A Death Pact

that means hitting local radio. Everybody listens to Gary B, including hopefully someone who knows something anything new about Rebecca's murder. In September of two thousand and four, twenty two year old Rebecca Gould was brutally murdered in a remote area of the Arkansas Ozarks. Fourteen years later, her killer is still out there. I've come back to Mountain View with one mission to get justice for Rebecca. I'm Catherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. We're one month into our

investigation and we've made a lot of headway. We've talked to Chris and JB, the guys who we've heard are the police's main suspects. But the physical evidence doesn't seem to point to a frenzied meth murder or to a sexual assault. The blunt forced trauma of the head indicates that someone killed Rebecca in a rage. The lack of defensive wound seems to indicate that there wasn't a fight beforehand, but the decomposition of her body could have hidden them.

The one person we'd like to get in touch with, Jennifer, has left town for Florida, so we're back to looking for new potential leads. And that's why I'm sitting here in front of Gary B. Because if we can get the town talking, someone will say something that may give us the break we need. Catherine Township, Hello, Katherine. Hello.

WRD Entertainment operates six radio stations covering everything from top forty to country and heavy metal, and Gary B plays on all of them, which means pretty soon everyone in town will hear this interview looking into the death of Rebecca Gould. Yes, Gary B has a silky, soothing voice that's made for radio. It matches his personality. He has a grandfatherly, caring and completely genuine manner that puts me instantly at ease. Even though the case we're discussing is

disturbing as hell. I know things can get exasperating when you're investigating what kind of gets on your nerves about trying to follow up on a lead or something like that. Well, look, I think it's important to take a step back and remember that this is someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's family member, and if it was your daughter's sister or someone in your life, you'd want someone to come home. If someone

knew something, you would want them to come forth. I think that's a good way to look at absolutely absolutely, so that you know, the reluctance to come forward or kind of rock the boat has been a little bit difficult. And then also just the physicality just finding people, you know, as I said, I mean finding where they are, getting a hold of them. Also just getting them to understand that I'm not from here. I'm a journalist, you know,

I'm a female. It's just letting everyone know they can talk to me, and you know, I am here to help. She's here to help. She wants to talk to you. If you know something, or if you'd like to tell her something. Hopefully someone can come through that one piece

of information that'll help solve it. And sometimes it only takes one piece that's right, that's right, so and you never know what that piece of information might be absolutely When a beautiful and popular local college student was murdered, it dominated the headlines, but as time passed with no new leads, the media coverage became scant. Rebecca's father, Larry, was determined to keep the case alive however he could.

In two thousand and six, he was interviewed for an article written by George Jared and Ak Barnes that provided new details on the case. Several days after the story was published, an anonymous letter arrived at doctor Gould's house. Her father received a letter. He really thought it was the real deal. Yes, tell us a little bit about Dan. I have not seen the letter. I've heard about it. I know that someone claimed to have heard and in the college parking lot claimed to have overheard some people

talking about murder. It's hard to say, you know, I'm hoping to see a copy, but based on what I've sort of seen and heard, it's really hard to say whether it's someone who was involved, or possibly maybe someone who was trying to stir something up, or you know, it's really hard to say. I can't really say too much because I haven't seen it. When I first showed up in town and started asking questions. A lot of people told me you're not the police, you have no power.

In a way, they are right, But making people talk to you because you have a badge and making people want to talk to you two totally different skill sets. And I have always been good at getting people to tell me their darkest secrets. The radio station plays my interview three times in three days, and it doesn't take long for my Facebook and text messages to start lighting up. Dude, someone else anonymous text, gotta love it. What does it say if it's me? The woman who was on the

radio today they replayed it again. Okay, I'm in love with the guys at Katieboozy Radio. They have been amazing. They got me on the radio, they made it a priority. They've replayed it three times now, Like I got to give them a big shout out. They're awesome. It's big news around here, and everyone knows people involved in this case,

so it's like everyone's got a personal involvement. They've gone above and beyond, and they also put it in a slot that's like drive time when most people would hear it. And it's working. And I'm continuing to tell them, Hey, this is working. Because every single week we've gotten hits on that radio show, because it's right here in the community and everybody listens to it, and because it takes

an hour to get anywhere in this town. Yeah, everybody in Melbourne Batesville area, like everyone in the morning is going somewhere. They're taking their kids to school or going to work. But the other fact that's been racing through my brain since the interview is that anonymous letter that has never been publicly released. It seems like a lead we need to follow, especially since it mentions a group of people who supposedly were talking about the murder of Rebecca.

