Speaker 1: This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: On a dark winter night in nineteen ninety two, high
Speaker 1: school senior Kelly day Wilson finished her shift at NTV
Speaker 1: Northeast Texas Video, a movie rental store on the town
Speaker 1: square in Gilmer, Texas. Kelly locked up the shop with
Speaker 1: manager Joe Henry.
Speaker 2: I say, you opened tomorrow and she says yes, and
Speaker 2: I said, okay.
Speaker 1: See that was the last time anyone is known to
Speaker 1: have seen Kelly.
Speaker 2: The mom called me about six the next morning and
Speaker 2: asked me if she'd go anywhere sink. I said, yes,
Speaker 2: you going with the girls house? And that's all I
Speaker 2: knew at the time. It was a little bit disturbing
Speaker 2: to me, but I mean's like much of.
Speaker 1: A Kelly and one of her friends, a fellow student
Speaker 1: at Gilmour High School, had made plans to attend a
Speaker 1: party together, a party out of town. Kelly never showed.
Speaker 1: At seven a m Kelly's mom, Kathy, called the police department.
Speaker 1: She got on the phone with a veteran sergeant named
Speaker 1: James York Brown. From the get go, Sergeant Brown wondered
Speaker 1: if Kelly simply ran away from home he asked Kathy
Speaker 1: and her husband Robert to come down to the station
Speaker 1: to file a missing person's report. Then Sergeant Brown drove
Speaker 1: over to look at Kelly's car. Her gold Dodge Charger
Speaker 1: was still parked beside the video store. There was a
Speaker 1: bottle of vodka inside the car. The keys were missing,
Speaker 1: no signs of a struggle, but the left rear tire
Speaker 1: had been slashed. The tire had even come off the rim.
Speaker 1: That's an important detail. Obviously Kelly or someone had tried
Speaker 1: to drive the car before realizing it was flat. After
Speaker 1: closing up the video store with Joe Kelly's life, last
Speaker 1: task of the night would have been to drop off
Speaker 1: all the cash from that day's movie rentals. The bank
Speaker 1: was just a couple of blocks northeast of the store,
Speaker 1: and when Sergeant Brown checked with the bank, sure enough
Speaker 1: the nightly deposit had been made.
Speaker 2: Lati has probably been slash by this time. Is not
Speaker 2: known if she backed out, started off in the tires
Speaker 2: flat and cooled back in, or if she went all
Speaker 2: the way around to the mine to do the deposit
Speaker 2: and then come back in.
Speaker 1: Kelly's parents were divorced, her dad and stepmom Robbie and
Speaker 1: Waverlin lived in the town of Knaketish, Louisiana, which is
Speaker 1: about two and a half hours southeast of Gilmour. That winter,
Speaker 1: Kelly had been telling her friends that she was moving
Speaker 1: back to Louisiana, where she'd spent most of her childhood.
Speaker 1: Had she left Gilmour without saying goodbye, Kathy called Waverlin.
Speaker 1: Waverland called Robbie.
Speaker 3: Won't say. It was like eight or nine o'clock in
Speaker 3: the morning.
Speaker 4: Wavern called me at work, said, told me a little bit,
Speaker 4: and you know, I told my people I had to
Speaker 4: go sham home.
Speaker 3: We got backed up, we went, we went to So
Speaker 3: you were worried at that point.
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Robbie had always felt that his daughter was just a
Speaker 1: little too trusting.
Speaker 3: Kearn never met a stranger. She was very, very outgoing,
Speaker 3: probably to her own.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it concerned me a little bit because she again,
Speaker 4: she never she could go up to a perfect stranger,
Speaker 4: strike a conversation, just like she'd known them all her life.
Speaker 4: Best I can remember, we went straight to the police
Speaker 4: station and talked to.
Speaker 3: Uh, sorry Brown.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown was lean and linky. He rocked a dark
Speaker 1: brown mustache and aviator sunglasses. Picture a local cop from
Speaker 1: like an eighties movie. That's James Brown.
