Episode 5: Bad Blood

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the way. You've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice.

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This is episode 5, Bad Blood. A quick note, if while listening to this season you recognize any of the names or locations that are being discussed and have information you'd like to share, send me an email at counterclock at audiochuck.com.

To understand why Rhoda McFarland was working at the Lane Bryant on the fateful morning of February 2nd, 2008, you need to go back several critical years before she was a store manager. To when she was living a very different life, focused on church leadership and service. We grew up in the uh Lockport and Joliet area. We were there all our lives and we had a big family. They were spread out throughout Jolietta and Lockport from my mother's side to my father's side.

Rhoda is the oldest. I had an older brother, then it was me, then I had a younger sister and a younger brother. From a young age the Hamilton kids regularly attended church and Rhoda herself was deeply religious. After graduating high school in the early 80s, she chose a path few women did at the time. She went to the Air Force, which she was honorably discharged because of bad knees.

She came back, worked for Illinois Gas Company, done that for a while, then after that she went into the ministry, helping out the church. Amen. The entity he's referring to was a church called Living Faith Church of Joliet, which was located in Joliet, Illinois. It was established in 1986 and by the mid-90s was a place that Rhoda, her mother Barbara, And many others in her family plugged in too.

A minister named George Asia Jr. and his wife Angela Asia founded the church, and in 1996 they added Rhoda as one of its directors. The operation quickly grew, and by mid-January 2002, the church had bought a big new building in the suburb of Crest Hill. They'd also changed its name to Embassy Christian Center.

It was several hundred members strong and sat on a nearly five-acre plot of land worth more than a million dollars. Documents I obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State's office and the IRS. Show that in 2002, even though Rhoda was an ordained minister, her most prominent roles within the church were as the secretary and the treasurer.

Those jobs required her to do things like keep a ledger of official church meetings, tally membership, execute documents on behalf of the church, and stay on top of the institution's finances. Mm-hmm. Her signature with its perfectly looped cursive letters is all over paperwork I found for the church. It's evident that so much about this particular house of worship consumed a lot of her personal and social life.

She also used the institution as a vehicle for a nonprofit she'd established called Princess Unveiled. This 501 was something very close to Rhoda's heart. It was a racially diverse program where preteen girls from the city and the suburbs could be mentored by older women, brainstorm about their future career dreams. Get a hot meal, and make friends. They learned life skills and didn't even have to be of the Christian faith to attend.

Rhoda's reputation as a leader for such an influential church like Embassy Christian Center gave credibility to her nonprofit, and it thrived for several years. Mm-hmm.

However, by the fall of 2006, Rhoda's family noticed a shift in her attitude towards church and serving. She was growing tired of the day-to-day of handling the church. She was the ordained pastor, she was the secretary, she was the coordinator. Basically had a bunch of jobs. On a random weekday in November two thousand six, Rhoda's brother Maurice got a call from his sister.

Details were few, but something had happened between staff members and the church's president and CEO pastor, George Asia Jr. He basically kicked them all out to church that night. The other pastor wrote it herself and basically told him he wanted everything they had in that church out of his damn church. all her stuff out and after that that's when she went into retail. So basically he fired everybody.

Why did this happen? Well, no one who agreed to speak with me knows for sure, but Maurice has his suspicions. Mm. it was all about monetary things with that cat. I guess he got upset that she would not sign that cheque that everybody's talkin' about. The check he's referring to isn't so much a check as it is a loan document. You see, in early March 2005, George Asia, without

Explicit approval from his congregation, took out a nearly one million dollar mortgage on Embassy Christian Center's building in Crest Hill. Just prior to that, Three other mortgages had been taken out in 2003 and 2004, which Rhoda co signed on with George. Combined, those three loans totaled about$870,000, a huge amount of money. According to Rhoda's family, she'd refused to co sign the almost$1 million mortgage that George eventually took out in March 2005.

