Paul: [00:00:01] Hey, Small Town Fam, this is Paul Holes. Make sure you subscribe to The Briefing Room with Detectives Dan and Dave. Season 2 is out now. Subscribe now and thanks.

[music]

George: [00:00:17] So, I asked him, “What was inside the bag?” Just some clothes, change of clothes.” So, I knew he was lying [unintelligible 00:00:23] because Detective Dave mentioned you can see sharp, bulging, hard objects in the bag.

Dave: [00:00:26] Your agenda is, if he’s not going to confess, I want provable lies because his credibility will be sharp. If you’re going to lie about the small stuff, are you ever going to be honest about the big stuff?

Yeardley: [00:00:37] I’m Yeardley.

Zibby: [00:00:38] And I’m Zibby, and we’re fascinated by true crime.

Yeardley: [00:00:41] So, we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [00:00:44] To sit down with us and share their most interesting cases.

Dan: [00:00:48] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:00:49] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:00:50] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:00:51] And we’re detectives in small town USA.

Dan: [00:00:54] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:00:56] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together we’ve worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan [00:01:06] Names, places, and certain details including relationships have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.

Dave: [00:01:14] Though 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.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley: [00:01:38] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:45] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:01:45] And Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:47] Hello, everyone.

Yeardley: [00:01:48] And we are so pleased to have one of our very favorite guests back with us today, Sergeant George.

George: [00:01:54] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:01:55] Good morning. So, George, you worked on this case with Dan and Dave. Tell us how this case came to you.

George: [00:02:01] Came in on a holiday. It was labor day a few years back, only a couple of us were working that day. I think may have been Dan and I.

Dave: [00:02:10] No, it was me.

George: [00:02:11] You guys look so much alike.

[laughter]

Yeardley: [00:02:14] At that time, you guys were all still detectives, right? Because, George, you’ve been promoted. And you too, Dave. Yes.

Dave: [00:02:19] Right.

George: [00:02:20] Yeah. We were all working back in the office bay and there’re only a couple of us there. And patrol sergeant called dispatch and said they’re on the scene of a deceased subject is how it initially came in and asked if we would respond out there to take a look at it to see what we thought. So, we arrived on scene, got to the apartment building. It’s a second-floor apartment building downtown. We opened the door and first thing you see is about a 70-year-old man sitting in a chair covered in blood. And I think the initial caller thought there may be some medical problem. Didn’t initially recognize it as homicide because the victim had some medical issues, he was on an oxygen tank with a tube running through the door. He had emphysema, lifelong smoker.

[00:03:01] And initially they thought maybe he just coughed up blood and died and didn’t recognize that there was some kind of crime scene. I think the responding officers initially believed that or thought that until they started digging around a little bit and realized maybe there’s something more to it. But that was the original call, is maybe just a natural death of sorts.

Dave: [00:03:17] I remember standing over the victim. His name is Neil. And I look down, and somebody had made mention that one of the original callers thought maybe the guy had aspirated blood due to an asthma attack or something like that. And I’m standing over this body, and I’m like, “Well, I can see his heart.”

Yeardley: [00:03:34] Huh, seriously?

Dave: [00:03:35] Well, that’s a little hyperbole, but the number of wounds to his chest area was so significant that I could see inside the chest cavity. The flesh was all separated.

Yeardley: [00:03:46] My God. Could you tell at that point what kind of weapon had been used on Neil?

Dave: [00:03:52] Well, in looking at the rest of Neil’s body, you see defensive wounds that we associate with cutting instruments, sharp objects, and so forearms, fingers, different wounds on those surfaces, like you’re reaching up to block something or defend yourself.

George: [00:04:07] That was the giveaway, that it was more of a homicide, not just something else going on. When you see those defensive wounds, the slashes.

Dave: [00:04:14] Yeah. The thing about this particular apartment is, the first thing we notice is the amount of swords and knives all over the place.

Zibby: [00:04:21] What?

Yeardley: [00:04:22] What? Swords, like a knight would carry.

George: [00:04:24] Katana type swords, I think they’re called.

Yeardley: [00:04:26] Oh.

Dave: [00:04:27] Right. Curved blade and with a decorative sheath that would go over it. So, the more we dig into this apartment, the more we see that this guy’s got a fascination with knives.

George: [00:04:37] Collectibles in general, too. In addition to knives, biker paraphernalia, and collectible cars.

Yeardley: [00:04:42] Model cars, like matchbox cars.

George: [00:04:44] Bigger than matchbox cars, but the metal cast iron collectible cars.

Yeardley: [00:04:48] Okay.

Dave: [00:04:49] Right. So, right above his chair, there’s a bookcase right behind where his recliner was, that Neil’s sitting in. And right above it, there’s one sword hung at a diagonal, and you see the nails that this sword is mounted on, and then there’re nails going the other way, and there’s no sword there. So, it looked like he had them displayed kind of in an X. So, on that bookshelf, we also notice Neil didn’t regularly clean or dust his apartment. So, there’s this layer of dust on the shelving unit. And you look and if you get the right viewpoint, you can see clean areas where something round had been sitting that didn’t have dust on it. So, we start to notice these things that clearly were there, and now they’re gone and we can’t find them. So, we start thinking, well, somebody took care of Neil and now they started grabbing things.

Yeardley: [00:05:39] Okay, describe the apartment for us. Is it big, small? What’s the-

Dave: [00:05:43] So, right when you open the door to his apartment and we’re talking maybe 350 square foot apartment.

George: [00:05:50] It’s a studio-style apartment.

Dave: [00:05:52] It’s tiny, so it’s got a little kitchenette area. But as you open the door, you can see all the way to the back of the apartment. Kitchen, straight back, right off the kitchen, to the left, as you’re looking at it, is the bathroom. And then everything forward of that is the living room/bedroom. So, as you walk just inside the threshold, if you look to your left, there’d be a couch against the far wall. And against the wall that you’re looking at right as you enter towards the back of the apartment is his recliner. Right beside it to the left, is this bookcase. And then right up against the front window, there’s a little waist high bookcase. And that’s where some of these decorative items are displayed. And we also see things that are missing.

[00:06:34] There is a skull, a decorative skull, not a real human skull, but it’s a display skull. And there’s one knife into the head, kind of like skull and crossbones, like at angle. And then there’s no knife going in the other slot. So, we’re noticing all these missing things. And then you stand over Neil, and Neil’s slumped over to his left in the recliner and he’s got his legs up on one of the armrests. So, it’s clear that he died in kind of an awkward looking position, probably squirming and fighting for his life.

Zibby: [00:07:06] So, there are multiple swords missing.

George: [00:07:09] Yes, that’s initially the thought is he may have been murdered with one of his own collectibles.

Yeardley: [00:07:13] Oh, you said that patrol called you to say there’s a dead body, but who called patrol to say we think there’s a dead body?

George: [00:07:20] So a friend of Neil’s had been trying to call him for days. He checks in with him once a week, and it was his time to check in. Called and called and called, Neil didn’t answer. So, the friend asks his wife, “Hey, let’s go over and check on Neil, see how he’s doing. I haven’t heard from him and it’s really weird. He’s not returning my calls.” They went there, and when they got there, the door was unlocked. So, they just pushed open the front door and there he was, sitting there in the recliner.

Zibby: [00:07:43] Oh, my God. When you first come upon a scene like that, can you just, with your own base assessment, tell if it’s been 24 hours or two days, roughly.

George: [00:07:55] A scene like that, it helps because there’s blood, and you can tell by the presence of blood what condition it is in. If it’s wet and sticky, if it’s hardened, coagulated or starting to dry up, that gives you an idea not for me scientifically, but at least gives me an idea how fresh the murder scene is if it’s been a couple of days or not. And it seemed that was consistent.

Dave: [00:08:12] Yeah. What I remember is that was a hot day, extremely hot, 90s probably. And it was really warm in this apartment. We’ve been to other death scenes where it’s been days or weeks and hot weather, no air conditioning, and there’s an odor. I didn’t catch the odor in that apartment at that time, which threw me. I was like, “Well, how fresh is this?” So, we’re trying to establish a timeline here and we’re using all of our senses. And smell is definitely one we use on deceased subjects. I don’t know if it’s because he was undisturbed. And when we start moving bodies is when they release fluids. And so, then you’ll get the wave of the smell. And in this case, turns out when we did move him, I got the smell, but initially I didn’t smell anything.

Yeardley: [00:08:57] So you walk in, you realize some blades are missing, and you determine this is likely a homicide.

George: [00:09:03] Right? So, we started examining the apartment, taking pictures of everything, try to determine what may be missing. Looking for phones, looking for a wallet, property missing to indicate if this is some stranger robbery, intimate relationship issue. We don’t know this guy’s history yet. But this particular housing area was meant to be transitional housing for sex offenders released from prison. It was owned by a local nonprofit company, and they housed people in here that are sex offenders. A lot of them were fresh out of prison, some of them stayed longer, they couldn’t find other housing. So, the not for profit allowed them to actually live there longer as long as they followed rules and stayed in contact with their POS and didn’t break any rules of their sex offender conditions.

Yeardley: [00:09:43] So Neil, was he recently out of prison and he is a sex offender?

George: [00:09:48] Neil’s a sex offender. I’d say he was out of prison maybe 10 years.

Yeardley: [00:09:51] Oh.

George: [00:09:52] He had spent a substantial amount of time in prison.