Speaker 4: Oh, he's a fairly typical small town police officer from
Speaker 4: what I could you know, be away describe it. He
Speaker 4: kind of ran us through what they had had so far. Uh,
Speaker 4: pretty much the basics of the story. She you know,
Speaker 4: she had closed the stores, she'd she'd her car had
Speaker 4: been moved from where it was originally parked, assuming that
Speaker 4: she had taken a bank deposits to the bank which
Speaker 4: they were made. Uh, and her car was back at
Speaker 4: the store in it but in a different parking slot.
Speaker 3: I think there was a I think her person.
Speaker 4: Was still in the car. There was I think I
Speaker 4: remember writing a vodka bottle in the car. There were uh,
Speaker 4: you know, who knows how long that stuff, and her
Speaker 4: purse probably was there.
Speaker 3: But that, you know, and that's pretty much about it. Really.
Speaker 4: Why why they didn't impound the car treated as a
Speaker 4: crime scene, I mean they were treating everything as just
Speaker 4: a common, ordinary, everyday missing person runaway type same rather
Speaker 4: than a crime scene. So there was a lot of
Speaker 4: probably potential evidence that could have been collected.
Speaker 3: It wasn't.
Speaker 1: Hard to imagine the teenage girl running away without her purse.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or without her car. Why wouldn't she take a car? Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, let's unless somebody you know abducted her. What
Speaker 4: else do you hear she voluntarily left for somebody else,
Speaker 4: you know, that would be the only two scenarios I
Speaker 4: could come up with.
Speaker 1: That's what a lot of people thought at first. Maybe
Speaker 1: Kelly couldn't decide which household to live in, so she
Speaker 1: skipped down with a boyfriend.
Speaker 7: I just remember in the beginning, it was a.
Speaker 2: She ran off.
Speaker 8: They just kept saying, Oh, she ran off with some boy.
Speaker 1: That's Kelly's friend from high school.
Speaker 6: Lee.
Speaker 2: It was a lot of she's a wild child.
Speaker 8: She definitely just ran off with some boy for the
Speaker 8: first couple of days, I believe.
Speaker 9: I feel like it took them a couple of days
Speaker 9: before they took it seriously.
Speaker 1: That mindset was about to shift. The bank where everybody
Speaker 1: thought Kelly made the deposit right before she disappeared had
Speaker 1: a security camera. Sergeant Brown got hold of the footage.
Speaker 1: It showed three vehicles making deposits around the time that
Speaker 1: Kelly would have left the video store. None of the
Speaker 1: vehicles was an eighty five Dodge Charger, though, nor did
Speaker 1: any of the drivers look like Kelly. Although the video
Speaker 1: quality was so bad it was hard to know for sure.
Speaker 10: I just had a feeling, ominous feeling that just did
Speaker 10: not go to run well, and that I can't tell
Speaker 10: you why I did fail, and I just had that
Speaker 10: as Unfortunately it turned out to be pretty true.
Speaker 1: Robbie had no idea how bad it was going to get.
Speaker 6: It's the story of a missing teenage girl.
Speaker 4: To find her would change the lines of just about
Speaker 4: everyone she knew.
Speaker 5: In this case of missing Gilmourtine Kelly Wilson.
Speaker 11: She told be careful that I could end up like
Speaker 11: Kelly Wilson. The strip put fear in me.
Speaker 6: If there was devil worshiping back in the woods right
Speaker 6: behind your.
Speaker 5: House, Yeah, further back in the woods.
Speaker 12: The details are sketchy, the trail goes cold, and Kelly
Speaker 12: Wilson vanishes forever in the small town of Gilmour, everyone
Speaker 12: wants to know what happened to Kelly Wilson.
Speaker 1: From Imperative Entertainment. I'm West Ferguson. This is Deviltown. This
Speaker 1: is chapter two, The Devil comes to town. It's been
Speaker 1: thirty years since Kelly Wilson walked out of Northeast Texas.
Speaker 1: Video and vanished into the night. I was a kid
Speaker 1: back then. Now I'm trying to answer a question that
Speaker 1: seems so simple, and yet it's been devil the town
Speaker 1: of Gilmer for decades.
Speaker 7: STA Steel, no answers, and the disappearance of Kelly Wilson.
Speaker 1: Leaving the city wondering well they ever know. That's all
Speaker 1: anyone can say for certain.