Because by then, George was no longer physically present in Illinois to pastor the congregation in Crest Hill. Three months earlier, in January 2005, he and his family and a number of people from the congregation had moved to Austin, Texas to plant a new arm of Embassy Christian Center, which they called Embassy Nation Network. Rhoda's younger sister Crystal and her family were part of that church plan. We came down with that branch and moved here and That's Elijah Poston, Rhoda's nephew.

He was in elementary school when Embassy Nation Network set up shop in Texas. His family was close with the Asians when everyone was in Illinois and when a lot of the congregants transplanted to Austin. From the outside looking in, Elijah remembers that George and his wife Angela were as shiny as the future they promised all the church members.

I remember even being at their house a few times with people from Illinois and everything. We'd be over there. They'd have like get togethers on occasion. Up there he may have lived in a area that was well off. It was the same thing down here.

I'm pretty sure it's the Lake Travis area, so that's kind of a there's an area that, you know, you have to have a certain amount of wealth to stay in and everything and you know, seeing that even at a young age, it's like, Oh, okay, they're living different than we live in and everything and it's like I guess that's how Pasta's got it. The Asia's apparent wealth stood in stark contrast to the lives of the rest of the staff helping to keep things afloat.

He had a house over in Homer Hills. And that's a predominantly uh wealthy type of neighborhood. So he he lived a good life. My aunt didn't live like that. It was a more humble life and everything. So you could kinda see it No one saw it more clearly than Maurice, wrote his younger brother. I don't know how she met George Asia, to be honest with you. He was a real

character. And I'm being polite cause I really don't swear or cuss. But he was a real character. He wasn't the uh up to part type of pastor that you would normally see back in the day. about things that didn't have nothing to do with Jesus, God or the kingdom of God. People use church to do their devilish way. In the summer of 2005, months after the Texas church plant arrived in Austin, cracks started to show in both embassy campuses.

Shortly after we moved here, I don't know if it was a s it was between six months and a year, but we stopped going to that church and everything because there happened to be the falling out and everything up there. Now I didn't know

Exact details, but I knew it was something along the lines of hey, my family up there stopped going and you know, down here we're stopped going. And well, I'd hear her speaking with our family members up in Illinois about, oh, you know, this is kinda going on and they would have them discussions about how it feels up here versus how we're feeling down here.

So those are the conversations I would hear. Be like, oh, this is it's a little bit interesting. Something is a bit off and everything. And that's why I feel like shortly after the congregation moved down here, we split off. A year after opening its doors at a storefront in an industrial park in Austin, Embassy Nation Network closed, and the state of Texas yanked its tax exemption status as a nonprofit religious entity.

In the fallout, the Asias stayed put on their expensive ranch in a suburb of Austin known as Spicewood. They created, owned, and managed numerous LLCs and businesses that had nothing to do with ministry work. Meanwhile, back in Illinois, things appeared to be imploding financially for the congregation in Crest Hill. The building was over leveraged with all those mortgages to the tune of nearly$1.8 million, most of which Rhoda McFarlane had signed the dotted line for.

Why would Rhoda have signed those earlier mortgages for several hundred thousand dollars? That's when they was starting a church down here, so she must have thought it was for the church to start down here, so she went ahead and signed em. The maturity date on the smallest of the three mortgages Rhoda co signed for was late January 2005.

So, right around the time George and his wife left Illinois to start their church plant in Texas, the maturity dates on the other two loans, worth about three-quarters of a million dollars, were April 2008. and April 2009. As Maurice said, it makes sense that in 2003 and 2004, when things were good between Rhoda and the Asias, she'd signed the loan documents. She believed in the mission still.

But the fact remain, for several years leading up to George Asia firing Rhoda, there was a considerable amount of debt leveraged on Embassy Christian Center's building in Crest Hill. Debt that had ballooned with every new mortgage that was taken out. So I imagine in 2006, with George gone and the Texas branch floundering, Rhoda had to wonder. Where was all the money going? Why the need for so many mortgages? And when the banks came calling, could she be left holding the bag?

I asked a mortgage and lending expert I know named Phil Seaver, who is also a lawyer, to review the loans Rota co-sign to determine if or how much she could have been personally liable for. His interview was over the phone, so pardon the audio quality.

