Dan: [00:00:03] Did it cross your mind to stay with him?

Sarah: [00:00:07] It did.

Dan: [00:00:08] Okay. Why didn’t you?

Sarah: [00:00:10] I was scared.

Dan: [00:00:12] Did he look like he was in pretty bad shape?

Sarah: [00:00:14] I didn’t even look at him.

Dave: [00:00:16] One of the conditions of one of these crimes that involves homicide or manslaughter is manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. Would you say we’ve checked the box?

Yeardley: [00:00:28] Yes.

Dave: [00:00:28] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:00:31] 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: [00:00:57] I’m Dan.

Dave: [00:00:57] And I’m Dave.

Dan: [00:00:58] We’re identical twins.

Dave: [00:00:59] And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.

Dan: [00:01:02] Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:01:05] 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: [00:01:41] Today on Small Town Dicks, I’m excited. We have the usual suspects. [giggles] We have Detective Dan.

Dan: [00:01:48] Good morning.

Yeardley: [00:01:49] Good morning. And we have Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:51] Always a pleasure.

Yeardley: [00:01:52] That’s who we have today. It’s awesome.

Dave: [00:01:55] Nice and simple.

Yeardley: [00:01:56] Nice and simple. So, Detective Dan, you have a very interesting case for us today.

Dan: [00:02:01] Really, a tragic case.

Yeardley: [00:02:03] Indeed.

Dan: [00:02:04] Yes. An unfortunate sequence of events, really. This happened several years ago, and this is a few weeks before Christmas. So, we’ve got a man named Joseph, who is visiting his son, Jeremy. Joseph lives out of the country and arrived the day before this incident. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time, so it was great. Joseph and Jeremy decide that they’re going to walk to a nearby grocery store to get groceries and make some dinner.

Yeardley: [00:02:34] Jeremy is the son?

Dan: [00:02:35] Adult son. And Jeremy’s got kids too. They decide they’re going to walk a few blocks to this grocery store to get groceries. They go grocery shopping. They have several bags when they’re leaving and they begin walking home. Right out in front of this grocery store is a major thoroughfare in our town. It’s two lanes going in each direction and then a center turn lane. The speed limit on this particular stretch of road is 40 miles an hour, but it’s pretty common for people to be exceeding that, 45 miles all the way up to 50 miles an hour. There’s a controlled intersection where they will be crossing the street. There’s a crosswalk and everything. So, Joseph and Jeremy are on the south side of the street. They’re walking north and they’re walking against a don’t walk signal.

Yeardley: [00:03:20] So, are they walking against a red light?

Dan: [00:03:23] Yes. They should not have been crossing the road, but there was not much traffic at this point. And as they started crossing the road, a couple of cars that were coming actually stopped and said, “Well, I’m going to let them go across the road.” So, you’ve got a westbound vehicle, and you’ve got an eastbound vehicle have stopped, and are allowing Joseph and Jeremy to cross the road. So, as Jeremy and Joseph cross in front of this car that’s in the left lane, just as they clear it, Jeremy says that he looks over to the right and he sees this vehicle approaching them quickly. He tries to jump out of the way. The car catches, I think, his foot or his lower leg barely glancing off him. He tumbles into the bike lane right next to the curb and looks to see where his father is. And all he sees is a hat in the air, the hat his father was wearing. His father is not there anymore.

Dave: [00:04:24] Nowhere to be seen. And the car that hit them is continuing westbound. So, they’re just looking at taillights.

Dan: [00:04:30] So, pretty quickly, we’ve got 911 call coming in from the witnesses at this intersection. Now these witnesses are able to say that they witnessed this collision. They see that Joseph is on top of this vehicle. He’s not on the hood, he’s on the roof of the car. They’re figuring that he’s seriously injured, obviously, because he got hit by a car going 40 miles to 45 miles an hour.

Yeardley: [00:04:55] Good God.

Dan: [00:04:56] And according to these witnesses, the car that hit him is not slowing down, not attempting to stop. They’re actually speeding up and they begin swerving back and forth.

Yeardley: [00:05:06] Is there no traffic to speak of?

Dan: [00:05:08] There’s not much traffic. It’s not in the middle of the night, but it’s late enough where people coming home from work. We don’t have that traffic at this point. So, this car continues westbound on this street and passes one of our buses, like, our mass transit buses here that we have in town. We actually catch footage later of this car passing the bus, and you can clearly see that Joseph is on top of this car.

Yeardley: [00:05:34] Because the bus has a camera on it?

Dan: [00:05:36] Bus has a camera. We’ve talked on this podcast several times about all the camera coverage that our buses have, and it is really good. It’s pretty clear in this bus video that Joseph isn’t moving.

Dave: [00:05:47] Not like where he’s grabbed the roof rack or anything like that. He’s just a figure on top of the roof.

Yeardley: [00:05:52] And is there a roof rack? Is that why he’s tangled up in it and has not just been hit and glanced off it?

Dan: [00:05:59] We’ve got the beginnings of a roof rack. We don’t have a full roof rack. So, we’ve got bars going across, but we don’t have a full cage where you put luggage up there or anything. I think it was similar to like a ski rack.

Yeardley: [00:06:11] What kind of car?

Dan: [00:06:12] Well, that’s the problem here. Our witnesses at the intersection who see this, they see the collision, but it happens so fast that we don’t get a really good vehicle description. Until a few blocks later, where a woman is coming up to this intersection and she looks in front of her, and this vehicle passes her, and she clearly sees Joseph. Joseph, his feet are toward the front of the car. His torso is toward the top of the windshield on the passenger side, and his head is hanging over the passenger side window, and one of his arms is hanging over that side. There’s a lot of blood. This witness describes the amount of blood as if somebody took a cup full of blood and threw it against the side of the car. And she says, “Joseph is not moving and he appears to be stuck on this roof rack.” But she also is able to provide us a decent description of this vehicle. She guesses that it’s like an early 1990s model tan import vehicle, hatchback.

Yeardley: [00:07:21] Import vehicle.

Dan: [00:07:22] Like a Honda or a Toyota or a Nissan, something like that. She’s not sure on the make or model, but she’s pretty sure that it’s a tan colored hatchback that’s about 20 years old, 25 years old. So, that gives us something. And then she sees the bus pass also. That’s what actually prompted us to go look at bus footage is because she says within a second or two of this car driving by with Joseph on it, the bus passes. So, we know we’re going to be able to get footage from that bus.

