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Beth, a successful woman who is now retired, offers to provide her great-grandson with some stability. At first things go well. But Beth soon learns that her strong sense of family has not trickled down to the younger generation and that no good deed goes unpunished.

Special Guest: Detective Robert

Detective Robert has been in law enforcement for over 18 years. He spent nine years on patrol, where he served as a field-training officer (FTO) and an FBI-trained hostage negotiator. He was subsequently promoted to corporal and later to detective. As a new detective, he worked in the crimes against children unit, which investigates sex crimes, serious physical abuse and child homicides. He was later re-assigned to the violent crimes unit, where he continues to serve. He is an active member of his county’s major crimes team, which investigates homicides and officer-involved shootings.

Read Transcript

Robert: [00:00:04] There were signs of a very vigorous struggle. This fight was so violent that what stands out to me is that these suspects were probably very surprised how much force it took to actually kill someone.

Yeardley: [00:00:18] 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: [00:00:44] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:00:45] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:00:45] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:00:47] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:00:49] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:00:52] Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse. 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.

[theme music]

Yeardley: [00:01:30] Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:36] Afternoon.

Yeardley: [00:01:37] Afternoon, sir. And we have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:40] Glad to be here.

Yeardley: [00:01:41] Glad to have you. And we are so pleased to welcome a new guest to the podcast, Detective Robert.

Robert: [00:01:47] Thanks for having me.

Yeardley: [00:01:48] Thank you for coming. So, Detective Robert, before we start, actually, tell us about your jurisdiction. We’d love to get the lay of the land of our detectives. Tell us how many people in your town or county and a little bit about your department.

Robert: [00:02:06] So, I work for a sheriff’s office where we cover about 727 square miles of land. And it’s pretty suburban. So, we’re right up next to a big city. We have a large population about a quarter of a million that live in the unincorporated county area. So, it’s a place where sometimes people call 911, and they expect the big city police department to come, but it’s the sheriff that comes and they don’t even know whether they live in the city or the county. So, we have a pretty large population that we provide law enforcement services for.

Yeardley: [00:02:36] And how many people in your particular agency?

Robert: [00:02:39] So, we have just over 600 employees with about 220 on patrol. We have anywhere between 40 detectives and 50 detectives.

Yeardley: [00:02:47] Oh, that’s quite a lot.

Robert: [00:02:48] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:02:49] Awesome.

Robert: [00:02:49] We’re covering a lot of ground though.

Yeardley: [00:02:51] That’s true.

Robert: [00:02:52] That’s a big area.

Dave: [00:02:53] I’m assuming your detectives are split off into specialized areas. You have the child abuse and sex crimes, person crimes, property crimes, fraud, burglary, that kind of stuff?

Robert: [00:03:03] That’s exactly right.

Yeardley: [00:03:04] And how long have you been with violent crimes?

Robert: [00:03:07] I was on patrol for nine years. I’ve now been a detective just over nine years. The first five years as a detective was in child abuse, and now I’m in violent crimes. So, I guess, that makes it, what, about four years.

Yeardley: [00:03:16] Right. Okay. So, let’s get to it. Tell us how this case came to you.

Robert: [00:03:21] All right. So, at this point, I had never been a lead and I had never been a second. And on this case, a very experienced and awesome detective was selected to be lead, and I was chosen to be the secondary investigator. So, this call begins on Friday night or early into Saturday morning. It was about 03:00 AM, and our 911 center gets a call from a teenage boy named Andy. And Andy tells the dispatcher that he’d been staying at his friend, Jimmy’s house. And he also explains that Jimmy lives with his grandma. And basically, Andy says he was hanging out with Jimmy, and he goes to sleep. He gets woken up by screaming.

[00:04:00] Andy gets so scared by what hears that he barely takes time to slip his shoes on, and he runs out of the house, and he runs down the road, and he’s terrified. Here’s the other thing sometimes about teenagers. They don’t know where they are. They know I was at Jimmy’s house, but they don’t know where they are. He has no idea where he is. And this is a dark, foresty kind of area. It’s a very, very nice, affluent neighborhood. We never go to calls in this neighborhood. You might go to an alarm call on day shift or something, but it’s one of those areas you’re just never there. We had very experienced people coming that were getting lost. So, Andy runs out. He has no idea where he is. He calls 911 and he says, “Please send help. Please send help. I don’t know what’s going on, but please send help.”

[00:04:46] So, it’s graveyard shift. That’s considered a hot call. We’re anxious and eager. Our graveyard crew goes out there, and they’re trying to find Andy, and they can’t find him because he doesn’t know where he is. So, the dispatcher does a great job of trying to guide him. “Hey, I need you to go find a street sign, so you can tell us where you are.” Well, he’s so freaked out that he’s scared to even come out to look for the street sign. So, some motion lights are activated by this house where he’s hiding, and that homeowner calls 911, and that’s how we find Andy.

Yeardley: [00:05:16] Oh. [laughs]

Dave: [00:05:17] For a prowler.

Robert: [00:05:18] Yes, exactly. So, that’s how Andy gets located. The deputy tries to talk to him and calm him down, and all he knows is, “Hey, I was staying at Jimmy’s house. I’m woken up by this screaming, and I ran away.” And the deputy, of course, is, “Well, where’s Jimmy’s house?” And he’s so turned around, he has no idea. And they say, “Well, what’s Jimmy’s last name?” But because Jimmy is a kid, he has a different last name from his great grandma where Jimmy is living. Jimmy, at this point, hadn’t lived in our state for very long, and plus he’s a minor. So, he’s not searchable in any of the databases that we would normally use. We’re not able to search like property records. Like, if he were an adult, we have just a million databases that we could use to find anyone.

Yeardley: [00:06:02] And how old is Andy?

