Speaker 1: It is Tuesday at this time. You know what that means.
Speaker 1: We bring you stories from the world of true crime.
Speaker 2: The story is true, sounds true? No, it sounds made up.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Perry and Shannon present true crime.
Speaker 1: So here's a headline that captured our attention. Nearly half
Speaker 1: of America's murderers get away with it. When you think
Speaker 1: about high profile murders, you think of dateline, You think
Speaker 1: of the familial murders, husband wife stuff. You think of
Speaker 1: the headlines of Lacy Peterson and things like that, and
Speaker 1: of course there's always one suspect that's zeroed in on.
Speaker 1: And what do you mean half of America's murderers get
Speaker 1: away with it? Because we hear about one percent of
Speaker 1: the murders. I don't know how many of them reach
Speaker 1: our our minds, our television screens, our newspapers, but many,
Speaker 1: many murders do not reach that level. Someone had murdered
Speaker 1: Raymel Atkins in Louisville in twenty twenty three, and more
Speaker 1: than a year later, his mom and sister don't know
Speaker 1: who did it. Police have not made an arrest in
Speaker 1: the case. Raymel's not the only one. Same for Tiffany
Speaker 1: Floyd killed in twenty twenty one, Michael David killed in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, Corey Crowe killed in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Not just no ending, no solution, no verdict, no arrest.
Speaker 1: Don't even have a suspect in these cases, and these
Speaker 1: are just a couple of names. In fact, police in
Speaker 1: Louisville do not arrest anyone in roughly half of murder cases.
Speaker 1: Family members of these victims have a similar sentiment that
Speaker 1: the police had abandoned them. The police don't really care.
Speaker 1: They've proven it to me, the victim's family say. Now,
Speaker 1: Lousville's police department acknowledges serious problems. They are understaffed, like
Speaker 1: many major police departments, about three hundred officers below full staffing. Now,
Speaker 1: you don't get to say that murders aren't solved. Nobody
Speaker 1: cares about us. The police don't care about us. In
Speaker 1: one hand, and in the other hand, say let's get
Speaker 1: rid of the police department, because that has been the
Speaker 1: mood in this country now for ten years, at least
Speaker 1: five years, the defund the police movement, things like that.
Speaker 2: Get rid of the police. They're out to get you.
Speaker 1: But what about when you need the police to go
Speaker 1: get whoever killed your loved ones, then it's nice to
Speaker 1: have them around, right. Well, that very sentiment of defund
Speaker 1: the police has done just that. It's defunded a lot
Speaker 1: of police departments. It's a struggle here in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: to get the LAPD back up to where it needs
Speaker 1: to be. It's not just budgetary concerns, it's recruitment. Who
Speaker 1: wants to be a police officer anymore? Who wants to
Speaker 1: be a police officer in twenty twenty five Put on
Speaker 1: that uniform and that badge and go put your life
Speaker 1: on the line every day for an ungrateful public who
Speaker 1: wants that job. It used to come with honor and respect,
Speaker 1: and now you get zero of those things. For a
Speaker 1: lot of the population. You don't look at police and
Speaker 1: see help. They look at police and see the enemy.
Speaker 1: And one of the side effects of that is going
Speaker 1: to be a very low conviction rate. The Louisville departments
Speaker 1: trying to address those issues. They've told victims' families, we
Speaker 1: understand you're grieving. Oh, it's frustrating for us too, they say.
Speaker 1: In the United States, most people get away with murder.
Speaker 1: Louisville's just my or cosm of that the clearance rate
Speaker 1: was fifty eight.
Speaker 2: Percent in twenty twenty three. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: The clearance rate, that's the share of cases that result
Speaker 1: in an arrest or that are solved, just fifty eight percent.
Speaker 1: All that figures inflated too, because they're also counting murders
Speaker 1: from previous years that the police solved in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: So yeah, you're looking maybe at forty percent. In other words,
Speaker 2: a murderer's.
Speaker 1: Chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down
Speaker 1: to a coin flip. For other crimes that don't rise
Speaker 1: to the level of murder, clearance rates are even lower.
Speaker 1: You steal a car, You're pretty, You're good, You're good.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but that's what the data says. Only eight
Speaker 1: percent of car thef's result in an arrest. That's that's
Speaker 1: pretty good odds. I hope I see a Lamborghini on
Speaker 1: the way home. I understand understand why people jack cars
Speaker 1: and lead police on a chase that aren't Lamborghinis. Now,
Speaker 1: if I'm going to lead the cops on a chase,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do it with it like a Dodge
Speaker 1: charge or something with a little something with a little
Speaker 1: go maybe a Honda civic.
