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They just left the house. They didn't have their shoes on. She steps out of the truck. The ground's cold and wet. As she approaches, there's a pool of blood on the ground, and she remembers as she stepped closer, all of a sudden her feet became really warm. Oh my god.

I'm Yardley. And I'm Zibby, and we're fascinated by true crime. So we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave, to sit down with us and share their most interesting cases. I'm Dan and I'm Dave. We're identical twins and we're detectives in small town USA. Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse. Dan investigates violent crimes, and together we've worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, bursts. Burglaries, sex abuse, and child abuse.

Names, places, and certain details, including relationships, have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families. While we realize that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we hope you'll join us in continuing to protect. the true identities of those involved out of respect for what they've been through. Thank you. Today on Small Town Dicks we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan. My pleasure. Detective Dave. Good to be here.

And one of our favorite guests returning, Detective George, who since season two has been promoted to sergeant. Congratulations, George. Thank you. Fantastic and well deserved. Thanks. So George Tell us how this case came to you.

This was another one of those cases where a lot of our things happen for us as detectives when we're away from work. Late at night, we're home sleeping. Patrol responds to a call in which some citizens called nine one one because a male and a female were in a dispute. Tell me exactly what happened. So we were driving down the street. There was a guy, a big black male, pushing a female around. She's screaming. We pulled over and asked her if she needed help.

She's saying she's fine and he's screaming at us to get the fuck on and mind our own damn business. He's beating her up. Was this a lovers quarrel? Essentially that's exactly what it was. These two had been dating for a period of time, a couple of months. Even though the male was significantly older, they had a relationship where she was uh just finishing up high school and he was just a guy hanging around not really doing much of anything good. What was his name?

Trevor. And what was the girlfriend's name? Molly. Okay. So Molly and Trevor. Molly and Trevor. And we found a lot more of this stuff after the fact about their relationship. We were able to backtrack a little bit with friends and relatives and family. try to get some history, where they met up, what they did. They partied, they drank alcohol, gotten into disputes, but

Keeping in mind we're dealing with a young lady in her late teens who's trying to figure life out and part of that is having other friends in her life, whether it be friends that are boys or friends that are girls. And uh Friends that are boys were perceived as somewhat as a threat to Trevor. That seemed to be a constant source of their arguing. Anytime another boy was talking to her, he became jealous.

He was upset that she would be spending time with another friend that was a boy. And that's just what seventeen year old girls do. It's normal and and not really a reason to get upset and angry, but in Trevor's case that was one of the things that upset him. And it was a reason for a break up that kind of happened for a day before they got back together the next day.

And on this particular night they had been hanging out with friends, drinking alcohol over at Molly's house, and they decided to walk to a party they heard was taking place in another part of town, not a great distance away, probably about a mile and a half away. So this incident took place in late fall, early winter. So we're dealing with cold weather, rain, snow that time of year. Walking a mile and a half wasn't a big deal for a young group of people heading to a party.

While at the party there was some arguing going on about Molly's interaction with another boy. And this caused Trevor to become upset and a little jealous. They argued about that. They got over it. They started making out in the garage of the party. And then at some point they decided, okay, we're done. We're walking home. About what time of night is this? So we're talking now about two in the morning, they leave the party and they decide to walk back to Molly's house.

And that point is just Trevor and Molly walking. Residential neighborhoods, not extremely busy. Usually not a lot of pedestrian bikes or vehicle traffic this time of night. They had some loud arguing on the sidewalk as they were walking. And the reason we know this is when we were able to canvas neighborhoods and start asking questions of people, we found a person that lived down the street and this person recalled being woke up

And he remembered the exact time on the clock. He happened to be staying at a relative's house. And when he was woken up by the arguing, looking at this clock and remembering the time on the clock'cause it stuck out to him'cause it wasn't his room. So he gave us a really good timestamp of when the arguing happened.

compared to later when people driving down the street saw this dispute. And this dispute started as a verbal dispute and at some point somehow became physical and we had to rely a lot on evidence and witness statements to paint a picture of how it became physical and why it became physical. So there were witnesses to this dispute. Yes. Patrol officers respond to the scene. They start talking to a car full of people that drive by and say, Hey, we saw this couple arguing.