Robert: [00:06:03] Andy’s about 16 years or 17 years. And so, the deputy takes him home and we call it good. He goes to sleep, and then the next morning, it’s now Saturday morning, Andy wakes up he tells his mom what happened the night before, because she was surprised to see him. She says, “Hey, I thought you were spending the night at Jimmy’s house.” And he says, “Well, I was.” And he relates how in the middle of night, he hears screaming. And at this point, he remembers, “Gosh, I think I remember his grandma screaming and calling out to Jimmy for help.” And so, the mom says, “Well, did you go help her?” And he says, “No, I got scared. I barely threw my shoes on and I ran out of the house. I left everything behind.” She said, “Well, I think we should probably call and ask for a welfare check.”

[00:06:49] So, she calls non-emergency dispatch and she requests a welfare check. Andy’s mom knew Beth, who’s Jimmy’s great grandmother who lives at this house. So, patrol goes out to do a welfare check in Beth’s house. It’s a very large house. It’s about 3,000 sq ft. It’s on almost an acre. It sits back from the road with a long driveway. It’s very nice and peaceful, very nice place. So, patrol goes in to do this welfare check, and of course, where possible we try not to kick down doors or break windows. So, we go all the way around the house, and we find a door from the exterior of the house into the garage open, and then we’re able to go into the house without breaking anything.

Yeardley: [00:07:29] Because nobody’s answered.

Robert: [00:07:30] Because no one’s answering. Correct. And the house is immaculate. The upstairs part is immaculate. The common living spaces are immaculate. What they find first is they find a shovel on the floor in the kitchen. We’re not quite sure what to make of that. So, we continue slow clearing this house. We go upstairs, and it’s nice white clean carpet with some blood. There’s not tons, but you can tell that someone has stepped in blood and tracked that out. And so, then we round the corner into the master bedroom. We find Beth deceased in the master bedroom. Beth is a 71-year-old woman. She’s a retired business executive. She’s been very successful in her career. Beth is on the ground. Her face is covered. She is wearing only a t shirt and nothing else. It’s obvious that she’s been pulled from the bed and that there was a very brutal attack on her.

Yeardley: [00:08:27] And do you think her face is covered? I’ve often heard that’s a sign of remorse.

Robert: [00:08:31] Absolutely. Or, it’s a clue to us that the killer may be known to her.

Yeardley: [00:08:36] Yes.

Robert: [00:08:37] It’s obvious from just even the first inspection of the body that this is blunt force trauma to her head. At this point, we know that the murder weapon is a sledgehammer, and that is still in the bedroom. There’s signs with very vigorous struggle, very, very violent struggle where she’s hit in the head, and her chest, her arms, her back with this sledgehammer. She has defensive wounds to her wrist and inner arms. This fight was so violent that what stands out to me is that these suspects were probably very surprised how much force it took to actually kill someone. She put up a fight.

Dave: [00:09:12] It’s so cowardly. I mean, you think about this elderly woman asleep, and the moments before the first swing of this sledgehammer. You kidding me?

Yeardley: [00:09:23] Right.

Robert: [00:09:23] Once we find Beth’s body and we see the crime scene, one thing that is immediately obvious too is that her car is missing from the garage as is her wallet and jewelry. So, there’s like a jewelry box on her dresser and you could tell that stuff’s missing ad it’s ransacked, because again, the rest of the house, this upstairs part is immaculate. So, her neighbors tell us that she is actually a great grandma of Jimmy and they’re wondering, where’s Jimmy? Jimmy’s not here. And by the way, her car is not here, because it’s always parked right there. And of course, that’s the first we know about Jimmy. So, we wonder where Jimmy is too. So, we call his phone. No answer.

[00:10:00] So during our neighborhood canvas, we learned from people that Beth is the best neighbor ever. She’s a retired executive. She’s a hardworking lady. And one of her projects in retirement is to save her great grandson. He’s grown up in a different part of the country. She has put a lot of time and effort and resources to bring him to our state and provide him with opportunities that she thinks that otherwise he’ll never have.

Yeardley: [00:10:25] So, does he live with her now?

Robert: [00:10:27] At this point, yes, he’s lived with her. Not for super long, but he grew up in the suburbs of a large city over 1,000 miles away and not the best environment. So, Jimmy’s mom has had different male figures in her life and he’s grown up with different boyfriends and father figures. Jimmy is very fascinated and very intrigued by the thug life or the gangster life. He has this really romanticized version of wanting to be a gangster. That’s not really his life. He lives in the suburbs of this large city, but every chance he gets, he goes to visit his cousin, Mikey, in this large city. Mikey is that person. Mikey is a thug. Mikey has been arrested. He’s been arrested for burglary, stealing weapons. I think there was a robbery in there. Even at his young age, he’s had a lot of interaction with the criminal justice system.

[00:11:22] And so, Beth, in her retirement, she decides, “I’m going to save Jimmy.” First, she tries to sit down with Jimmy’s mom and say, “Jimmy’s better off with me. Let me bring him to my state, and let me provide him resources and opportunities that you can’t.” And mom says, “No way.” And Beth has quite a bit of financial resources that Jimmy’s mom does not. The situation is weird, because if mom takes Jimmy’s phone away, great grandma sends him a new one overnight.

Yeardley: [00:11:49] Oh, wow.

Robert: [00:11:50] If Jimmy says, “Great grandma, can I have some money?” She’ll send him $1,000. So, mom, you can understand, she says, “It’s really hard for me to parent when this is going on.”

Dave: [00:12:02] Right. You’re circumventing my authority and just making it easy on him.

Robert: [00:12:05] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:12:06] Now, is mom Beth’s granddaughter?

Robert: [00:12:10] So, Jimmy’s dad is Beth’s grandson.

Yeardley: [00:12:14] Got it. So, mom has no blood relation to Beth.

Robert: [00:12:19] Correct.

Yeardley: [00:12:19] And therefore, she might really feel as though, “Who the hell are you, lady? He’s my kid.”

Robert: [00:12:24] Correct.

Yeardley: [00:12:24] Copy.