Speaker 2: You know, if we're not going to get the Lamborghini.
Speaker 1: America compared with its peers, does an unusually poor job
Speaker 1: of solving killings. When you look at murder clearance rates
Speaker 1: of other countries Australia, Britain, Germany, those hover in the seventies, eighties,
Speaker 1: and nineties.
Speaker 2: They say there are several issues.
Speaker 1: Lack of resources, the sheer volume of cases, a distrust
Speaker 1: of the police. This is from a criminal justice researcher
Speaker 1: not named me. This is Philip Cook, who says it's
Speaker 1: a serious problem. And I've got to believe my hypothesis
Speaker 1: more than just the volume of cases. If you hate
Speaker 1: the police, you're not going to talk to them either.
Speaker 1: And a lot of clearing cases, solving cases relies on witnesses.
Speaker 1: I'm not just talking about people who saw a crime,
Speaker 1: but people who know the guy who did it, or
Speaker 1: know that the guy who did it recently came in
Speaker 1: the way of a firearm, things like that. Right, we're
Speaker 1: just at this. If you're okay with defunding the police,
Speaker 1: you've got to also be okay with unchecked violence. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: so they say that there's some sort of solution in
Speaker 1: this article guns, they blame it on guns. Well, we've
Speaker 1: had guns for a very long time. Volume distrust of
Speaker 1: the police. Yes, they said that the solutions are this. First,
Speaker 1: lawmakers and the police could commit more resources to solving murders. Okay, again,
Speaker 1: nobody's signing up to be a police officer because of
Speaker 1: the anti police sentiment right now in this country. They say, Second,
Speaker 1: the police could make greater use of modern technology cameras,
Speaker 1: facial recognition software.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, I'd like.
Speaker 1: To introduce you to people over here called the ACLU,
Speaker 1: which will keep that kind of technology wrapped up in
Speaker 1: the courts for a long time. They talk about more
Speaker 1: police departments embracing flock cameras they automatically read those license plates,
Speaker 1: detect gunfire, things like that. Again, those are not going
Speaker 1: to be in line with what civil libertarians will go.
Speaker 2: To bat for.
Speaker 1: So we're just at this place right now where we're screwed.
Speaker 1: So if you want to steal a car, I guess
Speaker 1: to take away is you know you might you might
Speaker 1: do better in that in that field. Where is Jody
Speaker 1: huisen trut I'm not sure if I'm saying that last
Speaker 1: name correctly, but Jody Hoisten truth Twissen Truth was a
Speaker 1: local morning television anchor in Mason City, Iowa, meant arriving
Speaker 1: for work at three am. If you've worked the morning
Speaker 1: shift in broadcast, you've done this before as well. And
Speaker 1: she had never missed a show, not once. But if
Speaker 1: you've ever done a morning broadcast schedule, you know that
Speaker 1: time always comes.
Speaker 2: You oversleep at least once.
Speaker 1: When your alarm goes off at two AM to get
Speaker 1: to work, it's gonna happen.
Speaker 2: It's going to happen at least once.
Speaker 1: Even for the most dedicated, the strongest work ethic, it
Speaker 1: happens at least once. Well, it was June twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five, and she finally overslept. She called the
Speaker 1: news producer at the station and she said, I'll be
Speaker 1: right in. She realized she lived about a mile from work.
Speaker 1: She was from Minnesota. Jody was youngest of three daughters,
Speaker 1: very much into sports, loved golf, and she briefly worked
Speaker 1: as a Northwest Airlines flight attendant. A friend remembers that
Speaker 1: she liked to say she wanted to be on the air,
Speaker 1: not in the air, and that morning, when she still
Speaker 1: didn't show up at the station, everyone thought whateveryone one
Speaker 1: else thinks, oh, she overslept.
Speaker 2: It happens. She was never found.
Speaker 1: Twenty seven year old Jody hoisten Trut was never found,
Speaker 1: but they did find disturbing signs of her absence. When
Speaker 1: police got to the scene of her apartment, there was
Speaker 1: no sign of Jody, but her car was there and
Speaker 1: there were definite signs of a struggle a bent car key.