Speaker 13: Kelly Wilson has vanished.
Speaker 1: From day one. Sergeant James York Brown led the investigation.
Speaker 1: He probably knows more about Kelly's disappearance than anyone else,
Speaker 1: but this case changed his life. It nearly broke him.
Speaker 1: To this day. Some folks in Gilmer wonder if Sergeant
Speaker 1: Brown knows more than he's letting on. I mailed Sergeant
Speaker 1: Brown a letter and called a few times. Nothing. One day,
Speaker 1: I even tried to drive by his house to knock
Speaker 1: on his front door. He lives way out in the country. Now,
Speaker 1: the map on my phone sent me far off course
Speaker 1: to a pine forest in the middle of nowhere, not
Speaker 1: a house in sight. Kelly's mom, Kathy, had already decided
Speaker 1: not to talk to me. Without Sergeant Brown, I'd probably
Speaker 1: never find out what happened to Kelly. Then I dove
Speaker 1: a little deeper into Facebook and Reddit comments about the case.
Speaker 1: They were full of finger pointing and amateur investigators. James
Speaker 1: York Brown was a prime suspect in the eyes of some.
Speaker 1: Here are a few examples.
Speaker 2: I still think it was the cop.
Speaker 6: To me, he was so creepy.
Speaker 2: It was in it up to his ears.
Speaker 1: One of the commenters caught my attention. This guy was feisty.
Speaker 1: Plenty of bad information here. I'd be proud to set
Speaker 1: some things straight. I lost good years of my childhood
Speaker 1: to this case. He is my father. I'd be happy
Speaker 1: to answer any questions you have. Jan Brown has a son.
Speaker 1: His name is Josh. I found a phone number.
Speaker 6: Oh I've been mad. Yeah, I've been mad.
Speaker 8: I've even questioned my own dad, just out of out
Speaker 8: of fury, out of out of fucking lost time, and
Speaker 8: just just being just flat out mad, you know, trying
Speaker 8: to figure out why I've questioned dad, My brother's questioned dad.
Speaker 8: My brother and I both questioned each other just you know,
Speaker 8: we wanted to know what we were shielded from. But
Speaker 8: I can guarantee you that I can guarantee you he
Speaker 8: didn't do it.
Speaker 1: Josh's mom and dad split up when he was a toddler.
Speaker 1: He was eight when his dad took on Kelly's case.
Speaker 8: They've been divorced. It's all I can remember, you know.
Speaker 8: I just see dad on the weekends, first, third, and fifth.
Speaker 1: Back then, Sergeant Brown was always on the job, whether
Speaker 1: he was in uniform or not.
Speaker 8: He had a Brown trans am and uh, you know,
Speaker 8: we we would go ride the back roads on the weekend.
Speaker 8: And uh, I didn't know this, but you know he
Speaker 8: was he was looking. I remember he would talk to
Speaker 8: people when we were just, you know, quote riding around
Speaker 8: and he would ask him, hey, you know, you see anything?
Speaker 8: You know, he was always asking questions. You know anybody
Speaker 8: and everybody that you know, everybody. Gimmer's a small town.
Speaker 1: Josh and I had been talking for a while. I
Speaker 1: had to ask, do you think he'd want to talk
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 6: I don't know that he would.
Speaker 8: I think he's I think he's pretty well done with
Speaker 8: that stage in his life that you know, he's moved
Speaker 8: on from that really doesn't want anything to do with it.
Speaker 8: I will call him and ask him and see if
Speaker 8: he'll do one more interview. However, my request, if I'm
Speaker 8: going to do that for you, give us the direction
Speaker 8: that's going to be geared, because if you're going to
Speaker 8: try to make him look like a criminal, yeah, we
Speaker 8: ain't got much use for that.
Speaker 1: Josh and I hung up. Minutes later, the phone buzzed
Speaker 1: in my pocket Josh again. He had his dad on
Speaker 1: the line. I scrambled to find my recorder. Mister Brown,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for being willing to get on
Speaker 1: the phone with me.
Speaker 3: My name is he.
Speaker 6: Before you get started, lest I want you understand.