Yeardley: [00:09:54] For crimes he committed as a sex offender.

George: [00:09:57] Yes. But a lot of people didn’t even know that building existed as sex offender housing. I look back on it now, and once we started interviewing people as part of the canvas, you start coming across these people and every single one of them is a sex offender. But people in the neighborhood had no idea, let alone some police officers, had no idea.

Yeardley: [00:10:13] That’s interesting.

George: [00:10:15] It is in a way, because they behave there. Part of the condition of living there was, you better behave and not cause any problems, and if there’re calls for service for the police, you’re going to get booted out.

Dave: [00:10:25] So, I remember when we established that this is sex offender housing, all kinds of theories started going through our head, like, “Who would want to kill a sex offender?” Well, that’s a pretty broad population. So, we start thinking, well, who would have a real incentive to kill a sex offender? And we started thinking it down the lines of who was his victim and where was that victim mentally and emotionally with the crime that was committed against them. So, I think went down that lane for a while and then you start trying to narrow down who was around Neil in his last hour. So, we’re really digging, canvassing the area, talking to neighbors. “Hey, have you heard disputes? Who comes over and visits Neil often?” And that’s how we start to get some more information that allows us to explore some other people who might have a motive.

George: [00:11:17] It was pretty overwhelming at first because there’s only a couple of us working it, so we’re all trying to take different angles. Is it a neighbor? Is it a friend? And then we start finding drug paraphernalia inside the apartment, which opens up a whole range of possible suspects. Is this something to do with drugs?

Zibby: [00:11:31] What kind of drugs?

Dave: [00:11:32] We found marijuana in the apartment and there was also methamphetamine in the kitchen.

George: [00:11:37] So that opens the door to all kinds of possibilities. And there’re two of us initially working it, then a third.

Dan: [00:11:43] Yeah. Appreciate the invite, guys. I was the third.

George: [00:11:46] Yes, Dan, you’re the third.

[laughter]

George: [00:11:49] Sorry. But we’re all trying to split up possible motives, and none of us know which one’s going to be the right one. So, I’m canvassing going door to door, and I talked to one neighbor who says, “Yeah, Neil got in a dispute with this guy a couple weeks ago. He has some weird street nickname, but he goes, they’ve been friends forever. I remember them getting an argument, but I don’t remember anything happening.” So, we try to figure out who he is. Dave’s working the scene most of the day, I believe.

Dave: [00:12:14] Right.

Dan: [00:12:15] And when I got there, I helped photograph our process of removing Neil from the scene. And pretty graphic injuries that he had to his arms especially.

Zibby: [00:12:25] So you’re actually photographing other people removing that body? Is that protocol always?

Dan: [00:12:32] Yes. We want to document that process just so there’s no question when we come to a trial as to what happened when we’re actually putting him in a body bag. So, we document that process visually with photographs and also in our reports.

Dave: [00:12:46] The amount of blood in this scene was pretty significant. And when you move the body, you want to see that the blood beneath the body matches the scene that you’re at. You want to see if maybe that body has been moved after it bled out, which would indicate somebody else has been in that apartment. So, we want to see what’s beneath the body to see if it’s consistent with the way we found him.

Dan: [00:13:07] And we’re going to turn him over. And that’s really our first look at his backside to see if he’s got injuries there as well.

Yeardley: [00:13:13] And did he?

Dave: [00:13:14] Nothing.

Dan: [00:13:15] No. Everything was on his ventral side. So, then I started searching the house. We went through his phone and his answering machine to see who had really talked to him last. One of the messages on his answering machine was from his friend named Shotgun. And George and I actually ended up interviewing that guy Shotgun, I think, the next day, and he had some interesting things to say.

[00:13:35] This really was like, every time you flip a rock over, cockroaches go scurrying, and you have to round them all up and interview them. That’s really what it felt like in this case. Every rock we turned over, there was more and there was more and there was more.

George: [00:13:50] That’s a great way of putting it.

[00:13:52]

[Break 1]

[00:14:00]

George: [00:14:04] So, I ended up tracking down who Shotgun was.

Yeardley: [00:14:06] That’s his street name.

George: [00:14:07] That’s his street name. We ended up finding out he did time in prison with Neil and that’s how he knew Neil. So, when they both got out of prison, they were friends and able to alibi him out, essentially determine where he was around that time frame. And I interviewed him that night. It was the same night we found Neil’s body. I ended up find him at a bus stop down the street. He was genuinely shocked and upset upon hearing the news that Neil was dead. You get a feel. It’s not 100%, but when you talk to somebody, you can kind of get an idea when they’re lying to you, how genuine their reactions are when you share certain news with them. And it was obvious to me that was the case.

[00:14:41] And we were able to alibi him out with other people, indicating where he was around that time frame. The main thing was there’s a church down the street that gives handouts meals at night at a certain time of day, and people would remember seeing him there and his father seeing him at home.

Dan: [00:14:54] So we found out that Shotgun and Neil had been in a dispute.

Yeardley: [00:14:57] Do you know what it was about?

George: [00:14:58] I believe it was Shotgun was mad at Neil because Neil had just gone up to a neighboring state to celebrate the labor day holiday with some people, and he didn’t tell Shotgun where he was at. So, he was worried about Neil and upset that he had gone up to this barbecue. He was gone for a couple days and he was genuinely worried about where he was and it was an argument about that.

Zibby: [00:15:16] That’s sweet. Yeah. Shotgun, you kind of have a heart.

Yeardley: [00:15:19] Yeah. Okay, Shotgun.

Zibby: [00:15:20] Okay. So, Shotgun’s ruled out.

George: [00:15:22] He’s ruled out. So going back to processing the scene, Dan found a cell phone in the apartment that belonged to Neil. And when checking it, the last outgoing call was to Felicia and listed her number, and that was pretty important. Maybe the last person that talked to him, possibly. And Dave, a little bit later, got some information that a couple of in-home care nurses visit once or twice a week to take care of Neil because of all his problems. They mentioned seeing and their word was an Oriental woman had come and go from the apartment. Those two things rang a bell to me because I know somebody named Felicia who is of Asian descent who is mixed in the drug world. I’ve personally dealt with her a handful of times, arrested her for methamphetamine-related charges.

[00:16:05] So using that number on the phone, shot her a call and said, “Hey, want to talk to you.” Didn’t say a whole lot of why I want to talk to her initially, but she ended up meeting up with me in a parking lot of a grocery store later that day.

Zibby: [00:16:15] Did you choose the parking lot or did she? That’s so specific.

George: [00:16:17] She did. It doesn’t necessarily matter to me. You want that person to meet with you and wherever they’re comfortable meeting with you, it doesn’t matter. I think she wanted an open area, not really knowing what was going on. So, she showed up and I talked to her about what she knew about Neil. So, this is Monday that we find the body. She indicated that on Saturday, two days before she had been at Neil’s apartment, she had stopped by, she brought him some ramen, was visiting with him. There may have been some smoking marijuana, hanging out. And at one point a guy showed up and it’s a guy she had met a couple times before. And she said, “Yeah, this guy deals drugs, he’s a sex offender also. His name’s Kenny.” And I asked her, “What do you know about Kenny?”

[00:16:55] She said Kenny showed up and she left almost immediately afterwards because he indicated he had some business to talk to Neil about. So, she departed. She ended up seeing and calling Kenny later that night because she knew Kenny would be able to hook her up with some methamphetamine. And Kenny agreed to meet her the following morning, which would have been Sunday morning downtown, not far from Neil’s house. So, she met up with him at a bus stop downtown and she noticed Kenny was carrying a large blue duffel bag and inside the bag she heard a bunch of metal things clinging around.

[00:17:27] Didn’t think much of it until we started talking about things, but she said they got on a bus, rode out east of town, met up with a drug connect of Kenny’s, they got some drugs, came back downtown, they went their separate ways and she really had no direct knowledge of anything that happened between Kenny and Neil. She goes, “He may have been the last person that saw Neil alive.” She goes, I’s there, I left, Kenny showed up. That’s all I know.”

Dan: [00:17:52] George mentioning the ramen noodles is significant because when we’re searching this house, we’ve got Neil in front of us, now deceased, on a TV stand. In front of him is a half-eaten cup of ramen noodles.

George: [00:18:08] It just corroborates what she’s saying. The people that we deal with in these types of cases aren’t always the most truthful, honest people. So, anything you can latch onto to say, “Okay, I believe this person more than not, it helps a lot.”

Zibby: [00:18:17] I’m surprised she reveals that she was going to get meth with this Kenny guy. Do you start these interviews where you’re like, “Listen, whatever you’re up to, I’m after a bigger fish at the moment.”

George: [00:18:28] I think it’s important for people to know we’re not judging them. I think when people get that vibe from you, it makes it easier to interview people, get along with people, even develop them as informants over time when they’re comfortable talking to you. Like I said, I’ve dealt with her in the past, so I think she knew from the get go I wasn’t judging her for that. And I really care less if that’s what’s going on. I didn’t really have bring it up a whole lot, except to say, what do you know? And she was very open about it.

[00:18:50] So, Felicia, I asked her about the condition of the apartment, what she remembers in there, and she indicated, yeah, Neil had a bunch of collectibles all over the place, and she was a matter of fact, he had talked about wanting me to help him sell these collectibles on eBay or something. So, I have pictures of them. And she had pictures of the katana swords that were missing, as well as some knives, collectible cars, motorcycle memorabilia, all this stuff that’s missing. She happens to have pictures of all these things. Those were there when she was there that day, on Saturday. And I confirmed with her. “Are you sure those are there?” She goes, “Yeah.” She described in detail what Detective Dave already described about the display racks and how they were. And she showed me the pictures on her cell phone, and lo and behold, those were there on Saturday.

