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Yeardley:  Hey Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. I want to remind you that if you want access to bonus episodes and regular episodes a day early and ad free and our community forum and other behind the scenes goodies, you got to go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and then in the top righthand corner, hit that little tab that says join. And then listen to the end of today’s episode for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

[music]

 Hey Small Town Fam, it’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all doing well. If you’re gearing up for the holidays, I hope it’s going great. And if you’re not gearing up for the holidays, I hope that’s going great. We have such an interesting case for you today from a new guest, Deputy Alia. The case Alia brings us today happened early on in her career. And by the end of this episode, you’ll totally get why it stuck with her all these years. People often ask me if after being submerged in true crime stories for the past seven years on Small Town Dicks, if I’ve become immune to the horrible ways people choose to deal with the problems in their lives. But I haven’t. I’m still shocked by people’s cowardice, by what they think they can get away with or their inability to deal with their own shit and face regular human problems head on. And I often wonder what combination of nature and nurture leads someone to devise their own moral code where they’re only accountable when they feel like it. Here is Trust.

 Hi there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins-

Dave:  –And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]:  Thank you.

Yeardley:  Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan:  Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. That was better.

Yeardley:  Good. That was good.

Dan:  Let’s go with number two.

Yeardley:  That was perfect. We have Detective Dave.

Dave:  Hello, team.

Yeardley:  Hello. Hello, sir. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hi, all.

Yeardley:  Hi. [laughs]

Paul:  Hi.

Yeardley:  Hi. It all just makes me so happy to see the A team, even though I’m not in the same room with any of them, but it fills my heart and my soul to see them in any way, shape, or form that I can. And Small Town Fam, we are so excited. You’re going to love this. We have a brand-new guest on the podcast, but she comes to us through a connection that you will recognize when I’m done introducing her and she gives you the lowdown, please welcome Deputy Alia.

Alia:  Hi. Happy to be here.

Yeardley:  Oh, we’re so happy to have you, Alia. So, now that I’ve set you up, tell us a little bit about how we have the honor of having you sit down with us today.

Alia:  Well, you have interviewed my sister, Detective Bre.

Yeardley:  Yes.

Alia:  She is amazing.

Yeardley:  She’s amazing. I’m just going to interrupt for a second and tell our listeners. So, Bre gave us our first episode of this season, Season 15 called Superstar, and I named it that for all the women who were involved in that case. And then more recently, Bre gave us an episode, we called Heinous, which just aired a couple of weeks ago. It’s also excellent. And, oh, fun fact listeners, Bre is actually in the room with Alia right now. And so even though Alia is front and center on the mic today, we like to consider Bre our silent second guest. But she is truly remarkable. So, yeah, this is so fun to have you with us today, Alia.

Alia:  Thank you. Yes, she is incredible. I am very, very lucky to be her sister and follow in her footsteps. Although, I’ve tried to make my own path, she has just been such a remarkable human in my life. She has always taken care of me. She’s always protected me, looked out for me, our dad was a lieutenant at our agency and my sister followed in his footsteps. And I’m like, “I’m going to do exactly what my sister is doing.” I just always wanted to be exactly like her. [laughs]

Yeardley:  And is she looking at you now?

Alia:  [laughs] Yeah. I can’t look at her.

[laughter]

Bre:  I’m going to leave.

Alia:  [laughs] She’s staring up. I can’t look at her. [Yeardley laughs] But she is just such an incredible person and such an incredible investigator and yeah. So, that is how I am here. And I’m very thankful to be here.

Yeardley:  We’re so honored. Give us a little thumbnail of your law enforcement career so far.

Alia:  Sure. So, I started at my agency in 2014. So, January will be 11 years with my agency. I spent about eight and a half years on patrol. Five of those years I was a field training officer before I got pulled back to the training division like two years ago.

Yeardley:  Does that mean they reassigned you to something else when you got pulled back?

Alia:  Yes. So, I was fortunate enough to get a phone call and say, “Hey, we would love to have you in our training division.” And begrudgingly I went. I was kicking and screaming. I was crying on the way home of my last patrol shift because I love patrol. I feel like you never go back to patrol as like a deputy and you’re just responding to calls and being in the action. And that’s what I love to do. I grew up with stories from my dad and my sister of patrol. And that’s what I wanted to do. And I was loving training. Like I said, I was a field training officer for about five years. So, I was training new recruits on the street. We are a very big county and we have a lot of people coming through our academies.

 So, I was training lots of recruits and I felt very, very blessed to be in that position. And I loved it. So, when I got the call, I was very thankful for it. I was very grateful for it. However, I was like, “This means that my patrol career is over.” Because you don’t really go back. After a step like that, you don’t really go back. I might go back as a supervisor one day or something like that. You never really go back to just being a patrol deputy.

Yeardley:  Sure. And somehow it seems, I think Paul has mentioned this, certainly Dave, when he became a sergeant. When you are promoted, while it’s an honor now, you’re really s taken out of the action because now you’re supervising all the people who are in the action. And it’s a real double-edged sword.

Alia:  It is.

