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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 2: Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 2: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 2: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 2: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 6: Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 6: program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in True crime
Speaker 6: History and the authors that have written about them. On
Speaker 6: October twenty nine, nineteen ninety seven, hooker Andrea Slick Hendrix's beaten,
Speaker 6: naked body was discovered in a roadside ditch near Stuartsville, Indiana,
Speaker 6: with no leeds for police to follow. The case eventually
Speaker 6: went cold, but it wouldn't stay that way. In two
Speaker 6: thousand and three, sadistic sexual predator Joseph W. Brown claimed
Speaker 6: to have strangled Hendrix with his favorite murder weapon, a
Speaker 6: shoe lace from a woman's size eight shoe. Ginger Gasaway
Speaker 6: fifty three met Brown at a gambler's anonymous meeting. She
Speaker 6: didn't know that when she took up with him, she
Speaker 6: was gambling with her life. On August thirtieth, two thousand,
Speaker 6: Brown murdered Gasway and scattered her body parts across three
Speaker 6: Indiana counties. For this grisly crime, he would be sentenced
Speaker 6: to life in prison without parole, but it wouldn't be
Speaker 6: his first time behind bars. In nineteen seventy seven, Brown
Speaker 6: had been sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping an
Speaker 6: arm robbery. In nineteen ninety five, he was released despite
Speaker 6: the fact that he'd beaten a fellow inmate nearly to death.
Speaker 6: Brown later confessed that during the next five years, he
Speaker 6: indulged in a Seventh State rampage of torture and murder.
Speaker 6: His victims female hitchhikers and prostitutes. Now doing time in
Speaker 6: Walbash Valley Correctional Correction Center, Brown maintains that he'd murdered
Speaker 6: no less than thirteen other women. The book that we're
Speaker 6: profiling this evening is Blood Trail, with my special guest,
Speaker 6: Rick Reid. Thank you very much for agreeing to this
Speaker 6: interview and welcome to True Murder.
Speaker 5: Rick Reid, thank you for having me.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much, and congratulations on this book. It
Speaker 6: was written a few years ago, but still an amazing
Speaker 6: story and a great book, great really great read. Now,
Speaker 6: first off, let's give our audience a little bit of
Speaker 6: the background. How you came to be such an integral
Speaker 6: part of this book. Like I had mentioned in our
Speaker 6: earlier conversations, there is seems to be a trend towards
Speaker 6: a lot of true crime authors partnering with homicide detectives
Speaker 6: police officers to get the invaluable information that needed necessary
Speaker 6: to write the book even more effectively than they would
Speaker 6: normally write the book. So tell our audience who you are,
Speaker 6: what your background is, and before we start taking some
Speaker 6: questions here asking some questions about the book specifically.
Speaker 5: Okay, I've or I was a police officer since nineteen eighty.
Speaker 5: I was on the Vanderberg County Sheriff's Department here in Evansville,
Speaker 5: Indiana for six years, and then I went on to
Speaker 5: Evansville City Police and was on there for twenty years
Speaker 5: before I retired and went into teaching. It was during
Speaker 5: that time on the Evansville Police Department that this case
Speaker 5: came up. So my background basically, I had six years
Speaker 5: on the county police as a deputy and went into
Speaker 5: law enforcement and immediately within just a couple of months,
Speaker 5: coming on the police department. I went in through the
Speaker 5: detective's office, so I was in detectives for about seventeen
Speaker 5: years and ended up with my last three years being
Speaker 5: in internal affairs. The most hated position on the police department.
Speaker 6: Why is that.
Speaker 5: Internal affairs have to investigate their own So it's really
Speaker 5: a tough position to be put in where you have
Speaker 5: to investigate other police officers for suspected or complaints of wrongdoing.
Speaker 5: And the position that it puts you in basically is
Speaker 5: on the outside of everything, where the other officers don't
Speaker 5: like you. The chief of police doesn't really like you
Speaker 5: because every time they have run across you, there's a problem.
Speaker 5: So it's kind of like being a black cloud.
Speaker 6: Okay, Now, this story when we're talking about Ginger Gasaway
Speaker 6: and you start the book, we're talking about Ginger, but
Speaker 6: what was your position as in the police department at
Speaker 6: the time that you were investigating or the disappearance of
Speaker 6: Ginger gas Away? But that's not originally what you started with,
Speaker 6: but the bad checks of Joe Brown. What year was
Speaker 6: that and where was that and what was your position
Speaker 6: within the police department?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 5: This basically all started for me around two thousand when
Speaker 5: Joe Brown came to my attention as somebody that was
Speaker 5: writing a lot of bad checks, doing what we called
Speaker 5: kiding with checks between banks that were no good And
Speaker 5: at the time I had moved from violent crime section
Speaker 5: to white collar crime. We called it the buncle fraud unit,
Speaker 5: and I was working primarily with the banks and with
Speaker 5: that type of crime, paper crimes, So that's what I
Speaker 5: was doing. It seemed like for some reason in that position, though,
Speaker 5: I ended up working four or five other homicides while
Speaker 5: I was in the white collar crime unit. Also, the
Speaker 5: one thing kind of led to another. Money sometimes breeds violence,
Speaker 5: so in this case, I was looking at Joe Brown
Speaker 5: for several months prior to this incident occurring, because he
Speaker 5: had opened several bank accounts and was kiting bad checks
Speaker 5: from bank to bank to bank and was in about
Speaker 5: fifty thousand dollars to the banks. At the time, we
Speaker 5: have such a large number of those type cases coming
Speaker 5: in that every detective that worked in the white collar
Speaker 5: unit might be carrying a caseload of eighty to one
Speaker 5: hundred cases at a time, so you couldn't really focus
Speaker 5: your attention on one person and go after them unless
Speaker 5: something merited that kind of attention. In his case, Labor
Speaker 5: day was coming up and he was hitting the bank's
Speaker 5: pretty heavy, and I had put an alert out to
Speaker 5: all the banks asking that anybody that had any contact
Speaker 5: with Joe Brown to let me know because I was
Speaker 5: going to go ahead and arrest him on several bad
Speaker 5: check charges that I had. But the surprise was that
Speaker 5: when I got a call from one of the banks,
Speaker 5: it was an old national bank here in town. They
Speaker 5: said he had been there, but he'd been there several
Speaker 5: hours earlier, and they hesitated to call me, But when
Speaker 5: they did, they told me the check that he was
Speaker 5: trying to pass was a large check written on the
Speaker 5: account of Ginger gas Away off of a fifth third bank.
Speaker 5: So it got me interested to try to find out
Speaker 5: what he was doing with one of Ginger Gasaway's checks
Speaker 5: that wasn't one that he had normally used. I didn't
Speaker 5: know he had any connection to her. I thought it
Speaker 5: was probably stolen, it was such a large amount. And
Speaker 5: the whole case then began because I tried to find
Speaker 5: Ginger gas Away to confirm that she hadn't written him
Speaker 5: that check so I could arrest him.
Speaker 6: Now at the time time when you have an arrest
Speaker 6: warrant for Joe Brown. You're looking for Joe Brown? What
Speaker 6: was in your discovery? What did you discover was the
Speaker 6: background of Joe Brown.
Speaker 5: Okay, basically, what we found about him all came about
Speaker 5: later after we knew that Ginger was missing and something
Speaker 5: was horribly wrong in her situation. But we didn't really
Speaker 5: know at first that he and Ginger had any kind
Speaker 5: of connection other than that check. But what I did
Speaker 5: find out I went to the bank that issued her checks,
Speaker 5: the Fifth Third Bank, and was able to talk to them,
Speaker 5: and they said that he had stolen checks from her
Speaker 5: once before, and that she had opened an account for him,
Speaker 5: Joe Brown Masonry. He had his own little company, and
Speaker 5: she had set him up. And the bank was able
Speaker 5: to tell me that she had actually cashed in her
Speaker 5: four oh one K from a job that she had
Speaker 5: had previously and took about fifty thousand dollars to open
Speaker 5: an account for him, and that those were the bad checks.
Speaker 5: That he was right and he had cleaned that account
Speaker 5: out and was writing bad checks to other banks. So
Speaker 5: now I had the connection between Joe and Ginger. I
Speaker 5: knew that she had been supplying him with money that
Speaker 5: he had stolen from her in the past, and so
Speaker 5: I had a real good reason to go and look
Speaker 5: for her to get her to go ahead and file
Speaker 5: a formal charge against him for this check that he
Speaker 5: tried to pass. We had him on film doing it. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: when he saw the bank looking at him funny, he
Speaker 5: grabbed the check and his ID card and fled the bank.
Speaker 5: So we didn't have the check itself, so we needed
Speaker 5: to find her and get information from her to be
Speaker 5: able to proceed the way it worked pretty much here
Speaker 5: in Evansville, and I'm not sure about other agencies. If
Speaker 5: you have an old case that's say over two or
Speaker 5: three days old, and you want to make an arrest
Speaker 5: on it, you have to get a an arrest warrant
Speaker 5: issued first. If you have something that's current within say
Speaker 5: thirty six to seventy two hours. If it's that current,
Speaker 5: you can make an on side arrest, which is a
Speaker 5: warrantless arrest. And that's what I was wanting to go for,
Speaker 5: was to just be able to arrest him and not
Speaker 5: have to go to the prosecutor's office and get papers
Speaker 5: drawn up and go to a judge and get a
Speaker 5: warrant to arrest him on some of.
Speaker 6: The old charges.
Speaker 5: We thought we would be able to wrap that up
Speaker 5: very quickly, and it didn't turn out that way.
Speaker 6: Now, what I thought interesting too is some of the
Speaker 6: talking about this specific law here, that this is a
Speaker 6: certain class of felony, and I'll get you to explain
Speaker 6: to our audience what the class of felony is. But
Speaker 6: also that what I had asked is that kind of
Speaker 6: what criminal background did you were you already aware of
Speaker 6: or were you already aware of about Joe Brown? And
Speaker 6: then what were you aware of in terms of likely
Speaker 6: would in terms of sentence that this man would receive
Speaker 6: if he were actually convicted of these frauds, these bad checks.