[00:07:51] After the bus goes by, she speeds up to try to catch up to this vehicle that Joseph is on, and she can’t find it. It’s gone. And so, this caller stops on the other side of the road. She knows that the car that Joseph is on has gone down a side street at some point, because she can’t see it in front of her on this main thoroughfare. So, she goes down to about where she lost sight of this car, and she just stops in a parking lot, and waits to see if it reemerges from a side street. So, at the original scene, patrol officers are arriving. They’re talking to Jeremy, Joseph’s son, getting details of what has happened. They’re talking to the witnesses who stayed on scene with Jeremy. And now we’ve got other officers who are checking the area to see if they can locate the car and or Joseph.

[00:08:40] Within a few minutes, another person who had been driving on this main street turns down a side street, and this side street bends to the left and it connects with another major thoroughfare. Pretty short street, but it’s a pretty hard bank to the left. And as his headlights come up to that turn in the road, his headlights pan across Joseph, who is lying in the gutter.

Yeardley: [00:09:06] Oh, no.

Dan: [00:09:07] So, he gets out and he tries to render aid. Officers are dispatched to that location. One of our officers arrives, notices that Joseph is definitely unconscious, but he’s got agonal breathing. So, agonal breathing, like it sounds, he’s having trouble breathing. He’s in trouble. He starts rendering first aid to Joseph. There’s not a whole lot this officer can do at this point. Joseph’s got massive injuries, and he’s got clear head injuries.

Yeardley: [00:09:36] And the car is nowhere to be seen. The car he was on top of is gone.

Dan: [00:09:40] It’s gone. And so, the medics arrive. They transport Joseph to the hospital. Jeremy is soon transported to the hospital as well.

Yeardley: [00:09:48] Did he have a broken ankle or anything because he got clipped?

Dan: [00:09:51] No, he had minor injuries. He got hit by the car, but it just glanced off him, barely touched him. But his dad was about a step behind him, and that’s why his dad was struck by the car full force. So, Jeremy gets to the hospital. Joseph is unfortunately passed away. He didn’t make it.

Yeardley: [00:10:11] What an awful Christmas.

Dan: [00:10:13] Yeah. So, now we’ve got a homicide investigation. We got to check out a lot of things here. Was it intentional? Was it reckless? Was it careless? Was it negligent? We have to answer a bunch of questions. But the biggest thing we got to do now is we got to find this car and whoever was driving it.

Dave: [00:10:30] This case garners a lot of media attention. So, they send out media live at the intersection to show where this collision occurred, because, one, the circumstances are egregious. You hit somebody and don’t even stop to let them off the car. You’re more concerned with getting away than you are of human life that’s riding on top of your car. So, you’ve got that issue, plus we have an unidentified hit and run suspect that killed somebody. So, that quickly tied up all the media around here. There were lots of stories about this.

Yeardley: [00:11:07] I’m assuming that the media have police radio scanners. Did they hear about it immediately?

Dave: [00:11:14] The media have police scanners, but our channels are encrypted around here. So, they can hear very few channels, but they do hear Firecom. So, fire and medics, they can hear those calls go out. Based on the details that are coming out of those, that’s where they’re not ambulance chasers, but they’re looking for the story, and they’ll show up at our scenes that were originated as a police call, but fire was dispatched to it.

Dan: [00:11:45] And it says fatal hit and run, which is significant. So, from where Joseph actually got hit by this car to where he’s found is 1.5 miles.

Yeardley: [00:11:55] [gasps] Oh, my God.

Dan: [00:11:57] You think about, if you’re going 50 miles an hour– He was on the car for a long time. And meanwhile, we’ve got a witness who says, “Whoever’s driving that car swerving back and forth,” presumably trying to shake Joseph off the car, I’m guessing. Pretty educated guess there, I would think. So, now we’ve got this media coverage. We have bus video. We release some of the bus video to try to identify who this is.

Yeardley: [00:12:23] With the body on the car?

Dan: [00:12:24] Yes.

Dave: [00:12:25] There’s no detail. You can’t see a face. You just see a lump of a body on top of a car. It also gives us the opportunity to release that and say, this is the type of car. You get the general shape of this car, so we can narrow it down at least.

Yeardley: [00:12:39] Do you start to get a bunch of tips when you release that photo?

Dan: [00:12:42] We do. So, one of the tips that we get is from a witness who says on the evening of this accident at about 10 o’clock, he is driving on the other side of our neighboring town. So, he’s way west of us. It’s about 10 o’clock, and as he’s going over an overpass, he passes a dark colored SUV that has a trailer that is towing a late 1980s or early 1990s Honda Civic wagon. There’s a tarp over the front of a car, but not the back. The other thing he notices is that the back license plate is bent up, so you can’t read the plate.

Yeardley: [00:13:24] That seems deliberate.

Dan: [00:13:26] Yes.

Yeardley: [00:13:27] And he notices the color, obviously, because the back is not covered.

Dan: [00:13:31] Yes. So, at the time, he doesn’t know that this car has even been involved in an accident. But after he watches the news, he’s like, “Oh, my God, I think I saw that car when I was driving home the other night,” and that prompts him to call the police and say, “I think I saw that car here at this point and it was heading in this direction.”

Yeardley: [00:13:53] That’s so interesting, because I feel like I might have passed a situation like that and not have taken notice of it even after I saw the picture in the news or whatever.

Dave: [00:14:03] Memories are funny like that. When these cases hit the media where we ask for information from the public, people have these aha moments and they’re like, “Wait a minute, this coincides with I remember this guy passing me or me passing this guy,” and then it clicks for them. That’s why we do it. Get it out there and see what it generates, because we’re at a standstill until we get something else.

Dan: [00:14:39] This accident happened, I think, at about like 7 o’clock in the evening, right?

Dave: [00:14:43] Yeah, it was dark winter months, and this intersection where this happened is kind of notorious. I’ve been to two other fatal vehicle pedestrian accidents there. It’s not well lit. We’ve got this issue of cars exiting the freeway and still moving at a pretty high clip. And some people don’t observe the crosswalk signs. They don’t abide by them. Others, it’s negligent or inattentive drivers that just aren’t paying attention. But this intersection has been the site of several vehicle pedestrian accidents that resulted in deaths.

