Time Opens All Wounds

what she saw. And she's reluctant to talk. But I was able to sort of talk to her for about twenty minutes and explain to her who you were, what we're doing, that we're legit, and I feel like if we get some new information or we have something she can collaborate with us on, I feel like she will talk. Sylvia is heavily featured in ABC's forty minute episode of their show called Primetime that was dedicated to Janie's case.

It aired in two thousand and nine. In the program, Sylvia tells the producers that at the time of Janie's death, she was a runner, someone who delivered drugs to parties, and on September ninth, nineteen eighty nine. She said she was asked to deliver drugs to a high school party that was happening in a cabin on Zach Road in Marshall, Arkansas. She said when she pulled up to the cabin, she was looking straight at the porch and she witnessed the

girl hid another girl in the face. Sylvia said she high tailed it out of there because she didn't want any trouble. She had bags of pot in her car and didn't want to risk arrest. Sylvia didn't come forward until two thousand and seven, three years into a new investigation into Janie Ward's death. She claimed she had been scared, but now she said she had a kid herself, and she felt for the Ward family and she wanted the Wards to know once and for all what happened to

their daughter. I'm Catherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. I do love the names of some of these roads, Like some of them make sense, like Nighthawk Road and Cricket Lane, and then some of them are like high Tech Road. It's gonna be almost like purposely ironic. Right now, we are going to the cabin where the party happened

and where Jane fell. Whatever happened to Janey happened to turn right onto Zach Road, and we'd managed to get some directions from the Freedom Information Request and from I compared that address with the name of the person who bought the cabin afterwards, So we're gonna go out there and look for it. The cabin on Zach Road has been renovated in the thirty years since Janie's death. It's been spruced up since that fateful night in nineteen eighty

nine when Jane's cousin Jay lived there alone. The house had two bedrooms. One had a dirty mattress on the ground. The other, where Jay slept, had a mattress with stained sheets and three thin pillows on it. Three shirts hung in the closet. Another room was converted into a makeshift workspace and was filled with old food containers and another folded up mattress and file cabinet that looked like someone

to toss into the room. The living room had a matching set of faded floral furniture, and there was a model of a boat on display. The cabin didn't have electricity or running water, so the appliances in the kitchen and bathroom were unusable. And the whole house was covered in matted brown carpet. The walls were unfinished. The house had two porches. The one facing the gravel road that leads up to the cabin is where Janey supposedly fell off the step, and that step was no more than

ten inches in height. In December of two thousand and four, Special Prosecutor Tim Williamson was court appointed to Janey's case. At the time, he was a prosecutor based in Mina, Arkansas. Governor Mike Huckabee sets aside ten thousand dollars for the investigation so that Williamson can build a team of investigators and a deputy prosecutor. The governor's spotlight on the case gets readers hooked to Mike Masterson's column, and journalists from

around the state start covering the case again. One of those journalists was Jason Peterson, and in his news report that aired on KATV, he puts a cushion down where Jennie falls and demonstrates the fall himself, tumbling backwards and landing with a heavy smack under the cushion. When you sort of demonstrated the fall off the porch, what was your impression of the of the porch and how far the fall was. Well, that's what I wanted to try

to convey to our viewers. You know, it's been widely thought that she I mean, it's a fact she fell off the porch. Three people witnessed her fall off the porch. What's in dispute is whether that fall could kill someone. A backward fall off the porch an fty plunges investigator Beach years later would call it. And so I thought the best way to try to show our viewers exactly what the people at that party saw was to fall

off the porch myself. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was because our top three ports showed that her head had been snapped backwards. But a fall like that does not propel your head backwards if anything pushes it forwards when you hit the ground. And the physical act of falling off the porch didn't match the physical evidence of the head being snapped backwards, you know, either struck in the face or somehow pushed backwards from

the face. And do you think that when you were when you were you know, when you were falling off the porch. It's widely been described as she fell ten inches, but actually then others were saying, but it wasn't really ten inches. If you count if you're going from the top of her head, it's more than ten inches. Yeah, it's much more. I mean, it's a much further fall

than ten inches the porch. While it's true as ten inches high, you're falling from a height, and if you're falling straight back, you know, that's probably maybe a six or seven foot you know, acceleration before you hit. But I think the prosecutor one time said he had seen a case where a man in Hot Springs fell off sent made a similar fall and he was now quadriplegic. And I guess what you have to decide that the viewer is, you know, is that enough to kill someone?

