Jay: [00:00:20] All of these scenarios were running through our head. He’s got a long history of theft, burglary, stolen cars, firearms. His criminal history is extensive.

Dan: [00:00:30] This is an enterprising criminal. He’s been around the block.

Yeardley: [00:00:35] When a serious crime is committed in a small town, a handful of detectives are charged with solving the case. I’m Yeardley, and I’m fascinated by these stories. So, I invited my friends, detectives Dan and Dave, to help me gather the best true crime cases from around the country, and have the men and women who investigated them, tell us how it happened.

Dan: [00:01:01] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:01:02] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:01:02] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:01:04] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:01:06] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:01:09] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan: [00:01:18] Names, places, and certain details, including relationships have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families. 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.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:01:47] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:54] Good to be back.

Yeardley: [00:01:55] Such a pleasure. And we have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:59] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:01:59] Good morning. And we’re very pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Detective Jay.

Jay: [00:02:05] I’m excited to be here again.

Yeardley: [00:02:07] Thank you for joining us this morning. So, Jay, you have a really interesting rather complicated case for us today. Tell us how this case came to you.

Jay: [00:02:19] So, this occurred in 2016. There was a call to our dispatch about a subject in the roadway.

Yeardley: [00:02:26] You mean like a person?

Jay: [00:02:28] Yes, person in the roadway, near a park, that’s actually very close to our police station. So, a citizen calls in and reports that while they are on their way to this park to do early morning exercises, they observed a person laying part way in the roadway.

Dispatch: [00:02:48] Tell me exactly what happened.

Citizen: [00:02:49] There’s a guy laying in the middle of the road, kind of like wheezing. I mean, he’s back and forth. I think he’s a homeless guy. I was going to stop, but I just am not comfortable doing that. We’re here to exercise. So, if you just come in the main entrance to [beep] park, he’s just right by the bridge. [crosstalk]

Dispatch: [00:03:11] Is he lying in the roadway or–?

Citizen: [00:03:13] Yeah, he’s on the side, but he’s definitely in the out lane. You would [unintelligible] if you were in the out lane going out. He’s still there. I can see him from where I’m standing.

Jay: [00:03:31] This type of call for police in our city happens many, many times a day. So, there’s nothing unique whatsoever. There’s somebody who’s passed out on the lawn somewhere on the sidewalk, laying down somebody in the roadway. Just the other day, I heard three of these being dispatched out.

Yeardley: [00:03:47] Is this because you have a large homeless population?

Jay: [00:03:50] We do. Our community has very effective services available to homeless people, which causes them to tell their friends, and their friends from other communities come to our community because we have such great services for the homeless.

Yeardley: [00:04:05] Got it.

Dave: [00:04:05] They actually come on buses.

Yeardley: [00:04:07] Is that true?

Dave: [00:04:08] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:04:09] Oh.

Jay: [00:04:10] This park that we get called to, it’s a long park. It parallels the river. It has lots of running paths, biking paths, and there’s fishing area as well.

Dan: [00:04:19] What time of year is? What season is this?

Jay: [00:04:21] So, this is May, and this call comes in just after 06:00 in the morning.

Dan: [00:04:25] It’s not freezing out?

Jay: [00:04:26] No.

Dan: [00:04:26] Okay.

Dave: [00:04:27] And fairly typical of a caller in that situation, they don’t want to go up and check on this person, because it’s uncomfortable for them. We’re used to dealing with that. So, I’m sure when that got dispatched, it’s like, “Okay, some guy drank too much last night. He’s sleeping where he fell.”

Yeardley: [00:04:43] Right.

Jay: [00:04:44] So, patrol officer responds. He comes from our police station, which is less than a mile away. It’s a very quick drive and shows up. As he’s getting out of his car, he immediately calls for Code 3 medics, which is emergency response, lights and sirens, because he can see that our person laying in the roadway is covered in blood.

Yeardley: [00:05:06] Oh no.

Jay: [00:05:07] So, the patrol officer contacts the person on the ground, our subject, and he identifies himself as Steven. Steven’s laying halfway in the roadway. He is covered in blood. And Steven doesn’t say how he got injured. He’s not really communicative. He’s losing consciousness in and out as the officer is waiting for the medics to arrive. At one point, it was an interesting thing. The officer doesn’t know how he got injured, so he starts shining his flashlight up in the tree, which is directly above where our guy’s laying, thinking that perhaps he may have fallen out of a tree.

