30 Years Gone

and it hadn't been on ice. Gary Don asks again, more aggressively. This time he is refused again. He hadn't even brought one of the keg taps back. Gary Don gives up. He slams the door of his truck, annoyed that he couldn't get the money back. It's April two thousand and seven and investigators are asking Sherry, who was one of the passengers in Ron Roses truck, about the night Janie died and what she thinks happened. There's no one down there fighting, There is no one doing anything here.

She had no one who did find her there was no boy that she was dating someone else's life, and you know all those unders that have always gone around. So that's why I just don't believe that anything happened there in all these hears in school, even saying they're rum and rumors among the kids. No, the only ones who've ever made allegations and who brought up rumor had been her parents and adults, not the kids. There's no way that if something bad had happened, it would have

not somehow gotten through the kids in school. Even teachers here things. The teacher's never heard anything because we see these outside. So I mean, I don't know. I'm times that anything happened to her. That same day, Investigators interview Kim. She says that September ninth, nineteen eighty nine, was the worst day of her life. Fourth day in my life. I I can understand. It's been thirty years and we still don't know how Janie Ward died. I'm Catherine Townsend

and this is Helen Gone. Janie's third autopsy was filled with observers. There was a representative for the Ward family, a forensic anthropology, and ABC had their FBI consultant, Brad Garrett in the room. Brad worked at the FBI for years. He worked on tons of high profile cases. Because of this, he got the nickname doctor Death. When he first started looking into Janey's case, even before the third autopsy, he

didn't think anything pointed to a homicide. Well, it was really unclear to me based on the initial evidence that looked at you. And I will say that it struck me that the Arkansas State Police really did a great job of trying to figure out what really happened at this cabin. And I started get in the flavor of and I totally ABC this early on was I'm not sure this is a homicide. It could be, but it's not in my mind, not at least at that point going together as sort of a clearcutter of an homicide

that it really could be something else. Is there anything specific that you remember about this case in terms of that. Is it more challenging than cases like it? Is it similar to what makes it different? The important thing for the public to understand is that people form opinions about what happens in cases. Obviously, families God bless them, form their own opinions because it's very difficult. And let me

tell you I've worked a number of child deaths. It's very difficult for parents to accept that, you know, their child in effect either died by accident or by their own hand. In this case, I'm not suggesting at all this was by our own hand, but the point being, there's like this opinion form. Then then the parents in a very rural county now are promoting that this was a homicide. They're not really going to be interested in anything but an outcome that says that. And you made it.

You said something in the program about talking to the kids, and you said it'd be hard to have a conspiracy if there were something like twenty people with a similar story. Yeah, I mean, I find most conspiracies laughable because you know, I used to hear these constantly that you know, the FBI colluded to cover up. You can't get two agents to collude on something, so let alone to get an entire system too, and what would be the motive of

doing that? But I realized that there was, you know, controversy if that's the right word, with a local judge and a local judge's daughter, and you know, allegations made with really nothing factually just supported. Of course, many of the suspicions that get brought up in the news articles about Jane and on the Justice for Jennie forums have answers, but these are still questions that get brought up constantly, and rumors continue in Marshall across Arkansas and as Janie's

case continued to get traction across the nation. You know, anytime you have I suppose public exposure of a case that draws particular conclusions, or you know, for example, when you look at the second autopsy, which you know, sort of reinforce the Wards belief that Godter was murdered, you know, you then you know, sort of get an emotional reaction from the community as to you know, well maybe that's what happened, you know, whether it's really true or not.