But he told me that if the bank chose to foreclose on Embassy Christian Center's building, then whatever the difference between the sale of the property and the remaining loan balance was, that would have been money George and Rhoda would have had to pay. Since they were the people who'd signed as guarantors. If there is a shortfall, then the secondary party becomes liable for the amount of that shortage.

But there was also another path the bank could take, a much worse path for Rhoda and George. The lender mate. not to go f the foreclosure route, they could go directly to the guarantor and demand all of the money from them, leaving them to go to the church to recover their money. In other words, if the banks came to collect and the church couldn't pay, the lender would then look to Rhoda and George, who would then look to the congregants, which by the end of 2006 no longer existed.

In Phil's opinion, signing multiple large mortgages for nonprofit religious entities is unwise. They would have to be intricately avowed to be foolish enough to go so. Yeah. And when you say foolish enough just because you think there's just a lot of personal liability you take on. Yeah, quite often the congregation is dependent upon the pastor. There's no congregation and there's no money coming in.

Very few attorneys would allow their client to sign a wide open liability document to guarantee the performance of the pastor. To be a true believer that would sign a guarantee for a church loan. This person who is a cosigner on the mortgage who's doing this because they're an associate pastor, they believe in the church, and so they are putting their name on this document that is indebting them potentially personally, but if there isn't a clear understanding of where's the money coming from,

How often is it going to pay the debt? That's obviously something that I think as an individual you would want to be abreast of to know, hey, what's going on. Good. This is person would sometimes a good Samaritan is pretty blind. If you ask Maurice Hamilton, despite his love for Rhoda, he believes she was the blind Good Samaritan, a once-willing true believer who got duped.

Some people see it, some people don't. I'm the type of person that sees you full of it. I never believed anything he said. He kinda steered away from me. For the simple fact he probably knew I knew he was full of myself.

Right after Rhoda parted ways with Embassy Christian Center in late 2006 is when she met Stuart Gipp. It was the night of his 40th birthday. He was smoking a cigarette outside a breakfast restaurant in Joliet when he spotted Rhoda walking by with one of her girlfriends. It was two women that was walking on the room. Alone. coming into the IHOP. So I don't know. I was just really uh hmm, just was mind my business boy. And some just said say something to them.

I said, how y'all ladies doing? Speaking plural to them, you know, but I could see her smiling more than the other person. I was like, can I get to know that smile? He wasted no time making a move. I introduce myself and I say that I know y'all waiting on y'all order and I don't wanna intrude and stuff like that and I'm like I say what's your name? I said, Can we exchange numbers and stuff like that? I said today is like my birthday, it's my fortieth birthday.

Oh, okay, such such nice. She said, yeah, you know, so we exchanged numbers, the sense of energy was so strong, it was like Okay, this is a safe place. They immediately became an item, and almost right away Stuart could tell something dark loomed in Rhoda's past regarding her former church. It was a priory vet that had fractured Rhoda's nuclear family, too.

When I met her, she was out of that church. So I don't know what went on in the church, but something that wasn't right in the church. When she left the church, half of the members left right behind her. But her mom didn't leave. Her mom didn't leave. When we met, I think her and her mom just had started talking back to each other'cause they wasn't talking to each other. Was that because of church stuff? Just top it so.

The real indicator to Stuart, though, that Rhoda had burned her Embassy Christian Center bridges forever came one evening when they were driving through Crest Hill. We was on our way to her brother's house, Maurice. He lived in Romeoville. And so the direction to get to his house, I ain't knew where the church was located, I didn't know until I happened the pass through that we passed the church. And she's like, That's the church right there.

right there, and I could see her demeanor, you know what I'm saying? And I was like, oh, okay, you know what I'm saying? I was like, oh, okay, you know? And I drove on, but I could see her demeanor, you know? She was angry, whatever it is about that church. Which is why it's very strange to Stuart that Rhoda's mother insisted her funeral take place at Embassy Christian Center. Her mother. It was about her. It was about her.

