Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
Speaker 1: not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: Listen, man, you know I'm telling you. You know I'm
Speaker 2: condescent to you.
Speaker 3: I'm telling you that I did it.
Speaker 2: Would you rast me?
Speaker 1: Welcome to Season thirteen, episode three hundred and thirty six
Speaker 1: of Sword and Scale, A show that reveals that the
Speaker 1: worst monsters are real. You know, the show gets a
Speaker 1: lot better when you stop complaining and just enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to start talking like you do. When
Speaker 1: I don't know northern Michigan or West Appalaysia or god
Speaker 1: forsake in Ohio, You're not gonna be able to get
Speaker 1: me to talk exactly how you talk in your little,
Speaker 1: specific local town.
Speaker 4: So just stop.
Speaker 5: You can't control everything.
Speaker 1: Just stop trying to control everything. You're probably saying that
Speaker 1: wrong anyway. It's usually a word that comes from a
Speaker 1: different language, and shit y'all saying it in Ohio and
Speaker 1: in a small newsroom in Batesville, Arkansas, George Jared was
Speaker 1: a brand new, twenty something year old journalist. It was
Speaker 1: September of two thousand and four. He was still learning
Speaker 1: the rhythm of leads stories and deadlines. Most reporters expect
Speaker 1: stories to come and go. That's the nature of the job.
Speaker 1: Research it, write about it, and move on. Maybe go
Speaker 1: get a peppermint latte from Starbucks before they take him
Speaker 1: off the menu. But every so often a case doesn't
Speaker 1: let go, or maybe there's just something about a certain
Speaker 1: personality type that just can't let it go. For George,
Speaker 1: that case arrived just as his career began.
Speaker 5: I'd been there maybe seven months.
Speaker 4: I was just out of college, and you know, most
Speaker 4: of the stuff I'm covering, like school board meetings and
Speaker 4: you know, city council stuff, and you know, i'd go
Speaker 4: to do features at local schools and whatnot.
Speaker 5: And then one I remember very vividly.
Speaker 4: It was a Wednesday morning, phone rings at my pick
Speaker 4: it up and a woman was on the phone and.
Speaker 5: She said, my niece is missing and we can't find her.
Speaker 1: And I said, really, George jumped in his car and
Speaker 1: drove straight to where the woman said she was calling
Speaker 1: from the Izard County Sheriff's office.
Speaker 5: And then I walked over to some family members and
Speaker 5: Rebecca's mother handed me a missing poster that I still
Speaker 5: have to this day at sitting in the other room.
Speaker 1: The missing girl was twenty two year old Rebecca Gould.
Speaker 4: And so immediately I started talking to Rebecca's mother and
Speaker 4: one of her sisters, and I just flipped the missing
Speaker 4: poster over on its other side, and I put it
Speaker 4: up against the building, and I just started taking notes
Speaker 4: on the back, and those notes are still there. And
Speaker 4: then I walked over to her father, doctor Larry Gould,
Speaker 4: and he was standing with another one of.
Speaker 5: His daughters, and that's how I first met.
Speaker 4: Him, and I just I was out with them the
Speaker 4: whole week that she was missing.
Speaker 5: That's how it started.
Speaker 1: Apparently, Rebecca had arrived in the small town of Melbourne, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: on Saturday, September eighteenth, to visit her boyfriend, Casey McCullough.
Speaker 1: She was on break from college, but it wasn't unusual
Speaker 1: for her to take a few days off to see friends.
Speaker 1: Rebecca's mother told George she'd talked with her daughter on
Speaker 1: the phone just the day before, but during their call,
Speaker 1: Rebecca realized she was about to run out of minutes,
Speaker 1: so she told her mom she'd call back. That call
Speaker 1: never came. When police searched Casey's house, everything looked fairly
Speaker 1: normal until they reached the back bedroom, the room Casey
Speaker 1: and Rebecca would sleep in. Inside, they found a bloodsiak
Speaker 1: mattress that had been stripped and propped up against the wall.
Speaker 1: The box springs remained, and it too was stained red.
Speaker 1: The bedclothes were spinning around in the washing machine, wet
Speaker 1: fabric mixed with bleach and blood. Interestingly, any fingerprints on
Speaker 1: the washing machine had been wiped away, probably with the
Speaker 1: brand new cleaning supplies that sat on the kitchen counter.
Speaker 1: Back in the bedroom, again, sections of carpeting had to
Speaker 1: be cut up and taken in for evidence. The amount
Speaker 1: of blood was so extreme and had seeped into the subfloor.
Speaker 1: At this point, detectives knew they'd be searching for a
Speaker 1: dead body, not an alive Rebecca.
Speaker 4: And you know, Monday morning came one week later, on
Speaker 4: September twenty seven, two thousand and four. I was at
Speaker 4: the office, probably five or six o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 4: I got there really early, and I just decided, for
Speaker 4: some reason, I felt like I needed to go back
Speaker 4: to Melbourne, because my office was about twenty five or
Speaker 4: so miles away, and so I.
Speaker 5: Drove down there.
Speaker 4: There were some ladies walking around in the courthouse, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of a southern thing.
Speaker 5: To walk around, you know, the courthouse in the morning.
Speaker 4: And I overheard as I was walking past them, I
Speaker 4: was going to go talk to the county judge and
Speaker 4: I was gonna see it. They were coordinating their search
Speaker 4: efforts that day, because the county's big, and it's very
Speaker 4: rule and it's very mountainous and so it's hard. And
Speaker 4: I overheard, let me say, hey, they're out searching over
Speaker 4: by or my property or my house something like that.
Speaker 5: And I said, where do you live?
Speaker 4: And she said that she lived down Highway nine, which
Speaker 4: is a thoroughfare that connects Melbourne to Mountain View, which
Speaker 4: is Rebecca's hometown.
Speaker 5: It's very treacherous.
Speaker 1: Twenty years ago, George still had that restless new reporter energy.
Speaker 1: This case had already begun to dig its claws into him.
Speaker 1: He knew he had to go help with the.
Speaker 5: Search efforts, and so I drove down there.
Speaker 4: I saw a line of cars on the side of
Speaker 4: the road, just pulled in behind him, got out. It
Speaker 4: was very steep, you know, lots of trees and bushes.
Speaker 4: I saw a searcher and I asked him, I said,
Speaker 4: do you guys out here looking for Rebecca, and he says,
Speaker 4: she's right there, and he pointed at her and she
Speaker 4: was just laying there.
Speaker 1: Volunteers had already been searching for days, but on this
Speaker 1: particular day, at this spot, about five miles outside of Melbourne,
Speaker 1: they noticed vultures circling overhead, never a good sign. Searchers
Speaker 1: located Rebecca's severely decomposed body about thirty five feet down
Speaker 1: the embankment. She was wearing only a T shirt and underwear.
Speaker 4: You could see her her hair was like over her head,
Speaker 4: like her face. I mean when I didn't realize at
Speaker 4: the time it literally it had decomposed off of her
Speaker 4: scalp and had just moved down. It almost looked like,
Speaker 4: you know, like if you flip if you have long hair,
Speaker 4: and its flipped it over like that. I was in
Speaker 4: an absolute chock, like it was like being in a tunnel.
Speaker 4: That's the only way I could describe it. Like all
Speaker 4: of a sudden, I couldn't hear anything, I couldn't see anything.
Speaker 4: My heart was racing, my head just was throbbing.
Speaker 5: You know. At the time, I had.
Speaker 4: Two very small kids, and so I'm sitting here thinking
Speaker 4: I've just talked to this mom and his dad and
Speaker 4: they're hoping on hope that this is what happened. A
Speaker 4: few minutes later, I drive back to the Sheriff's department, which,
Speaker 4: as the crow flies, is only four or five miles
Speaker 4: from this place where she was dumped, and her father,
Speaker 4: doctor Larry Gould, came running up to me and he
Speaker 4: grabbed me and he said, did they fight my daughter?
Speaker 4: And I said, Larry, you need to go talk to
Speaker 4: the sheriff right now. And he grabbed me and he said,
Speaker 4: did they fight my daughter? And I said yes, and
Speaker 4: he just collapsed, went to his knees and started crying,
Speaker 4: put his head.
Speaker 5: In my stomach. And this is a man I hadn't either.
Speaker 5: I'd known him for five days.
Speaker 1: Rebecca was gone forever, and for a few days time stopped,
Speaker 1: at least for the people who had hoped she'd come
Speaker 1: home alive.
Speaker 4: I can honestly say that I was never the same
Speaker 4: person after that. I remember, I wrote when I wrote
Speaker 4: the story.
Speaker 2: I wrote it.
Speaker 4: I went back to the office that night and I
Speaker 4: stayed till four o'clock in the morning writing it. And
Speaker 4: it was the newspaper office was his old creaky building
Speaker 4: is a huge building, and if the wind blew, you know,
Speaker 4: you hear all these creaking sounds. And I was just
Speaker 4: sitting there with her missing poster sitting on my desk.
Speaker 4: And I've written about this before. I have never every
Speaker 4: single resume that I've ever submitted after this attached to
Speaker 4: that resume was a story I wrote about her case.
Speaker 5: And she never left me. It was in my soul.
Speaker 1: After that, everyone's focus shifted to finding Rebecca's killer, well,
Speaker 1: the medical examiner did, the autopsy. Investigators turned their attention
Speaker 1: to the trailer where she had last been seen.
Speaker 5: She was on it.
Speaker 4: She had an on again, off again boyfriend named Casey McCullough,
Speaker 4: and she would come back. You know, she was living
Speaker 4: up in northwest Arkansas at this point. She'd come back
Speaker 4: and see him on the weekend. She'd stay at his house.
Speaker 4: They were just kind of on again, off again, you
Speaker 4: know how it is when you're that age, you know,
Speaker 4: twenty two, and you know you're dating someone and you know,
Speaker 4: and he obviously was not a long term thing for her.
Speaker 4: There's she was quite a catch for him, I guess,
Speaker 4: I'll just put it that way. And he was obsessed
Speaker 4: with her. He was totally in love with her, but weirdly,
Speaker 4: when she vanished, he didn't spend one second looking for her.
Speaker 6: And tell me, how do you come to know Rebecca?
Speaker 7: We worked at Sonic together, and very first day that
Speaker 7: she worked.