Speaker 1: They said that it indicated she was probably attacked from behind,
Speaker 1: a lot of force used. Her stuff was strown across
Speaker 1: the garage and the floor, red heels, blow dryer, earrings,
Speaker 1: drag marks in the parking lot. Anyway, her building had
Speaker 1: no security cameras, it was not lit very well. Police
Speaker 1: found no blood, no witnesses, never been seen nobody. Thirty
Speaker 1: years later, there is a devoted team of volunteers still
Speaker 1: trying to solve this mystery. Mason City, by the Way,
Speaker 1: on its fourth police chief since Jody's disappearance. That tip
Speaker 1: continually come in about Jody, usually around this time of
Speaker 1: year because it's the anniversary. Late June is when they
Speaker 1: hear more about it. Now, about nine months before she
Speaker 1: went missing, she did file a police report regarding a
Speaker 1: suspicious subject who was following her, driving her or driving
Speaker 1: behind her in a small white Newer pickup. She had
Speaker 1: taken a self defense class. The day before she disappeared.
Speaker 1: She played in a charity golf tournament, and she told
Speaker 1: some people that she was playing with that she considered
Speaker 1: changing her phone number because she was getting harassing phone calls.
Speaker 1: This is kind of troubling, but also she's in the
Speaker 1: public eye and it's not completely out of the realm.
Speaker 1: There was a guy that they focused in on, John
Speaker 1: Van Seiss was his name. They ran in the same circle.
Speaker 1: He was twenty years older. She had been at his
Speaker 1: place the night before she disappeared. He was never named
Speaker 1: a suspect, never charged. He had always claimed he was
Speaker 1: friends with her and denied any involved in her abduction.
Speaker 1: Back in twenty seventeen, as technology had come a long
Speaker 1: way since ninety five, they did put a GPS mobile
Speaker 1: tracking device on his vehicles. He provided DNA fingerprints palm
Speaker 1: prints to comply with a court order, but nothing and
Speaker 1: then he died.
Speaker 2: He died last year.
Speaker 1: They do have one piece of evidence, a palm print,
Speaker 1: and they do have her belongings collected at the scene.
Speaker 1: Whose palm print is it? They don't know. They did
Speaker 1: get a tip last October and they worked with police
Speaker 1: in her home state of Minnesota to search a farm
Speaker 1: construction area. They'd only found animal bones. They had gotten
Speaker 1: a tip that there was a guy by the name
Speaker 1: of Christopher Revik who had been linked to two other
Speaker 1: cases with female victims. And there were some sort of
Speaker 1: connections between the two. But again that led nowhere, and
Speaker 1: then he died. He died in jail, but again nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing else. There's a colleague that worked with her at
Speaker 1: the TV station in this small town, Mason City, Iowa,
Speaker 1: and he said he can feel the anxiety and the
Speaker 1: shock of it as if it were yesterday.
Speaker 2: Yesterday.
Speaker 1: Remember, she did the news, so this station was covering
Speaker 1: her disappearance in real time. It wasn't just a local
Speaker 1: girl has disappeared. It's a local girl who worked here,
Speaker 1: who was on your television screen, in your living room,
Speaker 1: in your bedroom.
Speaker 2: Every night. They had to cover the news of her disappearances.
Speaker 2: It was unfolding.
Speaker 1: This guy, Brian still has a two page script he
Speaker 1: wrote for that night's broadcast. He said, nothing would it
Speaker 1: have prepared him or that team for having to report
Speaker 1: on the disappearance of a beloved colleague. He says he's
Speaker 1: surprised that nobody has slipped up over the years to
Speaker 1: reveal any secrets that would lead to any answers. He said,
Speaker 1: it was crazy trying to be a news reporter just
Speaker 1: starting out and investigating that story. And you know, the
Speaker 1: person missing, the eyes in town, the Iowa Division of
Speaker 1: Criminal Investigation are in town.
Speaker 2: They're all in the newsroom.
Speaker 1: They're doing the same investigation that you're doing about your friend,
Speaker 1: interviewing them while they're trying to write that night's show.
Speaker 2: About the disappearance.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all just so very surreal, just like
Speaker 1: the fact that nobody has turned up. Now nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: if not necessarily the time when you were having any
Speaker 1: sort of great results with technology with DNA and things
Speaker 1: like that, but it's not like it was nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 1: It's wild that there's been no body and no one
Speaker 1: has talked, and they worry that everyone that knows something
Speaker 1: could could die. But again, nineteen ninety five not that
Speaker 1: far away. Jody Hoisenstrut Weisnstrut. I'm going to learn her
Speaker 1: name overnight.