Dave: [00:00:22] This crime scene, right as you walk in this department at Patty’s house is this recliner within a couple of steps of the front door. She’s facing away from the front door towards the television in the living room, and this rock is laying on her upper body. She’s got devastating physical trauma to her head and her face, and there’s blood cast off on the ceiling, there’s blood cast off on the wall, so there’d be a fly on the wall and watch what he did to her. It would have been vicious.

Yeardley: [00:01:01] 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: [00:01:26] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:01:27] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:01:28] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:01:29] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:01:32] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:01:34] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Dan: [00:01:44] 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: [00:02:13] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. I’m very excited. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:02:20] Awesome to be here.

Yeardley: [00:02:22] Awesome to have you. And we have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:02:25] Good afternoon.

Yeardley: [00:02:26] Always so happy to see you.

Dave: [00:02:27] Likewise.

Yeardley: [00:02:28] And we are thrilled to welcome back one of our favorite and frequent guests, Sergeant David.

David: [00:02:35] Nice to be back.

Yeardley: [00:02:36] We are so pleased to see you, sir.

David: [00:02:37] Well, thank you.

Yeardley: [00:02:38] Thank you, and you always bring us incredibly interesting and intricate cases. So, please tell us how this one came to you.

David: [00:02:47] This case happened back in 2003. Originally, we got called to the scene from a case worker, her name was Tiffany, called for the victim whose name was Patty Woods. I had not heard from her for a while, and Tiffany would check on Patty periodically and make sure she was taking her medications and following procedures. She was living in a small little apartment where she needed assistance a little bit.

Yeardley: [00:03:12] Why does Patty have a case worker? Is she disabled?

David: [00:03:16] She has some disabilities. She’s pretty obese and takes a lot of medications. Basically, it’s kind of a shut in. She was somebody who was getting service from the county where they’d come out and see her at least weekly and make sure that she was doing what she was supposed to be doing as far as her health. They hadn’t heard from her, which was unusual for them. And so, Tiffany called her several times, got no answer, and then finally went out to her apartment.

[00:03:42] Her apartment was a single-story apartment. It has a front door and a back door and then a back porch. The front door was locked. So, she went around the back and the back door was unlocked, which was unusual too, because she said that Patty never used the back, because she wasn’t really that mobile. It was the yard and some other things back there. But when she went in the door, she could see that Patty was all the way reclined on her chair in the front room, this little small apartment, and that she was “obviously deceased,” is what she told the dispatcher. Patrol officer initially went out there. As soon as they got there, they called for the detective division to come out, and I went straight out there. I was the first detective on the scene.

Yeardley: [00:04:22] Even though, Patty, the victim, was clearly deceased, a detective was called in, because you automatically have to determine what the circumstances are?

Dave: [00:04:32] No. So, patrol gets sent out to dead bodies often. So, to prompt a response by the detectives, there’s got to be some things that are fairly obvious. Trauma or suspicious circumstances where the patrol guy’s going, “This doesn’t feel right. Let me get the detectives who can really devote the time and the attention to this.” So, this would have been a case where right when the officer sees the body, sees Patty, he goes, “Okay. That’s not self-inflicted. She’s got injuries. I’m calling the detectives in.”

Yeardley: [00:05:05] I see.

David: [00:05:06] When I got there, we went in real quick to look around. Looked at Patty’s body, she was all the way reclined in a recliner. Right on her left shoulder was a large rock, and she had several obvious blows and trauma to her head and actually had bled out all the way across the top of her upper body, and the rock itself that were all encased in really coagulated, dried blood.

Yeardley: [00:05:28] Oh, my God.

David: [00:05:29] And her skin, she’d been dead probably for three to four days, I’d estimate at that point. [unintelligible [00:05:34] was the first time anyone had found her.

Yeardley: [00:05:36] So, the smell too. You guys always talk about the smell.

David: [00:05:39] The smell in this case is, it wasn’t bad as long as you weren’t right next to her, but we knew as soon as we moved her, it would be bad.

Dave: [00:05:47] There’s lividity. The blood has settled in this body, the way she’s laying. So, the blood goes to the lowest point. In this case, she’s suspended in the air by this recliner. So, she bleeds out from the wounds and the blood settles to her back and her legs. In this case, I remember seeing her body and her skin because of the lividity and the pooling of the blood, it looked like marble. You can see the veins, but there’s no color to her skin. It’s pale white.

Yeardley: [00:06:17] Oh.

David: [00:06:17] They actually referred as marbling when they’re in that state of precursors or decomposition is what it is. The rock that was laying next to her was similar to a whole bunch of decorative rocks that were right next to the back porch, and it obviously came from that group. So, the theory was, whoever was there, either got the rock on the way in or during the time they were meeting there, got the rock, and came in and took care of business. One of the things we did find at the scene was a six pack of beer that had two or three gone out of it and looks like it was sitting out, like, it had been out, like, they were drinking it.

Dave: [00:06:54] I remember there was a bowl of half-eaten oatmeal or cereal with a cigarette butt in it in the kitchen.

David: [00:07:00] Yes.

Dave: [00:07:02] My understanding is Patty didn’t smoke.

