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Season Seven: Plans and Crows
173 Plays5 days ago
This is a chat show about the new year, old cases and the future of true crime xs.
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Origins of True Crime Obsession
00:00:25
Speaker
This is True Crime
00:01:01
Speaker
right, so this is mainly on you. You said you wanted to do an episode where we just talked. i I don't have a topic left in 2025. I'll go ahead and warn you that. But I do have something that I can talk about some because it's interesting to me and I didn't know it before.
00:01:15
Speaker
Oh, that sounds interesting. But we have. But I guess we could talk a little bit about where the show is headed because we've already started cutting season seven.
00:01:27
Speaker
Right. So the first year that we did this, we started with Keyes. Right. And that was really all we had been like planning for. right Yeah. Yeah. We had been so obsessed over that case for so long.
00:01:42
Speaker
were like, we have to do something with this. Yeah. I just had a drive to do something and it had been kind of ruined because someone else had put out keys stuff and then other people have tried since then to put out stuff about Israel keys that i don't I don't know if people realize how much I had that other people didn't have at the time that I started recording I don't think getting betting i don't think anybody realizes it and part of it is so bad like we can't even share it right most of it like I have the full videos from the Samantha Koenig recovery and I don't even know why they got sent to me It is so bad. Like, it's so bad.
00:02:23
Speaker
and I had the original ransom photo. I had the walkthrough of Key's house by the Anchorage police, like, in the hours after he was arrested in Texas and they got their search warrant. So the reason that you got that was because of the way I think the files were filed.
00:02:45
Speaker
And so didn't come from a FOIA, right? Yeah. Well, so, okay, I did an FBI for you. So I got this huge amount of information.
00:02:57
Speaker
And i at one point, I even checked two of the other creators for keys to see what they had gotten. And they had less files than me. And I never really figured out exactly why. But the conclusion I came to was that my original files...
00:03:15
Speaker
included a bunch of Anchorage stuff. So to verify that later, i went back and like, I did a public records request in
Challenges in Information Access
00:03:23
Speaker
Texas. I did one in Oklahoma and then I did one in Alaska and i kind of recreated within like a hundred pages, the original file dump that you and I were using.
00:03:35
Speaker
And I even compared them. I think true crime BS and I, ah were, probably around the same time, foyering the same information, doing different things with it. Because I had done a bunch of Washington stuff as well. And i think when I compared, like I went on their Patreon just to see if they had different information than I did And like when I totaled up their pages, it was still less, but I had done some stuff related to the fires and the bank robberies. And I think that might've been where I got some of the info. Right. Well, I think it it had all the graphic stuff from the recovery of the body.
00:04:15
Speaker
Right. And I think that's where the difference was. I think part of it like, because the Anchorage police department files would not have come from the FOIA. Right.
00:04:25
Speaker
no No, they didn't come from the federal, but I think some of i think because some of the personnel on scene, that like because I ordered that first FOIA way before we were going to do this, and I was just shocked at how much it cost. and i bet it was, what, five years before? I mean, it was a long time before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah It was way before like we even thought about this, and i had gotten enough that when I looked at it I realized kind of what you're saying. i think there was some confusion over who was who personnel wise.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so because of the task some things in the original files. Yeah. So, yeah. And it was the task force and then the evidence recovery teams. So the evidence recovery teams were both Anchorage and federal.
00:05:17
Speaker
And i think some of the stuff just got dumped into the Anchorage files. And like, I actually, i had some Anchorage files that later were not in follow-up
Exclusive Content on Samantha Koenig
00:05:28
Speaker
stuff. Like, and if I go on the vault now and look at like um what the FBI put out, there's stuff missing that we had from the vault.
00:05:37
Speaker
And I think it was because of the way Task Force Evidence Recovery and maybe the tip line worked. Maybe they had local tips coming in. and so some of the Samantha Koenig stuff is not in the federal, but it's in Anchorage. And so all of that was very enlightening to me over time. It took a long time to sort of for my brain to sort of figure out that, like, oh, everybody doesn't have all this information.
00:06:03
Speaker
And why is that? Well, who knows, right? ultimately there was some sort of snafu and we ended up with stuff i know nobody has it unfortunately the reason that i know that is because i feel like other people would have put it out there and i know it's not out there yeah and like there's even been creators since then that i know don't have all of it because ah somebody got somebody made a big deal recently out of the um Like the posthumous photos of Key's jail cell. i had those. They just weren't worth anything. they're not. just blood on the wall blood on the floor.
00:06:42
Speaker
and I had post-traumatic stress after I saw stuff that I thought... I wanted to see or I thought would be interesting to see. And I was like, nobody else is ever seeing that by us.
00:06:56
Speaker
Like from our um us putting it out there because um it's terrible. Well, and I think the difference might have been so I was not doing anything with media. I was writing about keys. In my mind, I was going to write this thing. I don't know what it was going to be um when I first requested it all, but I was really just doing it for research, not for publication. So when you check through public records requests with local police station um police agencies, sometimes they'll ask you if it's for you know publication or broadcast or not. And i checked no.
00:07:34
Speaker
And so there was a point in time that wasn't... No, it wasn't a lie. um i just originally was not going to do a podcast, per se, because i hadn't even thought about that. um when i i'll i'll ill I'll say it to say this.
00:07:52
Speaker
I had every photo of Samantha Koenig's body recovery, every video of Samantha Koenig's body recovery. I had her full autopsy, all the autopsy photos, which were very, very disturbing.
00:08:05
Speaker
But I also had video of Kimberly, And i had audio of Kimberly. And so this was his girlfriend at the time that this all happened. This was Israel Key's girlfriend. um i knew i know that people don't get that now. Because when I did a later request to Anchorage, just because sometimes I'll do a re-request to see if anything new pops in.
00:08:31
Speaker
And there was actually less. The number files went down. Yeah, it went down. um So when it went down, i realized they had left out the walkthrough of the house that was unredacted, which had like, we had two sets of files. One was videos of like them going through like everything in the house in Alaska, in Anchorage.
00:08:52
Speaker
And then, so there were photos and there were video. and Originally, I got two versions. One was completely unredacted, and that's how the body recovery came to me, too. I got two versions. I got a version that was blurred, and then I got a version that was not blurred.
00:09:07
Speaker
um But in the house, like all the medications and different drugs and all the things they cataloged, they came two ways in one way they like blurbed out like addresses and records, uh, and the other one they
Israel Keyes and Adam Walsh Case Comparisons
00:09:23
Speaker
didn't.
00:09:23
Speaker
So I have no idea why I got all of that except that it was the research. for Exactly. And so that opened my eyes about a lot of stuff. Now, to be fair, listened to all of keys is, uh, like YouTube available on the FBI YouTube page. Um,
00:09:42
Speaker
and Back then, yeah yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if they're still available now. But I listened to them ad nauseum. And I made notes. And I like i was like analyzing this guy the way that I analyzed. You so many spreadsheets. I did. Because I needed to know where everything was. And so I would make summaries. And so i had like a searchable spreadsheet.
00:10:04
Speaker
And then, so that was... I remember getting the text from you with like his mugshot and like, I mean, this was probably 13, 2014, 2013, 2014. thirteen twenty fourteen i thirteen twenty four think it was and I think it was announcing he was dead.
00:10:24
Speaker
Like yeah the guy that nobody knows anything about is dead. Right. That's what it's, that's what my memory is. And I'm like rolling my eyes at you going, I'm not having this guy live rent free in my head for any amount of time. Right.
00:10:39
Speaker
Because he, what he did was truly alarming. I had a conversation with someone while Samantha Koenig was missing about that situation. Right.
00:10:51
Speaker
Like just in passing, like, oh my goodness, this 18-year-old girl has been taken and they don't know where she's at. And then shortly, it wasn't too long where she was recovered and her killer was captured, right? And that was at a time where nobody knew who Israel Keyes was.
00:11:10
Speaker
And I remember all that happening in real time. And then, you know, fast forward a year later, you send me the text of his mugshot. And if I recall correctly, it was saying something to the effect of, you know, killer of Samantha Koenig found dead in cell in Alaska or whatever, something like that.
00:11:31
Speaker
Something like that. Yeah. And I just was like, oh, you know, fast forward. um It would have been five to six years later. We had no idea we were about to go into a pandemic.
00:11:44
Speaker
No idea. Because we're leading up, starting. i remember that the Lori Vallow Daybell case, ah the kids were missing.
00:11:56
Speaker
That showed up while we were, you know, in the middle of doing all this work for our podcast. Yeah. if you recall that showed up. So that happened like September of 19, I think. It started being out there that they were looking for these kids. And of course, at that point in time, we had no idea of what that case was about.
00:12:20
Speaker
And then a lot of our case, a lot of our A lot of the case going into the podcast, you know, it was structured by you, predetermined sort of how it was going to flow by you. And I had just all this information from his interviews, right?
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah. Where I had stored it in my head. I had, you know, his timeline. I had the FBI's timeline. I had the timeline that I made based on the other information we had. I had all this stuff.
00:12:52
Speaker
Well, we got through that. and And looking back, you can I feel like art our show has evolved over the past five years, right?
00:13:03
Speaker
But then we just sort of lock
Public Records and Legal Hurdles
00:13:06
Speaker
we sort of launched into some other stuff, right? We got to the end. Yeah, there was some weird stuff that happened at the end of those 20-some episodes. Yeah. I mean, things happen. We didn't really know what we were doing. We wanted to talk about it. We got sort of mixed reviews, but I mean, it it accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. And we sort of we were never about clicks and likes. And at that point in time, and we didn't know we were about to go into a pandemic. Yeah.
00:13:39
Speaker
Where everybody and their brother's cousin's nephew was going to start a podcast. Right. Right. He had no idea. Anyway, we fast forward. We end that year. If you recall, we did not do a holiday dump that year.
00:13:56
Speaker
We did. it sounds right. ah We did Adam Wash. Right, which I still stand by my research on that case. We ended up, oh, I don't think there's any question about that at this point.
00:14:09
Speaker
I don't know, actually. But there is no question about this. I came up with what I feel like happened, and then I didn't share it with everybody because it wasn't necessarily true crime. I have thought about that over the years, and I've thought to myself, but think about the aftermath and how much true crime was involved in that, right?
00:14:30
Speaker
it It changed the shape of so many things in the country that like, it's, it's very strange to me that ultimately an accident by a friend of the family led to this wild shift in how missing children's cases and later wanted people were um like It all changed. It changed because of John Walsh.
00:15:01
Speaker
Everything changed, and I am so baffled by that. That's one of the very first things that happened having to do with our show that made me feel like I was being gaslit by the universe.