Dan: [00:15:19] Yeah. So, we’ve got pretty much our whole detective bureau working on this case. We’ve all been, “You do this, you do this.” We’re really working on this now, because we have to find this car. And so, one of our detectives, he had taken that tip from where they’d seen the car on the trailer. Right after he gets off the phone with that tipster, another tip comes in, and this person says, “I don’t want to give my name. I want to be anonymous, but that car is at this address.” They say that the person who actually committed the hit and run lives at this address. The car is hidden in the garage at this address, and they give us the actual address. They also tell us that there was a 17-year-old female passenger in the car when it happened.

Yeardley: [00:16:06] Oh, so they know quite a bit.

Dan: [00:16:08] They know quite a bit. They don’t want to give their name, which I understand that, but it would help us if we had a name.

Yeardley: [00:16:13] Why? Why does it matter?

Dave: [00:16:15] You get into court documents, affidavits, writing search warrants. It’s easy to say, “Well, I got this anonymous information.” When you have a named source of that information, the credibility goes way up, because now a judge isn’t just taking this as hearsay. We have a direct source of this information who can be named, who can be a witness in this case.

Yeardley: [00:16:37] Right.

Dan: [00:16:37] So, we run this address. We start running the names associated with this address, and we locate a Honda Civic wagon that comes back as registered to this address. So, now we’re onto something. A couple of our detectives go out there and a couple of things that they immediately notice. They notice a dark colored SUV that’s parked in front of the house. So, we’ve got the dark colored SUV that was towing the trailer that had this car on it. So, we’re checking boxes. We’re starting to check boxes. Our detectives go up and knock on the door, and a 17-year-old girl answers the door. Her name is Marie. The detectives say, “Hey, we’re wondering, do you guys have a late 1980s, early 1990s Honda Civic at this house?” And she says, “No, we don’t. We don’t have that.” Lie number one.

[00:17:24] She’s saying that they don’t have that kind of car. We’ve already got one that’s registered to the address. So, the car is registered to this other female, and they ask, “Hey, is this other female here?” And she says, “No, she’s not here either. She’s at work.” Okay. So, Marie is playing dumb, and then she says, “Oh, you know what? That car that you’re asking about, I think that the girl you’re looking for, she does drive that sometimes, but I haven’t seen it in a while. I don’t know where it is.”

Yeardley: [00:17:50] Does she not let the detectives into the house?

Dan: [00:17:53] They haven’t asked to come into the house yet. We’re still at the front door, and what you’re doing is you’re asking for like, “Hey, is mom and dad here? Let’s cut to the chase. I don’t want to be playing this game.”

Yeardley: [00:18:03] Is she defiant?

Dan: [00:18:04] She’s not defiant, but she’s just playing dumb.

Dave: [00:18:07] Being cagey.

Dan: [00:18:08] She’s looking over her shoulder when the detectives are trying to talk to her. She’s given a lot of signs that she’s being deceptive and that she’s trying to hide something, which we’re pretty good at picking up.

Yeardley: [00:18:16] Does she have the same last name as the other people you’re looking for?

Dan: [00:18:19] No, they all have different last names. So, as they’re talking to her, they ask about the car again. She says, “Nobody that lives at this residence drives that car.”

Yeardley: [00:18:30] Wait, but she just said the other woman you’re looking for drives it sometimes.

Dan: [00:18:34] Right. She’s all over the map. So, she’s just beating around the bush, really. And then they ask, “Hey, do you mind if we check the garage to make sure the car is not in the garage?” And she says, “I don’t feel comfortable doing that because the house belongs to my uncle, Ryan, and Ryan’s not here.” “Well, where’s Ryan?” “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know where he’s at. I think he’s at work.” So, they’re like, “Okay, can you call Ryan?” “Ah, yeah, I’m not supposed to call him at work. His boss gets mad at him.”

Yeardley: [00:19:04] Is there ever a scenario where they say, “Okay, we’ll get you off the hook. You don’t have to call him.” “Where does he work?” “We will call him.”

Dan: [00:19:12] Oh, they absolutely do that. “Okay, what’s his phone number? We’ll call him, or we’ll send somebody over there to talk to him.” She’s like, “Yeah, I’m not going to play ball with that.”

Dave: [00:19:19] You get in these situations where you can smirk to yourself, because you’re like, “All right, I’ll play the game. Let’s go.” And you say, “All right, well, where does he work? We’ll just drive to him.” Well, actually, he works there, but he’s supposed to be out of town doing deliveries today. And just the story keeps growing to make it impossible for you to get in contact with this person. I’m fine with that too. I’ll play that game to a point where I’m just writing down how your credibility factor is starting to do a nosedive. So, it just shows the lack of cooperation. I’m trying to cooperate, but you’re not really cooperating. It’s a game.

Dan: [00:19:58] So, as they’re talking to Marie at the front door, they haven’t come inside, she’s starting to get hanked up a little bit. They notice out of the corner of their eyes somebody down in the hallway who just peeks their head around the corner. All they can see is an adult male. They don’t get a really good look at his face. As they’re talking to her, the male that was in the hallway who peeked around, he slips out the back door and he goes to his car that’s parked in an alley behind their house. We’ve got a patrol car set up in the alley, and this male tries to drive away. Our patrol car guy, he stops him, says, “What’s your name?” “My name’s Ryan.”

Yeardley: [00:20:38] [laughs]

Dave: [00:20:39] I thought he was at work.

Dan: [00:20:41] I guess. Yeah, he didn’t make it. So, now they’re like, “Okay, what’s going on here?” They’re trying to hide something, obviously. So, they ask about the car, and he says, “Oh, it’s a relative of his. She’s probably got the car. She works down at the local gas station. You can go down there and talk to her.”

Yeardley: [00:21:00] How is Ryan related to the person who owns the car?

Dan: [00:21:03] I think it’s like a cousin or something like that.

Yeardley: [00:21:06] Do they all live in the same house?

Dan: [00:21:08] Once we start peeling the layers back of all these lies, yes, they all live there. They all come and go from there. There are a couple of houses that are within a block of each other that they all go back and forth from both of them. The two detectives that were at the door are like, “While our patrol officer is talking to Ryan, I’m going to run across the street, and I’m going to talk to the neighbors over there to see if they’ve seen anything that’s kind of peculiar.”

Yeardley: [00:21:31] Is Marie still at the door with the other detective?

Dan: [00:21:34] We’ve let her back in the house. She can just hang out in the house, because now we’re starting to get somewhere. So, they run across the street, talk to the neighbors. The neighbors invite them in, the detectives, and they’re chatting with them, “Hey, how well do you know your neighbors?” “We know them pretty well. They actually hide their Christmas presents at our house.”