David: [00:07:04] Patty didn’t smoke, and the brand of cigarettes were Camels. We took the cigarette butts, obviously, to get them DNAed. So, we secured the crime scene, and I was the lead detective in this case, and so I want to start figuring out who’s the last person to see her alive. We assigned people to start talking to everyone in the apartment complex, and one of the people in the complex had said, “There’s a guy that comes over here every now and then, and his name’s Joey.” They didn’t know his last name. And we started to ask around some of the other people in the neighborhood, and then finally came to someone who said, “Oh, Joey’s her cousin.”

Yeardley: [00:07:38] So, Joey comes over to– [crosstalk]

David: [00:07:40] Patty’s house, occasionally. And Patty and Joey, we find out, have the same last name of Woods. But throughout this investigation, Joey would refer to himself as her cousin, but we were never able to establish that. In fact, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think he was telling people that she was her cousin, because he was basically mooching off of her, and trying to take things from her, in money wise and drug wise and whatever else conveniences he had.

[00:08:06] When we ran Joey Woods, we found out that he was convicted sex offender. He had been arrested for molesting a minor child. He wasn’t to be around children. His registration address for a sex offender registry was the mission, which is where transients live. So, he basically had no home at that point. So, in the interim, we also found her phone. And so, we started looking to the last people that she had called and who was on that phone. One of the numbers on the phone was a phone number that also had called in and left messages.

Yeardley: [00:08:37] For Patty?

David: [00:08:38] Yes. The messages were from a female, and they were not really threatening, but they were basically, “You had to stay away from my property and the people that I know.” There was a lot of vulgarity and a lot of cussing and that kind of thing. It wasn’t a cell phone that it came from. So, we actually ran the phone numbers that the call came from, and it came back to the apartment manager’s office at an apartment complex that was probably about 10 blocks away.

Yeardley: [00:09:03] From Patty’s place?

David: [00:09:04] Yeah. We contact the phone number and we talked to a person who said, “Yeah, that’s the number for the office, but we’ve just fired our manager because of some bad phone calls whose name was Laura.” He didn’t have a contact place for Laura at that point, but she said she’s still got stuff here and she’s moving out, and she said she was moving to another city where she’s got another job, apparently, managing apartments. In the conversation with that manager for those apartments, we found out that Laura had a boyfriend and it was Joey. So, Joey Woods is Laura’s boyfriend, and apparently has the same last name as Patty Woods.

[00:09:43] So, now we’re going to start looking for both of them, and we find out that Joey’s parole officer is somebody who we’ve dealt with a lot. We contacted her, and she told us that Joey checks in every Wednesday and has never missed one since he’d been out of prison. He got out of prison four months earlier than this incident happened. So, he’s supposed to show up there on a Wednesday, and this was on, I think, a Monday that we had found the body. And so, Detective Don and I, we were working together at the time, went out and staked outside of his parole officer’s office. Like I said, she told us he had never missed appointments, he’d been out. But today, on Wednesday, two days after the murder, he didn’t show up. No word from him, know anything.

[00:10:27] The parole officer didn’t have a cell phone number. Joey is supposed to be at the mission. So, we had other detectives go out to the mission to find out if he’s actually staying there, because they keep a really good record of who’s staying there at the time. You have to sign in and sign out when you’re there, and you have to be at a certain time or they won’t let you in. And Joey had been there since he’d been out of prison, probably about three times is all, and he hadn’t been there at all.

Yeardley: [00:10:49] Is the mission like a halfway house kind of thing? What is the set up there?

Dan: [00:10:53] It’s a homeless shelter, basically, and you got to abide by some very basic rules. You can’t use drugs or alcohol, and you have chores that you have to do when you’re there.

Dave: [00:11:03] Right. There’s a cut off time to check in and there’s a cut off time to check out in the morning.

Yeardley: [00:11:07] Okay.

David: [00:11:08] Also, a little bit more about Joey, we did some more research about his past. We found out he’d been acquitted for stabbing someone before he got arrested for his sex offense. In the research to that, we found the victim in that case, and he basically refused to testify, because he got put in jail with Joey after the stabbing for something else and was threatened so much by Joey that he didn’t testify truthfully or testify hardly at all, actually.

Yeardley: [00:11:32] So, they put Joey stabbing victim in the same jail as him?

Dan: [00:11:36] That’s actually pretty common in our area, especially when these guys run in these circles. It sounds like when the victim got to jail, Joey may have leveraged him a little bit, and the victim became maybe not so willing to aid in the prosecution of Joey. Where we work, we call that tampering with a witness.

David: [00:11:57] Exactly. So, they ended up acquitting Joey for that incident. He later gets arrested for the sex offense. In the research into him, he’s a small-time punk who likes methamphetamine, likes to hurt people, and got an aggravate problem. And so, we deal with those people all the time. So, there’s unfortunately an abundance of them around here. So, we’re looking for him and friends of his who might know where he’s at and we’re also looking for Laura, his girlfriend.