But you know, we're all i think suspect or vulnerable to the stories of others in driving our own narrative. I mean, that's the problem today and trying to figure out what's actually true, and certain people speaks to just accept it or question it as to well, that doesn't make any sense, it's probably not true. And so you know, people, particularly folks like average everyday citizens, they don't really know, I mean from the standpoint of what is it? What

does it take to actually prove these cases? Is there really any evidence to support one's or the other other than this sort of idle chat about it or what some media outlet might say about it. I will tell you because I've worked so many high profile cases that I just sort of ignore all that because you know, the facts are the facts, and wherever they drive you to. Now you know, sadly the facts don't always because maybe even the lack of facts or evidence, you know, they

draw you to not a really solid conclusion. When I talked to the ward's lawyer, Jerry Sallings, he didn't think the first investigation was done very well. But Brad Garrett said he thought the Arkansas State Police did a pretty thorough job investigating what happened, particularly because it was all

happening in such a small town. I know, I was a little surprised the witness statement seemed really short, and also they didn't I was surprised that weren't They weren't separated in question that night and in a more fair away, right,

because I thought that made it difficult later. Right, So, investigative protocol is supposed to sort of be the template of how you investigate a case, separate the witnesses, sort of locked down the scene, and basically you don't let anybody leave, or you make sure you've got the names of all the people that were there, which in a place like Marshall, Arkansas, shouldn't be that difficult. But you still have to understand that I doubt if they were

thinking that way. Let's face it, a deputy sheriff in that county, I'm sure doesn't make much money. That obviously affects the quality of person you're going to get. And again, it's nothing against the people who were there who did this, It's just that it's going to be hard to get somebody that really has a lot of experience or super qualified to work in a super rural county unless they've

got some passion about living there. On Janie's death certificate, both the and the cause of death are still undetermined. But because it's not definitive, can we say that the Wards are completely wrong in their perception of what happened, that their daughter was murdered, and can anything we find

support what the family believes. You're not going to make any family feel better unless it fits the fact patterns as to how they want it to be, and so could anything else be done in this case to support the family's fact pattern And I don't think there is, because I don't think there's evidence to support that. You know, like that one totally unreliable witness claimed that she was struck with a board or a bat or a club

and that she went down. First of all, there was no evidence, there was no forensic evidence on her body to support that. But again, there's nothing to suitue that

any of that occurred. So you know, I've walked away from a number of families basically telling them literally everything I could tell them about a case that was appropriate to tell them, and you know, they're just not happy with what I'm saying, and I fully accept that and say I totally understand, so that I can only be driven by the facts, my own experience, what the forensics

tell me, and I have to go with that. So you know, I'm open to if you or somebody else could tell me that contradicts what this sort of general conclusion is about this particular case. Great, but nobody has ever come up with that because I just don't think it exists. Now, I will say one thing about that you know, every case is like a pie. Investigators have part of it, The prosecutor obviously has a huge part

of it. The medical exam there and the medical professionals for instant anthropologies, et cetera have a part of it. But you have to take each one of them in perspective, you know, And what if you put them all together, then what do you have, you know, with all the failings and biases and pinions and so forth. But what do you have at the at the end of all that,

of that pie going together? And you know, and so I say that in that when you take the first or second autopsy, Okay, they found X or Y, fine, is there anything beyond with the medical examiner, Let's face it, that's a political examination of a body that's not with all the facts and circumstances that cops, detectives, prosecutors are finding through evidence collected through interviews with people at the sea, people who saw her fall, people who thought she was choking,

people who poured beer on her. If that was the case, all of these things, you know, the medical him were supposed to stick to his or her lane. This is what I found in the autopsy, and it great. And then you go from there. So what you have in this case is a third autopsy by a sort of a seasoned professional and a forensic anthropologist to tell you the fact pattern that she was beaten to death with

something is not there. We'll be right back. We've been able to answer some questions about the circumstances surrounding Janie's death. Our producer, Gaby and I sorted through what we know, what we don't know, and at this point what we

can't know. One of the things that the family thought was suspicious was the fact that Jannie's dad, Ron Ward, said that he had seen Jane in a different shirt when he saw at the morgue the night that she died, versus what he saw in some photos that the investigator, Bill Beach had showed him a couple of weeks later. We did look into the shirt and we did figure out some things about the shirt. So what were some

of those things. Well, we figured out first of all, that Jane stayed the night before the party with her friend Leslie, and according to Leslie, Janny borrowed that shirt

