Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
not intended for all audiences.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion these advice.
Speaker 3: Did it seem strange to you that you were taking
human flesh inside into the top.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that
the worst monsters are real. If you like true crime documentaries,
we make them. Let's head on over to our YouTube
channel or website Swordscale dot com for more info on
Sword and Scale television. These are hour long documentaries, cinematic,
really beautiful, beautifully shot documentaries about uh, you know, murder.
On October fourth, twenty twenty one, firefighters rush to three
eighty six Moon Valley Road in Dallas County, Missouri. The
name sounds like it should be printed on a postcard.
Moon Valley makes you think of a serene getaway with
cozy cabins and campfires. In reality, Moon Valley Road is
a boring strip of gravel that cuts through dense ozark woods.
These trees are so thick that they almost block out
the sky when you look up from the ground. The
nights are so dark you can't see your hand in
front of you. There are no street lights, no neighbors
in sight, only the kind of isolation where bad things
happen without anyone noticing. By the time they get there,
the fire is already out of control. Nothing on the
property can be salvaged. Flames shoot out of every building
and don't stop burning until they've destroyed them all. After
the fires are finally out, a Dallas County deputy steps
onto the property. The ground is soft and sooty with
wet ash. The black mud sticks to his boots, and
smoke is seeping from the rubble. The cabin is a
shell now, with the roof collapsed and the windows blown
out out. The outbuildings are mostly gone. In the middle
of the cabin's rubble stands a lone familiar piece of furniture,
a bathtub. The deputy wades through the debris, scanning with
a flashlight. Then his beam catches a wire, stretched tight,
almost invisible, still attached to two scorched posts. He freezes
it's a trip wire. He knows that if he moves
the wrong way he could trigger it and blow them
all to pieces. His eyes follow it carefully, and his
focus is locked on the wire until it leads to
a device buried in the rubble. They call the bomb squad,
who detonates one device on site and removes two more.
These are homemade bombs. The fire marshal will make the
easy call. This was arson.
Speaker 5: Scarce but solid details being released on what could have
caused a late night fire on Moon Valley Road hours
before Cassidy Rainwater suspected kidnappers were due in court. A
cabin where James Phelps and Timothy Norton had been living
burned to the ground. A report obtained by Ozarks First
Today shows the Springfield bomb squad discovered not one, but
two explosive devices among the ashes, and while it doesn't
say whether the fire was set intentionally, it does list
what equipment was taken by investigators. The report calls them
incendiary devices made with mortar tubes, balloons, and coiled fuses
with a trip wire attached. A Springfield fire marshal says
one of the explosives was detonated on site, but what
happened to the second device has not yet been released.
Speaker 1: The Missouri Ozarks cover more than forty thousand square miles
of rough isolated country, over half the state and twice
the size of Switzerland. The Ozarks aren't a true mountain range,
but a high ancient plateau of limestone carved over millions
of years. These limestone hills fold into deep valleys, Caves
run for miles underground, and rivers disappear into sinkholes without
a trace, and a lot of the roads are narrow
and surrounded by woods. What goes on in the hollows
is anyone's guests. Tourists come here for the fishing, cabins,
float trips, and lake towns, but the Ozarks have another side.
Civil War confederates use these woods to disappear and then
ambush their enemies. Prohibition gangs built stills so far back
in the timber that no one dared to go there.
Math cooks and armed weed growers still guard their territory
like they're at war. And then there are the legends
weird lights moving through the trees with no source, numerous
bigfoot sightings, and whispers of feral people living in the
back country. Out here, it's easy to go missing, and
even easier to stay that way. Thirty three year old
Cassidy rainwater didn't just disappear all at once. It happened
slowly and under the radar, the kind of missing person's
case that didn't start with a nine to one one call,
but with a gap in contact that kept getting longer.
Speaker 6: Cassidy was a free spirited girl, loud.
Speaker 7: If she walked in a room, everybody knew she was there,
but she.
Speaker 8: Had a beautiful soul.
Speaker 1: She was born on June ninth, nineteen eighty eight, near Lebanon, Missouri. Officially,
Cassidy's parents were Clifford Welch and Tracy Wawasuck, but she
went by Rainwater, a Native American name tied to someone
in her past, her grandfather, who happened to own land
on Moon Valley Road, near where she was last seen.
Cassidy had her first child with a high school boyfriend
named Ben. The couple tried to make it work for
the sake of their baby, but they chose to put
them up for adoption at some point. Regardless, she and
Ben remained on good terms. Later, she remarried and had
other children with that partner. Reports say that she was
still legally married in twenty twenty one, but living apart.
By the summer of twenty twenty one, Cassidy's life was unsettled.
She'd been moving between places looking for stability. Her first partner, Ben,
remembered being worried about her.
Speaker 9: She was in a bad way, like at that time.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure she was homeless, and she and I
were talking and was just like, you come to Kansas City,
we'll get things figured out.
Speaker 1: Searching for a place to stay eventually led her to
a small property on Moon Valley Road, a remote rental
cabin occupied by sixty year old him Phelps and owned
by a man named John. John Nucassidy's grandparents and suggested
she talk with the guy living there. Jim, living in
the cabin, had a soft spot for taking in women
and girls, but none of them ever said anything negative
about him.
Speaker 10: Okay, Jim, it's a friend. Once again. He let me
stay with him from time to time when I was
having a hard time.
Speaker 3: I have a lot of health problems, so it's.
Speaker 10: Hard for me to work, which is why I'm getting
a job to where I work on my own time.
Speaker 7: Now. Seems like in the podcast, but.
Speaker 10: Jim, he was really kind. He was a sweet guy.
But when I met him, he was a really kind guy.
Speaker 11: He was caring, He was really nice.
Speaker 10: No sexual relations, not like that out there. I mean,
I've met Jim's family, I've met Tim's family. They know me,
I know them.
Speaker 1: Amanda didn't just stumbled into this story. Her paths here
started months earlier when she met fifty six year old
Tim Norton, Jim's best friend. Amanda met Tim through a
friend who was engaged to his nephew and living there.
