You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by Greg Aracker, private investigator and
newly minted author of the book The Hunt for Brianna Maitland. Greg, thank
you for joining us today. Thank you for to me so for those of
our listeners who might not remember you from our second season, which was two
full years ago, tell us a little bit about who you are and what
your very unique job description is so, I'm a private investigator that I work
almost specifically for the Maitland family, whose daughter Brienna has been missing since March
nineteenth, two thousand and four. The book is the relentless pursuit of answers
to one of Vermont's biggest mysteries. I know Brianna's case is complicated. If
someone is less familiar with the case and they haven't bought your book yet,
which we strongly recommend, tell us a little bit about the Brionna Maitland disappearance.
The winteen year old Brianna Maitland went missing in Montgomery, Vermont, March
nineteenth, two thousand. She left work lack Lantern and which was a historic
in She left eleven to twenty pm two miles down the road. Her car
was found crashed into band and was backed off the road into an abandoned home
quite hard, punched a hole inside of the house, and no one's ever
seen her again. We've been searching for her ever since I got balled around
two thousand and six. How did you go about getting involved in this case?
I was actually at my brother's house at Father's Day. My brother's house
in Albany and I was on the throughway with my daughter and we went in
to use the restroom at one of the three way stops, and there was
a poster there. And I've seen those posters. I worked for years as
a Bonnie Hunter. I traveled up and down the East Coast, in and
out of police stations, probably a thousand different police stations, and you'd see
these posters everywhere. I don't know why I caught my eye, but did,
and I asked my daughter to commit it to memory, and she did.
And I came home and I started looking for things on the internet.
I ended up reaching out to Class Kids. Class Kids is an organization that
was started by Holly Class's father Mark. Holly went missing and she was abducted
at a little m California, and I think nineteen ninety three, was subducted
and murdered young girl. He started this organization that does searches and things like
that for families of missing people. They had gone up and helped the Maitlands
out. Now I was two years out from her disappearance, two years afterwards,
so I got a hold of Brad who headed up to search for the
Maitlands. He put me in touch with Bruce and Kelly, Brianna's parents,
and Kelly was happy to hear from me and asked me to come sit down
with him, and that's how I met him. They had moved from Vermont
at the time. By that they had moved to governor of New York,
and they had moved to get outside of the news coverage area try to have
a little normalcy in their life. They wanted to be able to go back
and deal with the police and do searches and things like that, so they
just moved a little bit away in a New York state. And that's where
they were at the time. Had you transitioned by this point from being a
bounty hunter and you trace people down on skip tracing that sort of thing.
Yeah, I was still doing it a little bit when I got married.
I was married for a short time. I gave it up. I went
back afterwards, I get a divorce, and some of my clients had moved
down and stuff. It was never quite the same again, but I still
did it. I had a process serving business where I live. I still
do that to this day. And we did auto repossessions and stuff like that,
all the stuff nobody else wanted to do. All the legal stuff nobody
else wanted to do. Yeah, I would still do it for old clients
here and there and stuff like that. Once that came up, I dedicated
a lot of my time to Brionne's case. Some of the best interludes in
the book, I think before you get into the case, or about your
life as a bounty hunter, definitely some. I think you've got a lot
of material here when you're ready to do your second book. Quite frankly,
how has your work as a bounty hunter helped you in your current work as
a private investigator and now as an advocate for Brianna's case. I get asked
that a lot when I do podcasts and stuff, and I don't know,
other than the fact that experience is a hard thing to explain. It just
comes with time. It's just looking for missing people. Looking for fugitives was
one thing. This was a lot different and it became very parent right away.
But it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of being patient,
which oftentimes I don't have. It's a lot of soaking up a ton
of information and collecting a lot of information, recording a lot of information.
Stuff like that. I thought it translated well, from one job to another.
I was used to being on the road a lot traveled when I did
bail skips and stuff like that. So when I travel now to Vermont,
New Hampshire and stuff like that, it doesn't bother me as much, I
think is with most people. One of the things you point out in the
book, Greg is the difference between trying to track down a fugitive and trying
to track down a missing person, and you contrast those two things. Can
you talk a little bit about that when you're looking for someone who jump bell.
Some of these guys are on some pretty serious charges and stuff like that.