Dave: [00:05:42] Like Back to the Future.

Jay: [00:05:44] Yeah.

[laughter]

Jay: [00:05:45] You learn to assess all possibilities on something like this.

Yeardley: [00:05:48] So, he can’t see where the blood is coming from.

Jay: [00:05:50] That’s correct.

Dave: [00:05:51] And it’s not readily apparent, I’m guessing, that he’s been stabbed or any other method. That’s probably why he’s looking up like, “This guy’s covered in blood and he landed here. How’d he get here?”

Jay: [00:06:00] That’s right. And it’s not a place where you would expect somebody to either intentionally lay down, because while it’s partway on the roadway, it’s next to some shrubbery. While the officer is talking to him, two guys on bikes ride by and identify themselves as friends of Steven. They said that earlier in the evening, Steven had been camping with them near a place called the Tunnel, which is an intersection just a few blocks away. They said that he was also camping with another guy named Aaron inside the bathroom. This is the bathroom in the park. They start asking, “Steven? What happened to him?” And Steven’s not responding. So, they bike off, head towards the bathroom. When they get to the bathroom, they immediately come back and tell the officer that there’s a huge amount of blood contained within the bathroom.

[00:06:49] So, now we’ve got two potential crime scenes. One, where Steven has been found and this restroom that’s about 250ft away. The medics arrive and they take Steven and transport him to the hospital. While on the way to the hospital, the medics talk to Steven and ask him what happened. Steven’s not really responding that at some point the medic asks Steven, if he had done this to himself. And then Steven says, “It doesn’t matter.” And then he was asked again if he had done this to himself and Steven said, “Yeah.” That’s the last word spoken by Steven.

Dave: [00:07:26] He bled out?

Jay: [00:07:28] He did, yes. He gets transported to the hospital where he’s pronounced deceased a short time later.

Yeardley: [00:07:34] Oh no.

Jay: [00:07:35] He had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen and that was cause of his death. The patrol officers find where his coat had been taken off by the medics. And right near, there is a small pocket knife. We’re talking about a pocket knife with, perhaps, a one-inch blade. Now looking at these injuries, including his intestines had started to protrude from his abdomen, it’s unlikely that that knife would have caused any of those injuries. Even though he said he had done this to himself, we’re thinking that he’s not thinking clearly as he’s reporting this or he’s trying to hide something because there’s no way that little knife had caused those injuries.

[00:08:12] So next, while the patrol officers are setting up a crime scene both at the bathroom and near the bridge where Steven had been located, the two guys on bikes come back up to the officers and they contact him, they said, there was a male they had seen in the bathroom with Steven, described him as a male in his 50s, and he had salt and pepper hair, scruffy beard. They said they spoke with that man, and that man told them that Steven had been attacked by three-masked men. Immediately this just sounds ridiculous. Really, three masked men come in and kill some guy in the bathroom randomly? So, we didn’t really believe that story.

[00:08:56] The two friends of Steven on the bicycles, we got the idea that they knew more about this and they were minimizing their involvement. There’s many reasons why somebody may minimize in this situation is they’re probably afraid of reprisals from other people within the community and they don’t want to be perceived as somebody who talks to the police.

Yeardley: [00:09:16] Are they suggesting that the 50-year-old salt and pepper man in the bathroom just stood by while three masked men stabbed Steven in the bathroom?

Jay: [00:09:25] That’s exactly correct. That’s why we had such a hard time believing this, because this one guy was unharmed and yet Steven was attacked, and this guy did nothing to prevent this or stop it. He’s nowhere to be found. He’s not in the immediate area of where this occurred.

Yeardley: [00:09:42] Okay. How many officers are on the scene now?

Jay: [00:09:45] Well, at this point, there’s six patrol officers. I had yet to been notified. I receive a call from our sergeant at the time, and I was told there might be a homicide, but he’s still alive when I received the call, he had not died at that point. I get up, get dressed, and I head into a local convenience store on my way, and I bought some coffee and other provisions. When the clerk rang me up, she told me, “Oh, that’ll be 12-49.”

Dave and Jay: [00:10:14] No way.

Dave: [00:10:16] [laughs]

Yeardley: [00:10:16] What’s funny about that?

Jay: [00:10:17] So, 12-49 is a police code that we use to reference a deceased subject. As far as I knew, Steven was still alive. So, referencing 12-49, I thought this to be quite the harbinger. And the time, at this point was 07:18 is the time printed on my receipt. So, I pay for my items, take off, start driving towards the scene, and then I get a phone call from the sergeant, says, “Well, subject’s deceased and he’s deceased at 07:18.” So, it’s 12-49 at 07:18.

