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guilty in a court of law. Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing. Thanks for listening.
On January seventh, nineteen ninety five, forty three year old Connie Townsend's home burned to the ground in Brockwell, Arkansas, in front of over twenty witnesses. Connie was moving out of her house that day. He had separated from her estranged husband, David Townsend.
Years earlier.
David had been staying with his parents, Dale and Ramona, and also with his girlfriend of three years, joe Anne Ellis, But according to Connie's daughters Stacy and Amber, David was angry that day and had threatened Connie. They also said that David had threatened to burn the house down in the past. Connie's body was found in a utility room. She was lying face down with a pair of sewing
scissors underneath her body. Investigators said that Connie had died of smoke and soot inhalation, and according to the autopsy report, there was basically no tissue left and it seemed like after investigators went through the charred remains of her trailer, they had a lot more questions. Was Connie's death due to an accidental fire or was this a murder an arson? Thirty years later, her daughters still have no Joe justice
and no answers. And if you ask around Brockwell, Arkansas, a lot of people will tell you police know who did it, but that there will never be justice. I don't believe that. We've only had this case file for about two weeks, and in that time we have managed to answer a lot of the questions that we had last week, and a lot of people have reached out, but there's still more to uncover. Last week we talked about someone named Eddie. Eddie was a name mentioned in
the handwritten note in the case file. We wondered why was his name mentioned in connection to joe Anne Ellis.
We found Eddie.
He was the coroner at the time of Connie's death, so he was the first one to examine Connie's body. Obviously it's been thirty years, and he said he doesn't remember a lot, but he did have some information that we've never heard before. We had heard from Connie's daughters and from the case file that Connie's body was found in a junk room, a bedroom that the family used as an extra utility room. Eddie told us that Connie was found in a closet.
Thirty years later. I can't even remember what they said because of death was but I do remember toxicology was negative for any Incoxicans. I know she was found in a closet. I remember that she was leaving, moving out, and had her sister and brother in law coming to help her move stuff. What I understood she was making trips in now that's carrying stuff out to her car.
That was the middle of the day, and it just struck me there, you know, you're not going to get caught up at a house fire if you're going in and out and leaving and got somebody coming to help you and all that stuff. So I always felt that it was really suspicious.
If there was a fire, why would Connie shut herself into a closet in the back of a utility room, into a place where there was no escape or could someone have put her in that closet it I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past seven years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing
as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities.
If you have a case you'd like me.
And my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. The Arkansas State Police said they're done with this case file. They've
labeled Connie Townsend's case inactive. Connie's daughter Stacey emailed the Arkansas State Police in two thousand and seven and in two thousand and nine asking for a copy of the case file. She also spoke to Arkansas State Police investigator Dennis Simons. Now side note here, if you've listened to season one of Helen Gone or followed the Rebecca Gould case, you'll know that I have my own history with Dennis Simons.
So I'm going to refrain on commenting on what he did or did not do in conn investigation because I truly don't know, And to be fair, he wasn't the only investigator saying that they had exhausted all investigative leads.
As we said last week, TJ.
Hively and the prosecutor's office had also said there was nowhere else that they could go with this investigation. I just want to go back and go over the case file with a fine tooth comb and see if there are any questions that we can answer. Thirty years later, I want to go back to the timeline. I want to go back in time to January seventh, nineteen ninety five.
Connie Townshend was moving out of her trailer. She had told people that she was afraid of her estranged husband, David Townsend, both of Connie's daughters told us that David had verbally abused their mother in the past and that he had made threats. Though Connie and David had been separated for years, there was a lot happening that week. Because Connie had just filed for divorce. David would not get the divorce paperwork until January eleven, four days after the fire.
This was intentional on Connie's part.
Connie had hired a lawyer, and she had a conversation with her lawyer about serving David after she left home. She did not want to escalate the situation.
The police talked.
To Connie's attorney on January eighteenth. He said that he looked for her case file but was unable to locate it. He told police he believed someone may have broken in and stolen it, which honestly is a bit of a bizarre answer in my opinion. But then there's no follow up by police in the case file. But we found out something else from the case file. Even though Connie had that conversation with her lawyer about serving David after she left home, something happened that morning before she died.
Connie told her sisters that she had let it slip to David Townsend's mother, Ramona that she was filing for divorce. We went back and tried to piece together everyone's interviews to see if there are gaps in the timeline or any conflicting information about the morning of the fire, and we have found a lot of inconsistencies, places where facts don't match, gaps of time where it seems as though
either someone is misremembering or someone is lying. As we said last week, Connie called both of her sisters on the morning of the move.
She wanted her brothers in law to come and help.