At the time. Amanda was between homes, so she moved
into Tim's trailer, which, by all accounts was a disgusting
pig pen. Tim was a long haul trucker and Amanda
sometimes went along for the ride. Other times she acted
like his personal dispatcher or helped with his finances. People
assumed they were a couple. Amanda says, that's ridiculous. He
was too old for her. According to Amanda, she was
just helping him in exchange for a place to live.
I mean, he was fifty six and she was nineteen.
Nothing to see here. Right months later, Amanda's living situation
shifted again. The chaos of everyone living in the trailer
wore her down. Tim suggested she go and stay at
his buddy, Jim's cabin for a while, so she did.
On paper, it sounded like a quiet escape, a rural
place with a name that could pass for a weekend getaway,
but this was no campground. The cabin sat isolated, hidden
from the road, with sheds of outbuildings scattered across the property.
Amanda says her time there was temporary, but her connections
with Jim and Tim were already cemented and they were
about to become a lot more than casual acquaintances. Let's
circle back to Cassidy Rainwater. Amanda knew who she was
because their time at Jim's cabin overlapped. Amanda remembered meeting her.
Speaker 3: I met her once.
Speaker 10: Me and Jim went over there because I had some
mail to hook up, because that's when I melt Millan
addresses right.
Speaker 11: Know, and her didn't really talk.
Speaker 12: She didn't She was kind of.
Speaker 10: Quiet, which I get a new person.
Speaker 11: I'm quiet too with new people, But.
Speaker 10: She didn't really talk. She kind of stayed to herself,
and whenever I went to go do something in my car,
and when I came back in, she had told Jim
that she wanted to leave, that she wasn't comfortable those
two many people. Jim didn't tell her that people were coming.
Speaker 3: Over and she wasn't comfortable with this.
Speaker 10: It was just me, Jim, Tim and her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't exactly a warm welcome. Cassidy, like Amanda,
wasn't looking for new friends. You could say both women
had retreated to the cabin for the same reason, to
escape drama and conflict and piece themselves back together. The
problem was that the place was starting to feel less
like an isolated hideout and more like the worst kind
of Airbnb, the kind where the host keeps allowing more
guests to book the place without telling you. According to Amanda,
the two tried to stay out of each other's way.
This was around mid July twenty twenty one. By the
time Cassidy went missing in late August, Amanda had already
moved out.
Speaker 10: I didn't really I tried not to get involved in
too much because I just I can't pay you bees.
Just I was like, I looked at him and I said, so,
how is Cassady doing? Because I was just kind of
curious because I know she's been struggling with some stuff
and I was in He was like, I don't know.
She left in the middle of night. I like, oh,
And then later I found out this she's missing. How
you know? God until I read the article and I'm like, oh,
this suff happened, and then I said it. In the
back of my mind, it was like that could have
been me.
Speaker 1: In August, a friend noticed that it had been about
six weeks since anyone had seen Cassidy. She was reported missing.
The last person to admit seeing her was Jim. It
wasn't the police who made the first big move in
the case. It was the FBI, after someone sent them
an email with photographs labeled Cassidy. The first one showed
a topless woman in a cage, and whoever sent it
made sure the FBI knew exactly where to find her,
or at least what was left of her. In the
summer of twenty twenty one, Jim Phelps was living in
a small cabin on Moon Valley Road, a patch of
rural Missouri surrounded by dense ozark woods. He was a quiet,
reclusive person who spent most of his time at the cabin.
His closest friend, Tim Norton, was a long haul trucker,
also with a habit of keeping to himself, and yet somehow,
women kept finding their way to that cabin. One was
a nineteen year old woman named Amanda. She also stayed
at the cabin for a few weeks after life became
too crowded at Tim's place, Cassidy Rainwater, whose life was unraveling,
had come to the cabin searching for solitude and some
kind of sanctuary. Like Amanda, she was private, guarded, not
quick to share her world. Their paths only crossed briefly
before Amanda moved out. A few weeks later, Cassidy was
gone too, but unlike Amanda, she didn't choose her next destination.
She simply disappeared. After six weeks with no sign of her,
she was reported missing by a family member. The last
person to have seen her was Jim Phelps. One night,
deputies drove out to Moon Valley Road. The cabin was
lit only by a porch bulb and their headlights. Otherwise
it was an opaque kind of darkness. They knocked, asking
Jim where Cassidy was.
Speaker 8: Haii Sheriff's office?
Speaker 10: How howdye?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Is a Cassidy here?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 1: No, I was seen her in Wait?
Speaker 8: Really, well, I'm trying to check on her.
Speaker 7: You know her?
Speaker 8: You know Cassidy?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know, Well, I've been trying to check on her.
Speaker 1: Jim Phelps over six feet tall, bald, with glasses and
a white Beard came to the cabin door, wearing only
jeans and a dog tag around his neck. He looked
relatively harmless, at least for OZARKI and Missouri.
Speaker 8: Do you have a phone number for her? Nope? Okay,
do you want to look at Oh? No, she's not here.
She's not here. She's not in any trouble. They're just
worried about her. Do you know maybe where she's at?
Speaker 7: Last I heard she was going to Colorado?
Speaker 8: Going to Colorado? Yeah, Oh, do you know what's over there?
She never told you?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 10: How long?
Speaker 3: How long ago?
Speaker 13: Was that?
Speaker 7: All right?
Speaker 8: Well, if she comes back, or if she comes and busys,
shed appreciate if you'd call us so we can tell,
you know, tell her family that she's okay. So all right, Well,
I guess.
Speaker 10: I'll be out of here.
Speaker 1: You mean to tell me that. In the whole time
Cassidy was staying there under his roof, he didn't even
have her phone number. Come on. Just a few weeks later,
on September sixteenth, twenty twenty one, an anonymous email lands
in the FBI's tip line inbox. Attached are pictures, all
labeled with the same name Cassidy. The first picture stops
the FBI agent cold. It's a woman in a cage,
blonde hair bear from the waist up, crouched in the
cage with her knees pulled tightly against her chest. She
has a vacant stare in between and the steel bars.
He sees the room behind. This is a large animal cage,
but it's inside a room. It's inside someone's house. He
clicks to the next frame, and the scenery is outside
old weather sheds, piles of scrap, and a tall metal frame.