Could this be members of Rebecca's friend group or the female we've heard rumors about getting into fights with Rebecca. As I told Gary, I haven't seen the letter, but George Jarrett has. The letter came right after I had

written a series. Actually i've written some see kind of the chronology was, you know, for the first little bit, maybe a year after she died, there was lots of media attention, even when I was in the backtor Bolton, I wrote about it, but then it just kind of went away, and then I was writing my book about the West Memphis three case, and I didn't know if

I'd ever write more than one book, you know. And so the first editor, you know, who edited it, I was like, I included the Ford and he's like, this is a really good story, but it doesn't really belong with this this case that you're writing about. And I

told him I don't care. I said, if I'm only going to write one book, I'm going to get this out one way or the other, because somebody, besides people who live in these three or four little counties in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, are going to find out about this case. And so I wrote the book and universally the comments I would get people would always ask me about that case. And then of course that led to me reconnecting with her dad, you know. And actually

it happened right here in Hardy. I was at the library here, Jess mac come on do a book signing one Saturday. I was like, yeah, I'll come over there. I mean, I enjoyed doing them, you know, meet people. And this gentleman came up, you know. I pitched the book and at the very end I always pitched her story. And then I asked him, I said, did you want to buy one? He said yes, and I said okay, and he goes, well, I want to buy ten of them. I was like ten. Whatever I said to him, I

need to say to everybody, you know. And as I folded over the first page, he took out a little ribbon with her face on it and he put it on the book and I had I hadn't seen him. I didn't recognize him. He was he had kind of had like a scruffy beard before. He's wearing a hat, you know, looking for his daughter. I mean, you understand, And I said, I know exactly who you are, and I got up. I shook his hand. Of course, we started hugging and started crying, but we reconnected and then

we started really hitting hard. Doctor Glider received the letter. I believe he got it in a office. It was an anonymous letter. It had too it was either going to go to him or the return address was the

FBI office in Little Rock. And in the letter, the person who wrote it claimed that they overheard a conversation at I believe it's ozarka college in Melbourne, between a couple of people, a female male, two or four people talking and you know, somebody said in quotes, we did that bitch, you know, and they were talking about Rebecca was pretty obvious. And then in the letter they gave, you know, some descriptions of what the people look like,

and I didn't. I wrote about it, but I didn't include it in my latest book, and I didn't include it in the news stories. You know, the police are investigating, and you know that didn't want to tie it together, so I didn't want to impede their investigation in any way. It's important in investigations to not release every piece of information because you have to be able to compare and verify a new source. But I did want to make

sure people knew that this letter was out there. And I read it, and I understand that the police think that it's it's a it's a false lead, But I read it. There was some sincerity in it. It looked like it had been written again. It looked like a

woman had written it. It was uh, the grammar was good, you know, which you know, being a writer, you know, you just you see certain words put put together a certain way, and you and you can kind of tell the identity of the person writing it if you if you write every day, But it could be totally bogus. That's possible. It could be totally real. You know. I actually set him in the book. I said, if you wrote this, please identify yourself and come to the police

and make a statement. I think that what happened was is this person who wrote the letter, if it's real, probably read a story somewhere that got out. I worked really closely with A. K. Barnes, the reporter over at Erowide Media. She's a really good friend of mine, really great human being by the way, and you know, we did stories together and we just hit it hard and then it just kind of died down again and at some point something it's just going to take one little crack.

As it was so frustrating. I remember reading because I've meant, like a long time, I've done articles about it and stuff. And then and then when in twenty sixteen, whenever this your series of stories came out followed by the letter. When I read about the letter, I was like, thank God, like, maybe something will happen now, even if it's not real, maybe it'll get someone to talk, you know. But then yeah, and now nothing, and so now that no, we're here. Yeah,

we're back, I mean literally, we're back. To where we were the day that they found our body. I mean, that's where we're at right now. It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that we need to find out who wrote this synonymous letter, and to do that, we need to see it for ourselves and mine it for any new clues. So we go back to Larry. I'm hopeful that now that we've gained his trust, he'll share it with us. Over the years, I would get things. I'd