Speaker 5: Okay, what we had done when this all happened, it
Speaker 5: happened so fast. We left our office in contact basically
Speaker 5: with everybody trying to locate Ginger, trying to locate Joe,
Speaker 5: and we really didn't know a whole lot about any
Speaker 5: other background on him other than that he was writing
Speaker 5: bad checks. So at that time I hadn't done much
Speaker 5: of a background check on him as far as old
Speaker 5: charges or what we would call the Triple I. Its
Speaker 5: an interstate index that shows you felony charges that a
Speaker 5: person has all over the United States. I hadn't gone
Speaker 5: to that link yet because I had so many cases
Speaker 5: that I was working. Joe was way down the line.
Speaker 5: He was way down my list until the day that
Speaker 5: he showed up at Old National Bank, so I really
Speaker 5: didn't have much of a background on him other than
Speaker 5: that I knew if we didn't arrest him, he was
Speaker 5: going to continue to write bad checks to the banks,
Speaker 5: and then when we came back to work after Labor Day,
Speaker 5: we'd have one hundred thousand dollars loss or more. So
Speaker 5: we decided to go after him on that. We didn't
Speaker 5: really find out about his criminal background until probably the
Speaker 5: next day, and that's when I started really delving into
Speaker 5: his background to find out what kind of person he was.
Speaker 5: And the reason for that was because Ginger Gasaway was
Speaker 5: missing and we weren't able to find her, and the
Speaker 5: circumstances around her not being present in her apartment or
Speaker 5: in town began to look suspicious, but it took a
Speaker 5: while for that to develop. It took a couple of
Speaker 5: days before that really developed because the things we learned
Speaker 5: about her and about Joe, even the family thought that
Speaker 5: she might possibly be off with him gambling someplace, So
Speaker 5: the fact that he had tried to cash a bad
Speaker 5: check lost a little bit of its appeal if she
Speaker 5: was maybe in this with him. So we didn't really
Speaker 5: know what we were dealing with at that point, but
Speaker 5: after we couldn't locate her for a while, then it
Speaker 5: started looking more suspicious. The only real troubling background we
Speaker 5: had on him, but it didn't come to light right away,
Speaker 5: was that Joe had beaten her up at one other time,
Speaker 5: and he beat her very severely, and it was over
Speaker 5: him taking money from her, and she had decided press
Speaker 5: charges and then changed her mind, And it was more
Speaker 5: or less a domestic violence case at that point, where
Speaker 5: he was ordered to do not a community service, but
Speaker 5: go to domestic violence classes. Anger management, they called it,
Speaker 5: and Joe failed to do that. He didn't go to
Speaker 5: anger management. The warrant that was issued for him was
Speaker 5: very minor and all it said was, you know that
Speaker 5: he had to appear before a judge to explain why
Speaker 5: he didn't go to anchor management class. So what would
Speaker 5: happened if we'd arrested him on that he would appear
Speaker 5: in front of a judge and go, I'm sorry your honor,
Speaker 5: I'll go tomorrow, and they would have let him go,
Speaker 5: so that it really wasn't enough to hold him on.
Speaker 5: I didn't think.
Speaker 6: Now, you were trying to find out the location of
Speaker 6: Ginger Gasaway, so you can ask her what the details
Speaker 6: and circumstances were regarding this check. It looks like it
Speaker 6: doesn't look good, but you don't know very much information.
Speaker 6: But in this process you find out gradually the character
Speaker 6: of Ginger gas Away and a little bit of her background.
Speaker 6: Tell us about Ginger Gasaway what you found initially she
Speaker 6: was fifty three years old. But tell us what you
Speaker 6: found out from friends, relatives, coworkers. What did you What
Speaker 6: was the picture that was being drawn about the character
Speaker 6: of Ginger Gasaway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what we found out during the investigation led us
Speaker 5: to believe that she was somebody that was fairly easily led.
Speaker 5: She was lonely. She was in rather an unhappy marriage.
Speaker 5: Her and her husband had been having some issues, but
Speaker 5: it was mostly family type issues where he had a
Speaker 5: little bit of a drinking problem, she had a gambling problem,
Speaker 5: and so they weren't getting along real well. And that
Speaker 5: was when Joe came into her life. She met him
Speaker 5: at a gambler's anonymous meeting, and that was really one
Speaker 5: of the first things we found out about her. She
Speaker 5: felt sorry for him. He told her that he had
Speaker 5: a past, criminal past and that he was trying to
Speaker 5: overcome it and he was living in a shelter and
Speaker 5: he needed help. And he pretty much indicated us too,
Speaker 5: that he had charmed his way into her life, convinced
Speaker 5: her that he needed help and that she was the
Speaker 5: one that could do it for him. He kind of
Speaker 5: looked at her as a older mother type figure, but
Speaker 5: he was romantically inclined towards her also, and then he
Speaker 5: more or less took over her life. He started getting
Speaker 5: into her bank accounts, he moved in with her, and
Speaker 5: he moved in with her while she was still married
Speaker 5: to her husband. She had allowed him to come in
Speaker 5: the house while her husband had just had open heart surgery,
Speaker 5: so Joe. We found out from a husband that Joe
Speaker 5: had been threatening the husband that if he didn't stay
Speaker 5: out of the way, he'd take care of him, and
Speaker 5: the husband said, I was in no physical condition to
Speaker 5: hardly even talk to the guy, much less get in
Speaker 5: a fight with him. So the husband ended up having
Speaker 5: to go into town and get a restraining order to
Speaker 5: have Joe moved.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 5: When Joe was ordered out by the Sheriff's department and
Speaker 5: told to move, then Ginger told her husband, well, if
Speaker 5: you're making him leave, I'm going with him. So she
Speaker 5: left with Joe and file for divorce from her husband,
Speaker 5: and her and Joe moved in together. It was kind
Speaker 5: of poor judgments all around. She felt like she had
Speaker 5: a kinship with him because they both had gambling problems
Speaker 5: and she was unhappy, and Joe made her happy, at
Speaker 5: least for a while. He was the kind of person
Speaker 5: typical of a serial killer, where he can maintain a relationship.
Speaker 5: He can be very charming like Ted Bundy or someone
Speaker 5: be very charming for short periods of time, but eventually
Speaker 5: that face kind of fades away and they become who
Speaker 5: they really are. They act out. They're very dominating, controlling, violent,
Speaker 5: and he showed her that side one time too often.
Speaker 5: She continued, though, to work and pay the bills, continued
Speaker 5: to gamble and spend her money and steal from her
Speaker 5: She was At one time we knew she was holding
Speaker 5: two jobs, one at TJ Max here in Evansville as
Speaker 5: a forklift operator, and then her second job was working
Speaker 5: out at the regional airport, and so she was bringing
Speaker 5: in two paychecks and working a lot, and Joe was
Speaker 5: spending all of his time gambling. I really felt sorry
Speaker 5: for her that she was unable to detach him. She
Speaker 5: tried several times to throw him out and would get
Speaker 5: him out of the house, maybe even have to call
Speaker 5: the police, and he would leave, but he would stalk
Speaker 5: and harass and write letters and promise, cry all these
Speaker 5: type things to get his way insinuate back into her
Speaker 5: life again. And with the domestic violence type situation, eventually
Speaker 5: it's easier to give in than it is to continue
Speaker 5: fighting them. And that's what she did. She would just
Speaker 5: give in and let him come back, and then eventually
Speaker 5: it would be so bad she would have to kick
Speaker 5: him out again.
Speaker 6: Now let's go back for our audience to the background
Speaker 6: the early life of Joe Brown, his troubled childhood. Tell
Speaker 6: us how and where Joe Brown grew up and under
Speaker 6: what conditions. What type of person was Joe Brown as
Speaker 6: a child and a young young adult.
Speaker 5: Okay, Joe, in some ways, if you looked at his childhood,
Speaker 5: it wasn't much different than anyone else. He had two brothers.
Speaker 5: He had two sisters. His dad was a bricklayer. Mother
Speaker 5: was just a housewife that sometimes took in sewing, did
Speaker 5: things like that. We were told that the mother had
Speaker 5: a drinking problem and prescription medication problem, and that the
Speaker 5: father had an extremely violent temper, and some of the
Speaker 5: stories that we heard from witnesses and family members. We're
Speaker 5: not very.
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Speaker 5: We're pleasant about the way Joe was raised, but he
Speaker 5: wasn't the only one in that family, and always had
Speaker 5: to look at that aspect of it that he wasn't
Speaker 5: the only one that was being treated bad an angry
Speaker 5: father or a drunken mother. But he turned out the
Speaker 5: way he did, and that's often the case in serial killers.
Speaker 5: There could be two brothers and one of them be
Speaker 5: a serial killer, not both. So he was raised pretty rough.
Speaker 5: When he was eight or nine years old, he was
Speaker 5: being molested by a neighbor boy that was I think
Speaker 5: around age twelve that was coming to the house, and
Speaker 5: Joe had gone to his mother and complained and told
Speaker 5: her that this guy was coming to the house doing
Speaker 5: things to him, and instead of his mother protecting him,
Speaker 5: and this is the story from Joe, instead of the
Speaker 5: mother protecting him, she told his father about what was
Speaker 5: going on, and his father just erupted basically accused him
Speaker 5: of being homosexual and beating for that. So Joe said
Speaker 5: he never forgave his mother for that, that he went
Speaker 5: to her for help and instead he got a beating
Speaker 5: and the abuse continued. Then, you know, the neighbor continued
Speaker 5: to go at him and he never really got any
Speaker 5: help with that. I think for somebody at that age,
Speaker 5: that was very confusing for him and it would really
Speaker 5: mess him up as far as his sexuality is identity
Speaker 5: what he was, and he resisted that pretty much up
Speaker 5: into this part of his life now where he claims
Speaker 5: that he hates homosexuals and that he wants to kill him.
Speaker 5: But while he was in prison, we found out he
Speaker 5: was having homosexual relations in prison. He had a boyfriend
Speaker 5: in prison in Pinky. But then on the other hand,
Speaker 5: he would make these remarks that he wasn't you know,
Speaker 5: so he was very confused about it.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Interesting point in the book too, is that he
Speaker 6: said that he'd always had had horrible teeth and so
Speaker 6: he while he was in prison, he had all of
Speaker 6: his teeth taken out. And then the surprise was that
Speaker 6: this was also, according to your research, the benefit to
Speaker 6: him servicing men in prison.