Speaker 8: At Sonic, I thought she must beautiful creature I ever seen, So,
Speaker 8: you know, that's when we started talking.
Speaker 2: How long did you live with Rebecca?
Speaker 7: For? About two two?
Speaker 2: Much?
Speaker 8: And after that just a relationship? Did y'all split up
Speaker 8: or what took place?
Speaker 2: Well, we did split up.
Speaker 7: We decided that, you know, it'd be better for just
Speaker 7: stay friends, and that's what we did. We still spend
Speaker 7: awful lot of time.
Speaker 4: She would live with certain people at certain times, you know,
Speaker 4: and she kind of bounced around a little bit. But
Speaker 4: then she finally decided that she wanted to go into
Speaker 4: pharmaceutical sales. And so she had a sister that was
Speaker 4: already going to school up in Fayetteville, which.
Speaker 5: Is about three hours or so for Melbourne.
Speaker 4: So she moved up there and she moved in with
Speaker 4: her sister in an apartment, and she started attending a
Speaker 4: local community college and she started taking classes, and so
Speaker 4: she was twenty two and she was just trying to
Speaker 4: get her life together.
Speaker 1: The previous spring, Rebecca and Casey's relationship had been pretty serious.
Speaker 1: Casey was head over heels for her, which brought out
Speaker 1: the controlling side of them that didn't work well with
Speaker 1: Rebecca's fiery personality. By the end of the summer, things
Speaker 1: had become a little messy. On her drive from northwest
Speaker 1: Arkansas to Melbourne, Rebecca told her sister that this would
Speaker 1: be her final trip.
Speaker 4: She told her sister She's like, I'm done, this is it,
Speaker 4: and then they stop off at their dad's house. He
Speaker 4: gives the meech one hundred dollars bill on their way
Speaker 4: to Melbourne, and she tells her father. She says, I'm
Speaker 4: done with Casey.
Speaker 5: It's over. We're done.
Speaker 1: Detectives often use an investigative strategy called Canter and Larkin's
Speaker 1: circle theory. It's a fancy way of saying that most
Speaker 1: offenders don't stray far from home when they commit a crime.
Speaker 1: They stick to what they know, neighborhoods, they've been in, routes.
Speaker 1: They're comfortable with places that feel familiar, So investigators start
Speaker 1: looking close to the victim, family, partners, roommates. Then they
Speaker 1: widen the lens to include friends, co workers, casual acquaintances,
Speaker 1: and if that still turns up nothing, Only then do
Speaker 1: they start to consider strangers. With this in mind, you'd
Speaker 1: think the first person in the hot seat would be
Speaker 1: the boyfriend. It's always the boyfriend, right. Arkansas State Police
Speaker 1: didn't think so. Instead, they zerode in on an old
Speaker 1: friend of Rebecca's.
Speaker 4: The main suspects for years and years and years and
Speaker 4: years was Chris Cantrell.
Speaker 5: And he was just this.
Speaker 4: Guy who was involved in a local, you know, kind
Speaker 4: of drug scene. You know, he I don't think he
Speaker 4: sold a lot of drugs that he consumednewim he'd get
Speaker 4: in trouble for it. And this guy, I mean, you're
Speaker 4: not talking about somebody who has the sophistication probably to
Speaker 4: you know, wipe their own DNA from a crime scene
Speaker 4: or get rid of all their fingerprints and all this
Speaker 4: other stuff. Because the story was is that he he
Speaker 4: killed her over like a very small drug debt, like
Speaker 4: now I'm talking like forty dollars, which was really weird
Speaker 4: because she had at least that much money in her
Speaker 4: possession when she was killed. So if that was the motive,
Speaker 4: why didn't he take some of her stuff or her
Speaker 4: cash or And the second problem with it was was
Speaker 4: that you know I've written about assassinations. You know where
Speaker 4: somebody is. You know, you're you're you're involved in a
Speaker 4: drug trade, and we're going to get rid of you.
Speaker 4: And that involves something very simple. They come with a gun,
Speaker 4: they shoot you in the head, and they leave.
Speaker 5: They don't do anything else, and they walk away.
Speaker 1: Rebecca's autopsy report remained unreleased for years. Even today, only
Speaker 1: a few people have a copy of it. The report
Speaker 1: suggests that she was likely bludgeoned. It's hard to tell
Speaker 1: if there were any defensive wounds. She'd been exposed to
Speaker 1: the elements for a week, and her body was very
Speaker 1: badly decomposed. Rebecca had two clear blunt force injuries, one
Speaker 1: to the left side of her head and one that
Speaker 1: was a direct hit on the center of her face.
Speaker 1: Experts and medical professionals who have read and analyzed the
Speaker 1: report say that neither of those injuries would have killed
Speaker 1: her immediately. In fact, it's very possible that Rebecca was
Speaker 1: alive for hours after the killer hit her. Even worse,
Speaker 1: she could have been alive when her body was dumped
Speaker 1: down the embankment. As for the weapon, the autopsy pointed
Speaker 1: to something long, thin and heavy, something like a tire
Speaker 1: iron or a bat. And in the house where Rebecca disappeared,
Speaker 1: police noticed something strange. The piano. Yeah, there was a piano.
Speaker 1: The piano was missing one of its legs.
Speaker 4: This story that this guy shows up at this house
Speaker 4: out of the middle of nowhere that the he's never
Speaker 4: been before, doesn't bring a weapon. He's like huge, I
Speaker 4: wonder if, oh, I wonder if the piano leg will
Speaker 4: come off with this piano over here?
Speaker 5: Okay, whoa, here we go. Yeah, I mean, it was
Speaker 5: just this ridiculous, stupid, like are you kidding me? Story?
Speaker 5: Like come on.
Speaker 1: A guy named Dennis was the Arkansas State Police detective
Speaker 1: working the case. This man was hell bent on pushing
Speaker 1: the Chris Cantrell story and he wouldn't give up you
Speaker 1: goo as a hell of a drug.
Speaker 5: Well, Dennis was an narcotics officer.
Speaker 4: They had a working theory that drugs were somehow involved
Speaker 4: in this, even though no drugs were found in their
Speaker 4: system that they could find, and he had hit. He
Speaker 4: had dealt with Chris in the past. And I've always
Speaker 4: said this about Dennis, It's one of my favorite sayings.
Speaker 5: You know, if you're born a hammer. Every problem in
Speaker 5: the world has to be a nail. There's no other.
Speaker 5: It can't be a screw, it can't be a attack.
Speaker 5: It's got to be a nail. So that's what he
Speaker 5: turned his case into.
Speaker 4: Dennis gets the case I think in November December, and
Speaker 4: then he starts to focus in on Chris Cantrell. And
Speaker 4: it was pretty widely known by like June July two
Speaker 4: thousand and five, that they were focusing on Chris. I mean,
Speaker 4: that was that was out in the public. People talked
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 1: There were other suspects along the way, and people in
Speaker 1: town gossiped about the possibility that Rebecca's boyfriend, Casey was
Speaker 1: the real killer. But this detective wouldn't hear any of it.
Speaker 1: He refused to look into any tips or reanalyze any
Speaker 1: of the existing evidence. But a lot of it pointed
Speaker 1: straight to Casey McCullough.
Speaker 4: I mean, I spent, you know, years just befuddled by
Speaker 4: the detective because, you know, you automatically assume that they
Speaker 4: know more than you know, because they've got the case file,
Speaker 4: and there must be I had there had to be
Speaker 4: something in there that was really pointing them away from him.
Speaker 1: George didn't get his hands on the case file until
Speaker 1: years later, but by the time he'd read it, this
Speaker 1: detective decided to pay him a surprise visit, armed with
Speaker 1: all the original evidence. This turned out to be a
Speaker 1: perfect opportunity for George to ask Dennis why he was
Speaker 1: so focused on the wrong suspect.
Speaker 5: And I'm not kidding you.
Speaker 4: This guy, this detective snuck into a book signing of
Speaker 4: mine one time and these cut off daisy duke looking shorts,
Speaker 4: cut off flannel shirt. I mean, like, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to notice this dude coming in here. I pitch him
Speaker 4: the book because I didn't recognize him at this point.
Speaker 4: And then as I said, do you want to buy
Speaker 4: a book, He's like, He's like, no, I'm specially Agententis
Speaker 4: Simon was with the argisal State Relieves.
Speaker 5: He pulls out his badge and I looked at him.
Speaker 4: I'm like, okay, Dennis, I haven't seen you in years,
Speaker 4: but you know, come on, and he.
Speaker 5: Tells me I can't. I told him, I said, I
Speaker 5: don't understand something here. Why would he clean up the mess?
Speaker 5: Why wouldn't he just take a match in torch the place?
Speaker 4: And he said, George, if you had a case file,
Speaker 4: you know exactly why this person did this thing. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, okay, well we have the case file now
Speaker 4: and it's even more incomprehensible.
Speaker 1: This Dennis character sure does remind me of Lieutenant Jim
Speaker 1: Dangle from Reno nine one one. Can you picture it?
Speaker 1: Life imitates art, I guess Rebecca's case whirled around in
Speaker 1: George's mind for years, and all the while it had
Speaker 1: become a closed loop. He wrote articles about the case
Speaker 1: and about various theories, but law enforcement was holding all
Speaker 1: the information under lock and key. They held no press
Speaker 1: conferences and gave no updates. Fourteen years with no progress.
Speaker 1: When Rebecca's father tried to request a copy of her
Speaker 1: autopsy report, officials denied it, citing the case was still active.
Speaker 1: George kept writing articles, Websleuth's discussed the case to death,
Speaker 1: and by twenty eighteen, a woman named Catherine Townsend hoped
Speaker 1: to put even more eyes on this mystery by doing
Speaker 1: a podcast. Rebecca was murdered in this woman's hometown, so
Speaker 1: she traveled back there, lived in the community for six months,
Speaker 1: and did her own investigation.
Speaker 9: I first heard about a podcast called Hellngon in late
Speaker 9: twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: This is Jen Bucholtz. She's a former US Army counterintelligence
Speaker 1: agent who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. She now teaches
Speaker 1: forensic science at American Military University and works as a
Speaker 1: cold case investigator for Colorado's El Paso County Sheriff's Office.