from her, and so she was wearing both. Multiple witnesses said that they saw her wearing the black t shirt over the white pin striped shirt, because, including ambulance attendants who were trying to revive her at the scene, they specifically remembered rolling the sleeves up and pulling up the bottom of the shirt to expose her stomach, and rolling

up the sleeves to expose her arms. At some point, someone must have removed the white pin striped shirt and what happened to that item of clothing is a mystery because we know that it was lost by law enforcement at some point. And that's just another one of the tragedies of this case because one of the biggest questions that the family had was why how she got all that debris under her clothes and what exactly that was. And of course you know, now with forensic testing, who

knows what could be accomplished, But they lost the evidence. Okay. So one of the other big questions that the journalist Mike Master said brings up and his column is this idea of the ninety missing minutes, And he brings it up because there's a police dispatcher named Harold Young who said that the truck in the route from the party to the bank parking lot did stop at the police station. So what have we been able to figure out about this?

It's very confusing. Well, I think the ninety missing minutes is like a classic example of something that was it was put out there and it's not necessarily correct because, first of all, in a lot of the early reports, I saw that the time of the sunset was wrong. It was it was described as being around six thirty,

when in fact it was around seven thirty. And everyone at the party basically said that they said when people when things started happening, when things started to go wrong, when all hell broke loose, it was around dusk, which would have been around seven thirty, not six thirty. And Harold Young made that statement, but he also said that he called the ambulance service, and the two people from the ambulance service who were interviewed by the police both

say they never received that call. So their discrepancies in Harold Young's statement. And Ron Kim and Sherry, who were all in the truck, they all told police that they never stopped anywhere, so they are all their statements match. Now, could three people have concocted a story, possibly, I mean, but their statements do match. And Harold Young GE's an outlier.

He really is the outlier in that. And I think another thing that we found that was really important is that there may have been missing time, but I don't believe it was ninety minutes. It wasn't hours. You know, it may have been half an hour or longer, but it wasn't you know, it doesn't seem that it was an hour and a half. I think I do think that's six thirty times probably could not have been right, just based on what everyone at the party. Everyone else

at the party said they saw. Okay, So another one of the big rumors is that she was hit in the face with a baseball bat and killed at the party by another Marshall High School student. People would often say it was Sarah, who was a popular cheerleader who came from prominent family in the town. Her dad was the judge. But it seems in our investigation that there's

very little evidence that supports that theory at all. We've really looked into this theory and the possibility this could have happened, but we just can't find any evidence to point to it. I mean, there are a lot of rumors about, you know, something that happened to the party, but again, when you go back and look at them, You look at the statements, you find the people. It turns out that, oh it's just something I heard. And usually they didn't even hear it secondhand. Usually it's third

hand or fourth hand. And you know, were there was there some truth to it, Yes, I mean Sarah, I think because she was a she was a judge's daughter, because she did have a temper. She'd admittedly like assaulted a couple of other girls, and she got in a fight with a boyfriend slapped him in the face. I mean, there's there's she had a temper. And also she told the police, she lied to the police about who she'd come to the party with, and they were inconsist since

he's in her story. So I can see where that all taken together could lead people to conclude she had something to do with it. And also a lot of people, you know, they just didn't like her. They didn't like her, they didn't like her attitude, and that led them to believe that she could have had some role in this. But again, like none of the forensic evidence points to that, not one person that the party said they saw anything like that. The one witness that we did find who

said she saw Jane's struck with a baseball bat. We've talked to her, you know about how problematic her testimony is. She's had a couple of different stories, and again, if she was struck with a baseball bat, you would see much more catastrophic injuries to her face. When I talked to the neurosurgeon the first autopsy, one of the biggest tragedy was such a simple mistake and something that should

have been corrected really early. Fami Malick referred to the injury as a hyper extension injury rather than a hyperflection injury, which you know, they're two completely different things. Then you have all this confusion about whether her head snapped forward or backward, and that led to, you know, the rumors that she was hit in the face with something which would have snapped her head backward, and that led to you know, who could it have been? And the doctor