Speaker 5: Right, he was making money with it to be able
Speaker 5: to do sexual favors for the other prisoners. And that's
Speaker 5: how he bought things in prison. It was a barber
Speaker 5: system basically. You know, they don't allow him to smoke
Speaker 5: in prison, at least here in Indiana, So if you
Speaker 5: can get your hands on a pack of cigarettes, it's
Speaker 5: worth gold. And they still get stuff like that in there.
Speaker 5: So Joe trading what he had to be able to
Speaker 5: get things.
Speaker 6: Now, tell us about, just briefly, what were the circumstances
Speaker 6: that he landed in jail and what kind of sentence
Speaker 6: did he get. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: In nineteen seventy seven, he was still a juvenile or
Speaker 5: seventeen eighteen year old at the time. He knew of
Speaker 5: a farmer that lived in the area, and he said
Speaker 5: he had done some work for this guy on occasion
Speaker 5: on his farm and he needed some money. He wanted
Speaker 5: to go gambling and he needed money, and so he
Speaker 5: goes to the guy's house with a gun and threatens
Speaker 5: a guy and wants money. The guy's home with his wife,
Speaker 5: and he gives him I think four or five hundred
Speaker 5: dollars and told Joe that's all the money he had.
Speaker 5: And Joe said, but you can get more. So he
Speaker 5: threatened him that he was going to take him to
Speaker 5: the bank. He wanted the guy to go in the bank,
Speaker 5: cash a check and give him more money, or he
Speaker 5: was going to shoot him. So Joe gets a guy
Speaker 5: in the car to take came to the bank and
Speaker 5: on the way there, now this is out in the county,
Speaker 5: out in the cornfields on a farm. While they're going
Speaker 5: down the road, I think the gentleman was driving, and
Speaker 5: he just bails out of the car and rolls away
Speaker 5: and runs off in the cornfields, leaves Joe in the car.
Speaker 5: So Joe gets scared and takes off with the car
Speaker 5: and goes to Las Vegas with the money that he
Speaker 5: had already gotten. And that's where they caught him, was
Speaker 5: in Las Vegas. So they charged him with battery and
Speaker 5: kidnapping and robbery because I believe he beat the guy
Speaker 5: a little bit too, And so he was charged with
Speaker 5: some very serious crimes and he got a life sentence,
Speaker 5: and Indiana, a life sentence is fifty years. It's a
Speaker 5: class A felony. They go by ABC and D felonies.
Speaker 5: It's a class A felony. So it's the worst. And
Speaker 5: he got a life sentence which is fifty years, but
Speaker 5: you get a day for a day credit for good
Speaker 5: time if you don't create problems in prison. You get
Speaker 5: a day for every day that you're in there. So
Speaker 5: he would only have to do twenty five years in
Speaker 5: that case on a life sentence. So it's kind of
Speaker 5: deceptive when they say life sentence, it doesn't really mean that.
Speaker 5: Sure at the time they didn't have I don't believe
Speaker 5: they had life without parole. They have death penalty, they
Speaker 5: had life sentence and so forth. Now they have what
Speaker 5: they call life without parole, and that means you actually
Speaker 5: do your life. You never get out right. So he
Speaker 5: ends up getting the twenty five years and goes to prison.
Speaker 5: But five years into his sentence, he gets angry with
Speaker 5: another guy that he claimed was making sexual advances towards him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and.
Speaker 5: I always wondered if it was like a failure to
Speaker 5: pay or something like that. He gets one of these
Speaker 5: industrial can openers. He worked in the kitchen and they
Speaker 5: make these huge can openers weigh about three pounds. It's
Speaker 5: a square metal bar that's about and a half long,
Speaker 5: with a screw type thing on top, a handle, and
Speaker 5: like it would be in a cafeteria in a school
Speaker 5: or something. Well, he pulls that out of the table
Speaker 5: and beats this guy almost to death. It took several
Speaker 5: prisoners and guards to get him off of the guy.
Speaker 5: He was going to kill him for that. He only
Speaker 5: got five years tacked. I didn't get tacked onto a
Speaker 5: sentence that was run concurrent with the time he was doing,
Speaker 5: so it was nothing.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: It was basically like getting slapped on the hand. Probably
Speaker 5: more paperwork and cost to the state than any inconvenience
Speaker 5: at all to Joe. So that taught him a lesson.
Speaker 5: And the other thing that they give you, even though
Speaker 5: you're supposed to do twenty five years, if you go
Speaker 5: to certain programs, you go to alcoholics anonymous, you take classes,
Speaker 5: you join church programs, any of these kind of things
Speaker 5: you do, you get additional time off too, So you
Speaker 5: could be released as early as like fifteen sixteen years
Speaker 5: on a twenty five year sentence or a fifty year sentence,
Speaker 5: I should say, so he got out. He went in
Speaker 5: in seventy seven, he got out in ninety five, and
Speaker 5: he shouldn't have been released for a while, but he
Speaker 5: got out early. As soon as he got out, he
Speaker 5: started a little rampage and started killing women.
Speaker 6: Now getting back to Ginger gas Away and the hunt
Speaker 6: for her and to get them from information from her.
Speaker 6: And you have your suspicions that foul play has occurred.
Speaker 6: How do you proceed with Ginger gas Away in trying
Speaker 6: to locate her and what are your results?
Speaker 5: Okay, what happened to us was we found out where
Speaker 5: she was living from the bank, and we went to
Speaker 5: her apartment to try to talk to her, and it
Speaker 5: was a note taped to her apartment door that's it
Speaker 5: was a note to her daughter or from her daughter
Speaker 5: to her that said, I'll be over Saturday to help
Speaker 5: you move. So we knew she was in the process
Speaker 5: of moving to another apartment. So we went to the
Speaker 5: office and found out where she was moving to, and
Speaker 5: we went to those apartments thinking maybe she was over there,
Speaker 5: and she had been there a couple of days earlier
Speaker 5: and made arrangements to rent, had picked out an apartment
Speaker 5: and was supposed to come and get her keys in
Speaker 5: the next day or two. So we spent about three
Speaker 5: or four days basically running back and forth different places
Speaker 5: trying to locate her. It didn't really at the time,
Speaker 5: it didn't look like Joe had done anything to her.
Speaker 5: It looked like they may even be together, so we weren't.
Speaker 5: We didn't really have anything solid to go on to
Speaker 5: issue an alert at that point, and at the risk
Speaker 5: of looking really stupid to the public, I finally had
Speaker 5: to make a decision. You know, I would rather her
Speaker 5: be mad at me for looking for her more strongly
Speaker 5: than that something happened to her and I didn't look
Speaker 5: for So I made the decision on my own to
Speaker 5: go ahead and issue a all points bulletin basically for her,
Speaker 5: her vehicle, and Joe. And it was only maybe an
Speaker 5: hour or two later after we put the bulletin out
Speaker 5: that her car, one of her cars, was located about
Speaker 5: fifteen blocks from her apartment, if that far, maybe not
Speaker 5: even five hundred yards from her apartment. Joe had taken
Speaker 5: the car and left it in a parking lot in
Speaker 5: a real high traffic area that's a lot of apartment complexes,
Speaker 5: a lot of cars stolen in that area, a lot
Speaker 5: of thefts out of cars in that area with Joe
Speaker 5: left her car there with the keys in it and
Speaker 5: the door unlocked, and it set there for three or
Speaker 5: four days, and nobody stole it. I think the people
Speaker 5: in the area were afraid it was a trap set
Speaker 5: by the police, you know, like sting. So nobody took
Speaker 5: the car. It was good for us, and once we
Speaker 5: found the car, that changed the game. If she was
Speaker 5: gonna run off with Joe and go gambling somewhere and
Speaker 5: go on a vacation and not show up for work
Speaker 5: for a day or two, it was very unlikely that
Speaker 5: she would also leave a nice car. It was a
Speaker 5: newer Ford Taurus, leave it sitting with the keys in
Speaker 5: it near her apartment so I could get stolen. So
Speaker 5: we had to change the face the investigations that time.
Speaker 5: We started looking a lot harder.
Speaker 6: For then you also spoke with her. She has a
Speaker 6: couple daughters, and so you spoke to one of her
Speaker 6: daughters as well. Thompson, is it Lisa.
Speaker 5: Thompson, Lisa Thompson.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So you spoke to co workers, you spoke to
Speaker 6: her daughter, tell us what the picture was slowly evolving
Speaker 6: into and what your conclusion was after speaking with these people,
Speaker 6: and what did some of these people have to say
Speaker 6: about Ginger Gasaway and Joe Brown and concerning your investigation.
Speaker 5: Well, I think once they saw that we were becoming
Speaker 5: more concerned about her whereabouts, the family got more concerned.
Speaker 5: Friends were more concerned also, And then we started hearing
Speaker 5: stories of domestic violence, and we started hearing stories of
Speaker 5: Joe beating her. We heard about him threatening her and
Speaker 5: her being afraid, and the family members were also afraid.
Speaker 5: That's when we heard about her husband or ex husband
Speaker 5: have to get a restraining order against Joe. And so
Speaker 5: we started tracking down other apartments that she'd lived in
Speaker 5: and talking to those managers and found out that there'd
Speaker 5: been some horrendous fights in those apartments and they'd been
Speaker 5: made to leave because of the disturbance to the other neighbors.
Speaker 5: It began to look more and more like Ginger didn't
Speaker 5: leave on her own, but that maybe he had had
Speaker 5: injured her somehow, maybe she had gotten away from him.