get phone calls here at my office. I would get some notes that were taken by my secretary on somebody that called about Rebecca's case, and then they'd scribbles some things. In some cases there would be a phone number and I could follow up. And in some cases I got written materials. So I'd get letters, or i'd get things sent to me. I can recall just offhand that I did receive a phone call, and I believe I talked

to this girl and she was frightened. She wanted to get some information to me, and bits and pieces of that did get passed to me. Larry has several overflowing manila folders filled with notes from years of collecting tips. They are neatly laid out on the dining room table, next to his own murder board, and I see pictures of Rebecca with Justin Casey Chris, so much red string linking the various parties, And in one of those Manila folders we find the letter. Like George mentioned, it looks

like it was written by a female. We won't read the entire letter in order to protect parts of the police investigation, but we can share parts that have already been made public. The writer claimed to have overheard a conversation at ozarka college in Melbourne between at least four people who were bragging about Rebecca's murder. The author said two women and a man approached another man with dirty blonde hair who was a student at the college. As

they walked toward the parking lot. The writer said they overheard the mail student asking the other three did you get it. The three people told him that they killed her and dragged her through several rooms at the house. The alleged mail killer said blood was everywhere, and she put up a fight and screamed a lot. The letter contained specific descriptions of all of the people involved in the conversation. The letter writer apologized for not coming forward

sooner and said they could identify those people. But because nobody has identified the writer, whatever knowledge they have remains a secret. If you just took that letter and spent some time on it, you'd probably be able to find the person that wrote it. And the person that wrote it definitely could have been able to and they even said that they could identify the people that just look at old pictures and probably put the faces to the

description that was on there. I love to see somehow just get out to whoever wrote that one letter, if they could hear about it, and I mean possibly come forward. So what we've been doing is the Kat story got shared a lot, and it's all being shared people in that community, and then all these people are friending me.

So it is becoming more hard to escape, I guess, you know, so I think so my point is, I mean, if there is someone who's a student, A lot of them were students at Ozarka too, So if there's if there are people who in that friend group a friend a friend, they're probably going to see it on Facebook. I mean, it's well, I think there's probably quite a few people that if they had access to that letter and that the description that that whoever wrote the letter provided,

which was really well done. Yeah, that many people could probably say, oh, I know who this would have been. Yeah, and to come up with those individuals or maybe one or two that fit that description that would narrow it down. At one time, it's going to try to get into the people at Ozarka that were higher ups and try to get access to records. But then you're into areas where you're going to probably need some kind of permission or well, I'm sure I have a yearbook or a

list of students. Yeah. Well, in the past, when certain things have been done to try to draw people out, a number of the people that I guess I would call suspicious or possibly suspects in my mind. Whether they are in law ENFORCEMNE, I don't know, but they would befriend the person that was out there. Yes, that's another complication. A lot of people will friend you for good reasons

and some people will friend you to watch you. But either way it's good because then you can watch it's two ways, so you can see what they're doing too, and you can see who their friends are. So yeah, I think that's good. I'm friending. I'm accepting all the friend requests right now. I can really feel the frustration in Larry's voice, and I can't say I blame him. Every time he gets a tip he is forced to go on an emotional roller coaster and reopen old wounds.

I've heard from both George and Larry that the police think the letter is a red herring, but I can tell neither of them wholeheartedly believe that, and I'm not sure I do either. We'll be right back. It's the next day, and we tracked down Ak Barnes, who wrote the story that led to Larry getting a letter. I know, I'm not now. She works as a media teacher at

the local high school. We meet in the hallway of the church she attends, and her son heads off to play in another room while we talk about Rebecca's murder. Oh yeah, can you give me twenty minutes? Definitely? You always gotten closer than me. Ak is excited to talk to us. She believes in the power of media attention and thinks that this is the best way to bring Rebecca's killer to justice. Okay, so I started doing a cold case series at the paper. I've always been interested

in in unsolved murders. I guess it's been watching Insolved mysteries growing up, perhaps, and so I was just asking around and I had done one on Sabrina Underwood in Fulton County. And then there's another lady who was actually Connie Townsend from I think israc County, Fulton County maybe

was burn alive and her trailer. And then one of my coworkers had brought up George author George Jared, and brought that he had worked this Rebecca Gooul case, and they told me I should check it out, and so that all they knew was that the dad was a doctor in Mountain Home. So I just looked up Golden Out, Baxter County, Mountain Home, and I found him and left him a boy smiling, I kid you not like I think that was in the fall, and he did not, And I just wrote it off because I thought I'd

never hear from again. And then Easter Sunday, the weirdest days ever for him to respond. He sent me this long text from Bora Bora about how he wants to work with me in this case and let me just hit the ground running, Bora Bora. I remind myself to ask Larry about that the next time we talk just the way that he has overcome so much, and how he's able to function. I don't know that I could function if I lost a child, let alone a child that was brutally murdered, and nobody will help me solve it.