Yeardley: [00:21:53] Oh.

Dan: [00:21:54] “That’s how well we know them.” Meanwhile, we’ve got patrol officer who’s talking to Ryan and asking him, “How well do you know your neighbors across the street?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know them very well at all.” So, it’s just another lie. Like, why are you lying? You’re lying about everything. Ryan ends up going back to the house. The detectives are over at the neighbor’s house, and I think Ryan starts to realize these lies are not working. They’re not going away. We’re not going to be able to keep doing this. This isn’t sustainable for us. So, he goes over and knocks on the neighbor’s door. The detectives go, “Oh, hey, how’s it going?” And he says, “We want to talk to you guys.” So, they walk back with Ryan back across the street, they go into the house, and there’s another female who’s sitting on the couch. Her name is Sarah.

Yeardley: [00:22:41] And how old are Ryan and Sarah?

Dan: [00:22:44] Early to mid-30s.

Yeardley: [00:22:45] Okay.

Dave: [00:22:46] This is why Marie is peeking over her shoulder at the door, probably only had the door open enough to get her head through the opening. It’s all the body language. She probably didn’t even realize she was doing it. But every time that happens, I’m like, “Oh, who else is in here? Oh, nothing.”

Yeardley: [00:23:01] Nothing and nobody.

Dan: [00:23:02] Right. Yeah. [Yeardley giggles] So, our detectives, they walk inside. Sarah identifies herself and she says, “I hit the person.” Now we got our driver.

Yeardley: [00:23:24] So, Sarah just confessed to the hit and run that killed Joseph. Is she taken into custody right there?

Dan: [00:23:30] Not immediately. It’s pretty clear in the room. The atmosphere in the room is no one is free to leave at this point, but we don’t have handcuffs out. We’re not hooking people up at this point. So, our detective immediately advises her of her Miranda rights, because you have to at that point. And she agrees to speak to our investigators there on the couch. So, we’ve got Marie and Sarah in separate rooms now. One of our detectives is talking to Marie. They identify that Marie was in the car when the hit and run happened and Sarah was driving. Marie tells this detective that she’s really stressed out, and the details of that night are a little blurry to her. She doesn’t remember everything. He says, “That’s fine, I understand. Just start from the beginning.”

[00:24:15] So, she says that on the night of the accident, Sarah picked her up from their house. And this is at least 30 minutes from the accident site. They’re way west of town in another small town where they live. Sarah picks her up, and they’re going to drive to Ryan’s work in the evening, and I think take him something to eat because he was going to be working late. So, as they start driving into town, they get on the freeway. They’re heading toward our town. And Sarah misses the exit on the freeway to go to Ryan’s work. She continues on the freeway, and it will eventually link back up to a road that will take them to Ryan’s work. So, she just continues down the road. She takes the exit, and they notice that the car in the left lane has stopped at a green light allowing two people to cross the street.

Yeardley: [00:25:10] Jeremy and Joseph.

Dan: [00:25:12] Jeremy and Joseph.

Yeardley: [00:25:13] And Sarah doesn’t stop.

Dan: [00:25:15] No, she did not see Jeremy and Joseph until it was too late. They had actually emerged. They’d almost crossed the street. They’d almost made it.

Yeardley: [00:25:24] Right.

Dan: [00:25:25] And boom.

Yeardley: [00:25:27] Wow.

Dan: [00:25:30] Marie says that she knows that the body is on the car, as they continue westbound. She says that Sarah starts accelerating and swerving back and forth trying to get the body off the car, and Marie is freaked out, obviously. So, they take this side road. After they pass this other witness and everything, they take this side road. As they take the bend in the road, the body falls off the car. Our witness who first saw the car is pretty adamant that the body appeared stuck on the car, not like he was holding on. He was stuck. So, our investigator asks, “Did he fall off the car? Did somebody take him off the car?” Marie says, “I don’t know.” ‘Did you guys stop?” “No, we didn’t stop.” Okay. Meanwhile, our other investigator is talking to Sarah, and Sarah’s first statement to us after she’s been Mirandized is, “I didn’t know I hit a person. I didn’t know if that person was on top of the car.”

Yeardley: [00:26:31] Does she say she knew she hit something?

Dan: [00:26:34] She says she knows she hit something, but she says, “I didn’t know what I hit. I had no idea if it was a person or not.”

Yeardley: [00:26:40] “And I decided still not to slow down. I’m just going to keep going.”

Dan: [00:26:43] Exactly. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Yeardley: [00:26:46] Do you catch her in lies?

Dan: [00:26:47] We catch her in lies by omission. She’s just not giving us information. She’s trying to sterilize this for herself. I think she thinks if she says she didn’t know and she was unaware that it minimizes her exposure.

Yeardley: [00:27:03] Right.

Dan: [00:27:03] So, from this initial interview with Detective Jeff, her next interview is with Officer Tom, and eventually, it’s me. And over these three interviews, her story just continues to evolve. Very self-serving. And with this initial interview, we get our first look at the car too. So, they say, “The car is in the garage. Let’s go out and look at it.” And the damage is massive. There’s a hole in the windshield that is enough for a human to fit through. It’s on the driver’s side. It’s not on the passenger side.

Yeardley: [00:27:40] So, this idea that she doesn’t know what she hit, it’s a fucking lie.

Dan: [00:27:44] It’s preposterous, and there’s blood everywhere. There’s actually even brain matter and skull tissue on the dashboard right in front of the driver.

Dave: [00:27:52] They miss that during the wash down.

Dan: [00:27:54] Yeah.

Dave: [00:27:55] This explains the tarp over the car that’s being towed. Let’s tarp the front half, because it’s clearly going to show these people hit something, that’s fairly significant. It’s not like a chipped windshield. It’s a destroyed windshield, one that when we look at them, you go, “They hit a human or they hit a large mammal,” that’s the kind of damage that gets caused.

Dan: [00:28:18] Yeah, and the plates are bent. Both the front and back license plates are bent up, so you can’t read them.

Yeardley: [00:28:23] Right. I’m surprised that if Joseph hit the windshield with that kind of impact and made that big a hole that he didn’t actually end up in the car.

Dan: [00:28:33] I think parts of his body were in the car. You try to visualize the dynamics of that violent of a collision.