Speaker 5: We didn't really up until almost the last two days
Speaker 5: of the investigation, believed that something more serious may have
Speaker 5: happened to her. We knew she was missing, We knew
Speaker 5: he had a violent temper, We knew that he had
Speaker 5: beat her up once before and put her in the hospital,
Speaker 5: but he wasn't a murderer at that point, and we
Speaker 5: didn't really and she was somebody that was just such
Speaker 5: a nice lady, but she had a gambling problem, a
Speaker 5: little bit of a drinking problem, and even the family
Speaker 5: was telling us it's possible that she went with him
Speaker 5: and there gambling somewhere. So given the fact that their
Speaker 5: relationship was one of those on again, off again all
Speaker 5: the time, we didn't know where it was at what
Speaker 5: stage it was in, and when we finally got on
Speaker 5: his trail, then it was something that we had to
Speaker 5: kind of decide to do on our own. The other
Speaker 5: detective that worked with me primarily prior to finding Joe
Speaker 5: and getting him into custody, we put in a lot
Speaker 5: of our own time over the holidays, talking to people
Speaker 5: and taking trips and making reports out and entering things
Speaker 5: in the computer, and we finally ended up putting a
Speaker 5: bulletin out that would look a little farther through other states.
Speaker 5: It went through a wireless system that went through several
Speaker 5: states to look for Joe. Look for the car, and
Speaker 5: look for Ginger. Still, we were looking for Ginger all
Speaker 5: this time. We didn't know that he hadn't taken her
Speaker 5: like kidnapped and he tried to kidnap this other guy.
Speaker 5: We didn't know that he maybe hadn't just stuck her
Speaker 5: in a car and took off. So we were looking
Speaker 5: for them to try to get her home and make
Speaker 5: sure she was okay. What we found out was kind
Speaker 5: of surprising, though.
Speaker 6: You also put out this sort of all points bulletin
Speaker 6: in neighboring states in case Joe Brown was arrested, and
Speaker 6: because he was really only wanted on a misdemeanor, you
Speaker 6: put out this all points alert with the express purpose
Speaker 6: of making sure that he was held so that you
Speaker 6: could be questioned so he wouldn't be let go. Isn't
Speaker 6: that correct, right?
Speaker 5: And it was very risky to do that because the
Speaker 5: only charge we had on him was failure to appear
Speaker 5: for anger management, which is kind of like a rit
Speaker 5: of attachment type thing. It was very small. It was
Speaker 5: a misdemeanor. But the way the law works, basically, or
Speaker 5: the way the system works in Indiana, is that if
Speaker 5: you have a misdemeanor charge against you and a warrant.
Speaker 5: You can be arrested anywhere within Indiana, but there's no
Speaker 5: guarantee that the county that's wanting you will pay to
Speaker 5: have you transported here. So if he had been caught,
Speaker 5: say up north in Kokomo or up around Gary or
Speaker 5: something like that, the county Vanderberg County may not have
Speaker 5: paid to even have him shipped back down here. They
Speaker 5: may have just told him to let him go. So
Speaker 5: that's statewide what we're looking at, and the chances of
Speaker 5: having somebody arrested in another state on a misdemeanor charge
Speaker 5: or very slim. Most police departments in a neighboring state
Speaker 5: will refuse to serve a misdemeanor warrant, partly because they
Speaker 5: know that the state that's looking for them won't honor
Speaker 5: the warrant and they won't transport them. So it's a loss.
Speaker 5: It's a big amount of money that they're looking about
Speaker 5: manpower things like that to hold somebody court time, and
Speaker 5: so we really didn't think that they would pick him up.
Speaker 5: While we had that all points bulletin issued, I was
Speaker 5: contacting our prosecutor's office trying to get warrants issued on
Speaker 5: the bank charges. Which were Class C felonies. He was
Speaker 5: looking at like ten years on each one of those,
Speaker 5: but we never got the chance to get those warrants
Speaker 5: issued before Ohio caughting.
Speaker 6: Right now, tell us about the circumstances of him finally
Speaker 6: being arrested, where he was arrested, and just tell us
Speaker 6: the circumstances.
Speaker 5: The thing that worked out really good for us is
Speaker 5: on a Sunday, I contacted all the news media here
Speaker 5: in Evansville and told him I wanted to meet with
Speaker 5: them all at the same time at police headquarters. I
Speaker 5: had a news release on a missing person, and I
Speaker 5: gave them all the same information at the same time.
Speaker 5: Picture him, picture of her, picture of the car we
Speaker 5: thought they might be driving, plate numbers, all this kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. Put it out on the news media. We
Speaker 5: didn't have any luck with the All Points bulletin yet,
Speaker 5: and so we put all this out the news media. Well,
Speaker 5: within about an hour of the news going out, we
Speaker 5: get a call from somebody that is like second or
Speaker 5: third cousin of Joe Brown in a little town north
Speaker 5: of here about an hour called Buckskin, and this lady
Speaker 5: called and said, I just saw the news. Joe was
Speaker 5: here about an hour ago, and he parked way down
Speaker 5: at the end of our drive, like one hundred yards
Speaker 5: away from the house, and came up and he really
Speaker 5: looked bad, and he was shaken, and he was almost crying,
Speaker 5: and he said, I got to have some money. I
Speaker 5: got to get out of here. I've done something really bad.
Speaker 5: And she said it scared her so bad that she
Speaker 5: gave him money, even though she didn't want to, just
Speaker 5: so he would leave. She didn't really have any idea
Speaker 5: where he was going. So since she was a family member,
Speaker 5: we talked about family and where people lived, and I'm
Speaker 5: trying to think if he hit one family member, he
Speaker 5: might go looking for another. So the only thing she
Speaker 5: knew was that he had a brother. He had a
Speaker 5: sister up in terror Hate, which is north of here
Speaker 5: a couple hours, and he had a brother in Zanesville, Ohio,
Speaker 5: but she didn't know the name. She just said he
Speaker 5: had a brother named David, and he works for Colgate
Speaker 5: Colgate Paul Mallive and being a wonderful detective that I am,
Speaker 5: I'm thinking toothpaste toothpaste tubes. It says Cincinnati and all
Speaker 5: that on it. So I called several departments over that way.
Speaker 5: And found out, you know, that there was a cogate
Speaker 5: plant there. And so when we put our bulletin out,
Speaker 5: we specifically concentrated on the interstates that would go through Cincinnati, Cleveland,
Speaker 5: Columbus in that area, and that's when we finally got
Speaker 5: some luck on it. As it turned out, he was
Speaker 5: going to his brother's house and the brother lived in Zanesville, Ohio. Well,
Speaker 5: Joe made it as far as levin In, Ohio, which
Speaker 5: is about a five hour drive. He made it to
Speaker 5: levin In, Ohio, and he was tired, so he pulled
Speaker 5: into a truck stop and crawled in a back see
Speaker 5: that the car had stolen from Ginger, and went to sleep.
Speaker 5: Well was he woke up like five o'clock, six o'clock
Speaker 5: in the morning with a state trooper tapping on a
Speaker 5: window from Ohio. That's where we got lucky.
Speaker 6: Now, from there he is transported back to Evansville. Is it?
Speaker 6: How is he what happens after his arrest? How does
Speaker 6: that work? Or you go towards where he is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, we ended up have to go to him. The
Speaker 5: way the law works due process under constitutional rights, all
Speaker 5: your rights and stuff. Due process says that if you're
Speaker 5: arrested for a crime, you have to appear before a
Speaker 5: court at the next convenient court date, the next available
Speaker 5: court date. It doesn't say you have to go immediately
Speaker 5: in front of a judge, just the next available court date.
Speaker 5: It has to You can't put it off, you know,
Speaker 5: and wait three days. So he's in Ohio. The way
Speaker 5: the law works is you have to extradite from another
Speaker 5: Even here in Evansville. We're just right across the bridge
Speaker 5: from Henderson, Kentucky. If somebody makes it across the bridge
Speaker 5: and I want to arrest them, I have to have
Speaker 5: Kentucky authorities arrest them, and then I have to extrad
Speaker 5: ite them back to Evansville, like ten miles away. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but that's the way the law works. Well, he's in Ohio,
Speaker 5: which is a couple of states away.
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Speaker 5: And so we have to extra dide him. What the
Speaker 5: law doesn't say is that I have to. It just
Speaker 5: says I have to get to court at the next
Speaker 5: available court date. It doesn't say that I have to
Speaker 5: leave him in Ohio until he goes to court. I
Speaker 5: just have to get him in front of a judge
Speaker 5: to answer the extradition charges. So we talked to when
Speaker 5: we found out he was there, we talked to our prosecutor,
Speaker 5: we talked to their prosecutor, and between the two of them,
Speaker 5: they agreed that we had the right to check him
Speaker 5: out of the jail in Ohio and bring him to
Speaker 5: Indiana temporarily to do what we did. And I'll get
Speaker 5: into that in a minute. And then we had to
Speaker 5: take him back to Ohio as soon as court was
Speaker 5: open so that he could go in front of a
Speaker 5: jemach and do it formally. It didn't violate any of
Speaker 5: his rights. Due process is just a process. It's not
Speaker 5: a constitutional requirement. Every case is different. They always look
Speaker 5: at the totality of the circumstances before they make a
Speaker 5: decision whether you violated somebody's rights. And basically the whole
Speaker 5: case in the end took a whole year in court
Speaker 5: for all the hearings and stuff to decide whether or
Speaker 5: not we had violated due process by bringing him to
Speaker 5: Indiana prior to extra hiding him in Ohio courts. And
Speaker 5: the ruling was that we hadn't, that we had had
Speaker 5: played fair and done what we were supposed to do.
Speaker 5: But there were a lot of reasons for that. The
Speaker 5: primary one was that it was Joe's idea. Joe wanted
Speaker 5: to come here. He said, if you don't take me now,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to show you anything. He said, I
Speaker 5: want to go right now and go to Indiana and
Speaker 5: I'll show you where all the body parts are. And
Speaker 5: so we didn't have much of a time frame to
Speaker 5: do it. We barely had time to get him here,
Speaker 5: find the body parts, and then get him back to court.
Speaker 5: And that was what we did.
Speaker 6: Okay, sorry, let's go back just a little bit to
Speaker 6: this incredible confession that you elicited from from Joe Brown.
Speaker 6: You speak about in your book that you have. Your
Speaker 6: own philosophy is based on Maslow's theory of hierarchy of needs.
Speaker 6: Please explain this philosophy and what it has to do
Speaker 6: with how you deal with criminals and how it played
Speaker 6: into this your mentality and basically your philosophy beforehand of
Speaker 6: interviewing Joe Brown to try to elicit a confession and
Speaker 6: try to get the truth out of Joe Brown.