Are they the ones that called nine one one? They're the ones that called nine one one. They were out themselves that night, partying. They had a designated driver. They went back to the house and they decided, Let's go out and get something to eat. We're all hungry. Yeah, it's two in the morning, but young people, lifestyle, why not? And

Fortunately for us and fortunately for Molly's family, that they happened to have a craving for some fast food and decided to go out at doing the morning and get something to eat as they were driving down the street. They saw this couple arguing and at some point it looked like the male was pushing the female.

So it bugged them enough to where they weren't discontent with calling nine one one and going and finishing their night out and getting some deep. They actually parked around the corner and decided, We'll just wait here for a couple of seconds and see if the couple walks by. And they waited and they waited.

And nothing really happened. So they decided to drive around the block. As they rounded the corner to coming back to the spot where they saw the margoing, the couple had just moved slightly up the block, maybe a hundred, fifty feet or so up the street. And as they approach, they pull over and say, Are you okay to the female? Why do they ask that? Is she still standing? She's screaming at that point. And they pull alongside and say, Are you okay? And she says, Everything's fine, everything's fine

But the male aggressively approaches the vehicle they're in. He's a big guy. He's about six four, two hundred fifty. Physically imposing guy to most people. He approaches the vehicle that witnesses are in pretty aggressively. What are you doing? Get out of here. Leave us alone. That type of thing. So they're like, All right, we'll get out of here. So they drive around the block and then as they come back again, they're on the phone with nine one one reporting this dispute.

They see her laying on the ground. This is probably forty five seconds later. and they see the male running down the street. Whoa. So at that point they pull over, get out, and try to render aid to the female on the ground. How old are these people in the car? Mid twenties. Wow. That's amazing. So within forty five seconds, under a minute, they go from seeing them. Both standing, both Trevor and Molly standing and arguing,

to turning back around and now she's on the ground. Trevor's running. Yes. So a couple of them get out and they try to render aid to her and resuscitate her. One of the people in the car says, I gotta keep an eye on this suspect. So he starts going down the street trying to keep an eye, jogging. Uh he's on the phone to nine one one. Uh the girl is laying on the ground, she's laid out. We went across I went around the block. The guy's running down the road toward the county. Richard, you're off.

He hold on, he like physically ripped her ear off? Yes, and she is laid on the ground unconscious and he is running down the road for Okay, so I just want to be sure her ear is a he has ripped her ear off with what? Yes, that is correct. I don't know. It's gone. Okay. So she's bleeding? Yes, we need the ambulance. Okay.

Now make sure it hold on, how old is she? I have no idea. I can still running down the road. Okay. Is she unconscious? Yes. Okay. Do you know she's breathing? She is breathing. Okay. Breathing, air. Okay. But the the mail is now running, he's getting forward right now. On foot. He's approaching a bike path. We live in an area there's lots of bike paths. And when he refers to it, we all know exactly the bike path he's talking about. It has a funny little name to it.

So now 911's putting the details is heading towards the bike path. So we have officers responding to the scene. We have other officers responding to the area of the bike path. We also know, because of where the bike path comes out, this is pretty much adjacent to a freeway. And we know that it's a possibility that if the suspect is on the bike path, he can pop out on the other side of the freeway at some point.

The young people in the car try to render aid to the victim. She's covered in blood. Her ear is detached from her face. She's brutally beaten to the point where she's essentially has agable breathing. She's desperately trying to stay alive. They try to render aid, they try to do CPR. You know, the witnesses end up giving some pretty powerful statements. The two young ladies that tried to render aid to her

They just left the house. They didn't have their shoes on. They were just gonna go through a drive through, get some food and head back home. One young lady, being this is late November, she steps out of the truck. The ground's cold and wet. As she approaches Molly laying on the ground, she later recalled as she got to where Molly was laying, there was a pool of blood on the ground. And she remembers as she stepped closer, all of a sudden her feet became really warm.

That's her memory. My God. That's a powerful thing for a witness to say to us, let alone later in a trial. It paints a very vivid picture. It gives an indication of how much blood is on the ground, not to mention the time in which this happened. You know, that time of year Blood's not gonna stay warm very long. So this obviously just happened. I c still can't get over how much damage was done in such a short amount of time. It was pretty brutal.

Molly was a seventeen year old young lady, pretty small stature, petite young lady. As I mentioned before, Trevor's big six four, two fifty, pretty muscular, big guy. It's not gonna be difficult for him to cause some damage if he wanted to. And he absolutely did.