Yeardley:  You get more money, you get a better title, but you’re like, “Shit, I miss my stuff.”

Dan:  You get a lot more headaches too.

Alia:  Yeah, it’s so hard because I am full time training. We are running our own academy classes. So, I’m training these kids to be like, what I love the most. And then I get to like see them off and they get to go out and be on the street. And so, it’s very rewarding but it is difficult in a way because, it’s like, “Man, I just really miss it.” But I am very thankful for the position that I’m in. It has opened a lot of opportunities and a lot of doors for me. I’m also a negotiator with our agency and I have been a negotiator for a little over four years now.

Yeardley:  So, totally low stress. No stakes.

Alia:  No stress at all. [Yeardley laughs] There’s zero stress, nothing. What is stress? I don’t know what that is.

[laughter]

Dave:  The adage is people who are shit magnets want to be around the shit all the time.

Alia:  Yeah.

Dave:  When you’re not finding stuff like that, you start going, what am I doing different? What am I doing wrong? Why am I not finding anything? So, you get taken out of the game.

Yeardley:  Sure. It’s not normal, by the way, just speaking as a civilian, it ain’t normal.

Alia:  [laughs] You’re like, that is not a normal headspace.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Alia, we are so happy to have you. Please tell us how this case came to you.

Alia:  So, I was fairly early in my career at the time I was working night shift. I was dispatched to a call of a person down.

Yeardley:  What does that mean?

Alia:  Somebody that needed assistance. However, it’ll come in as a person down. But then the comments in the call will elaborate on that. So, the comments in the call elaborated and said basically, husband’s calling in, his elderly wife is deceased, she’s not breathing, she has no pulse and she is obviously deceased. Because dispatch will try to have them start CPR and things like that. If they’re warm to the touch, if there’s any signs of life, they will have them. And he was based basically refusing saying that she is very obviously deceased and we just needed to respond.

Yeardley:  So off you go into the middle of the night.

Alia:  So, off I go into the middle of the night and funny story, so [chuckles] I don’t even know if I should share this or not. [laughs] I used to get full blown pizzas every night and just put them in my passenger seat and just eat my pizza while I was like going all night long.

[laughter]

So, I had just gotten my pizza for the night and I was like buckling it into the passenger seat [Yeardley laughs] when I got dispatched to this. And I was like, “Oh, I need to eat this pizza.” But off I go to this call and at the time, I think I had probably three years of experience on the road, which is not a ton of time on the road whatsoever.

 It’s a little bit of time to get your feet wet and kind of know what you’re doing, but not really. So, we get dispatched two people at a time to these kinds of calls. Because if you need to do CPR or something like that, you want to have a second person there to do CPR. But from the comments in the call and the way that it was so obviously somebody that was already deceased, she was 74 at the time. I very stupidly told my zone partner, I was like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go, I’ll take the report.” You can hang back. No worries. I was not as smart as I am now. I should have been a little bit smarter back then.

 So, I get there and this house sits on the corner of a major road within my zone. So, a house that I pass a lot, the area that I worked at the time, it’s a very low-income area. There’s a lot of crime. Homicides are a dime a dozen. So, this guy calling in saying that his elderly wife was deceased was a very common call at the time for a patrol deputy to just go and respond and take the report. So, I get there and he meets me in the driveway of the residence. As I’m pulling off of the main road, I can see him standing in the driveway ready to meet me. So, I’m like, “Okay, this is where I’m going.” It’s dark, it’s January. It gets dark at like 6 o’clock.

 So, I see him, I pull up, I’m like, okay, this is the run of the mill investigation. And in my very naive brain, that’s what I’m thinking at the time.

Dan:  Let me interrupt you just for a second. You said him– you meet the caller. What’s his name?

Alia:  Ken.

Yeardley:  How old is Ken? Husband Ken, roughly.

Alia:  Ken at the time is also 74 years old.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Dave:  I’m trying to think of down subjects or dead subject calls that I’ve been to. You get the whole gamut. All the family members are inside and it’s quiet until you get inside and you’re like, “Oh, everyone’s really upset.” There’s others where people are out in the middle of the street waving law enforcement and ambulances down. So, it runs the gamut. What was Ken’s affect as he sees law enforcement arrive at his house?

Alia:  So, I am so glad you brought that up because you’re right, normal elderly deaths, there’s family involved, there’s a lot of people there. You will see everything from grandchildren to great grandchildren, children, spouses, all of these things. That’s a very normal situation. Ken was by himself in the driveway. When I met him in the driveway, he was very calm, almost eerily calm. He described to me what was going on and I did a little bit of an interview with him in the driveway, asking him a few questions, like where she was located, when the last time that he saw her alive was, what he think may have happened to her, if it was an expected death, if it was something that was sudden, because a 74-year-old could be a very healthy 74-year-old.