Speaker 3: You've I've talked to Dad and h You've got a
Speaker 3: few minutes.
Speaker 8: And if he gets uncomfortable, I told him to hung up,
Speaker 8: or he can say hey, I don't feel comfortable and
Speaker 8: hang up. So understood, get started, understood, and I won't
Speaker 8: take too much of your time.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown. James had been a cop for several years
Speaker 1: in Gilmer before he answered the call to search for
Speaker 1: Kelly Wilson. He believed in his mission to serve and protect.
Speaker 11: And that was the whole region of being in law
Speaker 11: enforcement anyway, or in my opinion, it is is to
Speaker 11: help people and take them And I mean I went
Speaker 11: to shootings and bandage people up until they get the ambulance.
Speaker 6: The whole hopefully they subviigned it.
Speaker 11: You know, it didn't matter if they were the bad
Speaker 11: guy or the good guy.
Speaker 6: It was just your job was to take it.
Speaker 1: Didn't take him long to realize that Kelly's situation was
Speaker 1: more dire than a case of a teenage runaway.
Speaker 11: Usually if somebody runs from their home or was a
Speaker 11: runaway or usually sign them within cyber or six days.
Speaker 11: But then from what I understood, she was supposed to
Speaker 11: live with her father in Louisiana.
Speaker 6: And when he told me that, I said, just don't.
Speaker 11: Look good at all, because usually a person don't maybe
Speaker 11: eight from where.
Speaker 6: They want to go.
Speaker 11: They could have run away, or anything could have happened.
Speaker 11: But you start at that point and then you.
Speaker 6: Go from where the last place was.
Speaker 11: And you know, even in this case, there was problems
Speaker 11: with that because the vehicle was tampered with by this
Speaker 11: stepfather and mother of her at that time, before we
Speaker 11: were notified.
Speaker 1: Kelly's stepdad, Robert, not to be confused with Kelly's dad, Robbie,
Speaker 1: probably didn't give a second thought to grabbing the purse
Speaker 1: when he found Kelly's unlocked car beside the video store.
Speaker 1: But in Sergeant Brown's opinion, Robert had had already compromised
Speaker 1: the crime scene purse.
Speaker 11: With thetization of another They had already went.
Speaker 6: Through that car before we got that.
Speaker 11: You had to start at zero because you don't know
Speaker 11: what was removed from the vega or anything.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown didn't really think the car held any clues,
Speaker 1: so he turned his search elsewhere. That meant interviewing everyone
Speaker 1: he could find.
Speaker 6: You talked to the people that were there at the story,
Speaker 6: You talked to people outside you.
Speaker 11: I mean, there's a lot of interviews that were done
Speaker 11: with the last people that had contact, and from there
Speaker 11: you start nearing your focus. And of course I was
Speaker 11: and a loan in the investigation.
Speaker 1: Enter Philip Williams.
Speaker 7: About two or three days that you disa feared, he
Speaker 7: called me in said I need some help. Distinct remember
Speaker 7: saying that.
Speaker 1: Philip Williams was and is a newspaper reporter in Gilmer.
Speaker 1: You heard from him in the first episode.
Speaker 7: And then he told me we got this missing girl.
Speaker 1: To spread the word, Philip wrote a news article that
Speaker 1: described Kelly blue eyes, sandy, blonde hair, five foot seven,
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty pounds. She was last seen wearing
Speaker 1: blue jean cut off shorts and a purple rugby shirt
Speaker 1: with a white collar and white sleeve bands. Sergeant Brown
Speaker 1: also called the Texas Rangers, Louisiana Police, and the FBI,
Speaker 1: looking for help anywhere he could find it.
Speaker 11: The FBI help when Danley's and interview people.
Speaker 1: There had been a few skateboarders out that night on
Speaker 1: the town square. According to at least one news report,
Speaker 1: A handful of people told police they saw Kelly go
Speaker 1: back into the video store after she discovered her flat tire,
Speaker 1: but apparently no one saw what happened after that. Asking around,
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown found out that one of Kelly's tires also
Speaker 1: had been slashed that Friday, two nights before she vanished.