Speaker 5: The mesows hierarchy of needs theory says that you have
Speaker 5: everybody has the same needs. On a very basic level.
Speaker 5: You have the need to feel safe and to not
Speaker 5: be hunted. You have to feel like you're able to
Speaker 5: defend yourself. And once you feel like you're safe, where
Speaker 5: you're at your feet are on the ground, then you
Speaker 5: can start looking to satisfy other needs, like if you're
Speaker 5: hungry or you're thirsty, and so then your bodily needs
Speaker 5: will come second after that. So you start finding that
Speaker 5: once you've satisfied your thirst and your hunger, then you're
Speaker 5: looking for other needs and they build like in a
Speaker 5: pyramid to where the very top need. Once you get
Speaker 5: to the very top, you self actualize. You become the
Speaker 5: person that you always wanted to be. But you have
Speaker 5: everything that you need. The foundation has been laid for
Speaker 5: you to become the person that you want to be.
Speaker 5: Whenever one of those little blocks is knocked out from
Speaker 5: under you, you start from there and build up again.
Speaker 5: And so everybody basically has the same type of needs.
Speaker 5: And that's something important to know. When you're interviewing someone
Speaker 5: for a crime, especially anything very serious or sex crime.
Speaker 5: People do not want to admit their part in something horrible.
Speaker 5: Sex crimes are one of the worst because we have
Speaker 5: such a stigma against that they don't want to say
Speaker 5: that they did something. And with Joe, if he was
Speaker 5: going to admit that he killed somebody, he's looking at
Speaker 5: probably getting a death penalty or getting life without parole.
Speaker 5: Now he's already been down once and got a life sentence.
Speaker 5: Second time, it would be much harder on him, and
Speaker 5: so he has a lot of reasons not to talk.
Speaker 5: And we knew this before we went into the interview.
Speaker 5: We knew he'd gotten a twenty or a fifty year sentence.
Speaker 5: We knew that he had a lot of experience with
Speaker 5: the police. And the other thing that I knew too,
Speaker 5: was that the Ohio troopers that caught him for me
Speaker 5: had tried to interview him and had ready with Miranda Rights,
Speaker 5: and he spent the entire time cussing and threatening them.
Speaker 5: Got a fight in jail before I got there, within
Speaker 5: like six hours, he'd already gotten a fight in jail,
Speaker 5: and he was really cranked up, and he was ready
Speaker 5: to fight us too. He didn't want us coming, didn't
Speaker 5: want to talk to us. Everything was a cussword coming
Speaker 5: out of his mouth, and he was very mad. The
Speaker 5: way that I was a hostage negotiator for quite a
Speaker 5: few years for our department. And what you do when
Speaker 5: you deal with somebody that's angry is you become calm.
Speaker 5: You get quieter, You talk softly because that makes them
Speaker 5: quiet down to listen to what you're saying. They may
Speaker 5: yell for a while, but eventually it'll blow over. It's
Speaker 5: just like steam. So you don't buy into that. You
Speaker 5: let them play your game instead of playing theirs. And
Speaker 5: as long as they're talking, you let them talk, no
Speaker 5: matter what they're saying. If it's all cuss words, it's
Speaker 5: still words. You just let them go. But using the
Speaker 5: Maslow's theory as a basis for that, says, I know
Speaker 5: that Joe needs things he's in jail, he's scared, he
Speaker 5: thinks he's going to go to prison. So what I
Speaker 5: want to do is try to allay some of those fears,
Speaker 5: to get his feet back on the ground to where
Speaker 5: he has some foundation to talk from. And so we
Speaker 5: have to address all these little base needs first before
Speaker 5: we could ever ask even the first question about where's
Speaker 5: Ginger was a real good question. We didn't get to
Speaker 5: ask it for a long time. It had to put
Speaker 5: him in a position where he would talk first, where
Speaker 5: he would even speak to us. His mind was five
Speaker 5: questions ahead because he was angry and he was scared.
Speaker 5: So I had to bring him back into the present again.
Speaker 5: And you use all those little things, these little tools
Speaker 5: to do that. And part of it is just establishing
Speaker 5: a relationship with them where they don't have to be
Speaker 5: afraid of you. You can't promise him anything, of course,
Speaker 5: I can't go, Joe. If you tell me where Ginger's at,
Speaker 5: we won't file charges on you. We'll let you go,
Speaker 5: because we didn't know that that was going to be
Speaker 5: the case. So you can't make those kind of promises.
Speaker 5: You have to make them want to tell you.
Speaker 6: So you started befriending him, You talked about his brick
Speaker 6: laying job. You talked about everything bought, mentioning ginger gassaway
Speaker 6: for quite a while, for at least half an hour,
Speaker 6: was just small talk. Now, not everybody that you worked
Speaker 6: with was in agreement with this as well, but you
Speaker 6: were not the only person in the room. So tell
Speaker 6: us just how you set this up in the first place,
Speaker 6: how many people were in that room, and tell us
Speaker 6: how you proceeded. What was the subject matter of for
Speaker 6: that first while. Let's get right into that confession, because
Speaker 6: I think it was brilliant how you did it and
Speaker 6: the events that sort of created, even for you, the
Speaker 6: surprise utterance of the four words that we'll talk about
Speaker 6: in a bit. So tell us the dynamic of the
Speaker 6: officers in the room itself, and what your strategy was,
Speaker 6: and what you particularly chose to speak about for the
Speaker 6: for more than a half an hour in this do
Speaker 6: with Joe Brown.
Speaker 5: Okay, when we first arrived in Ohio, there was a
Speaker 5: state trooper that had stopped Joe and brought him in
Speaker 5: and they arrested him on our misdemeanor charge and Ready's rights.
Speaker 5: I was really surprised that they would do that and
Speaker 5: because of the nature of our concerns. They also charged
Speaker 5: him with flight to avoid lawful prosecution, which is a felony,
Speaker 5: and it's also a no bond They can't bond out
Speaker 5: of jail for that right. And they ensured by doing
Speaker 5: that that he wouldn't be released until we got there.
Speaker 5: If things went different after we got there, he probably
Speaker 5: would have been released. But I had to really give
Speaker 5: credit to the Ohio Police Department for doing that. That's
Speaker 5: way above and beyond what most police agencies would do,
Speaker 5: because you know, there's a lot of political things going on.
Speaker 5: They did a really good job. But one thing they
Speaker 5: showed us was that he had been read his rights
Speaker 5: in the back of the police car on the way
Speaker 5: to the station, and again at the station in the
Speaker 5: police car, and each time all he responded to was
Speaker 5: was cussing them and saying, I know my rights, I
Speaker 5: know my rights, You not have to tell me my rights,
Speaker 5: and giving them a hard time. And so after viewing
Speaker 5: that tape, they showed me the video before I went
Speaker 5: in to interview him, and there was a lieutenant and
Speaker 5: sergeant with the Ohio State Troopers that had had Joe
Speaker 5: in custody there for me. Holding him, and they go,
Speaker 5: how are you going to interview this guy? All he
Speaker 5: does when we ask him a question, he cusses us.
Speaker 5: He's got nothing to say. He keeps his arms folded,
Speaker 5: nose in the air, and he has nothing to say,
Speaker 5: and he hates us. And I said, well that's good,
Speaker 5: because now I got you to deflect all that anger
Speaker 5: and hatred. So I said, what I'm going to do.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to interview him. I'm going to go
Speaker 5: in and negotiate with him like a hostage negotiator. I'm
Speaker 5: going to go in and talk to him that way,
Speaker 5: because negotiations is about satisfying needs, it's about train it's
Speaker 5: being a car salesman. Basically, he has something I want,
Speaker 5: I got something he wants. Let's trade. And so I've
Speaker 5: decided to go at it from that angle. And one
Speaker 5: thing you never do as a detective. You go in
Speaker 5: a room with a prisoner. You either go in alone
Speaker 5: and another detective on the outside takes notes, watching the
Speaker 5: video or listening, or you go in with another detective
Speaker 5: and only one of the detectives talks. The other one
Speaker 5: takes notes and watches what's going on, and that's it.
Speaker 5: So you really don't. You don't have more than two
Speaker 5: people in a room. That's the rule. It just doesn't
Speaker 5: work any other way. A negotiation is different. I thought
Speaker 5: I needed to distract Joe. He's mad. He's mad at them.
Speaker 5: He's not mad at me yet, so he's really mad
Speaker 5: at them. And I wanted to use that anger and
Speaker 5: deflect it towards them and get it off of me
Speaker 5: so I could talk to him. So I told him,
Speaker 5: I said, I appreciate it if you guys would come
Speaker 5: in a room too. So I brought both the Ohio
Speaker 5: troopers in and my partner and we all were in
Speaker 5: the room together, and me and my partner sat down
Speaker 5: the two troopers set kind of across the room in
Speaker 5: a corner, out of the way, but where he could
Speaker 5: see him. And it worked out perfect because Joe immediately
Speaker 5: started pointing and threatening them and go on, I already
Speaker 5: told these you know what's that, I'm not going to
Speaker 5: talk and I'm not talking to you either, and he
Speaker 5: called me a bunch of names and he yelled, and
Speaker 5: I mean, he's very animated. And another thing you do
Speaker 5: as a negotiator is you try to deflect anger. The
Speaker 5: best thing to deflect anger as humor. If you can
Speaker 5: make somebody laugh, they can't be mad and laughing at
Speaker 5: the same time, right. So I looked at Joe, and
Speaker 5: the other thing you do is you become whatever you
Speaker 5: have to be to get them to talk, you know,
Speaker 5: if you have to be nice or mean or whatever.
Speaker 5: And I looked at Joe and I kind of leaned
Speaker 5: over and held my hands out like I bleeding. I
Speaker 5: go Jesus Christ, Joe, nice mouth. I said, I can't
Speaker 5: believe you said all that stuff. I said, my ex
Speaker 5: wife didn't cust me like that, laughing, and I could
Speaker 5: see a smirk come on his face. It was like
Speaker 5: I got to him immediately, and he looked away real quick,
Speaker 5: and I could tell he was trying not to grin.