 So, I was asking him a few questions and he was very calm, very put together. Ken is a bigger guy and I think this plays into it later on. He’s a bigger guy, he’s a heftier guy. He definitely had like a belly on him, heavy set, older male. So, I’m talking to him in the driveway and I’m feeling him out. And again, I’m by myself, it’s nighttime. But I had already told my zone partner, like, “Don’t worry, I got this.” So, I don’t want to start calling in the Calvary, but he’s giving me a little bit of an off vibe and I don’t know how to explain it unless, you know and unless you’ve been there, that somebody is just giving you a vibe that your body is not accepting, if that makes sense.

Yeardley:  Totally get it, yeah.

Alia:  Yeah, like the sixth sense and the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up. And the way he’s describing his wife to me is a little concerning at that point. But it’s me and it’s Ken in the driveway. And then Barbara is deceased inside the house.

Yeardley:  So, Barbara is his wife.

Alia:  Barbara is his wife. So, after having a little bit of a conversation with Ken, a very short conversation, because I still want to check for signs of life and things like that, because obviously I would have more experience with that than Ken probably would. So, we have that little bit of dialogue in the driveway and I’m like, “Okay, let me get in the house. And see where she’s at.” Because fire rescue is on the way. And interestingly, fire rescue, their station was like a half a mile down the road. It was very, very close to their residence. But no shade to fire rescue, we all know they stage, on things.

Yeardley:  What, what, what does this mean?

Alia:  We got to let them know it’s safe. It’s safe for everybody here. We’re all safe here. [Yeardley laughs] Again, no shade to fire rescue, they’re great. [laughs]

Yeardley:  You’re saying you have to secure the scene before fire rescue will come into the house. Yes, we’ve heard a version of that before.

Alia:  Absolutely. So, we need to make sure that everything is safe. And that’s a very valid thing for them. We need to make sure the scene is safe and allow them to come in and do their job safely. So, after getting some brief information from Ken in the driveway, I proceed in the house. The house is just a ranch style, single story house. When I walk into the living room, it looks like the living room that your grandparents would have growing up. It’s got all the little figurines and there’s mail with a mail opener everywhere.

[laughter]

 We don’t do mail openers really anymore. plaid couches- [crosstalk]

Yeardley:  Shag rug?

Alia:  Shag carpet, yes, yes. Panel walls, like the wood panel walls. So, I’m just, “Okay, this feels like you’d be at your grandparent’s house.” So, I’m feeling it out. And Barbara’s located in the bedroom all the way at the end of the hallway. So, I make my way inside the house with Ken. I ask Ken to stay in the living room and let me go assess Barbara by myself. And so, I leave him in the living room, which gives me a little bit of like Spidey senses as well. But again, I’m by myself and I’m not really sure what I’m dealing with. So, I go into the back bedroom and I see Barbara, and she’s laying on the right side of the bed. And I can see that there is a person laying there. And I make my way over because the side that she is laying on is not the side closest to the bedroom door.

 So, I make my way over to her side of the bed, and she’s covered with a blanket, and I can see her face. And I legitimately thought I was looking at a fake skeleton, like a Halloween prop.

Yeardley:  Really?

Alia:  Yes.

[Break 1]

Yeardley:  So, Alia, you said Barbara’s body looked like it was a Halloween prop, can you describe what you mean by that?

Alia:  So, her face was so lacking in any fat or tissue or anything that you could see every single bone, every structure of her face. And so, I’m like, “That’s very odd.” But I understand, she’s older, people pass, they look different when they pass. When the life leaves you, it’s a different look. You lose that healthy, life-giving glow. If I can put it in any type of description. Barbara’s covered with a blanket on this bed and I remove the blanket from her and I’m shocked at what I see. And again, I am a younger deputy. I have dealt with a lot of death and a lot of natural death, a lot of homicides from the area that I worked. But like this actually shocked me.

Yeardley:  Why does Barbara’s condition shock you considering what you’d seen already?

Alia:  So, I could see a few contusions to her face. She had a gash above her eyebrow and she looked like she had little bit of a golf ball on her forehead. And like I said, her face was so sunken in and lifeless. And I don’t think I mentioned when I met Ken in the driveway, he told me he had last heard her breathing in bed about 30 minutes prior to calling us. So, around 07:30 he had heard Barbara breathing, He went into the bathroom of their master bedroom, had heard her breathing, and around 8-ish o’clock is when he found her lifeless from his account. So, when I pulled back the sheet, Barbara was laying completely straight.

 Her feet were together, like her ankles were together, her legs were completely straight, her hands were down by her sides, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of clean blue underwear. So, she was naked other than a pair of clean blue underwear. And I had dealt with deaths and things like that before. And you would see people commonly like urinate themselves when they pass, things like that. But these underwear were perfectly clean. And her body positioning was so odd to me that she would die completely straight.

Yeardley:  Like a board?

Alia:  Like arms by her side, legs completely straight out. It was very eerie to me the way she was laying, the fact that she only had a pair of underwear on that were not soiled at all. And on top of that she was incredibly emaciated. I could see every single bone in her body. Like I could probably count them all to you. And I’m just like, “This does not look right to me at all.” And again, I only have like 3 years of experience at the time, but I’m like, “There’s something wrong, very, very wrong here.” So, that sense is still going. EMS ended up showing up and pronounced her deceased. And after they did their thing with her, because obviously, once I got there, once I saw what was going on, it was very obvious that she was deceased.