This was a point of conflict between Connie and her estranged husband David and his parents, Ramona and Dale Townsend. We talked to Connie's sister, Dolores Brown about what she remembers from the day her sister died.
Connie called me somewhere around ten or ten thirty on Saturday morning and she said that her and David had got into it again, and she says that David said she had to get out right away, so she said I stayed as soon as possible.
The night before the fire, both of Connie's daughters, Amber and Stacy spoke to their mom remember Amber was moving with her mother, so her stuff was packed along with Connie's. At two am on the morning of the seventh, Amber showed up at Connie's trailer.
Her mom was in the process.
Of moving out, but Amber said that because of icy roads, they decided to stay one last night in the trailer. The next morning, Amber loaded her stuff into Connie's car and left to go to her grandmother's house. At around seven to fifty five am. She clarified to police that she was planning to shower at her grandmother's so she could get ready for the day because the hot water
was not working at the trailer. She drove back by the trailer at around nine am, and she said that at that time she saw David's two tone brown Cadillac park there. When she saw that, she just honked and drove on one. She said, quote, my mom didn't want me there when he was there end quote. This would match David's statement he told police, which was that he left his parents' house some time after nine am and
that he drove over to Connie's. David said that he and Connie argued about who was going to help her move. Connie's daughter, Stacy told police that she called her mom at around ten am. She said that by that point David was gone. Connie told Stacy that when David was there, they had an argument and that at that time David had threatened her with bodily harm. Connie had rented an apartment with Amber, and she had actually just gotten the keys to her new place a couple of days earlier,
on January fifth. For Connie, this was going to be a new start. But after David came by the trailer, then his parents went over. His father, Dale, told police that he and his wife Ramona, drove over to Connie's at around eleven am. At this point, Connie broke down. She had talked to her sister Dolores on the phone about five times that morning, and this time when she called, she was in tears.
She called and she was crying. She was upset. David's parents, Ramona and Dale, were there and they were concerned about what she was gonna take, and they were telling her she couldn't do this and couldn't do that, and Connie said, I guess you've got to get out.
It's bad.
And then I've tried to calm her down, and then I asked to speak to one of them, and Ramona came to the phone. I asked her what we could do about that situation that we were coming, if they couldn't just go home and just let us get her out of there and then everything would calm down. And she said they were gonna stay there make sure we didn't take anything, and I said that would be fine.
I asked her if maybe if she could go home, and then I would call her whenever we left here and they could meet us back over there and let Connie have some peace. And I talked to Connie again, and she was calming down and explained to her what they were going to do.
Dale's told police that he and Ramona stayed for a little while and then left, and that they got back to their own home at noon. At some point after heated arguments, Dolores said that the situation at Connie's house seemed to have calmed down, or so she thought.
And so she got feeling better about it. We hung out that Ramona and Dale did not leave right away. I called just to check to see if they're gone. I waited not very long because I was nervous about it all, and Dale answered the phone, so I asked him where Connie was, and he said, well, she's outside. I think I think she's putting her purse in the car and she's loading the car, you know, and all
this stuff. And I said, well, I'm just gonna hang on until she came back in nan and I want to talk to her because I was not quite sure he was telling me the truth. So in a little bit she came back in though, and I talked to her and she said, yeah, she would say little better about it, you know. So we hung up again, and I called Connie for about twelve thirty and told her we were on our way, and she said, don't be in any hurry, eat some lunch if you want to
or whatever. I'm okay now, I'm okay. And this was the last conversation I had with her. And so we were there quickly, and when we talked, that hill that home was already in plazes. It was already really burning.
The fire department was dispatched at one eleven PM, which means that shortly after Dolores hung up the phone with her sister, the fire broke out. Delores said that by the time she got to Connie's trailer, she was shocked to see the raging fire. Her sister Marlene showed up shortly after she did.
We were trying to figure out how to get inside, but then it was already so bad. Everything was hot, the door knob was the hutch, couldn't touch it, and there just wasn't enough windows. We couldn't get in. We couldn't see in even because of the smoke, and of course we didn't know for a while whether Connie was in there or not. We started searching around outside Marlene and I did, hoping that she was outside somewhere, and it took off running.
We asked another question last week, what happened to Connie and David's big black dog, Bobo. Connie was an animal lover and had several cats that she let into the home, and the dog didn't roam free normally. He was either tied up by the carport or he was inside the house. Dolores believed that the dog might be significant because when she called Connie that last time, she heard the dog bark, and she said he normally only barked when people came to the trailer.