branella autopsy. So I just think you can just really see how one little simple thing can just have this catastrophic effect on an investigation if it's not caught early and not dealt with. So throughout this case, a lot of what we've seen is that the wards will say one thing and then other people will say something else, like you know, they said they saw a clear fracture in the X ray when they visited the crime lab, but then in the X rays that they got sent

to them a few weeks later showed the spine blocked out. Also, they said that they received death threats, And there's just sort of some of these these sorts of things that it doesn't see. There's doesn't seem to be any way to prove one way or another because it is what they saw versus what other people heard and saw. Yeah, I think that there are some things that we it's very difficult to prove one way the other. Like, for example, we can never know what Ron actually saw when he

saw Janie's body. He described it, but obviously we can't know that we weren't there, and we also can't know, you know, when Ron Amona saw the X rays and they say that the X rays they saw later were different,

We really have no way of knowing that either. But what we can say is that they definitely felt that the system was not working, and they felt people weren't helping them, and they felt that people in power were being treated differently, and they also were afraid and they were so afraid that they moved and they put their other daughter in a different school and said they were getting death threats. So there was definitely they seemed to feel that there was an atmosphere of fear in the town.

When we talked to Richard Walter from the Vedok Society, he described a similar environment in Marshall, and a lot of other people did too. Several reporters said that people weren't cooperative or weren't helping. And then there was another journalist we talked to who said they received threats too. So it's only it's a few people's word, but we can't get inside their head and know their experience. We

can only report what they said to us. One of the most frustrating things we can't know is Janey's full toxicology report. Some listeners brought up this theory from the beginning. Could Janey have been poisoned by accident? At the party, the host Jay made PGA that's pure grain alcohol punch, and in it he put orange slices that had been soaked overnight in rubbing alcohol. Here's his interview with Bill Beach again describing the punch. There's been some discussion about

the fruit that would put in time. Was there any special preparations taken of soaked the fruit for to over twenty fires reven alcohol? What was the purpose for that? He seemed like a higher content. Danny koorol rode alcohol out, pray pulses or over the Very little alcohol and no drugs were found in Janie's system. Her blood alcohol level was point zero five. That's about one drink, but that's ethyl alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol, and in the

first autopsy, doctor Malick didn't test for it. One of the pathologists who reviewed doctor Malik's work in nineteen ninety two pointed out that the toxicology screens were limited to cannabis, ethyl alcohol, drugs, and lead. Rubbing alcohol poisoning is rare,

but it can be fatal. According to the National Library of Medicines Hazardous Substances Databank, it's acute potency as a central nervous depressant is about twice that of ethanol eight ounces as a lethal dose, but as little as one hundred millilters or just over three ounces can be fatal. So I had her producers Gabby and tay or do an experiment. We wanted to see how much fruit Janey would have had to consume to ingest eight ounces of rubbing alcohol. So they follow Jay's recipe and soak the

fruit for twenty four hours. Okay, so basically what we've done is we have three different oranges. We have an orange that's cut into pieces of four, we have eight pieces smaller pieces, and then we also have one that's peeled. With these three oranges cut into different quantities, we're trying to see if it's possible for one orange to absorb enough rubbing alcohol to be fatal. Basically, can the oranges absorb a lethal dosage of rubbing alcohol? That's a lot

about rubbing alcohol and not very much orange. It's been twenty four hours and we take a look at what happened. Doesn't look like that much of the rubbing alcohol was actually absorbed in them, and that was in our different control environments, and it looks like only about three yeah, about three ounces was probably absorbed by the fruit pieces. We determined that to get to the lethal amount of eight ounces, Janie would have had to eat around three oranges.