00:15:14
Speaker
Because, you know, there was a very specific piece of evidence in the Adam Walsh case that I came upon, and the evidence was... that there was a small piece of material found on Adam Wash's face when he was recovered.
00:15:33
Speaker
Correct. Okay. And that led me to my ultimate conclusion. Well, then we did a wrap up episode instead of telling everybody, right? Yeah. Do you remember all this?
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah. i've I've told a few people since then that haveve like emailed me or messaged me about it. And ultimately, i mean you know, we could tell everybody that's listening because i don't really know. i don't know what the all the fallout would be.
00:16:01
Speaker
So my problem with that was i found a couple of pieces of evidence in that case beyond what you did. And I've always had some like public records requests that I do. i know everybody calls them FOIAs.
00:16:18
Speaker
FOIAs are the federal version. you can do FOIAs with some agencies. beyond federal, um but public records requests are different by jurisdiction. And that area of Florida made me crazy because I dealt with Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, New York, Washington, California.
00:16:42
Speaker
I had dealt with Florida and had like pretty good success in getting the records I wanted to get my hands on for so many things to that point.
Juvenile Records and Investigation Roadblocks
00:16:52
Speaker
Really just nothing to do with the show at many points, just personal exercises and wanting to know like what was going on. I've always worked in different levels of intelligence and investigations in my jobs, and i just wanted to know information. think it's funny you say that it has nothing to do with the show because it doesn't directly, but indirectly it has everything to do with the show.
00:17:16
Speaker
Oh, yeah. it I mean, now it does. But I was so angry because there were a couple of key pieces of information I needed to, like, we double verify everything for the most part. Triple verify it. Yeah, we tried to triple verify it. And we we had a single source for some information.
00:17:37
Speaker
ah You had come across this... piece of material that was on him. And we were like, oh, that made so much more sense than like the stories that were told around the like quote unquote conclusion of the Adam Walsh case.
00:17:52
Speaker
So I messaged the police department down there and I started talking to them and I had somebody that was like listening for a minute and then suddenly they weren't. And I always reopen this case.
00:18:02
Speaker
I didn't want them to reopen it. I just want them to share information with me. So I went around them at that point and I went to the coroner And I ended up in this. So what happens for people who don't know, if you have a FOIA request or a public records request that you put in and it's denied that to give you a reason, depending on the jurisdiction, there's a certain timeline you have to act within.
00:18:26
Speaker
um a lot of times you end up having an argument that's sort of quasi judicial with the state's attorney general's office. And most of this issue,
00:18:38
Speaker
is basically you have to threaten that you're going to sue to get the information. They have to like give you a portion of the information. They heavily redact it. ah There's one or two loopholes where they can kind of shut you down.
00:18:54
Speaker
And weirdly, the one that people think is that there's an open investigation, that's not true. There's always a way around that. You may not get exactly what you want, but depending on how good you are with redacted documents, you can find a source. You can figure out where information came from. You can make a phone call and talk to somebody that'll verify something for you on background.
00:19:18
Speaker
But in the Adam Walsh case, um
00:19:24
Speaker
The second thing, well, I guess, yeah, it's the
Rick Stone's Role and Media Influence
00:19:29
Speaker
second. So the first most popular reason to deny you is it's a sexual assault case. Most places, if it's a sexual assault case, you're just not going to get the information. i did not feel like this was a sexual assault case. They were denying the information. So I kind of skipped around that because the statute or whatever answer they gave me kind of read like there's a couple of reasons we could not give you this information.
00:19:52
Speaker
And they wanted you to think like there's something to do with a sexual assault. But that's not what it is. What it is is in Florida, you cannot get information about juveniles. And this is true a lot of places.
00:20:04
Speaker
As it should be. As it should be. Except when we want to know. exactly Right. And so the reason we couldn't double check what we were looking at or triple check what we were looking at is because some remains had been found in the right time frame.
00:20:23
Speaker
that were juvenile remains. And so for those of you don't know the Adam Walsh story, his entire body has never been recovered.
00:20:35
Speaker
And we would be looking for a body that did not have a head. Right. So we felt like these other remains would potentially be, or have been preserved in a way that DNA could like be tested. at one point I volunteered to pay for the testing.
00:21:00
Speaker
And I did talk with the, like one of the assistant chief medical examiners and some other people in the medical examiner's office there and and tried to get the ball rolling, but they shut me down. And the reason they ultimately quote unquote, won the argument in, you know, cause
00:21:23
Speaker
I don't know that anybody wins. ah But ultimately it was because Adam Wash was a juvenile. The remains they had were a juvenile. So in a case like that, you need to open up one side or the other and show something linking the two things.
00:21:42
Speaker
And I couldn't do it because both sides were ultimately juvenile cases. Great. And so that is where I realized that we were going to suffocate on red tape with that case.
00:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, we were. like And there was and like i i pretty quickly figured out there was no amount of money I could throw at it. No amount of money I could raise or borrow or whatever. And from my perspective, so I found the the file, so to speak, and it was based on a gentleman who I can't remember his name being very certain that Jeffrey Dahmer was responsible for Adam Wash. Yeah.
00:22:21
Speaker
Right. which put that out there as like look at all this information and obviously jeffrey dahmer iss not responsible for adam wash jeffrey dahmer was not a pedophile right he had absolutely no interest in adam wash And, right you know, there was there was factual information indicating he had been in Florida around the time of Adam Walsh's disappearance. Well, that's fine. He still was not responsible for it. When it was announced ah that they had basically closed the case and the way that they did that, it I had other stuff going on in life that made it not like,
00:23:06
Speaker
important to me that they had closed this monumental case that had shifted the trajectory of my life and everybody around my Asia's life.
00:23:19
Speaker
Right. But it came up right after, you know, wait, like after we had gone through keys and we were on that pathway and we ended the year with the Adam wash case, but having found myself sitting in the middle of all this information
America's Most Wanted and True Crime Media
00:23:34
Speaker
that some you know, very inquisitive person who really wanted to make a case for Jeffrey Dahmer, having been responsible for it, he had put all this stuff out there that I just had free access to. right Yeah. I found myself sort of swirling a little bit because i was going, well, he's, he's motivated, but he's wrong. Right.
00:24:01
Speaker
as, far as Nobody's ever going to convince me Jeffrey Dahmer had anything to do with Adam Wash's disappearance and ultimate murder, right? And I'm like, I don't know what to do with all this stuff because everybody's going down right-wrong path or the wrong-right path or however you want to look at it, right? Yeah. No matter what, we know that the way that the case closed was bogus, right? i'm Correct. I, for one, am like,
00:24:31
Speaker
what are you doing, John Walsh? Right. Okay. So that was five years ago now. That was the first, the first, the wrap of the first season of our show.
00:24:43
Speaker
We didn't do a holiday, any sort of holiday, anything, except we had a i episode where we talked about everything that had happened. And,
00:24:56
Speaker
Now, after letting that simmer all these years, and ultimately, my conclusion is, I don't think that, I don't know that we'll ever have the weight behind us to do anything about it.
00:25:10
Speaker
I don't know. i think, so here's the weird part about it and the reason that, like, it still comes up. There's this guy, Rick Stone, that gets involved. He's the one who ultimately, like, goes with what John Walsh wants, which is the case closed. and I think 2008. Yeah, that's right.
00:25:28
Speaker
And, um, and I, you know, I'm pulling this from memory. So if I get some of it wrong, I apologize. But ultimately what we wanted was to point out to them that in their evidence lockers, like if they were to like put things together between the Hollywood police department and the FDLE and the medical examiner's office, They actually have, under different file numbers from different dates for very different reasons, all of the evidence sitting there.
00:26:04
Speaker
Like, there's this weird reconstruction they did of quote-unquote accident. There's these bones that are found. there's like ah They seem completely unrelated. Yeah.
00:26:18
Speaker
But I am relatively certain if you were to test between the three case files, you would actually know exactly what happened to Adam Walsh. But it is a far less interesting story than the crazy confessions killer killed him.
00:26:40
Speaker
Right, because those guys really didn't, I mean, they I think they killed one person, or one of them killed one person. we We think they were involved in some deaths, but ultimately, as far as quote-unquote murder, it was more like neglect than it was like straight up. They were absolutely not serial killers. Right. They were milking that position for everything it was worth, but they were not serial killers. Right.
00:27:09
Speaker
But what I think what bothered me the most about it all was, like, so either at that point law enforcement is, like, playing the game. Like, closing the book. They just care.
00:27:22
Speaker
Or they don't care. Or they've been bamboozled by, like, two fairly low IQ manipulative people.
00:27:36
Speaker
Goobers. at withroom But they, there haven't, there's the people who have manipulated them the goobers. They had a different prerogative than law enforcement did.
00:27:47
Speaker
Law enforcement's prerogative was like, I don't want this on my watch.
Podcast's Mission and Personal Reflections
00:27:54
Speaker
Like yeah through the various chiefs of police or what have you. Now, the other thing that comes into play here for me personally was all of a sudden America's most wanted is back.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm going, you've got to be kidding me. It will not die. Right now. Granted America's most wanted has done a lot of good things. Okay. It has been, it, it ushered in the era of pre-social media true crime, right?
00:28:26
Speaker
I would say, yeah. Okay. Between America's Most Wanted cops. Yeah. Okay. And Unsolved Mysteries. All right. So, but, so you got to keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective. So I have this huge epiphany for absolutely from literally no, it was out of nowhere.
00:28:45
Speaker
And I realized this huge case that's always been this like, I don't know, the back of my mind, there's always been a thing about Adam Walsh because he, his kidnapping and decapitation and finding his head, it skewed my entire life. Okay.
00:29:05
Speaker
yeah There was this whole missing child panic that was very similar to satanic panic that came out of all of it. And like, It definitely changed the lives of elementary students from 1981 to, would say, about 1995. Like, it really changed, like, how those kids were raised. Even though Adam Walsh, if he were alive today, would be several years older than me. Right, exactly.
00:29:32
Speaker
But it still affected my life. Oh, just tremendously. And all this is happening. And from my perspective and this show's perspective, which is why we're talking about it.
00:29:45
Speaker
And then I'm thinking to myself, I don't know what to do with this. Right. I never a million years starting with Israel keys. Okay. A guy who I was determined not to have live rent free in my head because he is literally somebody that if I had met him,
00:30:03
Speaker
I probably would have been friends with. And it was very bothersome that he was a serial killer. Right. I don't, I don't know that I would have been friends with him, but I probably would have known him. i would have known him through. Yeah.