They're attempting to People are creatures that habit and they fade in and out
of their life. They're still staying in contact with their parents or their girlfriend
or whatever. We will used to go. We used to joke about we
would go after the girlfriend and she wasn't wanted for anything, but if we
could find a girlfriend, we'd find the guy. Work that way. If
you know that your fugitive is a gambler, you're not going to find him
in the library. You're going to find him in because you know there's things
like that. You just have to pick up on and know there's certain things
to look for. They have to survive, they have to find a way
to get by, and they have to find a way to do that while
they're hiding. It can be really interesting and to see how low people will
stoop to try to stay hidden like that. In a case like a missing
person's, like Brianna's case, none of that really applies. It's looking at
everyone else and you're looking at the circumstances and it's quite different and it's difficult,
and the police on Brianna's case, I think for people who are familiar
with Brianna's case s they'll understand this. For people who are not, once
they if they read the book and they look into it more, they'll understand
this. Initially it wasn't treated as well as it should have been. Police
made some mistakes which they acknowledge now. It's really unfortunate because that time was
really important. But coming into something and working on it that the police have
dedicated years to after that phase was gone and other people worked on it,
it's difficult. A lot of talented, really knowledgeable people have worked on this,
but you start to understand that you're seeing things from different perspectives. Now
my perspective that, given the end of the book, I think is correct,
and I don't think it's something that people on the outside would see or
may acknowledge. If that makes sense. It totally does. And from having
read the book and from no I can tell you're a really keen observer of
human nature, which you would have to be in your line of work.
And I could definitely get a sense of the real feel that you have for
people. As I was reading through the book and you were discussing all the
various facets of Brianna's case, I did want to ask you mentioned this very
briefly at the end of the book, but I want to go ahead and
get that out on the record here. When you approached Brianna's family about writing
the book, how did they feel about it? Were they cool with you
writing all of this down and putting this out. I had gotten pretty close
to Bruce over the years, Brianna's father, Brianna's mother, Kelly, who
initially brought me in. She initially asked me to get involved, and when
I sat down with him, Bruce was really disenchanted with what was going on.
It was still at that point where the police and the family didn't have
a good relationship. He didn't talk a lot. Then it flipped the other
way. I think Kelly kind of processes things differently than Bruce does, and
that's okay. We still talk occasionally, but we're not close. We don't
talk often, and I respect. However, she's going to process it and
deal with it. That's her thing. Bruce gave me the go ahead one
hundred percent. He said I wouldn't want anyone else to write it. In
fact, I think it would have upset him if someone else did. A
lot of times when you see true crime books, people don't actually have the
information. It's very frustrating. If you read this book, it's the facts
you're getting exact, and it's information people don't have. I mean every time
I read comments on the internet. As a matter of fact, before I
got on with you guys, today, I was watching a short video about
her case. It popped up on YouTube, and in the comments, people
are saying things are patently false, that they obviously believe things that just aren't
true, and they also commented about how her case is not related to another
case that I entirely think it is. I think it's related to another missing
girl. And I came to that conclusion because I have the inside information and
I have spent years studying it. It gets confusing. Oh but yeah,
Bruce did endorse it. Yeah for sure. So in those situations like on
social media, which is of course become such a force during the time since
Brehanna has gone missing, is it worth your engaging with these people who are
making statements and I'm going to assume that these people are well meaning, in
other words, they're not just being trolls or just writing stuff just to be
jerks. Is it worth your engaging with them and setting the record straight or
do you not see that as a good use of your time. I don't
know. I don't do it a lot, but I like to try to
tell people, look, this is incorrect information, and here's what's the correct
information. It's funny how people relay information on Facebook. A lot of my
advertisements on Facebook. And it's a complete picture of the book cover. It
says this book can be purchased at online or at the Eloquent Page bookstore in
Saint Albans, And underneath in the comments it'll say where can I get this
book? And it drives me nuts, even though it says call me from
at a bookstart. Called me from Burmington recently and they said, we want
to carry your book. And I said, great, we have this discuss.
And so everybody keeps coming in and saying, I saw your advertisement in
the Burlington Free Press for the advertisement for the book, where do I get
it? The advertisement literally was this is where you can get my book.