Speaker 9: And it was my content editor at the university who
Speaker 9: we would go back and forth sometimes about new podcasts
Speaker 9: and cases, and sometimes I'd write about different cases and
Speaker 9: she's like, you really should listen to Helen. I think
Speaker 9: you're going to find that case really interesting. Maybe you
Speaker 9: want to write about it. And so, of course she
Speaker 9: was correct, and I binged it and George was featured
Speaker 9: in several of the episodes. So I thought, well, I'll
Speaker 9: reach out to this George guy. He clearly knows the
Speaker 9: case really well, and so, like, I very carefully crafted
Speaker 9: this email to him. Whatever I wrote, which I don't
Speaker 9: totally remember now caught his attention because he called me
Speaker 9: pretty much right away, and then we ended up on
Speaker 9: the phone for three hours and twenty two minutes, I believe,
Speaker 9: our first conversation, and so it was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 9: we're going to work on this case.
Speaker 5: I think, I don't know.
Speaker 9: We had very similar mindset was the behaviors that this
Speaker 9: killer took and the importance of understanding those behaviors and
Speaker 9: what they meant about the relationship between the killer and victim.
Speaker 9: Very clear that the detective at the time had no
Speaker 9: idea about criminal profiling or behavioral analysis and it was
Speaker 9: really being overlooked. And that was like one of my
Speaker 9: key points in reaching out to George, and as you'll hear,
Speaker 9: he had the same thoughts through the years.
Speaker 1: Jen Bucholtz spent years working as a private investigator before
Speaker 1: stepping into her current role in cold case investigations. Now
Speaker 1: embedded within a police department, she sees a sharp divide,
Speaker 1: maybe even a distrust, between law enforcement and civilian investigators.
Speaker 1: In many cases, police simply won't accept outside help. Again,
Speaker 1: Ego is a hell of a drug. Rebecca's father, doctor
Speaker 1: Larry Gould, learned that the hard way. He spent thousands
Speaker 1: on private investigators over the years, but law enforcement never
Speaker 1: seemed interested in what they uncovered. Here's doctor Gould.
Speaker 10: The law enforcement officers that to me are truly the
Speaker 10: real professionals are the ones that reach out to the
Speaker 10: public and they ask for help. The ones that reach
Speaker 10: out and say that.
Speaker 5: They don't use their ego.
Speaker 10: They say, I'm the officer, I'm in charge of this case.
Speaker 5: Help me.
Speaker 10: Now, there's somebody I respect, and there's no reason to
Speaker 10: not be that way, especially nowadays, there's a lot of
Speaker 10: unsolved murders.
Speaker 2: That the public can get involved with.
Speaker 10: There's a lot of the public that loves to get
Speaker 10: involved with these types of cases because they feel sincerely
Speaker 10: like they can help and that they can offer something.
Speaker 1: And this is where the Internet proves it's worth to
Speaker 1: some degree. Perhaps I can't believe I just said that.
Speaker 1: In case after case, it's not a detective who breathes
Speaker 1: new life into a forgotten file. It's a podcast, it's
Speaker 1: a subreddit. It's a web form or a Facebook group,
Speaker 1: or even a TikTok channel where some web sleuth, usually
Speaker 1: a middle aged woman, I might add, that has so
Speaker 1: much time on their hands and so much empathy in
Speaker 1: their heart that they have to do something with it,
Speaker 1: so they focus on their favorite hobby. They dig into
Speaker 1: parts of a cold case that no one ever seemed
Speaker 1: to be able to uncover, not even Lieutenant Jim Dank
Speaker 1: I mean, Dennis.
Speaker 9: It's a lesson learned by us that can be passed
Speaker 9: on to other not just private investigators or citizens, but
Speaker 9: law enforcement agencies too, Like keep an eye on social
Speaker 9: media sites for your victim, see if any of your
Speaker 9: suspects are.
Speaker 1: In there, Like I do it at work, because sometimes
Speaker 1: the killer does come back to the scene of the crime.
Speaker 1: Only in Rebecca's case, the scene was now virtual. By
Speaker 1: the fall of twenty eighteen, Rebecca Gould's case sat unsolved
Speaker 1: for nearly fourteen years. The crime scene had been cleaned,
Speaker 1: the man she was last seen with had quietly receded
Speaker 1: into the shadows, and the Arkansas State Police special agent
Speaker 1: was borderline obsessed with pinning the whole crime on the
Speaker 1: wrong guy. But then something shifted. A podcast called Hell
Speaker 1: and Gone started digging into the case. The show gave
Speaker 1: the public a voice, and it gave the story new
Speaker 1: life online. One of the podcasts fans was a former
Speaker 1: Army counter intelligence agent named Jen Bucholtz. Another was George Jared,
Speaker 1: the very reporter who had watched Rebecca's body be pulled
Speaker 1: from the embankment. When these two connected, they spent hours
Speaker 1: on the phone. Soon after, they created a Facebook group.
Speaker 1: The plan was not just to rehash the case, but
Speaker 1: to solve it once and for all.
Speaker 9: Well, me and George were the admins, and we set
Speaker 9: the group setting so.
Speaker 2: That it's a public group. Anybody can find it, but.
Speaker 9: You have to request to join because we always want
Speaker 9: to keep track of who's joining.
Speaker 2: So, you know, one of our.
Speaker 9: Goals, and I guess subconsciously one of our goals in
Speaker 9: the week in the group was to lure the killer
Speaker 9: in there or somebody who knew something.
Speaker 1: The Facebook group grew quickly. At this point. Neither the
Speaker 1: police's case file nor Rebecca's autopsy had been made available
Speaker 1: to the public. Yet this meant that the host of
Speaker 1: the Hell and Gone podcast had to piece the story
Speaker 1: together using rumors and gossip from people in town. By
Speaker 1: the time Catherine Townsend aired the final episode of season one,
Speaker 1: the narrative had shifted away from small town gossip and
Speaker 1: toward a deeper, darker truth. This was never about random
Speaker 1: drifters or drug deals. This looked like a crime of
Speaker 1: passion and a cleanup that took time and work.
Speaker 5: So here's the thing about this case.
Speaker 4: We don't have a definitive time of death for Rebecca.
Speaker 4: This is the working theory of the prosecutorial theory about
Speaker 4: what happened is on that Monday morning, Rebecca takes Casey
Speaker 4: to work because his father had borrowed Casey's truck the
Speaker 4: night before, Casey needed to ride, so she drops.
Speaker 5: Him off at the Sonic that morning.
Speaker 4: Then she goes back to his house to collect up
Speaker 4: all her things. She had a little Pomeranian dog, and
Speaker 4: she had her clothes, and she had brought two big
Speaker 4: suitcases because she had told her father and her sister Danielle,
Speaker 4: that this was going to be the last time that
Speaker 4: she came to Casey's house, and so she brought an
Speaker 4: extra suitcase because she had some personal items over there
Speaker 4: at the house. And so it's during this timeframe that morning,
Speaker 4: when she's collecting of all this stuff, that's when the
Speaker 4: police and the prosecutors think that she was murdered. And
Speaker 4: so I will say this, there is absolutely no proof
Speaker 4: of life on Monday morning.
Speaker 5: There's none.
Speaker 4: And for years we were led to believe that there
Speaker 4: was a video at a convenience store that she stopped
Speaker 4: off and got a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and
Speaker 4: so we thought there was all this evidence, you know,
Speaker 4: that she was there. The problem is is that none
Speaker 4: of that stuff was true, so there's no proof of
Speaker 4: life Monday morning, but that's the official story.
Speaker 1: Just to fill in some gaps. The day Rebecca went missing,
Speaker 1: Casey's father had borrowed as truck, so he was carloss
Speaker 1: and needed transportation to and from work. He worked at Sonic.
Speaker 1: By the way, we know, Rebecca's plan was to quietly
Speaker 1: packer things and dump his ass that day, but Casey
Speaker 1: was clueless about this or was he did he find out?
Speaker 1: Was there a subsequent altercation. This is where things get
Speaker 1: really suspicious and a little messy.
Speaker 4: So he asked a group of four friends, people that
Speaker 4: he was friends with. They were going to go to
Speaker 4: the movies that night, and they we're going to go
Speaker 4: see the movie Resident Evil too, and so he asked
Speaker 4: them if he could ride with them, and they were
Speaker 4: all kind of surprised by it because he was kind
Speaker 4: of a recluse. He didn't like to hang out with anybody,
Speaker 4: And so he went down to Batesville that night. They
Speaker 4: watched the movie, They go into some stores. He was
Speaker 4: clearly trying to make himself available to cameras that were in,
Speaker 4: you know, like they went to a Walmart to look
Speaker 4: at Halloween decorations. And they went to some other places,
Speaker 4: and it was clear that he was trying to make
Speaker 4: himself visible on these cameras. And then at one point
Speaker 4: in the night, he gets a call, and during this call,
Speaker 4: he used his friend's phone to make this call.
Speaker 5: By the way, he didn't use his own phone. After
Speaker 5: he hangs up, he tells all four of these friends
Speaker 5: that Rebecca is missing.
Speaker 9: He used his friend's phone to call his own voicemail,
Speaker 9: so he didn't actually talk to anybody. He listened to
Speaker 9: his messages, whatever they were, and then got off the
Speaker 9: phone and told his friends that Rebecca's missing.
Speaker 5: Now here's the problem.
Speaker 4: She wasn't reported missing until the next morning, at eight
Speaker 4: thirty in the morning by her mother. The second part
Speaker 4: of it is all four friends, and all four of
Speaker 4: their statements to police said that he was obsessed with her,
Speaker 4: and I'm paraphrasing this, that he was obsessed with her,
Speaker 4: and they were all shocked that he wasn't.
Speaker 5: Running out the door to go and find her. And
Speaker 5: so what he did instead is he went to his
Speaker 5: friend's house, smoked some marijuana, played some video games, and
Speaker 5: fell asleep on the couch.
Speaker 1: Are you suspicious yet, fellow websleuth.
Speaker 2: She dropped you work and.
Speaker 8: Get a little past eight, a little past eight, and
Speaker 8: I just remember saying bye and flying to each other
Speaker 8: and wait, Ane.
Speaker 7: That's the last time I saw that. Okay?
Speaker 6: Did you have any contact with her by telephone?
Speaker 11: No?
Speaker 7: Sorry, I tried.
Speaker 8: Have you talked with her since Monday morning at eight o'clock?
Speaker 8: About the last time I talked to her? And you
Speaker 8: haven't seen her since?
