School of Humans.
On September ninth, twenty twenty four, searchers on a property in Madison County in the area of Kingston, Arkansas, found female body parts. My source tells me that they found remains belonging to the same woman, including her torso elsewhere on the property.
Police have shared.
Almost no information about this investigation, and while Sheriff Ronnie Boyd at the Madison County Sheriff's Department has publicly denied this, some people in Madison County think that this body was discovered while the police were searching for Jason Lyrel. We did several episodes about that case. Forty one year old Jason Lerell was going through a divorce. His fourteen year
relationship with his wife, Jamaica, had deteriorated. Jason had had issues with drugs in the past, and then sometime around the winner of teawenty twenty two, it seems he relapsed. In January of twenty twenty two, Jason Lerel was visiting friends.
In Madison County.
He was last seen at various residences in Huntsville, and then Jason disappeared. His abandoned car was found in the parking lot of a mall in Fayette, Arkansas. His car, keys, his motorcycle, and a lot of his other belongings were found in different places in Arkansas and in Missouri. Jason Lyrell was never seen alive again, which has had a lot of people asking what's going on in Madison County and if there could be a killer, maybe even a
serial killer on the loose. I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helling 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 Hell and gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. When police found the remains in a field by a rural residence in Kingston, my sources said they were shocked to discover that those remains were not Jason Lyrell's. Instead, they found the body
of a young woman. They figured out that that woman was thirty year old Taylor Barksdale, who had been living in Huntsville. A lot of Taylor's life is still a mystery. We don't even officially know when she went missing. We are trying to piece together what was going on in Taylor's life by talking to her family and friends. Taylor posted on social media that she worked at the Little Rock Airport at one point, but that was about ten
years ago. In recent years, her family he tells me Taylor had become involved with drugs, and also, according to her family, the drug use had taken over her life.
I called Taylor's.
Aunt, Hello, oh had This is Catherine from Helen Gone. Nice to talk to you, which under circumstances I was gonna say, I'm so sorry it's under these circumstances, but I really do appreciate you talking to me. I appreciate you wanting to get involved in SODA's the rest of the family.
The area where Taylor was found was in a very rural area of Kingston. Said that a woman she knows there lives next door to a property where she alleges that people manufacture, deal, and use drugs. Shortly after midnight on August fifth, she heard a woman screaming next door, so she called nine one one.
She did not know Taylor, but she had seen Taylor the day before, so on August before, she saw Taylor on a property next to hers, which is a known drug area that drugs for being manufactured there. She has tried for three years to get this place shut down and no avail, many many calls and many emails and
texts to the sheriff himself. She had made a nine one one call on August the fifth and told them that she could hear a woman screaming for help and that it sounded like she was being raped and tortured and or I'm not sure exactly which word, and or tortured.
Went on to explain that the caller waited all night, but no one ever came to the residence.
And I like, you're going to miss a police car coming exact fright road exactly. And if you have ANW one one call for a woman screaming for help, you should go with life blazing. Of course, it's an emergency, I mean absolutely you took an oath to serve and protect. So no, it was totally outragious. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's so unbelievable.
As days and weeks passed with no communication from law enforcement, the nine to one one caller got more and more worried about the young woman, especially once she realized that since the day before she made the nine to one one call, since August fourth, she had not seen any trace of her. So I'm not sure exactly what the sequence of events is here. That's something I'm still trying to figure out, but it seems like the nine to one one caller went on social media and started googling
missing people in Madison County. Then she saw a photo of Taylor Barksdale on an Arkansas missing person's page, and the date that Taylor was reported missing there was July twentieth. That's when she realized Taylor was the young woman that she had seen, and not only that, because this is a small town, she knew Taylor's aunt, so on September seventeenth, she reached out to.
At the same time that this was all.
Going on, there were rumors flying around that a woman's body had been found in Madison County, So the newspaper was asking the police for comment and doing foy requests. This was all happening at the same time. But when she talked to police, she said that they did not seem overly concerned about Taylor. Believes that they wrote Taylor
off because she used drugs. Now, as I'm going to get into, as we get further into this case, when exactly Taylor went missing, who put her on that missing person's page, and why she was removed from the missing person's page at some point, or just some of the many mysteries around this case. Because police are not revealing anything, I talked to a source of mine who has spent countless hours trying to help Jason Lerell's family with their case.