[00:12:24] We end up finding out that Laura is just now moving into the apartment complex in the other city. So, we sent detectives up there, actually, to find her, and they didn’t find her there, but they did find a manager and ask where she was, and she says, “Well, she’s in the process of moving in right now.” We find out through him that she’s with Joey. He said, “She’s with the guy that’s helping her move.” We showed a picture of Joey to him. “So, yeah, it’s the guy she’s with.” So, in the interim where we have those people watching for them to show back up at the apartment, because they’re in the process of moving, we get a warrant for Joey’s arrest for parole violation, for missing his parole meeting. And so, we have a reason to pick him up. The idea is we’re going to find them together, arrest him on the warrant, and then separate them and talk to him about where they’ve been during this period of time when Patty was murdered.

Yeardley: [00:13:13] And Laura, she doesn’t have any warrants out for her?

David: [00:13:17] No.

Yeardley: [00:13:17] Did you say she’s a drug user as well?

David: [00:13:19] Yeah, she’s got some small entries for possession of meth and some things like that. No violent crimes or anything like that.

Yeardley: [00:13:26] And about how old are all these people?

David: [00:13:28] Well, Joey is much younger than both Laura and Patty. Much younger, like, probably close to 15 to 20 years younger than them.

Yeardley: [00:13:35] Oh.

David: [00:13:36] Like I said, Patty is a shut in and Laura is like an old original tweaker who’s started to clean up her life a little bit, but not much.

Yeardley: [00:13:45] And sort of in her 50s?

David: [00:13:47] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:13:47] Yeah? Okay.

David: [00:13:49] One of the things about people like Joey, he’s looking for someplace that the path at least resists, someplace where he can stay and be the boss of the house, but not have to be responsible for the bills, and the food, and everything like that. He’s basically a leech, and he’s looking for easy targets, and that’s what Patty certainly was, and Laura kind of was too.

Yeardley: [00:14:10] How did they become friends, I wonder, Joey and Patty?

David: [00:14:13] Well, we found out one of his ex-cell mates, when he was in prison, had actually introduced him to Patty when he got out of prison as a place he could go and hang out. Joey didn’t like Santa Mission, because, like I said, there’s rules, like, you got to be in time and you can’t be high and all these other things, and he just doesn’t want to be there. So, he’s looking for someplace to hang out and stay without his parole officer really knowing where he is, and someone to feed him and keep him warm, I guess. But he’s total user.

Dan: [00:14:39] We actually come across guys like this quite a bit in our line of work. They use people, they will manipulate them to get everything that they want out of them, and then they move on.

Yeardley: [00:14:50] Ugh, that’s dark.

David: [00:15:05] One of the other things that happened was, we actually got Joey’s food stamp card activity and we had found out that he was recently making purchases right near the apartment complex in the other city. We also looked at places he had been buying things in and around the time we figured Patty was murdered. We did find that he had made one purchase at a Deli downtown in this city. We sent people out to get video of that. In that case, they got video of him and Laura together buying a meat box at that time.

Yeardley: [00:15:38] A meat box? What’s a meat box?

Dan: [00:15:41] Box of meat, like, assorted meats.

Yeardley: [00:15:44] [laughs] Okay.

David: [00:15:48] This was actually four days before the murder. So, we have detectives in the other city waiting for them. There’s a couple of things we wanted to do. We wanted to get any kind of clothing that they might have been wearing, if they were both present at this murder, particularly Joey’s, because he was transitory, so he’d probably be keeping all of his clothes with him. We also wanted to separate him, interview him, since it was our case. Well, these two detectives that were up there, find out that they’re there, and they called myself and Detective Don. In the interim, when they call us to come up there 60 miles away, somehow Joey and Laura get in a car and drive away-

Yeardley: [00:16:23] No.

David: [00:16:24] -and are lost.

Yeardley: [00:16:25] [gasps]

Dave: [00:16:26] How’d you take that, Sergeant David?

David: [00:16:28] Not very well.

[laughter]

David: [00:16:31] It was a team of people that have a– I guess, it’s my fault for putting them there, because they have a reputation of not being good followers.

Dave: [00:16:38] Wait a minute.

Yeardley: [00:16:39] Were you one of those, Dave?

Dave: [00:16:41] Ah, there’s a certain team of investigators among detectives that are more cautious when following people to the point that you lose sight of them. We’re ineffective, we fuck it up.

David: [00:16:55] Yeah. What he’s trying to tell you is, is they’re sex crime detectives and they’re not used to actually going out and looking for people. They never work dope or they never work something where you have to be sneaky. The littlest sneaky thing that someone else does throws them off.

[laughter]

Dave: [00:17:12] There’s so much evidence to support what he’s saying that I’m just going to shut up.

Yeardley: [00:17:16] [laughs]

David: [00:17:18] So, Detective Don and I drive all the way up there only to find out there’s nobody home. We talk to the management of this other city and they say, “No, they left.”

Yeardley: [00:17:26] Laura and Joey have flown the coop?

David: [00:17:28] They’ve flown the coop.

Yeardley: [00:17:29] Have they taken everything with them as well?

David: [00:17:31] Not yet. What happened was the manager had fired her, because they don’t like the fact that the police are already talking about this new manager they have, “You haven’t been here one day and the cops are already up here looking for you. That’s not what we want here at this apartment complex,” which is a smart move on his part, because both these people would have just been bringing the cops. But their stuff was still there. So, we figured they were somewhere and we watched the store, we put the two stellar detectives that lost this person [Yeardley giggles] on the store where he had last used his food stamp card, thinking maybe they would show back up to buy something, and that was a lost cause. After 12 hours, we gave up.