It's difficult. That's the one thing about this book that I thought was pretty
important, and I think Bruce did too, and I think Lotu Berry,
the other private investigator A thought it was really important. Was that it tells
you what is wrong about the theories and the rumors that are going around and
why they're wrong, and here's the facts, and this is why you shouldn't
believe this. It's nonsense. One of the comments I got going really go
around with people, I just say, look, you should read the book.
One of them was, look, I already told the police who this
is who did it? And I said, okay, I'd like to hear
what you have to say. And he said it was this guy. This
is what happened to her, and this is where she is and it's not
my job. As he said, I don't know what that's supposed to be.
But I said, okay, it's not him. If you read the
book, it'll explain to you why it's not him. It's not possible.
And then I doesn't hear anything. But I thought that was important because and
there's a community up there that wants answers, and it's the unknown is scary.
They don't know what to think and you can't help. But hear rumors.
It's just natural. So hopefully people will read it. It's gotten rave
reviews, absolutely rave reviews. Everyone loves it. People reach out to me
on Facebook all the time. I want to talk about it and stuff like
that. Just great. But I think it gives people perspective on what happened,
and it's minute to minute sometimes some of it, and it's absolutely detailed.
And I tell people this before they read it, if I talked to
before they read it, as look, just so you understand. It's very
heavy reading at some points because it's times, places, dates, people,
and it can get a little confusing. And then it's also a little repetitive
because I put two lengthy articles written by Hank Albarelli, who was a journalist
who wrote articles early on in two thousands, I think six and seven about
the case. So it gets a little it seems a little repetitive. But
if you look at it as this is helping me learn this material, it
helps. That's the only one thing I heard two people say out of probably
a thousand they said this book was repetitive. But it's that way by one
girl got ennasty about it without maybe thinking that through that it was that way
by design. There's a couple of things. By designing the book the chapter
about the Maitland's is then it gives you everything you need to know, and
it does paint a good picture of where they were living, how they were
living, and who they are and all this other stuff. Didn't need to
be any deeper than that. People in this situation feel like everyone's peaking in
their windows all the time and it's intrusive. Out of respect for them,
I didn't want it to be intrusive. Bruce read the whole book before it
was released. I said, I'm not putting anything out that you don't want
out there, and when he read it, he said, no, this
is good. Did Bruce ask for any changes in the manuscript. I think
he made some corrections, but I don't think he made changes so much.
I can't think of that. I let a small audience about twelve people read
it, and I asked I'd give him a list of questions so Bruce and
Lou, which if people are familiar with case too, they know Lou because
Lou works, we work together. Lou's thirty five year retired police chief law
enforcement professional. So I would say, is this factually correct? So that
was the main point of that, and the other people that read, I
just want to see how much they enjoyed it and if it made sense,
because to me, I knew the material so well that I would find myself
when I explained it to people, I would maybe gloss over things, or
when they asked me a question. When I got done, I'd be like,
oh, I didn't fill that in. So I wanted to make sure
the book build most of the stuff because the book has to be read and
understood by civilians like Kristen and Bill, and also by people that have no
familiarity with Brianna's story, and it is important that you reach thousands of people.
The hope is obviously that this will help move the case forward. And
then at the same time, when you have experts like Bruce and Kelly Maitland
or your fellow PI Lou Barry. They're reading it from a much more sophisticated
level in terms of their understanding of Brianna's life and this loss. Do you
feel like you could please all of those audiences? What was your thinking there?
It's odd. So I've obviously never written a book before, especially the
part that was about me, but all of it it feels like you're pulling
your pants down in public. Just a weird thing. It's intrusive. A
lot of people have said, including my publisher, you need to write a
whole book just about Bonnie Unting, and I'm like that, it's weird to
write something about your own stuff. Kristen said that just a moment ago.