Dave: [00:28:41] Speeds and momentum. He just rolls up onto the top of the car.

Dan: [00:28:45] Yeah. But it’s a massive hole. I ended up processing the car after a couple of days, and we did a search warrant on the car. When you process a car like that, you put your mind into being there and witnessing the accident and trying to visualize what’s going on. Horrible.

Dave: [00:29:02] So, is Sarah arrested on the spot that day?

Dan: [00:29:06] She is.

Dave: [00:29:06] So, she hasn’t lawyered up?

Dan: [00:29:09] She hasn’t lawyered up. We talked to her husband, Ryan. He works at an auto shop.

Yeardley: [00:29:14] Oh, how convenient.

Dan: [00:29:15] How appropriate. And Ryan tells us his role. So, he says that he’s waiting at work. He’s got a couple of work buddies there, and he gets a phone call. This is all backed up by some video surveillance that we’re able to get from Ryan’s work. He gets a phone call. He runs out of the building. And minutes later, you see the car that Sarah is driving, the involved vehicle drive in and pull partially into the bay, the auto bay.

Ryan: [00:29:45] About that time, she pulled in and that’s when I saw the windshield busted. She was freaking out, told me that she hit something. She didn’t say at the time. She said she hit something, and obviously, it was somebody.

Detective: [00:30:02] What made you think that?

Ryan: [00:30:03] Well, there’s a little bit of blood on the car. I was like, “Well, it could have been a cone or something. It couldn’t have been a sign.” So, obviously, she hit a person. And automatically, I started panicking. I started freaking out. I don’t really know what to do either. I didn’t know. I told her. I said, “Why are you here? You left the scene of an accident. You’re supposed to stay there.” I said, “Why’d you leave?” And she said that she just freaking out. She doesn’t know what to do.

Detective: [00:30:39] You said she hit something you figured out with somebody. What’d she tell you about that?

Ryan: [00:30:43] She said she hit a person, later on, after she was done, after she calmed down a little bit, she hit a person. And she drove a little ways, and then realized that there was somebody still on top of the car.

Detective: [00:30:58] Would you say she did then after she pulled them all?

Ryan: [00:31:01] Well, that’s when she came to my shop.

Detective: [00:31:03] Okay.

Dan: [00:31:04] These other two coworkers are looking like, “What the hell did you hit?”

Yeardley: [00:31:09] So, the other guys working at the garage, they see this car coming in with a giant hole and enough blood, according to the witness, that looks like somebody took a cup of it and threw it against the car. That seems pretty alarming. You would think someone in that room would have the conscience to call the police.

Dan: [00:31:26] This is something that Dave and I have encountered multiple times where we will release information to the public. And then when you find out somebody actually knew about it, and you go talk to them, and you say, “Why didn’t you call?” And they say, “Well, I figured other people had probably called. So, I didn’t need to call too,” and you just kind of scratch your head, which is why a lot of times when we do press releases now, we’ll say, “If you have any information, please, please call.”

Dave: [00:31:53] People don’t want to get involved. People don’t want to have to show up to court. People don’t want to have subpoenas served at their house or their place of employment. People just don’t want to get involved.

Dan: [00:32:01] So, one of the things we also considered is that, perhaps, one of the two guys that worked at the garage are our anonymous tipster.

Yeardley: [00:32:11] Oh.

Dan: [00:32:12] Because the information that we receive in our anonymous tip is pretty specific. It mentions who is in the car, who was driving, where they live. So, they have to have some pretty good knowledge of who was involved in this. And according to Sarah and Ryan, they hadn’t talked about this with anybody.

Yeardley: [00:32:33] Right.

Dan: [00:32:34] So, whoever our anonymous tipster was, we really appreciate it. We probably don’t solve this crime without people coming forward.

Yeardley: [00:32:42] Maybe if you’re close to Ryan, you certainly don’t want him to know it was you that called the police, because you don’t want to be a snitch.

Dan: [00:32:50] Yeah. I don’t know if it’s out of your respect for Ryan or maybe it’s other coworkers that you work with who you don’t want to draw their ire from.

Yeardley: [00:32:59] That’s so interesting. Okay, so, we’re at the body shop, and Sarah has just rolled up in this wrecked car. What happens next?

Dan: [00:33:09] So, Ryan and Sarah spray off the car with a hose. Just do a once over on it. And then one of the coworkers actually calls his boss up after hours and it’s like, “Hey, do you mind if we use that car trailer that you have?” And the boss is like, “Absolutely not. You will not be using my car trailer. I don’t know what you’re using it for, but no, that stays at work.” That doesn’t stop them. They use a trailer, anyway. Ryan and Sarah drive the car about a mile away to an industrial park that’s in our town. There’s some railroad tracks that run through there, there’s some blackberry bushes, and you can tuck stuff in behind these blackberry bushes and hide it, especially at night. At daytime, you’d be able to see it, but at night, it’s really dark back there.

[00:33:54] So, they tuck that car in there, they come back, they hook up the trailer to Ryan’s SUV, and he goes back over there, he backs the trailer in front of the car, they put the car up on the trailer, tarp it, bend the license plates up, and they’re off. They’re driving back home now. That’s where they pass our first tipster, who says, “I saw this car on a trailer, and it matches.” And that’s at like 10 o’clock at night.

Yeardley: [00:34:20] So, if it was already dark when Sarah brought the car to the body shop, why are they hiding it in the blackberry bushes, only to take it out when it’s still dark to drive it home.

Dan: [00:34:30] I think he was aware of the surveillance cameras that they’ve got at work and that potentially it could come back to bite him. He was trying to separate them covering up this crime from his actual place of employment.

Yeardley: [00:34:42] But wouldn’t the surveillance cameras catch the fact that they’d brought the car to the body shop?

Dave: [00:34:46] Yeah, but it doesn’t capture him then accommodating everything that she’s asking. It doesn’t capture him hooking up the trailer that he was told not to use.

Dan: [00:34:55] That’s all off camera.

Dave: [00:34:57] So, he’s trying to take his criminal activity away from where he works. I get it. There’s lights in parking lots. There’s lights at businesses. He doesn’t want to do this where there’s a bunch of people walking around. He wants to do this in a remote site where he has time, and doesn’t have to worry about people walking up on him, his boss showing up at work.

Yeardley: [00:35:18] Okay.

Dan: [00:35:19] That do not make sense.

Yeardley: [00:35:21] No, because presumably that first encounter at the body shop should be on camera.