To most people it's nothing, but he's seen enough hunting
setups to know what this is. A deer gantry. The
details fall into place in his head, the wood grain
on the walls, the layout of the yard and all
of its clutter. Whoever sent him this email wasn't trying
to hide anything. They wanted him to know exactly where
this was. And as he stares at the screen, one
thought is very clear. Whatever is happening out there on
Moon Valley Road, it's probably already too late to stop it.
On the same day, Dallas County detectives get a warrant
and show up in broad daylight. They want to compare
the scenery to the photos this time, the officer stops
the car halfway up the gravel lane when he sees
Jim's dog on a long leash, and then spots Jim
walking slowly across the yard. Now he's fully clothed, but
still is nonchalant as last time. Nope, I haven't seen her.
Speaker 12: Hello, how you doing okay? Yeah, uh well, I was
just following up with you on Cassidy and it's been once.
Speaker 3: It been a couple of weeks since we've been here, and.
Speaker 12: We haven't heard a peep out over you know, So
I'm just gonna see maybe you'd heard anything out of
her or anything extra. You can send us to do
follow ups arm some We're coming up pretty.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 12: He doesn't like it, does he?
Speaker 1: Actually, he wants you to play with him. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 12: The the last time I was here, I was walking
by him and.
Speaker 7: He grabbed hold of me.
Speaker 12: I didn't know if he was trying to play or.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: The dog looks well cared for. So does Jim actually,
but as unbothered as he seems, his posture says a lot.
While his voice is easy, his words are compliant. He
almost immediately folds his arms tightly across his chest. They
call that a defensive posture.
Speaker 7: Jim.
Speaker 12: The last time I was here, let me get a
piece of paper. I uh, I got to do a
big report on it and stuff, and I have, Jim felt,
but I won't have any room for it.
Speaker 1: I just wonder if I get that from you? Okay,
Jim Phelps?
Speaker 7: Is it Jim James Eliot Man.
Speaker 1: James Philps.
Speaker 7: What's your data? Birth January thirteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: If you pay close attention, Jim is getting increasingly anxious.
Listen for his nervous laugh.
Speaker 7: I guess you know your social.
Speaker 14: Media thirteen years in military? Yeah, I know, Yeah, you
remember those things after that, long after the.
Speaker 1: First day or so.
Speaker 14: Yeah, remember you remember it.
Speaker 1: You don't want to have to go back there dig
it out?
Speaker 3: What's that number again?
Speaker 14: I remember going to go through MEPs.
Speaker 3: It was like, because I didn't know mine, I had
my car. It's like every time I turned around, I
was digging it out.
Speaker 5: By the end of that day.
Speaker 12: I had it by the end of the first day,
rattled it off without a problem.
Speaker 1: And you still can't today.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 12: There was a picture that I had come across of
Cassidy and I was wondering if it was done here,
would you mind if I looked at your backyard? In
my backyard, Yeah, there's a picture taken over with a
stump in the background. Do you have anything like that in.
Speaker 4: The back yard.
Speaker 7: I don't have a stump.
Speaker 4: Stump.
Speaker 12: You might have to take a look recruiting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, back, here's my boy.
Speaker 1: Jim tries to brush it off, saying the only thing
back there is this hoist. But once they step into
the yard, it's like walking right into the pictures themselves
three D now, not just images on a page. The hoist,
the clutter, the leaning sheds, every detail of the image
lines up.
Speaker 12: Get up against that truck right now. Get your hands
on that truck. Do not fuck with me. Get up
there on that truck, on the truck, hands behind your back.
Speaker 4: What's going on?
Speaker 7: Kay?
Speaker 12: Going on, mister Phelps? Yeah, the right to remain silent.
Anything you say cannon willbeasies against you in a court
of law.
Speaker 1: You know how the rest of that goes. In fact,
you probably have it memorized.
Speaker 12: You understand your rights. Yeah, Okay, what's going on right now?
You're under arrest for the homicide of Cassidy Rainwater.
Speaker 3: What's the app of my dog.
Speaker 7: We'll talk about that in just a little bit.
Speaker 1: To understand who Jim Phelps was, you have to hear
from John Warren. He's the man who actually owned the
cabin on Moon Valley Road. He wasn't just a landlord.
He was family. He was Jim Phelps's brother in law
and rented property to Jim for a mere two hundred
dollars a month plus utilities. Keep in mind the place
was no mansion. This guy also knew Cassidy because her grandfather,
Bill Rainwater, used to be his neighbor.
Speaker 3: So that's when you met Cassie. When she's a kid.
Speaker 4: She was just who came out of the film one day.
Speaker 2: I kind of find out about two years later her
mother disappeared, and about twenty years later who had done it?
Speaker 4: Him? When how it happened that her boyfriend meet her
death and put her in.
Speaker 2: A box and to grew out in a very in
shallow gray on the intro. Found that out twenty years later.
Speaker 4: Where was that over Lukely again?
Speaker 3: Who was your boyfriend?
Speaker 4: I don't know. Bill told me about it.
Speaker 1: In other words, John Warren wasn't just Jim Phelps landlord
and brother in law. He was linked to all of them.
He tied Jim to the property, and he tied Cassidy
to a family history already marked by violence. Her mother's murder,
hidden for twenty years, had only come to light a
few years before Cassidy herself would disappear. John said Cassidy
was going through a hard time. Finding out her mother
was murdered was probably part of that, and so he
and his wife were trying to help her.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, robbing head and that you go to sut
because now you get.
Speaker 7: It.
Speaker 1: Seemed like John Warren was kind of a grandfather to Cassidy.
He tried to help her, but she stole from his wife,
and he continued trying to help a recovering addict. He
told Jim Phelps that to use his property there was
a zero tolerance policy for drugs. He told Cassidy the
same thing before he allowed her to stay on the
property with Jim. By the time Cassidy was staying there,
Amanda had already been in and out of the cabin.
Their time overlapped, and Amanda remembered Cassidy as quiet and uneasy,
not comfortable with strangers coming around. Apparently, John, the property
owner felt the same way. Yet another friend of Tim's
was making herself at home without getting permission and this little.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I was.