So Rhoda's mom really wanted the funeral to be at the Crest Hill Church Embassy Christian Center, even though that was a place that Rhoda had clearly Did it seem weird? Well, yeah. To me, well, I don't know too much about the church, really, you know what I'm saying? But for something that you know she despised it. Yeah. But you have it there. Unfortunately, Stewart never got a clear answer to that question.

He also never got to the bottom of what specifically had made Rhoda hate her former church so much. But he wished he had. Because when police interrogated him in 2008, they specifically asked him about this topic. Cảm ơn các bạn đã theo dõi. digging and trying to I'm and and I told'em it's nothing I couldn't give you information about the church. I couldn't. She never shared that with me. And you know, and I think that's why the investigators are on to me thinking like, I should known this.

But I didn't. We was only together 13 months. As part of detectives' deep dive into each victim, the police had discovered Rhoda's former connection to Embassy Christian Center and its new branch in Texas. Texas. Both campuses were closed by then, but investigators still had a lot of questions for George and Angela Asia, as well as the former congregants. Questions about the mortgages Rhoda had signed, the inner workings of the church, its finances, and something else.

There was also several burner phones involved. In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence. I'm Brandy Churchwell, host of 13th Europe Podcast. And I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week, I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box.

We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcast.

As part of the homicide investigation, Tinley Park Police obtained cell traffic data for three cell towers closest to Brookside Marketplace. They went through over forty-five thousand. Bones on those three cell towers for that whole day. The results were interesting, to say the least. About an hour before the murders, a phone located in Tinley Park with a Chicago number had received a call from someone with a Texas area code who was formerly associated with the church plant in Austin.

According to what an investigator told the Chicago Tribune, that call lasted about 20 minutes, and it pinged through the cell tower closest to the Lane Bryant store. Which meant the person who received the call had been in fairly close proximity to the crime scene before the slangs occurred. Unfortunately, due to delays in getting the cell tower data, the police said they couldn't determine who owned the device in Tinley Park that received the call from Texas.

Because I don't have access to TPPD's case files, I don't know whether the phone that received the call was a device registered to a specific person or if it was a burner phone. Ed Zabraki told me that investigators did see a few burner phones active on the cell towers surrounding Lane Bryant shortly before the murders. So it's possible those burners could be related to the crime, but they also might not be.

Since police had Rhoda's phone after the crime, as well as the survivors and likely all the other victims, I assume they were able to confirm the mystery call from the Texas number didn't come into one of those devices. Rhoda's family checked with her younger sister in Texas to make sure they hadn't spoken that morning, and they hadn't.

But the cell tower data and Rhoda's history with the church's finances were suspicious enough to police that TPPD and the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force flew to Austin in august two thousand eight. They wanted to further investigate the church and question former congregants. We sent two cops down to Texas and they they went to two locations there. But the trip proved fruitless. They came back and said we got nothing. So you know, at least nothing tangible.

They got nothing that they could use in this incident from that. There were some yellow flags, I think, but nothing substantial. You may have found smoke, but so what? But usually where there's smoke there's a fire. But until you find a fire you the smoke doesn't mean a damn thing.

In August 2008, when reporters with the Chicago Tribune were following this development, they found George Asia at a restaurant he owned, but he kicked them out and wouldn't answer any of their questions. When Austin based news station K E Y E T V sent a reporter to his door that same week, George only said quote

My family and I are devastated and hurt that we would somehow be implicated in the death of somebody we loved for years. I believe unfortunately that Rhoda McFarland was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't believe any church squabble could have led to anything like this. It's interesting to me that George referred to Rhoda as someone his family loved for years, even though others sensed bad blood between them.

By the time George gave this statement, though, Embassy Christian's building in Crest Hill had been sold for more than one point two million dollars, which went to pay off its mound of debt. Also, by that point, the Asians had transferred the Texas church entity to someone unaffiliated with faith-based ministry work. It became a life center with a new name. In January 2009, the Asias personally filed for bankruptcy, but claimed that several assets they owned were exempt from creditors.