Yeardley: [00:10:48] Okay, that’s weird.

Dave: [00:10:50] Yeah, that’s nuts.

Jay: [00:10:51] I even saved the receipt. Okay, so he’s pronounced dead. I head to the scene. I check out the restroom where Steven had fallen, and I begin to devise a plan with the other detectives. This was my first case as primary detective. I had worked a lot of homicides, but never as primary. So, we identify this long path of blood from where Steven had fallen. There appears to be a point in the middle where he had stopped in between the scene and where he was found, where he expelled a lot of blood. We necessarily couldn’t tell if it was from him either aspirating or falling out of his clothing. So, it’s about 250ft from where he was found to where the crime scene was.

[00:11:36] The bathroom is littered with blood. There’s several spots where there appears to be cast off. Now cast off is, if you were to dip a stick in paint and throw it up, flick it up against the wall, you’d have the blood spots or the paint spots up the wall. Well, we find that and there’s two spots specifically, one against the restroom wall, and that has a gouge mark and then cast off coming off that in the direction that the knife was used.

Yeardley: [00:12:05] You mean the knife they probably used on Steven?

Jay: [00:12:08] Yeah. There’s also a concrete bench in this restroom where it appears that this knife had struck the bench, blood had sprayed off of that, and then you can see the gouge mark from the tip of the knife going across the concrete in a different direction.

Yeardley: [00:12:24] So, there’s a gouge mark in the wall of the bathroom as well as a gouge mark in the bench itself?

Jay: [00:12:31] Yes. And then there’s many passive blood drops throughout the whole bathroom, as if someone’s standing or walking very slowly when blood is falling.

Dave: [00:12:40] So, this park, there are so many avenues for someone to leave the scene? You can go east, west, north, south.

Dan: [00:12:49] You can float the river, you can get across the river by going different directions and using bridges.

Dave: [00:12:54] Right. And it’s a huge park that’s near a large stadium. I imagine almost all of your patrol officers were heading to that area, trying to get in a position to where they can contact pedestrians leaving that area. Your search area, it’s going to be wide. We’re talking miles.

Jay: [00:13:10] Yeah. And this park and its bike paths parallel the river, which goes for many miles. So, there’s literally hundreds of avenues that you can depart from this one part of the park throughout the city. We had our lab come out and they sprayed what’s called amido black. Amido black reacts with blood, and it shows where blood may have been or has been. We sprayed that whole restroom with that, so we could get an idea of if there’s footprints in blood, shoe prints, if there’s fingerprints in blood that might not readily be available to just the naked eye.

Yeardley: [00:13:46] Is that, like, luminol similar?

Jay: [00:13:48] Yes, it is. You don’t need to turn off the lights for amido black. You can just view it in normal room light. This helped us identify several shoe prints that turned out to be Steven’s.

Yeardley: [00:14:01] But no other unidentified shoe prints, for instance, from supposedly the three masked men or–?

Jay: [00:14:07] At that point, we didn’t know, but that is correct. We ended up contacting several people later that day and essentially getting consent from them to take their shoes, because they had very similar footwear patterns. We ended up buying several sets of clothing and shoes for people, because they were of interest to this case.

Dave: [00:14:25] That was nice of you.

Jay: [00:14:26] Yeah.

Jay: [00:14:39] So, now we start to look into Steven, what’s he about, where’s he from, what he does. Steven is from another state, and he had come to our town about two years prior. He’s developed a serious methamphetamine problem. His criminal record is mostly petty crimes and drug possession charges. He’s got open sores all across his face from his use of methamphetamine, and he’s not taking very good care of himself.

Yeardley: [00:15:07] How old is he?

Jay: [00:15:08] He is 25 years old at this point. That day, we made a death notification to his mother, and I talked to her about his history, and she said that he had previously been accused of sexually assaulting a family member. So, we go to the autopsy. And during the autopsy, we find multiple stab wounds. Most of them are on the left side of his body. One of the things we find right next to a stab wound is a tattoo of a bloody knife. The irony in this case is immense. We also find that he has a broken orbital socket on his right eye. There’s some fresh injuries that are not stab wounds, but look like the skins abraded. We also find several defensive wounds on his arms and fingers. Whatever he was attacked with, he had tried to fend off.