Speaker 4: Not got anything on wast uh.
Speaker 2: And I said you might want to us mom on
hood if are you And she told me.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm Tim's friend.
Speaker 2: Well, Tams friends, you need to use your ass down
here and get your.
Speaker 4: Stuff back your lean because does not are the deal orderstand.
Speaker 2: He's a caplace, he's working there.
Speaker 15: All week and she's staying there. Desn't try to find out?
Uh recent that they called me Jim was in the.
Speaker 4: Hospital and just person was in the.
Speaker 2: Camps getting you out of there as as she walked
out door locked on the door because of MS in
my hospital and kill as the other key.
Speaker 3: Jim's at the hospital and you kt Tim's friend out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a friend out and uh that was an amazing thing.
Kim was able to come down and pick her up.
And he was supposed to be there until two or
three days m h. And imagine that he actually was
able to show up a couple of hours later.
Speaker 1: None of this was sitting well with John. He made
it clear he didn't like Tim hanging around the property.
Tim always seemed to be lurking around the corner, quick
to show up, always in Jim's shadow. John said he
never wanted him out there in the first place. Meanwhile,
on September sixteenth, Jim was already in custody. Deputies sit
him down and ask about Cassidy. He doesn't give them much.
He sticks to his story. She talked about going to Colorado.
She left in the middle of the night, someone picked
her up, and he hadn't seen her since. When they press,
he deflects, even whining about his dog, and then he
shuts up completely. He wants a lawyer, he says. Investigators
still have an angle. Though his friend Tim Norton, it
seems pretty clear he's a big player in whatever happened
to Cassidy, and if he isn't an active participant, he
at least knows stuff, a lot of stuff. Detectives bring
him into another room. Compared to Jim, he is easier prey.
Where Jim had clammed up, Tim talked so much that
he couldn't hold his story straight for more than five minutes.
At first, he flat out to nies knowing anything about
Cassidy's disappearance. He says he didn't see her, doesn't know
what happened and doesn't have a clue. But when asked
about her relationship with Jim, he's got a lot to say.
Speaker 3: Were they in a sexual relationship?
Speaker 9: Not that I know him. I know he talked about that.
She said she was going to do certain things, well,
that she would spend night and you'll sleep with him
and stuff. I'm lord, I know nothing ever happened, because
he always he was always aggravated after she left because
she didn't knew she said she was going to do that.
Speaker 3: Okay. So so it's your understanding that Jim thought that
the two of them may at some point we have
a romantic or sexual relationship, Okay, but you don't think
it ever happened based on non Okay.
Speaker 1: Both Jim and Tim were annoyed with Cassidy for different reasons,
but the property owner kept sticking up for her.
Speaker 3: I didn't like her, Okay. What about Jim?
Speaker 9: He do he tolerated because of John.
Speaker 3: He tolerated her because of John and John again being
the person who owns the property.
Speaker 9: Jim tried to keep her eye on the property for
a while. After a while after she's thrown the rings, Okay,
but she would go to John and get John. Okay, ever,
come out there and stay into Kevin. Jim hands her tighten.
Speaker 1: They believe John when he said she had stolen jewelry
from his wife, but John was willing to forgive her.
But later a collection of Tim's knives went missing from
the cabin, and Tim blamed Cassidy. Tim and Jim's plan
escalated quickly. What started as talk of confronting her turned
into restraining her and ended with killing her. By that point,
Cassidy had already spent time locked inside a dog cage.
Speaker 3: How did that progress?
Speaker 7: That one?
Speaker 3: I do believe.
Speaker 9: Progressed with him saying he wanted her dead?
Speaker 3: Okay, I was about.
Speaker 9: To tell you that she was accusing me and or
mister Fellows of kidnapping her or killing her, or I'm
not sure exactly what she was.
Speaker 1: Cassidy accused them outright of kidnapping her and planning to
kill her, and that, according to Tim, pissed Jim off
even more.
Speaker 3: And so during that planning process between you and mister Phelps,
was anyone else ever a part of that?
Speaker 9: Yes, there was one version, one time, maybe two times.
Speaker 14: M No was there.
Speaker 3: Her name was Amanda.
Speaker 1: Golly, don't let Amanda's small baby voice fool you into
thinking she was innocent. She insisted she wasn't his girlfriend.
He was too old for her, she had her age limits,
no X, nothing to see here. But she was much
more involved than she said.
Speaker 3: Fellows Kidd, neithers have ever talked about folks.
Speaker 10: They talked about, you know, like hunting stuff like that,
like deer and stuff, fish, fishing and stuff like that,
but never killing anyone.
Speaker 4: How about yea.
Speaker 10: They made jokes, They're like, oh, she's pretty, I'll take
her home. They kind of stopped, but you know, I
never thought anything of it, because, like I said, when
I'm a beast human they were sweet men. They were
really nice. They were carried.
Speaker 1: But their jokes may not have been jokes at all.
I mean, who jokes about that. Detectives were already onto
the fact that they weren't joking. They had text messages
and Facebook dialogue between the two of them. If there
was any doubt about how dark Jim and Tim's conversations got,
the messages they sent each other erased it. Jim told
Tim flat out, you.
Speaker 7: Need to bring me a woman. I don't care where
you get her.
Speaker 1: Tim didn't push back. He asked, where do you want
me to get her? Jim's answer was as casual as
it was chilling.
Speaker 7: Parking lots are good. Big lots is a good place
to people watch. I can watch women all day.
Speaker 1: And it didn't stop there. Jim bragged, I've.
Speaker 7: Been watching the girls in town. One day, I'm going
to have one tied up out here.
Speaker 1: Then came the line that made investigator's stomachs turn.
Speaker 7: I want fresh meat, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: We hear at Sorinscale, did a little digging and found
someone who almost got caught up and Tim Norton's web
This is red.
Speaker 16: So my name is Lauren. I at the time was
in college in twenty twenty one. I believe I can't
remember what month he got arrested, but I do remember
that it was about two weeks after I had met him.