These things included their nearly$500,000 ranch, vehicles, two timeshares in the Caribbean, household goods, and jewelry. Those items, they claimed, were necessary for them to start fresh after going bankrupt. I had a lot of questions for the Asias, especially for George.

The couple is no longer married, and when I reached out to them, neither emailed me back or picked up at phone numbers associated with them. At one point, I got one of their adult children on the line, but he never got back in touch. Angela has rebranded herself after her divorce as a life coach and founded Angela Asia Ministry.

Today, her website states that her community, which she calls the Crown Collective, is where stories are redeemed and purpose is reignited. She credits herself as a speaker, author strategist, and expert life coach. She even has a podcast, but only a few episodes are up. George has taken his inspirational aspirations to social media. True to your vision. Stay positive and train your brain. His TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are where he mostly tries to reach people these days.

The topics of his posts and videos run the gamut. From spiritual advice to gym motivation, it's all very intense. George A, you here? Wanted to say happy Sunday to everybody. Take the time. Don't give up on yourself. Don't give in. We all need to stop playing the comparison game. It's not about he who has the most toys win. My circle is super small. I live at this gym and it makes me happy. I get my dopamine. When you start to feel in down or heavy in your spirit, immediately address.

Don't let it simmer. Don't let it percolate. And some of you just wallow in it all day and you lose a day or two days. A week, a month, and then your whole life. Grab that thing by its neck, snap it, and move. I declare I'm here. Go on with your bad self, my friend. I love ya and remember you were created to shine. Charge, charge, charge. I've messaged George and Angela on their respective platforms, but they've never responded.

Whatever happened that caused their former churches to fail, and what exactly Rhoda knew about the inner workings of those institutions, remains a mystery. Most of the evidence I've found points to financial issues as the cause of the downfalls, but what the specific source of those issues was is unclear.

Where I've landed is that I have a hard time believing Rhoda's fallout with the church stemmed only from the mortgage problem. If she was really that worried the church loans would smother her with crippling debt because she was a guarantor on them, then why were, like I mentioned in the last episode, her personal spending habits so loose?

Remember, in the fall of 2007, she had creditors regularly at her door trying to serve her with papers about her credit card debt. And she'd bought that brand new Lexus, as well as had a habit of accumulating items in her home. Those don't seem like choices someone who was worried about financial ruin from their past commitments to a church would make. I have to wonder if Rhoda's dislike for Embassy Christian Center stemmed from something else entirely. Something only she knew about.

Even though police came back from Texas empty-handed, the theory that perhaps Rhoda had been targeted because of sensitive or confidential information she might have known about the church and its operations. was a theory that people like her boyfriend Stuart Gibbs put stock in. A lot of things go down because of money. It connects with the church. To me, that's just my opinion. They knew Rhoda was a viable

She left the church for a reason. People have fear of exposure. So when people fear of exposure, what And he's far from the only person who thinks that. Don Palacek, one of the first responding paramedics to the crime scene, told me an interesting story during our interview.

I have a daughter who's a bartender and um she was working at a bar one day and she had called me, she's like, Mom, there's two guys in here talking about those Lane Bryant murders She's like, You're talking about, you know, a trip And um stuff like that. It sounds like they're involved in it, you know. The manager rota is somehow tied to these this church.

According to Dawn's daughter, the guys at the bar who were discussing Rhoda's murder and Embassy Christian Center were either part of or very close with the church's band. After Dawn's daughter eavesdropped, she expressed to her mom that the guys at the bar had indicated Rhoda's murder was no robbery gone wrong. A hit job is one theory that makes sense. At least to Connie's brother Aaron Wolfo, Carrie's husband Tony Chuso, and former mayor Ed Zubrat.

He knew that he was going there for a particular person and I think everybody else kinda got caught up in the mix. My personal opinion is I think he showed up to kill someone. I think he was there for somebody and killed everybody else to make it look like you don't know which one which one was the target. Either he had a ax to grind or he was paid a lot of money. He was paid fifty grand to go in and shoot somebody. Chicago has a history.