[00:16:03] He also tests positive for opioids, THC, and amphetamines. So, we also begin to evaluate his clothing and we find that his leather jacket that he was wearing have multiple large stab wounds, completely inconsistent with that knife we found on the ground.

Yeardley: [00:16:19] Again, this mystery pocket knife that Steven had on him? That’s what you’re talking about?

Jay: [00:16:24] Yes. These wounds are about 4cm wide, which is a large knife.

Dave: [00:16:31] It’s not a pocket knife.

Jay: [00:16:33] It’s not a pocket knife. And the size of the wound doesn’t always directly translate to the size of the blade, but they were consistent throughout his coat. So, we’re thinking that likely this was a very large knife used.

Yeardley: [00:16:48] Are you saying the size of the wound doesn’t always correlate to the size of the knife, in general, or in this case in particular?

Jay: [00:16:55] Well, in general, because if you were to use a knife and stab something, someone without the person moving, you would likely get a directly correlated size of injury to the knife. But if somebody’s moving, the knife can slice, it can tear. As in this case, I would think that Steven was moving around while this was occurring.

Yeardley: [00:17:17] Right.

Dave: [00:17:17] I’m picturing with the defensive wounds and looking at the photos, this is a frenzy. He’s fighting for his life, trying to avoid getting stabbed in the torso. And so, he’s taking it in the forearms and the fingers.

Dan: [00:17:30] And he’s taking a beating too. He’s got a fractured orbit. He’s getting punched, probably kicked and stabbed at the same time. It’s brutal.

Dave: [00:17:38] Right. If you think about it, he’s got this broken eye socket, which indicates he probably got punched or hit with something. Somebody who’s doing that is probably not going to have a knife in their hands while they’re doing it. So, does it suggest there’s multiple people and that’s consistent with the witnesses saying there’s three guys or was it a fight and then somebody goes, “You know what? Screw this. I’m pulling out the knife.” So, it’s confusing and you’ve got people who are providing information, but you have to evaluate how credible that is the whole time. So, it’s difficult.

Jay: [00:18:10] Yeah, that’s a great point. And in hindsight, I know the answer to that, but at the time, we absolutely did not, and all of these scenarios were running through our head. So, when we bring the two guys on bicycles back to the police station, we talked to them at length, and they give us a different version. They said, “Well, here’s the thing. We didn’t want to tell you in front of everybody else, but the guy in the bathroom is Aaron,” and Aaron’s also a homeless male who lives at the tunnel area. The police had come earlier that morning and contacted several people and given them warnings for prohibited camping, because this tunnel area is just a bike bridge, and people camp out there because it’s out of the elements. When the officers contacted them, they said, “You got to leave.” And so, Aaron and Steven both left and went to this restroom, which is about a distance of two city blocks away from the tunnel.

Yeardley: [00:19:05] So, now they’re saying it wasn’t three masked men, it was just Aaron?

Jay: [00:19:09] Well, no. They’re repeating to us what Aaron told them that it was three masked men.

Dan: [00:19:15] But it’s helpful because now you know who Aaron is, because police hours prior have already had contact and ID-ed this guy. So, now, it’s not a, “Who’s Aaron? We got an ID on him. It’s probably the same guy. It’s two blocks away and a couple of hours prior to that.”

Jay: [00:19:28] Yep. So, we had all of our detective units come out, and we had them start canvassing up and down the river bike paths, and contact everybody they could to see if they had any information on what had occurred. One of our detectives contacted Aaron, and he denied having anything to do with this and said he didn’t know Steven. But that detective was keen enough to take a photo of Aaron, so we could identify people. And if we needed to talk to them later, it would help us.

Yeardley: [00:19:56] Is that something you usually do investigations?

Jay: [00:19:59] Yes. So, records check of Aaron shows that he has many arrests, about 80 arrests in our community.

Yeardley: [00:20:06] Wow.

Jay: [00:20:07] And probably another hundred in the state that he’s from, thefts, drugs. He doesn’t have a violent history, but he has a reputation of being a fighter on the street. So, he hasn’t been convicted for any assaults. As we found out later, he also had a reputation for assaulting people with little notice. We go through a report and find that he had assaulted another transient at the tunnel area, and that transient had filed a report with the police, and it was still under investigation. It just happened a very short time prior to this.

Dave: [00:20:40] So, you get a little glimpse of Aaron can snap and he is violent, even though he doesn’t have that in his arrest history, certainly his life history. He’d probably be a guy where other transients would see him coming and probably veer out of the way.