Speaker 5: He goes, well, I'm not talking to you, and I said, well,
Speaker 5: you don't have to talk, Joe. But don't you even
Speaker 5: want to know why I'm here? I said, I'm a
Speaker 5: white collar crime detective of Evansville Police Department, and I
Speaker 5: need to ask you some questions. I said, I'm here
Speaker 5: to ask you for help. I need some help. And
Speaker 5: I said, you're the only guy that can help me.
Speaker 5: I hope you're not going to turn me down, and
Speaker 5: so he goes, well, he says, I don't like the
Speaker 5: way these guys have been treating me. I said, I
Speaker 5: wouldn't like it either. I said, I understand, and I
Speaker 5: kind of pointed to them, like, you know, they are
Speaker 5: a bunch of jerks. I said, but I need some
Speaker 5: help and I just want to sit down and talk
Speaker 5: to you for a bit. He goes, well, you can
Speaker 5: sit down, but I'm not talking, and I go, okay,
Speaker 5: that's all I can ask. Just listen to me then,
Speaker 5: and that's what got the conversation started, basically. So at
Speaker 5: that point, he's still mad, he's trying not to like me.
Speaker 5: He thinks he might kind of like me, but he's
Speaker 5: interested now I got him curious what am I doing there?
Speaker 5: You know, what, do we really know? How deep is
Speaker 5: he in this? And really, to be honest, at that time,
Speaker 5: I wasn't sure that he had done anything bad to Ginger.
Speaker 5: I thought she might he might have dumped her out
Speaker 5: of the car somewhere and she might be hurt, she
Speaker 5: might be in a hospital. I didn't really think he
Speaker 5: had killed her. I really didn't believe that yet. So
Speaker 5: we're talking and we're talking about school and jobs he's
Speaker 5: had and brick laying and how hard the work is.
Speaker 5: And then we start talking about the apartments that he
Speaker 5: lived in with her, the apartment that we had been
Speaker 5: to where she was moving out of. And we talked
Speaker 5: about the apartment quite a bit, and I've been out
Speaker 5: there numerous times on other runs, so I remembered where
Speaker 5: the swimming pool was and the club of the recreation
Speaker 5: room and all that kind of stuff. And so I
Speaker 5: saw while I was there too, there was ashtrays near
Speaker 5: the porch, and so I'm building this picture in my
Speaker 5: head of what it would be like with Joe and
Speaker 5: Ginger on the porch of that apartment. What would they see?
Speaker 5: And we talked about that what did they do? And
Speaker 5: it turned out he did sit out there a lot
Speaker 5: with her, and they'd watch people come and go and
Speaker 5: people go into the pool and smoke cigarettes and talk
Speaker 5: and so he started telling me stories. But what he
Speaker 5: always did was depersonalized Ginger. She was never Ginger, she
Speaker 5: was her she those kind of things. He would never
Speaker 5: say her name, And that was another thing that you
Speaker 5: have to do, is overcome that. So we worked on
Speaker 5: that for a while, and I eventually got him to
Speaker 5: look at a picture of her. But every time I
Speaker 5: would pull this picture out of her, he'd turn his
Speaker 5: head away and he wouldn't look at it, and I'd
Speaker 5: put it back in the envelope, and next time i'd
Speaker 5: catch him looking at me, I'd pull it out a
Speaker 5: little bit and he couldn't help himself. He'd look down
Speaker 5: and then he'd yank his head away. It's kind of
Speaker 5: conditioning to get them back to where that person becomes
Speaker 5: a person again. They're not about it. And we talked
Speaker 5: about her for a long time, and he finally I thought, well,
Speaker 5: I'll give him an out where he can blame this
Speaker 5: on someone else. So he said, if you need if
Speaker 5: you want to know where Ginger's at, you're going to
Speaker 5: have to ask her ex husband, Hobart. He's the one
Speaker 5: that would know where she is. I don't know, right,
Speaker 5: And so to bond with him, I go Hobart. I said,
Speaker 5: I'm not talking to Hobert. Hobert said, no, good, you
Speaker 5: know what. I've talked to him. I'm not talking to
Speaker 5: him again. He really pissed me off. I don't want
Speaker 5: to talk to him. And so Joe gives me a
Speaker 5: look like yeah, that's right. I don't like him either.
Speaker 5: So we worked with that for a while and I thought, well,
Speaker 5: let him blame it on Hobart. At least he'll keep talking, right,
Speaker 5: And so I would ask and then, well, what do
Speaker 5: you think Hobart might have done to her? And he goes,
Speaker 5: I don't know what he would do. He's crazy, He's
Speaker 5: liable to do anything. He's violent. So that kind of
Speaker 5: made me feel a little uneye because I thought, well,
Speaker 5: maybe Joe did do something to her. But the more
Speaker 5: we talked, we just kind of beat around the bush
Speaker 5: on this conversation about where Ginger was. And I kept
Speaker 5: telling him. I said, look, Joe, I'm not the world's
Speaker 5: best detective and I am struggling with this case. But
Speaker 5: I can tell you this much. I can't quit until
Speaker 5: I find her. I'm not going home till I know
Speaker 5: where she's at. I can't stop. I said, you understand
Speaker 5: how I feel about that. And he's not in his head.
Speaker 5: Yeah you know, And I said, you're like me. You're
Speaker 5: not a quitter. You're like me. Well, that's the other
Speaker 5: thing you do. You become a team. You and him
Speaker 5: become the team to fix the problem, and you can
Speaker 5: do it together. It's hard to do things alone, but
Speaker 5: it's easy to do things together type thing. So I
Speaker 5: kept talking about us and I need your help, you know,
Speaker 5: and me and you can do this. And then I
Speaker 5: was also bringing in the fact that he was in
Speaker 5: love with Ginger at least for a while until he tries.
Speaker 6: Pardon me, that's the question you asked, but he gave you. You
Speaker 6: asked him, do you love Ginger? And what was his response?
Speaker 6: Which was kind of he was revealing it.
Speaker 5: Was It was pretty revealing that he still did love her.
Speaker 5: The look in his eyes and stuff said he did.
Speaker 5: But he said she threw him out all the time
Speaker 5: and he didn't know where she was. She just left.
Speaker 5: So he wasn't real concerned or he didn't act like
Speaker 5: he was concerned with that part of it for a while,
Speaker 5: but you could tell by the look in his eyes
Speaker 5: that it was starting to weigh on him a little bit.
Speaker 5: But he really spoke.
Speaker 6: But he spoke to her in about the past tense.
Speaker 6: He said, do you love her? And he I did
Speaker 6: love I did love her.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he said, I did love her and I and
Speaker 5: when you think about it at the time, it meant
Speaker 5: a lot to me. But when you think back on it,
Speaker 5: it could be. Yeah, I used to love her, but
Speaker 5: then she kicked me out and none of o her
Speaker 5: no more. So, you know, I didn't want to read
Speaker 5: anything really big into it, but it was hard not
Speaker 5: too yeah at that point. And at some point we
Speaker 5: got to talking about this so much. The other detective
Speaker 5: was sitting there having a fit because he liked to
Speaker 5: smoke and he liked to drink coffee. And this had
Speaker 5: been hours of just talking about nothing, and he wasn't
Speaker 5: telling us anything that would convict him, but he was talking,
Speaker 5: you know. And I've been known to go nine ten
Speaker 5: hours into an interview before, you know, I'll take breaks,
Speaker 5: go to the bathroom, get something to eat, that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. If I got to go twenty four hours,
Speaker 5: I'll do it, you know. And as you can tell,
Speaker 5: I hardly ever shut up.
Speaker 7: Do I.
Speaker 5: So he he wanted to keep talking. But the other detective,
Speaker 5: it was with me, he was getting fed up. I
Speaker 5: could tell by his body language. He was getting tense
Speaker 5: and he was tired. And we'd driven for like five
Speaker 5: hours and now we'd set for about three hours, and
Speaker 5: he was wanting me to ask the tough questions you know,
Speaker 5: did you hurt her? All that kind of stuff, And
Speaker 5: I'm beating around the bush with it because I want
Speaker 5: Joe to bring it up.
Speaker 6: Yea.
Speaker 5: And so he finally blows up the other detective did,
Speaker 5: and he goes, he's not going to tell us nothing.
Speaker 5: Let's just lock him up. Blah blah blah. He's going
Speaker 5: to go to prison. We're not going to be able
Speaker 5: to do anything with him. He's not going to say anything.
Speaker 5: And so I'm hollering at my partner, going, shut up,
Speaker 5: sit down, you want to have a cigarette, Go get
Speaker 5: a cigarette. Just leave me alone. I want to talk
Speaker 5: to Joe. And he's yelling back at me. And in
Speaker 5: the midst of all that, you hear Joe kind of
Speaker 5: pipe in real quietly, you'll never find her. And you
Speaker 5: could have heard a pin drop in a room. The
Speaker 5: other detected the state troopers. I could see them sit forward,
Speaker 5: you know, listening. My partner shut up. He forgot about
Speaker 5: his cigarettes. And I looked at Joe and I said,
Speaker 5: what did you say? And he goes, Ricky says, listen
Speaker 5: to me, you'll never find her. You don't want to
Speaker 5: be the one to find her. And I could feel
Speaker 5: my heart almost stopped because I knew something really bad
Speaker 5: had happened. He pretty much gave it away right then.
Speaker 6: There was enough of a rapport built. It was fascinating
Speaker 6: that in that three hours and the car ride, there
Speaker 6: was enough of a rapport built that he, as you
Speaker 6: state in your book, he really didn't want to harm you.
Speaker 6: You had built enough of a relationship that he really
Speaker 6: wanted to spare you finding that body. Isn't that right? Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I had convinced him. And this is another thing
Speaker 5: in negotiations, is you become an actor. If you have
Speaker 5: to cry, you cry, you know. If you have to
Speaker 5: get mad, you get mad and you spout off and
Speaker 5: you blow steam whatever it takes to get the situation
Speaker 5: back in their court where they feel willing to talk again.
Speaker 5: You never put words in their mouths. You never suggest
Speaker 5: things to them, because then you're going to have a
Speaker 5: problem in court. Sure, but anything else is fair. You
Speaker 5: can lie about. You know, I've been married twenty five times.