And you know, we're not making light of this, but you can't dismiss that either. Ed's right, you can't dismiss it. Especially because of what happened in the weeks after my friend Ashley Flowers posted her TikTok about this case. We're trying to get in touch with as many people as possible. So if you have any connection to this case, If you know anything, if you are local and you've heard anything, this is where I need you guys. Do your TikTok thing.

After that video went out, several tips came in that alleged the key to these murders is tied to Rhoda's former church. Tchau. These sources claimed, albeit without proof, that some of Embassy Christian Center's most prominent members in the early 2000s were tied to questionable activities. Activities, violent felons, and some really shady business. Others wouldn't talk to me on record. I've never heard from any of them again.

So, why so skittish? Well, I have my theories. But my lending expert/slash lawyer Phil Seaver put it this way. It's called Phantoms. And it's pretty clear that Chicago's been well known to have the Phantom Historical for a long time. The Phantom System, aka people ghosting because they're afraid of the mob. Gangs. Take your pick.

But for some folks, a contract killing arranged by one of these underworld organizations doesn't make sense. If this was a hit, you find the target, you follow the target, and you take the target out with nobody around. And this guy didn't do that. I don't think it was targeted because why would the guy spend forty minutes in that store? If it was targeted, they would have went in and got up. It probably wouldn't even happen in the store. store, it would have happened outside the store.

Here's the interesting thing though. I think there's a small but important clue that suggests something was off with Rhoda outside of the Lane Bryant that morning. A clue that's been flashing across people's television screens and old news footage. For nearly two decades. First thing I noticed was, my wire's road apart like that. In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence. I'm Brandi Churchwell, host of 13th Europe Podcast.

And I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week, I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box. We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcast. How was she parked? But looked like she bagged in instead of pulling properly in. She just

went all the way across and it was just odd to me knowing how she was. Perfect Parker, never bagged in, pulled in or anything. She followed the rules. She like almost pulled into the next spring. Maurice Hamilton's small observation about the way Rhoda's vehicle was parked when he saw it on the news the morning of the Lane Bryant murders was something Marie, the Sally Beauty supply employee who worked next door, also noticed when she saw later news coverage about the crime.

Her car was pushed a little uh like it was a little forward, kind of taking up a couple spots. I don't know if that was out of the ordinary though. You know, maybe she was just in a hurry that morning or something, you know. I don't know. That Saturday, Marie had arrived to work shortly before her store and Elaine Bryant opened at ten A. M. I would get there probably nine forty five nine thirty to nine forty five. And at that time, Rhoda's minivan was already in the lock.

Marie didn't notice anything odd about how it was parked then, but she did observe that Rhoda was early, like really early. Typically I would see Rhoda in the morning'cause I was a store manager. We were both store managers. So we, you know, worked full time. We would open the store every single day together. So, you know, we would exchange pleasantries and that kind of thing.

On that particular morning, did you see Rhoda McFarland when you got to work or did you see that she was already next door? I saw that she was already next door, so I know what car she drove. So I noticed it was her just her car and my car in the plaza at the time. So I didn't see it. So she must have gone in before me.

So if Rhoda was already inside Lane Bryant when Marie arrived at work between nine thirty and nine hundred forty five, that means she would have had a chunk of time by herself in the store or possibly with the survivor as they got things ready for the day. We don't know when the survivor got there, but Erica Karstens, a former employee, gave me a rough idea.

We would usually get there between like nine, nine thirty because we'd have to, you know, make a pit stop at the bank if we had any deposits to make. Erica worked with Rhoda the night before the crime and remembers that the store had made enough cash to merit a bank run the following morning. We were slammed pretty good because of the even with the weather.

You know, people are spending, you know, fifty, sixty, almost a hundred dollars, you know, each transaction. So the money we did have it was, you know, pretty no I don't remember the exact amount'cause again, it's been years, but we had to have had some kind of deposit'cause usually on the weekends when I did work we had deposits in. in the morning. Would there have been a deposit to take to the bank on Saturday?