Yeah, I get it. I get I get that for sure. I
could. I don't know how exciting it would be. I could, though
it was when you do that kind of stuff, it doesn't seem crazy at
the time, but then i'd look back at it and talk to people about
it. I'm like, that was nuts. I was I thinking. I
was young too, I was pretty young at the time. Would everybody feel
inclusive when you put material out like that. You hope. I hoped I
presented everything well enough that everybody understood. That was the whole idea. It's
don't expect when if you read it, don't expect like a book that you
know, how you read a true crime book and they try to describe the
area that you went into, and oh, you're in northern Vermont and that
the maple sugar whatever is going on and the trees thaves are turning, and
there's none of that in my book. It's fact, this is what takes
place, this is that's what happened. This was other crimes that were going
on at the time. So it of going into all that other than there's
a drug scourge going on at the time and stuff. So I'm not that
author that's going to paint you a picture of about nineteen twenties Vermont that morphed
into this other thing, other than the fact that maybe that oddly Vermont was
almost completely crime free. Certain years they didn't even record any murders. That's
all changed in the last couple of months up there, just now, I've
had seven homicides. I think in the last month they just had three young
Palestinian guys college students get shot on the street. They were walking together and
somebody walked out and shot them. It's just things have changed, I think.
And that was another thing I saw. One of the comments was a
guy and he was very played about it. He said, I really liked
the book. It was really formative. I wish it was more about me,
which wasn't going to happen, and a little lefts heavy on the facts.
That's the purpose of the book was to be heavy on the facts.
That was my whole goal. It is definitely meant to be, like the
book, a record for the case. You can very clearly see that this
is the definitive work. Yeah. It's drawn from police interviews, from court
records, from my own experience, from newspaper articles, people with firsthand knowledge,
and some of it is insane. My brother read one of the chapters
and he called me up because I'm traumatized from reading that. That was funny.
We can't get into every single aspect of the roadblocks and the issues that
has plagued this case because we would be here all night, and although we
love talking to you, I don't think any of us would have spend seventeen
hours doing a recitation of all of the issues, but can you highlight just
some of the roadblocks and issues that have caused this case to become old and
cold. That goes to I think people got really frustrated that read it.
I heard from a lot of people up in that community. They would reach
out to me on Facebook and they would want to talk, and I would
talk to them, I would FaceTime with them, or I would just chat
with him or whatever, and they were frustrated at the way the police handled
things. And I discussed that at the end of the book too, about
how that's changed. But in the beginning it was handled really poorly. So
one of the things that really went south is that when her vehicle was there,
it was spotted there on the night of the nineteenth at the Dutch burned
home, the abandoned home. The police ended up coming around one o'clock the
next afternoon. In the morning, the car was spotted a bunch of times
as it sat there, but when the police officer showed up, he viewed
the vehicle and stuff. He saw her paychecks on the front seat from the
lantern, the black lantern in and he had the car towed away, and
he went to the end and the end was closed and he left and he
went on a long weekend and never filed anything. If he ran the registration
and stuff like that, he never contacted Kelly Maitland who it was registered to,
which would have put things in motion. The alarm bell would have rang,
and it didn't. So by the next week she was staying at a
friend's house. The next week, her friend came home. She had been
away for the weekend. There's another problem. She returned home on I think
a Monday. She ended up calling the maintenance and the maintland started looking for
her. They end up going to the police station when they really started to
panic. They go back to the police station later that week and the top
that was at the scene pulled a picture out of his effects and showed it
to him and said, is this her car? And they added Kelly physically
got sick. They realized, okay, where did he get towed to?
And they went to the tow yard and they popped the trunk looking for her,
and they're just baffled what took place here. Now there's a huge time
frame. You're talking from Friday night when she left work and went missing.
So I'd have to look in the book, it's there by almost to the
minute, but I think it was Friday, the following Thursday that no one's
been looking for. So whoever did this, make no mistake. Somebody did
this. A deer didn't run out the road, and she went off the
road and had a tree or something like that. She backed up off a
busy road, a busy a fast road, I should say, fifty mile
an hour a road, backed up off the opposite side of the road into
a building and had to have been extracted from the vehicle because it sat right
there, hung up on the foundation. But you have this huge and then
the police just I don't know if it was because they were so sparse up
there, the police are so sparse up there or what, but the Mainlands
really had a hard time with them. I mean they ended up nine days
after she went missing. They went to the end Bruce died and got the
phone records from the end. The police hadn't even been there yet. I
hadn't even been there to ask any questions. Was she okay that night or
did she mention anything? Was anybody wait there or nothing? And then at
the end of the book, I explained that the general public and stuff.