Robert: [00:12:25] Now, at the same time though, Jimmy’s getting to be more than mom can handle. He’s getting in trouble. He’s skipping school. He’s a frequent runaway. And mom has a baby at this point and she’s like, “You know what, Beth? If you want to [laughs] deal with this, maybe you can deal with this, and you can seek what I’m going through here.” And at some point, Beth travels to that state. She retains an attorney and tries to fight mom for custody of Jimmy. So, it gets really messy. But at some point, Jimmy’s mom says, “All yours.” So, then that’s when Jimmy comes to our state. Because of where Beth lives, she enrolls him at a very nice, affluent high school.

Yeardley: [00:13:03] How does that go?

Robert: [00:13:04] Well, he’s kind of a novelty. So, he’s from this large city in the Midwest. He’s African-American. He is a novelty, and he is instantly on the football team. He has tons of friends. He has all these girls who want to date him. And at the same time, Beth is providing him with literally anything he wants. So, he now has the whole basement of this large house. It’s his living space. Even though there’s multiple rooms, it’s all his. She provides him with a laptop, she provides him with expensive gaming systems, so many new clothes, you would think it was a store down there. I mean, he has all kinds of expensive clothing. Anything he wants, she provides.

[00:13:44] In fact, when we’re looking through the crime scene, one thing that stands out to me is, I remember in the kitchen on the counter was this self-help book on how to interact with teenagers, how to interact with my troubled teenager. It was apparent, not just from what her friends were telling us, but also what we were seeing, how invested she was in saving Jimmy. She has hired the very best of tutors. She has counselors for him. There’s documentation where she personally goes to the school and advocates for him. Everything she can do is trying to make him successful and give him opportunities. There’s also pictures of Beth and Jimmy with celebrities that are on the dresser in her bedroom. She’s literally throwing every resource possible to help Jimmy.

Yeardley: [00:14:28] Is it working?

Robert: [00:14:30] To a certain extent, yes. He’s in this school. He’s taking classes. He’s involved in the sports team. The football team gives him an incentive to have a C average with his grades. So, yeah, to a certain extent, it is working. But even though he’s been removed from this big city, he still has this fascination with being a thug.

Yeardley: [00:14:48] We haven’t been able to actually deal with the root of the problem.

Robert: [00:14:52] Correct.

[00:14:53]

[00:15:03]

Robert: [00:15:05] So, while this is going on, on the far other side of the state about 300 miles away, the state police get a call from a truck driver. And the truck driver calls 911 and he says, “Hey, there is this red Mercedes that is out of control, driving really recklessly. I just want you to know, in case you can get someone to stop it.” Well, in our state, the state police is grossly understaffed. There are sometimes 10 or 20 on in the entire state. So, grossly, grossly understaffed. But on this day and this time, there was a trooper right there, right in position, right in the right spot.

Yeardley: [00:15:40] [giggles]

Robert: [00:15:42] So, this trooper gets this call. He sees the red Mercedes driving erratically, and he goes after he lights it up. He turns on his emergency lights, and he goes after this red Mercedes. Well, the red Mercedes doesn’t stop, continues driving erratically, and this trooper decides, “I need to get this car stopped any way I can because it’s very unsafe.” He’s concerned about the occupants of the red Mercedes, and he’s concerned about the general public.

[00:16:06] So, at one point, this red Mercedes takes a freeway exit and then tries to get right back on the freeway. And the trooper employees will be called a pit maneuver, a pursuit intervention technique. And basically, what that does is, it spins the red Mercedes around where it comes to rest against the trooper vehicle, and the trooper’s car is pinning that driver’s door closed. So, the driver stays inside the car. The passenger takes off on foot. Now, we’re in a really, really rural area. This kid that runs away, his name is Mikey, he has nowhere to go. There is literally [laughs] like farms, and that’s it. So, he quickly realizes, “There’s nowhere for me to hide. I’m screwed.” So, he gives up. Meanwhile, the driver of the car, who is Jimmy– [crosstalk]

Yeardley: [00:16:52] Is this great grandma Beth’s Jimmy?

Robert: [00:16:54] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:16:55] But now he’s 300 miles away.

Robert: [00:16:57] Correct.

Yeardley: [00:16:58] Okay, that seems fishy.

Dave: [00:16:59] It could be a coincidence.

[laughter]

Dave: [00:17:02] Perhaps.

Yeardley: [00:17:03] Perhaps not.

Dave: [00:17:05] Screaming woman asking for help, and hours later, 300 miles away.

Yeardley: [00:17:09] In a nice red Mercedes.

Robert: [00:17:11] Mm-hmm. So, Jimmy says, “Hey, I was kidnapped, and this guy Mikey pointed a gun at me and forced me to drive him. And that’s why we’re here. I’ve been kidnapped. I’m so glad you stopped me. Thank you so much for rescuing me.”

Yeardley: [00:17:25] But isn’t Mikey, the troublemaking cousin from Jimmy’s hometown?

Robert: [00:17:29] Yes. [chuckles] So, Mikey, he doesn’t lawyer up, but he doesn’t say very much either. He’s pretty quiet guy, and he doesn’t say anything. So, at this point, the troopers, obviously, they have no idea what’s going on in my area, and we have no idea what’s going on in their area, okay? So, at this point, Jimmy gets arrested for reckless driving, attempt to elude a police officer. And then Mikey actually gets held initially on Jimmy’s crazy story. He’s saying, “You kidnapped him. So, until we know differently, you’re not going anywhere.”

Yeardley: [00:18:00] Are they about the same age, Mikey and Jimmy?

Robert: [00:18:02] They’re similar in age, except that Mikey is an adult barely. He’s 18. And then Jimmy is juvenile, he’s 17. So, pretty similar in age. But that subtle age difference really plays into what happens in this case.

Yeardley: [00:18:16] Okay.