I don't know how he functioned. And you got this awesome story and then someone and then you know, then someone did write a letter. Do you know what I mean? Like he asked them to write a letter, and then someone wrote a letter, and we feel like we made such progress, Like that's the most progress we think we've made, just because all of us just finally got together and said, Okay, you know what, let's do this, let's solve this, and we got so far, and we were so hopeful when

we got that letter. You can sense how hopeful she, George and Larry were when they got the letter. I still think someone it was a genuine letter. I don't know. George goes back and forth, but I think for the most part, we're pretty sure that was a genuine letter. Well, if I mean, if the letter is genuine, so who what do you think? I mean, do you have any

theories about who killed Rebecca? What's your thoughts now? I think we all have our theories, and I think we all kind of speculate who did it, and I think the p I don't know. I do have my theories, don't I want to like say names, but I think I know who did it. AK like a lot of the town seems to think that there were multiple people involved in Rebecca's murder. She also seems sure that the

letter is genuine, but I'm not convinced. It's just so hard because it's you just can't pinpoint one person because I think there were so many people involved in this. Especially in that letter really supports our theory that we already had. That's why it was so bizarre, because it was like totally backing the theory we already had. Obviously, the person is still anonymous. Do you have any theory

about who wrote it or where they are? No? And we wish that they would come forward because it's not like we're gonna blast them to the press or blast them in the paper, like we just we just want to talk. I have so many people that it will tell me little hints or tell me something, and then I'm like, can you just meet with me and Larry and George for just a minute, and we don't even

want to publish anything, and they're scared they won't do it. People, it's very hard, and you know, to get people to talk about this, and we just wish whoever wrote this would come forward. If anyone understands how hard getting people

to talk about this case is, it's me. In many cases, we've had to just show up because if we call and ask, it's so much harder for people, or either we show up or we'll have to be introduced through a friend of theirs, because it's so hard when you call someone and just say you're from the press and you want to talk. It's like it's really hard, and

people are scared. There's some scary people involved in this case, so especially since you don't know who it is, you don't really know who to trust and who not to trust because it could literally be anyone. And I'm sure we've seen them at this point and absolutely, and you know they're following your stuff, they're reading your stories, and they get spoofed out and then it's like a nope,

contact order. They all just zip it. And I think we put some pressure on people, and I think people were starting to get scared because I would go through Sonic and people would make little comments be like you better be careful writing this article. I think the people who have done this are around or have ties here still, and they are still on their toes. I think they think it's died down, but it hasn't because now you

guys are gonna bring it back up. Yeah, so now you're trying to fit some pressure on this story is like still my baby at the favor. So actually I could do an article on y'all. We totally you done to do it. We did some new stuff. We did a radio thing, I think because I feel like you guys made so much progress in breaking this and like and it's kind of everyone working together at this point because the more pressure we can put on these people, like,

the better chance we're gonna have. I mean, I've had people who will give us enough information to kind of help us along. But I think a lot of people just want to be protected, and I think they don't want their name out there. I think they've tried to move on, which if somebody knows what happened, I don't care. If you are trying to move on, I don't care if you have recreated yourself this is your moral duty to come forward. But I mean at the same time I do. I stand by my word and I protect

people when they want anonymity. There's a lot of people who know who did it, and that's what's just so crazy to me. I don't understand why this case can't get solved. I do not understand they spent twelve hours inside that trailer well, and in talking to these guys, it seems like we've heard a lot of stories. There are stories that make sense right, they fit together, and I don't understand they weren't able to piece this together when they have these people voluntarily talking to them. That's

what I can't get. There's just so many also, that's been a big part of the challenge too, It's figuring out what's rumor and what's not. I think this little circle that did this, they have like this death pack and I've never seen anything like it. It's like the the bro Code or something. Nobody's breaking through this because they will not talk. Either they don't really know or they are just taking it to their grave. And I don't know. I'm just not built like that. I couldn't