And ter freak accidents happened, but for the most part, the human bodies designed to live. It's pretty difficult to kill someone or you know, you can sustain a lot of injuries and still live. And would that have been enough to kill her or did something else happen either before or after that fall that contributed to her death. Peterson's report was in two thousand and five, a few months into Tim Williamson's investigation, and In his report, he

brings up suspicions that he has about Jane's case. First, the fact that ron Rose, Sherry, and Kim All said they went straight to the bank parking lot, even though dispatcher Harold Young said they went by the police station. First, Peterson talked about the condition of Jannie's clothing, the fact that her clothes were wet and sandy, even though the cabin and the truck bed were reportedly dry and dusty.

He also mentioned the fact that those same clothes went missing, and that the X rays the Wards supposedly saw in nineteen eighty nine that showed a fracture were not the same one sent to them from the crime lab, and he pointed out the discrepancies in witness statements from Sarah and some of her friends. He also said that the ambulance run reports pertaining to Janie's death were stolen. In

the months after Jane died. The ambulance service had reported that the building had been broken into, only one report was stolen, Janey's. Peterson reached out to twenty six people at the party. He was able to get a few people to open up to him, but he got a lot of doors slammed in his face, and a lot of people hung up on him. Most people did not want to revisit the night that Janie died. I think

we did a pretty good job. I did a pretty good job contacting as many people at the party as I could now as far as what their reactions were, I thought maybe time would have loosened some lips, they'd be less fearful to talk or to tell what they know. It's suming there's something to know, But you know, a lot of people as soon as identified who I was and what I was calling about or what I was

visiting about, shutting down right away. Me know, it's just a lot of over and over people not wanting to talk about it at all, which kind of surprised me. Though maybe they've just they're just tired of hearing about it, are tired of talking about it, or tired of thinking about it as soon as they do. When he tried to call Gary Dn, Gary Don's girlfriend gave Peterson a number for him to reach him on That number one

eight hundred fuck you. One other thing we still don't know the answer to is the route that the truck took from the cabin to the town Square. There are two ways to drive from the cabin on Zach Road to marshall'stown Square. The most direct route is turning left out of the driveway. You go a few miles on

rocky roads and then hit the pavement. On this route you pass the Sheriff's offices, old location, several homes, and the community center where on the night Jane died, there was huge event going on, but the people in the truck who carry Janey in the back say they didn't stop or notice the community meeting. They say they never stopped until they got to the town square, which they went to because it was close to the only medical facility in town, the ambulance service. It was also across

the street from the car wash. The alternate route, a little longer and even rockier, is a right turn out of the driveway. This route goes along the creek bed and comes out at the same place on the pavement as the first route. Five point one miles to the main road and zero point eight miles only really like point eight like around just under a mile to a good paved road. Whichever route they chose, the drive from the cabin on Zach Road to Marshall's town Square should

not take any more than twenty minutes. We'll be right back. It's like so many other people who worked on Jamie's case. The Wards found the special prosecutor Tim Williamson disappointing. How did that affect you and Ron the whole Tim Williamson thing. I know, he came and prayed with you, right, Oh yeah, what a joke he was, and the governor gave him ten thousand dollars to have to investigate. He did nothing but covered that. I mean it was already covered at

and all he did was helped them. I mean all he did was yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And he didn't hear from him. Michael said, you didn't hear from him after him? You never, I mean we might ask questions, we never got anything. Nothing. Journalist Mike Masterson writes about this in his column about how much faith the Words put into Tim Williamson. They prayed together, but after this meeting, Mike said, it became harder and harder to get in

touch with him. The Words contacted Tim Williamson right away, and Williamson drove to Marshall and met at a church with a family and prayed together or justice to emerge in this case. He promised the family, I will find out what happened to your daughter, you know, and if it need be, there'll be accountability. He promised them that in the church, well they believed. I wanted to believe him, of course. I mean. Ron called me and said, well, we have hope for the first time that something's going

to happen. He seems like a very sincere guy. He will do the right thing. For the first week or two, Tim Williamson called me, knowing I'd been involved in it and writing about it, and he said, you know, I'm going to rely on you, Mike, if you don't mind this for information if I get stuck. And I said, sure, I don't have anything to hide, and I'll be glad to help because I'd like to see justice done too.