Dave: [00:19:28] We also confirmed with Felicia that Neil had in-home healthcare nurses that would come and treat him once or twice a week. And one of those nurses contacted us and said, “I think I have some information for you, just because I know that’s one of my patients. And I figured you guys are trying to figure out a timeline. Is there any information I can give you?” And I said, “Well, please come down to the police station and meet with us. I’d like to show you some photos.” And so, we had taken overall photos of the apartment and these display racks that are now empty and the areas where there’s dust on the shelves, but there’s voids where there used to be items.

[00:20:05] And so she walks me through the apartment via these photos and says, “Oh, no, there were three swords on that rack. The rack is there, but the swords are gone. That skull, there should be two knives set at diagonals, perpendicular to each other. That bookcase, there’s one sword, there should be another sword and an X right above it. Oh, that area where there’s the dust void that should be like this decorative collectible dragon.” It was amazing the observation she had made when she would go over and treat Neil. So, she corroborates all this information that Felicia is giving us. So now we know this guy’s house. Not only has he been murdered, but it’s been burglarized.

Yeardley: [00:20:48] Okay, so what did Felicia say happened when she met Kenny at the bus stop?

George: [00:20:51] She said he acted weird. He was all disheveled and dirty, appeared nervous, upset. She goes maybe that has something to do with what happened to Neil.

Yeardley: [00:21:00] All right, just so I know I’m tracking here, I want to do a little recap for the laypeople. Really? It’s just a little recap for me. You have Kenny, who’s a suspect. You have Felicia, who’s not a suspect, but she’s given you some pretty good information. You’ve eliminated Shotgun and Dan, earlier you said that a guy named Gary left a message on Neil’s answering machine. Yes.

Dan: [00:21:00] Yeah. Gary on Saturday afternoon had called, and it was like three in the afternoon, had called Neil. And I believe the message was, “Your buddy is on his way over here. He’s supposed to be here in 45 minutes. I’ll keep you posted. Bye.”

[00:21:42] Yeah, and at the time, we didn’t know who the buddy was, so now we have to go talk to Gary. So, we find his address. He lives in a neighboring town. He’s had a history with the police, but he’s a bit older now, and I think he’s mellowed out a bit.

Yeardley: [00:21:57] Is he a sex offender also?

Dan: [00:21:58] Yes, he was. So, we’re in Tuesday morning now, and George and I go over to Gary’s apartment, and Gary is pretty specific about who he meant when he said, “Your buddy’s about to come over here.” And the buddy is Kenny.

Yeardley: [00:22:14] Kenny, who’s carried the duffel bag with metal things rattling inside, according to Felicia.

Dan: [00:22:19] Correct.

Dave: [00:22:20] Right.

Dan: [00:22:20] Now we’ve also got Gary, who says, “Yeah, Kenny was going to meet Neil, and Kenny was upset about a drug deal with Neil, and Neil owed Kenny money.” So now a bit of a picture is developing for us, but we still don’t have any rock-hard evidence. So, our tech guy, our tech detective, goes to the bus company.

Dave: [00:22:40] And Felicia had ridden the bus with Kenny.

Dan: [00:22:43] So, we want to get the video. And our local bus company actually has really good, clear images.

George: [00:22:48] Unbelievable.

Dan: [00:22:50] Yeah, we solve a lot of crimes with that bus video.

Yeardley: [00:22:53] You guys have spoken about that often actually.

Dan: [00:22:56] Yeah, they’re so easy to deal with. They’re just awesome. They’re a real asset to us. So, we get this video and we’re able to confirm some of the things that Felicia is saying about Kenny. And it creates a bit of a timeline for us too.

George: [00:23:08] You can almost follow him on the bus to wherever his destination was.

Yeardley: [00:23:12] You had made that great analogy that every rock you turned over, the cockroaches scattered and you had to corral them all. So, now you have 1000-piece puzzle. But at least it seems like all the puzzles are in the box. Now, you just have to put them together.

Dave: [00:23:25] Right.

George: [00:23:25] We decided at this point Kenny is the guy we want to talk to.

Yeardley: [00:23:29] How old is Kenny?

George: [00:23:29] I’d say around 50, a good 20 years younger.

Yeardley: [00:23:32] Okay.

George: [00:23:33] So, we asked the bus company about this Kenny guy and they said, “Whoa, Kenny’s not supposed to be on our bus. We have an agreement with him. He’s got a little problem when he rides our bus. And he can only be on certain buses at certain times and there’s conditions about him being allowed.” And asked, why? “Well, Kenny liked to masturbate on the bus.”

Yeardley: [00:23:51] Oh God.

George: [00:23:52] Yeah. Especially if there’s a woman driver. He was seated next to a woman, so he was not allowed to be sitting next to women and was discouraged from being on a bus when there was a woman driver.

Dave: [00:24:01] Didn’t he have to ride with his hands visible?

George: [00:24:03] He had to show his hands at all times. If his hands were out of sight, they’d kick him off the bus.

Yeardley: [00:24:08] Is this a private agreement between the bus company and Kenny?

George: [00:24:10] It’s a written contract they have.

Yeardley: [00:24:13] So not law enforcement or no parole officer is saying, “You can’t ride the bus, blah, blah.” This is like a personal dude. You’re going to comply with these rules that you and I agree to?

George: [00:24:21] Yes. So, when I went out to talk to Kenny at his house, it wasn’t to arrest him. It wasn’t even really to interview him a lot in detail about the case. It was just to gauge his honesty first and see where he was at. So, we initially went out there to his house, nearby town he lived in. Knocked on the door, introduced ourselves, came inside and said, “Hey, been riding the bus lately” and just see what he’d say. And he initially didn’t even clue into the fact that were police officers. We introduced ourselves as detectives and we’d said where we worked. But I think I got lost on him once we started talking about the bus company.

Yeardley: [00:24:55] He doesn’t put together that detectives are usually part of the police department.

George: [00:24:59] He thinks we’re representatives of the bus company.

Yeardley: [00:25:01] Oh, okay.

George: [00:25:02] He thinks we’re like higher ups of the bus company and come to question him about his riding the bus.

Yeardley: [00:25:06] Okay.

Zibby: [00:25:07] Oh my God.

George: [00:25:08] He did acknowledge having this agreement that he shouldn’t be riding the bus when he’s doing certain things. And we told him we thought he’s in violation of the agreement and he apologized for that. So where were you heading to? We got video surveillance of you on this bus on Saturday. And he admitted coming over to our town and visiting his friend. And then he started realizing, “Hey, we’re the police.” He realized at that point we weren’t the bus company people. So, he got a little bit protective of what he was saying and just mentioned he went over to visit his buddy, Neil. He does corroborate that Felicia was there when he got there and that they visited and then Felicia left and he visited with Neil for a little while and then he left. Kenny tells me, yeah, you can go ahead and call Neil, here’s his number. You give him a call and he’ll corroborate I was there.

Yeardley: [00:25:49] Is that when you tell him Neil is dead?

George: [00:25:50] I didn’t tell him at that point that he was dead. I actually let that go and just let him keep on talking and then it went into– because I knew Felicia reported he had a bag, so I asked him some details. “Hey, do you happen to have a duffel bag?” He goes, “Yeah, I have one.” I said, “What’s it look like?” “It’s a blue duffel bag. I don’t have that bag anymore.” So, what happened to it? He goes, “Oh, it’s gone, I lost it or something, I don’t know what happened to it.” So, I asked him, “What was inside the bag?” “So just some clothes, change clothes.” So, I knew he was lying about those things [unintelligible 00:26:17] because Detective Dave mentioned you can see sharp, bulging, hard objects in the bag. I don’t believe he didn’t know where the bag was, but I let it be. I wasn’t going to push the issue just yet about the bag.

Dave: [00:26:28] Your agenda is, if he’s not going to confess, I want provable lies because his credibility will be shot. If you’re going to lie about the small stuff, are you ever going to be honest about the big stuff?

Yeardley: [00:26:39] Right.

[00:26:40]

[Break 2]

[00:26:47]

George: [00:26:51] So, some time goes by, we’re following up on any other possible leads, video, looking for other witnesses, any other people, and I get a hold of Kenny’s probation officer and I let him know, “Hey, by the way, we’re looking at homicide. Kenny might be involved.” There’re some things missing from this victim’s house and I give him specifics about what’s missing from the house to include the swords, the collectibles and the PO says, “Well, listen, I’ve got a home visit scheduled, I need to go over and visit with him. If I see anything, I’ll let you know and I’ll give you a call.” So, they do the home visit, they talk to Kenny just about possible violations. They don’t really dig a lot in searching. They do a general search, but they’re not prying things up and looking in hidden nooks for items. But Kenny shows his PO, his cell phone.

Yeardley: [00:27:36] He has to, is that part of the deal?

George: [00:27:38] If the PO says, I want to search your phone, Kenny can either say, yes, I’ll comply, or no, I’m not going to comply. And then the PO would be able to violate him for not complying.

Yeardley: [00:27:47] I see.