Robert: [00:18:17] So, once the dust settles, this trooper on the other side of the state, they run the license plate on the car. They realize it’s registered to an older woman named Beth. And they call my agency and say, “Hey, we have some arrests after pursuit here. Can you go check on this woman Beth, and see if she knows where her car is?” That’s a common welfare check that we get. So, when the dispatchers are putting the call together, they realize, “Boy, that’s the same address where Andy has asked us to go do a welfare check.” And so, again, these calls are merging at this point.

[00:18:51] So, Jimmy, because he’s a juvenile, he gets transported to a regional juvenile facility. This county out where this pursuit ended is very rural, and they’re not big enough to have their own facility, and so they contract with a regional center. So, Jimmy takes a ride almost 200 miles to the west to get to this regional juvenile facility, whereas Mikey, because he’s an adult, he can go to the local jail in the area where the pursuit ended.

Yeardley: [00:19:18] It’s 200 miles to the west. Is that 200 miles closer to where his great grandmother lives?

Robert: [00:19:23] Yes, closer to us.

Yeardley: [00:19:24] All right.

Dave: [00:19:25] This is an area of the state where you get the signs like, “Next service is 75 miles.”

Yeardley: [00:19:30] Okay.

Dave: [00:19:31] Yeah. You’re in the middle of nowhere.

Yeardley: [00:19:33] Don’t run out of gas.

Dave: [00:19:34] You’re more apt to see cattle than people out on these roads.

Yeardley: [00:19:37] Copy that.

Robert: [00:19:39] So, we say to the state police, “I know you’re transporting Jimmy to this juvenile facility, but please set Jimmy’s clothing aside, because it’s going to be very important evidence for us. Please hang on to the clothing. I’ll be working on a search warrant.” So, we have multiple crime scenes, right? And to make it worse, Beth’s car gets towed to a crime lab 50 miles west of where this pursuit stops. So, we got stuff now [laughs] all over the place, and we’re really relying on a lot of outside agencies to help us. And so, networking is so important and crucial. We’re still a small enough community in our state where you might know people from the police academy or from trainings you’ve been to or cases you’ve worked. And so, that came in really handy.

[00:20:23] We have the state police crime lab helping us. We have these local agencies helping us. Again, it’s the weekend, and people could not be nicer or happier to help, because they also know it could be you someday that’s asking for the help.

Dave: [00:20:36] That’s absolutely right. [Robert laughs] I’m always like, “Whatever you guys need, because when I ask you, I want the same response.”

Robert: [00:20:42] Exactly. Something can be a very backburner item, or it could be right up front.

Yeardley: [00:20:47] Right.

Robert: [00:20:47] So, I start on five search warrants that first day. So, we do one for the house, so we can search it and collect evidence from the house.

Yeardley: [00:20:54] Dan is shaking his head.

Dan: [00:20:55] I know what that entails. Lots of paperwork. Lots of paperwork.

Robert: [00:20:58] Paperwork, coffee, and being really tired at the end of it.

Dave: [00:21:02] It doesn’t help that now you’ve got scattered across the state all these different places that you need to get your hands on things like clothing, cell phones, cars, people, you got to do a person search warrant to get their DNA to match it up with the original crime scene. So, that just doesn’t go into one search warrant.

Robert: [00:21:19] You hit the nail on the head. So, we have a car, like I said, in one place. We have the two suspects in different places. We have our original crime scene. So, we got lots of search warrants to write. So, I do that. And another reason, we need a search warrant for the house, because Jimmy was living there. So, even though he’s our suspect, he has a privacy interest to the items in that house. We have to do a search warrant to get into that house.

Dave: [00:21:41] So, you guys do the welfare check, discover your victim, and have to back out.

Robert: [00:21:46] Correct.

Yeardley: [00:21:47] Oh.

Dave: [00:21:49] Until you’ve got the search warrant.

Yeardley: [00:21:50] Okay.

Robert: [00:21:51] So, this is all Saturday morning. Sunday morning is the autopsy, and the autopsy doesn’t really tell us anything we weren’t already able to tell. What it told us, again, was that Beth died from blunt force head and chest trauma. And the sledgehammer, the instrument itself is a perfect match in size, and with all the bruise patterns. The doctor was able to tell us that as Beth is raising her hands in defense that she suffers a broken wrist due to a blow from that sledgehammer to her body while she’s trying to defend herself. But the number of injuries to her back and her head is just terrible. They numbered over 50 different blows from the sledgehammer.

Yeardley: [00:22:33] Good God.

Robert: [00:22:34] Yeah. These defendants were very surprised by how much it took to kill Beth. Very surprised by that.

Yeardley: [00:22:42] Wow.

Robert: [00:22:43] Monday morning, my partner and I head out to this regional juvenile facility, and we’re there to serve our search warrant on Jimmy to get his DNA to collect the clothing. What happens in these cases is, there’s always stuff [chuckles] that goes awry. And so, we arrive there, and these juvenile correctional facility people are happy to have us, and they were thinking they were being helpful and they told us, “We washed his clothes.”

Yeardley: [00:23:09] Oh, no.

Dave: [00:23:11] “Come on in. He’s got clean clothes and everything.” You’re like, “Ah, you’re killing me.”

Yeardley: [00:23:15] Oh, my God.

Robert: [00:23:17] So, we tried to contain our disappointment. They had washed his clothes. So, yeah.

Dave: [00:23:23] Son of a bitch. [laughs] I can picture the reaction between you and your partner looking at each other. When you got back out into the car like, “Are you kidding me?”

Robert: [00:23:34] There were some swear words once were back in the car with the doors closed. Yes. But nevertheless, we’re able to get DNA buckle swabs from him.

Yeardley: [00:23:41] Can you explain what that is?

Robert: [00:23:43] Sure. Basically, we put a couple of Q-tips in the mouth and scrape along the cheeks, and that is the least intrusive way of getting a DNA sample from someone.

Yeardley: [00:23:50] Okay.

Robert: [00:23:51] So, we’re able to have that. Again, not the clothing, but we’re able to have that.