 But I was going to let EMS come in and do their thing. They obviously pronounced her. I called my zone partner while they were working on her, and I was like, “Listen, something’s not sitting right with me. I need you to come over here, and I need you to at least entertain Ken while I figure out what is going on, because none of this is sitting right to me. This doesn’t look like an elderly woman who just passed. This looks like she’s been abused for a really, really, really long time.” So, after I call my zone partner, I start trying to manipulate her a little bit to see what her level of rigor is.

Yeardley:  Manipulate Barbara’s body.

Alia:  Her body, to see if her joints were moving because she was very cold to the touch. So, I was like, “Let me just try to manipulate her a little bit,” because if we’re legitimately talking 30 minutes, she should still be able to be manipulated. Her arms, her legs, things like that. But she was already in rigor mortis when I was there, five minutes after I had come there, after Ken had called, she was already in rigor. Her joints were not moving whatsoever. So, I know that what he was saying to me was not true because she didn’t die 30 minutes prior to me showing up there.

Yeardley:  How long does it take for rigor mortis like that to set in?

Alia:  So, full rigor mortis would be about 12 hours.

Paul:  And, rigor is something that sets in gradually and starts with the extremities with the smaller muscles, and then pretty soon the larger muscles end up going into rigor. And so, a pathologist in the morgue can sit there and determine to what extent the body is along this rigor gradient. Now, it is dependent a little bit upon temperature. And this is in January you said?

Alia:  January, and it’s January in Florida. So, it is colder, but it is not necessarily cold. It’s definitely not snowing. It’s decent outside. It’s our happy months. Because it’s like 70. It’s not cold. [Yeardley laughs]

Paul:  So, there isn’t heat on in the house or anything like that?

Alia:  No, no. We took a picture of the temperature and I believe it was at 75.

Paul:  Okay. Alia, this is impressive to me that a young deputy is well versed enough to make the observation of rigor, because we generally don’t get that from patrol.

Alia:  You can thank my sister for that.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Shout out to Bre.

Alia:  She taught me a lot.

Dave:  Well, I also think, I don’t know how many dead bodies I’ve seen a lot. And folks who die in the last seconds of life, in the throes of death don’t expire in a solid planking maneuver that looks like you’re going into a pine box, like back in the old West. They’re contorted. They look like they died uncomfortably. So, again, the red flags, all the observations about the condition of Barbara’s physical appearance, all these things are okay, nice try, Ken. But there’s more to what you’ve told me in the two-minute interview that I got in your front yard.

Alia:  Absolutely. And to my sister’s credit also, she told me when I started this career about leaning into that sixth sense, leaning into that feeling of something not being correct. And if my body is telling me that something is not correct, something is probably not correct. And that advice has carried throughout my entire career. And I’ve always had that in the back of my head, like her saying, if something does not feel correct, it’s not. You need to lean into it and you need to listen to it. Don’t dismiss it. So, at that moment, I was like, “Okay, this is just not checking out.” For me, this isn’t passing the smell test. And so, I called my zone partner, Deputy Phil. As soon as, I called him, he was like, “Yep, I’m on my way. No problem. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Yeardley:  Can I ask you a question, Alia?

Alia:  Yes.

Yeardley:  Once you see Barbara’s body and you see that she’s emaciated and she has contusions, clearly she did not, as you say, just die in her sleep, as her husband Ken is telling you. Does the hair on the back of your neck stand up? Because now Ken is in a room basically behind you, like you can’t see him. You no longer have eyes on Ken. And clearly something has happened to Barbara and it probably has to do with Ken. And now you’re in that house alone and you are the one at the disadvantage because you don’t know the layout of this dwelling. Does any of that come up for you?

Alia:  Oh, absolutely. That was my first thought was that me and Ken were just in this house together. It’s just the two of us. I’m spending time back there. So, he knows that I’m not just walking back out to talk to him like, “Oh, Barbara’s passed.”

Yeardley:  All is well, exactly.

Alia:  All is well. We’ll get a funeral, homecoming, those types of things. So, I’m thinking that he knows that I’m understanding that something is not right. So, yes, there is definitely that sense of, I could definitely be just hanging out in this house with a guy that just murdered his wife. And, that is a very eerie, very interesting feeling unless you felt something like that. I just don’t even really know how to describe it.

Dan:  I think a way that maybe our listeners could maybe understand if they’ve seen The Silence of the Lambs and when Clarice Starling goes into Buffalo Bill’s house and the lights go out, [Alia laughs] what that feeling is like oh, shit.

Alia:  Yes. Oh, shit. Yes, 100%.

Dave:  Where is he and what is he wearing?

Alia:  Right? And what is he doing right now?

Yeardley:  Also, Ken gave you the its out in the driveway. As Ken is giving you this account of how Barbara died, you’re like, “Mm, I don’t know.” I’m not getting the vibe here.