George: [00:27:47] So, he voluntarily lets him look at the phone as the PO is scrolling through the phone, he comes across pictures of collectible items, swords, collectible cars, all the things that are missing. So, after the PO tells me this, I said, “Well, I want to talk to your client some more.” So go back over. I think I meet with Kenny at his PO’s office the following day and confronted him about a couple things. And he then admits, “Okay, yeah, I knew Neil was dead. I didn’t tell you. Sorry, I didn’t tell you. I heard from somebody else that lived by an apartment building.” So, what do you mean you heard from somebody else? He goes, “Well, the cops were there and there’s a big to do going on. And then they moved a body out of the apartment.” So I concluded, you know, that’s what happened.

[00:28:23] Why didn’t you tell me that, that day? Why’d you tell me to call Neil if you knew he was died. He goes, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just stupid.” So, then I confronted him about what Detective Dan had learned about Gary and the drug deal about him supposed to show up at the apartment at Neil’s place. Kenny admitted, “Yeah, I ripped off Gary on a drug deal and I knew Neil was going to talk to Gary about that,” so he’s corroborating more and more stuff. So, I don’t initially arrest Kenny that day for anything. Still want to keep on digging. And as luck may have it, Kenny had just been found guilty of another crime unrelated to this thing altogether. And he had a sentencing date. He was sentenced and he had a date to turn himself in by.

[00:29:03] That date was coming up, we knew he was going to have to go to jail. So, the PO arrested his client for probation violation, putting Kenny in jail. And then soon after that, Kenny was supposed to start his prison sentence for a completely unrelated crime.

Yeardley: [00:29:16] Like a burglary or something.

Dave: [00:29:19] This was an identity theft.

George: [00:29:21] Okay, so we know where Kenny is, so we’re not in a big hurry to push this. We know he’s our primary suspect, but we’re still keeping the possibility open that there’s other people involved or maybe somebody else did this. So, we interview Kenny a series of times after he’s booked into the jail. We literally go drive over there, check him out, bring him back to our police station and interview him.

Dan: [00:29:41] It seemed like every day for like two weeks.

George: [00:29:43] It did.

Yeardley: [00:29:44] And what’s his demeanor? Is he getting increasingly defensive? Is he increasingly more willing? Like, if I’m cooperative, it will help me?

George: [00:29:51] Yeah, I think that’s exactly where to put it. He gave us a little bit more information every time. Initially it was, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Okay? Yeah, I was there. Then it turned to, yeah, I was there, but when I was there, some other guy showed up and I left. And I don’t know what happened, I just left. What happened after that? Nothing. I said you go to this apartment the next day and take anything. We got you on video with a blue bag. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then he admitted,”Okay, yeah, I did go back and I took items.”

Kenny: [00:30:21] So, I get there Monday morning, I knock on the door, no answer. I hear the TV or the stereo, I wasn’t sure which one. I knock again harder because [beep] harder hearing. And the door creaked open a little bit. So, I opened it all the way and that’s when I saw [beep] sitting on the chair.

David: [00:30:48] This is Monday, Monday?

Kenny: [00:30:49] Mm-hm

David: [00:30:50] Okay.

Kenny: [00:30:53] That freaked me out and I went in and I closed the door and I called his name and he didn’t respond. He didn’t look, He did nothing.

David: [00:31:13] Then what happened?

Kenny: [00:31:14] I suck.

David: [00:31:18] What did you tell me happened on Friday when you talked to me, what did you say happened after that?

Kenny: [00:31:23] The actual thing that happened.

David: [00:31:25] Okay, what was that?

Kenny: [00:31:30] I started thinking, you know, stupid shit.

David: [00:31:36] Like.

Kenny: [00:31:40] How can I come up on some money or something or whatever. And I thought maybe I could sell his dragons. So, I started putting dragons in my bag.

David: [00:31:53] Your blue bag?

Kenny: [00:32:00] I finished putting the dragons in my bag. And what I didn’t tell you Friday but I remembered later and told Detective [beep] on a phone. As I was crossing the floor to go to the table where all this little stuff was, I [unintelligible [00:32:24] [beep] again and I saw a gray pair of pants wedged between him and the chair. And I had a belt on it and a leather loop attached to a chain going into the back pocket.

David: [00:32:40] Like a chain wallet.

Kenny: [00:32:41] Yes.

David: [00:32:42] Okay.

Kenny: [00:32:42] That’s exactly what I thought it was. So, I grabbed the pants and started to pull them up and it was hard and as I was doing it, [beep] hand slipped down and brushed on my arm.

David: [00:32:58] Was he cold?

Kenny: [00:33:01] I don’t even know.

David: [00:33:04] Okay, did you get blood on you then?

Kenny: [00:33:07] I don’t know.

David: [00:33:07] Okay. Did you get a wallet from him?

Kenny: [00:33:11] I grabbed the pants and it turned out to be shorts.

David: [00:33:15] Okay. Was there blood on him?

Kenny: [00:33:18] [unintelligible 00:33:17] with blood.

David: [00:33:22] Was there a wallet in the pants?

Kenny: [00:33:23] Yeah, but I didn’t go through it right then. I just threw it in the bag and I was just too freaked out to do anything else. I grabbed the keys and the bag and I left.

David: [00:33:40] After that, the next day the police come over, talked to you about being on the bus, right?

Kenny: [00:33:45] Mm-hmm.

David: [00:33:47] You knew [beep] he was dead, but you didn’t tell him he was dead then, right?

Kenny: [00:33:51] Yeah, I was too nervous and scared about all this stuff that my thinking was skewed. It was thrown out of whack.

David: [00:34:05] That was a bigger deal than you’re finding your buddy dead. You even told us we could call him and check on your alibi, remember?

Kenny: [00:34:13] I know.

David: [00:34:15] What makes you think we wouldn’t do that?

Kenny: [00:34:18] I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just–

David: [00:34:20] All right, calm down, relax. You admittedly that you’ve lied to me almost every time you talk to me, right?

Kenny: [00:34:32] In a little bit, yeah.

Dave: [00:34:37] So our listeners probably recognize that voice. That’s Sergeant David. He’s interviewing Kenny there and Kenny’s feeding us a bunch of lies. Kenny basically lied to anybody with a badge.

George: [00:34:48] Yeah. He says, I brought somebody else with me. It was somebody else that did it to. Who’s this somebody else? Well, this guy named Phil, and he came with me, and he stole some stuff too. So, here’s this whole new Phil character to deal with. So, then I went back to the bus station looking for video to corroborate where he was with Phil that day.

Dan: [00:35:07] So, we start reviewing some of the video, and we have video of Kenny meeting Phil downtown next to this bus station. And they walk to a thrift store, and they go inside, and Kenny’s got the blue duffel bag. Phil’s actually helping him carry some items, too. And you can clearly see swords in his hand.

Yeardley: [00:35:26] Really.

Dave: [00:35:27] We have even got video from inside that thrift store, because they would do exchanges like a pawn shop would do. And so, we have video inside that store of them walking in with these items.

Dan: [00:35:36] So, George and I end up going to this store, and we talked to the owner, and he’s got decent video in there, and you can clearly see Phil and Kenny inside trying to sell these swords. And we asked this store owner, “Did you buy them?” And he said, “No, they were junk.” But he confirms that two males came in there. And then I’m able to identify both of these guys visually on the video. That’s Kenny and that’s Phil.

Yeardley: [00:35:59] Is Phil a frequent flyer too?

Dan: [00:36:01] He’s got a past. I recognized Phil from a few months earlier because we had served a drug search warrant at a house, and he just happened to be there, and he was a total asshole. He’d love to tell you about his experience in prison, that he was a badass when he was in prison. He really wants to try to intimidate you with his prison status, which I’m not impressed. So, now we got to find Phil. We find an address and Detective Kyle, who’s been on the show before Season 1, Kyle and I go to this address and we find a car that is registered to Phil. So now we know we’re on the right track. So, we get out, we knock on the door, and sure enough, Phil is there.

[00:36:43] We talk to him and we identify ourselves as police officers and say, “Hey, we’d like to talk to you and ask you some questions.” He goes, “Oh, what about?” I said, “Like to ask you some questions about some swords.” And he goes, “I don’t know anything about any swords.” Lie number one, we’ve started out the first thing that he tells me is a lie and I can prove it. So, now we kind of have an idea of where we’re going, and we make small talk. Phil recognized us. We’re starting to develop a little rapport at this point. And I’m thinking to myself, this guy’s supposed to be a badass prison guy. He showed me his tattoos where he’s a part of a prison gang. And I know that Kenny is a sex offender.

[00:37:26] And Phil being in the prison hierarchy, sex offenders are not well thought of. So, if Phil is living by this code outside of prison where there’s a hierarchy, why is he hanging out with Kenny? So, we started talking about his relationship with Kenny and how that all developed. And Phil tells me he’s got a daughter named Katie and she’s not on the right path. She’s not totally on the dark side yet, violating a lot of laws, but she’s on her way.

Zibby: [00:37:55] How old is she?

Dan: [00:37:58] She’s late teens, and she’s dabbling in meth, and she doesn’t have money. So, a lot of these girls to procure meth will do certain things, and she ends up meeting Kenny. Kenny has a proclivity for pleasuring himself and she is able to get meth from Kenny if he’s able to masturbate in front of her.

Yeardley: [00:38:22] Oh God.

Zibby: [00:38:23] Wow.