If Trevor is on foot and the nine one one caller actually saw him running away, he can't have gotten that far. So how does the search for him go down? Our officers set up a perimeter on both sides of the freeway and a canine officer is called in to help track and the witness running down the street says this is where I last saw him and points the canine officer to exactly where he last saw the guy. Cannon officer gets to that area and the dog's on a track.

Dan could probably speak more to the specifics of how dog tracks work, but my understanding is essentially as you are living and breathing, you're shedding skin cells. And the more you sweat, the more you breathe, the more you run, you're leaving parts of you behind. And that dog follows that trail. And he picks up that area where Trevor, he was last seen. And tracks for about three quarters of a mile, maybe a half mile, along the bike path.

out to a major street intersection underneath the freeway, out the other side, and keeps on tracking to the point where there's another officer on perimeter to the north. And he he's on perimeter, he sees all of a sudden a guy walking down the street that matches the exact description of the suspect. And that officer steps out of his car and verbally challenges the suspect, stop right there, show me your hands.

I'm assuming it's Trevor. Is he walking nonchalantly as though trying to pass off like what I'm just at two thirty in the morning walking down the road. Exactly. It's exactly how he's presenting himself. He's not running so when he's confronted verbally, he complies and the officer says, Show him your hands. The officer has a flashlight. He puts a spotlight on the guy to light him up to see what's going on.

you can see blood on one of the guy's hands. The officer sees this and he describes as he's looking at the hand, all of a sudden the suspect looks over at his own hand and puts his hand in his pocket. Officer gives more commands, keep your hands out of your pockets, thinking he may be going for a weapon or something. So directs him to the ground. By direct he orders him to get on the ground, and they approach him, another officer arrives on scene, and they detain him, put him in handcuffs.

So Trevor's compliant. He's totally compliant, doesn't fight, and as they're handcuffing him, here around the corner comes the canine officer who's on his track. And the track leads exactly to where the suspect is found. Wow. That's amazing.

Suspects issued his Miranda rights and they talk to him briefly at the scene about what he's doing, what's going on, and he gives a story of, I don't know, I'm just out walking and You know, me and my girlfriend are rat walking, I'm walking home and she's probably at home now hanging out and

Not a big deal, kinda dismissive about what's going on and doesn't know exactly why his hand's bleeding, thinks he may have punched the ground or something or hurt himself, but doesn't really know. Doesn't have a lot of answers as to why he has blood on his hand. Uh brother. I'm always surprised by the audacity of someone who's so clearly committed A horrible deed.

to just default straight into, No, I didn't. Don't know where that blood came from. I'm like, how does he think he's really gonna back out of that one? And I guess, you know, it maybe it helps. It should be noted. Our victim's uh a white female and our suspect is a black male. This isn't just a random guy the Patrol Oster came across wearing dark clothes and a puffy jacket. Where we live.

is a predominantly white area. There's not a lot of diversity as far as African Americans. So we have larger Latino Hispanic culture than here. So it really does help that when somebody describes a black male with this type of clothing, when an officer stops him, we're not just stopping some tweaker out and I just happen to be dressed in a similar manner. We have a pretty good reason to stop this guy, and especially the blood on the hand.

That adds to the reason to we need to detain this person. There's not that many people running around two in the morning, let alone somebody wearing that exact clothing matching that description. With blood on their hand. With blood on their hand.

And heading in the same direction as where a canine is tracking to. All those factors adding up just helps us more and more. At that point, detectives get called in and once he's detained, it's like okay, we've got this guy in custody, you guys can process the scene and interview the suspect.

Meanwhile, what state is Molly in? She was pronounced deceased immediately. The officer showed up in the scene to assist our witnesses in rendering aid and give CPR and it was obvious at that point she was deceased. But they continued until uh medics arrived. That's horrifying. Uh

I can't believe she was that injured that she was beyond resuscitation. Medics I think even in situations where somebody is almost obviously deceased, they're still gonna try everything they can to try to revive somebody. They hooked her up to a defibrillator, put the patches on, and ran it to see if they can give her a shock to restart the heart. She'd lost so much blood at that point.

And what had he specifically done to her? Initially punched her in the face. One punch from this guy was enough to knock her down, probably. It's uh unknown how many times he may have punched her. But when she was down in the ground, uh this took place just off the sidewalk they were walking on. There's a small driveway and a vehicle parked in the driveway. this happened adjacent to the vehicle. So as we're processing the scene

There's blood everywhere, but there's a lot of blood in the vehicle, including hand smudges on the vehicle and spatter on the vehicle from different directions. The smudges are important because that tells us somebody had blood on them was standing up at some point touching the car and smearing blood over the windows.