So he kind of had a rapport until about the third week into it, when he called me and said he was going to the crime lab to start really digging deeper into this, all this and all the records there at the crime lab and blah blah blah. He said, I'll get back to you next week. I said, great. So I waited a week past nothing two weeks nothing. Finally about probably three weeks after, you know, I tried to reach him and couldn't get through. You know, it's

like he's busy, he's tied up. Now. Who knows what happened to the crime lab. I don't, but logically I would say something happened to the crime lab, and he was told something at the crime lab and during his visit over in a little rock that maybe sort of dampened his attitude. Put it that way, because after that he would announce that he's dug into this. He's got a staff helping him do it. He's doing interviews, going

to find out what happened. He spent four years total, and he amassed lots of you know, paper, stacks of paper with interviews and stuff. So when you looked at it, you know, it looks like, boy, this guy's been really busy. But when you broke it down, there wasn't anything of substance that mattered. Tim Williamson's report makes up the bulk of the police case file we got from the Arkansas

State Police. It's filled with transcriptions of interviews with witnesses and a bunch of repeated material from the first investigations. Case file. A lot of the accusations against Williamson center on the fact that people didn't think he was working hard enough. In the case file, there are dozens of letters addressed to Williamson from people around Arkansas telling him to get a move on. On page three, eight hundred and sixty, I find a note from Williamson's deputy prosecutor.

He says they should hold off on conducting interviews until after the Wards have concluded their civil suit. That's the one where they're petitioning to change Janey's death certificate from undetermined to homicide, and he says that they might as well hold off because the ward's lawyer is already deposing witnesses, meaning court ordered subpoenas to get the to interview. That way, they wouldn't have to double up on the work. The

depositions were done by the ward's lawyer, Jerry Sallings. Saling's law firm started working for the Wards when the family needed to get Janie's body exhumed before the second autopsy. What we're hoping to get from these depositions is the answer to some key questions, including how much time elapsed from the time Jannie fell to the ground to the time that she got to the bank parking lot, and

did the truck make any other stops en route. I'm also interested in the depositions from Ron Rose and Kim because they were the ones in the truck. I'm also interested in Gary Donn's deposition because Richard Walter from the Vidock Society said Gary Donn told him a completely different story than the one that was in his statement. In Kim's deposition, she's cooperative, but she gives yes and no

answers and doesn't elaborate. But what she says in her interview mostly matches her original statements, which were taken in the months after the incident. Do you you you said that you and Janie were good friends, who were friends? Okay? Do you know if she was having any problems with anybody at school? No? I don't don't know. No, you're not saying she wasn't. You just don't know where it was that. Had you heard any rumors about her having

any problems at school with anybody? No? After Janie got in the vehicle with you, did you go straight to the party. Yes. Here Saling is asking about how they got there in case they had passed the river or the creek before going to the party. Didn't go by the river? No, didn't stop to buy anything, No, didn't go drink somewhere else or anything at all. Did you pick up anybody else on the way to the party? No? Okay,

So how help me out? How long does it take to get from the square out to where the party was? I mean minutes, maybe thirty. That's just a gives Ron Rose is more descriptive in his answers. Do you remember what she was wearing then? Like a blue jeans and a black shirt? And I don't know. I pause it. That's wet. He said. He felt like it was his duty to get help for Janey. Might I say, no, won,

there's a good good as friends. We was being kid and everything, and I feel like there's my responsibility to get her out of there, you know. So we try to get her in front of my truck, try to load her up. And how did you try to do that? Just about three or four, I think it's four of us there, four or five of us picked her up and tried to handle as best we kids, and tried the slider up in front of my truck in the cab, in my truck and we couldn't get her in there.

She's too big and she was limp, you know, she just it was hard. We couldn't get her in there. Right, you know the back of your truck? Was it wet or dry? Pretty sure it was dry. Here Ron gives more details about the car wreck. This is the one that we talked about in the last episode. The vehicle was Ryan's. He became his hysterical after Janneye was pronounced dead in the parking lot as you were leaving. Do

you remember Brian getting his truck stuck? Yes, he wrecked atop of the hill up there, had a wrecked up there. Who's in the truck with him? He was in a car. I don't know who was with him for sure, but he was in a car, a car, Yeah, all right? Did he block the He had roadblock he'd come out this big steep hill. When he come out on top, he'd lost it and nosed off in the bank and the back end was sticking all the way off the road.

So how did y'all get around him? I had a friend Jimmy, come up there and yanked him back to the truck bank, yanked his car out of the way to where I could drive up on the bank and get by, and then after you got on the past him, you've got a gravel road for a while or ways here, And did y'all ever stop and never stopped? Neither Ron nor Kim said they stopped by the police station, and they both said they took a left out of the driveway, the more direct route that does not pass by the creek.