Yeardley: [00:23:54] But you wanted to know if there was her blood on his clothing or anything like that.

Robert: [00:23:59] Correct.

Dave: [00:24:00] That’s a critical piece of this case is to tie him to the room where it happened.

Yeardley: [00:24:05] Right.

Robert: [00:24:06] Anytime you have multiple suspects, we are prepared. What are they going to do? They’re going to blame one another, right? So, we need to be ready to combat that defense almost from the first moment. So, that’s super, super important evidence, especially if we’re not going to get statements from these guys. So, that’s Monday morning. Tuesday morning, our team meets, and we divvy up our work, what’s important now, kind of stuff.

Yeardley: [00:24:33] Do you take Jimmy back with you?

Robert: [00:24:35] No, we leave him where he is.

Yeardley: [00:24:37] And what’s his affect when you meet him? Is he defiant? Is he compliant? Is he quiet? Is he downtrodden? What’s his deal?

Robert: [00:24:45] So, one thing we noted about Jimmy is, at no point does he ask, how Grandma’s doing, or in what condition Grandma’s in.

Dave: [00:24:52] He already knows.

[00:24:54]

[00:25:04]

Yeardley: [00:25:05] So, Jimmy doesn’t ask how his great grandmother is doing at all?

Robert: [00:25:09] No. He doesn’t ask about her at all. And Jimmy is charismatic. He is calm, cool, collected. Jimmy, aside from this, is a very likable guy. He’s very charismatic, very cool, lots of friends, very easy-going guy. He loves the attention. So, we leave him there. Tuesday, we debrief this as a team. We decide where we’re going to go next. And then Wednesday morning, my partner and I, we hit the road. We are making this tour of the state. So, first, we go to the crime lab to collect evidence from Beth’s car. My partner’s, much smarter than I, he says, “Hey, this is a nice car. The GPS system will tell us where they were going, if they had a destination.” So, sure enough, that gets processed and it’s later turned out that they had typed in their hometown where this pursuit happened with the state police is definitely on the way to that state.

[00:25:57] So, we also go out and meet with the state police detective who interviewed Mikey, who, again, he didn’t say very much. He’s really quiet. He doesn’t lawyer up, but he also just doesn’t say very much. He’s a kind where you can ask him a question and he’ll take a little while to answer.

Yeardley: [00:26:13] He’s done this before though.

Robert: [00:26:15] He’s been in trouble before. He knows the system.

Yeardley: [00:26:17] Do you get his clothes?

Robert: [00:26:18] We do get his clothes. Yes, we do get his clothes.

Yeardley: [00:26:21] Unlaundered?

Robert: [00:26:22] Yes. So, then we drive to the local jail, where we pick up Mikey and we bring him back. It’s about a four-and-a-half-hour drive to get back to my office. And my partner and I, we’re not in the business of transporting inmates, neither of us. We don’t do that normally. So, we’re thinking like, “What if he needs to stop and use the bathroom? What are we going to do?”

Yeardley: [00:26:42] [laughs] We’ve talked about that on here. It’s been great.

Dave: [00:26:47] Rochambeau.

[laughter]

Robert: [00:26:49] So, here it is. We have this murder suspect and we don’t want to just stop at a rest stop and kick everyone else out or say they can’t go in. So, we decide that I’ll drive. I drive a little bit faster than normal to get back to my office. Unfortunately, Mikey doesn’t ask to use the restroom. He’s not very talkative on the ride either. So, at this point, we’re very interested in learning the background on these two.

Yeardley: [00:27:10] Jimmy and Mikey.

Robert: [00:27:11] Yeah. And you really only have a short window to get a lot of background information before attorneys get involved. So, what we do is, I call up Jimmy’s mom in this other state, and I develop a good rapport with her. She’s very nice and she’s heard what happened. Her first thing is, if Jimmy did this, then I hope he’s held accountable for it. I don’t think he did it, but if he did do it, then I hope he’s held accountable for it. And so, I shared that in common with her. Again, it’s Thursday morning, and I ask her, “Hey, I can’t talk a lot right now, but can you set aside a couple of hours tomorrow where we talk?” And she says, “Sure.” We set up a time to talk the next morning, and then we do something kind of sneaky. We fly to that state.

Yeardley: [00:27:53] She doesn’t know you’re coming?

Robert: [00:27:54] She doesn’t know we’re coming, but we have an appointment to talk to her. She just assumes it’s going to be over the phone, but no, then we’re knocking on her door.

Yeardley: [00:28:00] Can I ask why you do that?

Robert: [00:28:02] So, there’s many reasons that we wanted to go to the state anyway. We know that the quality of interviews with being able to read body language and just all the stuff that comes with nonverbal communication, talking to her was just one of many reasons we were going to need to go there anyway. So, we show up, we surprise her. This local police agency has a detective there. This agency just goes out of their way to help us and chauffeur us around, because we don’t know the area. We have a rental car, but we don’t know the area, and we don’t have the radios, we don’t know where anything is. And so, this detective accompanied us and he was very helpful.

Dave: [00:28:36] And you guys don’t have police powers in that state either.

Robert: [00:28:38] Correct. We don’t have any police power.

Yeardley: [00:28:40] Right. Interesting.

Robert: [00:28:42] Yeah. So, this detective was very helpful. Mom, she was surprised us being there, but she tells us what we already knew that Jimmy was a wannabe gangster. He was fascinated with the thug life. He was doing very poorly in school, having bad relationships with mom and stepdad, and loves hanging out with his cousin, Mikey, in the inner city.

Yeardley: [00:29:00] Was he into drugs?

Robert: [00:29:02] Nothing more than marijuana that we knew about. So, while we’re there, we also hit up the local police agencies and we gather police reports from them that sometimes when you call over the phone and you’re from out of state, they’re not as eager to help you. But when you show up in person with a local detective, they were all very nice. And we got all the reports we needed in one trip, so it was a very efficient trip. We also noticed that Jimmy had a tattoo on his chest, very large and very prominent with a girl’s name. And we were able to find her and interview her and just get some really good information.