The picture I'm envisioning with this happening is him stomping on her while she's on the ground, with his feet with his boots, which we're able to corroborate later. But going back to the scene, the smudges on the car get documented, photographed, measured, all the blood. On the lower part of the car, specifically on the hub cap of the wheel, you can see directional spatter, and by spatter, just envision a puddle of water on your desk and you hitting it with your hand.

depending on which direction your hand hits it, that water will move one direction or another. It'll move up into the side. And from an elevated platform if you spatter that water will drop certain ways. It's the same concept with blood. We're able to see based on the position of her body, when a blow is delivered, the blood is sent to the

in a trajectory upward and at an angle and you can see exactly the angle from which the strikes took place. Based on the severity of the injury and later what was corroborated by the medical examiner is it took a very blunt object, a hard blunt object, something other than a soft tissue in your hand or a punch to cause the damage that was caused to her. And he surmised it'd be something like a boot.

So you could see multiple blows, multiple directions of spatter. It wasn't just one segment. There were several angles from which you can say at least multiple blows took place. while she was down on the ground to cause injury. And the majority of her injuries were to her upper body from the chest up, mostly her head and face.

And were they in her driveway? No. They had not made it home to her. They were still three quarters of a mile away from her house. Where Trevor was found was about three blocks away from her house. He was making his way back to her house. To her house. What for? He stays there on and off. Trevor doesn't really have a place to stay. He crashes wherever he can crash. He had some roommates, he's had places he lives. He just stays with whoever lets him crash. Were her parents there?

Her mother had come and gone, her father did not live there at the time. They were separated and they allowed them to stay at the house. When you say come and gone, what do you mean? Mom and dad are out of touch with what's going on in Molly's life. So yeah, they came and went from her house regularly. It wasn't a big deal for Trevor to stay at Molly's house and sleep in her room with her. It wasn't abnormal.

So maybe to him he just defaulted to I'm going back there. I'm just gonna go back and go to sleep and he'd been drinking, so he was heading back there. Did he know she was dead?

That is a great question. Yes, he did. But the way it came out initially, he feigned ignorance as to everything that was going on. How did that interview with Trevor go? So we get to take some pictures of his injuries and we want to get some samples of the blood on his hands. And another detective gives him a couple swabs to get those blood. It's easier to let him swab his own hands. That's what the detective does.

But he refuses to give the q tips back. They have the swabs on there. He says, You're not getting these. So we do the okay fine. We'll get him later, one way or the other. Maybe we gotta do a more formal process like writing a search warrant if he's not gonna comply with that. We start talking to him and initially he says, I don't know what's going on. Molly's fine. She's I'm sure she's at home with the baby.

And we're like, Whoa But w oh, what baby? So we learned that she had a small baby at home, not with him, that was with another uh young man. who had died in a tragic incident several months prior. Oh. So the father of the baby is deceased. Baby's only a few months old at this point. My God. So she's had a pretty tumultuous life. Parents separated, she got pregnant at a young age, the father of the child dies, now she's in a bad relationship with an older guy.

So that's what he tells us. And we know that's baloney, so we try to call him out on it a little bit and say, We know there's something else going on. Why don't you talk to us about where you guys were tonight?

And oh, we were at a party, but she's at home, everything's fine, she was drinking, everything's good and he feigns ignorance as to what's going on and he wants to know what's going on. And we say, Well, Molly's dead and he does this whole episode, What are you talking about? Dead. There's no way she's dead.

Yeah, she's dead and we need to talk to you about what happened and I don't know what you're talking about, he says, but Molly's fine. She's at home with a baby. I'm not talking to you. Leave me alone. But he doesn't ask for a lawyer. He does. Oh. He says, I'm not talking to you guys without a lawyer.

We're done. So we're done at this point talking to him about that part of the case. But we still have evidence we need to get from him. So he does us no good sitting in the interview room, stewing, having problems, getting upset. But we're like, Well, we're at least getting your clothes from you. We're gonna change the clothes.

So we give him a change of clothes, some jail clothes to put on. So he gives us the clothes he has on. The important thing to notice about that is blood on the sleeves of the coat he has on. But even more important is the boots he's wearing. And there's blood all over the boots. And not only on the bottom, which blood on the bottom on the sole of the boot is not going to be indicative of this person committed the crime. All it means is they could have stepped in the blood.