00:30:18
Speaker
Either you or like a couple of other people in my life probably would have been right up his alley, either from work or sports connections, I'm sure. Well, I can say without question, he's not somebody I would have dated, okay? Right. He's not the type of guy that I would have been interested in. However, he's the exact—I'm friends with Blake in the sense that like if I come upon you in a social circle— we're never going to be close enough for me to know anything about you that I'm not going to want to be friends with you. Right. Right. That's just how it is. But he is right down the alley. i'm I'm telling you, there's so much about him, ah having like a weird upbringing where he was like homeschooled instead of like mainstream public school or even private school, like all those things. i have so many and people in my life just like that. He is amazing.
00:31:11
Speaker
he's only slept about two months older than my husband. Okay. Like the extreme religious background, ah like all the different things that we learned about keys.
00:31:24
Speaker
I know if I had encountered him that I would have been at least acquaintances with him, if not friends. Okay. I do feel pretty solid though, that he was not the kind of guy I would have dated. So that's comforting, I guess. I don't really know. Okay.
00:31:39
Speaker
But so it that kind of thing, I'd never experienced in real time a person who could have altered the course of my life. Okay. Not that I wanted him to, but I also was in, this is the worst part of about this, at various times in the single digit 2000s. I don't really know how to say that yet, but let's say 2009,
00:32:07
Speaker
I was in various places in upstate New York, very close to where his house that he ultimately owned is located. And I would frequently stay for five or six days, stretches of time in an ah RV that I never locked.
00:32:27
Speaker
Well, and that horrifying, right? I mean, just think of how that plays into that whole story. i mean, I think so. um This actually all ties together.
00:32:41
Speaker
So I had an affinity for missing persons cases. And like I think I was always looking at missing persons cases. And I think you were also doing that. And sometime back in 2011 or 2012, you and I started talking about this one missing persons case.
00:32:58
Speaker
And I don't know if you remember, we came to this mushroom hunter thing back then. Right. And we were looking at this West Virginia case by text message. Cause like I worked somewhere else and you didn't live in the same place you did. and like, so that's when we started talking about all this stuff.
00:33:16
Speaker
But I have to say, even then i was really angry about all things that came out of Texas. Do you remember? Yeah. This over time.
00:33:29
Speaker
And I'm bringing this up for a couple different reasons. One is, so the Adam Wash case is closed by a guy named Rick Stone, who most of the time was working in Texas and weirdly working for departments that at different times I have demanded information from and butted heads with.
Rick Stone's Career and Controversies
00:33:53
Speaker
So at one point he becomes, for a very brief period of time, the police chief for Hollywood, Florida.
00:34:05
Speaker
And that is a strange time where he's looking at the Adam Walsh case. I already know him to be the type of person that
00:34:17
Speaker
he has to talk about his accolades because he's covering up a lot of things he ignored. And if you had a good conversation with him, I'm positive. I have never done that.
00:34:28
Speaker
I'm positive that like he would have like we only have so many resources. We only have so much time type stories. He retired from the Hollywood Police Department after only being there for three years.
00:34:44
Speaker
And I say all of that because he is now back in Texas and And he's back with the Dallas, Texas Police Department. I think he's working as a division commander again.
00:34:59
Speaker
he is considered to be, at one point, like their most decorated officer. you think that it was by design that he went to Hollywood?
00:35:10
Speaker
he Yeah, 100%. He was always – so he probably still has it up. I haven't looked at it in a long time. So if I'm wrong and people want to call me out on it, truecrimexs at gmail.com is the place to call me out on things.
00:35:23
Speaker
I think he still has like this website. At one point it was like angel fire, like the old type website. And it's like chiefrickstone.com.
00:35:34
Speaker
And he was really trying to sell a book and he had everything he'd ever done on there. Weird thing about that is, ah a couple of places in Texas, but among them Dallas, I have found to be lacking in all of the things that a good police agency should be.
00:35:55
Speaker
um Primarily because of leadership. And he appears to be, you know, at different times in key leadership positions. He likes accolades. He likes titles. He likes patting himself on the back.
00:36:08
Speaker
He likes, he wants Hollywood to tell a story one day. and He would have to tell the truth for that to happen. He would have to be like, look, here's the things I ignored. Here's what I lied about.
00:36:20
Speaker
And if he did that, Hollywood would tell his story. Hollywood, California. Yeah, like the Hollywood, the industry. Right. But he went to Hollywood, Florida by design.
00:36:31
Speaker
Right. By design. I don't know why he goes down there. i think he went to close the case. Yeah. I think that's really what happened, which is weird because like all the problems with Otis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas come from Texas. Don't you think though that it benefited John Walsh to have this case closed because he was the moving force behind America's Most Wanted and his son's case lingered.
00:37:03
Speaker
I think that's why they did it. i think ultimately, like the reason they did it, because that is a weight to carry when you have, like, because they they tout these numbers. I
Podcast's Independence and Audience Engagement
00:37:13
Speaker
saw when America's Most Wanted came back out.
00:37:16
Speaker
I think they had Paul Holes on there or something. They they like talk about the number of fugitives they've caught, missing persons they've found. And like you know a lot of that, just the stuff that makes headlines is just garbage. like It's there to get our attention and and to be this. It is, but at the same time, i just can't say too many bad things about it because it was an effort, right? It was an effort at a time where that wasn't happening. Yeah. I'm not knocking the effort. I agree with you.
00:37:44
Speaker
I'm knocking the overstating our accolades kind of position, which is how we end up here Right. And I don't like that coming from anybody. I can't stand a press conference that starts with a whole bunch of thanks to people that they were doing their job. I mean, really?
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I have to say, though, you did not give me a topic or a script for this show. And I did not give you a topic or a script for this show. So this next part is probably going to annoy you since I talked to you about this like a month ago. Okay.
00:38:13
Speaker
I am going to point out that like here's so here's how bad it's been in Texas. and And this ties to Adam Walsh, but it doesn't. Yeah. I am still hunting three cases in Texas that like I genuinely have been able to get zero information on no matter how many letters I write, now how how many arguments I have by email with the attorney general's office.
00:38:35
Speaker
And one of them stems from Dallas and like another one doesn't, but like it's this case that it's very important. And like, it's important for like some weird reasons. But what's interesting is we're going to do something in January we haven't done before.
00:38:54
Speaker
And that is we're going to have some of our old episodes. I think it's one and a half episodes are going to pop back up in the feed with some new information with someone that we got close to about a case.
00:39:08
Speaker
Did you say it was 2022? I think so. i think so So weirdly, it's going to tie back to the Dallas police department. um But we're going to be talking about an older case and we're going to We'll be talking about an older case and then we're going to be using that information to kind of update people on the case, but also the process that family members go through related to cold cases. That is enough to kill anybody.
00:39:34
Speaker
Yeah, and um there's somebody that we wanted to revisit and re-bring up that case. and so that's going to come up in January. so Honestly, those's yeah the families, we've actually talked to quite a few family members ah on the show.
00:39:51
Speaker
And like if I could wave a magic wand to make it happen for somebody, it would be those family members. Right? Yeah. And that is something that is you know This has been a process because we started, we we did a research project, essentially. did. We did a research project that we didn't we were doing it anyway all along.
00:40:17
Speaker
We do this constantly. I don't know what's wrong with us, but we do these things. And we decided we were going to showcase this particular one. I think for me, it was more of all the information we had with regard to Kiesa's interviews and everything. Yeah.
00:40:33
Speaker
But it just expanded. We got to see, like, you know, what's being done, what's not being done. How do we want to do this? We are in, ah I have 50% control and you have 50% control of this, you know, gigantic research project that we're still doing on various cases.
00:40:54
Speaker
But we got to consume so many different aspects and we got to see so many different things. And the biggest thing for me has been, and we've talked to families that like things have never even come out, right? Because we just can't quite wrangle it in enough to get it onto the show.
00:41:12
Speaker
But when you're talking with someone who has felt the firsthand implications of the whole, terrible crimes that have happened in some of these cases.
00:41:27
Speaker
It is, it is no longer entertainment, right? It is as real as it possibly can be. and it makes me like really dig in and try. And unfortunately that doesn't seem to matter. Yeah. I mean, so this next year, which I'm, I'm kind of segueing, we're going to,
00:41:51
Speaker
Bring back on a family member. There's a new family that I've talked to some over the last two years that I'm still working on their case. They have a very interesting case. I've had trouble getting the information. It's down in one of those southern states.
00:42:05
Speaker
But it is it is a wholly fascinating case. ah One of them reached out to me a year and a half ago, and I started digging into that case and doing background work on it. That's going to come up in the new year.
00:42:18
Speaker
There is an alleged serial killer's wife that I have told i will give her airtime and I will talk to her. I'm not going to. We have said some things that they don't like, and I will bring them on the show because I i am interested in the possibility that something is wrong with that case. I'm interested. Um, it's a lot of work to, to do that, but I'm willing to tell their side of it and swing back around. i have multiple serial killer stories that like are part of the new year that like I've sent you books, at least one or two books. Um, I know you've gotten one. I don't know if the second one's arrived. Um, that'll be part of the new year. we have tons of dirty badge cases to cover.
00:43:01
Speaker
Um, dirty badges. Um, we've, decided that we're going to keep doing this because people keep listening to it. We had a tremendous number of responses by email and by messenger over the holiday season. So thank you to everybody who listened and who reached out there.
00:43:21
Speaker
we
Production Challenges and Personal Loss
00:43:22
Speaker
are going to be I'm trying to cover a specific case in Texas. I, I have three there that like, I, I will till the end of time wonder about. Um, we talked about another case in Texas that I think he, the kid finally had resolution. Um, it was one you and I were very interested in that may come back up this year.
00:43:46
Speaker
When we do this, it's it i like, I don't, I don't know that I would share this. Most of, most of what we share here, is like the verifiable version of our text message chain for the year. Sure.
00:43:59
Speaker
Because like, I already planned holidays for 2026. Yeah.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yes, that is a structured event. it has I'm in all of your planning capabilities. And the fact that you, well, I mean, I do ah quite a bit of work, but i I can't say that I'm really involved in the planning except for showing up when I'm supposed to.
00:44:22
Speaker
And then I edit, but like we actually pulled it off. Yeah. Yeah. This was a, so, and and I guess you wanted this to be more chat, like for the end of the year, and this was a particularly hard year for me.
00:44:36
Speaker
Um, i I lost a dog that I had had forever. First thing this year. And it messed me up.
00:44:49
Speaker
Weirdly. like i have So I had this pair of bonded dogs for many, many years. ah My wife and I had them. And we had lost one a couple years ago. And we actually thought that we would lose the one we lost this year, like right before that. But this is a dog that you have known since they were very small.