He's a former law enforcement officer who has worked in Madison County in the past. He knew Jason from high school, and he said that he started working on this case because he became very disillusioned with how things in Madison County were operating. He goes under the pseudonym Jay Brown. I reached out to him after I saw his posts on the website Jason Lerell Missing Persons that was set up by Jason's.
Sister, Sarah Wood.
He believes that Jason and Taylor's cases are connected.
Could he be right?
And could he also be right about Jason and Taylor's deaths being connected to as many as nine other deaths in Madison County, all of which he claimed were labeled accidental overdoses and never investigated by police. We're going to get more into these potential other cases in later episodes, but for now, I'll just say that they were all people who had a history with drug use. They were all found in the same area, and my source claims that many of the same people were involved in these cases.
And he's asking why police don't seem to be prosecuting any.
Of these people.
If this is true, if these cases are connected, we need to go back to the beginning. We need to go back to Jason Lyrell's case. Some people in Madison County believe that Taylor Barksdale and Jason Lyrell's deaths are connected. So let's reinvestigate what happened to Jason. Remember, we talked to Sarah Wood, Jason's sister. She told us that in the fall of twenty twenty one, Jason had moved in with her into an apartment they shared and fayeateful. Jason
started spending more and more time with old friends. Sarah believed that his friends were a bad influence, so she was worried about him, but there wasn't a lot she could do. He was with some of these friends on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Sarah was leaving town for work. She expected Jason back at their apartment because he was supposed to dog sit for her, so they
were texting back and forth. Jason said he was planning to be back at the apartment on January twenty fifth, but January twenty fifth came and Jason never showed up. Sarah did receive some text messages from Jason on the twenty fifth, but she told us that for various reasons, she does not believe that those texts were sent by Jason. She said they were misspelled, they were not written in a way that Jason had written his text messages, and
she believed someone else had access to his phone. The last text she got from Jason's phone indicated that he was in Hinesville, Arkansas. Then, as we covered in previous episodes, Jason's car was found abandoned parked at the Fayetteville Mall. The car was out of gas, so the Fayetteville Police were in charge of the case for the first few days of the investigation. We filed a Foyer request and we got access to that police file. In my opinion,
as I said before, it was very comprehensive. So from that police report, we learned that Sarah had started calling some of Jason's friends trying to find him. She found out that he had been spending time with some friends named Randall and Rachel. Apparently he stayed with him for a couple days. His Harley Davidson motorcycle was parked there, but then he left there on January twenty first, about
three days before he disappeared. On the twenty first, he went over to another friend's house, a woman named Miriam Zulman. Miriam lived on a huge property that was owned by her family. It spanned over two hundred acres, and Miriam actually started speaking out about Jason. She talked to a podcast called Helen the Highlands. She posted a very detailed timeline of everyone who was at the house and and what Jason was doing during those days from her point
of view. On social media, she said there were several people around on that property. There was a guy named Aaron and a guy named Don. There were also two other people, a couple named Troy and Charity. These were Miriam's friends and they had been staying on the property for a while. So for the first few days Jason was there, Miriam and Jason had a flirtation and they were all hanging out together. She admits that they were
doing drugs and that those drugs included methamphetamine. At one point, though, things started to deteriorate. This happened, according to Miriam, after Jason and Don left her house together. She said when they came back, Jason was acting very strangely, almost like something traumatic had happened. She wrote on Facebook that Jason, in her opinion, was acting schizophrenic or like he was
having some sort of mental breakdown. On her timeline, Miriam said Jason left her house but then came back on January twenty fourth, and that he was there that night. She said the next morning, on January twenty fifth, Miriam.
And Charity went to Missouri.