Speaker 7: I haven't seen her?
Speaker 6: So did you play on the center before she went back?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 8: She was supposed to come back and pick me up
Speaker 8: from work to go pick up my truck from Matsville.
Speaker 6: And did she show up?
Speaker 2: No, sir?
Speaker 6: What time she was she supposed to pick you up for?
Speaker 6: And then you came back to Oxford at anytime?
Speaker 12: Uh?
Speaker 6: Since you left there?
Speaker 2: Did you go back to.
Speaker 6: Your house at any time that night?
Speaker 7: No, sir.
Speaker 6: Did you ever go back there to get some clothing
Speaker 6: out of the sure Harris hands or anything like that?
Speaker 8: No, sir, I never went back to the house that night.
Speaker 8: What time did you leave Oxford? That house and come
Speaker 8: to work next morning? About seven thirty? You get to
Speaker 8: work at eight? And how long did you stay at work?
Speaker 8: I stayed there for about ten to fifteen minutes. I
Speaker 8: called Rebecca's mom to see if she had heard from Rebecca,
Speaker 8: because you know, I haven't yet, and she said she
Speaker 8: sounded really worried and freaking out, And so I asked my.
Speaker 7: Manager Daniel, if I could go down.
Speaker 8: To the house and see if she was there. Send
Speaker 8: me what you find when you get to your house.
Speaker 12: I drive up and.
Speaker 8: I see your car, so I'm thinking she's there and
Speaker 8: she's safe inside. And I walk in and I see
Speaker 8: her dog, which which gives me a little bit more.
Speaker 7: What's the way I'm looking for insurance?
Speaker 6: What's significant about the dogs being here?
Speaker 8: That if she's there, then she's Rebecca's got to be there,
Speaker 8: because Rebecca goes no way.
Speaker 7: To got that dog. I walked in and checked our
Speaker 7: room and then I call it our room because it is.
Speaker 1: And wow, did you catch it? Tell me you caught
Speaker 1: that we walked into r room. I call it our
Speaker 1: room because it is. That's what he said, don't need
Speaker 1: to be so defensive there, buddy, you weren't questioning your
Speaker 1: relationship status.
Speaker 7: No sheets on the bed and nobody's in there.
Speaker 2: And I thought it was very odd.
Speaker 8: No sheets on the bed because she just washed them
Speaker 8: the week earlier, and I would't say he washed them again.
Speaker 8: I looked to the whole house again, double backed in
Speaker 8: every room, and I didn't see anything, and I was.
Speaker 4: Well appeared to me.
Speaker 2: I thought I was on the clock.
Speaker 7: Because I posted in. That thing doesn't work all the time.
Speaker 7: And so I took off back towards signing cable.
Speaker 6: Her car there, my car was there. Did you see
Speaker 6: anything like her slipper or anything like that at the house.
Speaker 7: Yes, I saw her pink slippers.
Speaker 1: These are all clips from Casey's first interview with police.
Speaker 1: He tells them that he never went back to the
Speaker 1: house that day, the day Rebecca went missing. It was
Speaker 1: the next morning that he said he'd back home by
Speaker 1: himself to search the trailer for clues.
Speaker 4: One day, I was driving through Melbourne and I saw
Speaker 4: him outside smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. And
Speaker 4: this is probably eight or nine months after the murder,
Speaker 4: and so I just pulled my truck in, got out,
Speaker 4: and I just confronted him. I said, so tell me
Speaker 4: what happened. And he told me that he never went
Speaker 4: to the back to his house before he went with
Speaker 4: the police, and so he lied. When we get the
Speaker 4: case file. Not only did he not notice that his
Speaker 4: room and I'm not I think I'm exaggerating, it looked
Speaker 4: like a tornado had gone through his room. I mean
Speaker 4: there was stuff broken everywhere. I mean it was a
Speaker 4: mirror off kilter, off the closet, there were bloody pillows
Speaker 4: and plain sight. He admitted in his first interview with
Speaker 4: the police that he did go to the washing machine,
Speaker 4: open it up, and it's full of bedding with blood
Speaker 4: all over it. The you know, like the what's that
Speaker 4: thing the agitated There was bloody water in there, like
Speaker 4: the bleach dispenser. Thing was completely caked, caked with blood.
Speaker 4: And he just puts the lid down, gets in his
Speaker 4: truck and drives back to work like nothing happened.
Speaker 6: Did you subsequently go back after your house with the deafity.
Speaker 7: I asked him, I said, do you just want to
Speaker 7: follow me? And thought I was, And he just.
Speaker 2: Followed me all the way there.
Speaker 6: And when you get here the police, I take it
Speaker 6: looked in your house.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: See, I let him freely walk to the house. I
Speaker 7: showed him that her belongings were still there, and how
Speaker 7: it's very odd she really never ever.
Speaker 8: Lives without it and he walked into the back room,
Speaker 8: checked under the mattress and found some blood and uh,
Speaker 8: I really didn't know where it came from.
Speaker 7: That's when I started getting really scared. Didn't know what
Speaker 7: to think.
Speaker 8: Then, after we checked the mattress, he turned around and
Speaker 8: checked the washer. When we checked the washer, we saw
Speaker 8: just a little bit of film.
Speaker 2: On something red. We didn't know if it was.
Speaker 8: Blood or not, but we noticed, and we tried to
Speaker 8: put two and two together that you know, she's around
Speaker 8: the bed this.
Speaker 6: Case, and what do you think has happened to Rebecca.
Speaker 6: I think she was killed.
Speaker 2: I don't know who did it.
Speaker 9: So Monday night is when he tells his friend she's
Speaker 9: missing and whatever. So Tuesday morning, he had spent the
Speaker 9: night at his friend's house, he hadn't gone home. Tuesday morning,
Speaker 9: goes to work for a shift at Sonic. Well, for
Speaker 9: some reason, he didn't have his Sonic shirt even though
Speaker 9: he worked the day prior. So his boss is like,
Speaker 9: you got to go home and get a Sonic shirt.
Speaker 9: You got to be in uniform. So he was forced
Speaker 9: to go home Tuesday morning to his residence and he
Speaker 9: walks in. You know, her car's there, her purse, her dog,
Speaker 9: the mattress is flipped, there's bloody sheets in the washer,
Speaker 9: all this stuff, i mean, broken ash trays, broken mirrors,
Speaker 9: and he grabs a shirt and just goes back to work,
Speaker 9: and then later on said he didn't notice that anything,
Speaker 9: you know, was a miss which is impossible. I mean,
Speaker 9: you can't. After we've got the crime scene photos, you're like, yeah,
Speaker 9: there's no way you could, Like, how would you go
Speaker 9: in your room? And his bed was moved to cover
Speaker 9: a big bloodstain on the carpet, Like, you can't tell
Speaker 9: me you didn't noise your beds in a different position
Speaker 9: in the room, and it's been stripped and all this stuff.
Speaker 9: You already said the night prior she's missing, and you
Speaker 9: go home to this mess. Why aren't you immediately calling police?
Speaker 1: You know, if the lies, the changing timeline, and Casey's
Speaker 1: strange behavior weren't bad enough, just wait, it gets worse.
Speaker 4: Well, it's even more suspicious because he confessed to hurting her.
Speaker 4: He in let's see April of twy ten or twenty eleven,
Speaker 4: they're not quite sure what year. And so he was
Speaker 4: working on like these towers, he was climbing towers and
Speaker 4: he was one night he and two other people were
Speaker 4: in a hotel room. One of them is Tad Hickerson,
Speaker 4: and he signed us one affidavit to this. But they're
Speaker 4: all in a hotel room, they're drinking. He starts crying
Speaker 4: and tells them that he hurt Rebecca, that he had
Speaker 4: hit her with some type of a wooden object, that
Speaker 4: he had hurt her. And they were, of course, they
Speaker 4: were thought he was just full of that. They're like, well,
Speaker 4: the police have cleared you, you know, how could this
Speaker 4: be possible? And he said that the reason that he
Speaker 4: was getting away with it was because their timeline was off.
Speaker 4: But they couldn't figure that out. So the next day
Speaker 4: Tad still thinks, you know, he was just drunk and
Speaker 4: crying and feeling guilty and all this other stuff. Well,
Speaker 4: now they're sober, and so Tad asked Casey, he said,
Speaker 4: so tell me what happened. And he said that she
Speaker 4: said something to him, like said something like mockingly to him,
Speaker 4: like laughed at him or scoffed at him, and he
Speaker 4: just flew into a rage, hit her twice. He said,
Speaker 4: he threw the wooden object, which you know, we believe
Speaker 4: could be a piano leg. That's you know, obviously missing,
Speaker 4: that he threw it into the White River, and that
Speaker 4: he said, well, what mistake did you make? And he
Speaker 4: said cleaning up the.
Speaker 1: Mess by when exactly was the evidence cleaned from the teler?
Speaker 1: According to police, Rebecca was killed sometime on Monday, September eighteenth,
Speaker 1: after she dropped Casey off at work, and Casey had
Speaker 1: an alibi for that time period. He was working at
Speaker 1: Sonic all day then was seen on camera hanging out
Speaker 1: with friends in the evening.
Speaker 9: So because of that, Casey was cleared because they assumed
Speaker 9: she was alive Monday morning and he was accounted for
Speaker 9: at work during the hours that they thought she was killed.
Speaker 9: So he, I mean, Dennis Simon's the detective who was
Speaker 9: on it for fourteen years, had watched it. He did
Speaker 9: publicly clear him, which is always a mistake. You don't
Speaker 9: clear anybody, but he did publicly clear Casey. So Casey
Speaker 9: fell off the radar for most people. I think from
Speaker 9: that point forward.
Speaker 1: It was open and shut. Sherlock and Daisy Dukes had
Speaker 1: nailed the timeline, or did he? Jenn and George certainly
Speaker 1: didn't think so. They think Rebecca may have been killed
Speaker 1: much earlier, perhaps that morning, giving someone plenty of time
Speaker 1: to erase what couldn't be explained, and that changed everything.
Speaker 1: If the murder didn't happen when police thought it did,
Speaker 1: then Casey's alibi wasn't air tight. So fast forward to
Speaker 1: the year twenty nineteen, when fans of the Hell and
Speaker 1: Gone podcast are in a frenzy, obsessively discussing all these
Speaker 1: suspicions day and night. Y'all are relentless. I'll tell you well,
Speaker 1: all this chit chat attracts attention to anyone who's interested.