[00:18:06] We told the management, “If she shows back up to get her stuff, please call us.” So, we came back, did more research, and found out that Laura, her mother, lived in city next to ours and lived in a retirement facility that was right next to a shopping center and that she frequented there. So, we sent officers over there to find out if she was there. Found out she had recently been there. The mother said that she was with Joey and they had gone back up to the other city to get her property out of the job that she never started. So, again, we’re back up to the other city, and watching this place, and this is two days after the murder. At this point, we finally find Laura up at the apartment complex in their city and have an opportunity to talk to her.

[00:18:51] Detective Don initially talks to her. At that time, we’re trying to get where she’s been the last few days in and around the murder, and who she’s been with, and whether or not she even knows Joey, if she’ll admit to that or not. She does. She ends up telling us that she knows Joey, and she actually knows Patty, and she knows Patty through Joey. We asked her about the evil messages she left on Patty’s phone number and she said, “Well, I was actually looking for Joey. That phone that he gave me the phone number for Joey said was his.” He ended up being a situation where he had basically con Patty into letting him have that phone and use it. It was actually her phone, but he wanted to act like it was his, so he could do whatever else he was doing.

Yeardley: [00:19:35] Good God.

David: [00:19:36] Another thing that Laura told us is she’d actually stayed the night one time at Patty’s apartment with Joey, and it caused a lot of friction.

Yeardley: [00:19:44] Patty thought that maybe Joey was interested in her or she wanted Joey to be interested in her?

David: [00:19:50] I think Joey, when he was by himself, showed interest in Patty to get what he wanted from her.

Yeardley: [00:19:56] I see.

Dave: [00:19:57] He’s playing the game.

Dan: [00:19:58] Manipulating her.

Yeardley: [00:19:59] Gross.

David: [00:20:01] I’m not so sure Laura wouldn’t be right in there with him to get something out of her at some point, because this person’s getting disability checks. These guys would mooch the money off her anytime they could.

Yeardley: [00:20:11] Now, Patty is taking prescription medications. Is she also a meth user?

David: [00:20:17] We actually never established that, but she was trading her Xanax for marijuana a lot of times to Joey, according to Laura, actually. We didn’t find that out. But whatever Joey told Patty or Laura was probably a lie, because he couldn’t tell the truth if he tried to. So, the good thing about us talking to Laura is we can get a sketch in and around the time we found Patty’s body, if they were together and what they were doing. One of the interesting things we found out was that when Laura called Patty and left this big, vicious message, Laura had called the phone thinking she was going to get Joey and actually got Patty, and Patty said, “This is my phone. He was just using it.” Then she went off and just basically motherfucked her about having her boyfriend’s phone and said, “You better leave him alone,” and basically, made some threatening messages, which in the murder case is a big deal,-

Yeardley: [00:21:05] Yes.

David: [00:21:05] -because it establishes motive, obviously. Well, Patty knew that Laura was the manager of these apartments that were 10 blocks away. So, she calls back to talk to the boss of these apartments and then plays the recording of the messages. When Patty played those messages for Laura’s boss, that’s when Laura got fired, and that was actually about four days before the murder. So, Joey comes over to Laura’s apartment and finds out that she’s been fired. So, according to Laura, Joey says, “You know, that bitch, Patty’s ruining everything for us.” He says, “I got to go somewhere,” and takes off on his bicycle.

[00:21:47] So, he’s gone for several hours at that time. According to Laura, he comes back later that night, and he basically tells her that Patty won’t bother us anymore. She’s minimizing what she really knows at that point, and she says, she’ll take a polygraph. We leave it at that. In the interim of when we’re doing this, Laura tells us that Joey is actually at her mother’s house in a town next to ours. We ask her, “Does Joey have any property up here?” And she says, “Well, yeah, there’s his bag of clothes over there.” So, they’re moving out. We get a warrant to seize his bag of clothes, and then bring it back, and we get a warrant to search at some point.

[00:22:28] So, we have surveillance in the area where her mother’s living, and we also have a warrant for Joey. Pretty soon, Joey comes out of the complex where her mother lives and goes to a nearby store. Conveniently, it was time when Detective Don and I were coming back, and we were able to go over there, and grab him at the counter of the store and arrest him.

Yeardley: [00:22:50] Awesome.

Dave: [00:22:51] Do you guys call the sex crimes detectives for cover on that?

[laughter]

David: [00:22:56] You guys wouldn’t have seen him go in there.

[laughter]

David: [00:22:59] Anyway, now we have him in custody, and we bring him back to the station to interview him. Basically, the interview starts out where you’ve been living, because he thinks it’s a violation of his parole. We’re not talking anything about Patty or Laura. He tells us he’d been the mission every night since he’s been out prison. Every night. “Do you have a girlfriend?” “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.” “Where have you been?” “Just a mission.” I said, “Well, where were you right now?” “Because I was just walking.” He just lies about everything. Then we start hitting him with stuff that we know, and we ask him about Laura. “Is Laura your girlfriend?” “No.” I said, “When was the last time you were with her?” He goes, “I don’t know.” He just blows it off completely.