For many years, were really pissed off at the police. But those people
are all gone. They have nothing to do with the case for many years,
and the people that are in there now are different. So you can't
go back and undo that. You can't just shit all over them because they
did that, because it doesn't solve anything that was part of the issue.
For sure, that was what you were looking for. Yeah, no,
absolutely it is. Bruce has talked about his incredible unhappiness with the Vermont State
Police, and it's worth mentioning here we're talking about beautiful northern Vermont. In
a lot of those towns, there are no local law enforcement officers. It's
all done on a regional basis by the Vermont State Police, and Bruce has
talked about how incredibly unhappy he was with how they handled things from the beginning
of Brianna's disappearance. At what point do things begin to turn around and they
begin to build more of a relationship between Bruce and his family and the Vermont
State Police executives where the case begins to move forward in a more positive way.
I don't remember specifically, but I do remember he's long since retired now,
but Glen Hall headed up the case for a while and Bruce had a
very good relationship with him, and I think it was just a matter of
them being honest and working with him. And the people are in there now
sincerely want to out and they do a good job and they listen to Bruce
and brucell'sys to them, and it's a whole different story now. But I
don't remember exactly when that took a change. I've talked to him about this
before, where other cases where you see people are very frustrated in our odds
of the police and really give them the business, and so it doesn't help
anything. Both have to try to work together in function with each other,
but it's hard because the emotions are so high and it's difficult. It's got
to be an effort on both part of the family and the police. And
in his case, at worked because he worked at it for a long time,
and Bruce is a tough guy, he's fair. You're listening to Mind
over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're
back here at mindover Murder. So the case will be twenty years old next
year. We know that it can be sometimes very difficult to solve cases that
are heading into the double digits. What are your main concerns about Bree's case,
the older and colder it gets. I don't know. We still work
as hard as ever, and luckily we've got lou Berry with us. Now.
There are things happening right now that I'm excited about. It's difficult,
but I think there was something that was overlooked, and I'm pretty confident that
I hope that the book brought it. People said I, maybe I should
have been a little more clear about it, because I didn't realize this that
people that read the book everyone sees it differently. Everyone paints a different picture
in their mind when they read the book. Maybe I should have been brutally
clear about what I was trying to say. But I have a very good
point to make at the end of the book, and I think it's important
that people understand me clearly. But I don't know. It's a difficult situation,
for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's something some pretty exciting stuff
going on. Are you saying you wish you'd been clearer or more blunt,
but more blunt? Probably. Yeah, it's a strange thing. I'll ask
people we'll talk about the book and I'll say, because in the end,
I tell who I think is involved, and they'll say, I'll say who
do you think it is? And they'll they'll name people that I get told
in the book it's not it's And I'm like, how did you get to
that? Everybody has their pet theories when it comes to a case that they're
very invested in. And we have people who come up to us and they're
like, I still think actually supposition about our case and we're like, okay,
but probably that's not likely, and they're like, Oh, I don't
care. I like that anyway. Like I read this, read this great
magazine. I've got a subscription to Skeptic magazine, and then they have different
scientists and stuff, and I like the sociological type stuff. One of them
I was reading was that if people have a belief and they are presented with
empirical evidence that it's not true, they will dig their heels in even deeper.
Instead of saying that's emotional maturity. Instead of saying, you know what,
you've presented me with evidence that proves that I am incorrect. I stand
corrected. Most people don't do that. They will dig the heels in even
deeper. No, they just don't want to be wrong. That's emotional immaturity,
just to just not be able to say if you have evidence in front
of you. So that's what I try to do with the book, is
look, this isn't true and here's why. And ABC inded, it's a
lot of the stuff I couldn't prove definitively that it wasn't true, but it
was so close to impossible. One of the guys that was always thought to
be involved, he had no relation to brand Me. He wasn't even in
town long enough to even knowwher, but I did. I really liked that
final chapter where you're giving and you call it not the final chapter, but
the fact that this is and you systematically state here is people have said X,
here's the way that's not true. I liked that approach to it because
it really does like it is you being able to stand up and say,
look, as someone who has worked on this case, if you're saying it's
this person, I'm here to tell you here's why it's not. I like
the bluntness of it. Yeah something And Kristen said, just a minute ago,
and this happens in the Colonial Park by murders. People don't even say
I think. They say it's so and so. Yeah, and then when
you explain to them that here are reasons why it's likely not so, they
do dig in their heels in a very bizarre way. Yeah. I get
a theory about that. I think that a lot of people that have a
regular life, which I don't, but a lot of people that just let's
say they go to a job and let's say a factory or something, or
at whatever. Where can a retail store or something. If you're not like
with all these situations where you have to think critically all day long, I
just don't think you exercised that part of your mind. And we run into
this situation where and I don't know what this is, it's in the book
when I talk about it often, but interviewing people up there, a lot
of them didn't seem to have a clear understanding of the difference between gossip and
fact. And I don't know what that is, but it was difficult.