Alia:  Something’s not right. And, he knows what she looks like in that bed. He knows it’s not natural and it’s not normal. So, yes, all of that is definitely playing in my brain at the time. Going back to Barbara, not only can I literally see every single bone in her body, and when I say every single bone in her body, every single bone in her body, but she’s missing her front tooth. She has no front tooth. She does have dried blood around her mouth, which I have seen purge and things like that before. But then I start looking around the room. Because you get that tunnel vision on what you’re looking at, and you’re like, “Oh, man, this doesn’t feel right. But let me open my eyeballs and look and I see blood spatter, like, on the blinds behind her and on the wall. And like I said, she had a laceration above her eyebrow and she had a contusion on her head. And I’m just like, “There’s just something so, so wrong about this, including her positioning, including the rigor, including her mouth.” Her mouth is open.

Paul:  Well, okay. I was just going to ask some clarifying questions about the death scene and the physical evidence. Alia, so, Barbara’s laying there, and she’s obviously been positioned. This is not a natural position that somebody dies in. And I’ve got cases in my past where the deceased bodies have been positioned like this, in fact, where their arms have been crossed over their chest in one instance with a rose put on the chest. But you mentioned earlier your observation of extensive rigor in Barbara’s body. She’s been dead longer than the half hour that Ken is claiming she’s been dead. Are there any flies that you’re noticing at this point when you come in?

Alia:  No. No, none.

Paul:  Okay. Any type of odor, that death odor?

Alia:  Not even the death odor. No, I know exactly what you’re talking about. But no, no odor of her body at all.

Paul:  And then the laceration you’re observing to her forehead, did it have any bleeding out of that wound?

Alia:  There was and it was dried at the time.

Paul:  Dried blood flow or was there a pool of blood underneath her head?

Alia:  There was not a pool of blood underneath her head. It looked as if it had been cleaned, but it was an open laceration right above her eyebrow. That was significant enough that it looked like it may need stitches, but it was completely dried.

Paul:  This is a typical laceration that boxers get when they get that above the eyebrow. You see the blood just streaming. It’s a significant bleeding injury. And your observation of blood spatter, if you’re not seeing a pooled blood source, because it requires a pooled blood source and a blow to that pooled blood source to produce blood spatter, if you’re not seeing that on her face, on her head, on the bed at a location where you could see a blow producing that spatter, then that’s telling me, “Okay, something has been altered.” There’s been some level of cleanup. And so that’s where I’m starting to key in on, mentioning the fresh underwear, the positioning of the body. There’s been some interactions with Barbara’s body, likely by Ken since she died.

Alia:  Yes, absolutely. And when they removed her and they ended up taking pictures of the mattress underneath her, there was those stains underneath her.

Yeardley:  So, sorry, Alia, what is present underneath Barbara?

Alia:  It looks like urination stains underneath her on the mattress and on the sheet underneath the towel, underneath Barbara.

Yeardley:  Okay.

Alia:  But nothing on the towel. Nothing on the towel that was underneath her and nothing on her underwear. Those two are completely clean.

Yeardley:  So, the underwear and the towel were obviously put on and under her after the urination after she died.

Alia:  Yes.

Yeardley:  And these physical clues would suggest that Ken is lying about what happened to his wife.

Alia:  Yes.

[Break 2]

Yeardley:  So, Bre, Barbara’s death looks really suspicious now, and you know that Ken is lying to you. So, what’s next?

Bre:  So, I called my corporal at the time, and I was like, “Listen, I really need you to come here and I need you to look at this and give this a second look.” So, my zone partner gets there. Once he got there, I said, “Listen, can you just entertain Ken? Make sure he’s not doing anything in the house. Just entertain him, talk to him, keep him occupied until I can figure out what’s going on.” So, he’s entertaining Ken, and I’m able to run back to my car and get my computer and I bring my computer back into the bedroom with Barbara while I’m waiting for my supervisor to get there and a couple more resources in place. And I run everybody, I run all of their information in our databases, and I pull up her driver’s license picture.

Yeardley:  You run Ken and Barbara’s sort of who they are through the DMV deal?

Bre:  Absolutely. And I pulled up Barbara’s driver’s license photo and I was like, “Sick to my stomach.” I don’t even know another way to describe it. In her driver’s license photo, she’s older. She is definitely elderly in her driver’s license photo, but she is beautiful. Her skin is beautiful. She has makeup on, her hair is done. She looks healthy and like she takes care of herself. And I was like, “This is not who I am looking at whatsoever.” Something major has been done to her. Because this person I’m looking at is elderly. She’s definitely older. And she has gold hoops in her ears. She clearly cares about what she looks like and is presenting herself for her driver’s license photo, even as an elderly woman, as a very well-kept woman.

 And so when I saw that photo, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, there is something very very wrong here.” It made me sick. It made me sick to my stomach.

Yeardley:  So, Bre, when your corporal arrives, do you show him all these discrepancies you notice with Barbara.

Bre:  Yes.