Jay: [00:20:54] Exactly. Somewhat of an enforcer type. So, we pulled the video from our police cars in car video system and we went back through that. One of the things we find is that Aaron, who’s wearing a bright blue jacket is seen walking away from the bathroom. So, he is coming out of the park. The bathroom is maybe 150 yards, 200 yards into the park and he is walking away from that as the first officers are arriving. Nobody knows he’s involved with at that time. They’re going for a subject down call and they don’t know he has any relevance.

Yeardley: [00:21:31] Oh, I see. So, the camera catches Aaron walking out of the park while your guy is checking on Steven, who’s laying in the road.

Jay: [00:21:41] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:21:41] Copy that.

Jay: [00:21:43] Now, Aaron said he was never over by the restroom. He had never had anything to do with Steven. So, this definitely piques our interest because he’s lied to us. Somebody has put him at the crime scene. The other thing is, he’s also changed clothes at this point. So, we send our patrol officers out, and they contact him, and it turned out he had a warrant, and they arrested him for that, and we bring him back to the police station. We interview him, and we seize his clothes and give him other clothing to wear because we think he’s our likely suspect.

Dave: [00:22:16] According to these guys on bikes, he was camping with Steven. He was sleeping right next to him. So, I feel like you’re absolutely on the right track.

Jay: [00:22:24] Yeah. So, we write a search warrant for Aaron’s backpack. About 03:30 in the morning, mind you, this call came in at about 06:00 AM, now we are the next day at 03:30 in the morning. We serve the search warrant. One of the things we have to prove is identity of the property. So, we see that Aaron had written his name on the bottom of the backpack. So, there’s no issue with who owns the backpack.

Yeardley: [00:22:47] [giggles] So helpful.

Jay: [00:22:48] A lot of times, people will claim, “Well, that’s not my bag.” And then, well, when you write your name on it, it makes it a little bit more difficult. We find a bunch of needles, and then we find about a five-inch knife. So, this is a folding knife, and we don’t see any blood on that knife. We think it’d probably been washed off, but the lab can still determine if there is blood on there that’s not visible to the human eye. So, we’re feeling pretty good about this. Aaron was at the scene. He’s lied to us. He’s seen leaving the scene, and then he changes his story and said, “Okay, yeah, I was in the bathroom.” And he tells us that three masked men came in. Aaron said, the men told him to stay out of this and they also said, “This is for Andrea.”

Yeardley: [00:23:34] The three masked men said, “This is for Andrea”?

Jay: [00:23:36] Yes.

Dave: [00:23:37] As they’re about to deliver whatever to Steven.

Jay: [00:23:40] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:23:40] Okay.

Jay: [00:23:41] Aaron, while in the restroom says that, the three men come in, they start kicking and punching, and at some point, Steven is stabbed. Aaron doesn’t render any assistance to Steven. He says, at some point, Steven leaves. And then he leaves the restroom also.

Dave: [00:23:57] So, Aaron’s stuck in this bathroom while Steven’s getting jumped?

Jay: [00:24:02] Yes.

Dave: [00:24:03] The scene to watch that kind of violence and be like, “Holy shit, they’re coming after me next.”

Jay: [00:24:10] Yep. And he was warned to stay out of it. This is a one way in, one way out, and there’s three guys standing in his way.

Jay: [00:24:28] So, we took Aaron to jail because he had some warrants.

Yeardley: [00:24:31] What were they for?

Jay: [00:24:32] Aaron’s warrants were for theft related charges that he had.

Yeardley: [00:24:36] He has a drug problem as well?

Jay: [00:24:37] He does. Yes. He frequently uses methamphetamine. I think almost without exception, everybody in this case has a relationship with methamphetamine. So, we contact other transients in the area, and we try and get a timeline of when Steven had moved into the area. We talked to a gal, and she tells us that she had only known Steven for about a week and a half. He had come there. He was really nice. The morning of the murder, she said she walked past the restroom and heard sounds coming from inside. What she described as the sounds of two people having sex.

Yeardley: [00:25:12] Oh, or getting the shit beaten out of them?

Jay: [00:25:15] Yes. We don’t know, and she doesn’t know either. So, this gives us some pause while we know what Aaron has told us about these three masked men. We wonder if that’s just a jive story he’s telling us. Was there some twist between him and Steven that went awry and he gets pissed and he kills Steven? We don’t know. These are all the possibilities that we’re having to evaluate as we’re going on.