Speaker 1: Another girl who worked with Kelly at the video store
Speaker 1: also had one of her tires slashed on Saturday, just
Speaker 1: one night before. Maybe this this last tire was related,
Speaker 1: maybe not. Another baffling detail has to do with that
Speaker 1: bank deposit. For some reason, Sergeant Brown told the news
Speaker 1: media that Kelly was shown on the security camera making
Speaker 1: the deposit, even though the camera didn't really show that.
Speaker 1: I guess it's possible she walked two blocks to make
Speaker 1: the deposit off camera, but that seems unlikely given that
Speaker 1: it was dark and pretty cold in Gilmer that night.
Speaker 1: If not Kelly, then who dropped off the money?
Speaker 2: I'll let them carry my truck through to eliminate it.
Speaker 1: That's Joe Henry again, the store manager.
Speaker 3: We went drove through. Do that twice. Let's screw it.
Speaker 2: Did that to us? Eliminated my truck.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown, the FBI and Texas Rangers all interviewed Joe.
Speaker 1: Joe was a bachelor in his mid thirties. He and
Speaker 1: Kelly had been alone on her last night at the
Speaker 1: video store. Was he hiding something? Did you get the
Speaker 1: impression that they were asking some certain questions because they
Speaker 1: were trying to decide if you were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but they were very very nice. I mean yes,
Speaker 2: because I mean you start, I'm the proverbial last person.
Speaker 3: To see here.
Speaker 2: That's that's you know. I wasn't but whatever happened was
Speaker 2: the last person. But I'm the proverbial last person to
Speaker 2: see her. So we started with me and you worked
Speaker 2: away out.
Speaker 14: Well.
Speaker 2: We went through all this stuff, and it was very hard,
Speaker 2: very difficult, because I'd gone home that night. My mom
Speaker 2: was home the next door navy and that saw me
Speaker 2: come home. A guy at the grocery store. I bet
Speaker 2: and bought some stuff from my mom and group the
Speaker 2: frozen and stuff. Went home, took shower, eight and supper.
Speaker 2: Call my girlfriend and talked to her. She got me
Speaker 2: back in a little bit and this was crazy and
Speaker 2: asked me, he says, your dog in the yard.
Speaker 1: And I said, yeah, I think so, kind of random.
Speaker 2: So I got up and looked out the one and
Speaker 2: there he was, you know, and her name was Angela.
Speaker 2: She since passed away. But but all these people, now,
Speaker 2: I tried to think, y'all, go comp.
Speaker 3: Of these people. We don't need to.
Speaker 15: It's hard.
Speaker 2: So okay, I mean I had never ready here, interesting,
Speaker 2: anything like this before, and this is just terrifying, you know.
Speaker 2: But yeah, but they were very courteous and I didn't
Speaker 2: want They told me too and all that, and we
Speaker 2: went through any time they wanted.
Speaker 6: To talk, we talked.
Speaker 1: Everybody in town knew Joe, and not just from the
Speaker 1: video store or his burger joined around the block. Joe
Speaker 1: was from a good family with deep ties in Gilmer.
Speaker 1: He also had a solid alibi. Pretty soon he was
Speaker 1: more or less eliminated from the list of suspects, at
Speaker 1: least in the eyes of law. Enforcement, although Joe says
Speaker 1: he remained in touch with Sergeant Brown and the FBI
Speaker 1: and goa Jane to tell me something.
Speaker 2: We were kind of confident with each other. After a time,
Speaker 2: we got over the hurdle of me and I mine. Obviously,
Speaker 2: they ever quit looking at me in that respect. But
Speaker 2: after a while it changed and they would come over
Speaker 2: and eat lunch. We would talk and I told the
Speaker 2: guy I felt bad about that, about not staying an
Speaker 2: extra ten minutes or whatever. He said, you cannot lay yourself.
Speaker 2: He said, that is not your problem. He said, I
Speaker 2: know it's a bad situation, but he said you can't.
Speaker 2: You can't put yourself in that situation that if you
Speaker 2: had been then this wouldn't have happened. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: just that you just can't speculate on my kind stuff.
Speaker 1: Winding through the woods northwest of Gilmour is a narrow,
Speaker 1: and some would say mysterious road named the Cherokee Trace.