That's not impossible to imagine, but that's a lot of oranges, especially considering the fact that they smelled so strongly of rubby alcohol. But with one hundred millilters, she would only have to consume about one orange. In several witness statements, partygoers mentioned that Jane was chewing on the pieces of fruit. In fact, Ron Rose specifically said she ate a cup

of the fruit. He said she may have thought that this would be weaker than just drinking the punch, and in a police report, investigator Bill Beach said that when he went up to the cabin that night, he found orange piels on either side of where Jane had fallen, and though the orange PILs were bagged and logged into evidence, they were never tested. In that first autopsy, doctor Malick said that Jane had ten ounces of digested food matter in her stomach, so Jane was drinking and consuming the

fruit on a relatively empty stomach. He wrote, though that in the stomach tomato particles are encountered, no oranges are noted. We reached back out to doctor Grace Duke's, the pathologists who had reviewed the three autopsies for us in the last episode. First off, we wanted to know if doctor Malick could tell the difference between tomatoes and orange particles.

No one else mentioned tomatoes or a food of any kind at the party, And since doctor Malick only did a visual inspection of the food particles, could he actually tell the difference between tomatoes and oranges that had been soaked in the red PGA punch. Sometimes you can tell exactly what it is, sometimes you can't tell it all. But if she were not chewing well, it'd be fairly obvious what was in there, especially if it were a mix with just liquid where it could separate out easily.

If he says that he saw pieces of tomato, I would imagine that that would mean something fairly specific to a tomato, like either the seeds or a large piece of food. In terms of the oranges, it's kind of like if you were to again people choose their food to varying degrees. It's kind of like if you were to put food in a blender and blend it up a little bit. If you only blended up a little you could definitely still tell that there were orange pieces, you know how it has that kind of fibrous look.

But if it were, you know, if it were chewed beyond recognition, or it spent a lot of time in her stomach. You would potentially not be able to tell that. So the answer is maybe, maybe not. But people frequently will report which type of food items they've seen in the stomach contents. Doctor Duke's described some of the effects

of ingesting rubbing alcohol. The thing with rubbing alcohol being isoid propyle alcohol rather than ethanol, which is what we think of as you know, drinking alcoholic beverages would be ethanol isodprople alcohol. The effects of that would essentially be the same as ethyl alcohol. There would be the same sort of in an inebriated person, you know, impaired balance, slurred speech, things like that. The difference is that with isopropenol you're going to have more of an intoxicating effect

than with ethanol. So really the effects you see would not be different, they just might be more pronounced in someone who's ingested isopropenol. The level of alcohol that is fatal in a person varies quite a bit. There are some limits that have been set previously as sort of the norm, as in, you know, this is a lethal level when this is not, but that can vary according

to tolerance. Most teenagers haven't had enough, you know time to build up their tolerance, but it can certainly vary, so really the answer is that there's no specific limit. With this in mind, Janie could have had even less than eight ounces and had enough in her system to make her sick. Her mom, Mona, and people who knew her so that Jannie wasn't much of a drinker, so she most likely had a low tolerance. Isopropyle alcohol has a lot of the same symptoms as being drunk, drowsiness,

slurred speech, stumbling, headache, and vomiting. If someone is over intoxicated, their heart beat slows down, their breathing becomes more rapid, blood pressure drops. They may have seizures or collapse. They may experience pulmonary swelling or inflammation of an excess fluid in the lungs. This can make breathing difficult and cause oxygen deprivation. If not treated in time, it can cause cardiovascular collapse and death. The body rapidly absorbs isopropyle alcohol.

Symptoms are at their height from thirty minutes to two hours after consumption. The bottom line is isoproble alcohol hits fast and hard. Doctor Mallet noted in his autopsy that there was intense congestion in Jennie's lungs and in her liver. I wondered if this could be a symptom of alcohol poisoning. So those those autopsy findings are not specific to an alcohol poisoning. And when you say alcohol poisoning, that just that just means over over intoxication, right to the point

that it's toxic to your body. But there aren't going to be necessarily specific findings associated with it. It's essentially a It has a CNS depressant effect, and then if one were to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, then it would potentially cause general, generalized sort of organ failure.