[00:25:42] Several days later, we get contacted by a person who’s in our local jail. Detective Jeremy goes down to the jail and interviews this guy. He says he has some information about our case. He describes himself as Steven’s mentor and said that two weeks prior, Steven had been assaulted by some other transients and received a very large laceration to his forehead. The reason for that assault was because Steven had allegedly, sexually assaulted somebody else, and this was a payback for that assault.

Yeardley: [00:26:16] Is that different than the one his mother told you about?

Jay: [00:26:19] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:26:20] A different sexual assault?

Jay: [00:26:21] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:26:22] Okay.

Jay: [00:26:22] That one had happened years prior, but this one apparently has happened at some point recently. Steven told this guy in jail that we’re interviewing that he didn’t have anything to do with it and he was being falsely accused. So, this guy we’re talking to in jail says that there’s this gang around town. Really, it’s a band of like 30, 40 somethings that ride around on BMX bikes and use drugs, and they do a lot of tagging, and they’ll write all over the walls. This isn’t a traditional gang with a structure. They’re very disorganized.

Yeardley: [00:26:55] Are they transients also?

Jay: [00:26:57] Yes, they are, if I think of the broader membership.

Dave: [00:26:59] Probably the most stable housing they have is they couch surf.

Jay: [00:27:02] Yes. So, this guy we’re talking to in the jail says that another member of the loose gang had contacted him. He claimed to be the sergeant of arms of this gang. And he said that Steven had sexually assaulted his twin brother’s girlfriend, Andrea, and said that she’s 17 years old. The reason he was assaulted was payback for this. Now, they’re not actually brothers. They happen to look very similar to each other.

Yeardley: [00:27:31] So, they’re not twins and they’re not brothers.

Jay: [00:27:34] No.

Yeardley: [00:27:34] Copy that.

Jay: [00:27:35] But that’s how they refer to them.

Yeardley: [00:27:37] Okay.

Jay: [00:27:37] So, Detective Jeremy comes back to the police station, and he starts to look up Andrea in the computer system, and we find her. She has some petty crimes. She’s on probation and she doesn’t live with her parents. She’s been moving from house to house and is currently seeing a guy named Don.

Yeardley: [00:27:57] Okay.

Jay: [00:27:58] So, then we happen to get a call from the hospital a little bit later, and they said that the morning of the murder about 06:15, they get somebody who shows up who had a laceration to their left wrist. This guy said he was doing some extreme bicycling down by the river, and he had fallen, and that’s how he cut his wrist. This person had two very large knives on him. When the hospital employee told this person that, “Hey, you can’t have those in the hospital,” he said, “That’s fine. You can just keep them.” So, he’s trying to get rid of his knives.

Yeardley: [00:28:36] Oh.

Jay: [00:28:37] So, that was very useful information, but it took some time for that person at the hospital to report it to us. He identifies the patient who showed up as Herman.

Yeardley: [00:28:46] Herman.

Dave: [00:28:47] Herman.

Yeardley: [00:28:48] So, not Aaron? I was hoping it was Aaron.

Dave: [00:28:51] It’s never that easy.

Yeardley: [00:28:52] Never that easy.

Jay: [00:28:54] So, Herman is 41. He’s got a long history of theft, burglary, stolen cars, firearms. His criminal history is extensive. I think he’s been probably arrested about as many times as Aaron.

Dave: [00:29:05] He’s well known in our city too.

Dan: [00:29:07] Herman happens to be the first person I ever put handcuffs on.

Yeardley: [00:29:11] Really?

Dan: [00:29:12] Yep. When I first started, he was the first person that I ever arrested.

Yeardley: [00:29:16] Wow.

Jay: [00:29:17] So, Herman has quite the methamphetamine problem. When, where he might be staying, it’s at this house in the southwest portion of our town. We contact our detectives through our interagency drug team, and this is a location they’re familiar with. So, we begin doing surveillance of this house where Herman might be staying. We see somebody who I’ve contacted in other cases in the past and who has provided excellent information for me, that’s reliable and accurate. We see that she’s leaving this house. We find a reason to make a traffic stop on her. I believe it was a turn signal and we contact her, and I speak with her and tell her that I’m looking into this case where Steven was killed. She tells us more about who Andrea is and Andrea’s boyfriend.

[00:30:05] She doesn’t know what happened. She said she’ll get back to us in about a week or so. Normally, I’d expect somebody to just say, “Oh, yeah, I’ll tell you later,” to be a total blow off, but not with her. She’s very reliable in that sense. She has her own vices and things that she does, but she is a decent person at the heart. So, we start looking up Don. Don, his street name is Infectious.