Usually there's like a small deposit, you know, or they'll get like changed if there was a really busy the night before,'cause we count everything the night before and then we put it in the safe. According to Erica, deposits were made at a local bank in Tinley Park that was located right down the road from Brookside Marketplace. Going on this errand was typically a team test.

Whoever was the store manager on duty would, you know, get the get the safe'cause we didn't have combinations. We didn't know the combinations to any of the stuff. They'd either have a key or a combination, they'd get the money out, we'd get the bags of all the money and all the deposit slips and we would get into whoever wanted to drive. We kinda just brought paper scissors, whoever wanted to drive.

Rhoda always offered to volunteer'cause she had the bigger car, so we're like, Hey, if there's a bunch of us, we'll just cram in your van, like it's fine. And we would go to the bank and the bank at the time was like a two minute drive. We would go through the drive-thru, make the deposit, and then bounce back before customers before we open the doors.

Even Stuart Gibbs, Rhoda's boyfriend, remembers bank runs in the morning before the store opened to the public were a regular thing. During our interview, when I asked him about his inability to get a hold of Rhoda on the morning of the crime, he said something. That at the time I almost missed. I said maybe she got tied up, you know. I didn't think nothing of it. Cause I know when she gets there, she takes the money to the bank and stuff like that. Yeah. She takes the money to the bank.

Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, have I found any mention by the police that Rhoda or the survivor left the Lane Bryant in between the time they arrived for work and when the attack began shortly after 10 a.m. But the detail about how Rhoda Rhoda parked her car makes me wonder if one or both of them did make a trip off site. If so, the natural question I have is. Did Rhoda notice something while parking her van that distracted her and caused her to pull in so unusually? Did she see someone?

If this bank run did happen, why have police never said that? I mean, there should have been a record of it somewhere. A bank transaction, a deposit slip, surveillance video, something. In a lot of ways, it could change what we know about the timeline of this crime. It could play into why the killer chose that store. What if he saw them returning with a bank?

bank bag, for example, thinking it had cash in it, but it no longer did. Or maybe he'd planned for cash to be in the store's safe, which is why he got so upset when there wasn't any. To Rick Bruno and Maurice's point earlier about the crime not seeming like a professional hit, I have to wonder the same thing. If this killer was truly there only to take out Rhoda, then why didn't he just do it as she parked her car? Or outside her home?

Home. Why wait until she was inside her job and take a bunch of other women hostage at the same time? Also, police told the press that he hadn't worn gloves and he'd left behind ballistics evidence and DNA. That doesn't seem like Professional killer behavior to me. There is a world though in which the killer could have been someone who had something against one of the victims, but who just snapped for lack of a better phrase.

As a matter of due diligence, whenever I begin investigating a case, I always take a trip to courthouses in the vicinities of where the crime occurred and where the victims were from. This season I found myself regularly riding the elevator at the monstrous Richard J. Daly office building in downtown Chicago. It houses several courtrooms and multiple divisions of Cook County Clerk of Court.

Think yellowed floors, lots of wood paneling, outdated bathrooms, extremely rigid protocols for requesting public records, and that's it in a nutshell. For nearly all types of court cases, you can view records online, but for criminal or civil cases that are older than a couple years, you can only view dockets and print out records in person at a self-service kiosk.

Which, by the way, is just an old desktop computer with a wired mouse that sits on a questionably stained and tattered mouse pad. Anyway, during one particular visit, I punched in the names of the Lane Bryant victim. To understand their lives I needed to know what if any litigation they'd ever been a part of.

That's how I found Chase Banks' lawsuit against Rhoda McFarlane for credit card debt, her probate case, which listed her brand new Lexus as an asset, and Connie Wolfg's family's petition to preserve physical evidence. As well as one more file. There was a mortgage foreclosure case titled City Mortgage Inc., Personal Representative Connie Wolfolk versus Jose Ruiz, unknown owners and non-record claimants.