live with myself. This isn't the first time, I've heard rumors of an inner circle involved in Rebecca's death, a secret party, and a death pact. And if this group of killers does in fact exist, we're on their radar now. They're on my Facebook, they have my cell phone number, and they definitely know where I live. I know that I might be in danger, but I don't care. Am I crazy or just obsessed? It's probably a little bit

of both. Do you get freaked out? Because when I was knee deep in these articles, like my imagination told me once, I was doing this on the Sabrina Underwood and I know who killed her in my mind, and I'm like, he's watching you right this through your window. He's gonna come kill you tonight. In my mind, I'm like, he's the murderer. Is onto me because I was putting all these articles out. You're looking at me like I'm crazy, Like you think they're following you or something they thought,

And you know what, it's not entirely true. They all know where you live. I mean it's a small place. But what George saw me, he goes AKA, They're not gonna take you out, because if you're right in the middle of this case, they're done for and you're about to set you back in with you It's okay, I'm sorry. We can all talk it out together. Yeah, if I can tell, like when you get into this one, I don't know what it is about this case. Ak is right,

This case sucks you in. It's haunting that everyone thinks they know what happened, but they've reconciled themselves to just living near the killer. If we can find out who wrote this letter, we can get some insights about the leads it contains. We don't have many clues to go on. It's postmarked Little Rock. The return address was the FBI office in Little Rock, which seems like a pretty sophisticated move.

As George pointed out, the letter had good grammar. It seems like the biggest clue as to the writer's identity is the handwriting itself. Reach out to a handwriting analyst, let me get your case. Okay. That's Nam Peterson. She specializes in graphology, which is identifying personality, traits, and other characteristics of a letter writer's personality through the strokes and patterns revealed by their handwriting. She looks over the letter to see if she can provide any details about who

wrote it. I'm looking at where something you know, initial strokes, terminal strokes, placement on the page of word combinations, letter combinations, how they connect, spacing zone differences. You know, like this person they have a large mid zone. And what that means is like on the line paper, the lower case letters almost fill up. They're almost as large as the entire line, you know, between each line, there's not a

lot of space between. I mean, it is true that when you're young, you have immaturity showing up in your handwriting. As you get older, you have graphic maturity, and then you decline. So with that being said, I see graphic maturity with this letter, with you know, this writing. But as to say age line, I just it's an adult as far as personality traits. To me, this is a person that is more immature than mature. They live in the moment. And that's because that mid zone is it

is bubbly. Like you look at a teenager's handwriting, they're usually big and bubbly. And because they don't care about a year from now, they're looking at now Friday night. And so people that have this big, bubbly writing usually have money problems because they're never looking into the future because they're never planning for it. There's also the lower stem of the Y. See ow they're just straight, there's not a loop that goes back. That's usually a person

that is very socially. They like to be by themselves. They don't really prefer a lot of company. They would prefer to be They're probably more introverted and large loops like in the D and the O. Like the OS are people are willing to take on more responsibility. So you know, I didn't see any efforts that the person did to disguise their writing. An adult but with the

slightly immature personality more reminiscent of a team. Sounds like the letter writer could have been a student and money troubles in this part of the Ozarks that's nearly everybody. The handwriting tells us the writer wasn't trying to disguise their writing, which lends credence to the idea that the letter is genuine. But there are a few things about the letter that don't ring true. First of all, there's the timing. The letter was postmarked only a few days

after the story came out, asking for help. This is really suspicious. July twenty first. That was the first article that came out, the one we just read where it said, you know, hey, please write me a letter at my office. Okay, Now, then a story comes out on August third saying they got a letter, right, I mean that's and I don't know what their deadline is either. It might even be like some of these papers are weekly. So you got to wonder if the story came out on August third,

like when their deadline was. I mean that's literally like a couple days later they got a letter, you know, and the post office around here in exactly quick. So the two to three days it would take to get the letter, plus like the I don't know, it could be totally legit. Someone could have read that and been moved. But also what was the letter? July twenty first was the first and this is the story about the letter comes out on August the third. I wonder what day

it actually. Let's find out, you know what, right while we're sitting here, let's find out when their deadlines are, so area wide media is published. It was a Thursday, all right. The story came out on August third, which was which was about two weeks later. In the story it says on Friday, which I guess will be the twenty ninth. George Jared, like Mark Hollingsworth, confirmed with George Jared that there was interest in the letter, so it