Yeardley: [00:30:28] That’s his street name? Infectious?

Jay: [00:30:30] Infectious.

Yeardley: [00:30:31] Mm.

Jay: [00:30:32] He’s 46 years old. He has a long history out of another state that borders our state. He’s associated with prison skinhead gangs. He has priors for attempted murder. He, at one point in a coastal community in a state near us, he had been involved in a SWAT standoff after he shot somebody with a .22 caliber rifle.

Yeardley: [00:30:53] Jeez.

Dave: [00:30:54] He’s checking boxes.

Jay: [00:30:55] Yeah, he’s definitely piqued my interest.

Yeardley: [00:30:58] And Don is Andrea’s boyfriend, right?

Dave: [00:31:00] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:31:00] Got it.

Jay: [00:31:01] So, Infectious, he sells drugs. That’s what he does. He frequently trades methamphetamine for stolen property. This may sound weird, but he has somewhat of a cult following and he’s very well liked within the methamphetamine using community, and he’s respected.

Yeardley: [00:31:19] What do you think garners respect in the methamphetamine community?

Jay: [00:31:23] Yeah, that’s a great question and we actually learned this in the investigation. A lot of the women in the community who use methamphetamine enjoy his company, because he won’t rape them like the other drug dealers.

Dan: [00:31:35] So, Don is 46, Andrea is 17, and they’re a couple.

Jay: [00:31:41] Well, she’s not actually 17. That’s what was on a record. She’s actually 15.

Dave: [00:31:46] Andrea is 15?

Jay: [00:31:47] Yes.

Dave: [00:31:48] Don is 46?

Jay: [00:31:49] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:31:51] So, that’s a crime.

Jay: [00:31:52] It’s one of the many things we’re looking at in this.

Jay: [00:32:07] So, the real story about Don is that his ego is outpaced his legend. He thinks he’s able to do things and get away with things that are well outside of his reach anymore. Petty drug dealing, he can get away with that for a while, but he’s written checks that he can’t cash. Now, one of the things we do is we start doing a background check on Herman. We just assumed that he had a food stamp card, and we pulled the records on that and found that he went to a grocery store just a few blocks from this house that we started to watch. In the surveillance, you see that he is buying an almost entire paper grocery bag filled with steaks. So, it’s like he’s preparing for a big party or something. And he also has, in the shopping cart in this footage here, he has a powder blue BMX bike in the cart.

Yeardley: [00:32:57] In the cart?

Jay: [00:32:57] In the cart. So, he’s in the store, and he is loading up his shopping bag. After he’s gone to the self-checkout line, and he had wheeled his bike in in the cart. So, that sticks in our mind, “Is he preparing to leave town? Is he throwing a party?” We don’t know. So, the other thing we do is we pull video surveillance from all these businesses near where the crime scene was. There’s not a lot of businesses that have video surveillance because it’s a park. There’s so many ways to get out of that park that it makes it very difficult. But we pick the area that’s closest to downtown, so we know that Herman has been to the hospital. So, we basically draw a line on the map from where this murder occurred in the park, across the river, all the way through downtown towards where the hospital is located. We hit nearly every business there and we end up with five total. It’s several miles from there.

[00:33:52] The first one is from our local utility, and he capture the two guys on bicycles coming down the hill and riding through their parking lot. Then we get one from the federal courthouse in our jurisdiction and you can see two guys on the bikes. Now, the video is not the quality of which you can identify somebody, but you can tell what color his bike is and you can tell what color the other person’s bike is. There’s a silver and a powder blue bike.

Yeardley: [00:34:19] It’s our man, Herman.

Dan: [00:34:20] And our man, Don.

Jay: [00:34:22] There we go. And so, then the next thing, our local bus company, they have video on all of their buses.

Yeardley: [00:34:30] We know that the bus company actually has amazing video. That’s what we’ve learned on this podcast. Hooray for the bus company.

Jay: [00:34:36] And that it is, because about 20 minutes after Herman checks out of the hospital, he’s seen downtown riding past a bus on his bicycle with Don. At this point, you can see that he has something wrapped around his wrist, his left wrist.

Yeardley: [00:34:53] A bandage, perhaps?

Jay: [00:34:55] Bingo.

Yeardley: [00:34:56] Aha.