We actually had a lot of people who tell us more than one story.
They'd say, I'm what happened to her? Say okay, I want to
tell me, and they would tell two different stories, sometimes three, and
I'd go, wait a minute, they can't all be true, and they
would be like, what are you talking about? Well, you just be
three different stories. They can't all be true. Which one's true? Which
one of the one? You want to? Just didn't know? Just look
at you a blank look, I don't know. You're a teacher, Kristen.
Why don't they teach critical thinking in high school? We try very hard,
we really do, but I think it is literally it is something that's
hard to be taught, especially if you have, like you were saying,
people who want to dig in their heels. If you've got a teenager who's
bound and determined to always be right at the expense of all other things,
never mind the fact that I have, you know, a college degree and
a postgraduate degree in all of that. If they want me to be wrong
and they're right, then by gosh, that's how it's going to be.
I get that whole dig your heels in mentality. I'm around it all day.
I would like to see somebody teach logical fallacies, because you in my
class. I do. Yeah, I do. That's awesome because once you
learn that, you literally look at I've given my daughter a bunch of study
materials for that, because once you learn that stuff, you start to look
at the world differently. And I'll tell you right now that I should probably
should have expanded there. When I put the book out. Other people who
had written books told me, they said, once you put this out,
you're going to regret that you didn't add stuff and put stuff in. So
I kept going over and asking other people like Bruce and Blue, what did
I miss? What should I expand on something that? And then it went
to the publisher and the editor. There is a very important thing to understand
at the end, and it's that I believe it's just my opinion. Did
the police and the general public have been looking at this wrong for years?
And it's like a logical fallacy, is when you look at something in your
mind just is illogical. How do I want to explain this. I'm trying
to think of an example of something that's illogical, So I might as well
tell you this that I think that Brianna's case is This is the first time
I've ever publicly said this. I think Brianna's case is related to more on
Murger's case. Doesn't surprise me, You do I do absolutely, and let
me tell you why. And this is another thing I read in the comment
earlier. And I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me,
and I know that Lou and I having a conversation about this. So
back in the early days, prior to me even being involved, the police
from from Vermont went to New Hampshire and they had a meeting and the FBI
sat in, and they came out publicly and they said after the meeting,
they give a public release and they said, we don't believe these two things
are related. And they said it a couple more times, but then they
never didn't hear about it. But after that and then when Hank Calbertrelli wrote
his articles, one of them was entitled is something about is there a Seriah
killer around the Lucids? In the book the whole original articles. Yeah,
I remember the article. And the police came forward and they said, there's
no serial killer out there. We're looking for evidence, We're not looking for
some ghost and all this other stuff. In their first meeting, what did
they do. They looked at just like I did in the book. They
compared the two. Okay, so if you compare the two, you look
at Brianna. Brianna was staying with a friend with her and her father in
a home. So she woke up in the home. There was other occupants
in the home. When she went to bed at night, there was other
occupants in the home. She got up, she drove a short distance to
her job. She went into this job in a small building where there was
a few customers coming in here and there. It's an end. She worked
in the kitchen. She could see her car outside out the window. She
knew everybody. She left there and she disappears literally two minutes down the road.
Maura was at college. She fabricated a story about a death in her
family to her professors. She went to a liquor store and about alcohol.
She drove hundreds of miles away and it ended up on a remote road,
went off the road in an unpredictable accident. She left at an unpredictable time
to an underpredictable destination and an unpredictable accident, and within minutes she disappeared.