[00:23:41] So, we start showing him with her at the Deli and he lies about that. Then we ask him if he knows Patty, and he denies it originally, he doesn’t know her. I said, “What would you say if I said that somebody saw you smoking on her back porch about four days before she was murdered,” which was a lie. He goes, “Where’s that at? What street is it on?” Because he wanted to see if I really knew where I was at. When I tell him, he goes, “Well, I guess, I do know her, yeah, but I don’t ever go over there.” I said, “Well, why did you get seen on her back porch?” “Well, I don’t remember being on her back porch.” So, he’s denying stuff that we already obviously know.

[00:24:21] Laura also told us that he told Laura that he went over to Patty’s house, got money for beer from her, rode his bike down to get beer, and then came back to her house, and basically took care of her. But she denied knowing what that meant. While this is all going on, we’re able to get video of him at a market that’s probably only about four blocks from where Patty lived, actually buying beer. So, something’s corroborated that night. He’s out and about, he’s not with Laura, he’s probably in between Laura’s and Patty’s on his bike. He’s lying about everything when we’re talking about anything and everything. Even when we confront him with these pictures of him with Laura, and, “We got you on the video buying beer, where were you going that night?” He doesn’t remember any of that.

[00:25:08] Then at one point, I asked him, “Do you want to go have smoke?” And he goes, “Sure.” And so, I go, “What do you smoke?” And he goes, “Oh, Marlboro or something like that.” “All I got is Camels.” And he goes, “Oh, that’s actually my brand.”

Yeardley: [00:25:21] Which is the brand of cigarettes you found in Patty’s house?

David: [00:25:24] Yes, that’s what he says. And so, we go out, and we have a smoke, and we come back, and we talk some more, and he is not going to come off anything. He couldn’t tell us when the last time he saw Patty was, but he did know her, but he’d never been on her back porch. He’s only been out of prison for a period of about four or five months. So, there’s really not a lot of history to go back on. He does what a lot of ex-cons do. He’ll talk to you to find out what you know. So, when you start slowly leaking information and asking questions, “Oh, you know that?” And then they’ll find out how much you know about that. When it gets right down to, “Hey, what’d you do to Patty?” That’s when they want a lawyer.

[00:26:01] So, I didn’t want to get to that at this point. I wanted Laura, who had voluntarily said she would take a polygraph about what she knew about this. Detective Don said, “The only question we’re going to ask you is, did you hurt Patty?” And she goes, “Oh, I’ll take that. Yeah, I’ll do that right now.” So, she gets a polygraph scheduled. Joey goes off to jail for his sex offender parole violation at this point, and we bring Laura in for a polygraph.

David: [00:26:38] So, Don was lying to Laura. He said that, “We’re going to ask you, did you hurt Patty?” But then he said, “Do you know who did?” And that’s when she had problems.

Yeardley: [00:26:50] So, Detective Don changes one important question to Laura to get a genuine reaction from her?

David: [00:26:56] Yes.

Dave: [00:26:57] So, I’m guessing Laura passes on the did you hurt Patty, but fails on the do you know who did?

David: [00:27:02] Yes. Comes back inconclusive.

Yeardley: [00:27:04] Does inconclusive always mean you’re not telling the truth?

Dave: [00:27:08] No.

Yeardley: [00:27:08] No. Does it ever come back you’re lying?

Dave: [00:27:10] Yeah. We get inconclusives when people are doing what we call countermeasures, where they’re consciously altering their breathing, which messes with the instrument. These people get on google and start researching, how do I beat a polygraph? Because they’re already anticipating that they’re going to have to lie about the target of the investigation. So, they already know they’re going to have to lie to beat this, but they want to appear cooperative, so they take the polygraph. But now they’re like, “I need some tools to help me defeat this instrument.” And polygraphers all know about that. But there’s this point where they do these things to defeat the polygraph that makes the results inconclusive rather than a fail.

Yeardley: [00:27:49] I see.

David: [00:27:50] That’s a big process when you actually take a polygraph. A lot of times, if you tell them what the question is going to be, that’s going to be real specific, because you know something about that case, but then you put something in like, “Do you know who did?” That’s a big question for me. I didn’t think she did it, but I know she did know who did it.

Yeardley: [00:28:07] Right.

David: [00:28:08] So, in this case, she got told before the test what the questions were going to be. There’s a whole pretest thing that they do. I think she was so confident about that I didn’t do it. So, she thought, “Well, I’ll just ride through it and try to do my best on the other one.” After they don’t do well on it, there’s a follow up interview right there. I’m like, “Hey, you didn’t do so well or you failed. Here’s your chance to clean that up.”

Yeardley: [00:28:29] Was she receptive to trying to clean up that inconclusive mess?

David: [00:28:33] The next day, I get a phone call from her and she goes, “I have some things I forgot to tell you.”

Yeardley: [00:28:37] [giggles]

David: [00:28:39] That’s when we went back up and re interviewed her. She basically says, “The night that Joey was over there, he showed up, they were going to have some dinner, and he goes, ‘I got to go somewhere for a while.’ He’s gone for a couple of hours. He comes back to the apartment, and not only do you say he took care of Patty, but he said he killed her and how he did it.”