Jay: [00:34:57] So, by pure happenstance, we happen to be up in the DAs office talking with our prosecutor about this case, and we come across Jude. Now, Jude is Herman’s daughter, and I’d had previous contacts with her and was aware of her criminal history, and I asked the prosecutor, whose file folder just happened to be sitting in his door, I said, “Hey, what’s the deal with Jude? Why do you have this here?” It’s like, “Oh, she got picked up in an adjoining state for a parole violation.” I’m like, “Really? Well, that’s interesting. Okay, where is this?” So, I do the research, and I contact the local agency that had arrested her on a parole violation, and they send me a packet of the report, and I read through this, and she was arrested in a stolen car after trying to shoplift from a Walmart. That car was stolen from our town.  

[00:35:47] So, I’m starting to put things together mentally, and she flees town, and who’s she with, why does she do that. This seems out of the ordinary for her because she spent her entire life here.

Yeardley: [00:35:57] How old is she about?

Jay: [00:35:59] Mid 20s.

Yeardley: [00:35:59] Okay.

Jay: [00:36:00] So, we find out that she was also contacted with three people, and these three people were on this road trip with her as it’s outlined in this report. I recognize one of the names immediately. The other person I do a records check on and find that, “Oh, yeah, he’s from our town.” And then the third guy just seems totally out of place. I look him up and he has no record. He’s a professional. He’s never been arrested. I said, “There’s no way this guy was in this car in this state with these people, stolen car. It just doesn’t make sense.” So, I contact him. I just cold call him. I felt that comfortable about that this was not him in this other state. And I said, “Hey, were you recently in this other state?” He said, “No, I’ve never been there before. I’ve never even heard of that city.” I said, “Okay. Well, do you by chance know Herman?” “Oh, yeah, we know Herman. He’s my half-brother.”

[00:36:56] So, he said, “Yeah, the family’s ostracized him. We don’t have anything to do with him because he was stealing from us.” So, then it all makes sense that Herman, when he was in this car just gave his half-brother’s name because at the time, Herman had warrants for his arrest out of our community.

Yeardley: [00:37:14] Oh, my God. I’m assuming he didn’t have ID on him, so they couldn’t check it against anything?

Jay: [00:37:19] Well, you can tell somebody else’s name, and if they don’t have a way to verify it, the officer might not go the extra mile to confirm that, but they can certainly find out if a record exists for somebody.

Dave: [00:37:30] As a family member, he might know his Social Security Number. He might know things that the officer, if he doesn’t go the extra mile to check a DMV photo to make sure it matches the person he’s contacted, he’s like, “All right, what’s your Social Security Number? Okay, what’s this? What’s that?” You give the right answers, and he’s like, “Well, I don’t have any reason to think that he’s lying. Everything matches up.”

Yeardley: [00:37:53] I see.

Jay: [00:37:54] But you got to go the extra mile, right?

Dave: [00:37:57] Herman is an enterprising criminal. He’s been around the block.

Jay: [00:38:01] Yes.

Dave: [00:38:01] He can play the game.

Jay: [00:38:02] This is not his first rodeo.

Yeardley: [00:38:05] And from everything we’ve heard so far, this is nobody’s first rodeo. Though one could argue it’s actually Steven’s last rodeo. Yeah, I said it. Detective Jay, thank you so much for assembling all these pieces for us. That is a complicated picture, but you have painted it beautifully. Thank you for joining us.

Jay: [00:38:30] Thank you.

Yeardley: [00:38:31] Stay tuned Small Town Fam for Part 2 coming next week.

[00:38:39] Small Town Dicks is produced by Gary Scott and Yeardley Smith, and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Gary Scott, and me, Yeardley Smith. Our associate producers are Erin Gaynor and the Real Nick Smitty. Our music is composed by John Forest. Our editors extraordinaire are Logan Heftel and Soren Begin, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Dan: [00:39:07] If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, visit us on our website at smalltowndicks.com. And join the Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from you.

Dave: [00:39:23] And if you support us on Patreon, your subscription will give you access to exclusive content and merchandise that isn’t available anywhere else. Go to patreon.com/smalltowndickspodcast.

Yeardley: [00:39:35] That’s right. Your subscription also makes it possible for us to keep going to small towns across the country-

Dan: [00:39:41] -in search of the finest-

Dave: [00:39:42] -rare-

Dan: [00:39:43] -true crime cases told as always, by the detectives who investigated them.

Dave: [00:39:48] So, thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:39:50] Nobody’s better than you.

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