Speaker 1: And also they're cats. Do I know my audience or
Speaker 1: do I know my audience? The Facebook forum continues to
Speaker 1: grow and grow, and all of a sudden, a new
Speaker 1: name starts leaving comments in the forum. A guy by
Speaker 1: the name of William Miller, and.
Speaker 4: He was one of the first people to join our
Speaker 4: Facebook page when we created in October of twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: And there's a girl on our crowdsourcing team who's really
Speaker 4: good at like genealogy, you know, like she's good at
Speaker 4: putting family trees together. And as soon as he joined
Speaker 4: our page, and her name is Miranda, and she immediately
Speaker 4: told us, she said, Hey, this guy's a first cousin
Speaker 4: of cases, and we're like, okay, we didn't think anything
Speaker 4: of it because he lived in the Philippines, and I
Speaker 4: think Jen had done a little research on him and
Speaker 4: figured out pretty quickly that he lived in Ramsas Past Texas,
Speaker 4: you know, so we didn't think anything of it. And
Speaker 4: he was, you know, postulating theories on how she died,
Speaker 4: and he was very active on the page, and we
Speaker 4: just thought he was a mole for the family, you know,
Speaker 4: because what happened previously, you know, when Helen Gon came out,
Speaker 4: is these Facebook pages formed and a bunch of family
Speaker 4: members got on there and people would get into these
Speaker 4: huge fights and they would say all this stuff, and
Speaker 4: so we just thought, okay, they don't want to join
Speaker 4: and get into these you know, brew ha haas, and
Speaker 4: so they're just going to send in this first cousin.
Speaker 4: You know, he's kind of you know, kind of a
Speaker 4: weirdo anyway. You can just tell that from his messages
Speaker 4: and stuff like that. But he's living in the Philippines,
Speaker 4: he's working on ol rigs all over the world, you know,
Speaker 4: he flies all over the place.
Speaker 5: He's a very world traveler.
Speaker 4: And he made a lot of money too, and then
Speaker 4: I this may be a coincidence, but I just can't
Speaker 4: believe that it's a coincidence. Casey's birthday is January sixteenth,
Speaker 4: So on January sixteenth of twenty twenty, right before the
Speaker 4: pandemic starts, William Miller starts sending private dms to Jen. Now,
Speaker 4: he had sent me one or two, but I never
Speaker 4: responded because I mean, he was Casey's first cousin, so
Speaker 4: I'm just like, no, you know who cares. Of course,
Speaker 4: Jen is a much more thorough investigator than I am,
Speaker 4: so she started responding to him and asking him questions.
Speaker 1: At first, William Miller seemed like any other dedicated member
Speaker 1: of the group, curious, passionate, maybe a little too invested.
Speaker 1: But as Jen talked to him, the tone shifted. The
Speaker 1: conversations were often law back and forth dialogues. Sometimes William
Speaker 1: rambled and didn't make much sense. In one message, she
Speaker 1: claimed he was being targeted by other group members trying
Speaker 1: to stir up drama. I am being attacked by a
Speaker 1: few people. They took picks and sent them to Dennis,
Speaker 1: and he was one of them to blow up on me.
Speaker 1: He got more paranoid, even defensive, at one point, he wrote,
Speaker 1: now he talks shit to me. I'm sorry to talk
Speaker 1: like that, but about to block the guy if he
Speaker 1: keep it up. He need to be a grammar Nazi here.
Speaker 1: But anybody know English these days? Anyway, this guy William
Speaker 1: seemed like he wanted to be helpful. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be part of the team. He insisted, Sorry, if I
Speaker 1: sound like I am on Casey's side, maybe I come
Speaker 1: across that way, but am not.
Speaker 5: But behind the.
Speaker 1: Scenes, Jen was already putting the pieces together. William wasn't
Speaker 1: just engageing with the case. He was circling it, fixating
Speaker 1: on details like gloves, DNA and forensics. No fingerprints, no DNA.
Speaker 1: First thing pops in my head is did he have gloves?
Speaker 1: John's goal was to find out why William was so
Speaker 1: interested in this case, or at least to see what
Speaker 1: kind of answer he would give. They knew he was
Speaker 1: Casey's cousin, and they knew he was being evasive about it.
Speaker 4: But why and he was why he wouldn't He wouldn't
Speaker 4: tell her, like what was the relationship or to the case,
Speaker 4: like why was he interested in it? And he just
Speaker 4: said podcasts And then she asked him what states he'd
Speaker 4: been to, and he said fifty of them or something
Speaker 4: like that, and her and I would talk about him
Speaker 4: some early on, and then the pandemic hits, and then
Speaker 4: in September we found out something very interesting. We did
Speaker 4: not know that he was in town the weekend of
Speaker 4: the of this hell thing happening. We didn't We never
Speaker 4: knew that.
Speaker 1: Even more suspicious, they didn't know that William's mother, Linda
Speaker 1: and his brother Jeremy had actually been living in the
Speaker 1: area at the time of the murder.
Speaker 9: Like the family kept that way under wraps, which is
Speaker 9: so telling. Even Casey and his family never divulged that publicly.
Speaker 9: So I'm like, why are you hiding that?
Speaker 1: Jen and George both saw the signs William Miller was
Speaker 1: quickly moving up their list of suspects.
Speaker 4: Me and Jenn are talking one day and were just like,
Speaker 4: this guy could be involved, Like as soon as we
Speaker 4: found out that he was there, because our analysis had
Speaker 4: always pointed towards a male member of the McCullough family.
Speaker 4: His name is William Miller, but he's as much McCullough
Speaker 4: as the mcculloughs are. He fit the profile, and it
Speaker 4: was even more interesting with him because he immediately left.
Speaker 4: It's like your cousin's girlfriend vanishes and you don't stick
Speaker 4: around for a day or two to try to help
Speaker 4: find her. Of course, at this point we knew Casey
Speaker 4: hadn't been trying to find her. And then I'll never
Speaker 4: forget this. We kept digging on him, and so we're
Speaker 4: trying to put this together all through October of twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: and little did we know that the police were on
Speaker 4: the same track because we weren't. We weren't communicating to
Speaker 4: them when we were doing at this point, and they
Speaker 4: weren't communicating obviously with us.
Speaker 1: A new detective had been handling the investigation, and it
Speaker 1: took him only eight months to get his site set
Speaker 1: on William Miller. This detective wanted to get William in
Speaker 1: an interview room, but knowing that William lived overseas, he
Speaker 1: called his mother Linda, just so you know they're going
Speaker 1: to be referring to William as Billy by the way.
Speaker 13: Hello, Hello, hey Linda, how are you doing.
Speaker 5: Hanging in there? I didn't know you still worked?
Speaker 2: You still working?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I take care of a little lady that.
Speaker 13: Has alzheimer, Okay, and that difficult Oh yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 13: I can imagine I wanted to reach out to you.
Speaker 13: You know, I'm going through this case file, and the
Speaker 13: I guess the opinion of the Arkansas State Police is
Speaker 13: that they're basically.
Speaker 5: Wanting everybody reinterviewed. So I'm going.
Speaker 13: Back and I'm going through, you know, all of the
Speaker 13: documents and trying to trying to accomplish that.
Speaker 14: And I know that you and Jeremy and Billy.
Speaker 13: Were all interviewed back back in two thousand and four,
Speaker 13: and you know, I just wanted to reach out to
Speaker 13: you guys and see what of course I get. You know,
Speaker 13: Billy's in the Philippine means I probably won't be able
Speaker 13: to talk to him for I don't know if he's
Speaker 13: planning on coming back anytime soon or do you know,
Speaker 13: I don't know.
Speaker 7: Oh, you don't know.
Speaker 6: Things have been crazy with the COVID.
Speaker 14: Right and you have no idea when Billy might be
Speaker 14: returning to the States.
Speaker 6: Not right now, not when it's all the COVID stuff.
Speaker 13: So the last the last time Billy made it home
Speaker 13: was sometime last year.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know he does that, for I know
Speaker 5: he does that.
Speaker 4: I think you every year.
Speaker 13: Yeah, okay, well if you would, Linda, get with Jeremy
Speaker 13: and see if there's one day the same time. Yeah, awesome,
Speaker 13: Well thanks Linda, Yeah right, no problem, we have a
Speaker 13: good day to go back. That was Linda Miller, October
Speaker 13: twenty first, twenty twenty.
Speaker 14: Should be noted that Billy Miller is currently in Oregon.
Speaker 14: He returned from the Philippines approximately a little over a
Speaker 14: week ago.
Speaker 1: It's entirely possible that William or Bill or Billy was
Speaker 1: sitting right next to his mother listening to her lie
Speaker 1: to the detective about his whereabouts during this call. Just
Speaker 1: a little bit later, probably after having a team meeting
Speaker 1: with her sons, Linda called the detective back.
Speaker 6: Hello Miller, Hey, Linda, how are you pretty good?
Speaker 3: I think we got everybody coortinated?
Speaker 5: Where you being it?
Speaker 8: All?
Speaker 6: Three?
Speaker 10: Other that?
Speaker 6: Whe Oh really?
Speaker 12: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, when's when's Billy coming back in?
Speaker 15: He'll be here November seventh.
Speaker 6: That's when we.
Speaker 13: Want to have our meeting on you, okay, November the seventh.
Speaker 1: Linda Miller and her two sons believed they were heading
Speaker 1: into just another round of questioning. What they didn't realize
Speaker 1: was that every word they spoke would be used to
Speaker 1: dismantle the lie they'd been upholding for sixteen long years.
Speaker 1: By the fall of twenty twenty, almost exactly sixteen years
Speaker 1: after her murder, there was a Facebook group rife with
Speaker 1: theories on Rebecca Gould's case. One of the people offering
Speaker 1: up ideas was a man named William Miller. Jen Bucholtz
Speaker 1: and George Jared, the two investigators who had taken a
Speaker 1: personal interest in Rebecca's story, realized pretty quickly that William
Speaker 1: was Casey mcculla's first cousin. At first, they thought that
Speaker 1: McCullough family had sent him in as a spy, someone
Speaker 1: who could figure out just how much the public knew.