Speaker 5: You know you can. Yeah, I'm I'm a lester too.
Speaker 5: You know, anything that you have to say, it's fair
Speaker 5: to do that because you want them to feel comfortable
Speaker 5: talking to you. And in his case, like I said,
Speaker 5: when I told him, I said, I can't stop looking
Speaker 5: for her, Joe, I've got to keep looking for her.
Speaker 5: I said, you have to realize I suck at this job.
Speaker 5: I'm a horrible detective, I said. And I've let you down,
Speaker 5: and I've let Ginger down, and I've let her husband
Speaker 5: down and her daughter. I said, her daughter is just
Speaker 5: beside herself, and I don't know what I'm going to do.
Speaker 5: I said, I can't stop till I find her. I said,
Speaker 5: this is killing me, Joe. I don't I need your help.
Speaker 5: I don't know what else I'm gonna do. If you
Speaker 5: can't help me, I'm done. And he's just sitting there
Speaker 5: watching this. Well, then when me and my partner got
Speaker 5: into it, I think Joe felt like he had to
Speaker 5: step in and protect me because my partner was verbally
Speaker 5: abusing me and he's a lot bigger than me too,
Speaker 5: and so Joe was kind of mad at him. He
Speaker 5: was like shutting him up, wanting to protect me, and
Speaker 5: he goes, you'll never find her. And then he looked
Speaker 5: at me and he's like, because I'm already in tears
Speaker 5: about not finding a Ginger, and he goes, you don't
Speaker 5: want to be the one to find her. Do you understand?
Speaker 5: And I go, oh my god, I go, what did
Speaker 5: you do?
Speaker 7: Joe?
Speaker 5: And he says, I killed her? And I said you
Speaker 5: killed her. I said, no, you didn't. He goes, yeah,
Speaker 5: I did. I said you killed her. What did you do?
Speaker 5: He says I cut her up and I said, you
Speaker 5: mean you cut her with a knife. He goes, I
Speaker 5: cut her into pieces. And I thought, you know, oh
Speaker 5: my god. I said no, you couldn't have done that.
Speaker 5: I said, you're not like that. He goes, yeah, I
Speaker 5: did it. He said, I cut her into pieces. It
Speaker 5: was almost funny in a way. He wouldn't let us
Speaker 5: tape the interview so we didn't have a tape recorder
Speaker 5: running this, which was really unfortunate. But I got three
Speaker 5: other police officers in the room to testify what was said.
Speaker 5: I felt pretty safe with that. It was was funny
Speaker 5: to hear the like I said, the expression in his
Speaker 5: voice he was looking out for me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, incredible. You also played upon you said that you
Speaker 6: still regardless of whether this guy is a psychopathic killer,
Speaker 6: he still tried to play to his sense of decency
Speaker 6: by saying, listen, the family needs to have a burial
Speaker 6: you don't want animals to carry off her body or bugs.
Speaker 6: So you tried to play to that and were successful
Speaker 6: as well with that, breaking him down to get him
Speaker 6: to the point supple enough that this you know, event happened.
Speaker 6: And he just spilled the beans and said, yeah, I
Speaker 6: cut her up.
Speaker 5: I killed there right, And he what he did. He
Speaker 5: was telling us that he he could show us where
Speaker 5: he disposed of the body parts, but he couldn't tell
Speaker 5: us which was true. I mean, they were like out
Speaker 5: in fields that we would.
Speaker 6: Have never found true.
Speaker 5: And I knew that his mom was dead. I knew
Speaker 5: his dad was dead, and his brother was dead. By
Speaker 5: that time, one of his sisters had been talking to me,
Speaker 5: and she was very, very helpful, just a fantastic lady.
Speaker 5: And she said that Joe had told her once that
Speaker 5: he'd beat Ginger up real bad and he thought he'd
Speaker 5: killed her, and so she was very forthcoming with information
Speaker 5: that we got on the way to talk to him.
Speaker 5: So what I brought up, I said, well, you know,
Speaker 5: your sister has talked to me and she's told me
Speaker 5: that you're really a pretty nice guy. I said, And
Speaker 5: I know that your mom and dad are gone, and
Speaker 5: that you've been there to visit their burial site. I said,
Speaker 5: what are we going to do about Ginger? I said,
Speaker 5: the family will never believe that she's really dead until
Speaker 5: they know she's in the ground. I said, it's not
Speaker 5: fair that they go to an empty coffin to pay
Speaker 5: their respects because they'll never believe that she's really dead.
Speaker 5: They'll think she's out there somewhere hurt. I said, so
Speaker 5: we have to find her. We've got to put her
Speaker 5: back in a coffin so that the family can bury
Speaker 5: her and put this behind them. He goes, well, her
Speaker 5: daughter's never did anything for me, and that was true.
Speaker 5: They didn't like him at all. They were kind of
Speaker 5: mean to him because he was a jerk. But what
Speaker 5: I told him then I told him another lie. And
Speaker 5: I said, well, I hate to hear you say that, Joe,
Speaker 5: because Alicia had nothing but good things to say about
Speaker 5: you and the way you treated her mom and how
Speaker 5: you were in love. I said, and I hate to
Speaker 5: hear you say that because that's not true. It's not
Speaker 5: right to talk about her that way. I said, she's
Speaker 5: a good girl and you shouldn't be talking about her
Speaker 5: like that. And he goes, I know I'm sorry, and
Speaker 5: he goes, well, he says, you know, I could show
Speaker 5: you where they're at. He said, but I can't. I
Speaker 5: can't tell you. He said, I can show you, and
Speaker 5: I said, well, well, can you draw a map? And
Speaker 5: he goes no, Because I'm thinking I've got to extradite
Speaker 5: him the next day too late that day, we'd have
Speaker 5: to wait till the next morning to get him. And
Speaker 5: so he come up with the idea. He goes, I'll
Speaker 5: go with you right now to show you where the
Speaker 5: body parts are. And I said, well, Joe, I can't
Speaker 5: take you. I have to extradite you first. He goes,
Speaker 5: if you take me to court first, forget it. He said,
Speaker 5: I'm not I'm not going to show you nothing. I'm
Speaker 5: not going to talk to you no more if you
Speaker 5: don't let me show you right now. So that's when
Speaker 5: we had to hustle and try to find out if
Speaker 5: we could, and we found out we could. We were
Speaker 5: told by the prosecutors. But guess who gets to sign
Speaker 5: him out of jail?
Speaker 7: Rick Reed.
Speaker 4: I thought, oh my god.
Speaker 5: You know I'm going to go to prison for the
Speaker 5: rest of my life for this. That was kind of scary.
Speaker 5: That's probably The scariest thing I did was taking the
Speaker 5: risk that I wasn't like a constitutionally violating this man, sure,
Speaker 5: because I just didn't know. I mean, I knew enough
Speaker 5: about the law that I thought I was okay. But
Speaker 5: basically what I was doing was the humane thing to do,
Speaker 5: the right thing to do, you know, get the woman
Speaker 5: body back to her family. And if you get in trouble,
Speaker 5: you get in trouble.
Speaker 6: Right right now, we won't get we won't have time
Speaker 6: to go into the trial, but maybe you can tell
Speaker 6: us what were the circumstances under which Joe Brown confessed
Speaker 6: and claimed that he had killed these other women.
Speaker 5: About oh maybe. It took about a year to go
Speaker 5: through all these hearings before he was able to plead
Speaker 5: guilty and got life without parole. So during that entire
Speaker 5: year I had quite a bit of contact with him
Speaker 5: and his attorneys, and at one point they tried to
Speaker 5: file kidnapping charges on me for bringing him from Ohio
Speaker 5: to Indiana with that extradition. So they had gone to
Speaker 5: the FBI to see about filing charges against me, and
Speaker 5: Joe thought that was funny. He goes, I can't believe
Speaker 5: they're doing that to you. So he was writing me,
Speaker 5: calling me all kinds of stuff. And about a year
Speaker 5: or two, maybe two years after he'd been in he
Speaker 5: had been writing me letters periodically, and he sends a
Speaker 5: letter to the prosecutor, to one of our newspapers and me,
Speaker 5: saying I'm ready to tell you now about these other murders.
Speaker 5: I didn't know there were other murders, kind of suspected.
Speaker 5: But before he went for his ride to prison, before
Speaker 5: he left, he said, Ricky says, I've got something to
Speaker 5: tell you, but I can't tell you right now. He said,
Speaker 5: this isn't the time, he said, but I'll be in
Speaker 5: touch with you when i'm ready, and I've got something
Speaker 5: really important to tell you, and you'll want to hear this.
Speaker 5: And I tried to get out of what it was,
Speaker 5: but he wouldn't tell me. So then I get this
Speaker 5: letter and he says, I'm ready to tell you now.
Speaker 5: I murdered thirteen other women. And that's when all that started.
Speaker 5: So we started looking into that. But it was bad
Speaker 5: timing because I was involved in a case that turned
Speaker 5: very political and very ugly right after Joe's arrest, and
Speaker 5: I kind of gained the disfavor of the city and
Speaker 5: the police department, ended Attactives office, and pretty much everybody
Speaker 5: else because I didn't want to play politics with a
Speaker 5: murder case, and so I didn't get very much cooperation
Speaker 5: when I was looking into the thirteen other murders. That
Speaker 5: kind of got shoved at the side.
Speaker 6: So in terms of verification, it's still sort of there's
Speaker 6: still open cases. There is no verification that what Joe
Speaker 6: Brown had said it is true or or.
Speaker 5: Not, except for the one Andrew Hendrix that was founding
Speaker 5: up north of us. Here. He identified her. He told
Speaker 5: us about the murder, told us how he left her
Speaker 5: by the side of the road, and gave us great detail,
Speaker 5: so much detailed things that weren't even in the Corners report.