Dan: [00:38:24] So, she starts getting meth. Well, Phil doesn’t know Kenny at this point. Phil starts talking to Katie. She tells her dad about this guy who masturbates in front of her. Now she’s starting to get weirded out by it. Katie owes Kenny some money for these dope deals. So, Phil goes and confronts Kenny, but doesn’t beat him up for masturbating in front of his daughter and everything. Phil says, “I thought it was a good idea to keep my enemies closer.” And I just found that to be complete, utter bullshit. If I was a father, I’d beating Kenny’s ass if he’s doing that in front of my daughter. I would be pissed. I’m not going to hang out with this guy. So, Phil tells us he starts driving Kenny around. He feels bad for him, things like that.

[00:39:08] So we say, “Hey, do you mind coming back to the station and we’ll talk about Kenny, all that stuff?” He says, “Yeah, sure, I’ll come.” We give him his Miranda warning, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, sure. No problem. How’s it going, guys?” And he’s, like, joking around as we go back to the station.

Zibby: [00:39:23] This confidence comes from him believing that you’re buying his lies. So, he thinks he’s got you where he wants you.

Dan: [00:39:31] He’s very arrogant. I think that he always thinks that he’s the smartest guy in the room because he’s got all these street smarts over the years. And I think he really thinks that him being 20 years or so older than me in his mind makes him higher in the pecking order and that I don’t know shit. Look at youngster here. He thinks he’s going to take me down, this guy. I’ll show him. The other thing that he’s got going for him. If he’s not the smartest guy in the room, he’s going to intimidate me and make me back down.

Yeardley: [00:40:02] He thinks he has the advantage over you?

Dan: [00:40:03] Yes. And that’s fine with me. So, we get him back to the station and we decide that I’m going to interview Phil. And over the next few days, I interviewed him for hours and he just told me lie after lie after lie.

Dan: [00:40:20] When did he call you and talk about these sorts initially?

Phil: [00:40:25] I can’t think of a date, dude, because I’ve been running, trying to keep myself alive.

Dan: [00:40:31] Okay.

Phil: [00:40:31] But like I said, it’s only been a month at the most. So, I would say probably, I’m going to say three weeks ago.

Dan: [00:40:39] About three weeks ago.

Phil: [00:40:40] About three weeks ago.

Dan: [00:40:41] Okay.

Phil: [00:40:42] Just off the top of my head.

Dan: [00:40:43] All right.

Phil: [00:40:46] So, like I said, I was moving on with my life. That guy don’t mean shit to me, man. So, what did he do to me? Tell me did he fucking– how’s the sword stolen? Did he steal them from his friend or what?

Dan: [00:41:01] Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.

Phil: [00:41:03] Okay, okay.

Dan: [00:41:04] That’s what we’re trying to figure out. You’re obviously helping us.

Phil: [00:41:09] I hope so.

Dan: [00:41:10] That’s why we want you here, so can talk to you and see if you can help us out with that.

Phil: [00:41:14] Oh, man, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, man. Not what you want to know, but what I know.

Dan: [00:41:18] Okay.

Phil: [00:41:19] I’ve been down this road too many times. I’m not going to jeopardize my future by saying something to you guys that’s not true.

Dan: [00:41:27] Okay.

Phil: [00:41:28] Okay.

Dan: [00:41:29] I appreciate that.

Phil: [00:41:28] Yeah, not a problem.

Yeardley: [00:41:30] Do you tell Phil that Neil is dead?

Dan: [00:41:32] No. It’s actually kind of funny. During this interview, I think there were two or three occasions where I slipped up and I called Kenny, our victim, Neil.

Zibby: [00:41:42]

Dan: [00:41:43] By accident. And it actually worked a little bit to my advantage because both times I said Neil instead of Kenny. Phil looks at me and says, who’s Neil?

Dan: [00:41:56] Was anybody else with [beep]?

Phil: [00:41:58] Who is Neil?

Dan: [00:42:00] Anybody else with [beep]? There’s a million people that I’ve talked to.

Phil: [00:42:04] Okay, bud, I’m not trying to give you a hard time.

Dan: [00:42:05] No.

Phil: [00:42:07] I’m just trying to figure out what is this? [beep]

Dan: [00:42:09] I’ve talked to a million people today and [beep] was anybody else with [beep]?

Phil: [00:42:16] No.

Dan: [00:42:17] All right.

Yeardley: [00:42:19] Do you believe him that he doesn’t know who Neil is?

Dan: [00:42:21] No, not at all. As the conversation progresses, I confront him with a couple inconsistencies and that I know that he knows Neil and he finally admits, “Okay, I’m an enforcer and I do the collections for Kenny when he does drug deals. And the reason I’m doing that is to pay off my daughter’s debt to Kenny. And this is why I’m hanging out. I don’t like Kenny. He’s not my friend. I’m just trying to pay off the debt.” So, he’s like the hero for his daughter.

Dan: [00:42:54] What exactly do you do for [beep]?

Phil: [00:42:57] I would pick up money sometimes or I’d go over to that place right there and pick him up his white dope and take it to him. So, he wouldn’t involve [beep] and that’s all it was. I never did anything else with this guy except for pick him up one time over there by the police. One time that little clinic right there, I picked him up one time there and dropped him off downtown.

Dan: [00:43:19] Okay, otherwise you were just doing shuttle runs?

Phil: [00:43:21] Yeah, that’s it.

Dan: [00:43:24] What did you get out of it?

Phil: [00:43:24] I get $20 every time I made a trip.

Dan: [00:43:26] That’s it?

Phil: [00:43:27] Yeah. We’ll figure it out. It’s only like a 10-minute–

Dan: [00:43:34] What do you [beep] think does for a living?

Phil: [00:43:37] He sells dope.

Dan: [00:43:39] Were you carrying dope?

Phil: [00:43:40] I did from right there.

Dan: [00:43:41] That’s a big risk. $20 for carrying?

Phil: [00:43:45] It’s not that big of a risk if he’s leaving my daughter alone. Yeah, it’s not that big of a risk.

Dan: [00:43:57] So, I pull this picture out and I say, “Hey, do you know who this guy is? And it’s a picture of Neil. And he says, “Nope, I have no idea who that is.” And I know he’s lying because I already know through Kenny’s interviews with George that Phil has been over to Neil’s house on more than one occasion.

Yeardley: [00:44:16] Also, if he’s the enforcer and he’s going with Kenny, then of course he’s been to Neil’s house.

Dan: [00:44:21] Yeah. And Phil is really avoidant when it comes to Neil’s house. He doesn’t want to place himself there at all. And I think it’s because you know what happened there. So, I walk him through this process, and he actually says, “Okay, yeah, I was at Neil’s house one time and I never stepped foot inside.” I still think he’s lying. So, I ask him, “Are you sure you never stepped inside?” Because what I’m really trying to get at is I want to know if there’s any way he can plausibly say why his DNA might be in there. Because I’m still thinking we’re going to get DNA out of this. And it’s pretty common in any sharp edge attack that somebody will wound themselves.

[00:45:02] Maybe not so much with a sword because you’ve got a hilt there that will stop your hands from sliding down the blade. But we’re also missing a smaller knife, the one that was in the skull. So, Phil is adamant. I didn’t go into that apartment. I collected $50 from him one time, and I left. So, then I talked to him about the pawn shop video of the swords, and he says, “Yeah, there are some really nice swords, and Kenny had them, and he said we could sell these. And I thought they were really nice, and I thought they were like swords from what a soldier would use on the battlefield. And I figured we were going to get thousands of dollars for these things.” So, he says, “I go around town and I try to sell these swords. And, yeah, went to this place.” I show him the picture. “Who’s that? That’s me. Who’s that? That’s Kenny. And that’s us with the swords and we are trying to sell them.”

Yeardley: [00:45:52] I’m just curious, when you actually confront somebody like Phil with this provable lie, what’s their affect as they’re walking that back?

Dan: [00:46:00] Phil was odd. He’s got enough street smarts to know that I’m calling him a liar without directly calling him a liar when I’m asking these questions and I’m showing him pictures and things like that destroy the earlier lie that he told. And Phil had a really interesting reaction to those things. So, he would always grunt. He’d go [grunt sound] and he would stare at his forearm, and he would point at his forearm because he would get goosebumps when he got really angry. And so, he did this multiple times when I was interviewing him, and he would slap his hand on the table really hard to try to get me to back off. He was trying to intimidate me. And I would just calmly say, “What are you upset about, Phil?”-

[laughter]

Dan: [00:46:44] And try to talk him back down. So, we really wanted to keep him talking. And I think Sergeant Dave had talked to Phil at one point, and over the course of two and a half hours, we get quite a bit of information, but we don’t develop probable cause. We’re not even close to that yet. So, we let him go.

Dave: [00:47:02] But he gives us some other people to talk to. Now we’ve got to talk to Katie.

Zibby: [00:47:06] His daughter, right?

Dave: [00:47:08] And I remember once we got the information about Katie, I hopped on social media and looked her up. And I remember looking at her page and I said, “Hey, weird. On her Facebook page, she’s got a bunch of posts with swords and collectibles and she’s offering them up to whoever is interested in buying them.”

Yeardley: [00:47:31] Oh, my God.