After I had met Timothy, I was working at a
Buffalo Wild Wings in like middle of nowhere college town,
South Georgia. But whenever I was there, I had the
patio section in the morning, which was typically nobody was
really out there, and so I was just trying to
make conversations see if I could get a tip, and
he didn't really want anything from me, but he wanted
to talk more than I think most people want to
talk to their waitress. And when he had come through,
he had said something about being a truck driver from Missouri.
Speaker 1: Ren described Tim as looking much older than his fifties
and having what she described as a strangely flat face.
The conversation started somewhat normally.
Speaker 16: He started off asking if I like my job, and
I said, not really, but it pays the bills. He
had told me I should get a rich boyfriend so
I don't have to work this job anymore, and he
wouldn't let a woman work like that, And that's when
it started getting kind of weird. But it got creepy
when he started asking me if we had any cameras
in the parking lots and what time I got off work.
Speaker 1: The text messages alone suggested that Tim and Jim were
a team, just as they'd always been. There's not a
lot of information out there about who they were, but
they described each other as brothers. Within the team, it
seemed Tim was the scout, or maybe more like a
predatory lion, hunting during the day and bringing the kill
back to share.
Speaker 16: He had ended up telling me that he was a
truck driver from Missouri, and he knew I seventy five
like the back of his hand. And like when I
say that it sounded like a threat. Sometimes people don't
understand what I mean. But the way that he looked
at me and the tone that he said it was like,
I know where I'm going. I don't need to leave
a trail to tell you I was there.
Speaker 3: It was just it was weird.
Speaker 16: And the way that he looked at me and also
at a lot of the other girls that were working there,
just seemed very predatory.
Speaker 1: We haven't even scratched the surface here. Back at the investigation,
detectives had a broad idea of what actually went on
the day that Tim and Jim decided to make Cassidy
go away. Still, they had no idea how many details
Tim would give them, and it all corroborated what Amanda
was finally revealing, however minimized, she presented herself.
Speaker 6: I tell you, he didn't tell me he killed her, No,
but I know that they were jokes made.
Speaker 10: The jokes that were made was that if they were
to kill someone, they would cut them up in the little.
Speaker 1: Pisis that I'm in the Woods. Good joke, right.
Speaker 11: He never told me he killed her as far as
I came, but he never told me. Yes, we need
to trying to remember that conversation.
Speaker 3: If we had a conversation.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but if someone told me
they wanted to get rid of somebody and then joked
about how if they did it, they'd cut them into
little pieces. I kind of remember that. But oh wait,
just kidding. She did remember, Oh my god, I did.
Speaker 10: She was talking about how she had stolen something from
him and that he had he had helped restrain her
and die him and Jim like Apparently Jim looked at her,
and Cassie looked at him and said why.
Speaker 11: He said, because you said that.
Speaker 10: I wouldn't that I've done it before. I didn't think
anything of that.
Speaker 11: Oh my god, I thought.
Speaker 17: He was joking.
Speaker 7: I seriously did.
Speaker 10: Did me thinking it was a joke?
Speaker 7: Is? Yes?
Speaker 11: Uh, she's getting here.
Speaker 1: I guess it was all too easy for Amanda to
play dumb when the story lined up exactly with what
Tim admitted to telling her. Unlike Amanda, Tim didn't have
the luxury of hiding behind just joking. When detectives pushed
the thin wall denial cracked first to slip, then a fragment,
and then a flood. What he finally confessed, piece by
piece is the kind of thing you can't unhear.
Speaker 3: Okay, eight o'clock in the morning on in the in
late July. So the sun is up, sun, okay, bright
up in there with that, okay, so you can see,
you think you can see clearly, okay. And and the
person whose legs that you grabbed, it was cassidy ing water. Okay,
all right, So you you had you were holding your legs.
You you already described how you knelt down and were
holding her knees I think is what you said.
Speaker 9: Yeah, right out of the right under her knee area.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 9: So he did mootibilized all of her leg I mean,
I've got enough training and stuff and I don't know
how to do that.
Speaker 3: And then and then what did Jim do?
Speaker 9: Well there again because I had my head down, but
I really didn't see what he originally started doing. I
did look up, and he was trying to get the
bag of her head. Not not this way, just this way.
Speaker 4: And she was.
Speaker 9: I mean say she was yelling, but she was talking
a little louder than normal, okay, asking why? Why? Why?
And that's when I looked at him to see what
he was gonna say, and I seen his eyes and
at that point, I told you, at that point, I
wasn't sure about my life.
Speaker 1: At first, Tim said he just held her legs well.
Jim used a bag and then his hands. But as
the questions kept coming, the details got darker. He finally
admitted he joined in his own hands, tightening around her
throat until she stopped struggling. All in all, it took
thirty minutes to strangle the life out of her. Afterwards,
they left her body lying there before dragging it outside
toward the gantry. This was the same gantry that would
later show up in those photographs. The gantry stood in
the Ozark woods, where it held captive numerous corpses of deer, cattle, pork,
and who knows what else has the blood drained from them,
Only this time that would be a human. It would
be a mother.
Speaker 14: At least.
Speaker 1: This is the only time the detectives knew about that night.
The two men worked methodically knives, buckets, plastic wrap. Tim
told the officers how they cut her legs apart, piece
by piece. He described it flatly, as if they were
reading instructions off a page. Tim acted like he had
no vested interest in doing this, but he was lying.
He thought she was a liar and a thief, and
in his words, he didn't deal with people like that.
Speaker 9: And then he walked over to the crank crank, he
cranked it up, raising her up like you know, he
referred her to like them, and there's no better way
to put it to her head off first, wash Mason,
how country find you are to me? To big around,
which would be not unusual. It was processing a deer
or whatever. He took over her head, put it in there,
and then he started cutting, rode down the centers, so
all I'm running the guts.
Speaker 3: Everything went down.
Speaker 1: There, piece by piece. Cassidy's body was carved apart, dropped
into buckets like waste at a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 3: And so he handed you the camera and asked you
to take a picture. Yeah, and what did you take
a picture of?
Speaker 9: Standing there? To her?
Speaker 3: Okay, somebody, it's not coming in.
Speaker 9: I think he reached out a.