Speaker 1: But the more that William talked, the higher he moved
Speaker 1: up their suspect list. Coincidentally, Arkansas State Police were coming
Speaker 1: to the same conclusion in parallel. On November seventh, twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: detectives finally got William into an interview room. His mother
Speaker 1: and brother sat in the room next door.
Speaker 12: First, let me tell you this is called a non
Speaker 12: custodial interview.
Speaker 2: Okay, you probably never heard.
Speaker 3: Of such a thing, but what that means is you came.
Speaker 2: Up here voluntarily. You're not being detained. You're free to
Speaker 2: go at any time. That door is not locked.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 12: I want to tell you when I told the police
Speaker 12: went down into.
Speaker 16: Texas when they came and stuff, and I mean to
Speaker 16: be honest with you and truthful with you.
Speaker 2: Call everything. You know, maybe I saw something that maybe
Speaker 2: a key factor in something there and all of stuff. Right, right,
Speaker 2: So you're an oil field worker.
Speaker 15: I've been been working in an oil field for twenty
Speaker 15: eight three years. I remember moving mom up there and
Speaker 15: then she was moved into that little house.
Speaker 2: I was a couple of miles down the road from
Speaker 2: grandfather's property.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean yeah, so you're right that was about
Speaker 12: your mom's house was about two three miles from the
Speaker 12: the trailer where this happened.
Speaker 2: Okay, So so I've been.
Speaker 12: In that home and all that stuff, and prior to
Speaker 12: the homicide.
Speaker 3: Yes, how many times had you been in that trailer?
Speaker 2: Do you think? Maybe two?
Speaker 7: Three times?
Speaker 2: Maybe two or three times? Two or three times and stuff?
Speaker 3: So she was Rebecca was killed in September of before.
Speaker 3: When was the last time you were in that trailer?
Speaker 2: You think it was the way before that? Months?
Speaker 1: Yeah, William goes on to explain that back in September
Speaker 1: of two thousand and four, his mother asked him to
Speaker 1: help her move to Texas with William's younger brother, so
Speaker 1: he drove up to Arkansas and arrived on Sunday, the
Speaker 1: same day Rebecca had gotten into town.
Speaker 2: So in the.
Speaker 16: Information that was provided to Texas, you know four, you
Speaker 16: said that whenever you showed up in Melbourne, that you
Speaker 16: went and visited family in the small town.
Speaker 2: So that made it sound.
Speaker 16: Like that you were with your mom and that you
Speaker 16: visited family in the small town.
Speaker 2: So do you remember.
Speaker 16: Going to the grandparents' house on Sunday, because that's what
Speaker 16: you told investigators in O.
Speaker 5: Four.
Speaker 2: I don't, I can't remember and all that stuff.
Speaker 12: Yeah, do you think that probably if you if you
Speaker 12: said it No.
Speaker 2: Four, that that would probably be more accurate.
Speaker 15: There probably be more angry because it was set in
Speaker 15: went and then and then.
Speaker 2: Because I know that when I came up, I remember
Speaker 2: going and asking Casey if you can give me a
Speaker 2: hand helping me.
Speaker 16: Move, Help help me mom moved, help mom moved the
Speaker 16: stuff into the house.
Speaker 2: And he was like, Hey, I'm too busy.
Speaker 3: Is that whenever you showed up to Casey's trailer on Sunday.
Speaker 12: No, okay, Well when did you have that conversation when
Speaker 12: mom moved under?
Speaker 2: Three or four months before? Okay?
Speaker 1: William claimed that this interact shoudn't happened months before. But
Speaker 1: now that we have Casey's original interview from September of
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, we can look back and see
Speaker 1: that Casey told police something different.
Speaker 6: Your cousin, what's his name?
Speaker 2: His name is Billy Little.
Speaker 7: We call him a little Billy and it's Billy Miller.
Speaker 2: What were to Billy live it?
Speaker 7: He lives in Texas, and I'm not for sure where.
Speaker 2: What was he doing up here?
Speaker 6: He was coming up.
Speaker 7: Here to move his mom and his brother back to Texas.
Speaker 6: So has he already gone back?
Speaker 2: You know, Yes, he's already gone.
Speaker 7: I'm pretty sure, okay.
Speaker 8: And so I guess he came up and spoke with
Speaker 8: you gets a short period of time that night.
Speaker 6: Yes, that would be Sunday evening. Okay, So how long
Speaker 6: did he say that?
Speaker 2: Ten fifteen min tops?
Speaker 7: We just really talked about all the times and stuff.
Speaker 6: Did you come into your house?
Speaker 7: No, sir, he stayed outside.
Speaker 2: I was outside.
Speaker 7: He never came in the house. But BacT I was
Speaker 7: on the front porch. He saw her back on the.
Speaker 6: Did he know that you and Rebecca dated and past?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 6: Did you know Joe were living together?
Speaker 7: He knew that she visited on the weekends.
Speaker 1: He say, remember, Rebecca arrived at mccullus trailer on Saturday,
Speaker 1: September eighteenth. The police originally thought she was alive on
Speaker 1: Monday morning. Jen and George think she was actually killed
Speaker 1: before that, late Saturday night or maybe sometime on Sunday.
Speaker 5: There's a problem though, with this part of the story too.
Speaker 5: Here's the problem.
Speaker 4: So this was what Casey told people in you know,
Speaker 4: when he was interviewed the police, and then William kind
Speaker 4: of told a similar story that he just pulled.
Speaker 5: Up into the driveway and you know that was it.
Speaker 4: Well, a couple of weeks after their statements are taken,
Speaker 4: Casey's asked whose DNA could possibly be in the house,
Speaker 4: and he gives a list of people whose DNA could
Speaker 4: be in the house. He lists William and Jeremy, and
Speaker 4: besides of them, there's sua meeting Sunday night next to
Speaker 4: each of them. Well, if you never got out of
Speaker 4: his car, how could his DNA be in the house.
Speaker 17: Obviously, I can't talk a lot about the evidence in
Speaker 17: the investigation, you know, it's an ongoing investigation investigation, but
Speaker 17: I can assure you that.
Speaker 18: There are items of evidence that there should be no
Speaker 18: reason your DNA should be on it, you.
Speaker 6: Know what I mean.
Speaker 12: We believe investigators, with the people that had worked this,
Speaker 12: we believe that we have the suspects DNA on a
Speaker 12: piece of evidence that.
Speaker 16: Is very specific and very unique, and nobody else's DNA
Speaker 16: should be on it. So that's why I'm asking. There's
Speaker 16: a number of people that have provided DNA. Volunteer, would
Speaker 16: you be willing to provide your DNA?
Speaker 3: It would be a cheek swab.
Speaker 2: I don't want to take blood or what it is.
Speaker 2: If I mean in that house and all.
Speaker 3: That stuff, my DNA would be in there.
Speaker 12: You know, if if you don't feel comfortable doing it,
Speaker 12: I'm not gonna.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna.
Speaker 3: Push you or try to put any pressure on you.
Speaker 3: It's not ask for all that stuff.
Speaker 2: But you know, yeah, if.
Speaker 3: You're that's fine.
Speaker 2: He's just to me, it's just you know, yeah, my
Speaker 2: he is going to be in.
Speaker 1: There a lot of stuff, right, Okay, Since he was
Speaker 1: so willing to give up his DNA, A polygraph would
Speaker 1: be no problem.
Speaker 16: Right, Like I was talking before about polygraphs, you know,
Speaker 16: almost all of them becaulors have been polygraphed.
Speaker 2: A number of other people hadn't been. You know, that's
Speaker 2: one that's that's a tool that we like to use
Speaker 2: to you know, it kind of gives us.
Speaker 3: A pretty good indication of somebody who's lying or telling
Speaker 3: the truth.
Speaker 12: Yeah stuff, yeah, yeah, I mean, would you be okay
Speaker 12: with taking a polygraph?
Speaker 2: I'll just ask you now, I don't know, have a problem,
Speaker 2: know that you don't have that finale?
Speaker 3: You want to go to Arkansas and take one?
Speaker 2: Now, I'll tell you what. Let me holler.
Speaker 16: I'll call a I'll call the sergeant up here to
Speaker 16: see they may have a polygrapher in town.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a shot in the dark, but.
Speaker 1: Actually it was the furthest thing from a shot in
Speaker 1: the dark. This detective had his polygrapher locked and loaded.
Speaker 2: Right, And so we're going to view a great do
Speaker 2: you tell all the questions?
Speaker 6: We're going to be on the exam, We're going to
Speaker 6: administer the test. We're going to give you the test.
Speaker 19: They'll be done in several phases that want to value
Speaker 19: eight the exam results.
Speaker 2: So I'll tell you how you did before you leave today?
Speaker 6: Okay, whether you want to lay.
Speaker 19: Want to know if you cause the death of we're
Speaker 19: back at school, Well, how would you answer that question?
Speaker 12: I would I answer that yes that you know, how
Speaker 12: can you do something when you're in another notation?
Speaker 2: Okay? Perfect?
Speaker 19: So if they were asking that on the example, would your.
Speaker 12: Answer to you no, okay, not perfect? And are you
Speaker 12: half hundred percent positive?
Speaker 2: Yes? Perfect?
Speaker 5: You know you're not going to have a.
Speaker 19: Problem passive test if you know, if you didn't do it,
Speaker 19: you didn't do it, and then it was supposed to
Speaker 19: the process and that's that's that's what you want to know, right.
Speaker 1: William sat like a statue in his chair for the
Speaker 1: duration of the test, answering yes and no questions. Confidently
Speaker 1: when it was over he didn't have to wait very
Speaker 1: long to get his results.
Speaker 2: Now, I think you did.
Speaker 19: I don't know if you're many okay, okay. So the
Speaker 19: res also the example of deception indicated. Right, So those
Speaker 19: two the questions that did you you know what that
Speaker 19: cause you failed the test?
Speaker 2: I have the test?
Speaker 12: Yes, yes, and so my heart he felt like he
Speaker 12: was just beating out of my chest.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, we talked about your DNA being at.
Speaker 18: The crime scene, and you tried to give an explanation
Speaker 18: as to why you're doing it would be at the
Speaker 18: crime scene because your mom.
Speaker 11: Gave claude furniture, furniture stuff and betting, and you even
Speaker 11: you even said that it would be reasonable for your
Speaker 11: DNA to be on the betting, which is absolutely sir.
Speaker 2: No, I didn't say that, Okay.
Speaker 3: I just said that mom gives furniture and all that stuff.