But it's primarily based in the CNS depressant effect, meaning you know, depressed sensorium, which would eventually contribute to decreased breathing, which would potentially progress to death based on what doctor Dukes is saying. Just like we've seen before, so many of Jane's symptoms are not specific to her particular cause of death. But rubbing alcohol poisoning is possible, yes, So if it were president at a high enough level, it

would certainly be a potential cause of death. The issue is just that we don't have a level reported if it were present at all, Doctor Duke said that if it were to the point of being lethal, Janie would have been visibly intoxicated. In the witness statements, only a few people mentioned that Jane seemed drunk. One was Sarah. Sarah said that when Janie called her a snob, Jannie was stumbling up to her and warned her not to eat the fruit. Ron Rose said that Jane appeared to

be intoxicated shortly before her death. Jay said the same thing in his reenactment video. We may never know for sure what killed Janie, but we have to look probability, and we found some other pieces of evidence in the investigation that do suggest rubbing alcohol poisoning. Lividity or darkening of the skin due to blood pooling sets in at around two hours after death, but more than one person noticed that Janey started turning blue almost immediately. One partygoer

said she started turning a darker color all over. Then one of the ambulance attendants who treated Jane at the scene in the bank parking lot made the comment, she was not as blue as my genes, but she was getting blue, turning blue, especially blue coloring of the lips. Or cyanosis is an indicator of oxygen deprivation, which is one of the symptoms of rubbing alcohol poisoning. Ron Ward said that when he saw Jane in the morgue, she

had blood around her mouth. Blood in the mouth can come from gastric distress, which is yet another symptom of isoprobe alcohol poisoning. Another thing was that one of the ambulance attendants had smelled a faint perfume on Janie. A fruity smell can indicate keytnes in the urine, which is again another symptom of alcohol poisoning. As we said, alcohol poisoning can also lead to cardiovascular collapse, and in the third autopsy, doctor Plus did suggest that Janie could have

died from a heartarrhythmia. If Janie collapsed from alcohol poisoning, her condition might have been exacerbated at the party. She was lying on the ground gasping for breath when at least one person, in an attempt to revive her, threw a cup of beer on her. Another person had mentioned a cup of water also being thrown on her. This could explain the fluid in her lungs that doctor Malick

had noted in the first autopsy. So if Jannie was already suffering from over intoxication and central nervous depression, she wouldn't have been able to expel this fluid from her lungs, an she might have experienced some symptoms of drowning. One is that your throat closes up to prevent any more fluid entering the lungs, and when your throat closes up, that can cause hemorrhaging, which was noted in the third autopsy.

It's possible that at that point she blacked out. I hope so, because the alternative is that she was on the ground, helpless, paralyzed, and unable to ask for help while everyone continued to party around her and pour beer down her throat she lay dying. We'll be right back. The reason I'm an investigator is because I want to answer family's questions. But in Janie's case, I can't definitively answer the big question of how she died. Remember Parents

of Murdered Children. That's the organization where the Wards found doctor Burnell and the v doc's Richard Walter. When we talked with their executive director, Bev Warnock. We also spoke with their volunteer coordinator Sherry Nolan. She became involved with the organization when her daughter, who was pregnant, was killed. I was talking about and one of my goals as an investigator is to help families. But when I mentioned closure, she told us that isn't something we or anyone can

provide for a family. Well, we make sure we don't use the word closure. No one likes to hear the word closure. We hit someone here that used to say, the only thing that closes is the list of the coffin. The grief is so devastating to them. You know, it's not just have the funeral and then you try to recover. They have to go into the justice system, and then years later the pearl block system. So it never ends

for them. It never you know, and it's not something you can you know, after a couple Montiers, you know, you can kind of feel like you're moving on because you can't. You know, your mind is just consumed with guilt that you didn't say they loved them before they least, or you know, any other kind of guilt. There might be a lot of survivors. The healing process is to talk about it and to be with other families is to be able to talk to them because they understand