00:45:11
Speaker
I think one year she knocked over your Christmas tree. Oh, yeah. yeah um and And obviously all of our listeners, well, I don't know, but all of our listeners, if you've listened consecutively, ah we don't, we try to keep our, you know, we keep the banter down, but we both love dogs.
00:45:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, like between us, we have dogs. We have lot of dogs. I have five dogs that are all rescues. One showed up on my doorstep, literally.
00:45:43
Speaker
but we um So I lost a dog this year that like it threw my whole year off. My wife and I have this massive construction project that's been ongoing. We started planning it two years ago for specific reason. We had a family member. I felt like Mike needed a space, and incorporated that.
00:46:02
Speaker
um the The other thing that happened was, so I'm i'm married to a twin. And when you're married to a twin, you don't always choose all the things in your life the way you might if you're just married to like a... Person with a sibling? ah Yeah, like it's different than a sibling. Yeah.
00:46:21
Speaker
And... and i I've been married for a long time to this person, um with her even longer. So you get close to the twin, and the twin was also married. um And I was very close with her husband.
00:46:38
Speaker
And last year, he had a pacemaker put in. um And we're we're young. We're not the age that you should get pacemakers. But he had a specific thing going on where he had childhood experience.
00:46:52
Speaker
childhood heart problem. And he had had a corrective procedure when he was very young. They did not expect him to live very long. So the fact that like he's in his was kind of a miracle.
00:47:07
Speaker
And we knew like the pacemaker was going to give him some time uh, before he had to have a heart transplant. So he had the pacemaker put in, um, because some things weren't going well. Um, and this is, you know, somebody I travel with everywhere with our wives and and our families.
00:47:25
Speaker
Um, and the pacemaker procedure didn't go well. Uh, it was supposed to give them another decade. And then that decade was going to be,
00:47:35
Speaker
um a time when like we all started talking in our late fifties about like, you know, next steps on that. And we knew, he was going to need a heart transplant.
00:47:48
Speaker
That was, that was the idea behind him getting a pacemaker. Uh, so he was admitted early part of the year, i think in March.
00:47:59
Speaker
And, um, they were trying to figure out a corrective procedure for the pacemaker. Um, um, And they came to us and said, oh, we can't do anything.
00:48:14
Speaker
Instead, we're we're going to skip ahead to the transplant part, which because of the procedures that had gone on so far, he wasn't really in the shape that he needed to be in for the transplant ah health-wise.
00:48:26
Speaker
But it was the only option to save his life. So they were going to do a double transplant, um his heart and another organ. and the They were waiting for a match on that, and they they got a call in June that they'd found the perfect match. He's a big guy like I am. i'm I'm well over six foot and a fairly hefty person. so um he's a little older than me, and not a lot.
00:48:54
Speaker
Anyways, they found a match and he had a ah double organ transplant in late June and um he did not make it.
00:49:05
Speaker
He did not survive the recovery process. And it took its toll um on our families and all the things going on.
00:49:17
Speaker
um And obviously, his wife is still here and being married to the wife's twin, like a lot fell on my wife for the summer. and you and I had to kind of plot how we were like, I had everyday job stuff going on. And then we had the the regular show that we were trying to keep up with plus the research that goes into the regular show.
00:49:44
Speaker
And then we were sorting out um the Christmas process. Right, which we just ah successfully finished. We did. Yeah, everything. it concerned But it was a very hard year. it that ah That was, you know, obviously it's not my brother-in-law.
00:50:03
Speaker
but well i guess yeah But I feel like I felt the weight of all that for you. And, you know, I'm sure our listeners, um it's a tragic story. It's a terrible story. It was unexpected.
00:50:16
Speaker
absolutely. And, you know, sometimes life is just happening and it's just coming at you and you just have to keep going. Right. Yeah. It's kind of like, what's next? Except we don't ask that because we will find out what's going to be next.
00:50:32
Speaker
Right. It was a terrible loss. And I've, you know, i felt that for you and I'm sure anybody listening, you know, we're all very sorry for your loss. Yeah, i mean, that was just like sort of a – it became a milestone year whether I wanted it to or not, you know? Well, right, because, I mean he was he was a close family member, a very close family member of yours. So it wasn't like somebody, you know, distant passed away. This was somebody that was in your day-to-day life.
00:51:01
Speaker
Right, right. And he has, you know, college-age kids. And ah there's a look whole set of things that happens in the world where you get some freedom back when your kids go to school. So he was just about to get to enjoy that part.
00:51:17
Speaker
And so this was it was rough on everybody. But we did keep up the the schedule for getting all of our stuff done. And then i was just telling you about this today.
00:51:28
Speaker
i I guess you didn't know this part. So they had a dog and like the dog was belonged to the girls and to him and to his wife.
Future of Podcasting and AI
00:51:37
Speaker
And the dog is turning 17 years old and also ends up passing away like two months later.
00:51:44
Speaker
um so it's been a particularly rough year for the wife. I'm going, oh my goodness. What else could possibly have I'm pretty sure you omitted that to me on purpose. Yeah.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yeah, I left it out because, well, there's just so much happening at one time. One, you don't always remember. like i i finally took a week off in like August. I took a week off, and I just went with them, ah to two girls, and we went to the beach, and meaning the two girls being my wife and her sister.
00:52:16
Speaker
and then I think the others joined us later in the week. But the the bottom line was, we needed a little bit of a break and I've never felt closer to like just needing a break from the podcast. I try to keep everything together so that there's like lots happening out in the future recorded and done. So if anything does happen, we don't have, um, like major issues or have to take a huge break or anything. I did like, it's weird. Cause this year, the longest break that I took, which sounds selfish was because my dog died.
00:52:50
Speaker
And I sort of knew that was going to happen. We started getting, like, people were wondering if we were gone. would happen. Yeah. I don't think that that's going to happen. I feel like we would let people know. But if the show disappears, one of us died, more than likely. That would be my guess.
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, i mean I think I could probably make you live on an AI at this point. Possibly. i I would not be doing that, though. Yeah, it's I've tried that i've tried like the AI voice thing. It works a little bit, but it's like not quite there yet.
00:53:20
Speaker
um I've experimented with it on other projects. And the other thing that happened was I had tons of real-life investigation stuff going on with work, and that was like that's not something that...
00:53:32
Speaker
we that but yeah yeah We're not able to talk about that because of confidentiality. So we we don't get to include that in the show. Well, and see, I'm sitting over here a lot of times.
00:53:44
Speaker
To be completely honest, with the holiday stuff, we did 25 episodes hostage for the holidays. We recorded it throughout the year. And then i edited it and you did like the finalization and you dropped it in the feed.
00:54:03
Speaker
And so I recorded it. I did the edits. And then as they were coming out, I eventually listened to every single episode. And like, just as a sort of an illustration of how like crazy everything is, it was like a new show every single step of the way there.
00:54:22
Speaker
Like I got to hear it again. And so it was really great. I really enjoyed the hostage episodes. I thought they were fantastic. and ah sitting and looking back on the year, i like pat myself on the back thinking to myself like, wow, I can't believe we stayed on track because, you know, you summed it up kind of eloquently in sort of a, you know, but where you're trying to give information, but not like completely completely.
00:54:49
Speaker
you know, take everybody down with you. But like you say it that way, but as it was happening during the year, it was like, what else can possibly happen? Right. and we kept on track and it's, ah to me, that just shows, you know, I love doing the show.
00:55:08
Speaker
i love our show. I love everything about it. I love how it progressed. I remember one of the biggest things that was one of my fears was that like we would never be able to fill an hour's worth of time, which is hilarious to me now because we can talk for two, three hours, right? No problem. And it's just the back end of editing that.
00:55:32
Speaker
But i i feel like I feel like we've accomplished – we didn't know what we wanted – what exactly we were doing. we had it We had this research and information we wanted to put out there for people.
00:55:49
Speaker
And then we were sort of like, okay, well, now what? Well, there's endless content out there, right? Right, And we try to be selective and we try to like, we have absolutely no desire to be and getting, you know, clicks and likes about repeating something somebody else has already done. It's, that's...
00:56:12
Speaker
I tried to avoid that. We're not interested in the least in doing that. And I feel like we've actually accomplished this like un completely unset out goal, i guess.
00:56:25
Speaker
We have absolutely no no point like that we were aiming for except we've surpassed it. Yeah. Well, I'll say this. like So I always had the theory – And I've told you a certain number. like ah It's always been the same number. I said, if we get to that, i feel like podcasting will have come completely back around because it's doing this thing right now where everybody's like deep into video. And like it's not good. And it's not as entertaining when you have to like watch something that you really just want to listen to.
00:56:59
Speaker
And I've always felt like he would do that. And I've sort of set a couple of milestones along the way. we stayed ad-free for the most part. Like I did throw some things in for like when we are were originally with Anchor, i would do their little thing. Cause you get like some credit towards the services you use when
Narrative Integrity and Case Coverage
00:57:19
Speaker
you do that. we you know We've had people approach us and say, hey, come be part of this network. All you have to do is whatever. And I've always turned it down, even with money attached to it, because you had said from the beginning we would be fifty fifty And like you wanted to maintain that control because you felt like you would do better work. But if we started doing something where there was a lot of the business side was on us, that you were going to have to focus on that. And um I've always appreciated that you said that. And
00:57:50
Speaker
I've kept it ad free, except for some of the money that was put up originally. That's where Labrattis came in because that's like the like original starting cost of this were either ours, like mine and yours, or it came from Labrattis just because they wanted to see how the process worked.
00:58:08
Speaker
And um we did that with like just a small amount of money and just a ah lot of research. Like I put way more money into the show in terms of like copies and requests and fees than would ever get back out of it. And I did not want that to then be in the control of another person because of what you had said.
00:58:33
Speaker
um Right. as As soon as I am not putting out what I want us to put out, I'm not going to be interested in doing it anymore. That's just my personality.
00:58:46
Speaker
Every single thing like that we put out there, it's, we own it. Like the good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent, well it's all of our responsibility.
00:58:59
Speaker
And I take, risk and and that's the other thing. I take responsibility for it too. i'm I am not above saying I was wrong, right? Yeah. I have no problem saying I was wrong about stuff. Things that come up, I feel like it's always well-grounded in thought.
00:59:15
Speaker
That doesn't mean that it's got to be right. but i would I understand what you're saying. Yeah, 100%. I will apologize even you know when I'm wrong. And it's interesting how in the short five year, i mean, i don't know if that's short or long, in the five years that we've been doing this, we've had several things go full circle, right?
00:59:40
Speaker
We have. And like I think some of that's going to come up in the new year because certain things have closed out completely now. We've watched certain cases close. Is that what you mean? Well, I mean, ah the thing that sticks out my head was Ellen Greenberg.