Speaker 3: Red for head and pulled it up like posing on
the body.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean he was standing up almost straight.
Speaker 1: Jim even had Tim take a picture he was posing
with Cassidy's head like a trophy buck. Tim claims he
was emotionless and just following Jim's orders. Hand me this
take away that like a butcher's assistant.
Speaker 9: He started cutting one off. And after he split her
down the middle, you're not just gutting or the splitting,
and he went to the corner parts there again, knowing
what we did with regular carcasses, he just begin natural
to do it.
Speaker 1: We know you love true crime, but if you ever
find yourself saying it feels natural to cut a human
into pieces, I'm sorry, but there's no help for you. You're fucked.
Jim wasn't finished. What he did next crossed the line
from killing to desecration, the kind of act that makes
investigators question whether this was about murder at all or
something far more primal.
Speaker 9: He cut off from moves. Okay, answer, you don't tell you,
I'll tell you. He put in the bowl, Okay, the
moves he's doing the book.
Speaker 3: When you say you're talking about the bucket.
Speaker 9: And the scrub washman of the washman, all the guts and.
Speaker 1: Everything, Jim was all about trophies. Apparently they got rid
of her like she was nothing more than a carcass
According to Tim, Jim had him dig a hole and
barrier head the visceral remains. The guts were carried off
in buckets and dumped in the woods. Let the animals
do their jobs. In Tim's words, the rest was butchered, quartered,
and handled peace by piece. When investigators later served a warrant,
they opened a freezer on the property. Inside they found
packages of meat. Some were labeled deer, some coon, and
every other form of wildlife you could imagine. But they
also found neatly wrapped packs labeled simply seven twenty four,
the day they murdered and processed Cassidy. This raised a
question darker than anything investigators were prepared for. Was this
murder for murder's sake? Or had Cassidy Rainwater been killed,
butchered and prepared for something else? And then the biggest
mystery of all, why would anyone, whether it was Tim,
Jim or another accomplice, send those pictures straight to the FBI.
It could only have been for some kind of sick
bragging or proof that more people were involved, and there
may have been more victims.
Speaker 18: Now there are more questions than answers in the disappearance
of a thirty three year old Missouri woman, Cassidy Rainwater,
hasn't been seen or heard from since at least July
twenty fifth, With Rainwater still missing, two men, Timothy Norton
and James Helps, are in custody in charge with kidnapping
and connection to the case.
Speaker 3: They're accused of.
Speaker 18: Locking her up in a cage inside this small cabin
near Lebanon, Missouri. Adding to the mystery, just hours before
both men were scheduled to make their first appearance in court,
that same cabin burned to the ground. The Dallas County
Sheriff's office has been tight lipped about the case, and
a lengthy post online the sheriff condemned rumors about the case,
adding quote, no, you are not entitled to a play
by play of an ongoing investigation. If you want to
be in the know, we are hiring, along with every
other law enforcement agency in the country.
Speaker 1: The property was burned to the ground just days before
their first court appearance. To this day, by the way,
no one has been charged officially. Investigators said it was
a propane tank explosion, but for a community already buzzing
with rumors of cages, body parts, and cannibalism. It only
deepened the paranoia. The Sheriff's department was frustrated and issued
a harsh statement to the public. But here's the problem.
The stories weren't all wrong. The cage was real, the
pictures were real. The meat in the freezer was real.
It wasn't hard to put two and two together. If
cassidy was packaged like venison, where exactly was this meat
going to end up? The Ozarks are creepy. Put it
that way. You've seen the TV show I hope. It's
a great show, by the way, and the characters in
it are pretty spot on. Those hill people are weird, man,
There's no other way to put it. By late summer
of twenty twenty one, Dallas County, Missouri was giving the
best example of what is dark and creepy about the Ozarks.
A lonely cabin on Moon Valley Roads, surrounded by thick
Ozark woods seem like just another rundown property, hidden from
view like so many others in the back country. Jim
Phelps lived there, a reclusive man with interests in BDSM.
His closest friend was Tim Norton, a truck driver who
hovered around Jim's orbit, more follower than leader, At least
that's how he described their relationship. Both men had reputations
for keeping to themselves, but also for letting strangers, especially
young women, drift into their lives. Cassidy Rainwater was one
of them. She was a thirty three year old mother
trying to put her life back together after years of setbacks.
By August, she was staying at the cabin because the
property owner told her she could. Within weeks, she had disappeared.
What happened next was no mystery of the woods. Jim
and Tim got tired of her existence and strangled her
to death. They cortered her body on a gaantry like
game and left investigators with photographs that looked more like
hunting trophies than evidence of a crime. They say she
stayed willingly, that she climbed into a dog cage willingly
and stole from them freely. But these allegations weren't true.
She had no idea what she was getting herself into,
and before she knew it, she was a captive. If
this could happen to her, who else could it? Or
did it happen? To Text messages between Tim and Jim
suggested they were constantly on the prowl looking for women
worse yet probably underage girls. They even suggested that Tim
may have been bringing women or girls back after being
on the road as a trucker. The messages were always
cryptic and coded. Wren, the young woman you heard from before,
remembers her first hand experience.
Speaker 3: One of the.
Speaker 16: First things that I thought after he left was, there's
no way that man doesn't have like people in his basement.
He's weird.
Speaker 1: What Wren didn't know was that Tim Norton was worse
than weird. He was, in fact a predator of young women.
Speaker 16: I thought that he was like a little too old
to be doing all this, and especially too old to
be hitting on women who were God, I was probably
twenty two at the time.
Speaker 18: Like he was.
Speaker 16: The conversation that I had with him, I've never had
anybody speak to me that way, so I remembered him.
But when that mugshot came up, I remember being in
my college apartment and it had come across like CNN
or some like big. It was a mainstream thing, and
I saw it and immediately I texted my friend that
I worked with, and I said, do you remember that
creepy guy that I was telling you about, Like, I
swear to God, this is him. And then I read
kind of more about who he was and what he did,
and when I saw trucker from Missouri, I was like,
oh my god, that's that's him.
Speaker 1: Fortunately, Wren had enough life experience and confidence to keep
Tim at a distance, and she immediately reported what had happened.