Speaker 1: It's much older than all the other roads in the area.
Speaker 1: In fact, Cherokee Indians blazed the trail more than two
Speaker 1: centuries ago, supposedly by dragging buffalo skins through the brush.
Speaker 1: To this day, it remains a lonely out of the
Speaker 1: way black Top Lane meandering out of town for several miles.
Speaker 1: In this story, the Cherokee Trace will come up again
Speaker 1: and again. One month after Kelly disappeared, three hundred volunteers
Speaker 1: and a pack of search dogs combed the woods near
Speaker 1: Cherokee Trace. The spot was a popular hangout for local teens.
Speaker 1: What's more, a new reservoir, Gilmour Lake, was being planned
Speaker 1: for the area. The searchers found some mounds of recently
Speaker 1: turned earth, but it turned out that a team of
Speaker 1: archaeologists had been digging for Indian relics. There were no
Speaker 1: signs of Kelly. Sergeant Brown kept up the search on
Speaker 1: his own time. Meanwhile, Kelly's dad and stepmom practically moved
Speaker 1: to Gilmour.
Speaker 4: It seemed like every weekend there for quite a few months, we.
Speaker 6: Were over there.
Speaker 3: You know, we would follow a lead or just find
Speaker 3: a place in search. I mean, it was just, you know,
Speaker 3: he felt like he had to do some.
Speaker 1: Finally, in late April, Sergeant Brown seemed to get his
Speaker 1: first real break. A high school dropout named Michael Biby
Speaker 1: confessed to slashing Kelly's car tire on the night she vanished. Biby,
Speaker 1: who was seventeen years old at the time, was arrested
Speaker 1: on a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief.
Speaker 7: The guy that's last retire He was brought in the court,
Speaker 7: played guilty and to a missdemainor, and I was there
Speaker 7: when he was sentenced. But apparently, through a remarkable coincidence,
Speaker 7: he had nothing to do with her disappearance. He's last retired,
Speaker 7: she disappears, but he didn't have thing to do with
Speaker 7: the disappearance.
Speaker 3: Or as a law was concerned. That's quite the coincidence.
Speaker 1: Michael Biby moved out of state a long time ago.
Speaker 1: I've tried really hard to reach him, phone calls, emails,
Speaker 1: he blocked me on Facebook. Ultimately police decided his tire
Speaker 1: slashing was just a random act of vandalism. Police were
Speaker 1: back to square one. That spring high school graduation came
Speaker 1: and went with no sign of Kelly. The Gilmer class
Speaker 1: of ninety two dedicated this ceremony to their missing classmate.
Speaker 1: In the news, Sergeant Brown maintained that he was still
Speaker 1: interviewing people and pursuing leads, but reading between the lines,
Speaker 1: it seemed like the case.
Speaker 6: Had gone.
Speaker 1: Desperate for clues. Sergeant Brown was about to take a
Speaker 1: trip to the spirit world.
Speaker 16: Hi, Sergeant Brown, is it?
Speaker 5: Hi? Sergeant Brown?
Speaker 16: Just fine? Well, James, have you ever worked with the
Speaker 16: psychic before?
Speaker 1: No, ma'am James Brown dial to psychic. With the search
Speaker 1: for their daughter seeming to stall out, Kelly's parents had
Speaker 1: asked Sergeant James York Brown of the Gilmert Police Department
Speaker 1: to seek help from none other than Narene Rainier, a
Speaker 1: psychic detective in Florida. Here's Miss Renier being interviewed for
Speaker 1: a YouTube show just last year.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Paranormal Yaker.
Speaker 2: My guest today is psychic detective Noreen Rainier.
Speaker 11: She is the only psychic ever to lecture at the
Speaker 11: FBI Academy and has assisted.
Speaker 2: Law enforcement officials all over the world.
Speaker 9: I've been shot with a shotgun, and I've been a
Speaker 9: male in male parts. I've had my throat slit many times,
Speaker 9: stammed in the head, and for some reason, while I'm
Speaker 9: in this sort of trance state, I don't get upset.