00:59:57
Speaker
Yeah, we've now, oh man. That's like a whole thing. Maybe we shouldn't get into that here. But like that went, we covered that. It was sort of like, well, this is the information we have.
01:00:08
Speaker
It's possible some of that information changed. I'm still not entirely sure. the end of the day, they've still it's still a suicide Yeah. um It is one of the most heart-wrenching cases.
01:00:20
Speaker
And i can tell... in Now that became mainstream this year because there was a, i think it was a docu-series with like a couple episodes, maybe three episodes.
01:00:33
Speaker
So that hit like, you know, mainstream streaming. And I saw it and I was like, there was no, I didn't see anything new. And i was thinking to myself, like, oh, I get a pit in my stomach because I realized there was a lot of controversy around that case.
01:00:54
Speaker
And i don't want to be the person standing there, like, being like, I understand all that, but the evidence is still showing she killed herself, right?
01:01:05
Speaker
And it's not an argument to be had, right? if If I got evidence that that there was something else to this, I would relent. I would say, sure, i see that, right? In fact, at some point, I thought there was going to be something, but there's not.
01:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't, I'm not getting into Ellen Greenberg. I think that people are wrong about that. And like Ellen Greenberg's case is an example of why you don't let, like, it's weird to say this from my perspective. Like, there are just cases out there where you have to kind of go with what the professionals were originally looking at in terms of the medical examiner. and how they were dealing with a case. If it's like super wrong and it resulted in a conviction, you fix it. But like, it is very difficult to sit down and try and change a case.
01:02:02
Speaker
And there's there's several cases out there like that. One of the people I'm hoping to talk to this year we had them on the show. um they had written a book, and we had them on the show.
01:02:16
Speaker
and I wanted to talk to them about another case, but now their case that they were on the show about is wrapped up, and it was not the results they expected. so i definitely want to have them back on. And that happens, you know?
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that that happens more than you realize. um We're lucky because we haven't had to do like a ton of engagement to keep the size audience that we have.
01:02:42
Speaker
and It's not that we don't want to engage with everybody. It's just that's a it's a delicate line. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode was just to sort of talk a little bit to the audience as opposed to just like tell a story. But it's it's delicate because while I have appreciation for every single person who likes us enough to continue listening to us. When I engage in like banter conversation with people about top about case topics, right. It it's draining, right. yeah And it's already so hard when you're talking about these like literally death cases, right.
01:03:27
Speaker
to then, defend your position or defend the professional's position or, you know, engage in more conversation about it. And even you and I, like the two of us together, as great of a team as we are, we come to not blows, but we come to like explosive arguments over things at times. And, you know, they don't make them into it. It doesn't make it into the show anymore, but Like, it's just a delicate process, right? And so it's sort of, because it is just the two of us, like, we don't have, we we can't hire a social media coordinator.
01:04:05
Speaker
I love hearing from listeners. And I love hearing whatever it is Any listener that takes the time to listen to us has to say, like, good, bad, indifferent. I like hearing about it. The problem is to have the bandwidth to...
01:04:23
Speaker
to engage, like I can either do the show or I can engage about the show. i don't have enough to go around, if that makes sense. And, you know, it's purely selfish on my side of it because in a way I just put stuff out there.
01:04:39
Speaker
I wish we could have more engagement and, you know, talk one-on-one with more people It's just if we want to keep doing the show, there's only so many hours in the day, right? Yeah. And that's kind of we've had to focus on certain things. And essentially for this show, what I've focused on is the research and the work. I hear occasionally from you about something.
01:05:05
Speaker
And most of the time, i just put it in the back box. of my mind and I keep it in mind, but that's that, right? And so it's a weird balance and we have absolutely, i mean, now we have experience in it, but we had no background in any of this stuff.
01:05:21
Speaker
We just started doing it, right? Yeah, i don't like i don't know how to I don't know how to explain to people like the weird skills we put together to make the storytelling process work. And then to also do the research that we do with the stories. like It's kind of strange how it all worked. and like It's so much work.
01:05:44
Speaker
it It is a lot. like to And that's that's the other thing is we could we could just do the... main cases that people do. i just don't, I never found that all that interesting. There were a few of them we've touched on over the years that like I get a little obsessed with i trying to figure out something new. Well, we do the true crime news, which usually will hit the high notes of things, right?
01:06:12
Speaker
Yeah. I think, I mean, I feel like, going through things that happen, especially like the huge cases, right? yeah That especially when something, there's movement and like we talk about it in true crime news and then we move all along, right? We're not going to beat something to death, pardon the pun, but some things, there are big things happening. Now, I'm pretty sure you sent me a link this morning that one of the cases that we've covered several times in true crime news is actually going to go to trial and there's going to be a camera, right?
01:06:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That one, that, I don't know how i'm going to work that in because, like, I had all this stuff planned for January and February. And now I'm seeing that and I'm going, okay, well, how are we going to do that? Because we may do some coverage of that it happens. That's an interesting case. You have made it interesting for me. I'm not going to lie. It wouldn't have hit my radar. But because it did...
01:07:10
Speaker
It's interesting. And I am, i will be there. I am still not entirely sure that it's not going to be resolved before it goes to trial. It may, you could be one hundred percent right on that. honestly should be resolved before it goes to trial. There's not a whole lot to be had at trial, honestly, based on what we know.
01:07:31
Speaker
ah There's a literal co-defendant, right? yeah That's talking. and yeah it that i can't wait to see like how all that goes down because like it is it's a weird case and like it i don't think it's getting the coverage it should which is why i keep talking about it um because i'm actually not aware of how much coverage it's getting but it should be getting coverage it's horrifying the whole thing is and it should be a main case yeah yeah no i agree with that um
01:08:07
Speaker
But ah yeah, you wanted to do a chat episode. We ah were doing a chat episode and i I would, I would say ah i i have contributed as much as I can to that. I don't know how to do this part, unfortunately.
01:08:23
Speaker
That having been said, like the whole new season, we are going to repeat a couple of things that we're doing. Like episodes we've covered in the past. We're coming back around and talking to family members again. Um, there's an author that I i mentioned in this earlier that I'm trying to talk to her I originally had reached out to her about another case altogether, but now I'm like, there's an update in what we had episode wise. So we'll probably play that episode again and have her back on to talk about the update. Um, because she's still involved in a couple of really interesting sort of high profile cases There's a serial killer that she's gone really deep into, and I'd like to have a conversation with her about that.
Holly Bobo Case Revisited
01:09:11
Speaker
I do think the family member episodes are important.
01:09:14
Speaker
um I mentioned that we're looking at a missing persons case. But the the thing I didn't have on my 2025 into 2026 bingo card is that and and you and I have tried to've tried to cover this case. like We brought it up season one up front. We talked about it later on. It's it's a case that's bothered me. um And I think, like, I remember really being interested in this case, like, while this case was first making the news and how wild it was.
01:09:50
Speaker
You were so interested, and I absolutely refused. I was like, not today, Satan. yeah Yeah, and I think once I realized that this case was also in the original Israel keys files that we had, which somebody has done an interesting like OCR version where you can go search the vault files. And um i will note that like the vault files are still, I looked it up, 916 pages short from what you and I originally had. So that means not everything is in there, but most of it is. It's like 4,000 pages worth of stuff you can go through. But this case was in there.
01:10:31
Speaker
And like, I had this weird thought, like in terms of thoughts, it's like, it's just me being really nosy person and and like doing a lot of critical thinking. Like, I always wondered why did Keys have this case in there? And I had Like I've gone through all the different ways you could potentially tie him to this. He's, in my opinion, not tieable to this.
01:11:01
Speaker
It's too far a stretch. Hey, if I could have made this work, I would have. Right. Yeah. And yeah I think you and I had looked at it and like it made for sort of entertaining semi clickbait.
01:11:17
Speaker
We didn't go that far with it. We just talked about it because it was definitely in the browser on his computer. it came up as one of the sets of recognized files where they were doing the facial recognition from the stuff in his browser, and they were kind of comparing it against NamUs. I think they ended up doing some news searches on that later to do some more further comparisons.
01:11:38
Speaker
So we know she was in there, and then it kind of dies for us because like we weren't able to... fully rule him in for anything related to it. And then we started ruling him out and we were like, yeah, this doesn't make a lot of sense. But I did wonder like, does he recognize like another version of himself out there? And I think I'm overthinking it at that point. Oh no, I think that you're right.
01:12:03
Speaker
Well, so the case that we're talking about that like makes its way back into the bingo card is Holly Bobo. So the disappearance and murder of Holly Bobo was a huge deal for me. I've talked about it here and there on the, the episodes that we put out like since then, because, you know, there's a trial, there's all these people put forward. There's this story that's told and like, it is very difficult to get people to understand how much it's wrong. And,
01:12:38
Speaker
So you and I had even read a book by one of the TBI agents, and I had considered reaching out to him. And at one point, i think you and I... had taken the original trial, it's it's multiple days. It's about nine days, I think. Yeah. like if you um If you look at the original trials, like motions, opens, closed innings, it's nine or ten days. And we had gone through it and tried to figure out a way to make it into something for either our feed or its own feed because ah we had considered that it was like pretty disturbing how wrong the prosecution in Tennessee got
01:13:15
Speaker
the trial case. And like, it kind of sounds like you're defending a murderer if you try and talk about it that way. But I've noticed that people have started coming around to that. And so in 2025, one of the things that happened is there was this petition and a series of motions for appropriate relief and post-conviction relief that were done on behalf of Zach Adams, who is sort of the ringleader of that. if you could He's the only one that went to trial.
01:13:42
Speaker
Well, right, but he's considered the ringleader in terms of somehow being involved in spearheading the abduction And murder of Holly Bobo. And it like it never made sense to us because, that's a in my opinion, that's a single-person crime.
01:14:00
Speaker
Best case scenario, you might have two people involved, but one is tangentially involved with like some kind of accessory charges, either before or after the fact. And they tell this story on the stand. And it's hours and hours long. If people want to go down the rabbit hole, it's the testimony of a guy named Jason Autry who...
01:14:18
Speaker
Basically, his testimony gets him sort of off in that case, but like he had so many other things going on in his back-in-prison already. um but He was looking at a situation where he was going to prison anyway. he was either going to get thrown under the bus or he was going to throw somebody else under the bus.
01:14:37
Speaker
Right. And so he tells this story because they basically gave him the discovery in that case, and like he tailors a pretty... Interesting story. With the help of his investigators and his attorneys. Right. But I will tell you, I never...