Dan: [00:35:26] It is.

Yeardley: [00:35:27] And you have it.

Dan: [00:35:28] And we have it.

Dave: [00:35:29] Right. He just doesn’t want to have the whole thing on camera. Like, “Let’s not have the whole cover up.”

Yeardley: [00:35:33] The whole cover up on camera.

Dave: [00:35:35] I think he’s sifting through, “Okay, now what do we do?” And then it’s like, “Well, shit, we should probably do this somewhere else.” It finally dawns on him, like, “I’m doing all this shit on camera right now.”

Yeardley: [00:35:47] So, he’s only able to deal with where the headlights hit the road, not where they hit the horizon.

Dave: [00:35:52] Right. And clearly, when they’re first contacted by detectives, the strategy disintegrates, because they haven’t really thought this through. I’m sure they were hoping the police would never show up at their house, but when they do, it’s like, “Oh, shit, this is a lot sooner. We haven’t talked about this enough. What are we going to do? Marie, you go answer the door. We’re not here.”

Yeardley: [00:36:13] And, oh, by the way, there’s brain matter on the dashboard.

Dave: [00:36:16] Oops.

Dan: [00:36:17] Well, and still though, they’re so curious that they’re still peeking their head over and making themselves visible to law enforcement. These are not masterminds, and they’re in straight panic mode at this point. Like, “Oh, my God, that didn’t take very long for the cops to figure this out.” It’s thanks to all these witnesses that we have and people actually calling in. That’s so important to us. We have to have that.

Yeardley: [00:36:51] So, you arrest Sarah. What do you tell her she’s charged with?

Dan: [00:36:58] At this point, it’s going to be felony hit and run. That’s just the beginning of this. We’ve definitely got probable cause for felony hit and run. Now this is where the investigation starts to ramp up a little bit. So, we actually get a tip. Someone calls in and says, “Sarah was not at home all afternoon. She actually went to a bar.” So, we get in touch with the DA. The DA says, she’s about to get arraigned at 01:00 PM. I think it’s like 11 o’clock in the morning. I need one of you guys to hustle over to the jail and get a statement from her regarding her alcohol consumption that day. So, it was me. I ran over to the jail and interviewed Sarah.

[00:37:41] Did you know that he was on top of the car?

Sarah: [00:37:44] I didn’t. For a little, and then I went to go pull off the road, and then I pulled over on another road, and then I stopped, and I saw that he was up there.

Dan: [00:37:52] You had damage to your car?

Sarah: [00:37:54] Yeah, I was trying to focus out of where it broke my window.

Dan: [00:37:58] So, there was a lot of damage to the windshield?

Sarah: [00:38:01] Yeah.

Dan: [00:38:01] Okay. Do you know about how far you went before you stopped?

Sarah: [00:38:05] I don’t. I don’t even know that side of town.

Dan: [00:38:08] So, when you first stopped, that’s the first time you knew that he was on top of the car?

Sarah: [00:38:13] Yes.

Dan: [00:38:14] Okay. Changing lanes, anything?

Sarah: [00:38:17] Yeah, I ended up getting into the right lane to turn off the road.

Dan: [00:38:21] Were you driving erratically?

Sarah: [00:38:23] No.

Dan: [00:38:24] Were you swerving, anything like that?

Sarah: [00:38:27] I don’t believe that I was. No.

Dan: [00:38:28] So, you don’t believe that you were swerving?

Sarah: [00:38:30] No, I don’t.

Dan: [00:38:30] Okay.

Sarah: [00:38:31] Maybe when I turned off of the road, I was like, “Oh.” I was panicking, but no.

Yeardley: [00:38:37] At a certain point, obviously, if a man is hanging over the passenger side over the windshield, you recognize it’s a human being.

Dan: [00:38:44] Yeah. And you can see, there’s a hand hanging over the side. If you just look, I don’t know if you’re driving with your eyes closed, but it’s pretty obvious this is a human being. So, she takes this side road. She also says, “Yeah, whatever it was fell off the car, and I never stopped. And then I drove to my husband’s work, and I had my husband wash off the car. But there’s so much damage to the car that we didn’t feel it was safe to drive it home. So, we put it on a trailer and we took it home.” So, I probe a little more, and I say to her, “You got out of the car, didn’t you? He was stuck on the car.” She says, “Okay, yeah, I stopped the car and I drug him off the top of the car and put him on the ground, and I drove off.”

[00:39:35] So, I got to ask, all the indications that I’ve got are that you knew that he might have been on top of the car before you stopped. Were you just scared? Is that more the case?

Sarah: [00:39:52] Honestly, I couldn’t see because of my window. It was so cracked. I was trying to just look out the hole.

Dan: [00:39:59] But he wasn’t pounding on the roof of the car or anything like that?

Sarah: [00:40:01] No.

Dan: [00:40:02] Screaming?

Sarah: [00:40:03] No.

Dan: [00:40:04] Okay.

Sarah: [00:40:05] No. [sobbing]

Dan: [00:40:06] But you knew he was up there?

Sarah: [00:40:08] No, I did not.

Dan: [00:40:10] Not at all?

Sarah: [00:40:11] So, I pulled over. [sobbing]

Dan: [00:40:17] Did you say anything to him?

Sarah: [00:40:19] No.

Dan: [00:40:20] Did he say anything to you?

Sarah: [00:40:22] No.

Dan: [00:40:24] Okay. [Sarah sobbing] Did it cross your mind to stay with him?

Sarah: [00:40:32] It did.

Dan: [00:40:33] Okay. Why didn’t you?

Sarah: [00:40:35] I was scared.

Dan: [00:40:37] Did he look like he was in pretty bad shape?

Sarah: [00:40:39] I didn’t even look at him.

Dan: [00:40:41] Was he conscious?

Sarah: [00:40:43] I don’t even know.

Dan: [00:40:47] Was it difficult to get him off of your car?

Sarah: [00:40:50] Not really.

Dan: [00:40:52] So, he wasn’t hanging on?

Sarah: [00:40:53] No.

Dan: [00:40:54] He was just up there.

Sarah: [00:40:55] He was just up there because of my roof racks that just held him there.

Dan: [00:40:58] How much do you think he weighed?

Sarah: [00:41:00] I don’t even know.

Dan: [00:41:02] But you were able to get him off of there? How so?

Sarah: [00:41:05] I’m stronger than what I look.