Org had started barking when we were fixing to hang up from that last phone conversation. At that last phone conversation when I told her we were on our way and we were actually driving when I called her, and I thought about that later. It didn't hit me until I threw you know, of course, until it was over with and I got home and was thinking about that, and then I thought I heard that dog start barking off the phone. He only barked when someone came in and.
Drove in the drive, so was someone outside Connie's trailer When they hung up, Dolores mentioned seeing something else a witness, someone who she said, spoke to David Townsend at the scene.
David did make a statement at least to one or two people that at least he untied that gd dog and didn't let it burn up in the fire too. I spoke to Billy and she told me that the front door was locked, but that the side by the carport was not, and to say opened that and several cat went running and one cat came out and it was on fire.
We checked the case file and found that reference. Police did talk to a witness. It was a witness named David Herron, and he told police that David made a comment to him about the dog The witness told police that on the day of the fire, David said something to the effect of quote, well, at least I turned the goddamn dog loose so he wouldn't burn up.
Too end quote.
The witness told police that another friend of his name, Scotty Mast, was also there at the time, and that Scotty had apparently heard David say the same thing, but there's no record of an interview with Scotty in the case file. Was the fire arson or not? We said last week that an electrician did go in with law enforcement and looked at the service box and found that the service box had been shorted, So the electrician stated the short could have contributed to or caused the fire
that destroyed the trailer. But in late February, police brought in a specially trained dog named Gallagher from Little Rock. This dog could detect accelerants, and the dog alerted for accelerants at several different parts of the house, but no actual accelerant was found in the samples taken from the crime scene or from the samples that were taken from Connie's body at the medical Examiner's office, so investigators could.
Not be sure.
One of the handwritten notes that we were talking about last week referred to the arson theory. The note was hard to decipher, but part of it reads quote, they started at the living room and went to the kitchen throwing diesel gas end quote. Also in the emails from the Arkansas State Police to Stacy, Connie's daughter, they referred
to Connie's investigation as an arson homicide investigation. Connie's daughters told us the Arkansas police felt that David was their suspect, but that they told them they just didn't have enough evidence to prosecute him. David did have an alibi at the approximate time of the fire. Remember David's son, David Lynn said they drove to Caligo Rock together and went fishing after leaving David's parents' house.
But could there be any holes in this alibi?
Police did investigate leads other than David Townsend. There are two other names in the case file, names I'd never heard before, Tony Montgomery and Stanley Montgomery. One handwritten note read that Stanley and Tony quote had to leave Little Rock because of arson problems. We tracked down the police report regarding Stanley Montgomery. Connie's trailer burned down on Saturday.
On Monday, Stanley showed up at the hospital with severe burns to his arms, and according to the police report, quote told three different stories about how he got the burn. Police were apparently suspicious and they did a search of Stanley's residence. There's a search warrant for his house in the case file, stating they seized several items from his residence and that one of the items seized was a
charred bathrobe. But police tested that bathrobe and found no traces of accelerant on it, So it seems as though Stanley and anyone connected with him was ruled out. When I look through the police interviews with Connie's daughter Amber, the timeline, in my opinion, becomes more and more heartbreaking because she did everything in her power to make a safe plan to cut her ties with an abusive relationship. It's obvious that Connie was terrified of David, but on
that very last day, she seemed to relax. At twelve thirty, when Dolores talked to her sister for the last time, calling Connie to sa say that she and her husband were on their way. She told police that Connie seemed calmer and said that there was no Rush. Amber said, quote, my mother was in real good spirits and she was moving and told me to go ahead and go on to work today end quote. One question that we had from last week was who was driving the black truck
with the rainbow stripes. One possibility is David Lynn, David's son and Connie's stepson. At the time, David Lynn drove a black truck with bright red stripes. Obviously, he's not the only person who drove a vehicle somewhat matching this description, but it is interesting that there's no real record of his location before noon. That's when Dale and Ramona Townsend told police he arrived at their place to eat lunch
with them and his father. David Townsend was at Connie's at around nine am in his two tone brown Cadillac. Connie confirmed this, and Amber saw his car park there when she drove by on her way to work in Mountain Home. After that, David left Connie's trailer and told police that he drove back to his parents' house. Then Dale Townsend told police that he and Ramona went to Connie's at around ten am, but this was before David Lynn came to their house in his vehicle. Dale was
driving his own vehicle that day, a maroon truck. Where was David Lynn that morning before noon? It's a question that's not answered in this case file. And this is when we've found even more discrepancies because Ramona also reportedly told witnesses a slightly different story. A witness told police that they were there when the fire broke out. They said they saw David's mother, Ramona, and they were asking
what happened, who lived there, et cetera. They said that Ramona told him that she and her husband had been to Connie's trailer earlier that day, but she said she brought Connie some wood. This was never mentioned in any other report. David told police that he and David Lynn stopped at Harp's grocery store when they went fishing. This was confirmed by a witness who worked at Harp's grocery store. This person said that they saw David Lynne between two
and two thirty pm. That would have been before David and his son said they passed Dale townshend on the road after three pm when he supposedly told them about the fire. She said that he bought cigarettes and a pack of coke at that point. She asked if Connie was heart in the fire, and he said no, that
someone was bringing Connie back from Mountain Home. This is very confusing because if this is true, that would mean that David Lynn already knew about the fire before three pm, which is when David claims they ran into his father on the road and first learned about the fire. But again, it's very frustrating because there's no record that police ever explained this discrepancy. Joe Anne Ellis also had a different story.