Gary Donn's deposition openly hostile at the beginning, especially because during the depositions Ron and Moana Ward are in the room and you can feel the tension. You're here under the court order. Subpoena is a court order from the judge, and I get to ask you questions and it's my right and as I answer them, if I don't want to, well that's why I'm I'm about care to not go further than this right out here, right now, I understand. Let me just tell you the way this works in

a deposition. If you refuse to answer the question, you can walk out of here today and I can go to the judge and I can say he refused to answer these questions, and he can force you to come back here and answer them, and then you pay for the deposition. Go for that right now, I'm paying for it. Go for it. Okay. Well, I don't want to get into confident. I don't want to fool with this. I'm

this man right here. I don't care that he'd be in the same room with him, because the crap he's put me through, and I do not like to even be in the same block with the man you're pointing to, Ron Ron Ward right there. All right, well, I can tell that your your feelings are a little very very Sellings asked him to review his statement, and garyd On says he didn't say most of the stuff that was in it. To him, it looked like someone made up his answers say this in some parts, it's it's it's

like it's backwards. I mean, like, I don't really explain it to you. It just it's just like I told you had like it had a mace or Somethingody created theirself how they wanted it to be. That's what I'm saying. So it's not the truth of what you said. No not no, okay, uh now it's two pages. Did you read all of it? I've read enough. That's fine. So I read enough. Somebody made that up. Okay, tell me what part of it is not true. I've never seen her filling no cut from okay, Okay, I've never seen

her drinking. Let's take it one one statement at times so I can keep up with this. Okay, let's see, says I got to the party around six, Ron, Kim and Jane came in together. Is that is that what you said or not? That's about the one thing I've seen there in the first sentences that was correct. Okay,

that can recall. Well, let me tell you this. This is a statement that we got from the police department, and this is supposed This is a copy of an interview that supposedly Bill Beach of the State Police took and this is his statement. This is anything I came up with. They changed there, They changed much stuff over the years in the department down there at that time. I'm not disputing it. I'm asking questions. I'm interested in what you're telling me. I understand, Okay, So I want

to know what in here is not your statement. Sellings goes line by line and Gary don lists out what he doesn't agree with from his original state says, I went over to her and it was like the breath was knocked out of her. You're shaking your head. No, sorry, it's all right. And her shirt had come up when she fell, and I looked at her stomach and I couldn't tell that she was breathing. No, me, and somebody

picked her up and put her on the porch. No, her eyes were open about halfway and rolled back, and she was not blinking. No. I believe she had messed in her pants too. No, I couldn't get anybody to help me. The urinating part is the only part that I remember it looked like to me. In this deposition, gary Don doesn't mention anything about the creek bad and the drowning theory that we had heard from Richard Walter

of the Vedok Society. These answers are notably different from gary Don's original statement in nineteen eighty nine and his link the interview with Bill Beach in the months after Jane's death. In this deposition, he says he did not move Janeye onto the porch, and he also says she could have been lying on the ground for up to twenty minutes before he had said he had immediately gone over to her after she had fallen and moved her

up onto the porch. He also doesn't remember his interview with Bill Beach and says he had to do a polygraph test basically a light detector test at the Cercy County Jail, but there is no mention of a polygraph test anywhere in the case file. In fact, Bill Beach later specifically said that he hadn't administered any polygraph tests during his investigation. On the night Janie died, ron Ward saw his daughter in the morgue at the Kaufman Funeral

Home around midnight. He was there with the coroner of Sirsey County, Thomas Martin, and Ron said he had to insist on an autopsy. Sallings deposed Tom to ask him about his impressions of that night. Tell us your name, pleads Thomas W. Martin Jr. And mister Martin, I understand that you have some difficulty hearing at times. I do all right, and you know we're here today for a deposition.

At the time of Jane's death, Tom had been a coroner for about twenty five years, and his role was mainly to declare someone dead and also determine a cause of death if he couldn't determine anything. He would send the body to the medical examiner in Little Rock. Sellings asked him a question about his corner report. Next to a lot of the questions on the forum, Tom left

it blank or wrote a question mark. He could not tell if there were abrasions on Jane's body, He could not tell what injury there was, or if any foul play occurred. He had ruled out fairly obvious causes of death like gunshot wounds, and said he didn't see anything obviously wrong with Janey. Basically, he said he had no idea what happened to Janey. And he said he also didn't finish filling out the form because he was already