Yeardley: [00:41:07] It’s striking to me how she talks about Joseph as if he was just an object rather than a human being.

Dan: [00:41:13] Yeah. Sarah says she’s stronger than she looks and everything, but I think she was probably pretty violent. If you think about the top of a car, she’s not going to throw Joseph over her shoulder and gently lay him down on the ground. What’s she going to do? She’s going to peel him off the car and let him fall. And I’m guessing it’s 5ft, the top of a car, a hatchback. She’s going to let him fall 5ft after he’s already sustained these devastating injuries, and she’s going to just compound that by just letting his body fall to the ground.

Yeardley: [00:41:45] Any of way she can, she’s going to get him off the car.

Dan: [00:41:48] Yeah. Just try to picture that. What that looks like. Pretty infuriating.

Yeardley: [00:41:52] Yeah, it’s bad.

Dave: [00:41:53] Someone with a little bit of heart and compassion there, disregard the mile and a half, you get to that point where you’re actually having a physical interaction with this person who is gravely injured. Call the medics. Do something. One of the conditions of one of these crimes that involves homicide or manslaughter is manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. Would you say we’ve checked the box?

Yeardley: [00:42:22] Yes.

Dan: [00:42:22] Yeah.

Dave: [00:42:23] It’s just preposterous and absurd what this woman did.

Yeardley: [00:42:27] It’s extraordinary.

Dan: [00:42:29] Yeah.

[00:42:30] So, we’re getting some information that you were out drinking and things like that. Were you drinking that night?

Sarah: [00:42:38] I did have one drink.

Dan: [00:42:39] You had one drink?

Sarah: [00:42:40] Yeah.

Dan: [00:42:40] What kind of drink did you have?

Sarah: [00:42:42] Ah, Sex on the Beach.

Dan: [00:42:44] Okay. Remember how big it was?

Sarah: [00:42:46] Just a glass.

Dan: [00:42:47] Anything else to drink?

Sarah: [00:42:49] And one shot.

Dan: [00:42:51] And one shot? What was the shot of?

Sarah: [00:42:54] Vodka.

Dan: [00:42:55] There’s no way I’m going to find out if I go and talk to people that you had more to drink than a Sex on the Beach and one shot of vodka?

Sarah: [00:43:03] No.

Dan: [00:43:05] Do you feel like it had any impact on the way you were driving that day?

Sarah: [00:43:09] No, I don’t.

Dan: [00:43:15] So, after that interview now, I’ve got some homework I have to go to the bar that they went to and they have good surveillance cameras there. I get the video and I’m able to watch what Sarah did for about three hours while she was at this bar. She had many drinks and many shots. I think she had three Sex on the Beach drinks, like, full pint glass. Not like the small one, but like a full pint glass which actually has two shots of liquor in it. And then she was having shots on the side also. She also tells me that before she went to the bar, she smoked marijuana. She uses medicinal marijuana. So, she’s got a lot of stuff on board at this point.

Dave: [00:43:57] This video in the bar is fairly interesting, because you can see the evolution of her intoxication. You see how sure footed she is in the beginning to her condition when she’s walking out the door.

Yeardley: [00:44:09] And what is that?

Dan: [00:44:10] Well, she’s hanging on her friends. She’s also knocking drinks off of tables. She knocks a whole table, like a high-top table. She sweeps all these glasses off a table. It doesn’t even register with her that she’s done that. She goes into a bathroom with her friends, and I end up speaking to the bartenders who had cut her off. The bartender, “Here’s what’s going on in the bathroom.” The bartender goes storming off from behind the bar over to the bathroom and you can see her just open the door to the bathroom, so I can just see her back, because we don’t have cameras in the bathroom, obviously. You can tell that she’s giving them the what for, like, shut the fuck up. There are other people here. So, Sarah leaves pretty soon after that with another family member.

Yeardley: [00:44:54] With her niece?

Dan: [00:44:55] No, her niece is 17 years old. So, her niece wasn’t at the bar.

Yeardley: [00:44:59] So, how does her niece get in the car?

Dan: [00:45:01] Well, Sarah drives back home.

Yeardley: [00:45:04] In that condition?

Dan: [00:45:05] Picks up her niece, drops off the other family member, and off they go to Ryan’s work.

Yeardley: [00:45:10] Gets in the car again.

Dan: [00:45:11] Yeah. So, when I interview Sarah, one of the first things she says to me is, I ruined my life. That’s why she’s scared, if she ruined her life. She tells me that she doesn’t drink that often, and she also tells me that the alcohol she consumed didn’t have any impact on her driving. It was because she was stressed from her prior argument at work that day.

Yeardley: [00:45:32] There’s a lot of eye rolling going on at the table here.

Dan: [00:45:35] Yeah. So, then I talked to her about the collision. She’s crying at this point. She’s emotional.

Dave: [00:45:41] She’s crying about her circumstances, not what she did or the condition of the victim.

Yeardley: [00:45:46] She’s crying because she got caught.

Dan: [00:45:48] Yeah.

Dave: [00:45:48] Right. This is all about her.

Dan: [00:45:50] So, I ask her, “What’s upsetting you the most about these circumstances?” And she said, “I should have stopped. I really should have stayed.” “Well, yeah. Yeah, you should have.” So, at the very end of this interview, I asked her, I said, “Is there anything else you want to tell me or say?” And she says, “What’s going to happen to me?” Not, “Is the man okay? How is his son? I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” nothing like that. It’s, “What’s going to happen to me?” That’s the question. What I tell her is, “I don’t make those decisions.”

Dave: [00:46:20] So, I seem to remember a detail about this. When she leaves the bar, there’s some sort of hit and run that happens over in the other town.

Dan: [00:46:28] Yeah. So, she goes to leave the bar. Actually, it’s after she picks up Marie and she’s on her way back into town, because they’re in a rural, small-town area, so they got to drive through the country a little bit to get back town and then get on the freeway. So, as they’re getting back into town, they come up to a traffic light, and Sarah’s three sheets, pretty much, and she’s not paying attention, and she just rear ends a car that’s in front of her. And this person goes, “What the heck?” And Sarah drives around him to get away, and this person starts following. This other person calls 911 and says, “I’m following somebody who just struck the back of my vehicle. I need help. Can you send the police?”

[00:47:10] Sarah manages to get on the freeway, and this person isn’t able to follow them, because they’re still following traffic laws. Sarah squirts out of there. Police get to the area, but they can’t locate the car because she’s way out in front. So, obviously, she continues to our town, misses the exit, takes that freeway off ramp, and then strikes Joseph.