Speaker 1: Ranier is famous for her paranormal services. She's worked on
Speaker 1: more than six hundred unsolved cases and even lectured at
Speaker 1: the FBI Academy in nineteen eighty one. Believe it or not,
Speaker 1: Using psychics on missing persons cases at that time was
Speaker 1: a thing. The Atlanta child murders, where many young black
Speaker 1: boys went missing at the hands of a mysterious killer,
Speaker 1: most famously used psychics to help scour the woods for
Speaker 1: bodies around the Atlanta area. In the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: The Gilmer Police sent Lorene a tennis shoe, scarf, belt, necklace,
Speaker 1: and watch, all items that had belonged to Kelly. This
Speaker 1: is an actual recording from the psychic session with Sergeant Brown.
Speaker 16: Now, I'm gonna ask Nouren to relax, be with Kelly.
Speaker 16: See Kelly. What just describe Kelly for.
Speaker 15: More short than pause, more short around your pretty prettiness
Speaker 15: in her face.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown was on the other end of the line.
Speaker 1: It went on like that for a while.
Speaker 5: Tell us what you're feeling seeing this killer. Want to
Speaker 5: know only about the killer, Kelly. Relax, tell us what
Speaker 5: you feel. Tell us what you feel.
Speaker 2: Stunning is cousingly pain.
Speaker 15: You know to tell you the murderers, but I'm having
Speaker 15: an the stomach.
Speaker 5: Go beyond the pain. Now, you want to go beyond the.
Speaker 15: Pains were pushed up me.
Speaker 5: Go beyond the pain.
Speaker 14: Relax, relax, come back to Noreene. To come back to Noreene,
Speaker 14: be relaxed, James. We want Nourene to take just a
Speaker 14: little break from being psychic at this point. When we
Speaker 14: hit upon something that's stressful or painful, sometimes we have
Speaker 14: to do this so we don't lose very completely.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask her to take in her trance
Speaker 1: like state, Noreene envision two possible suspects. She described their
Speaker 1: facial appearances, a big man with thin hair, small eyes,
Speaker 1: round narrow shoulders, and baggy jeans, and a smaller man
Speaker 1: with curly hair and a broad note listening along. A
Speaker 1: police sketch artist drew their composite pictures that winner nearly
Speaker 1: to the day since Kelly was last seen. Gilmur Police
Speaker 1: Chief al McAllister unveiled the drawings and asked for the
Speaker 1: public's help finding the two men, while noting that information
Speaker 1: from psychics is not admissible in court. This really was
Speaker 1: presented to the town to try to find who might
Speaker 1: have been behind Kelly's disappearance.
Speaker 7: They had at the end of that year where us
Speaker 7: the girl disappeared On January fifth of ninety two, on
Speaker 7: New Year's Eve, they had a press conference where the
Speaker 7: police station was then, and they got so desperate that
Speaker 7: they had looked up a psyche out of Florida and
Speaker 7: this woman from this psyching in Florida. Based on her description,
Speaker 7: they had drawings there two men, and they said, if
Speaker 7: anybody knows these people, the police you said, we'd like
Speaker 7: to hear from our words to that effect. So the
Speaker 7: case was not just put in a drawer and showed
Speaker 7: to the back. This was nearly a year later to
Speaker 7: the day. In fact, it lacked five days being here
Speaker 7: to the day, and they were still trying to solve it.
Speaker 1: Phone calls flooded in from people who thought they recognized
Speaker 1: the police sketches. They didn't lead to any arrest, though
Speaker 1: none of us knew it at the time, but Sergeant
Speaker 1: Brown did have a different lead, or maybe a hunch.
Speaker 1: He zeroed in on the guys Kelly had been dating
Speaker 1: prior to her disappearance. Of particular interest was Chris Denton,
Speaker 1: a fellow senior at Gilmer High School. But neither Chris
Speaker 1: nor any of Kelly's other exes looked like the suspects
Speaker 1: in the police sketch. We'll go deeper into Chris Denton's
Speaker 1: story later in the series.
Speaker 7: He was once named publicly as the chief suspect, but
Speaker 7: they never could apparently get the.
Speaker 3: Goods of them and even never charged.
Speaker 1: By this point, as far as most of us knew,
Speaker 1: James Brown was still a trusted member of law enforcement,
Speaker 1: but he also had a life outside of work, and
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brown had met someone.