Yeardley: [00:29:33] Who was she?

Robert: [00:29:34] She was a former girlfriend when he lived in that state, but they thought they were going to be together forever and ever.

Dave: [00:29:39] I’ll never regret this tattoo.

Yeardley: [00:29:41] Tattoos are forever-

[laughter]

Yeardley: [00:29:43] -for the most part.

Dave: [00:29:44] No regrets.

Robert: [00:29:45] So true. So, we also, of course, learned that Mikey is gang connected. He had arrest for some serious crimes, including burglary, where some guns were taken, robbery, etc. He’d just been up to no good during his life, had dropped out of high school, just wasn’t really going anywhere.

Yeardley: [00:30:02] So, he was officially gang connected.

Robert: [00:30:04] Yes. He was a documented gang member back there. What happened was, at some point, Jimmy calls him up and says, “You need to come out to this place where I am. This place where I am is amazing. And my great grandma, Beth, she’s really hooking me up with a lot of good stuff and you would love it here. You need to come out.” And Mikey’s like, “Hey, I don’t even have ID. I don’t have a way to get there. I have no money.” And Jimmy says, “I got all the money we’re going to need. I have great grandma’s credit card.” And so, what he does is he orders an airport shuttle for Mikey, pays for a flight for Mikey, and tells Mikey that if you tell TSA at the airport that you’re under 16, you don’t need an ID.

Yeardley: [00:30:48] Is that true?

Robert: [00:30:49] It was at the time. Who knows what’s happening now? So, Mikey, the airport shuttle shows up, brings him to the airport, he gets on a plane. I don’t think he’d ever been on a plane before and he flies to our state. Jimmy meets him at the airport, and they head back to Beth’s house. Because Jimmy’s living in the basement and Beth’s living upstairs and Beth wants to give Jimmy, his private space, she doesn’t really bother him down there. She’ll call down the stairs and say, “Hey, come up.” But again, Jimmy’s popular and has a lot of friends over all the time, so she doesn’t really think too much about it. And so, that is how Mikey gets to our state.

Dave: [00:31:24] How long had he been in the state before this crime occurs?

Robert: [00:31:28] So, he arrived on Friday, and our murder happened Saturday morning.

Dave: [00:31:34] It’s a pretty quick turnaround.

Robert: [00:31:35] It’s a very quick turnaround. Because of the history of mom and Beth going back and forth, we wanted to rule mom out also, just to make sure this wasn’t a planned thing or where she had dispatched her son or this cousin over to do this. And so, mom agrees to take a polygraph. And so, we leave her there in the very capable hands of this polygrapher in the state, and this polygrapher is happy to help us, and then calls us the day of the exam and says, she was deceptive on the polygraph, but I don’t think we can use it. And he says, “It was a disaster. I’m really sorry.” Well, after someone is found deceptive on a polygraph, there is a post interview. That’s where you really get to the bottom of, “Well, why didn’t you pass the polygraph?”

[00:32:21] So, he says that he’s doing that post interview with mom and lets her know that she didn’t pass and hoping to build on that and learn what really happened. And she says, “Well, the whole time I was taking the test, I put the wrong name on the form. I’m married. I should be using this name, but I put this name on the form.” And so, the polygrapher says, it was his professional opinion that that tainted the results. And so, that, again, became the clothing being washed. It became something that we just can’t use, can’t rely on, which is still something we can’t use in court anyway. So, at the end of the day, it’s not the worst thing that happened, but it was a little disappointing. [laughs]

Dave: [00:33:00] People do the screwiest shit at these polygraphs, “If you tell the truth, you’re going to pass.”

Yeardley: [00:33:05] Tell the truth.

Dan: [00:33:06] If you wrote a search warrant for their Google history, like the night before the polygraph, I’m sure you’d get some results on how to beat a polygraph.

Dave: Yes. [laughs]

Robert: [00:33:14] Guaranteed.

Dan: [00:33:14] So true.

Robert: [00:33:15] Countermeasures, they don’t work.

Dave: [00:33:17] Squeeze your butt cheeks.

Robert: [00:33:18] Put a penny under your tongue.

Dave: [00:33:19] Right.

Robert: [00:33:20] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:33:20] What?

Dave: [00:33:21] Yeah. There’s all kinds of stuff. Like, put a thumbtack in your shoe. So, when you want to be stressed out on answer that’s actually truthful, that makes it match up with the actual lie that you’re going to tell, that’s going to stress you out, you put your foot on the thumbtack and it increases your body’s response. So, when you’re telling the truth with the thumbtack, it also matches up with you having anxiety when you’re lying during the polygraph, it doesn’t work. You’re sitting on an instrument that measures your body weight and how you’re shifting blood pressure, respirations, all this stuff.

Yeardley: [00:33:55] It’s not just one measurement.

Robert: [00:33:56] No. It’s five different measurements.

Dave: [00:33:58] Yeah. From head toe.

Yeardley: [00:33:59] So interesting.

[00:34:03]

[00:34:13]

Yeardley: [00:34:15] So, go back to Mikey and Jimmy.

Robert: [00:34:17] Yeah. So, also leading up to this is Jimmy is telling Mikey, “Hey, when you get here, we’re going to host this huge party. We’re going to have this amazing kegger at this house. Everyone from the school’s coming.” Jimmy is one to embellish, and so he’s telling people that some famous rapper is also going to be at this party. But anyway, he’s got lots of people coming, and multiple people are asking him like, “Beth’s okay with this? Your great grandma’s okay with this?” And he says, “Don’t worry, she’s not going to be here.” And they come up with a story that she is going to be on a trip to India. There’s no plans. All of her friends told us she has no plans to travel. She’s not going anywhere. She has Jimmy here and she is considering him her full-time job. So, that is what leads up to this murder.

Yeardley: [00:35:04] Does that make you think that this murder is premeditated?