Yeardley: [00:29:00] Oh. And this is the same night that Laura told Joey about the phone call Patty made to Laura’s boss, which got Laura fired, right? Yes?

David: [00:29:10] Yeah. We had never told anyone how Patty was killed, but Laura said that he told her that he went over there, talked to her. She was sitting in her chair. He bumped some money off her to get some beer and some cigarettes, and she didn’t have enough for both, so he was pissed off about that. And then he wanted to confront her about calling the apartment complex and getting Laura in trouble and asked her why she had done that. She said, “I’m not going to talk about that. So, if you’re over here to talk about this, go.” Patty’s on oxygen. She’s reclined her chair. The way this apartment was set up, she’s facing away from the kitchen, and the kitchen is where you go out to the back porch.

[00:29:48] He went out to the back porch to have a smoke, and he picks up a rock and he said, “I hit her in the head with it once.” Joey told Laura that the first thing she said, “Oh, Joey, what are you doing?” So, he goes, “I just kept hitting her. She just started gurgling, and then I just left the rock and I left.” Those are exact details of what happened. So, there’s only two things that could have happened. Laura did it or Joey was telling the truth to her. Laura said, “At the time, I didn’t want to believe it. I just said, ‘No, you didn’t, Joey. No, you didn’t.’ He just laughed and got up and made something to eat and came back.” They spent the night together that night.

Yeardley: [00:30:26] Oh, my God.

Dave: [00:30:27] This crime scene right as you walk in this apartment at Patty’s house, is this recliner within a couple of steps of the front door? She’s facing away from the front door towards the television in the living room, and this rock is laying on her upper body. She’s got devastating physical trauma to her head and her face, and there’s blood cast off on the ceiling, there’s blood cast off on the wall. So, to be a fly on the wall and watch what Joey did to her, it would have been vicious. Really vicious.

Yeardley: [00:31:03] How many blows did she sustain?

David: [00:31:06] The autopsy showed that she’d been struck at least seven times to her skull with this rock. The rock was probably the size of– I would say it’s probably like an iron. It’s pretty good size, and it’s really rough material. So, when we submitted all the things to the lab, one of the things we did find when we did the search warrant, we got all of Joey’s clothing and we sent them to the lab to find out if there was any blood from Patty on them. We also wanted this rock. It was covered with coagulated blood, just like really thick and dried on there. But I was told no, but I still believe this to this day that there’s no way that Joey’s skin cells can’t be on that rock, because you’re picking up something rough.

[00:31:45] I was told by the lab that, even if they were, they’d be destroyed by the blood that’s on in which they’d be actually held in place, I think. It’s just up them to separate it out. I know for a fact that it can be done. I refuse to believe that it can. I was really frustrating that they wouldn’t do that. But one of the good things was one of the cigarettes butts we found in the cereal bowl had Joey’s DNA on it. We also found a tank top undershirt in his dirty clothes that we’ve seized from the apartment in the other town. On the shoulder strap, we found blood that belonged to Patty.

Yeardley: [00:32:24] I should think it would be an incredibly messy crime. Is that the only bit of blood you found on his clothes?

David: [00:32:30] Well, that is, because we found out from Laura that he had brought clothes over and laundered him that night, but it still doesn’t get all the blood out sometimes. He thrown away the clothes that he actually had on a lot of them, but thought no, it didn’t soak through my undershirt, but it obviously did. So, we had that good evidence. But Joey never did take responsibility for this, ever.

Yeardley: [00:32:53] Ever?

David: [00:32:53] No.

Yeardley: [00:32:54] Did this go to trial?

David: [00:32:56] It did not go to trial, but what happened was, because of Laura leaving the evil messages on Patty’s phone number and being a low-life herself, the DAs office looks at this and says, “Well, she had motive to do it too. She could have done this or they could have got someone else to do it.” Discounting all of this DNA evidence on Joey’s shirt, the DNA evidence on the cigarette, and we can put him at the crime scene in and about the time with video. And the absolute chronological order of things that happened according to Laura. But the DA’s office, who should be acting as a prosecutor acts like a defense attorney and says, “Well, she could have done all that too, and just said, he did it.”

Dave: [00:33:39] Right. He didn’t confess and a defense attorney is going to go, “They just want reasonable doubt.” So, they point the finger at Laura and say, “She’s the one who had the motivation to kill Patty, not Joey.”

Dan: [00:33:51] This really emphasizes how important that rock is in the DNA evidence that’s on that rock.

David: [00:33:57] That’s exactly right, because when I have found out the way that the district attorney’s office, we were looking at this, not looking at this as a straight murder, which is exactly what it was. We were trying all kinds of things to send this rock off to some other lab and everything. We just got shut down by it. And Joey, like I said, never said a word. He let everybody else go down for him if he could, and they offered him a manslaughter plea for this thing. How you get manslaughter after hitting someone seven times in the head with a rock is beyond me. It’s a much lesser prison sense exposure, obviously, but ultimately, Joey pleads guilty, but takes an Alford plea, which an Alford plea, you know what that is?

Yeardley: [00:34:37] Yes, we’ve talked about it.

David: [00:34:38] Yeah. He goes in and says, “I didn’t do this, but they have enough evidence to maybe I get found guilty. So, I’m going to plead guilty.” To me, if you didn’t do something, there should be no such thing as an Alford plea.