intending to have the body taken to Little Rock. In fact, like I I couldn't exactly remember, he said he figured that he would have already called the medical Examiner's office by the time he met Ron at the funeral home. Did you see mister Ward that night, Ron Ward, Yes, he came to the funeral And would that have been before or after the court the medical examiner was called? Probably after he was called. No, I don't really remember the

time frame that he came in of the funeral. Do you have any memory of him insisting that an autopsv done. Uh No, don't have anything. He didn't have to insist on him because he was already on the way. The investigators working on the case did conduct and record interviews from two thousand and seven to two thousand and eight. Sarah is a glaring omission from these interviews. They interviewed JD and Kathy, the ambulance service attendants who checked Jane

in the bank parking lot. They're the ones who also said they saw debris on Janie and that her clothes were wet. They also saw swelling in her neck. And they're the ones who filled out the ambulance run reports, the ones that had supposedly been stolen in the months after Janie's death. Here's Kathy's interview with investigators. I after broken into then they thought, well, JD, who was my husband's, thought that the run sheet had gotten stolen. I found

that I had put it in a different place. But Kathy clarifies the run report was just misplaced, and this has been a Misunderstandably was and it was. I found it later on. I had put it under some new run sheet and I didn't realize that I had done that. Kathy again describes what she saw in the bank parking lot and what condition Janie's body was in clothes was a damp here you're stamp and what was that inmisphere conditions at this time? It was it was dry that

she was damp. Her clothes were damp, her hair was damp. The only place that there was in the dampness was between the raps. And I said, I smelled no urine or no bed. I just had a it's just a soft perfuse smell. That was all I smelled. There was leaves and twigs and sand in her hair, and you know, that was all I looked at at that time. And I did a cervical check, but I I didn't feel the spine. It it felt like it was in plite. And they said the flight the spine in her neck,

the free had a whole leaf spine. I was checking the sea spine and I felt like I felt everything. But you know, I still kept tractioning on the neck. I that we'd keep tractioning when we'd moving. Mkay, let me back you up to what you said the while. Was it real? Kathy said she didn't notice an obvious neck injury when she examined Janie, nor did she see any trauma to the face. Hearing these accounts from the coroner and Kathy, neither of them could see anything obviously

wrong with Jane. So if there were no obvious injuries to her face, was it possible that she was hitting the face at all. We'll be right back. We're driving to Little Rock to meet with a family's lawyer, Jerry Sallings. He conducted all the depositions and represented the Ward family for the duration of Tim Williamson's investigation, but he was also an outsider to Marshall. I don't care if we

wanted his perspective on the case. What I believe is, at the beginning of this case, a very small town, so you don't have resources, you don't have highly developed, intelligent police force, and you've got someone's family there who is prestigious in the community, the district judge, I think at the time, and all of those factors, But the biggest factor that I perceived as I was proceeding through the depositions is I don't think they really did a

good job of investigating or trying, and I think they assumed that because this was a small town, and mister Ward and his family were not sophisticated that they wouldn't have to worry about it. I think that's what happened. And then they found out differently when mister Ward said had all these questions and they couldn't answer them because they didn't do a good job in the first place. They did a really bad job. Honestly, does not share

the dislike that the family had towards Tim Williamson. He said they'd worked together in the court proceedings and they had a mutual respect for each other. We'd heard from some people that they thought Ron was uncooperative, but Selling said Ron always shared all of the information he collected independently with the police and with investigators. I don't think anybody anything I had or that Ron had was kept secret.

What we tried to get were specific answers, and Tim had a notebook, and I don't think I had that notebook anymore. But it was just topic by topic with you know, whatever the inconsistency was the or the question that he had that wasn't answered, and I felt like it was my job to try to answer it if I could. And the way you try to answer it is to go get the facts or the information through

depositions or whatever. And at the end of the day, there were some questions that we couldn't answer and still can't. As an investigator, this is a feeling that I can relate to. And while you always want to give people answers, and you always want to think that there's another step that you can take or something that can be done, the reality is, once mistakes are made at the initial crime scene, it's very difficult to go back and rectify them.