had to be before. It had to be sometime that week, sometime between the twenty first and the following Friday at least, which is a pretty short period of time, literally right after the story came out that they sent it a day or two after. Secondly, the identification. The letter writer says that they recognized one of the people talking as

a student at OZARKA. Now, if the author was organized enough to get this much detail and smart enough to figure out how to address a letter to the Arkansas FBI, it seems to me that on such a small campus they could have figured out that supposedly unknown student's name. It was said in the letter they were bragging about how they killed her and what she put up a fight, So she put up a fight, then that people would

have marks on their faces on somewhere. Finally, and most crucially, the letter doesn't match the physical evidence found at the crime scene. The letter mentioned a knock down, drag out fight, which, from the limited knowledge we have so far, of the case does not seem to have occurred, so references to getting the stuff don't ring true. A small amount of marijuana and some money were left behind. Most importantly, we know from Danielle and Rebecca's friends that she was a

spitfire who never backed down from a conflict. Now, I've replayed the morning of September twentieth, two thousand and four thousands of times in my mind, and in every scenario, no matter how afraid she may have been, if she saw people coming for her, Rebecca Gould would have gone down fighting. Trying to figure out what's real and what's not real is like a whole nother layer. It's really hard. It is really hard. Yeah, there's a lot that's hard

about this. I mean one of the things that I was thinking about last night is the fact that you know, and I'm not a lawyer, but it's been very difficult because you're not allowed to say. There's never been a suspect named by the police. The police are giving out no information. They won't even really tell you who the

people of interest are. I think they said a little bit about it at the time they named They said Casey was a person of interest at one point, but then it was very quickly reported that he was not a suspect, and then after that no official suspects were named. So it's difficult to even talk about the case because you don't want to get in trouble legally. And it really creates this just wall of silence. You can't talk.

Everyone's whispering the names, everyone's texting me these names. You can't say they're a suspect, you can't say they're a person of interest. And it not only is bad for the investigation, it's also bad for these people because they never get charged, but they never get cleared either. And I feel like the investigation feels like it's at a real impasse. I feel like, you know, for whatever reason, the police have a very definite idea about who it is.

Other people have a different idea. It just feels like it's at a place where it really might not get solved unless some radical new approach comes in. We've learned from the autopsy that there were no obvious defensive wounds on the body and no signs that she had been restrained. So who wrote this letter and why were they trying

to help or to throw off the police? Could it have been written in an attempt to get media attention to support one of the other theories surrounding Rebecca's death, Or could it have been the killer stoking the town's rumor mill to continue to hide in plain sight. We'll be right back. Even after being on the case for a short period of time, I do sympathize with the police because just a week after being on the air, we're weeding through hundreds of texts, tips and false rumors.

This is the one, the guy I talked to. I've recently heard some information you may be interested in Rebecca's Gould's boyfriend was my best friend since grade school. So this is the guy who was friends with Casey and called and said he again, I think he mentioned Chris and JB. And he said he knew someone at work who'd known them. Literally was one line, and it said it said look for a foot in a freezer in

Israd County. That's all it said. It said, if you're looking into the Rebecca Gould case, look into a foot that's in a freezer in Israd County. And we pretty quickly discounted that because of course we'd seen the autopsy report and she was not missing. A foot. Yeah. There was also one of the things that Brian Bangs said, Brian kind of became my guy on the inside, and he kind of started interviewing people inside prison and was like asking people, Hey, have you heard about this murder?

What do you know? And everybody seemed to have their own story, and Brian did mention, this is jail house gossip, and it clearly sounds like jail heu's gossip, because there was one that was like, yeah, somebody threatened to beat this guy up if he didn't keep his mouth shut because he found a toe and it was Rebecca's toe and again had all her toes. People told Brian that she had been held at a different location and like chained,

chained up and held hostage on a mattress and all that. Anna, I really think that came from the very beginning of the investigation, because look, an expert looking from the outside reading an autopsy report, it's very obvious that whoever he hit Rebecca on the head and from the blood they found the scene, she was dead pretty quickly. She wasn't taken to a secondary location. None of the autopsy bears

that out. But police said at the time that the mechanism of injury was created from the scene she had been forcibly removed from the residents. Of course, it wasn't her that was forcibly removed. It was her body that was forcibly removed. But with them saying that, I think people got ideas in their head that she might have been kidnapped. Tips are one of the things that make investigations so challenging. Some can contain a grain of truth while others are red herrings. But like I told Gary b,