Yeardley: [00:34:49] It does seem completely contradictory. Either you plead guilty because you did it. You don’t get to say I didn’t do it, but I plead guilty. I don’t know how you square that.

Dave: [00:34:59] There’s no accountability. You need the admission from this person, “Okay, I’m guilty, I killed that person.” Alford plea says, “I’m not saying I did it. I’m just saying that the state has enough evidence to prove to a jury that I did it.” It’s a cop out.

Yeardley: [00:35:13] It’s a total cop out. It means after the fact, now that you’ve shown me your hand, I’m not going to show you mine. That is not right.

David: [00:35:22] There’s two things that can happen that suspects can do to do something redeeming in a case, and one is take responsibility and try to explain why they did it in some way or else give some sort of closure to the families of the victims. One of the things about victims and their families who are people who have been killed, they always have questions. If somebody goes up there and answers those questions, even if they’re not what you want to hear, it helps those people cope with it, I think. When you have somebody get up there and say, “I’m going to go to prison for 10 years for killing your mom or your sister or whatever you are, but I didn’t really do it.” Then they go, “Who did?” They’re sitting there going, “Who did?”

[00:36:02] Hopefully, they can look at the evidence like a reasonable person and say, “Well, obviously you did it. This is just some kind of lawyer bull crap that you’re pulling.” To people with common sense, and I guess, without a law degree to make you so enlightened, they don’t understand this. I don’t understand this.

Yeardley: [00:36:16] I don’t understand it.

David: [00:36:17] No, I don’t either, and I’ve been a cop for 35 years.

Yeardley: [00:36:21] Right.

David: [00:36:22] So, [chuckles] we don’t come across it much. But when you did in a case like this, it was like, “You got to be kidding me.” There’s nothing accidental about bashing someone’s head into the rock seven times.

Yeardley: [00:36:32] Yeah, nothing.

Dave: [00:36:44] You’ll love this. Joey’s not in prison right now.

Yeardley: [00:36:48] What?

Dave: [00:36:49] He’s out. He’s already served his sentence.

Yeardley: [00:36:52] What was the sentence?

Dave: [00:36:53] 10 years.

Yeardley: [00:36:54] So, he’s out?

David: [00:36:55] He’s recently out. Yeah, again. And I guarantee he’ll reoffend. He’s a dangerous person. Anyone who has sex with little kids and murders shut in people. He’s a total wolf. He’s out there just trying to find the easiest victim that he can find and victimize him in any way he can for his own good, whether it’s his sexual satisfaction, whether it’s someone to make him a dinner, whether it’s a warm place to sleep, so he don’t had to go and sleep in the mission. If they cross him, look out.

Dan: [00:37:23] We have a sex offender registry. Yeardley brought this up one time, and it actually blew my mind. She said, “Why isn’t there a, ‘I’ve killed somebody registry?'” I think it’s a great idea. This guy is a perfect candidate for it.

David: [00:37:37] But the argument would be, “I took an Alford plea. So, I don’t think I really killed anybody.”

Dan: [00:37:42] True.

David: [00:37:43] They treated Laura almost like a codefendant. Anytime the district has codefendant state, where you charge someone with the same crime like a robbery, “I drove and I didn’t even know it was happening. And then he came and told me that he did it,” and you’re both charged with it, those kind of things.

Yeardley: [00:37:55] You’re both complicit.

David: [00:37:56] Yeah, you’re both complicit, but if you’re a codefendant with someone. They don’t want to hear it. They treated her like it. There was no evidence whatsoever that she was ever there when it happened.

Dan: [00:38:05] And it’s all because of this phone message.

David: [00:38:07] Yeah. And Laura wasn’t. She was actually really trying to get a legitimate job. At least she was putting a roof over her head. Joey wasn’t even coming close to doing that. He’s just running around mooching off people and victimizing people. To me, when you murder somebody, I don’t know how you’re ever out of parole. That’s the way it is. You can get 25 years to life. I guess, 25 years and at the end of the day, you can get out. It’s frustrating, because not only did he kill this person, but he is what I call a purebred criminal. There’s no redemption for this guy. He is going to do this all the time. Police officers, we have that, should have that innate drive in us to keep people safe.

[00:38:44] When you take someone like that off the street and you realize, “I didn’t keep people safe just for a little while from that person.” Then for the state, they look at someone went to jail for killing someone, and then you did your due diligence, wherever you want to call it, put him in jail, and he comes out and kills someone else. “What have you done?” I realize people have rights and that if they’ve done their time, they’re done. But I think in this case that there was a cop out to take less time and they should have went for murder, because that’s what he did. He’s got such a horrible past, why are you giving this guy another chance to do something else? Not only is he a killer, but he’s also a sex offender.

Dave: [00:39:20] Right. Joey’s a sex offender. What do we know about them? They groom people. So, he’s going to tell Patty and Laura, whatever they want to hear, he’s going to play the game and he’s going to get stuff out of it, money, credit cards, a place to sleep, etc.

David: [00:39:37] To them, to a criminal, it’s anonymous place to sleep. It’s not really his address and nobody really knows about it. So, whatever he goes out and does, being a registered sex offender, he didn’t live there. No one’s going to find him there.