Can you just in general, maybe not even about this case, but just talking about the difficulty of if the original crime scene is messed up, how difficult it is to go back and if something's not done right. I mean, is there something that the police could have done early on like that would have mitigated that? I mean, just from my experience with pure crime, I was looking through

the witness statements and they're very short. They're basically a paragraph a long each and they're just there's no detail. There's not much detail in any of them things like that. I mean, is there anything that could have done to I mean the reason that you have CSI all these police shows is because every every fact is important, and you can't say, oh, that's not important because you don't

know what was there. So photographs, statements from everybody, and following up on every lead, and I don't that wasn't done here for sure. The assumption was is that she fell off, fell off and died, and so when you work from that assumption, you're not really looking for anything else. Was there anything else? I don't know. I could not get that answer to the point that I could say

that was anything specifically. I mean, there were a lot of irregularities in this and that's why Ron had questions, and that's why it was pursued. But unfortunately it wasn't pursued early enough. And that's not his fault because he tried diligently to do it. But I think they assumed that he was just a uh, someone who didn't know what he was doing. I asked if Salings thought there would have been any answer that would have satisfied Ron Ward.

I don't know Ron was. He was he was convinced it was more than natural causes or falling off the porch or any of a number of things. So I don't know if he would have been or not. Maybe if maybe Fuld. Maybe you felt they'd been treated with more respect, and it was an answer that at least made sense. Maybe, but maybe he was he was a stubborn, determined man. Remember that after doctor Burnell's autopsy, there are a lot of people looking into Janie's death. There's Tim

Williamson in his investigation. There's the family's lawyer, Jerry Sallings doing depositions, and there's Mike Masterson's column it's now published multiple times a week looking into Jannie's case. And there's a film crew from ABC. The ABC producer contacts Sylvia, the runner, who said she witnessed Jane getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Sylvia's information could be crucial because it appears to match doctor Burnell's conclusion that

Jane could have been hit with a bluntfuls object. But some people were critical of Sylvia. They point out that she'd already given a statement in nineteen eighty nine, it's included in the case file, and in this statement she told a completely different story. When Sylvia was interviewed by Tim Williamson in two thousand and six, he asked her about inconsistencies in her story. He asked Sylvia about a previous interview that she did in nineteen eighty nine with

an investigator named Robert Hicks at her home. In that interview, Sylvia claimed she'd heard the story secondhand from three guys who told her as story about two girls who were mad at Janie because she was dating one of their boyfriends. Sylvia said that the injury to Janie's neck came when somebody hit her with a full beer bottle, and after that, she said, some guy in a pickup truck took her

to the house to clean her up. In two thousand and six, Sylvia denied to Tim Williamson that she ever made that statement, but it's a part of the police case file. Some people also criticized the fact that Sylvia came forward with this new version of events after the information about doctor Bannell's autopsy conclusions became public. Ron told Bill Beach that he spoke to Sylvia and that Sylvia told him a story about three girls and an older guy jumping on Janne and beating her up by the river.

But when ABC interviewed Sylvia, she said that she witnessed Sarah on the porch hitting Jane in the neck with a baseball bat in the eyes of investigators, Sylvia lost any credibility she had as a witness. Because of all these inconsistencies. We were able to reach Tim Williamson. He's no longer practicing law, but Janey's case remains vivid in his mind. Well, thank you for talking to us, Kim,

I really appreciate it. So you ended up with this case, now, had you heard about it before you took it on? I had recalled the headlines of the case from eighty nine, and then I think I probably recalled some of the discussions around the case that made to the made it into the newsprint. Tim started investigating, but he couldn't reach any new conclusions from the investigative evidence or from looking back at the previous autopsies, and he especially couldn't see

any evidence of a homicide. As we got favored into it, we were not developing additional information that was helping me to decide, well, if this is a homicide, than who

did it. It got down to the point eventually, where as I had some you know, we were looking at the Thenell's findings and then going back and comparing those with the photograss and the information collected the time doctor Fane Malik for the crime that I did the original autopsy, and it became apparent to me and to my investigators that we had to get to the bottom of the forensics on this because we truly felt because we had too somewhat competing autosic reports, we had to get a

definitive position as to what the medical evidence and the forensic evidence is, because inherently, you do not want to attempt to prosecute a case or you have information that is not corroborative of itself when it's in the forensic role. So we're relying on science. The science has to agree. So our only option was to do something that is extremely rare, and we did not want to do it,

but we were left without choice. Much like the ward's lawyer Jerry Sallings, Tim thought that there was no way to solve the case through the investigative evidence, so he decided there was one last thing he could do exhume Janey's body again and perform another autopsy. 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 Katherine Townsend, Taylor Church, and Gabby

Watts are our producers and story editors. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, and Els Crowley for School of Humans and Conell Byrne and Chuck Bryant for iHeart Our Field producer is Miranda Hawk. Theme and original score are by Ben Sale, available wherever you get your music. Please visit us at helengon podcast dot com or follow us on social media. School of Humans