Okay, so they looked at that and they go, these two things are
not the same, and you can understand look at why they would look at
this as a logical fallacy. Okay, what is a random abductor give a
shit what these what their backgrounds are, or where they're going or where they're
from. He doesn't care about anything, correct. All he cares about is
that he put himself in the right place at the right time. It's conducive
to his activities. That's all he cares about. So to look at those
two things and say these two things aren't related, these two girls that live
totally different lives, is a complete wrong way of looking at that. That's
almost like failing in the logical fallacy. You see what I'm saying. It's
like saying something is better because it's popular. No, that doesn't make any
sense by that line of thinking. Hitler was the man. That's not true.
It's the same idea. You can't take these two girls and say that's
what they did early on. That's they didn't have any other information. Now
I'm guessing I wasn't in the meeting, But how would they take these two
cases and look at them and say, Brianna, it was in this situation.
More was in this situation. These things can't have anything to do with
each other. These girls are totally different. Bullshit, A random Inductor doesn't
care about any of that. He's just trying to find someone put himself in
the right place at the right time that's conducive to his activities. And when
you read the book. In the contents of this book is a person who
was a prolific rapist and a murderer, and the police knew this because he
was caught, and they never not one person said I wonder if he was
involved. Does that make any sense? It makes sense when you look at
the system, because the system failed because of the way it's set up.
Are you in a position then to say whether you think this offender is alive
or dead. I don't know how much of that I should give away.
And the only reason I say that is because I have my opinion. If
you read the book, I think you. I think when someone reads the
book, they know they'll know what my opinion is. I hope did I
get that across in the book, Kristen, you read yes, No,
very definitely. And I was just as you were talking, I was going
back and reviewing and making sure, Okay, did this come across Well,
yes, I think it did. I think it came across one okay,
Bill said earlier people will definitively say something like it's this person, there's that
person. So the other day, almost daily, I'll see in the comments,
one specifically and a thread that I read, this guy said these two
things are not related More and Brianna are not related, And I wrote back,
you have no way of knowing that. How would you know that?
That doesn't make you sense to make that kind of a statement. You have
no way of knowing that the fact of the matter is you should be thinking
that they are because of what I just said that it is at least possible
you should at least entertain it. In Brianna's case, for people that know
about her, everyone did this thing, which Kristin helped me out with this.
If this is a logical fail, see also where people try to take
things that happened in her life prior and make it fit that this is the
cause of this. For instance, she was in a fight post hoc ergo
propter hawk. What is the post hoc ergo propter hoc? Is that what
it is? What do they call it? When you cherry pick things to
fit post talk ergo proptroc is after this? Because of this? Okay,
what's the one where you try to find information to support your already made idea.
You're already I got that one. Yeah, cherry picking. This is
good a term for it right now as we can think of. I haven't
looked at my logical fallacy materials yet so well, so I'm running short.
So she was in a fight twenty two days or twenty four days prior to
her disappearance. So everyone thinks that this has this must have something to do
You still see that counts today. This had to do something to do with
this must be what it is. This girl punched her in the face.
It's had to have something to do with it. You got to keep something
in mind. I think people forget that they were sixteen and seventeen year old
kids. These weren't adults, and they were immature, and they were partying
and all kinds of stuff, and there were goofballs. And if you think
back when you were sixteen and Brianna had been with this girl's boyfriend, she
had left town, that girl and she'd gone to the family. When she
came back, she found out brian had been with her boyfriend, and she
got in a fight with her. And everybody accuses this girl of having something
to do with it, merciless. And when you talk to her now,
this girl will say, Look, if she did it to me today,
I do I punch her again. And it wasn't just that she was with
her boyfriend. They were friends, and it was hurtful to know that she
did this. Her friend did this to her. So it's understandable. It
doesn't necessarily equate to murder. And there's other things that she had contact with,
these guys that are dealers and stuff like that. I don't think that
could be avoided. Up there, there was always this talk of all this
money being owed and all this other stuff. Look, she was a seventeen
year old kid that worked a part time job. The two checks that were
on her car seat, people made a big deal. Why did they take
her checks? The checks were for almost nothing. She only worked three days.
I think they were eeached for a day's pay or something. They were
almost nothing. And she worked at that kj's diner. She made a few
bucks there. She wasn't this big independent adult. She drove a car that
friends would work on it and stuff like that and keep it running and stuff.