Speaker 5: But the family verified and we were able to look
Speaker 5: at the coroner's picture and identify some of the marks
Speaker 5: he said he left on her, things that only the
Speaker 5: killer would have known. And Joe picked her out of
Speaker 5: a lineup. We gave him a lineup with six women
Speaker 5: in it, and she was one of the women and
Speaker 5: he immediately goes to that picture and he goes, that's slick,
Speaker 5: that's her the girl I killed. So we know that
Speaker 5: he did that. One the others. We just never really
Speaker 5: got to look at him very hard because most of
Speaker 5: them were prostitutes, and in Evansville, prostitutes come to town
Speaker 5: all the time, disappear, they move from place to place
Speaker 5: to place, and a missing prostitute is not a priority.
Speaker 5: Nobody has a report, nobody knows they're missing, nobody knows
Speaker 5: their name to begin with. So it's kind of like
Speaker 5: looking for invisible people. And that's the problem with it.
Speaker 5: You know, if they're not dumping a body where you
Speaker 5: find it, then you don't have a case. So there's
Speaker 5: no telling the things that he told me about how
Speaker 5: he killed Ginger and why he killed her, and the
Speaker 5: fact that after he killed her, he put her underwear
Speaker 5: back on her torso he'd cut her arms and head
Speaker 5: and legs off, and then he takes her underwear and
Speaker 5: puts it back on her torso before he dumps her,
Speaker 5: because he said, I didn't want her to be found
Speaker 5: naked because she was a very modest woman. Yeah, that's
Speaker 5: kind of a crazy statement. But with Andrew Hendrick, he
Speaker 5: stripped her naked and threw her out beside the road,
Speaker 5: kind of facing up because he said she was real
Speaker 5: flat chested and she was humiliated about it, and he
Speaker 5: wanted God and everybody to see that she didn't have
Speaker 5: any chest and he wanted to humiliate her. That kind
Speaker 5: of makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, when
Speaker 5: you put those two things together, this is a guy
Speaker 5: that's telling you the truth, the facts. You know, there's bodies.
Speaker 5: There were bodies in you know, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Mississippi.
Speaker 5: I was never able to go to those locations and
Speaker 5: talk to anybody. So the offer of assistance by the
Speaker 5: FBI that was made to me was turned down by
Speaker 5: might have partner, and I never had to go and look.
Speaker 6: But in your in your mind, did you if you
Speaker 6: talk about the serial killers sort of mentality, Uh, And
Speaker 6: you know I've I've read a lot of these books
Speaker 6: and you know, I'm up on the subject as well.
Speaker 6: It seemed that even though it wasn't maybe as blatant
Speaker 6: as some of these serial killers wanting to relive their crimes,
Speaker 6: he seems to have quite a bit of that characteristic
Speaker 6: as well, that he didn't.
Speaker 5: Want it to do and was reliving it by talking
Speaker 5: to me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly when he could show me.
Speaker 5: All about it again, he was going through it again.
Speaker 5: You could see the look in his on his face.
Speaker 5: He was there again. He transported back, and uh, I
Speaker 5: didn't want to really do that for him. I wanted
Speaker 5: him to tell me where they're at. But I've still
Speaker 5: got a little bit of hope that somewhere down the line,
Speaker 5: Joe will break and tell me the truth. Were you
Speaker 5: aware that he killed his cellmate back in June? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 5: he strangled his sellmate, just like he did these women
Speaker 5: back in June. And he was telling them that he
Speaker 5: wanted to talk to me, but we didn't never get
Speaker 5: to that point. I didn't want to talk to him
Speaker 5: about that, and I didn't want him using that as
Speaker 5: a way to get me back up there and relive
Speaker 5: all this stuff. If he's not going to do me
Speaker 5: any good. Yeah, if he's going to find these women,
Speaker 5: then I'll go for it, But I don't want to
Speaker 5: dig all it up again unless it's going to help.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I could see what you mean being I mean
Speaker 6: from my own experience too. I don't want to enable
Speaker 6: these people with their fantasies getting to the crimes that
Speaker 6: themselves and solving them. That's one thing for sure.
Speaker 5: And I think he's got the evidence. I think he
Speaker 5: knows where it is, the driver's license and things like that.
Speaker 5: I believe he knows where it is. But if he
Speaker 5: gives that up, then it's gone. He's not in control anymore.
Speaker 5: He doesn't dominate them. If he doesn't have their license,
Speaker 5: we don't have the body, we don't have their ide,
Speaker 5: so we can't prove it. So he's still in charge.
Speaker 5: And if he gives that up, then he's lost that control.
Speaker 5: And I don't think he's ready for that yet. It
Speaker 5: may be a couple of years, he may never do it,
Speaker 5: but I kind of expect one of these days to
Speaker 5: get a call from one of the prisons that he
Speaker 5: wants to talk, and I'll probably go if he does.
Speaker 5: I would really like to find the rest of these.
Speaker 6: Of course, absolutely well, Rick, I also want to tell
Speaker 6: their audience too that you've gone on to write some nonfiction,
Speaker 6: and tell us the titles of your nonfiction books, and
Speaker 6: just give us just briefly you're what you're doing, what
Speaker 6: your writing career is, and tell us about the couple
Speaker 6: books that you have written already.
Speaker 5: Okay, after a Blood Trail, that was the one about
Speaker 5: Joe Brown. I really didn't feel like it was very
Speaker 5: cathartic for me to write about true crime anymore. It
Speaker 5: didn't help me get this out of my system. But
Speaker 5: fiction is just totally made up. It's like they say,
Speaker 5: no animals were injured in the making of this film.
Speaker 5: So I can create anything I want and I sleep
Speaker 5: like a baby at night. So my two books, the
Speaker 5: first one is The Cruelest Cut, came out last year
Speaker 5: and it's a psychological murder mystery. There's serial killer involved
Speaker 5: in it, and a detective named Jack Murphy here in Evansville, Indiana,
Speaker 5: and he's kind of a wise guy that doesn't let
Speaker 5: department policy or anything else stand in his way as
Speaker 5: long as he solves the case. He's all about the victims,
Speaker 5: all about solving the case. And so the second book
Speaker 5: in that series then is The Coldest Fear, and it's
Speaker 5: continuation kind of. There's standalone enough that you could pick
Speaker 5: up either book and read them in any direction, but
Speaker 5: they're all about Evansville, Indiana and surrounding areas and Jack
Speaker 5: Murphy and his partner Ladell Blanchard. I'm planning three more
Speaker 5: at least in the series. Right now. I've got the
Speaker 5: third book almost finished in the series, and I'm hoping
Speaker 5: to do at least five. Uh, that remains to be seen.
Speaker 5: I'm in about a week, I'll be living in California,
Speaker 5: moving from Evansville and quitting my job and going into
Speaker 5: writing full time. So I'm regulations, well, thank you.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, it's been a long time coming. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's interesting. I speak to some true crime authors
Speaker 6: that have started in other careers and a little bit
Speaker 6: later in life. And one guy in particulars he's written
Speaker 6: about twenty or something books already. He's writing a couple
Speaker 6: of year and he's just loving it. He's writing true crime, though,
Speaker 6: But given you your situation and your occupation, I also
Speaker 6: see true crime authors at say, geez, I just need
Speaker 6: a break from this, you know, because, like you say,
Speaker 6: it's very hard to write this stuff that's nonfiction. It
Speaker 6: takes a certain amount out of you. So I think
Speaker 6: I can understand you're you're wanting to write fiction where again,
Speaker 6: like you say, you're not so personally involved and and
Speaker 6: it's it's not something that you have to relive just
Speaker 6: to write the book.
Speaker 5: So I still have some compassion, some feelings for Joe Brown.
Speaker 5: He was like an injured animal, and you know that
Speaker 5: he turned out like he did. There was probably no
Speaker 5: doubt he was going to be that way. But I'm
Speaker 5: not saying that he should be excused in any way
Speaker 5: for what he did. But down deep inside him there
Speaker 5: was still something good that could be reached, yeah, and
Speaker 5: brought to the surface. And he in the end, he
Speaker 5: did the right thing. He told the truth, he found
Speaker 5: the body, and he tried to tell about these other murders.
Speaker 5: You know. So I think, way down deep there's still
Speaker 5: a good person in there. He's just he's not in
Speaker 5: control of himself. Yeah, he kind of about That's why
Speaker 5: I don't like doing that kind of writing. I don't
Speaker 5: ever stop feeling these things about my job. And that's
Speaker 5: another reason I'm leaving Indiana. I can't drive down the
Speaker 5: street in this town without finding a spot where I
Speaker 5: picked up a dead baby, or somebody's brains were in
Speaker 5: the street, or you know, and it just is hard
Speaker 5: to take. So I want to get someplace new.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, in California visa place for sure. Oh wow, yeah, absolutely. Well,
Speaker 6: like I say, I want to thank you very much
Speaker 6: for number one for pending this book. Blood Trail. Amazing book,
Speaker 6: fascinating story, and the real bonus of this is the
Speaker 6: detail in the confession. I mean, this is not the
Speaker 6: first book where the police claim to have had a
Speaker 6: brilliant investigator. I don't know if you're familiar with the
Speaker 6: Colonel Williams case in Canada, but there was an officer
Speaker 6: that had again a similar approach in that he did
Speaker 6: not confront them. He tried to build a rapport and
Speaker 6: then played upon the person's conscience to do the right
Speaker 6: thing despite having done the wrong thing and been a
Speaker 6: rapist and a murderer. But again at the detail in
Speaker 6: this book, it shows exactly how that was done. And
Speaker 6: then that turning point where your partner said, he's not
Speaker 6: going to tell us nothing, and then you say, hey, listen,
Speaker 6: why don't you go for a coffee, And then the
Speaker 6: surprise of surprises, the good work that you've done. That's
Speaker 6: the big results. So very very fascinating to get so
Speaker 6: inside and so intimate in that room with Joe Brown
Speaker 6: and those officers. So again, congratulations on a great book,
Speaker 6: and thank you very much for coming on True Murder
Speaker 6: and talking about your book Blood Trail.
Speaker 5: Thank you for having me well, thank you very much.
Speaker 6: You have a good evening for our audience. You've been
Speaker 6: listening to the program True Murder, the most shocking killers
Speaker 6: in true crime history and the authors that are written
Speaker 6: about them, with my special guest Rick Reid talking about
Speaker 6: his book Blood Trail. Thank you very much and good night,