01:14:55
Speaker
bought what he was saying. One, because he just was openly displaying signs of lying on the sand. Well, and at one point during the trial and his testimony, he says, I couldn't rehearse that. Right. response to something that he was asked. He's like, how could I rehearse that? And that's a weird thing to say about your testimony, right? Right.
01:15:16
Speaker
So the rabbit hole that and i are currently down, and the reason I bring up this case at all, is... Now that it's like going through, i think it's on its fifth leg of like these PCR hearings, the post-conviction relief hearings. Right. And that's after they've already gone all the way to like the Tennessee Supreme Court for help and that it's all been denied. Right.
01:15:42
Speaker
Right. And what they're...
01:15:47
Speaker
Generally, what they're focused on, in just in terms of like the hearings they're having, is sort of whether or not there was ineffective assistance of counsel, whether or not there was like some kind of egregious type of prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecutor in that case has gone on to be ah judge. Which horrifying. It is absolutely horrifying.
01:16:07
Speaker
and And that's the rabbit hole we're down. And you can join us in that rabbit hole. We're going talk about this a little bit, but like you you can like see what we're talking about. It's taken place in five separate chunks because it's taken place in parts.
01:16:21
Speaker
So it's not all back to back. I think trial and error podcast YouTube channel had some of it. Law and crime had some of it. um Somehow this is not a bigger deal. I want to point out, trial and error is actually with Dr. Spierko, who has largely been a huge part of the post-conviction relief. She's actually, she's one of the co-hosts that gets subpoenaed by the state, and then ah her attorney takes over the rest of the podcast because she has been silenced by the state of Tennessee.
01:16:51
Speaker
Yeah. So, you You know a little bit more about her background. like Can you synopsize what she does? Sure. um she works for She is an expert who Doug Bates calls Dr. Katie Spierko often in his child custody cases. He specializes in divorce, family law, in a different part of Tennessee. He was appointed to Zach Adams Post Conviction Relief by the court after Zach Adams filed a pro se petition that the court found had enough merit to appoint him counsel.
01:17:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm not trying to get away from her for a second, but the the all this comes about because Jason Autry, at some point speaking with Zach Adams, like former counsel and parts of.
01:17:49
Speaker
It was with Katie. It was with Dr. Spierko. He basically says none of what I said was true. Right. Dr. Spierko went in to interview him as a neuropsychologist and as part of Zach Adams' post-conviction relief stuff.
01:18:08
Speaker
For some reason, I thought his previous attorney was also involved in that. Oh, you mean um Jennifer Thompson? Yeah, Jennifer Thompson. He's still involved. Right, but at this point, there's another lead defense counsel. He is his counsel anymore, but she testified how she was ineffect ineffective assistance of counsel.
01:18:29
Speaker
Right, and that's to keep the hearing going and get them more get more information out there. Jennifer Thompson fully believes that Zach Adams is innocent and that the only way he was convicted was because she was ineffective.
01:18:44
Speaker
Right. And so she's willing to get on the stand and say that because of what she examined, he wasn't guilty. Right. And so what's interesting about all of this is you're seeing all the players now have to either defend themselves or admit that like there were some problems going on. And I will just – this was the focal point for me, and you pointed it out to me.
01:19:10
Speaker
Because we've watched like everybody testify. Zach Adams testifies. Dylan Adams testifies. All in these post-conviction hearings. But the most interesting thing to me was the former prosecutor in this case is named Jennifer Nichols.
01:19:24
Speaker
She is Judge Jennifer Nichols now. and she should have fought this subpoena until the judge just didn't want to talk to her anymore. Because when she gets on the stand...
01:19:38
Speaker
She is like like, everything you hear about prosecutors but you don't want to believe is true. She had the absolute worst attitude of any person on the stand I've ever seen. She objected to the defense attorney, Doug Bates, asking her certain questions while she was sitting in the witness seat.
01:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, and and the problem with her, like, if you if you don't do anything else with this rabbit hole but go watch her testimony, I'm pretty sure trial and error put it up. You should, and the reason that you should watch it is because, not because of her attitude. Like, her attitude makes it actually pretty difficult to watch. um But it's because listening to her words, you realize that, like, while she is a terrible jurist,
01:20:34
Speaker
She was put in the untenable position of prosecuting something that she knows. And you can tell by how she's sitting on the stand. She never, in all of the testimony she gives, puts together that she actually had any kind of clear understanding of the evidence in that case.
01:20:55
Speaker
In fact, she says she didn't. Yeah. So that part alone should terrify everybody. And I'm not – look, when it comes to the whole A-train theory of nonsense related to these four kids having abducted and killed Holly Bobo, I've never really been on board with it.
01:21:15
Speaker
It didn't happen. Yeah, it's always been like ah like a ah situation that I look at and I go, these kids, like, if they're doing what you're describing, they're not capable of doing what you're describing.
01:21:30
Speaker
And it just depends on which part of the story you want to believe. And we have to believe in whole cloth. There was a couple things. that you pointed out to me as we've been talking about this recently, that I want to make sure that like I say out loud, credit to you.
01:21:45
Speaker
One of them is, like in order for the Bobo family to be on board with Holly Bobo having been involved with all of this and Jason Autry's story being at least enough to like, to make this seem truthful. You have to believe that clamp Bobo was going to learn how to make meth that day. And Holly wasn't supposed to be home and that they arrived prior to her leaving for school. And like, like that doesn't hold water, which is one of the things ah that really didn't make sense to me. One of my holdbacks on doing this case. And I think I stated it outright in a former episode where we like grazed on this,
01:22:22
Speaker
I think I said something to the effect of I'm not really in the business of trying to convince a family who feels like they got justice that they didn't.
01:22:34
Speaker
Right. Right. And that it's true. But... One of the things you'll find is, and and for whatever reason, people don't realize this. Jason Autry said that the reason they were there was to teach Clint Bobo how to make meth, and she came out raised in hell, so they took her.
01:22:54
Speaker
Which is ridiculous. Right, and Clint Bobo saw who took his sister, and nobody bothers to say which one of these four men took her. Because...
01:23:04
Speaker
None of them really matched the descriptions. And he actually said on the stand, none of them, none of them took her. He saw the man that took her. Right. He said, it looked like my cousin Richie. It wasn't Richie, but his body type looked like Richie.
01:23:23
Speaker
And that is just mind boggling to me. And so it's really hard for me to get, you know, Holly Boba was 20 year old nursing student who got taken from her driveway while she was about to get in her car to go to school. Why she didn't get in her car and go on. i mean, obviously something kept her from doing that, but her family went through absolute hell she,
01:23:51
Speaker
I think it's possible that they were so removed from the situation that it never registered with them in order for Jason Autry's testimony to be true. They had you have been coming over there to teach Clint Bobo how to cook meth. Now, I did find something out. At the end of Dylan's ah situation...
01:24:13
Speaker
he made a statement right before he was sentenced to like 35 years that Clint Bobo didn't have nothing to do with it, which again contradicts Jason Autry's testimony that got Zach Adams put away for life plus 50 years, which by the way, up until after the verdict, ah Zach Adams was on trial for the, and the death penalty was at stake.
01:24:39
Speaker
And the Bobo family agreed to life plus 50 years instead of allowing the sentencing phase to go on to the judge.
01:24:52
Speaker
Right. Well, so for those of you who haven't followed that case closely, now's a great time to dive into it. There's lots of YouTube channel fodder for that. I will say, i think that you...
01:25:10
Speaker
You said something to me. You were like, why would they do all of this? Because things are coming out now that like the TBI plus the local agencies that were part of the task force, essentially. i i don't know if it's ever declared an actual task force to, you know, find Holly Bobo because she was missing for a very long period of time.
01:25:34
Speaker
And then to punish those responsible have had like a lot of infighting. There's been a lot of gossip that's gone on. But it turns out that some of those things are accurate. There's a lot of information that was withheld from the defense. And that's not – Meg and I just swallowing the defense's side of this. That's like what they're bringing into court where they're showing us ATM videos and how Dylan Adams was coerced into having conversations with law enforcement.
01:26:05
Speaker
But probably the most interesting part of it to me is you developed a pretty perfect working theory as to why the TBI was behaving that way. And at first I kind of blew it off, but then I sat down and started like reading through documents. And the bottom line is there's been this guy that did it.
01:26:25
Speaker
And like, there's no other way to say it than like of all the people likely to have abducted, raped and murdered Holly Bobo. There was always a single predator that fits what you and I know about single predators.
01:26:40
Speaker
And this being a single predator crime. And he also fits Clint Bobo's description of who took his sister. To a T. um He doesn't write this second, like if you were to pull him up and look at his mugshot. At the he did.
01:26:55
Speaker
Yeah, he's this guy's on parole. He's out walking around. But what happened that was so... bizarre was this guy was supposed to essentially be on trial.
01:27:09
Speaker
so if you time it and you like look at the window of time in March and April around when this happened to Holly Bobo and she disappears, he was supposed to be on trial for an attempted rape.
01:27:24
Speaker
And the person was, was the prosecution's witness, some people call them the victim, my preference is the prosecution's witness, in that case was incarcerated at the time and was not retrieved to come to the trial.
01:27:44
Speaker
So ultimately, Terry Britt, the person who abducted and killed Holly Bobo, all could have been prevented if the local agencies and TBI had done their jobs back then related to his assault of a woman named Tequila Jones.
01:28:03
Speaker
Tequila Jones was incarcerated at the time. she was not brought to court. So ultimately, TBI, the local court, and the other folks involved here are responsible for what happened to Holly Bubba.
01:28:19
Speaker
And that's why the investigation has sort of taken a turn. Not because they did some overarching conspiracy to cover up for themselves, but because early on, like, their own agents were like, hey, this might might might be on us. And at least one of them was pointing out that, like, they have a very clear predator that has the background of someone who would do what had been done to Holly Bobo.
01:28:49
Speaker
And they shut him out. At least one of them got shut out. The local district attorneys had like a lot of turnover during the time to the point that a special prosecutor who had no idea what was going on was appointed.
01:29:01
Speaker
And the the reason we have these little missteps in that case that result in ultimately the conviction of Zach Adams and multiple other people, but to a degree, the suicide of Shane Autry, one of the suspects,
01:29:18
Speaker
Like, it's all because they let someone very dangerous off the hook through their own ineptitude. and that case, um one, I never thought I'd be, like, sitting here talking about it again.
01:29:34
Speaker
ah Two, it is disturbing on every level. It is one of the worst. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
01:29:45
Speaker
I was just going to say just how poorly this was investigated and then prosecuted. and it's almost political. It's not political, but like in terms of local politics and local nonsense, it's almost like people passing the buck.