And she was sleeping from going from house to house, spending time with
people. The only reason she was doing it, and everybody makes it Maitland's
out to be a bad family because of that. And I think the only
reason she was doing that was because they lived in a remote area and she
was felt isolated and she wanted to be down with her friends and be running
around with friends and stuff. Yeah, it was what it was, and
it's not horribly uncommon in that there. You talk to the locals and they're
like, I moved out at fifteen. I moved out at seventeen. It's
not that big of a deal. But what ends up happening is that she
gets into this situation where she's not monitored like most people are. Most people
who have continuity in their life. Bill walks out his door and says hi
to the mailman, and he gets his coffee at the corner shop and everybody
sees them all day long. She wasn't like that. She didn't have clear
continuity, so no one and then her friends were mad at her because of
the fight. So everybody just and her friends will tell you, look d
that would have blown over with time, It would have blown over. But
everybody who's staying away from everybody, no more phone calls and we're hanging out
partying at night, and so she starred laying loon. Now she's not being
mined. So it all ended up being a kind of a perfect storm,
I think. And she wasn't a seventeen year old girl who was living at
home with mom and dad and coming and going each day with her whereabouts being
known by family and friends. If she was involved in a more conventional living
situation for a seventeen year old girl. I think it's important to ask the
question at this point, what do you think it's going to take to solve
this case? Now that we're approaching the twenty year mark, is finding Breez's
body going to be a step in the right direction, or given the information
that you have, is it maybe not possible that we're going to find her.
I think it would help, but I already think I know the police
have to get that over the finish line, but I think I know it
at least the basic framework, So I don't know. We also don't want
to let you loose before we ask a little bit about private investigations for the
missing, because they're doing some really excellent work in addition to all of the
work on Brand's case. So can you talk about private investigations for the missing?
So that organization was started. Bruce and I used to talk about that
quite often and how families couldn't afford a private investigator to help them and stuff,
and it's not the police's fault. Where As time goes on and the
years go by, they're the police. They have present commitments, they have
to do other things. It doesn't become like a Really they're not extremely proactive
maybe and not by choice. A lot of them want to be that way,
they just can't. So having a private investigator is the families hope it
helps. Private investigators can get people to a cops can't things like that.
So we talked about it and when Brianna's reward money came up six times out,
he took the money and he started this organization and it's doing well and
it's providing private investigators for families all over the country and we need donations.
We can go to the website check it out. Some really good stuff on
there. And they just had a five k run of walk and which I
participated in. I did. I did it virtually, yes, but I
did. Yeah. It was in Reading, mass where Lance lives. Lance
and his girlfriend put it on. It was fun, it was a good
day and it was a good turnout. And did you run? I walked,
not a runner, my sister and some friends. So if our listeners
want to help, they can check out private investigations for the missing. We'll
put the link in the show notes. They can find out more about the
organization. They can make donations. We're actually recording this on Giving Tuesday.
It never goes out of fashion to give money to deserving organizations, particularly this
time of year, so we do urge people to check that out. You
continue to work this case, correct, Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm
in Vermont, New Hampshire often and Greg. If people want to buy the
book, they want to buy the book. So if you google the name
hunt for Brianna Maitland you will find it for sale through my publisher. It's
sold at the Eloquent Page Bookstore in St. Albans. If you go in,
Donna owns the store will help you out. She's awesome, she's great,
She's been really good to me. And if you want a signed copy,
can reach out to me on Facebook, pay me on PayPal or credit
card or whatever you want to do and I will mail you a signed copy.
We both love the book. We really enjoyed it. I'm sorry that
we may not get a Tales from the Bounty Hunter from Greg over a hacker.
I think I'm to continue to hope it's a great idea. I'm telling
you Tales from the Bounty Hunter. There you go. I think that would
be tremendous. It might be fun. That was a lot. I didn't
realize what I was getting myself into when I wrote the book. There's a
lot of work. It was fun though. It was good. It was
good therapy and this is I think this is going to be the book of
record about the case, and there is nobody better to have written it.
Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
We appreciate it. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Guys,
that is going to do it for this episode of Mind Over Murder. Thank
you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder
is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are
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six. Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.