her culpability may be less than others.

Erik:  Well, at that point, we didn’t necessarily think that she was involved in the homicide.

Carl:  We just think that she knew about it.

Erik:  Yeah. But we suspected her boyfriend was involved and another man, because we knew from our witnesses it was two men that came in, kicked the door, shot our victim, took off.

Carl:  This is your opportunity I’m going to give it to you. I think it’s the fair thing to do.

Michelle:  I think the best thing for me to do is not talk.

Carl:  If you think that’s the best thing for you, I just told you, right now– You were in the house–

Michelle:  I think I need a lawyer for one. [chuckles]

Carl:  We have every right for that.

Michelle:  I believe you.

Carl:  You’re in the house even though you didn’t pull the trigger, you’re just as guilty of it. I’m sure we work with the prosecutor real close. So, if you’re willing to help out, then he would probably be willing to help you out, that you didn’t know that was going to happen, that it was an accident and it wasn’t supposed to go down like that, and he would help you out a lot, which, this is the highest crime. So, obviously, the good sentence for this crime would be a life sentence. But if you went in there thinking you’re just robbing a place and all of a sudden, this happens, you didn’t know anything about it, you weren’t part of it, that’s different.

Unknown Speaker:  You got to keep in mind too. I mean, other people are talking.

Carl:  Well, they’re not going to go down for this. They don’t want this [unintelligible  property robbery, that stuff, they’ll go down for. They’ll probably take some hits for that, but they’re not going to go down for a murder.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Carl:  We have a picture. We have a picture of you, and Freddie and Bobby after a lick. Freddie told us what that is. You were picked out in a photo ID right before the robbery happened on a mushroom fireplace. Your car was observed and taken a picture of on a camera. So, you’re going to go down hard. How hard do you want to go down? Rest of your life?

Michelle:  I want a lawyer.

Carl:  It didn’t take very long until her attorney here actually reached out to Erik and said, “Hey, we want to play ball. We want to cooperate.”

Zibby:  But what can you offer her if you don’t know what she has?

Erik:  We felt very strongly that we had the goods on her for the mushroom robberies. And so, I certainly played up that part of it with the defense lawyer that under our sentencing scheme, people do years and years for those kind of robberies, even if they were just a driver, that would be aiding and abetting the offense.

 The offense itself was men in masks with guns going in and robbing multiple victims. So, her overall exposure for just driving in those was pretty high, or could be pretty high depending on if there was something to mitigate against that. And so, obviously, I provided her defense lawyer, some reports associated with that and making the link.

 I think by that point, we’d actually had somebody who was able to pick her out of a photo lineup as the driver of at least one of those robberies. The two robberies had such close MOs that if that was the woman in the one robbery, it was probably the woman and the other robbery.

 And so, once he was able to discuss that with her and show her what we had on that, very quickly we came up with a ceiling that I said, “If she cooperated, give us other information, that I would cap out her sentence at just short of eight years in prison.” Essentially, the lawyer comes back and says, “My client can take you to the gun.”

Zibby:  Holy shit.

Yeardley:  Oh, yes.

[music]

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 Soren Begin, 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 you.

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