no one else would understand. But we also make it very clear that we understand the grief and the pain, but we don't understand individually their grief and their pain, because no one knows exactly how I feel. It was my daughter, my granddaughter, But I understand the pain and grief that we all go through, and I never you know, a lot of questions that survivors ask is when does

it get better when you get over it. I think that they answer that because other people say it, and so I always say, it's not that it gets better, it's just that it's different. Never say that they'll be healed. It's a healing process that will never ask never tell them that they'll be over it at any point in time, because that grief's journey is a journey that you'll always be on. At the beginning of this investigation, I thought that people might be more forthcoming because so much time

is passed. I also thought more people would come forward with renewed pressure on the case. But the thing is they might have already come forward with everything they know, and over the years there has been a lot of pressure on the case. It was reopened in two thousand and four, reinvestigated, and was a high profile case in the state of Arkansas. I wondered if anything could have been done for her at the party, could she have survived?

I asked ABC's FBI consultant Brad Garrett about this in all the stories, I mean, do you think that there's anything that they could have done more to help her? Well, you know, when you talk about people helping other people, you have to get to look at it in context.

Where are you. You're sort of in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas, which means, you know, the luxury of where you all are, Like I'm in Washington, d C. If you started to choke on something, you could probably get an ambulance and or the fire department to your house in five or six minutes. Probably not realistic. In martiall arc and they did in my view, and you know other could they have done something at the scene? Maybe maybe not. I mean, if you believe that in

affect Janie choked to death. If you believe that that, I'm not sure what they could have done unless there happened to be a paramedic or an EMT. But you're talking a bunch of high school kids. So the odds of that weren't great. And so they did really what I would think is the next best thing. They didn't wait for emergency services to come to them, if in fact they even exist. They put them in the back

of a pickup truck. Now, it was sort of unclear about how much of a lag there was between when she went down off the porch of this cabin and when she was actually taken. You know, I got different time periods. But at some point they said, we've got to get her to a doctor or to somebody that can take a look at her. So what ultimately is

Jane's story. Janey's story is a tragedy. It's a story about a town where there was enough distrust between some of its citizens and the authorities that wild rumors could be believed. It's also a tragedy that a lot of the people in Marshall, Arkansas are tired of hearing about. And it's a story about a family who never got answers.

Jane died in nineteen eighty nine at the age of sixteen, and her father, Ron Ward, spent thirty years investigating his daughter's death, which was almost twice as long as she was alive. Ron is gone now as well, and I can't help but admire him. He wanted the truth, He wanted to live in a world that had answers and justice. He wanted his daughter back. Throughout this season, people have continued to reach out to us about unsolved cases. Parents, siblings, friends, spouses.

They are all desperately trying to find out what happened to their loved ones. I think about season one and Rebecca Gould's father and sister, Larry and Danielle, who were still trying to get justice for her. I've learned a lot from ren Ward. He shows us that you can go a long way if you don't give up. You can get a case reinvestigated, a special prosecutor appointed, and even another autopsy conducted. You can also get the information made public so that other people can come in and

try to get answers. I've learned the importance of never losing faith in the fact that one person can make a difference. With enough pressure and time, anything can happen. It's a lesson that I'm taking to heart as I continue to investigate Rebecca Gould's murder. At the beginning of the season we talked about time travel. On that fateful night in nineteen eight eighty nine, many of the partygoers were teens themselves. Thirty years later, a lot of those

kids are adults with kids of their own. A lot of them have teens who are the same age as they were when Jane died, and right now those teens might be heading out to parties and cabins in the woods. I'm Katherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a joint production between School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It is written and recorded by me. Catherine Townsend. Taylor Church and Gabby Watts are our producers and story editors.

Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, and el C. Crowley for School of Humans and Connell Byrne and Chuck Bryant for iHeart. Our Field producer is Miranda Hawkins. Theme and original school are by Ben Sale, available wherever you get your music. Please visit us at Helegoon podcast dot com or follow us on social media. School of Humans