Speaker 16: I had talked to my general manager and I said,
this guy is weird and he's asking me all these
weird questions. I need you to, like let the other
girls know that they need to have somebody walk them
to their cars tonight. I don't know how long he's
going to be here, but he doesn't seem like he
has a lot going on, and he kind of blew
me off. And then, you know, one or two ish
weeks later, I came back in with the mugshot pulled
up and I said, you know, this is the guy
that I was telling you about, Like, I'm serious, we
need more cameras.
Speaker 1: Right before Tim left the restaurant after staying way too
long without ordering food, Wren remembered the feeling she got
from him.
Speaker 16: I noticed that he looked sort of satisfied that I
was on comfortable, like he really enjoyed that what he
was saying was kind of making me squirm, Like I
really obviously didn't want to speak to him, and he
knew that, and I think that that was kind of
part of the game for him.
Speaker 1: Wren's experience offered a glimpse of how Tim would operate
in public, unsettling, inappropriate, and just weird. But in his
own words, he gave investigators an even darker view of
what was happening back at the cabin where he and
Jim hung out. During his interview, Tim admitted that both
he and Jim were into BDSM, but Jim took it
even further. He interacted online with all kinds of women,
including minors, in his sick fantasy world. According to Tim,
Jim was more to blame. He maintained he had only
stumbled across the content on Jim's hard drive. He described
it almost casually, like it was just another hobby.
Speaker 13: He ever talked to you about those sarems, Yeah, you
mentioned that they were repellent stuff, and like, what's still
kind of chaverrages, you know.
Speaker 4: Some of them were more of.
Speaker 13: The darker BDSM and that type of lifestyles.
Speaker 4: And some of my lifestyle, so you know, I mean
I know a little bit about it.
Speaker 9: Most of them known from him, you know, as far
as what it is.
Speaker 4: And I'm a little hot, isn't it?
Speaker 3: What he didn't dobots maybe, but that you continue to
stay with it and.
Speaker 7: What like that.
Speaker 13: I didn think in particular that I don't know if
he got into it or not. I mean, he talked
to you, do he had to introduce with him, you know.
Speaker 3: Like well some of the weirdest stuff that you would
talk about in there.
Speaker 13: I don't know what he talks about in the cabins,
but he told you about some makes you went. I
mean you mentioned, you know, this person from Sweden or
this person from this country and some other.
Speaker 17: Guns he was talting to do about it.
Speaker 4: And that was about it.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't all of it. Tim downplayed everything what
they thought about, what they talked about, and what they
actually did. But investigators compared his story against the phone
records and Facebook messages, and the reality looked far worse
than what Tim admitted. Jim's collection of bondage pictures and messages,
all contained in labeled folders, included women hanging on crosses,
and women in cages. There was even a folder named milking.
This contained sick images of women tied up with their
breasts connected to cow milking devices. There were other folders
labeled kids in cages and nude babies, no description needed.
Speaker 4: He had never.
Speaker 13: Mentioned that she might be into it, whether you know
he'd be Will's trial. I mean, I know he has
some medius and sons, like what you have a harness,
it's some pankos, angel shackles, hearing how much sort of
stuff like that, you know, adult enjoyables, And that's what
I can play it.
Speaker 4: And then there's a tail in there and whips.
Speaker 1: And other things to each his own right, live and
let live, right, all that shit. But there's a big
difference between consensual role play and being a predator, an
older man waiting for vulnerable women to be delivered to
him or to stumble into his trap like a fly
in the grips of a venus fly trap, like Cassidy did,
for example. And it's an entirely different matter for someone
to end up the way Cassidy did in a freezer.
You've heard the phrase where there's smoke, oh there's fire. Well,
where there's a freezer full of human meat fill in
the blank. Tim had even written a macabre story on
the topic. Not only that, it's clear he did some
intense research on the subject of cannibalism.
Speaker 9: It's like, no, I do, and I don't want to
know why you're doing this, okay, because that made me
rethink of the story he had read when I was
kind of stupid and it was hard to have looking
for movies or so, and I seen it was what's this?
I don't read it. It's like, no, I don't want
to know if he's that's what he's finally doing because
I don't know.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 9: You know, if you've remember correctly when you said something
about cannibalism when you first interviewed me, I said, if
you can take my bunk shot, tell me if I am,
because I desire myselbject who I had if.
Speaker 1: I had hard to hear. But that was Tim telling
the detectives that they might want to analyze his blood
for human DNA like someone else's, if that's possible, because
if he had partaken in Jim's sick cannibal fantasy, he
didn't know about it. Yeah, sure, he's been to a
few barbecues at Jim since the murderer. But who was
to say, do.
Speaker 3: You know if his intention was to consume to eat
some of that flesh.
Speaker 9: At a time? Honestly no?
Speaker 3: But since then maybe okay?
Speaker 9: Why maybe because he cuts the genitalia out and he
kept it.
Speaker 3: And do you know what he did with the genitalium?
Speaker 16: No?
Speaker 9: I did not.
Speaker 3: Okay, as far as I know, thinks in a way.
I don't know. Have you told someone else something different?
Speaker 9: No, I've had several people, and it's running Joe the odds.
Then I was a cannibal, and then he used it
to make a sandwich with and several things like that.
He said, it's a Ronning joke, you know, And I've
done my best form of everybody. I didn't need it,
and I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah,
they still make a joke out of it, and sometimes
I make jokes with other people. I own just find
alone with the cannibal situation. But I didn't need any
of it. I didn't touch it. I don't know what
he did with it.
Speaker 18: You know.
Speaker 9: I know what I've heard, I know what what I've
seen on the Newson that I don't know anything else.
Speaker 1: Here's a good example of the way Tim would minimize.
He pretended that he only went along with the jokes
about cannibalism in jail because he didn't want any trouble,
but he later admitted to signing autographs for money under
the name Hannibal the Annibal. While Jim stayed silent through
the days following Cassidy's murder, all of Tim's minimizing and
Amanda's beliefs that it was all a joke couldn't change
the overwhelming evidence that both Jim and Tim had viciously
murdered Cassidy and Amanda knew about it. Eventually, the courtroom
knew about it too.