Speaker 13: He was just a real outgoing kind person. He was tall,
Speaker 13: in good shape, He was handsome to me, and his personality,
Speaker 13: you know, has really what won me over, because he
Speaker 13: was just a real kind individual.
Speaker 1: This is Penny. She was soon to be Penny Brown.
Speaker 13: He was working on that case when I met him.
Speaker 13: I wasn't familiar with that case at all. He didn't
Speaker 13: share cases Case Stiles with me. I'd say maybe about
Speaker 13: a month after I met him, we started dating and
Speaker 13: we really enjoyed each other's company. Real happy, outgoing, hard
Speaker 13: working person.
Speaker 1: By this time, and the search for Kelly was entering
Speaker 1: its second year and it really seemed to be going nowhere.
Speaker 1: But James and Penny were in love. In November nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, just ten months after the couple met, they
Speaker 1: got married at the local Methodist church.
Speaker 14: Oh.
Speaker 13: I was ecstatic I was really happy, very happy. We
Speaker 13: returned from our honeymoon and I we both went back
Speaker 13: to work and just trying to think. I don't know
Speaker 13: if it was a month later or a month and
Speaker 13: a half later that I was at home with my
Speaker 13: daughter and he had gone out of town to a school.
Speaker 13: What it had to do with law enforcement.
Speaker 1: James Brown had been at law enforcement training in College Station,
Speaker 1: three and a half hours south of Gilmour when a
Speaker 1: SWAT team descended on the training facility and took him
Speaker 1: into custody. Penny was back home in Gilmer when she
Speaker 1: heard a knock.
Speaker 6: On the door.
Speaker 13: The chaplain came by my house and told me that
Speaker 13: he was either arrested or was going to be arrested
Speaker 13: for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Kellen Wilson. And
Speaker 13: I was dumbfounded. I was just blown away. It was
Speaker 13: very shocking.
Speaker 1: The sensational news of James Brown's arrest tore through East
Speaker 1: Texas and beyond. Everybody was stunned. It turns out there
Speaker 1: was another investigation going on at the same time as
Speaker 1: the search for Kelly, an investigation that led not just
Speaker 1: to Sergeant Brown, but to seven other men and women
Speaker 1: who were already in jail on other terrible charges. Almost
Speaker 1: two years to the day after Kelly disappeared from the
Speaker 1: Downtown Square in Gilmer, Texas, the police sergeant who was
Speaker 1: supposed to be leading the search was instead thrown in
Speaker 1: jail indicted in the kidnapping, sexual assault, and death of
Speaker 1: Kelly Day Wilson. Brown showed no emotion and made no
Speaker 1: comment as he passed through the hallway leading to the jail.
Speaker 1: Brown's bond is six hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 4: Dollars the murder, kidnapping, and rape of seventeen year old
Speaker 4: Kelly Wilson.
Speaker 3: I'm innocent.
Speaker 11: I'm looking forward to a coordinated as soon as possible
Speaker 11: so that the truth can come out and.
Speaker 3: I can be acquitted.
Speaker 1: Maybe even more shocking, if that's possible, was how and
Speaker 1: why Brown and these other folks had supposedly pulled off
Speaker 1: a crime more heinous than any of us could have imagined.
Speaker 12: It's feared she was kidnapped, raped and murdered by a
Speaker 12: group locals are calling a satanic cult, and that Kelly
Speaker 12: may have actually been eaten in a ritualistic killing.
Speaker 11: For the past two years, Sergeant James Brown has been
Speaker 11: the only investigator on the Wilson case.
Speaker 1: It was a j he volunteered for.
Speaker 11: Now he's a suspect in her disappearance.
Speaker 1: Deviltown is a production of Imperative Entertainment. It was written
Speaker 1: and created by me Wes Ferguson. Executive producer is Jason Hoak.
Speaker 1: Audio engineering and editing by Shane Freeman and Jason Hoak.
Speaker 1: Original score is by Robert Ellis, recording by Austin Sissler
Speaker 1: at Eastside Studios. If you like the show, leave a
Speaker 1: review and don't forget to tell your friends thanks for listening.