no piece of information is too small. Oh all right, just heard you on KWOZ with Gary and I just wanted to let you know that on that Saturday, on the weekend, Rebecca was killed. And not sure what time it was, but it was in the afternoon. There was a little dark blue car with a guy and a woman that came by and went up to the barn,

right past the trailer. The guy got out, and I thought he was going to use the bathroom, but he went to the back of the car, put on like jogging pants and got a weedied her out and weeded it a little bit. Rebecca came out on the porch when they drove back by and stopped and she went to the end of the porch and said did you get it done? And he said yes, and they drove off.

They had Texas tags on the car. Then a little while later, Rebecca came out to her car, opened the door and got something out and went back inside the trailer. She was wearing a gray tank top and a pair of gray sweatpants. We did tell the Arkansas State Police, and not sure it has anything to do with anything. It was just really strange because he only weedied for maybe about fifteen minutes or so, not long at all, and it was where the old barn is. Just thought

it was strange. Never seen the guy before. He yet black hair and was young looking, couldn't really see the woman. So is this person lying? Is this the is this the killer? Or like what is trying to deter us?

Like what is this? You know, it sounds the tip itself if you don't think about that part sounds kind of credible because it's why would you say, I mean, if you were trying to make something up, you'd say, you know, you got out of the back of the car, got a knife or whatever, but or you'd say you recognize somebody. But to say someone got out of the car, put on jogging pants and started weed eating. Seems like

something random to make up. I did look into the Texas connection, and there are a couple cars with Texas plates owned by different members of Casey's family because some of them live there. So that's not necessarily weird. I mean it might be, you know, I get that it's Melbourne, Arkansas, and there's not that many out of state plates, but in his particular case, it doesn't seem that strange. And they said not sure I could pick him out. But his hair was short, black, and he was tan skin,

not black or his span. It just looked tan. The lady was white, and she never got out. We had never seen that vehicle, and I just thought it was weird. And they had Texas tags. When Rebecca came out and asked if he finished whatever I think she means. When Rebecca came out of the house and asked if it was done, she acted like she knew him and seemed fine. You know what's weird about that, though, Taylor, do you

remember the letter? So in the letter, remember how whoever wrote the letters said it was made a point of several times saying tan skin, which I thought was odd. A lot of people seemed absolutely sure it was Jennifer and possibly Justin. Probably just as many seemed absolutely sure it was Chris and JV. To sift through these tips and figure out our next steps, Taylor and I take another look at the murder board. There's an odd similarity between the person who wrote the letter and this tip.

Could this tip be from the author of the letter, or is there a new person we need to be looking for with black hair and tan skin. As I said, the flood of tips is both extremely helpful and extremely frustrating. At this point, I think the letter is most likely bogus. The timing is it's just too convenient, and the description

doesn't match what we know about the crime scene. I still want to talk to Jennifer, but the group theory is looking less and less likely, and according to Justin and the police, she had an alibi the day of the murder. According to what we've heard from several police sources, whoever killed Rebecca most likely knew her, someone she knew well enough to be comfortable hanging around in her underwear and pajama top. That's not likely in a group setting.

It seems like it would be someone she trusted someone who was able to get close enough to her so that she never saw the first blow coming, someone who knew about the loose piano leg. We look over the murder board. The names on post its Rebecca, Chris, jb Justin, Jennifer, and Casey. I look at Casey's photo on the wall. He's the only person who has been officially ruled out as a suspect by the police. But at this point

I can't eliminate anyone. We need to find Casey and figure out if his alibi for September twentieth, two thousand and four is really as errortight as the police say it is. I'm Catherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a joint production between How Stuff Works in School of Humans. It is written and recorded by me, Catherine Townsend. Taylor Church is our producer and story editor. Audio editing and designed by Jonathan Sleeve Mix and Glenn Mattulo.

Audio mixing and love by Tunewelders. Executive producers Brandon Barr and Else Crowley for School of Humans and Connell Byrne and Chuck Bryant for How Stuff Works. Our field producer is James Morrison. Our researcher is Sandy Klosterman. Themon original score by Ben Solee available wherever you get your music. To dig into the investigation, please visit helengonepodcast dot com or follow us on social media. School of Humans