Speaker 5: Appearing in person for the first time since being charged
in mid September, James Phelps was escorted into a Dallas
County courtroom and asked if his defense was aware of
the new first degree murder charge filed against him. The
judge quickly took up his attorney's motion to set a bond,
with phelps public defender, arguing Phelps is not a flight risk,
having spent most of his life in the area, ties to.
Speaker 17: The community using white ball residence of the area, with
the exception of a brief set in the military.
Speaker 3: In Saint Louis for about three years.
Speaker 5: Attorney Sam Gearhart's as Phelps had only face charges of
writing bad checks and illegal hunting in the past, but
prosecutors argue Phelps poses a danger to the community, especially
those that are caring for Cassidy Rainwaters children.
Speaker 17: Saints position is he probably needs to be held a lot.
Speaker 4: For the community.
Speaker 5: City prosecuting attorney Jonathan Barker tells the court Phelps co
defendant Timothy Norton confessed to deputies he and Phelps would
search for potential victims online and at a local Walmart.
Speaker 9: This case that this particular is.
Speaker 17: That online is talking with the potential victors, even having
Jewish to appear at his location.
Speaker 7: The word.
Speaker 17: Itselfware code defensives to be brought back his location, where
he discusses with that that he really.
Speaker 4: Fast harm or kield them.
Speaker 5: And prosecutors also said tonight they are weighing all options
in phelps case, including possibly seeking the death penal.
Speaker 1: By twenty twenty three, the courts had delivered their verdict.
In April, Jim Phelps centered an Alford plea to first
degree murder, meaning he knew that prosecutors had enough evidence
to convict him, but he still maintained his innocence. The
judge senced him to life in prison with the possibility
of parole. In June, Timothy Norton pleaded guilty to the
same charge and received an identical sentence, life without parole.
As part of his plea agreement, charges of kidnapping and
abandonment of a corpse were dropped. Cassidy's son, Aiden, has
spoken about his mother, saying that even though his parents
gave him up for adoption at the age of four,
he loves her and no she did her best. He
admits that adoption was probably the best thing for him.
He's had a good life. Aiden has grown up to
be a very intelligent and talented young man who plays
thirty five different instruments and loves theater. This is what
he said at his mom's funeral.
Speaker 3: Think about the memories and.
Speaker 1: Just how great they were.
Speaker 3: She always loves the river.
Speaker 9: It was her favorite place, and I remember her always
singing to me as a baby.
Speaker 4: She was a great person.
Speaker 8: She was the hardest working mom I've ever known, and
I'm so proud of it, and I wish she should
know that sin here.
Speaker 1: Cassidy Rainwater died in the most horrible of circumstances, and
what they did to her body after was beyond despicable.
She may have fallen through the cracks at the time
she landed on Jim's doorstep, but she was a mother,
a daughter, and a friend. She just happened to be
a who trusted the wrong people. But the question that
lingers is bigger than Cassidy. Jim and Tim weren't just
two isolated monsters who snapped one day. They were predators,
and like all predators, they hunted where they knew the
vulnerable lived. For them, it was mostly women on the margins, alone, struggling,
sometimes with no place to go. But this was changing.
They started stalking in parking lots and restaurants. That's where
Ren's insight becomes so important. It could have been her.
She crossed paths with Tim before he was caught and
put away, and her story shows how monsters like Jim
and Tim operated not just with violence, but with patience,
with manipulation. They looked for weakness, tested boundaries, and moved
in slowly until it was too late. Fortunately for Ren,
she knew what to look for. She works as an EMT.
Speaker 16: I don't think I've ever ran into another murderer, but
I have, you know, worked cases where people are being trafficked,
and like on the side of the road, we're getting
people out of cars who are being taken against their will,
and it's a lot of the same behavior. It's a
lot of that, like I'm out to make you uncomfortable,
and I'm betting that you're not going to say anything
about it. They look for people who kind of don't
hold themselves high, who kind of you shrink your shoulders,
you make yourself small, you stay out of the way,
and a lot of people think that like being out
of sight in a way makes them a little safer,
and it just makes it easier for the people who
don't want to do horrible things to you to not
notice you, to not see you when you need help.
And like a lot of I've read a lot of
studies about serial killers, and you know, the way that
they picked their victims is who's the smallest person in
the room that doesn't look very sure of themselves.
Speaker 1: Cassidy may have been vulnerable, but she was strong willed
and stubborn. According to everyone in your that is but see,
Jim and Tim didn't seek her out. She landed there
and she became a problem for them because she didn't
want to give in to their demands. She didn't want
a sexual relationship with Jim. Even Tim acknowledged that, and
she paid for with her life.
Speaker 16: Another thing that I wanted to touch on is like
the packaged meat of it all, the cannibalism was the
craziest part of it for me to read, because it
was one of those things, especially like again, as the
information is coming out, you see it and it's so
out there and weird and wrong that you kind of
don't want to believe it. But then again, like and
especially getting in the line of work that I'm in now,
there are definitely people that, like beyond your worst imagination,
will do things like that or kind of surround themselves
with people that are cool with stuff like that. I
don't know. I don't know if society as a whole
just wants to push all the ugly stuff under the
rug and don't think about it, and that happens far
away and you know, it'll never be my problem. And
a lot of this stuff is happening like in these
tiny middle of nowhere unincorporated towns and like counties that
have just woods forever. It's hiding kind of in plain sight.
Speaker 1: Dallas County Police didn't find evidence that the human meat
in Jim's freezer was ever shared or sold, but absence
of evidence isn't evidence of absence bone appetite. That's gonna
do it for another one. If you're new here, head
on over to Swordinscale dot com for more until next week.
Stay safe.
Speaker 16: M M.
Speaker 14: Mike, you are so funny.
Speaker 15: You crack me up.
Speaker 2: Dude. Keep doing what you're doing.
Speaker 3: You're making so many.
Speaker 2: People laugh at but we don't sneak out, you know
what I mean, So all you hear is the negative
from the nagaie.
Speaker 13: You know, negatives, negatives.
Speaker 2: Take care, Mike, and thank you. Don't believe they hate
us