Dan: [00:39:49] It’s a reason why we have laws in our state that if you are in violation of your sex offender registry, that it’s automatic, you go to jail, because they have to be accountable and we have to know where they’re at. You can’t game the system by doing what Joey’s doing.

Yeardley: [00:40:05] Was Patty known to be a person who liked to help people out? So, they already knew she was an easy target in that way or just because she was a shut in, she didn’t have a lot of people looking in on her?

Dan: [00:40:16] Well, I’m guessing, that guy that was in jail with Joey knew that she was receptive to somebody coming over and presenting themselves as, “Hey, I’m going to help you out,” and probably directed Joey.

Dave: [00:40:28] Yeah. “Hey, when you get out, I’ve got a friend in this town, and you should get in contact with her.”

David: [00:40:33] One of the things about prison is you learn to be a master manipulator. That’s what they do. They do that in prison. When they get out, they do the same thing. So, they can find someone who’s lonely, who is vulnerable to that kind of stuff, and manipulate them think, “I’ll be your friend I’ll work around your place. I just got out of prison. I know and I’m going to do better.” Then they develop a relationship with these people and then they start using them. They use them for their food, they use them for their shelter, they use them for everything. But this other person, the Pattys are going to get nothing out of relationship except heartache. They’re going to use her as long as it takes to get to the next person up the line to use. There’s going to be nothing genuine in their relationships after that.

Yeardley: [00:41:14] So, he got 10 years and that Alford plea for manslaughter. Did he get anything tacked on for his violation of his sex offender parole?

David: [00:41:25] No, they ran it all concurrent.

Dave: [00:41:27] Getting arrested for failing to register as a sex offender, depending on what condition you violated about your registry, it could be a misdemeanor, where you would only get a few days in jail. So, even the highest-level felony you could get from failure to register as a sex offender, it would be presumptive probation. You’re not going to go to prison for it.

Yeardley: [00:41:48] Oh.

David: [00:41:49] The funny thing about the political end of that is making this mandatory registration for sex offenders give people the false feeling that we’re really keeping an eye on these people when they’re out, but that’s BS, because they don’t want to punish you for not registering, they get you out of prison. You’re already a sex offender. If you don’t register and you go try to hide and you get caught, you get brought down. All they really want you to do is bring you into compliance. They don’t really want to do anything about the fact that you’ve done that. I guess, it’s good in the fact that if you’re true to it and we know where you’re at and we can go find you if we need to. But in the reality of it, a lot of them game that system too and they say they live someplace when they don’t. I think it gives people a false sense of security that we have a registration.

Dave: [00:42:32] We deal with this guy the other night on patrol, and it’s this type of situation. It’s a female who allows this guy to be in her life every once in a while, but he is a sex offender, and he knows that he can use this person, and he’s just abusive towards her verbally. I’m not saying that he’s hit her, but he was absolutely destroying her the other night as far as verbally assaultive, putting her in fear, based on his demeanor, he was drunk. We go out to deal with him, he’s a registered sex offender. “Hey, what’s your address?” He knows his address on the sex offender registry. So, he gives it to us and we say, “Well, where’d you spend the night last night?” “Oh, well, I’m just visiting a friend over here.” So, he left the location where we had this dispute, and he walked about five blocks to the other female that he hangs out with, and he couch surfs between these two ladies’ residences. But he knows his sex offender registration address and he’s like, “Yeah, I usually stay over there.”

Yeardley: [00:43:35] Even though he doesn’t.

Dave: [00:43:36] It’s all bullshit. He probably hadn’t stayed at that address in months.

Yeardley: [00:43:40] Wow.

Dave: [00:43:41] It’s frustrating.

David: [00:43:43] For the state to realize that these people are irredeemable enough to make them register, the idea that they’re putting them back out there and there’s really nothing to make them stop doing what they’re doing. This case just shows you the failure of the system. This guy has been in the system his whole life, and he’s just continued to victimize. The other side of that, you’d say, “Well, the system made him into this person.” I don’t believe that. I don’t. His choices made this. The system didn’t make him go out and pick a rock up and raise it seven times and smash a lady’s head who’s just sitting in her recliner.

Dave: [00:44:17] He never got into the system until he had sexually abused somebody. That’s how he got into the system. He earned his way in. I’m sure there are exceptions, but if you can violate somebody sexually, it’s not a leap for you to be able to violate somebody with a rock. This guy’s just an asshole.

Yeardley: [00:44:36] Damn. Wow, Sergeant David, thank you so much. We always love it when you stop by.

David: [00:44:43] You’re welcome. I love being here.

Dan: [00:44:45] Thank you, Sarge.

Dave: [00:44:46] Thank you, Sarge. I’ll go out and work on my surveillance techniques.

[laughter] [music]

Yeardley: [00:45:04] 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: [00:45:32] 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.

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Yeardley: [00:45:59] That’s right. Your subscription also makes it possible for us to keep going to small towns across the country-

Dan: [00:46:05] -in search of the finest-

Dave: [00:46:07] -rare-

Dan: [00:46:07] -true crime cases told as always, by the detectives who investigated them.

Dave: [00:46:12] So, thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:46:15] Nobody’s better than you.

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