Bre:  So, I show him the blood spatter. I show him her face, her body, her positioning. So, I’m showing him all of these things. He’s like, “Okay, I 100% agree with you. I think that there’s something wrong here.” And he starts making phone calls to our Criminal Investigations Division, and detectives start responding. They get there and they start seeing what I’m seeing. So, once the detectives got there, I ended up putting Ken in my car because they asked me to transport him over to our Criminal Investigations Division. So, while we were waiting, Ken and I were talking in the car, just having casual conversation. And it was so strange because it was like I was talking to my grandfather.

Yeardley:  What did you talk about?

Bre:  We just talked about he had two adult grown daughters. We talked about the fact that him and Barbara had been married for 50 years and that they had these grown daughters together, and they had this whole life together. And he was describing this life that they had together to me, which sounded like a magical life. And I’m sitting here thinking all of these things that I’m thinking, and I’m just letting him talk, and I’m just having casual conversation with him. And he’s telling me about their years of marriage and how she’s been on the decline, and he believed that she had onset of dementia and all of these things, but she had not seen a doctor.

 And I’m like, “Man, this is interesting to hear him talk about their 50 years of marriage, their two grown daughters, all of these things that they’ve done in their lives,” because he’s just rambling at this point while I’m looking at Barbara, and I’m like, “You have severely abused her.” You have not taken care of her. You have not done what you vowed to do to her. And there was food in the fridge. The fridge was full. There was plenty of things to nourish her body. And yet Barbara is skin and bones. And Ken, like I said in the beginning, is a hefty man. He’s been eating, Barbara has not. You’re sitting here talking about your life together as if it’s some magical life that you’ve had. You’re making this sound so amazing, but, like, you’re severely abusing your wife.

Yeardley:  Did Ken have any questions as to why other officers are now showing up?

Bre:  He didn’t. Not a single one.

Yeardley:  That makes me feel like he knows what he’s done, and now he knows that everybody else knows too.

Bre:  Mm-hmm, absolutely. He was playing it cool as a cucumber. Because I was expecting that. I was expecting him to be in the backseat of my car. Why am I in the backseat of your car? Why do I need to go back to the Criminal Investigations Division? Why this? Why that?

Paul:  Alia, when you’re talking to Ken and he’s saying Barbara has been on the decline, is Ken offering up, “She’s been diagnosed with cancer or she’s stopped eating. She’s got some psychological issues.” Nothing to explain this severe weight loss.

Alia:  No. So, I asked him, because he did mention that he believed that she had the onset of dementia. So, I asked Ken if Barbara had seen a doctor yet for that or if they were addressing that at all. And he had told me, she does not want to see doctors. And so, no, she had not, because on her wishes, she had not seen any doctors because she did not want that. And I’m sitting there in my brain, and I’m like, but if you’re a husband and you think that your wife is in the early stages of dementia, even if she said she didn’t want one, wouldn’t you think that you would still take her?

Yeardley:  When you override that and go, I’m going to be the boss of you because you’re clearly not in your right mind. Right?

Alia:  Absolutely.

Yeardley:  What are the adult daughter’s names?

Alia:  Liz and Sarah.

Yeardley:  Do you know if Liz and Sarah were around at all? Did they know how poorly Barbara was doing?

Alia:  There was no other eyeballs on her whatsoever. Ken had her in such a state because their daughters lived in other states. So, it was just Ken and Barbara in this house alone, and there was nobody watching over her, no other set of eyeballs on her whatsoever. He had full access to do whatever he wanted without anybody stepping in between.

Dan:  So, you’ve been asked to take Ken back to Criminal Investigations Division, I’m guessing, to speak to a detective or two. So, when they ask you to do that, is that presented to Ken in such a way where it’s like, “Hey, we’re going to be here for a little bit. Why don’t we take you down to Criminal Investigations?” There’s a way to deliver that message and ask the question to get a lot more volunteer out of it than, “Hey, you are going to do this?” I’m guessing in this situation he volunteered to go down with you guys?

Alia:  Absolutely. Because I think that Ken thinks that we’re not as smart as we are. [laughs] So, he was under the impression that we’re going to go talk about just his wife’s death and nothing more, nothing less. That it was no big deal, it was a normal, everyday thing.

Dan:  Absolutely. So, procedurally, the distinction I’m trying to make here is if Ken is not willing to go and you’re going to take him anyway, then Miranda comes in. In this situation, it does not sound like Ken has been advised of his Miranda rights. So, your conversation with Ken while he’s riding down to the station in the back of the car, and Ken is giving you so much history on his life with Barbara. He’s got two daughters, Liz and Sarah. My question is, when’s the last time Liz and Sarah talked to their mother?

Alia:  Yeah. So, Detective Zach, he went to their respective states to talk to them about their relationship with their parents, had lengthy interviews with the both of them, and they basically said that they had not seen their mother in a very long time. Liz and Sarah had only been speaking to Ken and Barbara infrequently. And that was her affect was that Ken was getting a little bit more abusive towards Barbara. He was being a little bit more aggressive and difficult. And that was their extent of their knowledge of what was going on with their parents.