The issue at stake in this complaint was a nearly$120,000 mortgage for a house in Calumet City, Illinois that the defendant, Jose Ruiz, owed back payments on. What really caught my eye, though, was the date the foreclosure complaint was filed, January 31, 2008, just two days before the Lane Bryant murder. I thought to myself, why in the world was Connie listed as a plaintiff on this random foreclosure case?

Well, it wasn't until I interviewed her brother Aaron and former partner Victor a few weeks after I found this filing that I learned Connie had changed careers not long before her death. My mom had just started up a loan company, mortgage loans, refies and um new mortgages and stuff like that. My mom always kinda been a entrepreneur, right? She always she did a couple of businesses, so yeah, d it was r actually really going well at the time too.

Connie had fallen in love with this line of work. She had a real knack for it. Very ambitious. Very intelligent. In the fall of 2005, her and her mother's business was booming, and in case you're too young to remember what the housing market was like come 2008, let me summarize it for you. In the early 2000s, subprime mortgages were all the rage. And then the housing market in the US crashed. People lost their homes, their jobs, their retirements. It was bad.

So because Connie's name was on the foreclosure case I'd discovered and I'd learned that she was newly in the loan business, one explanation was that she might have packaged this mortgage. But the further I dug, the more confusing things got. I pulled everything I could find about the Calumet City House owned by Jose Ruiz, which included multiple mortgages and what appeared to be refinancing documents dating back as far as the mid-1990s.

And nowhere on any of those documents did Connie's name or signature appear. Neither did her mom's or the LLC that they'd created called Mortgages, etc., Inc. What was evident though was that Jose Ruiz did not sell his home during the years he kept taking out mortgages on it. Which is why it was so odd to me that in 2008, when the bank came calling, he didn't respond to subpoenas.

He ignored an official summons issued on February 10, 2008, and another one after that. From what I was seeing in the court file, it's like after January 31, 2008, he just completely vanished. Even more puzzling, further efforts in 2010 by the plaintiff's attorney to try and figure out where this guy was or if he was serving in the military resulted in more confusing dead ends.

An affidavit in the case file that was produced by the Department of Defense stated that the military did not possess any information about Jose. Based on the information the attorney had provided the DOD, officials didn't know whether Jose was an active duty member, inactive member, or what. They weren't even able to produce dates for which he might have been one of those statuses at some point in the past. It was like he was a ghost, just one big information void.

I didn't have much luck pinning him down either. He filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and then ten years later in 2020, his home in Calumet City was ordered to be demolished. Now it's just a plot of empty land. All the numbers I called for him were duds, and I couldn't find any working email address.

When I finally surfaced from this rabbit hole though, I couldn't help but wonder, was this foreclosure case somehow connected to Connie's murder? It didn't really seem like it, but the timing was unusual. I mean, what are the odds that a foreclosure complaint seeking to take a guy's house from him gets filed in court? And then 48 hours later, a woman whose name is included in the plaintiff section is murdered in a baffling shooting that seems targeted?

However, if Connie was targeted, then I have the same questions I had when considering whether Rhoda could have been the mark. How would the killer have even known that's where she'd be that morning? Why hold up a women's clothing store she might go into? It just doesn't make sense.

I guess though, if someone harbored enough ill will towards her or blamed her for something going sideways in their life, it's plausible they might have been watching her and chose to strike in a public place to make it seem like a random cry. Whatever the killer's reason was, whether it's related to Connie or not. The offender was definitely someone who felt confident enough to hold up a store full of hostages, kill them, and then leave after he realized the cops were already on their way.

Is he heartless or unhinged? The answer to that question might just be a clue in and of itself. Because, you see, there's something about Tinley Park, specifically a former mental health center next to Brookside Marketplace and Interstate 80, that I haven't told you about yet. Tinley Park Police Department regularly was at this property for calls. You'd hear people say, Oh, it must be somebody from there.

Brookside Marketplace. It is right down Harlem Avenue. You take two turns, you're right here. The police were looking along high E. That's all they worried about. about with MVN and I need that would have been like the perfect place to hide. That's coming up next time in episode six, Hold Up. Listen right now. Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover.

I don't just retell crime stories. I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The results? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your