Robert: [00:35:07] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:35:09] They didn’t have the party.

Robert: [00:35:11] They didn’t.

Yeardley: [00:35:12] Do you think that Mikey came out to commit this murder or you think he just came out to go to this party?

Robert: [00:35:20] Yeah, I think that Mikey came out for this party. It’s going to be a big deal. According to Jimmy, the plans were really grandiose, even though they had nothing really planned. I think that it came to a head with, “Well, how are we going to do this with Beth in the picture? How is this possible if your grandma’s upstairs and there’s noise and music and lots of kids here?” And so, I think they decided at that point that they needed to prevent her from being there, and that’s what led up to the murder.

Dan: [00:35:48] She wouldn’t allowed that party to occur.

Robert: [00:35:50] Correct.

Dan: [00:35:50] And they’d spread around the school, “Hey, we’re going to have this big party, this famous rapper is going to be there.” And to keep from being humiliated and try to save face, it just boggles your mind. I don’t understand it.

Robert: [00:36:04] It’s worthless.

Yeardley: [00:36:05] Oh, how terribly sad. So, do you go to trial with this?

Robert: [00:36:11] So, yes. We go to grand jury nine days after we start investigating.

Yeardley: [00:36:15] That seems fast.

Robert: [00:36:16] We have to be fast because they’re in custody. So, we have a clock that starts ticking. We have to be fast at that point. And so, we get Jimmy and Mikey, both indicted for murder, and they decide with their attorneys that they’re going to have separate trials. They have to do that because they are blaming the other guy. And so, they’re going to have separate trials and blame the other guy. Jimmy dresses up well, and he looks sharp again, very charismatic, very confident. He has a really good defense team, and they put up a good fight, in spite of the wonderful case that I have. I’m a little biased, but I think we have a wonderful case.

[00:36:51] What do you think they focus on? They focus on, you don’t have any clothing or blood to connect our client to this murder. And so, they blame Mikey. Mikey doesn’t look as clean cut and confident as Jimmy. So, Mikey goes to trial, and his attorneys come up with a different strategy, and their strategy is, our client is mentally retarded. He is not smart enough to understand these serious charges against him. They go with a defense where he is unable to aid and assist his defense team. And so, Mikey’s trial gets pushed out longer, because he needs to go down to our state hospital and receive treatment, so that he can understand what these serious charges are and how the court system works.

Dave: [00:37:38] Psyche evals from the defense and the prosecution side.

Yeardley: [00:37:42] Just because he declares that, does that mean it’s incumbent upon you to investigate that declaration?

Robert: [00:37:49] Absolutely. Because what we don’t want is the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court later on to send our cases back to us. That’s the last thing we want. And so, it’s better to be very careful and cautious on the front end. So, he goes to state hospital. He’s there for many, many, many, months. They occasionally will send updates to the prosecutor, and they say, “Mikey is making progress, and we think that with some more treatment, he will be able to understand these serious charges against him.”

[00:38:18] So, after many months of that, he is returned to our county for trial. We have a trial. These trials are each, I think, three weeks in length. There’s a lot of work and a lot of effort. Because, when I was talking about all these things that happen at different parts throughout the state, we have the state troopers and the detectives coming all the way from the other side of the state multiple times, for grand jury, for motion hearings, for both these trials. We have the crime lab people traveling from all over. There’s a lot of people traveling.

[00:38:48] At the end of the trials, Jimmy is found guilty of manslaughter, which is a lot less than murder. He is found guilty of manslaughter, and he’s sentenced to 10 years in a youth correctional facility. And again, if you’ll recall, at the time of the crime, he’s 17, cousin Mikey’s 18. So, they’re treated very differently. So, he is not in a prison that people would expect. He’s more in, like a imagine, like a school where you can’t leave kind of thing.

Yeardley: [00:39:11] But even though, by the time, he goes to trial, he might be 18.

Robert: [00:39:15] Absolutely.

Yeardley: [00:39:15] He’s still sentenced to a juvenile facility for a decade?

Dave: [00:39:19] It reverts back to your age at the time of the crime.

Robert: [00:39:23] So, Jimmy will get two years in adult, if I’m doing my math right. He’ll get two years in adult prison.

Yeardley: [00:39:28] Oh, I see. Just because you’re legally adult at 18, it doesn’t mean you then go to adult prison.

Robert: [00:39:34] I wish that makes the most sense, but this is a weird state. It’s a very weird state.

Dan: [00:39:39] They’re basically trying to soften the blow. Like, you’ve been raised in this environment, in this youth environment, and we’re not going to just throw you to the sharks, basically.

Yeardley: [00:39:48] All right. So, okay, manslaughter, 10 years.

Robert: [00:39:51] So, then coming back to Mikey, Mikey is found guilty of murder because he’s an adult and because he had a different jury, he is sentenced to true life in prison. What that means in our state is he will never get released on parole. He will always be in custody with no second look, no chance at being released ever.

Dave: [00:40:10] Right. Life without. You said the term mental retardation, and that is a term that I’ve heard from doctors, and it’s a legal term, and it’s been used when we have these cases. But I also know occasionally, this stings our fans, our audience, and they say, “Well, that’s–” [crosstalk]

Yeardley: [00:40:28] It’s a pejorative term.

Dave: [00:40:30] Right. And so, we’re using terms that were used in the legal portion of this case. We’re not trying to offend anybody. These are the words that were used. We understand that there are different ways to address that.

Yeardley: [00:40:43] Doesn’t mental retardation refer to an IQ number?

Robert: [00:40:47] So, I learned more about that through this case. Basically, anything under a 70 is considered not– [crosstalk]

Yeardley: [00:40:55] Mikey, was he considered to be that slow?

Robert: [00:40:58] Well, that’s the funny thing, because we have a state expert who evaluated him, and they think he’s fine, and then the defense has one or two experts that evaluate him, and they said that he’s pretty much drooling.