Dan:  So, timeline wise in your investigation, you’ve got Ken now. He’s down at the police station and he’s talking to investigators. Meanwhile, crime scene investigators are at the house and they’re checking on Barbara now. They’ve gotten a look at the bedding and the blood spatter. Are you sitting around back n investigations watching this questioning of Ken?

Alia:  So, I was not. I didn’t get the privilege of that. I wish I would have been able to see that because I would have loved it. I went back to the scene and was able to finish out my originating report back at the scene.

Dan:  While you’re at the scene, there are still investigators there, and I’m sure you’re having conversations with them.

Alia:  Absolutely. And that was one thing that was very important and validating to me, that they saw that I recognized the things that were going on that weren’t your normal, average, everyday natural death. And so, eventually, the detectives interviewed Ken. We finished up the crime scene, and that was it for the moment. They had a lot of leg work on the backend. Obviously, an autopsy was going to be done. And so, I was keeping up to date, checking in with the detectives, like, “Hey, what’s going on with this case?” I want to know what’s going on, because I personally wanted a resolution to it.

Yeardley:  What did the medical examiner say was Barbara’s cause of death.

Alia:  So, her cause of death was natural. However, there was parts in the report that advised that her cause of death was natural due to being malnourished.

Yeardley:  Right.

Alia:  So, eventually, the case was presented to the state attorney and all the facts were given to the state attorney, and they decided to charge Ken with manslaughter.

Yeardley:  Oh, wow.

Alia:  Yes. It was basically aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person or disabled adult.

[Break 3]

Alia:  So, Ken ended up being charged with manslaughter. So, he went to jail. He was arrested on the manslaughter charge. He had a warrant out for his arrest. Our Street Crimes Unit ended up picking him up on his warrant at his house, because obviously he’s thinking he got away with what he did and he’s just living his life. So, our Street Crimes Unit come knocking at the door, saying, “Hey, Ken, turn around. You got this manslaughter warrant, so we’re going to take you to jail today.” So, they ended up placing him under arrest for the manslaughter. Later on, a couple months later, we got a tip from another inmate who was saying basically that Ken was in jail with him. They were sharing a cell, and Ken was talking about how much he wanted younger women. And now that his bitch wife was dead, he was wanting to hook up with some younger women. And if this guy in his cell knew any women. And he’s so glad his bitch wife is dead now and he doesn’t have to deal with her anymore. He doesn’t have to take care of her. He doesn’t have to do any of these things for her. And he’s basically just looking for younger women to entertain him once he gets out of jail.

Yeardley:  I’m surprised that Ken is so convinced he’s getting out of jail.

Alia:  Me too. [chuckles]

Yeardley:  I mean, manslaughter, it’s not like you got a parking ticket.

Alia:  Yeah. These are some big charges.

Dave:  And I love that Ken just offered up his intent for the crime. “Why did you commit this crime, Ken? Well, I was kind of tired of her and I wanted someone younger.” The insight is that’s why Ken did what Ken did.

Alia:  Absolutely.

Yeardley:  Did Ken just wait around in jail until his trial or did he make bail?

Alia:  He ended up bonding out prior to his trial. About two weeks before he was supposed to stand trial for his charges against Barbara, Ken decided that he was going to crash his car into five other vehicles in an attempt to commit suicide, which he was successful in. So, Ken died in the crash. There was at least nine other people involved in those five vehicles. One of which was a juvenile because Ken hit the rear of the first vehicle with no attempt to stop whatsoever, which ended up hitting four more subsequent vehicles after that. And Ken perished in that traffic crash before he stood trial for the manslaughter of his wife.

Dave:  Did Ken kill anybody else? I’m sure there were lots of people injured, but I’m hoping he didn’t take anybody else with him.

Alia:  Luckily, he was the only one to perish in that crash.

Yeardley:  And what did the daughters, the adult daughters think? How do you square, my father basically killed my mother.

Alia:  I don’t know. Honestly, I wish I could have a conversation with them because I feel like I could probably provide a lot of insight, and maybe a little bit of closure to them. I don’t know what their affect is. I don’t know how they were feeling. I never got to speak to them. So, I am not sure. I’m not sure.

Dave:  I want to go back to the Spidey sense thing that you get when you’re a brand-new cop, you also get when you’re a 20-year cop. That’s a honed skill. That part of when you’re a younger cop, it’s one thing when someone lied to me. I always want to know, “Did you really lie to me?” Because I think you lied. I just want to know. Because it helps confirm that your Spidey senses are right down the middle, that you are hearing and sensing things that will help you later on in a case. And that’s a big feedback loop that young deputies and young police officers need from detectives, from medical examiners, from guys like Paul Holes saying, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re on the right track.

 There are other folks that I have worked with certainly, who would have gone to this scene with Barbara and Ken and not seen what Alia saw. And that’s just a fact of life in law enforcement, that there are some folks who would have completely poo pooed that dead subject, call into its natural causes and not taken a couple of extra steps just to, “Hey, I don’t feel right, let me see what this looks like. What am I seeing here?” That feedback loop, when you get your suspicions confirmed, is huge for baby detectives, huge.