01:30:03
Speaker
Right. so that they don't get in trouble for how awful and egregious all of this is. And they just continue to do it to the point in 2025, several of them were doing it on the witness stand, knowingly at this point. Like, at this point, the best response for someone like Judge Jennifer Nichols sitting on the stand would be, I'm I thought I was doing my job.
01:30:30
Speaker
I did not do a very good job in this case. This case deserves some kind of review. and if you're going to give it a new trial, give it a new trial, do whatever you want to do. The reason I did it was X, Y, Z. And she did not do that. She had the opportunity to do it. And that makes her a piss poor jurist in my eyes.
01:30:48
Speaker
And I will not ever be able to have a different perspective on her. She should not be anywhere near the justice system in any capacity whatsoever. not She shouldn't even be a defense attorney. Yeah.
01:30:59
Speaker
She's a, she is
Judicial Failures and Systemic Injustice
01:31:00
Speaker
a, and I don't typically say this. She's a terrible person. If it's true, like what you're saying now, it's been my position. She may not actually know, but if it really is her, if she really knows and she's continuing this, she's a terrible person.
01:31:21
Speaker
And she's had lots of opportunities to say I was wrong, which she was wrong. Don't get me wrong. She was wrong. But she she has chosen pride over the truth, essentially.
01:31:38
Speaker
And those are people that don't need to be in any position within the justice system, in my opinion. I mean, I agree with you. I don't have anything better to say about, like, her problems there. And I think the pride part is, um I think it's accurate. the The biggest problem with this case is that, like, somebody has to be the one eventually to tell the Bobo family that there's a problem.
01:32:10
Speaker
I feel like my explanation, like, putting aside Dylan's Like Dylan doesn't know what he's talking about. Okay. i A lot of what he says sounds okay, but it's really just word salad from someone who's cognitively impaired.
01:32:25
Speaker
And he's repeating things, okay? And Dylan is ah he's a good old boy who literally wants to make everybody happy. Like, if he's sitting there talking to TBI agents, like, he doesn't want to make them mad.
01:32:41
Speaker
He wouldn't want to make anybody mad, right? He just wants to say whatever it is to get them to leave him alone, essentially. And based on all of that,
01:32:53
Speaker
I think if the Bobo family could just wonder to themselves, well, if they weren't there to teach Clint how to make meth, why on earth would they have been there?
01:33:05
Speaker
And there's no answer, right? There's no reason for any of those boys would have been over there that day. They wouldn't have even been there to teach Clint how to make meth. but No, this that that's everything that came out of, unfortunately, everything that came out of,
01:33:21
Speaker
i Jason Autry's mouth was absolutely made up according to the discovery and the evidence available. And it's not just not believable. Doug Bates did an excellent job during the post-conviction relief hearings demonstrating the miles per hour someone would have to be traveling to, in fact, be able to accomplish what Jason Autry was saying happened versus what the 2G phone tower records indicate happened back then.
01:33:57
Speaker
And we're talking about like thousand mile an hour travel.
01:34:03
Speaker
Like he was really able to debunk it that far, which is kind of, I mean, i didn't do the math necessarily, but it's been done by several people.
01:34:14
Speaker
And it's just it just not only was it improbable, it was impossible. And nobody bothered to do that during the trial. The other huge thing that came out during the post-conviction relief, and this will be my last point in this little summary of it.
01:34:32
Speaker
During her closing, Jennifer Nichols said that the.380 bullet found next to Holly Bobo's skull was ruled out as causing the defect in the back of her head, which allowed the.32 pistol retrieved by the TBI couple weeks before trial started at the behest of Victor Dinsmore.
01:34:58
Speaker
as the murder weapon. However, the size of a 380 shell in a shell casing, the the casing was found, the the bullet was not.
01:35:12
Speaker
But the size of a 380 bullet is 0.55. No, 0.3, what is bullet is point five five no point three what is it I don't know the exact dimensions. It's.5. What did I say? Okay. She said the.380 was ruled out, and that's not true.
01:35:33
Speaker
Right. And so this is a casing found where Holly Bobo's remains were found. That would not fit the gun that they said was the murder weapon. That's another thing people can't keep up with, and I can't either, honestly, but I do get the gist of it. The gist of it is that is the bullet ah that is the casing of the bullet that killed her.
01:35:53
Speaker
And it was not rolled out. Right. And the gun is locatable. Like, like it would take some effort at this point because it's been so long, but like that gun, at least if you want to trust some of these people that we're saying are liars has been identifi its owners identified. owner is identified. Spoiler alert. It's Terry Britt.
01:36:16
Speaker
And the location of that gun is it currently, someplace that if they really wanted to solve this case, they could go and get it. But I don't know that that gun being found actually wraps this up the way it would just give some credence to something someone said.
01:36:35
Speaker
That the really? Yeah. So this is one that like, it's one to watch. It's it's like, there's a lot of different, um YouTube outlets that have kind of pieced together what's happening with it. But I know, like, I'm interested in how that goes in the new year. It's fascinating to me that the guy that did that, Terry Britt, is out walking around at this point. Because he did go to prison for a long period of time. Like, between the abduction and murder of Holly Bobo and now, like, he's out serving parole.
01:37:06
Speaker
for all of what's gone on. He and his wife both got into significant trouble of firearms. But the the end result of all of this is you've got these kids who, don't get me wrong, they were like slightly older juvenile delinquents. They were meth heads. They were addicts. They were doing all sorts of things they should not have been doing.
01:37:24
Speaker
They were not abducting, raping, and killing Holly Bobo. And this is actually a case that I have avoided because it is so complex. And all I want to do is scream like, oh my gosh, you people are so stupid for believing this. Except I don't really want to do that because it...
01:37:44
Speaker
just makes people shut down. It's just the complexity of it is so hard to explain. And I noticed even like just recently as the post-conviction relief hearings ended, I noticed people are saying, Zach Adams needs to just do his time. He is guilty as sin.
01:38:02
Speaker
But that is the overall attitude of like the responses I was seeing. And so to me, how do you how would I ever explain it to them? You can't. And like, so it's so funny to me, the last year and change, I went back and started sitting in a courtroom pretty much every day or working for cases that would be in court ah shortly or be settling out. um It is fascinating to me because I thought this attitude had died. I remembered this attitude. Last time I was really dealing with it was about 2014, 2014.
01:38:40
Speaker
um But now, 11 years later, i'm back in the the court system. And the attitude was – it sort of starts like this.
01:38:51
Speaker
People think when a news article pops up, oh, well, they've arrested him. He must have done something or her. It could be her as well in many cases. The next part of that problem is you have defense attorneys and prosecutors who go through all of the motions that are required, you know, per local jurisdiction and local court rules where they are deciding how to proceed with a case, whether it should be ah a good plea deal or a trial. Most of the plea deals are pretty atrocious. Even if you you know didn't do it, you want to take the plea deal because you don't want the expense and the wasted time of the trial.
01:39:26
Speaker
um And then you have judges attitudes, which is they're here before me in court. So therefore, they probably did something. The jury's attitude then becomes, well, they're here in court, they're showing us all these things. So clearly, they must have done something.
01:39:43
Speaker
um And then the prosecutor and the judge's attitudes become, well, if we're missing something, they'll find it on appeal. um And then the appellate court's attitude is, well, the district court and the superior court found all of this to be good, so we're only going to review these particular pieces. And then the Supreme Court, either at the state level or if you move over into the federal court, the different attitudes kind of change. But most of them are, we're only really reviewing this to see what you've already done.
01:40:11
Speaker
So, I say all that to say the criminal justice system is pretty clearly broken in a lot of different ways. It gets it right far less times than it gets it wrong. It's there to you know protect us. and it enforce the law and to make sure people are punished for doing bad things.
01:40:31
Speaker
This case is an egregious example of how all of those things come together and basically mean we're spending an incredible amount of resources, an amazing amount of time,
01:40:43
Speaker
To come to a conclusion that has nothing to do with what happened in the first place, to punish people who are not affiliated with whatever was going on, they had done other things that were able to say they did these other things. And that's enough like to basically put someone away for the rest of their life. And that's not how the court system is designed to work. This is just one example of it. There are so many cases I've seen where someone pleads out to something. And, like, the cases you're never going to hear about are the cases where a murder has taken place.
01:41:15
Speaker
I've had four of these this year. um They plead to some level of lower murder. And people who did nothing get a 12 to 20-year sentence for...
01:41:29
Speaker
for ah Simply negotiating future freedom. And that case is marked as solved.
01:41:41
Speaker
It's marked as adjudicated. And it's taken off the books. And at least two of them, I know that they did not, quote unquote, catch and punish. end quote, ah the the people who were actually involved in the homicide. Those people are out walking around. And that's the case in the Holly Bobo case.
01:42:03
Speaker
Zach Adams is definitely doing time. A lot of other people have gotten in time off of this case. But ultimately, you know, the guy who did it He got slapped on the wrist for something else. I say that, and you know he did do some time, so there's that. But he did time for a completely different crime.
01:42:22
Speaker
And ultimately, he's out walking around, even though he's on post-release supervision now. I'm not convinced that he is yet old enough to not do this at least one more time. So that means the state of Tennessee is once again going to be on the hook.
01:42:37
Speaker
for potentially at least an attempted, if not a completed, abduction, rape, and murder of another young girl. That's what I was going to say. Just wait until he does it again, because then it's going to be really obvious it was him.
01:42:52
Speaker
Yeah, because he like he has not broken his patterns. Like the crimes that he's accused of, like they have some variances in how they're committed, but ultimately his signature, has his motive, his m MO, they all remain the same. And Holly Bobo fits those because Holly Bobo was always, always a single predator perpetrated abduction, rape, and murder.
01:43:17
Speaker
There's no question. The interesting thing that I thought was – and now that i've seen the that I have seen the post-conviction relief, I feel like he didn't think Clint was home.
01:43:30
Speaker
And I think the reason he killed her was because he became aware of all the law enforcement activity happening so quickly. Yeah. Because Clint saw her being abducted, he thought he was going to have more time.
01:43:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, we've looked at it from that perspective. We think something about quickly... Clint's truck was in the garage. Yeah. Right. We think something about how quickly there was a response to this young woman being missing.
01:43:58
Speaker
We think it maybe accelerated some aspects of it. Like, I don't have a really clear picture in my head, but I agree with you that that's likely why we end up Well, i I know we're finishing talking about this, but I actually do have a clear picture because her the way her phone traveled and then it sat for like 30 minutes before it traveled on to be thrown out, like she died during that 30 minutes.