Yeardley: [00:41:09] It’s still something you have to investigate, but it does seem like somebody with an IQ of 70 or below, it’s quite distinct versus somebody who is above that.

Robert: [00:41:19] We had lengthy, like, days and days of pretrial motions on this very topic. And what we did was, at the end of the day, Mikey is sophisticated enough to text back and forth with Jimmy to get into an airport shuttle, to get himself into an airport and figure out where to go to find out which flight to get on, to lie to TSA and say, “I’m this age, so I don’t have to produce ID,” to get on the airplane to find a seat, to get in the right seat. There was a layover. I didn’t mention that. But there’s a layover at a very large airport along the way, and somehow, he navigated that, figured out what gate he was supposed to go to, found the right airplane, waited in line, got on at the appropriate time, found the right seat, and then got to our city in our airport, and navigated his way.

Dan: [00:42:06] Think about it. He got out and ran. He knows they did something wrong.

Yeardley: [00:42:10] Right.

Dan: [00:42:11] Which is another test regarding– [crosstalk]

Yeardley: [00:42:12] Can you tell the difference between right and wrong?

Dan: [00:42:14] Yeah. McNaughton rule is a test that was used. I don’t even know that it’s used anymore. But do you know the difference between right and wrong? He knows. He knows that they committed a terrible crime against a helpless woman.

Yeardley: [00:42:26] Right.

Dan: [00:42:27] And he’s trying to get away.

Dave: [00:42:28] Well, and you make this developmental delay defense, and you got to go all in. So, does that mean that you’re going to malinger when these psychological tests and these intelligence tests are given to you, or are you going to be completely truthful? Well, you’re not incentivized to look smart on those tests.

Yeardley: [00:42:48] Right.

Dave: [00:42:49] So you’re at the mercy of how truthful this person’s going to be on these exams.

Yeardley: [00:42:54] Yeah. What happened to the kidnapping charge?

Robert: [00:42:57] So, the kidnapping charge went nowhere. They quickly determined that these two know each other, so that was quickly dropped.

Dan: [00:43:05] Did Mikey have a high school diploma?

Robert: [00:43:07] No.

Dan: [00:43:08] He did not.

Robert: [00:43:08] No. Dropped out.

Dave: [00:43:10] Had Mikey, and I don’t know if you’ll know this, but Mikey’s got previous criminal cases in this other state. It’d be interesting if he had brought up this developmental delay defense on those occasions, or if it’s just on the biggie where he’s getting charged with murder.

Robert: [00:43:23] So, in the sentencing phase, we flew out police officers from this state. They loved coming to our state, by the way. They were grateful and wrote letters of thanks. But we flew police officers out from this state who had dealt with him and how he answered questions appropriately, all the kind of things that you would imagine. We went through all that, and these police officers got a trip. So, they were happy with that. [laughs]

Dave: [00:43:46] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:43:46] But it had no bearing on whether or not that developmentally delayed defense was thrown out or not.

Robert: [00:43:53] No, this was resolved prior to trial. So, a judge determined that after reviewing all the facts from the experts at the state hospital, all the treatment that he received, that was just a defense strategy, but it wasn’t a true issue.

Dave: [00:44:05] You got to get that settled before the trial starts, before you’ve even sat a jury.

Yeardley: [00:44:10] I see.

Dave: [00:44:11] That’s all going to be handled.

Robert: [00:44:12] Yeah.

Dave: [00:44:12] Yeah. Did either of them testify in one or both trials?

Robert: [00:44:17] No.

Dan: [00:44:18] At the trial, did they give a statement about being sorry when they were found guilty?

Robert: [00:44:23] No, at no time. In fact, I think they just went on the record that the decision would be appealed and that kind of stuff.

Dan: [00:44:29] Unfortunate. You got a golden opportunity there to clear a little bit of your soul, and they didn’t take it.

Dave: [00:44:36] I’m still thinking about Andy, beaten feet out of that house and running to God knows where, scared out of his mind.

Yeardley: [00:44:43] I’m surprised they didn’t off Andy too.

Robert: [00:44:46] So, I don’t know what their exact plan for Andy was, but certainly, when he runs out of the house, he’s a loose end. He’s a straight arrow kind of guy, and they wouldn’t have been able to tell him, “Hey, don’t say anything about this.”

Yeardley: [00:44:58] Right. So, maybe that prompted them to flee.

Robert: [00:45:01] Yes, exactly.

Yeardley: [00:45:03] And again, no plan.

Robert: [00:45:04] Right.

Yeardley: [00:45:05] Crappy.

Robert: [00:45:06] Andy was super important witness. At grand jury in both these trials and all the pretrial motions, super important witness. He’s just a stellar young man who’s going places. And his mom, great mom, coincidentally, they moved from the same inner-city area in this other part of the country and that’s how Andy and Jimmy became fast friends at this new high school is they both stood out. But Andy is quite the opposite. I won’t be surprised if he becomes a doctor or a lawyer or police officer, something very good in this life. He’s a fine young man, and we really relied on him in a trial, and he was fantastic.

Yeardley: [00:45:43] That’s good to hear. Well, Detective Robert, thank you so much. What a fascinating case. They’re all so tragic, but I really enjoy hearing how you all get where you need to go. We appreciate you doing what you do.

Dan: [00:45:57] Good work, sir.

Dave: [00:45:58] I like that storytelling. That was well done.

Yeardley: [00:46:00] That was. Well done.

Robert: [00:46:01] Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeardley: [00:46:03] Thank you.

[theme music]

Yeardley: [00:46:10] 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.

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Yeardley: [00:47:05] That’s right. Your subscription also makes it possible for us to keep going to small towns across the country-

Dan: [00:47:11] -in search of the finest-

Dave: [00:47:13] -rare-

Dan: [00:47:14] -true crime cases told-

Dave: [00:47:15] -as always, by the detectives who investigated them. So, thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:47:21] Nobody’s better than you.

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