Now we went into this a lot in previous episodes in much more detail, but just to keep a long story short, they met another guy named Moses. They bought some meth from him. They got home at dark. Miriam was saying the last time she really saw Jason was on the night of the twenty fourth. She said that Jason spent the night with her on the twenty fourth, but then later she seemed to kind of equivocate. She said something along the lines of she had an impression
that Jason was with her. She had felt him next to her in the bed, wrapped up in a blanket. On the twenty fifth, Miriam said that she left in the morning and by the time she got back from that outing to Missouri, Don and Jason were gone. Miriam said Don texted her at around four pm and said that he and Jason had left the house. So by the time she got back home from that outing to Missouri, Don and Jason were gone. Miriam got another man message from Jason's phone. It was a picture of a tree
and some boots. Now we talked to Sarah who looked at that image. She said she did not recognize those boots as Jason. She believed someone else took that picture, and as we discussed in a previous episode, I believe that it looks like someone else who was holding Jason's phone took an accidental picture of their own feet, someone who potentially was trying to make it seem as though
Jason was alive when he wasn't. Miriam and Don had conflicting stories because, according to the police report, Don told the police quote he meaning Don said Miriam told him Jason walked away from her residence and was not heard from again. So Don told the police Miriam was the last person to see Jason. Miriam said that Don left with Jason. These are two different stories, and Miriam said
something else that was potentially very interesting. She said Don was bisexual and that she believed Don was sexually interested in Jason. She said Don was sexually aggressive with men, which Don completely denied. The police talked to Don, and Don claimed that he picked Jason up and that they went to his house, meaning that they went to Don's
residence in Huntsville on January twenty fifth. Don said that he took a shower and while he was in the bathroom, Jason walked out of his house, and Don said he had not seen him. Since police issued a search warrant, they found some of Jason's clothing at Don's house. Don claimed that Jason left his stuff behind, But as I said before, I find Don's story totally unbelievable. Why would
Jason leave any of his clothing behind? And more importantly, I question why he would leave his really nice, expensive leather bike stuff. His bike was precious to him. I don't think that's something he'd leave behind, no matter what the circumstance is. So the police did subpoena Jason's phone records. Verizon records showed Jason's phone last pinged on January twenty seventh, twenty twenty two. This ping was from a cell phone
tower located on Highway twenty three in Carroll County. So this was an area where three counties, Benton County, Carroll County, and Madison County all converge, which of course adds another layer of complication to this investigation. But the area of the ping was close to Don's house and also to Miriam's house. These two residences were.
Not far apart.
So if Jason walked away from Don's home on January twenty fifth and was never seen again, what was going on between the twenty fifth and the twenty seventh. If something did happen to Jason on the twenty fifth, if someone's not telling the truth, who sent those text messages from Jason's phone? And if Jason was killed, where is
his body? According to the police report, police had talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of theories about what could have happened to Jason Lyrel, and those theories include that he was murdered in dumped in beaver Lake, that he was burned and buried somewhere on Miriam's property or possibly Dons, or that he gave himself an accidental lethal hotshot of meth, walked away and froze in the woods. As we covered previously, I believe that
it's very likely that something happened to Jason Lerell. In the early morning hours of January twenty fifth. There was another guy with Don and Jason and Troy and Charity of Miriam.
His name was Erin. We talked about him before now.
Miriam said Aaron and Jason were smoking meth together, also with Don and her on that first night. Later, Aaron's van was stolen. He claims the van was returned to him on January twenty fifth. Police went to Aaron's house and they found a pile of clothes on the porch. Jason's relatives said later that some of those clothes belonged to Jason. There was also a blanket for Miriam's house that had been on the bed when Jason stayed with her.
There was reportedly blood on some of these clothes. When police asked Aaron where the clothes came from, he told police that the clothes had come from the van, the one that had been stolen, and he'd gotten back on January twenty fifth. So if that's true, that points to the crucial point in time, the crucial day in question being January twenty fifth, and then for months we have had radio silence on Jason Lyrel's case until there were reports of a body being found in Madison County. A
lot of people believed this could be Jason Lerel. After the fact, though, the Madison County Sheriff's Department posted an update stating that the remains that were found had no connection to the Jason Lyrel case. As I said before, though a lot of people don't believe that police are claiming Taylor Barksdale's death had nothing to do with Jason's.
My source is telling me that's just not true that police absolutely were looking for Jason's remains when they found Taylor's, which, if true, would seem to point to the theory that the cases are connected somehow. After Taylor Barksdale's body was found, the Madison County Sheriff's Department started to put two and
two together. They figured out that the remains that they found may have been linked to that nine to one one call on August fifth, the one that reported a woman screaming and being tortured.
So the sheriff asked the deputy Blake Castle.
The only one who was on duty that night, if he had responded to that nine to one one call. Deputy Hassle said that he had, but later the sheriff admitted that this was a lie. So let's go back and take a detailed look at the timeline. On August fifth and the early morning hours, a nine to one to one caller contacted the Madison County Sheriff's Department and reported that they heard a woman screaming. This person contacted Taylor's aunt. Taylor was reported missing then on September ninth.