Joe Anne told she had been living with David Townsend for three years, but that he had been married to Connie for fifteen years. She said that David told her that he loved Connie and that he married her for the kids. She said that David did not talk to her about his and Connie's problems. She said, quote, someone called Dale and told him that the trailer was on fire, and David was at Dale's when the call was made.
End quote.
Now that's a totally different story than the one that David and Dale told police about David and David Lynn being out fishing, Dale, finding out about the trailer and running into them on the road and breaking the news. Then Joanne said she was home alone on January seventh, nineteen ninety five. She said she didn't find out about Connie's death until later, but then the page after that from her interview is missing, like so many of the
other pages in the Arkansas State Police file. David Townsend took a voice stress test, on which, according to police reports, invested gators believed that he was being deceptive. He got a lawyer and refused to take a light detector test.
His son, David.
Lynne, also told police he wasn't going to take a polygraph test because his dad failed.
One, But in the end, neither.
Polygraph tests nor stress tests are admissible in court. David Townsend hired a lawyer, and police told Connie's daughters they did not feel as though they had enough information to charge him. We said last week that we were looking for a mystery man, a curly haired, reddish blonde haired stranger who was driving a blue truck. Monica Jones, one of the first people on the scene who tried to break into the trailer before the fire got too intense, told police that Dale Townsend was at.
The scene talking to the curly haired man.
Her note read quote Dale Townsend was standing there and he seemed to know this person and spoke his name. I don't remember his name, but Dale did say he was from Horseshoe Bend End quote. As we said last week, most of the people in the case file are now deceased. Joe Anne Ellis is dead, and so were David Townsend and his son David Lynne, as well as both of David Townsend's parents. But the mystery man, possibly from Horseshoe Ben, might still be out there somewhere, and if he is,
does he know something and could we find him. Connie's daughters, Amber and Stacey know that justice will not be served in the traditional way, but if David or David Lynn's relatives are out there, maybe one of them talked to someone. And Connie's daughters said last week that just knowing what happened to their mother would help bring them some peace. We are also looking for Michael, joe Anne's son, who told police that David had told him that he killed
Connie one night while he was drunk. So far we haven't found him, but if he's out there, we would love to talk to him, and maybe if David or anyone in his family or anyone he talked to over the years, heard something about what happened to Connie. Maybe someone he encountered talked to someone else over the years.
I really hope.
That if there is someone out there, that they will reach out, Dolores told us, even after all this time, sometimes she catches a glimpse of someone who reminds her of Connie. As long as Connie's family is alive, they continue to hope for answers and justice.
And now she's been gone so long, it's not like I think that's her anymore. It's just the fact that it reminds me of her. The way someone's got their hair done, or just the back of their head or something like that, You know that reminds you of them, But everybody goes through that. But it's also brings the good memories back, so as you go through life yourself and try to live life the best you can.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep looking for inconsistencies in this case file, because killers can make one tiny mistake that can break the entire case. Which brings me to the final shocking fact. David told police that on the day of the fire, while he and David Limb were fishing, that they stopped by Harps and Calico Rock, and that David Lynn bought a can of corn. The cashier working at Harp's Calico Rock that day, Misty Jones, said that she remembered David Lynn. She said he came
in to buy a can of corn. This would have been some time after eleven am when she started her shift. During this time, another witness saw David Townsend in the parking lot, sitting in the passenger seat of David Lynn's black truck with the red stripe. So it does seem as though they were at Harps together. But were they just there to buy fishing gear and snacks because Misty
Jones said something else. She said that while David Lynn was in the store buying corn, David Lynn asked if they had another very particular item and she told him they didn't. What David Lynn asked for was lighter fluid. I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine
Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her Research Assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Kammer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Sale. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L. C.
Crowley.
Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plush channel on Apple Podcasts. If you were interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen Gonpod. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five at six seven eight seven four four six one four five
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