Speaker 6: Okay, all right.
Speaker 18: This is a wash cloth that was under the bed
Speaker 18: that the killer used to clean up. It was watered
Speaker 18: up in a ball. Okay, we've got we've got the
Speaker 18: killer's DNA on that wash cloth.
Speaker 15: Okay, would there be any reason for your DNA?
Speaker 2: It shouldn't be, shouldn't mail there?
Speaker 1: Are you ready to have your mind blown? The detective
Speaker 1: is lying, as DNA was not on the washcloth. This
Speaker 1: is just one of the tools in a seasoned detective's
Speaker 1: tool helt that's used to get a reaction, possibly a confession,
Speaker 1: out of a suspect when there's little loss to go on.
Speaker 1: They were baiting him.
Speaker 5: He got tricked and it was a gutsy move. I'll
Speaker 5: give Mike Neil credit. He got tricked.
Speaker 4: He got tricked into thinking that his DNA was on
Speaker 4: a rag that they had found they were going to
Speaker 4: do some DNA testing, and then he also got tricked
Speaker 4: into thinking that Rebecca's DNA. What Mike did is he
Speaker 4: went and found the truck, the actual truck that William
Speaker 4: Miller owned in two thousand and four. It was somewhere
Speaker 4: in South Texas. He sent the Texas Rangers down there
Speaker 4: to take pictures of it. And so Mike has a folder.
Speaker 4: And this is after William has failed the polygraph test
Speaker 4: during his interview, and he comes in. He says, well,
Speaker 4: I've got to share something with you, and he pulls
Speaker 4: out these pictures of this truck.
Speaker 3: That truck looks familiar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's your truck.
Speaker 3: YEA biological billy lasts for.
Speaker 16: Decades, blood, skin cells, all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right.
Speaker 3: That was a really bloody crime scene.
Speaker 2: What happened.
Speaker 12: You got blood on the side of your shoe.
Speaker 16: We got Rebecca's DNA next to the gas pedal in
Speaker 16: your truck, no question about it.
Speaker 2: Her DNA's in your truck.
Speaker 3: So What you have to do is you have to
Speaker 3: explain to me how that's possible.
Speaker 2: If you didn't kill.
Speaker 20: Her, you know who did, and if you know who did,
Speaker 20: if you're covered for casey. Dude, I'm telling you, you
Speaker 20: have got to come forward right now with what you know.
Speaker 4: And William immediately knows it's his old truck, and he goes,
Speaker 4: we're going to get this test out and whoever killed
Speaker 4: her is on the track.
Speaker 5: Neither one of those things was true.
Speaker 1: But it was enough to scare William into confessing. Still
Speaker 1: want to be a detective.
Speaker 2: We know what you did, we know how it went down.
Speaker 12: We've got her blood in your in your floorboard.
Speaker 2: You tried to clean up mess that you could.
Speaker 18: Billy, don't drag your mom through this anymore.
Speaker 2: Don't drag your brother through this anymore.
Speaker 3: Give give the family some peace.
Speaker 2: It was a freak deal man.
Speaker 3: You did not mean to killer.
Speaker 2: It happens.
Speaker 18: It should have never happened, but it did. Okay, So
Speaker 18: tell me, Billy, just tell me, tell me what you did,
Speaker 18: how it happened.
Speaker 2: Last to my mom. Outside you can look at the email.
Speaker 2: I've got to run off or any day.
Speaker 3: Listen, let me do this.
Speaker 2: Let me.
Speaker 18: Let me bring your mom in here and let's talk
Speaker 18: to her together. If that's what you want to do.
Speaker 12: I want to talk to her outside outside, and I
Speaker 12: promised to come back in here and sell you whatever
Speaker 12: you want.
Speaker 1: William Miller had failed this polygraph test. Miserably, he realized
Speaker 1: the walls were closing in, and he asked for one
Speaker 1: last chance to talk with his mother. When he came
Speaker 1: back into the room, William told police exactly what they'd
Speaker 1: been waiting to hear. He had murdered Rebecca Gould all
Speaker 1: of those years ago. It was him, that had always
Speaker 1: been him.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll get Jeremy in a minute.
Speaker 2: We need to have a conversation. I held up my
Speaker 2: end of the deal. Let's talk. What do you want
Speaker 2: me to tell you? I want you to tell me
Speaker 2: what you did, how it went down.
Speaker 12: One thing about this is it's been real and in
Speaker 12: your head like a movie real since it happened.
Speaker 2: There isn't anything about this. See you forgot I know
Speaker 2: that because.
Speaker 3: I've been doing this a long time.
Speaker 5: I did.
Speaker 2: You gotta sorry. I'm sorry for what I did. You
Speaker 2: gotta tell me how it went down. I just sent it.
Speaker 2: I kind of blocked it.
Speaker 3: Out of my mind and in a way to survive.
Speaker 18: Everybody that I'm associated is a victim about to me,
Speaker 18: absolutely victim, absolutely, And I played everybody.
Speaker 12: As a fool, everybody. I never told anybody but you
Speaker 12: right now. I remember going into the trailer and stuff,
Speaker 12: and then it just happened so quick and so fast,
Speaker 12: and then I freaked out.
Speaker 3: And you can't go all so for what happened so
Speaker 3: fast and so quick?
Speaker 2: What happened? Where did it happen?
Speaker 7: You have to tell me these things, if you guys,
Speaker 7: isn't so, I mean, you.
Speaker 3: Should know that I do I do?
Speaker 2: Or should I just get a lawyer and all that stuff. Now,
Speaker 2: I'm just asking you that because you know, listen, man,
Speaker 2: you know I'm telling you. You know I'm confessed to you.
Speaker 3: I'm telling you that I did it.
Speaker 2: Once you arrest me.
Speaker 15: Once you do arrest me, and that you said that
Speaker 15: I killed her by her blood and all that stuff
Speaker 15: is in.
Speaker 2: There, and arrest me, I'm confessant. I did it.
Speaker 6: Dude.
Speaker 2: You're under arrest for the murder from Becca Gould.
Speaker 7: Okay, okay, take me to Arkansas.
Speaker 3: I mean, listen, know that that's all.
Speaker 16: We will get there, right I know that, but you
Speaker 16: know it doesn't happen the way you want it to happen.
Speaker 16: It just doesn't take me to Arkansas, do this, do that.
Speaker 16: It doesn't happen that way.
Speaker 5: Here's the thing.
Speaker 4: You in the state of Arkansas, you can't and then
Speaker 4: this is Trinlana States.
Speaker 5: You cannot just have a confession.
Speaker 4: You have to have some other piece of evidence that
Speaker 4: ties the person of the crime.
Speaker 5: The problem for William is is.
Speaker 4: That there was a piece of evidence that did tie
Speaker 4: him to the crime, and that's the missing suitcase. When
Speaker 4: police arrived the day that Rebecca vantaged, there were three
Speaker 4: things missing. One of her suitcases, the piano, egg and
Speaker 4: her Okay.
Speaker 12: But I need to know what you did with Rebecca.
Speaker 12: Where did you put her before you dumped her? I
Speaker 12: need to know all that stuff. And I know that's
Speaker 12: not easy to talk about, but we got to have
Speaker 12: that conversation.
Speaker 2: Where did you put her before you dumped her? Where'd
Speaker 2: you keep her in the truck?
Speaker 6: Where in the truck?
Speaker 2: The back end of the truck?
Speaker 7: Okay, what was she in?
Speaker 2: She was in a shirt?
Speaker 1: Not no?
Speaker 3: Did you put her in a trash bag?
Speaker 6: Were there?
Speaker 2: No? Would you put her in there was a blanket
Speaker 2: and all that stuff.
Speaker 12: Okay, what was used to cause her injuries? We'll go
Speaker 12: to Arkansas and I'm going to point out something to
Speaker 12: you and then you'll find some certain things that you're
Speaker 12: going to be looking for.
Speaker 3: All right, So you're telling me.
Speaker 12: Right now in November twenty twenty, there is still physical
Speaker 12: evidence probably that has not been found. Yeah, let's go
Speaker 12: to Arkansas. That will nail them in the coffin, would it.
Speaker 17: Well no, I'm telling you, you know, unless somebody picked
Speaker 17: it up and thought it was trash.
Speaker 12: But it should be where it's at.
Speaker 1: It should be where it's at. Well, that's helpful, Isn't
Speaker 1: it weird how humans can do inhuman things but not
Speaker 1: talk about them afterwards. Words too violent for you, Billy.
Speaker 1: There are a strange species.
Speaker 4: Indeed, for you know, sixteen years they were trying to
Speaker 4: find this suitcase. Well, William told them where to find
Speaker 4: the suitcase and it was in proximity to his mom's
Speaker 4: old house when she was living in Guying, and it
Speaker 4: took him about the search. We estimate was about three
Speaker 4: to four hours, but they found the suitcase. The suitcase
Speaker 4: is weird, though, and there's a reason why it's weird.
Speaker 4: William says he took it. And William's he's not tall,
Speaker 4: but he's a big, stocky guy.
Speaker 5: He weighed over three hundred pounds.
Speaker 4: There was only like five six and so he took
Speaker 4: this suitcase and he said he launched it from the
Speaker 4: highway and it landed like thirty forty yards away or
Speaker 4: something like that. And so when it's found, it's open
Speaker 4: and all of the betting, and there's some betting, and
Speaker 4: there's some clothes. They're all in a pile over here,
Speaker 4: and there were some CDs in there and all this
Speaker 4: other stuff. So Jenna's at my house one night after
Speaker 4: we get the pictures of this suitcase, and it was
Speaker 4: confirmed to you was her suitcase, her stuff. There's only
Speaker 4: one problem. Think about the physics of throwing a suitcase. Okay,
Speaker 4: if it's all zipped up, you throw it, no problem.
Speaker 4: But if it was open, then all that stuff would
Speaker 4: have been scattered all over the place, and all of
Speaker 4: the clothing type items would have long been gone, deteriorated
Speaker 4: in nothing.
Speaker 9: They weren't faded. You could see the This is how
Speaker 9: we know it was came from Casey's houses because the
Speaker 9: plaid on the sheet matches that that was in his washer.