Police found Taylor's remains on September eleventh, two days after the remains were found, the deputy Blake Castle resigned, and still nothing had been made public at all. Nothing was released to the media or the public, saying that there could be a serial killer out there. On September twelfth or the thirteenth, depending on who you ask, Taylor's remains were sent to the Arkansas Crime Lab for analysis. The local newspaper, the Madison County Record, has been covering this
case since the beginning. They asked the Madison County Sheriff's office for comment. They filed a foyer request on September seventeenth, so then on September eighteenth, Sheriff Boyd released a statement to them. So it certainly seemed as though they were just reacting to getting called out by the newspaper rather than proactively releasing information to the public. In the statement, Sheriff Boyd explained that the delay in public communication was
intended to protect the integrity of investigation. In that statement, Sheriff Boyd said there are rumors around Madison County that are impeding the ongoing homicide investigation. He also said that Taylor was rumored to be missing at the end of July. However, according to police, she was last seen alive on July twentieth by the Huntsville Police Department. But we know that's not true because we know we have someone who saw
Taylor alive on August fourth. That release was posted on the Madison County Sheriff's office Facebook page on September twentieth. It seems like the police have been trying to shut down people in Madison County, people who were asking some very legitimate question questions, and they haven't been forthcoming with Taylor's family either. Sheriff Boyd did not even tell Taylor's family anything about the condition of her body.
There were local rumors.
Being posted on social media that Taylor's head had been found in a coyote den and her torso was separate from her body. The police did not tell Taylor's family anything about the condition of her body.
That job was left.
I think it was his place to have to tell the family, not mine, not mine, to have to make them face the reality that their loved one is coming back in pieces. So, yeah, oh, it's just horrible. It is, it is. It's ridiculous as what it is. So this friend of mine is the nine one one caller. She told me. She said they told me that they would file charges against me for hindering an open investigation if I talked. She said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to
stop talking because she deserves justice. It's time for her family to know. And so I got the other sister and got with the dad and we talked, and of course the dad is not getting up bas like I feel like you should. I think it's your obligation to call him every day. I really do.
At some point, admitt she and her husband and the rest of their family started feeling like the police just weren't interested in investigating this case, so they started asking questions themselves. They asked the nine to one one caller to keep an eye on that property, and they learned that there was a camper on that property, a camper that a few days after Taylor's murder was very abruptly
moved in the middle of the night. They were worried that crucial evidence could get lost, so they decided to find that trailer themselves.
It was moved on August the sixteenth, Yes, at like one point thirty in the morning. Yeah, that's very sustained. They exactly who moves to camper in the middle.
Of the night when and her family asked the police about that trailer, they say they were dismissed by the sheriff's department. They were told that the sheriff's department had been out there and investigated. They don't believe this because's husband is adamant.
That he never saw crime scene tape.
He never saw the scene being secured, and if there is investigating going on, it's being done in secret. Not only are the police not being forthcoming with information, but the family says they have reason to question whether what police are saying is true at all, because again, the police keep saying Jason's and Taylor's deaths aren't related. The Madison County Sheriff's office wrote on a post on September twentieth, quote there is no connection to the Jason Lierl case
end quote. Madison County Sheriff Ronnie Boyd said that on the evening of September fifth, the in County Sheriff's Office was notified that some people were concerned about Taylor Barksdale. And there's something else. There's another date that keeps coming up, July twentieth. Something happened with Taylor that day because the Madison County Sheriff's office is saying that on or around that day, she was involved in an argument in the Big Clifty area, which is a few miles away, and
that her clothes were found scattered in a field. We need to find out what happened to Taylor around July twentieth, why that led to reports of her being reported missing then when we know she was seen much later. And we need to find out what happened to Taylor between July twentieth and August fifth, the last few weeks of her life before she was heard screaming and no one
came to help. And I know that there's someone out there who knows something, but some people are scared and they have said that they will not talk to me unless I go down there and meet them in person. I'm told there's certain questions that can only be answered by going to Madison County, So that's where I'm headed next. I'm Catherine 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 and Miranda Hawkins. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. Noah camer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Sale, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and ELC.
Crowley.
Listen to Helen Gone idfree by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus 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 gonpot. 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 six seven eight seven four four six one four five
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