Dave: [00:47:34] It gives you a glimpse into her intent that night and her frame of mind is that she’s already committed– It’s a property crime, hit and run, but I got to get out of dodge. So, when she hits a person, she’s not going to stop for a car. She’s probably not going to stop for a person. It’s like when we say, if you’re going to lie about the little stuff, you’re probably not going to tell me the truth about the big stuff, right? And so, they’re lying about whether or not they own a car or where people live on initial contact. I’ll give them this, at least they realize like, “We need to get out in front of this now and start at least giving them a version of the truth.”

Dan: [00:48:09] So, one of the other things that happens in this is because Ryan’s got culpability as well, he tampered with physical evidence. So, we arrest him as well.

Yeardley: [00:48:19] So, Ryan is arrested. What is Sarah actually charged with?

Dan: [00:48:24] So, she was indicted for manslaughter, reckless driving, hit and run felony, quite a few charges. We couldn’t charge her for driving under the influence.

Yeardley: [00:48:33] Why?

Dan: [00:48:34] Because now we’re a couple days past and we don’t have evidence. Was she under the influence? Heck yeah, she was. We can’t prove it. We don’t have any evidence.

Dave: [00:48:43] The video could be evidence, but you need a blood-alcohol content. You need a BAC reading to say, “Yeah, she’s over the limit.” One could surmise based on the video, she’s housed, but that DUI charge in relation to all the other stuff, it’s just like a lesser included. She’s not going to get substantial time, because she was also DUI.

Yeardley: [00:49:03] And do each of those charges add to her overall sentence in length?

Dave: [00:49:06] The big one is the manslaughter charge. The rest are going to be months or maybe a year, tacked on to the end of it, but the bulk of her time is because of the big charge.

Yeardley: [00:49:15] And was it a jury trial?

Dan: [00:49:17] Well, we were all shaking our heads because we’re dealing with our district attorney, who Dave has done a bunch of cases with, and I have too, and she’s awesome, and she doesn’t put up with any BS. Sarah started introducing BS into this process. So, she would have an attorney, the attorney would say, “You need to plead guilty to this because you are dead to right.” And she would say, “I’m not pleading guilty to it. I want to go to trial.” And she would fire her counsel, and then they’d hire her another counsel, and we’d do the same thing again. And finally, our DA said, “Enough is enough. We’re delaying the inevitable here. So, yeah, if you want to go to trial, we’ll go to trial, and I’m going to go for everything.” That’s where Sarah changes her mind and goes, “Okay, I’ll take 10 years.” So, she got a 10-year prison sentence. Off she went.

Yeardley: [00:50:03] And what about Ryan? Did he get anything?

Dave: [00:50:06] Well, Sarah takes her 10 plus year prison sentence, and Ryan got several months in jail for tampering with evidence and then was put on probation. Since this case, which was probably five years, six years ago, last year, while on patrol, I got called out to assist one of our officers with a child abuse investigation, and we just happened to land at Ryan’s new residence, which is in our city now. And as a result of that investigation, Ryan is now in prison for the next 20 plus years.

Yeardley: [00:50:39] Oh, my God. He was the perpetrator of this child abuse crime?

Dave: [00:50:44] Yeah, he was, and he admitted it, and he got hammered by the justice system.

Yeardley: [00:50:50] Wow.

Dan: [00:50:51] Yeah. And the thing about this is, by witness accounts, Joseph and Jeremy were not crossing the street appropriately. If Sarah would have struck Joseph and then just pulled over right there and waited, she’s going to get a DUI. I don’t think she’s going to get manslaughter, do you?

Dave: [00:51:10] No. I mean, what can you do in that situation? You don’t see anybody, they’re in the crosswalk right in front of you. Boom.

Yeardley: [00:51:16] And they’re crossing against the red light.

Dan: [00:51:18] Right.

Dave: [00:51:18] Nobody would expect there to be two pedestrians in your lane. So, there’s no intent there.

Dan: [00:51:24] She’s probably looking at maybe criminal negligent homicide. She’s going to be culpable, because she shouldn’t be driving when she’s intoxicated, but it’s not going to be as bad as she made it.

Dave: [00:51:35] She made it egregious.

Dan: [00:51:37] And if she doesn’t drive with Joseph on the car, maybe he survives this. I don’t think Joseph was ever going to be the same after he got hit like this, but maybe he’s still alive.

Yeardley: [00:51:48] Yeah, that’s true, if she had just had an ounce of compassion. Is there anything about this case that stands out for you in particular?

Dan: [00:52:00] This is a case that’s always going to stick with me, because I think about Jeremy and he hadn’t seen his dad in such a long time, and his dad visits from another country and they spend one day together, and that’s it and he’s gone. This case will stick with me, for sure.

Yeardley: [00:52:15] Yeah. That makes it especially tragic, doesn’t it? I guess, one of the redeeming factors is that the community really came together to help law enforcement solve this crime. But then you guys did an incredible job of putting all those pieces together. Hats off to you.

Dan: [00:52:31] Thank you. Yeah, the people who started this investigation– I came in actually a little bit late. I think I was on vacation, so I had been called in like a day later. But Detective Kyle, Detective Jeff, Officer Tom, they knocked it out of the ballpark. I did quite a bit of work on this, but it was truly a team effort.

Yeardley: [00:52:52] You guys are incredible. I love a case that comes from the usual suspects.

Dan: [00:52:59] Thank you.

Dave: [00:52:59] Thank you.

Yeardley: [00:53:00] Thank you.

[theme music]

Yeardley: [00:53:04] Small Town Dicks is produced by Gary Scott and Yeardley Smith, and coproduced by Detectives Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Soren Begin, 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: [00:53:32] 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.

Dave: [00:53:48] And if you support us on Patreon, your subscription will give you access to exclusive content and merchandise that isn’t available anywhere else. Go to patreon.com/smalltowndickspodcast.

Yeardley: [00:54:00] That’s right. Your subscription also makes it possible for us to keep going to small towns across the country-

Dan: [00:54:06] -in search of the finest-

Dave: [00:54:07] -rare-

Dan: [00:54:08] -true crime cases told-

Dave: [00:54:10] -as always, by the detectives who investigated them. So, thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.

Yeardley: [00:54:15] Nobody’s better than you.

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