01:44:23
Speaker
Gotcha. Which was less than an hour after she was taken. That's crazy to think about. But... I mean, ultimately, this is wrapping up 2025 and we're moving into 2026. This is a great rabbit hole to go down if people want to go down a lot and just see like how bizarre a murder case can turn out in terms of the court part of it. And like you know i I am very cognizant of the fact that there are like relatives of the victim here that like have an emotional investment in the outcome of this case. I just, while I'm cognizant of that, I still have to look at it and go, you know, is it okay to be emotionally invested in an outcome that had nothing to do with the truth or reality?
01:45:10
Speaker
i think that a little bit of it is coping mechanism. I think that it's a, well, quote, prettier, end quote, picture for Zach Adams to have done it than to for Terry Britt to have done it.
01:45:26
Speaker
Yeah. Because Terry Britt is little... oh He's the boogeyman monster. Yeah, he's he i mean he reminds me a lot of BTK like in his physicality.
01:45:40
Speaker
So much worse, though, because BTK, I mean, he was like masturbating over his victims. There's no telling what Terry Britt did to her. Yeah. I don't have a lot more on this right now. I'm sure going to come up again in the future, especially after we get some kind of ruling in this case. I'm sure there'll be an episode on on the ruling and kind of going over... I have a feeling I know how it's going to i think that I think I would go a step further than it's going to go. I'd be shocked if he doesn't get a new trial in the back of all of this because of how glaring it's been. Oh, yeah. If he doesn't get a new trial, there's even i I think he's going to get a new trial. And I would not be surprised if the charges against him are vacated and dropped by the
01:46:25
Speaker
judiciary Now, I have heard ah professional attorneys say that like the judge doesn't have the authority to do that. so i think this judge could do
01:46:41
Speaker
an order in a way that like precludes the prosecution from, or like let's remove the word preclude. I think the judge in this case could make it clear in his rulings.
01:46:54
Speaker
that the path forward doesn't really involve Zach Adams. And it should come from the fact that, like, the evidence as it's laid out... You can look at it one of two ways. Either the contamination from the investigation and sort of the missteps by TBI, local law enforcement, the prosecution have so tainted this that like there's no way like to keep moving forward. That's my opinion on all of it. Having like watched all of this testimony, um you could also look at it from the perspective that like we need to take all of this back in in court and put a jury back on it. I think
01:47:32
Speaker
The first one is the better perspective, because at this point, I think you should focus on Terry Britt. The reason I say that is because of that future harm that Terry Britt has the potential to do to other people.
01:47:45
Speaker
Right. That's the scariest part, right? Yep. That's the scariest part for me. Oh, I was going to ask you. i do remember Jug...
01:47:54
Speaker
Bates asked for sanctions and couldn't sanctions in the form of sanctions for Brady violations result in the dismissal of the charges?
01:48:05
Speaker
It could. and um That's something the state could actually appeal, though. Whereas, i mean, yeah, he there's a couple of things that like are sanctionable here. In the testimony that I've seen, um there's a couple of things that the jurist overseeing this, the current judge,
01:48:28
Speaker
could do to throw out or to rule out future use of um a number of sort of BS pieces of evidence. i You know, I don't really think the state would choose to go forward without Jason Autry.
01:48:44
Speaker
He's not going to testify again. right but i don't even think you can use his previous testimony i think it all becomes hearsay and i think it all becomes unusable unless i'm missing something in the local rules in tennessee but ultimately i think I think it should all be tossed. That's what I was saying. like I would take it one step further. and I don't know if he has the authority to do that. Most of the talking heads talking about this case, it's kind of like Delphi. like Delphi was like the other thing that we could have talked about because there was a conviction in that case. And there's this very split true crime industry divide where a subsection of people think that it's all this crazy theory that that guy didn't do it versus like
01:49:30
Speaker
um people who think that like it was all wrapped up in a nice bow. yeah that That's another one of those not-today Satans. Yeah, yeah like that's a case that like I have a theory there that's like separate of everything where potentially they got the wrong guy in Delphi. But like when I look at it all, I don't feel the way I feel about the Holly Bobo case. like I think ultimately, probably...
01:49:59
Speaker
the disaster of a case that Delphi is, um they're probably at least in the right direction. I could be convinced otherwise. like You could bring me something to show like there were other people there or something, and like I could change my mind on that case. I can't change my mind on the Holly Bobo case because – and I said it this way. I'll say it this way again. These four idiots – have one of the idiots among them. And this is his description, not mine. He basically just described his day, which is totally believable.
01:50:35
Speaker
And when they gave him the discovery, he being kind of a felonious con artist incorporated into his day, the events they wanted to hear about it's fiction.
01:50:50
Speaker
he He acknowledges that it's completely fiction. What was believable about it was like, he told a little lie. He told a little truth. He told a little lie. He told a little truth. It's very difficult with someone as practiced as he is.
01:51:06
Speaker
And he is a he is an admitted addict. They are all admitted addicts. Addicts are good liars. Well, and something a lot of people don't know about Jason Autry is he's tried to hang himself several times since he gave the false testimony.
01:51:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, it it's crazy. Like how many people, as you said, like basically are saying, you know, shut up and sit down, Zach Adams, do your time.
01:51:33
Speaker
i mean, would you say that if it was you and like you had some kind of problem that had led to the situation? Because, know, i wouldn't I wouldn't say that if it was you.
01:51:44
Speaker
Anybody. I just wouldn't do it. I avoid it or I go all in, right? Yeah. i like I am definitely all in on on the idea that Tennessee got this very, very wrong and that like they a series of missteps have been made that like this is a disaster.
01:52:01
Speaker
Anyway, i've I've now like you you wanted to do like a ah ah chat type episode and I have now dragged all this nonsense into it. I apologize for that. But it's what you and i have been talking about in the real world out there as we segue from 2025 into 2026. Did you have anything else that you want to say right now about it?
01:52:19
Speaker
No, just ah the only thing I would say is I wanted to recreate the trial and not recreate it, but like rewatch it and try and go through and explain certain things. And I put that away because it was like going to be so much work and the backlash was going to be like too much for me.
01:52:36
Speaker
I thought. And then for this to for the post conviction relief to keep going, I didn't know it was continuing on. I saw the i listened to the oral argument ah with Jennifer Thompson and
Preview of Upcoming Season
01:52:49
Speaker
the state of Tennessee but before the Tennessee Supreme Court.
01:52:53
Speaker
And she didn't do a great job. ah And I was kind of like, well, there goes that, right? Because I knew, based on the oral argument, I didn't feel like it was going to go anywhere. And I sort of put it, it's one of those just it's one of those injustices that I don't feel like I'm going to be able to do anything about in my time, right?
01:53:16
Speaker
Yeah. And so I put it aside. And then the next thing I know is like closing arguments are about to be had in this, um, this other writ and PCR that they're having back at the trial court level. Right. And I'm like, wait, what? And so it's a lot of, uh, legal wrangling that occurred, but, uh, I would just say to keep in mind that Doug Bates was appointed,
01:53:42
Speaker
to And he wasn't he was appointed to represent Zach Adams, but he was appointed in the name of justice because the allegations were colorable enough to warrant this like re-examination.
01:53:59
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So, Ned White is actually acting in the name of justice as opposed to trying to prove Zach Adams' innocence or not our prove the need for a new trial, right? He's acting in the name of justice. Right. Right.
01:54:15
Speaker
Right. And that's, I mean, that's ultimately, you and I have wrestled with this particular case because, like, it it's fascinating. Like, it is a clear-cut example of a serial predator being caught in the middle of, like, his serial predation.
01:54:33
Speaker
And, like, they have him. And at one point, like, not only do they have him, they have him, like, admitting in a coy kind of way, like, You know, it looks like you guys have it all figured out. Like, I'll plead to to whatever. And they never capitalize on, like, putting that case together. They do an awful lot of work to then kind of pass it off to the defense, which is unfortunate, to continue the investigation into what Terry Britt was doing that day and how it all worked out. And they find like holes in his alibi and problems, but they never really follow up on it. In fact, they chastise their own investigators for going down that path. And the only thing that you and I came up with was that it had to do with the Tequila Jones debacle that left Harry Britt back out on the street.
01:55:22
Speaker
um But ultimately, this is the one, like, if you guys want a case going into the new year that's not a brand new trial, that and this has age on it. I mean, like, this the the Holly Bobo case, I mean, ultimately, this all kicks off because Holly Bobo is taken from her driveway.
01:55:41
Speaker
and April 13, 2011. Right. So we're 14 years ago. It's going to be 15 years this year. um by the time this case is decided, i think her body is ultimately found in 2014. So it's like...
01:55:59
Speaker
September of 2014. Yeah, three or six months or so. And then we end up with ah you know a verdict in 2017. And we we have a lot of different actions taking place between 2022 2022.
01:56:16
Speaker
five and we should have some kind of result from that in 2026. And I think that's going to be, um's it's a case that has it has a lot of material, but most of the material, go ahead and warn is just from the perspective that they got them.
01:56:29
Speaker
And it's wrong. And it's been wrong the time. There's factual evidence. If you think for yourself, you can look at the factual evidence and make your own determination and it it doesn't lead to the ending the state got.
01:56:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, and it's unfortunate. I could talk about this case for days. You and I have tried to figure out a way. At one point, we had put together this. um You described it pretty aptly. We were going to take the trial and break it down so people can understand it and like what was going on that was problematic. But now you've got even more. i mean, I'm kind of glad we didn't do it.
01:57:05
Speaker
I don't think it was going to be well received. Yeah. in terms of like true crime audiences, they are very pro victim. And ultimately Holly Bobo is the person that, you know, is at the center of all this. The person that you're trying to get justice for is her and her direct relatives that were affected by all of this. And it's difficult to get people to come across the mindset, like from, it's an injustice to her to just put these guys in jail and call it a day.
01:57:37
Speaker
Well, right. Not to mention the fact that once an innocent person faces death row and then is convicted by a jury of their peers, okay, which is what happened with Zach Adams, it he actually does become a victim.
01:57:55
Speaker
Correct. if you if if If everything plays out that that you've done that to an innocent person, they are then a victim of the state. But nobody wants to hear that. No, nobody, nobody wants to hear that. And and it doesn't, nothing about what's happening now with Zach Adams takes away from the atrociousness of the crime against Holly Bobo. Correct.
01:58:17
Speaker
So that's all I got on this one for now. Um, this has been an interesting chat episode. So glad that you're tuning in. Um, the season seven stuff will kick off in the next episode. Um, and like I said, there'll be a couple of repeats.
01:58:32
Speaker
Um, Leading up to new things. Yeah, leading up to to new conversations and new elements of um of different cases. and You and I have recorded quite a bit to to kick off the new year. have You got anything else you wanted to say?
01:58:46
Speaker
Nope, that's it. Happy New Year.
01:58:55
Speaker
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02:00:19
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