[00:47:33]

[Break 3]

[00:48:15]

Dave: [00:48:19] So, now we know that Katie has likely been in possession of these swords. So, we need to find where Katie is. And Phil was gracious enough to let us know where Katie lives with her mother. And it’s an apartment complex in a neighboring city. And so went over there to try to find these swords because we still don’t know where they are. So, I remember we knock [laughs] on the door and Phil’s wife Ann answers and Katie’s there. And we start talking to all of them. There were cats running through this apartment, several cats. And Ann steps right in the middle of cat feces.

Yeardley: [00:49:00] Oh.

Zibby: [00:49:00] [giggles] What?

Dave: [00:49:01] She’s barefoot. And I remember I was disgusted. There was an immediate smell, like smeared feces. And I looked at Ann and I said, “Do you want to go in the bathroom and wash that off?” And she’s like, “No, it’s fine.”

Yeardley: [00:49:16] Huh.

Zibby: [00:49:17] Okay.

Dave: [00:49:18] I remember looking at George like, “What is going on?” But during the course of that interaction with Ann and Katie, we learn that Kenny has retained the swords. He has them in his possession last they know. And Ann gives us some information about some boots that Phil had.

Dan: [00:49:37] Yeah, Ann has got some street smarts too. And she figures out these are not legit. These are stolen. I know these are stolen swords and I want them out of my house. So, she tells Phil, get the hell out of here with that stuff and don’t come back.

Zibby: [00:49:49] And is she also in on Katie’s dealings with Kenny? So, does she use meth? Does she know her daughter’s been letting Kenny jerk off in exchange for a meth discount?

Dan: [00:50:01] She might have known that. Ann is not active in the drug world other than being around people who are. But she’s clean and sober now, and her moral compass is really starting to turn due north in her advanced years. So, she comes clean with me and tells me about some things that Phil had thrown. And she didn’t see exactly what they were, but she said Phil went out on the back deck after he brought the swords here, and he chucked some things into the woods. So, there was a steep grade right behind the balcony going down to a grown over creek. And she said, “He threw things down there” and they sounded like they had some weight to them. I’m thinking swords, right.

[00:50:41] I’m thinking he chucked the murder weapon down there. So, we rally the troops. We get them all out there and we start hacking away. And we cleared probably a 60-foot x 60-foot swath of this hillside. And it’s September, it’s so hot out and I find a pair of boots and I bring the boots up and show them to Ann. And she says, “Those are Phil’s boots.”

Yeardley: [00:51:06] Like work boots.

Dan: [00:51:07] Ah-ah.

Yeardley: [00:51:08] Okay.

Dan: [00:51:09] And I’m thinking, why is he chucking his boots into the woods?

Dave: [00:51:13] So you start looking at him and we’re looking for blood.

Zibby: [00:51:16] Yeah.

Dave: [00:51:17] And there’s some stains that look like blood to us. So, Dan has a series of these interviews with Phil, but he brings the boots up to Phil.

Dan: [00:51:32] Do you have your work boots?

Phil: [00:51:33] Yeah, they were in my room.

Dan: [00:51:35] They’re in your room?

Phil: [00:51:35] Mm-hmm.

Dan: [00:51:39] Do you recognize these boots?

Phil: [00:51:46] No.

Dan: [00:51:48] You haven’t even looked at them yet?

Phil: [00:51:51] No, I don’t know them boots. Mine are white, tan.

Dan: [00:51:56] Well, that’s a bad picture. I mean, I can show you a better picture.

Phil: [00:51:58] No, I can tell you right now they’re not my boots.

Dan: [00:52:01] Those aren’t.

Phil: [00:52:01] No. Hell no. I can tell you that right now [unintelligible [00:52:05] my boots.

Dan: [00:52:07] Because I showed these boots to [beep], and she automatically said, those are [beep] boots.

Phil: [00:52:13] She’s full of shit. It ain’t my boots. She knows my boots are white, tan. Why is she telling me they were my boots [laughs].

Dan: [00:52:25] I don’t know. She’s got a reason to lie.

Phil: [00:52:29] Why would I have a reason to lie? See, there you go again, man. There you go again [crosstalk].

Dan: [00:52:35] Because she told me they were yours.

Phil: [00:52:36] I just told you they were not.

Dan: [00:52:37] Okay. Why are you so upset?

Phil: [00:52:40] Because you’re fighting with fingers again, man.

Dan: [00:52:42] I am just asking.

Phil: [00:52:42] No you just called me liar, dude.

Dan: [00:52:47] When did I call you a liar?

Phil: [00:52:48] Oh, ow, “She said they’re your boots.”

Dan: [00:52:50] I’m telling you what she said.

Phil: [00:52:51] And I told you what I said.

Dan: [00:52:53] Okay.

Phil: [00:52:55] Wow, dude. Okay. So where are we at?

Dan: [00:53:01] I’m trying to work through all this stuff. That’s what I’m doing.

Phil: [00:53:04] I’m being as goddamn open as I can be.

Dan: [00:53:07] All right?

Phil: [00:53:08] I mean, if I had anything to hide from you or I felt that I had done anything wrong, I wouldn’t even be here. I’d be gone.

Dan: [00:53:14] Okay.

Phil: [00:53:15] You know what I’m saying?

Dan: [00:53:16] Well, I appreciate that.

Phil: [00:53:17] I would not come down here yesterday to make sure that I had contact with you. I would not have called four fucking times. I need to take a cigarette, and you’re pissing me off.

Dan: [00:53:31] So at this point, Phil has fed me so many lies and I’ve got a pretty good idea that Kenny is somehow involved or has knowledge of how Neil died. But I’m also wondering, was Phil there? Did Phil actually kill Neil?

Dave: [00:53:48] Right. Kenny and Phil, there are multiple returns to Neil’s apartment where they’re grabbing additional items–

Zibby: [00:53:56] Post death.

Dave: [00:53:57] Post death. So, you think about it. You’ve got Neil dead in a recliner, and they’re reaching over him to grab extra things, searching his apartment, trying to find other collectibles that might be valuable. This is the caliber of people we’re dealing with here, that they don’t care that Neil’s sitting there decomposing.

Yeardley: [00:54:15] And the door is unlocked.

Dave: [00:54:16] Door’s unlocked.

Yeardley: [00:54:18] So they just come and go as they like.

Dave: [00:54:19] Right.

Yeardley: [00:54:20] That’s extraordinary.

Dave: [00:54:21] These series of interviews that we have to do with Kenny and Phil really stretched out this case, because every time you went to them, you got a little more, and you got to go check on things that they claim, and it turns out that’s a lie, but this was true.

George: [00:54:34] And then we’re meeting in between each interview. I’m almost exclusively dealing with Kenny. Dan’s almost exclusively dealing with Phil. Dave is tracking down leads in between every interview. We’re meeting up, trying to compare stories and try to figure out who’s lying more and who’s telling the truth more. So, initially, you know what Kenny’s telling us, I left the apartment. Mysterious guy showed up. I came back by a couple days later, Monday morning. That’s when. I took the stuff. Then it turned into– he’s in jail. I’m playing a game with him, he’s playing a game with me about being honest. So, I reach out to Kenny’s mom, and I say, “Hey, listen, your son is in custody. Getting ready to go to prison on this other case. We’re trying to figure out what happened to his buddy Neil. And I really wanted to cooperate.”

[00:55:18] Mom’s being mom, she’s defending Kenny. I believe him, this, that, and the other. And I’m telling her, “Well, I’m not so sure I believe him.” I said, by the way, we know the day that Neil died. And I could tell you he died on Monday. I purposely threw that out there to see if she’s talking to Kenny while he’s in jail. And lo and behold, she’s talking to Kenny on the phone. And she tells him, “By the way, I talked to Detective and he told me Neil got killed on Monday.” And he ends up telling her, no, “That’s wrong. Neil died on Saturday.”

Yeardley: [00:55:50] So now you know, he knows.

George: [00:55:52] What’s the next thing I do, I drive over to the jail, check him out again. Well, it just so happened he calls me from the jail wanting to talk to me about. “Hey, by the way, I want to clear some stuff up. We talked earlier and I told you that I took the stuff on Monday and this, that, and the other. I want to talk to you more about this,” because he knows I know more, so he’s willing to give me a little bit more too. Little by little–

Zibby: [00:56:14] It’s a fucking chess game.

George: [00:56:15] It totally is. And it’s hard to play the game a couple of moves ahead when you’re dealing with people just lie constantly. So, I get a couple of missed calls on my phone. I get a collect call from the jail because I had mentioned to mom that there’re some things missing from the scene and want Kenny to fill in the blanks. And he calls me up and says, “Well, I was there on Saturday and what happened was after the mysterious guy showed up and I left, I realized I forgot something. So, I came back that Saturday and when I came back, that’s when Neil was dead.” He feels like he’s coming to me being truthful about when he actually knew Neil was dead. I already knew this. I think initially his initial statement to me was he didn’t know how Neil had died.

[00:56:54] He just saw a little bit of speckled blood on him. Well, that’s a complete lie. I mean, the photos are clear. There’s blood all over the place, all over this guy. I asked him about going back. He goes, “Well, I did put my ear next to his chest to listen for a heartbeat, and I checked his pulse too, so I may have got some blood on me.” So right there he’s trying to excuse away how he’s got some blood on him. So, we let him roll with that. This is almost the same time frame that I’m talking to Kenny. Dan is still going back and forth with Phil on his lies and inconsistencies. And we’re almost like I’ll tell Dan what Kenny’s telling me, he tells me what Phil’s telling him. We’re trying to play each guy against each other to see who’s going to crack. Who’s going to tell us the truth first? Who’s going to admit to what they did first.