Speaker 9: And we've actually done our own suitcase experiment. One of
Speaker 9: the local residents in Melbourne went to Goodwill and got
Speaker 9: two black suitcases and her backyard has a very similar
Speaker 9: landscape to where this suitcase was found, with the same
Speaker 9: types of trees and leaves and obviously the same weather pattern.
Speaker 9: And so what we did is we had her put
Speaker 9: sheets in one suitcase and zip it closed and just
Speaker 9: put it out like that, and then the other one
Speaker 9: we had her put the suitcase like Rebecca's was found
Speaker 9: with unzipped open and the sheets they're not in any pile,
Speaker 9: but they're very close to the suitcase and just laying
Speaker 9: on top of the leaves, and so she put those
Speaker 9: sheets out there. This started in December of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 9: and within a few months those sheets were like unrecognizable,
Speaker 9: deteriorated and now they're just basically gone. So that's how
Speaker 9: we know, like Rebecca's suitcase could not have been laying
Speaker 9: open like that for sixteen years, and the sheets looked
Speaker 9: pretty new. So somebody opened that suitcase, but we haven't
Speaker 9: figured out who yet.
Speaker 12: What would just saying too were there as well, I'm
Speaker 12: true sorry.
Speaker 2: I know that I can't bring her.
Speaker 12: Back alone, and I yes, there was time to that.
Speaker 3: I wanted to go to Doctricol's office.
Speaker 2: It'm a guy and get him.
Speaker 4: That did to change to do that, Like he gave
Speaker 4: this confession, gave really no reason as to why Rebecca
Speaker 4: would you know he killed her. But then at his
Speaker 4: sentencing he agrees to meet with doctor Gould afterwards and
Speaker 4: he tells a completely different story about how he gave
Speaker 4: her seat, that he hit her, but then he gave
Speaker 4: her CPR and if they find his DNA on her shirt,
Speaker 4: it was because he was crying. He keeps telling all
Speaker 4: these crazy stories that don't make any sense. But like
Speaker 4: with any anybody who's lying, there's grain, there's grains of
Speaker 4: truth in there, and you've got to somehow try to
Speaker 4: mind them out. Of course, now I claims he had
Speaker 4: nothing to do with it, in case he did all
Speaker 4: of it.
Speaker 9: So and for listeners who want to waste eleven hours
Speaker 9: of their life, they can watch his entire interview, polygraph, confession,
Speaker 9: everything on YouTube.
Speaker 1: William was arrested for Rebecca's murder and eventually took a
Speaker 1: plea deal that landed him forty years in the Arkansas
Speaker 1: Department of Corrections, and like George said, these days, William
Speaker 1: has changed his story yet again. As you might suspect,
Speaker 1: he and Jen have been in contact with him since
Speaker 1: his arrest, and he now says that Casey murdered Rebecca,
Speaker 1: he just helped clean up the scene.
Speaker 4: And fun fact, the cleaning supplies that were used to
Speaker 4: clean up the crime scene were delivered by Linda, and
Speaker 4: that's verified.
Speaker 5: She delivered those clean spies.
Speaker 4: Now she claims that her brother that he asked her
Speaker 4: to pick up certain items for the house and they
Speaker 4: were all cleaning items that were used by the killer
Speaker 4: or killers to clean up the mess in the house.
Speaker 1: No one knows for sure just how much Linda Miller
Speaker 1: knew about the situation, but it warnant some serious speculation.
Speaker 1: Rebecca's murder wasn't the only secret her son had been keeping, though,
Speaker 1: the same day he took the polygraph test, failed it
Speaker 1: and confessed to the murder. He also confessed to five
Speaker 1: others too. That's right, William could be a serial killer.
Speaker 4: What happened was is he confessed to Rebecca's murderer, and
Speaker 4: of course then you know the detectives are trying to
Speaker 4: press him like, hey, we know this was your first rodeo.
Speaker 4: And so then he confesses to five other murders, but
Speaker 4: he doesn't give the names of the victims.
Speaker 5: He didn't give specific details though.
Speaker 4: About how he kidnapped one of these victims from which
Speaker 4: she was like at a payphone at a convenience store
Speaker 4: late night, you know, And he gave specific details about
Speaker 4: how he would, you know, trick them.
Speaker 5: He said it was some of them were sex workers, you.
Speaker 4: Know, they would think they were about getting ready to
Speaker 4: have a sexual encounter. And sometimes he would have a
Speaker 4: strap underneath his his somewhere in his truck that he
Speaker 4: could just grab it, wrap it around their neck and
Speaker 4: strangle them. I am almost one hundred percent confident that
Speaker 4: he's a serial killer, and he's done this many times.
Speaker 5: I just believe it.
Speaker 1: Jen still waivers on whether she agrees with George on
Speaker 1: this one. She is one hundred percent sure that William
Speaker 1: was somehow involved in the murder and disposal of Rebecca Gould.
Speaker 9: I just and this is the the tragedy of it,
Speaker 9: in a way, is that if only the state police
Speaker 9: had shared a little bit with us, and we had
Speaker 9: known William had been in the state of Arkansas, the
Speaker 9: weekend and the murder. I mean, everything would have been
Speaker 9: so different from our side the whole time. And then
Speaker 9: him joining the group. I mean, that was a golden opportunity.
Speaker 9: They're lucky that we're smart and like I'm used to
Speaker 9: running sources and stuff and we know how to interview
Speaker 9: or what to say and not to say, because we
Speaker 9: could have totally screwed the whole thing up and scared
Speaker 9: him off and he never would have gone to that
Speaker 9: interview and confessed. But they also could have used us
Speaker 9: to try to get information from him, if only they
Speaker 9: would have communicated with us, you know. And this was
Speaker 9: just what's so frustrating to me about this case. And
Speaker 9: we're not here to defend William. I am one hundred
Speaker 9: percent confident he was involved in this whole thing, and
Speaker 9: maybe others, but there are just aspects of the investigation
Speaker 9: and his confession that weren't vetted enough. For instance, his
Speaker 9: timeline on this murder Monday morning, and they didn't challenge
Speaker 9: him on any of those details. And just to clarify
Speaker 9: for listeners, Williams, DNA, and Prince were never found in
Speaker 9: that residence. I'm not saying they're not there. I'm sure
Speaker 9: his DNA was there somewhere, but they did not have
Speaker 9: anything else on him except his confession, which had parts
Speaker 9: that cannot be true. And there's actually a lot of
Speaker 9: das that would not approve an arrest warrant on this.
Speaker 1: It's no wonder this case has held the attention of
Speaker 1: so many for nearly two decades. It's not just the
Speaker 1: brutality of what happened to Rebecca. It's the sheer scale
Speaker 1: of what we don't know, the conflicting timelines, the recycled alibis,
Speaker 1: the parade of rumors, false leads, and players who still
Speaker 1: haven't been entirely ruled out. William Miller is serving a
Speaker 1: forty year sentence for murder he now insists he falsely
Speaker 1: confessed to He continues to beg Jen and George to
Speaker 1: uncover new evidence that will put Casey or someone else
Speaker 1: in prison for this crime instead of him, But that
Speaker 1: ship is sailed. He took a plea deal, he confessed,
Speaker 1: he volunteered evidence, and in doing so, he gave up
Speaker 1: almost any chance of appeal.
Speaker 9: So I've been to visit him three times, and George
Speaker 9: actually got to interview him and take video of it.
Speaker 9: Because he's an official journalist or what is it, George
Speaker 9: media member. I guess that got you in, and so
Speaker 9: I'm just if he's willing to keep talking to us,
Speaker 9: I'm not going to give up because I feel compelled
Speaker 9: to not only try to get the truth about Rebecca's case,
Speaker 9: but also try to figure out if he has other victims.
Speaker 9: And so I told him this last time. This is
Speaker 9: just a couple months ago when I went with Jeremy.
Speaker 9: I said, dude, we're about the same age, and barring
Speaker 9: some major catastrophe or me getting cancer like, we're going
Speaker 9: to be alive for about the same amount of time.
Speaker 9: And I'm not going to stop talking to you.
Speaker 1: And in the absence of official help, it's civilians like
Speaker 1: you and me who are stepping up and finding William's
Speaker 1: other potential victims, not ego driven cops in short charts,
Speaker 1: regular people like you and me with a moral compass,
Speaker 1: a strong sense of right and wrong, and a need
Speaker 1: for justice. People who will not stop asking questions even
Speaker 1: when officials have long forgotten the case and told you
Speaker 1: to shut up. Webslutes like this have already been calming
Speaker 1: through other cold cases across every state. William ever set
Speaker 1: foot in trying to make sense of what he vaguely
Speaker 1: blurted out during his police interview.
Speaker 9: So we can't do it by ourselves. And so we
Speaker 9: started this project several months ago and I just called
Speaker 9: it Operation Rebecca, so I didn't know what else. I
Speaker 9: couldn't come up with anything better. But I have an
Speaker 9: official sign up form. I have a video on our
Speaker 9: YouTube channel explaining the process of what we're doing, and
Speaker 9: I just asked volunteers if to fill out the forum,
Speaker 9: it's only four questions. Sign up for a state and
Speaker 9: then watch the video, and then email me once you
Speaker 9: watch a video, and I'll send you the links to
Speaker 9: the Google Drive folder that has all the information you need.
Speaker 1: We'll post a link to gens info in the show
Speaker 1: notes at Swordinscale dot com, so you too can join
Speaker 1: the investigative fund. Now where did I put that magnifying
Speaker 1: glass again?
Speaker 5: Anyway?
Speaker 1: I think this case proves justice doesn't always wear a badge.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it looks like a true crime podcast enthusiast with
Speaker 1: a search tab open at three am and way eat
Speaker 1: too much coffee in their digestive system. Get twenty percent
Speaker 1: off at Strongcoffeecompany dot com. With promo code Sword by
Speaker 1: the way. But as I was saying, sometimes justice looks
Speaker 1: just like you and just like me. Sometimes it requires
Speaker 1: a hive of citizens to stand up for justice and
Speaker 1: collectively uncover what a single mind cannot or will not.
Speaker 1: It's kind of amazing to see it happen in real time.
Speaker 1: And next time, maybe, just maybe, you'll be the reason
Speaker 1: someone's story doesn't end in silence. YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 1: Sword and Scale TVs, where you can find all three
Speaker 1: seasons of Sword and Scale television. It's ongoing, new episodes
Speaker 1: every month. That's gonna do it. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Until next time, Stay safe.
Speaker 11: S