Alia:  Yeah, it is. And I think that this is why this case has stuck with me for so long and has been a very, very important case in my career, was because it was one of those very validating cases to me that my six senses were right. Even though, it wasn’t your standard homicide, it wasn’t something that was so glaringly obvious. You’re right. It would have been so easy for me to go there and be like, “This lady’s 74. She’s lived a very long, happy life. Yeah. She’s emaciated. Yeah.” That probably happens when you get older. It would have been very, very easy for me to do that, but I would not have been doing Barbara any justice with that.

 And you’re absolutely right. It did shape me in a big way as far as leaning into my instincts and knowing that what I was doing, what I was feeling was right. It was a big thing for me. And I know that probably sounds kind of like, cops never want to sound lame, you know, but it’s like a thing. But it was. It very much so shaped me as a very young deputy in leaning into my instincts. And again, my sister had told me that since I started the job is that’s something you need to lean into. That sixth sense is something you need to feel, and you need to feel hard, and if you don’t, you’re not doing yourself any justice, and you’re going to get hurt.

 And so, it was a very, very validating thing for me, but also just knowing that Ken, yes, he took the easy way out, but he didn’t get what he wanted. Everybody knows the monster that he is, and I feel like if it weren’t for a little bit of knowledge and a lot of just, winging it at the time, but trying my best, I feel like he would have probably walked away scot-free.

Dan:  Alia, what does that leave you feeling, like after you’ve had a conversation with somebody who directly or indirectly killed his wife depending on which side of the fence you fall on here, I just recall conversations that I’ve had with people who have killed people, and it leaves an impression on you. I’m curious what your impression is.

Alia:  It does. Being a cop is the strangest job in the world. It really is, because you’re having this very normal conversation with somebody that you truly believed killed his wife, harmed her enough that she is now deceased, but you’re carrying on a normal conversation as if everything is okay, everything is right in the world. It’s very interesting, and it’s something that plays on your psyche, I think, throughout time. And I don’t think that people that haven’t been in that situation really understand that dynamic, that you can just switch on and switch off and play the game, but then you go home, and you’re like, “Man, I was really just sitting in a house with this guy that killed his wife and that’s happened many times throughout my career and many different ways.

 You have all these crazy things that happen to you all the time, and then it’s like, “yeah, let’s just work.” Like, that’s just normal. And I have all these girlfriends who are not cops, and they are my girlfriends I’ve had since I was a little girl. And they’re like, “Your life is crazy.” Even negotiations and these call outs and things like that. Not to get off track, I’m a negotiator, my husband’s on the SWAT team. We get deployed together. Our kids just wake up and we’re gone. And then we come home in the morning, it’s like nothing happened. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, your grandparents are here.” And like, “We just poofed in the middle of the night.” And it’s normal. And it’s crazy, it’s crazy.

[laughter]

 But somehow, it’s normal. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Yeardley:  I always say it is just not normal. It’s not a normal job for, certainly for me, sitting on this side of the table, it is a remarkable job. But the amount of trauma that you see and experience, I can’t even put words to it. Your Wednesday never looks like my Wednesday ever.

[laughter]

Alia:  Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. It is. It is a crazy, crazy life. I feel like one day I’m going to look back and just be like, “What happened?”

[laughter]

Yeardley:  Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing that to us today, Alia. So fascinating.

Dan:  Great work.

Yeardley:  Really great work.

Paul:  And, Alia, I think, your observations, it’s more than just instincts. It’s a level of expertise over, you know, your young deputy career and all the cases that you had been exposed, you do develop a level of expertise that the general person doesn’t have. And so, your observations, your physical observations are critical. And, I will talk to law enforcement. And typically, this type of training is due to unusual behaviors, you know, like serial predator aspects. But I always tell law enforcement, if you see something that doesn’t make sense, stop. If you see contradiction where the evidence just doesn’t look right. It’s looking like it’s pointing in two different directions. In Barbara’s case, where on one hand, per Ken, died peacefully in her sleep. Yet you’re seeing some injuries on her. You’re seeing this abused, emaciated state, that’s called contradiction.

 And any time you see contradiction, you have to consider that you’ve got a staged crime scene. Barbara’s death scene is a staged crime scene. Ken set it up to make it look like something it was not. And you had the expertise, you had the instincts in order to be able to, “No, this isn’t right.” You stopped and you brought in other people to dig deeper. Kudos to you. You did an amazing job on this, Alia.

Alia:  Thank you, Paul.

Dave:  Great case from one of the sisters.

Yeardley:  Yeah.

[laughter]

Dave:  It’s going to be recurring voices on Small Town Dicks. [Alia laughs]

Yeardley:  Yes, sir.

 Now for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

Dave:  So, you have parents who don’t feel in control of their own household and their own child’s behavior. Then you have a lack of accountability when these children do get into trouble. You have the same prosecutor that uses kid gloves on adults who are doing carjackings. How soft are they going to be on a 12-year-old who just did a carjacking?

[music]

Yeardley:  To listen today’s bonus episode and access hundreds more, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button.

Yeardley:  Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer, and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

[music]

 Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else.

 The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening.

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