George: [00:57:37] All I want is the truth.

Kenny: [00:57:38] I have given you the almost truth.

George: [00:57:40] You’ve never given me the truth.

Kenny: [00:57:42] I am now.

George: [00:57:43] What I am now, tell me how it is that I get to that from here.

Kenny: [00:57:50] What do you mean?

George: [00:57:51] How do I believe that?

Kenny: [00:57:53] I don’t know. But all I can do is tell you.

George: [00:57:58] It’s like a slow bleed with you. It’s like I get a little bit here, I get a little bit there and then I get a little more. I get a little more. And it’s all bad for you. Right?

Kenny: [00:58:07] That’s why I keep holding back, because I know it.

George: [00:58:09] I know that’s exactly right [beep] and it’s perfectly normal. But it’s going to kill you. Letting it out will make it better. You sit there and you hold stuff in like that. It’ll eat a man alive, right. You know that?

Kenny: [00:58:25] No.

George: [00:58:28] And you know that we’re not stupid. But the last thing I ever want to do in my police career is railroad a man who didn’t do some– And that includes you. But I tell you what another thing is. Everybody lies to me. [beep] And they have a really good reason to lie to me. Because what they did or what they might have done, they don’t even want to ever even mention or even want to remember, let alone talk to me about it, right?

Kenny: [00:58:58]. No.

George: [00:58:59] That’s why you can’t tell me the truth all the time. Am I right?

Kenny: [00:59:04] It’s because I’m scared.

George: [00:59:05] I know you’re scared. [beep] was scared when he was getting killed?

Kenny: [00:59:11] I imagine so.

George: [00:59:14] Okay. Why would somebody kill [beep] like that?

Kenny: [00:59:15] I don’t know. I’m just so afraid to tell the truth about everything? Because everything points to me.

George: [00:59:36] It does.

Kenny: [00:59:37] But I didn’t do it. That’s the problem. Everything points to me but I did not do it.

George: [00:59:48] So, you’re telling me if you were on your jury, you’d find me guilty?

Kenny: [00:59:51] Yeah.

George: [00:59:54] So, it had to be either you or we’ve already agreed that’d be you or this dude who showed up.

Kenny: [01:00:01] And this is exactly why I’ve been lying all along, is because it gets to a point where I have to prove my innocence instead of being proven guilty.

George: [01:00:16] No, it’s not that. It’s not never that. It’s never the burden. The burden is on the state, not us, to prove that you did it. And like I told you before, I have no interest in putting you in jail for something you didn’t do. None whatsoever. I don’t get a feather in my cap. I don’t get it. I do have interest in finding out who killed [beep] though. And every time I go down a trail, it leads right to you.

Kenny: [01:00:52] It wasn’t me.

George: [01:00:56] So, this goes on for a while. I don’t have probable cause to arrest either one of them for a murder. I do have probable cause to arrest both of them for burglary. We have evidence to show that they both went into the apartment and they stole stuff from Neil, the knives, the collectibles. So, we start talking to Kenny about that, and he ends up admitting, “Hey, I’ve got that stuff in my house. I got it buried in a couple places. Let’s go out there.” So, we take a trip out to his house.

Zibby: [01:01:19] So, you pick him up from jail.

George: [01:01:20] Pick him up from jail again.

Dave: [01:01:22] Another field trip for him.

Zibby: [01:01:23] Yeah. McDonald’s.

George: [01:01:24] I think we got some chew that day. He got some whatever kind of chew, skull bandage or whatever the heck it was he got that day. So, we go out there, and he directs us to a crawl space under the house. It’s accessible from the living room. There’s a rug in one spot underneath the recliner. So, we pull the recliner out of the way, pull up the rug, and there’s a crawl space. Open the door and look at the crawl space, and there’s this blue duffel bag down there. So, we pull the blue duffel bag out. It’s got all these collectible items, but it’s also got a good spill of blood at the bottom of the bag.

Yeardley: [01:01:52] Any swords in there?

George: [01:01:53] No swords in there. So, we ask him where the swords are at, and he says they’re in his backyard, buried under a shed. So we go to the backyard, and under the shed, we retrieve all three of the katana swords and one other lightning blade looking sword.

Dave: [01:02:06] Yeah, this shed had maybe two or three inches between it and the ground. It’s kind of set up from the ground, and he had slid him under the shed.

George: [01:02:14] So, now it’s time to play the, okay we collect our evidence, we’ll bring them back. Well, when he went to take his pinch of skull, he grabbed a couple more out of the can and keistered him and then smuggled him back into the jail so he can have some chew while he’s in jail.

Zibby: [01:02:27] I don’t know. What the word keister and what’s skull. Skull is chew.

George: [01:02:31] It’s chew in a little fabric pouch.

Dave: [01:02:33] When you say you keister it, he put it in an orifice.

Zibby: [01:02:36] His butt.

George: [01:02:37] His prison wallet.

Yeardley: [01:02:38] Literally did that. You allow this?

George: [01:02:40] Well, we didn’t know it.

Yeardley: [01:02:40] Oh.

Zibby: [01:02:42] Not to harp on this, but is it in a can?

George: [01:02:44] It’s in a little pouch. But he takes a couple of them out and puts them up his rear end.

Zibby: [01:02:48] Is he going to take it out later and chew it.

George: [01:02:50] It is exactly.

Yeardley: [01:02:51] Oh, no, no, no, no.

George: [01:02:52] It’s weird. But I think what helps us with the case is he has this proclivity to want to smuggle stuff to the jails, and to the prisons wherever he’s going, he’s an addict. To me, this is an indicator of what his demeanor is about, why this got to what it did. I think he goes to sell the drugs to Neil. Neil doesn’t have enough money, so he robs him, takes the money from Neil and takes the drugs and wants to smuggle the drugs into prison. He admits some of this later, so we keep on interviewing him. After we get the property from the backyard, from the house, he’s off to prison. Now, we play the lab game of DNA, fingerprints, evidence, whatever we can find.

Zibby: [01:03:28] There’s blood in that duffel bag.

George: [01:03:29] There’s blood in the duffel bag.

Zibby: [01:03:31] He’s with you when you recovered that duffel bag. Aren’t you, like, what’s this?

George: [01:03:34] Yeah, actually, this went like that. He actually acknowledges maybe it’s Neil’s blood. I don’t know. I took it after he was dead. The amount of blood that’s in there is not just a transfer from an item being rubbed. It’s a puddle of blood in the bottom of the bag. So that gets shipped off to the lab. The boots that Dan finds, the swords go to the lab. We have a fight with the lab to a certain extent about what to process, how to process it, about various items. They’re a busy place. They only want to do what they need to do to get by because they have every other cop in our state sending them items. We’re a small town. We don’t have our own crime lab here. We have to send it off to the Highway Patrol that process it.

[01:04:09] So, over a period of gosh, at least a year, we go through this process trying to get things tested. We ended up finding out the blood in the bag was Neil’s blood at the bottom of the bag. The boots that Detective Dan found did belong to Phil. His DNA was found at the footbed in the bottom of the boot. There were some blood stains on there. However, there wasn’t enough to prove conclusively whose blood was on the boots.

[01:04:31]

[Break 4]

[01:04:38]

Dave: [01:04:46] Meanwhile, Kenny’s in prison, serving his identity theft sentence. While we’re doing the wait. So, this alleviates the rush that we are feeling is we know where he is and we can wait for all of our lab stuff to come back.

Zibby: [01:04:59] But Phil’s out in the world.

George: [01:05:00] Well, Phil’s out in the world to the extent of I go looking for him, and we can’t find him anywhere around here. We do some checking, start talking to people. We talk to Ann, talk to Katie again, find out Phil’s good thousand miles away across the country, he moved. So, I’m anxious, I’m impatient. I want to get some more information. So, I hop on a plane and fly out to where Phil’s at. After getting permission from the DA to get a warrant for Phil’s arrest for the burglary. Phil’s living out in the middle of nowhere. We bring him down to the sheriff’s office back there and interview him. And he admits to lying to Detective Dan a little bit about things, about what he knew about what was going on. And he suspects that Kenny did in fact kill Neil.

[01:05:41] Even though Kenny didn’t tell him this, he suspects it. He says Kenny always carries knives with him. He’s angry. He knew he was mad at Neil. So, in the end, Phil gets extradited back to a relive and he gets sentenced to prison, five to seven years in prison for the burglaries.

Yeardley: [01:05:56] And what about Kenny?

George: [01:05:57] So, one of the last things in the interviews with Kenny, “I’m asking him, who else could have done this. If not you, who?” And he starts naming off some different drug dealers and different people. And he goes, “There’s a guy used to live next door to Neil and he may have done it.” And he gives me this guy’s name. I go to track this guy down. He’s already in the county jail. So, I go over to talk to him in the jail. I know he couldn’t have done it. He’s in jail. [Yeardley laughs] I talk to him and he goes, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have nothing to do with this. I’m in jail. But I know Kenny. I know you’re talking about and this guy’s a liar. And I know Neil because I used to live next door to Neil. We got along. I’ll see what’s going on because I’m on my way to prison too. I’ll ask around, see if anybody knows anything.”

[01:06:38] So, he goes off to prison, and lo and behold, this guy that Kenny said, well, maybe he did it ends up going to the same prison as Kenny. And they meet up in the yard one day, and they start talking, and he goes, “Hey, by the way, the cops are asking me questions about some murder. What in the world’s going on?” I find this out because this inmate calls me up a year and a half after the murder happens. By the way, “I’m in prison with this Kenny guy and he just admitted to killing Neil.”

Yeardley: [01:07:04] Oh, my God.

George: [01:07:06] He givesall the details already told me. And by the way, there’s another guy in prison that I met that knows Kenny also, and he says he picked up Kenny that night from a park about a block away from where Neil lives. So, this is the most exciting news I’ve had in a year and a half on this case to move towards probable cause for an arrest. So, I go interview the first inmate in the prison. He gives me all these details that Kenny tells him that he went over there with a motive to rob Neil, take the methamphetamine, take the money. But the problem was Neil resisted that and didn’t want to be robbed, didn’t want his stuff taken.

[01:07:37] So, this inmate tells me, “Kenny told me what he did and that Neil was sitting in their recliner and then he stabbed him a bunch of times.” Stabbed him like a dozen times in the recliner. This is really important because nobody should know this information, with the exception of the person that did it. During the autopsy, we learned that Neil was stabbed 22 times, 11 times in the chest, and then another 11 times the arms, the defensive injuries. So, he had stabs all over the place. The fact that he was stabbed in the recliner is pretty important. If I told you a murder happened at this apartment down the street, I don’t think the first thing you would conclude is that it happened in a recliner and it was a stabbing. You’d have to know some detailed information. So that’s great.

[01:08:12] He has all this information. I run to my DA, got this inmate in prison. He’s telling me this. I get pushback from the DA.

Yeardley: [01:08:20] What?

George: [01:08:22] It’s not completely unreasonable to have pushback. They want a case that they can prove in court.

Zibby: [01:08:26] Right. That’s hearsay.

George: [01:08:27] It is. And who are we dealing with here? We’re dealing with a victim sex offender, a suspect sex offender, a prison inmate who says this happened. Every player, the female, Felicia, everybody’s got history. This is really difficult to march into a courtroom and convince a jury that these bad guys over here are being honest, but this bad guy over here is being deceitful and untruthful. You have to believe our bad guys and not this one. It’s difficult, I give him that. And from my perspective at the time, I was really frustrated. I was really impatient to the point where the DA that initially had the case, gave the case up to another DA and said, “Fine, you run with it. If you think you can make something out of this, go for it.”

[01:09:02] So the younger DA gets it and I spend weeks and months meeting with him. In the meantime, I go back to the prison, find this other inmate who called me at my desk and said, “Hey, by the I hear you’re working a murder case. The guy that did the murder, I think I picked him up that night and drove him out of town over to another place, and he told me that he just killed some guy named Neil.” Okay. So, I go interview this guy in prison and coincidentally, it’s a guy that Detective Dan sent to prison-

Yeardley: [01:09:28] [laughs] Such a small town.

George: [01:09:29] -a year before.

Dan: [01:09:31] Remember the iced tea bottles?

Yeardley and Zibby: [01:09:32] Yes.

Yeardley: [01:09:33] From evidence breaks the case.

George and Dan: [01:09:35] Is that guy.

George: [01:09:36] Small town, right? Everybody knows everybody. It’s like two degrees of separation around here. This guy says, “Yeah, I got a call from Kenny. He asked me to pick him up. I picked him up. So, I let him run with it” and he goes, “Yeah, I picked him up. And he’s all nervous, he’s all scared, he’s sweating. And he goes, we got to get out of here. Take me over here. I got to go buy some dope. I got some money. Let’s go buy some dope.” So, this guy drives Kenny over and they pull into a parking lot of a 7-Eleven. And this guy says– he looks at me and says, “Listen, wait right here for me. I’m going to go buy dope. You better not rip me off, because if you do, I’ll do you the way I did, Neil.”

[01:10:07] He’s able to track it down to that time frame. He goes, “Yeah, it was Labor Day weekend. I hung out with my dad that weekend. I could tell you almost the exact day. Everything he’s saying is in line with what we know.” So, I go back to the new DA and say, “Hey, now I got two inmates, two separate people telling me this story. We’ve got some good evidence. Let’s push forward and try to get a grand jury indictment and get this guy indicted for murder.” So, at this point, we are two years after the murder happens. We finally get the ball rolling on getting a grand jury indictment. We march everybody into court that’s a relevant witness to testify.

[01:10:38] These inmates, Phil, the burglar that was burglarizing with Kenny comes in, testifies everything he knows, everybody gives their thing, and we get a true bill indictment to go arrest Kenny.

Yeardley: [01:10:48] True bill.

George: [01:10:48] Legal term. The grand jury has decided there’s enough evidence to issue a warrant for his arrest. So now we got to track down Kenny, because guess what? He’s out of prison already. Two years have gone by. He’s done his prison sentence on the property crimes and he’s bebopping around town. We track him down a couple days before Christmas and arrest him. And he still denies having anything to do with it. Gets confronted with the evidence and really has nothing to say. So, we’re preparing for court and another almost year goes by before he comes in with his lawyer and says, “I want to plead guilty.” And he goes to prison for a manslaughter.

Yeardley: [01:11:21] How much time did he get?

George: [01:11:22] Twelve years.

Zibby: [01:11:23] That’s it?

George: [01:11:24] I had the same reaction. It’s a little bit of both. What I wanted was some kind of conclusion of the case in which the person that did it makes the admission they did it. Other than admitting guilt, he refused to give details about what happened. That was one of the conditions of his plea agreement. He didn’t have to say anything. He was going to plead guilty to doing it and leave it at that. I would have liked to see more time, but at the same time, you run the risk of going to trial with a parade of characters who are questionable people. And this other guy who’s going to try to have every plausible explanation to say why he was there immediately before the murder happened, and he ends up saying, I was there obviously right after it happened.

[01:12:03] He says, “I left, I came back 10 minutes later and he was dead. The bushy haired stranger must have done it. I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t me.” I confronted Kenny with what the inmates told me. He admitted to talking to the one inmate. He said, “Yeah, I told him about the case, but I never told him I killed him.” Well, obviously not true, but he didn’t ever have the full admission, so we run the risk of going to trial and losing this case and him getting no accountability at all for it. So, he ended up getting 12 years in prison.

Zibby: [01:12:28] Is he there today?

George: [01:12:29] He’s there today. I think he’ll die in prison. He’s got some health issues. The other part that makes this case a little unique, there is no public outcry in this case. There are no people marching down the street demanding justice for Neil. Neil was somebody who is a child molester to be quite honest and nobody cared. There wasn’t one person that really said Justice for Neil. It was one of those cases where we can close this, have accountability, have some kind of sentence, know we got the right person and be done with it. Ended up being the best conclusion aside from a full confession that we can ask for.

Dan: [01:13:05] Did we talk about what Kenny did in the interview room?

George: [01:13:08] Nope.

Zibby: [01:13:09] He didn’t.

Dave: [01:13:10] We got Kenny-

Yeardley: [01:13:10] Oh.

Dave: [01:13:11] -on video-

Yeardley: [01:13:12] No

Dave: [01:13:13] Painting our wall.

Zibby: [01:13:15] No.

Yeardley: [01:13:15] No.

[01:13:16] He masturbated in the interview room.

George: [01:13:18] We didn’t know it till later.

Yeardley: [01:13:19] Huh.

Dave: [01:13:20] When you review the video, you can see he’s doing the five-knuckle shuffle down there under the table.

Dan: [01:13:24] We actually black lighted the room and-

Yeardley: [01:13:27] Oh my God.

Dan: [01:13:27] -it fluoresced. We should have had the same agreement-

Yeardley: [01:13:31] That the bus.

Dan: [01:13:32] -that he had with the bus. Keep your hands visible at all times.

George: [01:13:35] On a break from interview. Go back to watch the video so I can write reports. And all of sudden it’s like, What in the world? You glance over because there’s a pause, nothing much going on. Everybody left the room and there he is.

Yeardley: [01:13:45] Wow, that is so much. Well, gentlemen, first of all, really impressive that despite the questionable character of this whole crew, that you would work this case as diligently as you did. It just speaks to your integrity and your dedication to what you do and how you do it.

Dave: [01:14:05] Neil paid his debt to society. He did his prison time. And by all accounts after that, other than some dabbling in meth.

George: [01:14:13] Everybody liked Neil. Everybody he came across spoke highly of him.

Dan: [01:14:17] Thought he was like a father like figure to a lot of people. So, he’d moved on. He deserved some justice.

George: [01:14:21] But the people that were, the people that cared for him the most were all very questionable characters too. And they weren’t the ones outspoken on the news demanding justice for Neil. These are people that lived in the shadows. They literally lived in the shadows of our town that didn’t want to be seen or known, that were troublemakers, that were addicts, they were criminals themselves. They didn’t want to be on the front page of the news or on the paper advocating for Neil. But they all spoke highly of him and liked him.

Yeardley: [01:14:45] It really is a situation where justice is blind.

George: [01:14:49] Absolutely. You need that.

Yeardley: [01:14:50] Thank you for bringing that to us.

George: [01:14:52] You’re welcome.

[music]

Yeardley: [01:15:00] Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave.

Zibby: [01:15:06] This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley: [01:15:12] Music for the show was composed by John Forest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby: [01:15:21] 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: [01:15:35] Yeah. And also, we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes.

Zibby: [01:15:40] 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: [01:15:58] Nobody’s better than you.

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