The more important parts is the spatter on top of the boot and the directionality. Once again, looking at the spatter of the direction of where the blood drops are. You could tell force was used and it's on the everywhere from the eyelets to the tongue, as well as on his pants, on the lower parts of his pants around the cuff area. There's blood spatter there.

So the spatter is most indicative thing, not just the presence of blood. So we have the okay, good, we got the right guy, this guy definitely did it type thing. So I go start writing a search warrant. We need to get samples of blood on his hands, but I also want to get his own blood from his body.

for blood alcohol content or to see if there's any drugs on board. Right. And are you writing a warrant for the swabs that he swabbed himself with as well? That and we're gonna read swab it ourselves, not only to check his injury but any other blood on him. I want to get those samples.

So he gets escorted to a holding cell, kind of down the hall in our building, and gets put in a room to wait while I'm writing a search warrant. And as I'm sure you've discussed in previous podcasts and as your listeners are aware, search warrants can be a long, tedious process. Writing down a lot of information. Then waking up a judge at oh dark thirty in the morning and going to their house and saying, Will you sign this piece of paper authorizing me to do all this stuff?

In between that, your DA has to review your paperwork. So it takes a while. So he's over in a holding room, and while I'm getting my search warrant signed, supervisor is checking in on where the suspect is, and we learn that he was put in a room that has a sink and a toilet in it.

And we're concerned that he may be trying to wash off the blood on his hands. Oh God. Oh my. So supervisor goes over there and says, Hey, we need to move you to another room, make sure everything's good to go. He gets transferred to another room that has no water running and he hadn't done this yet. But as a preventative thing, hey, let's put him in here, make sure he doesn't disturb the evidence. When he's moved, he basically does this, Hey, you guys want to tell me why I'm here?

And supervisor says, No, we can't talk to you. He goes, No, no, I wanna know what's going on. Where's Molly at? I wanna I wanna know why I'm here. And supervisor tells him, Hey,

Detective George and the other guy tried to talk to you earlier and you said you don't want to talk to him, you wanted a lawyer. So we can't violate your rights. We can't talk to you without a lawyer. Well, forget that. He says, I I'll talk to you. I don't want a lawyer. I want to hear what happened. I want to know what's going on and I'll tell you what's going on, but I don't want a lawyer. So the supervisor comes back across the hall and says, Hey.

This guy says he wants to talk to you now. He's reaching out to you saying he wants to talk to you guys now. So he can take it back? He can say I want to let her and he can take it back. He can. He has to reinitiate that contact. He has to be the one. We can't just go over to check in with him and say, Do you want to talk to us now? Do you want to talk to us now? And pastor him.

There's laws in place. It's for a reason. We don't want to violate someone's rights at all, ever. So he reinitiates and says, I want to talk to those cops. So we sit down and talk to him. And he gives a confession as to what he did. He basically says they were at a party with several friends. They left the party and they were both drinking. He gave real good descriptions to even name the rum they were drinking, a Barbarossa rum.

He says they have been walking, they got into a verbal dispute and then he says, I don't remember anything else. Next thing you know, short time later I look at my hands and I have blood on my hands. I don't know where the blood came from. I must have got in a fight with someone. Someone? Someone.

For whatever reason he's not acknowledging any kind of physical dispute with Molly at that point. Does he say what they argued about? Constantly arguing about all kinds of things, but he doesn't give specifics at that time. They break up, get back together and they're talking about their constant breakups. Does he seem remorseful, sad, scared? Matter of fact. Not scared. Not remorseful, not emotional. Just like he's just telling a story like us, walk down the street, next thing you know, uh

We were in argument and now we're walking I remember arguing and then I remember looking at my hands and having blood on him. You know, his selective memory seems really self serving. Yeah. He remembers last time he saw Molly is he was either holding or hugging her. And he remembers at some point during the argument she fell to the ground, he had to hold her up to try to steady her.

But he doesn't remember necessarily pushing her to the ground or doing anything like that. Or that when he was holding her she was bleeding to death. No. Nothing like that at all. And then he remembers having blood on his hands and he tried to get dirt and leaves to wipe off the blood on his hands and clean up.

But the important thing is he puts himself there time and place with her. He acknowledges some kind of dispute. No one else was involved. He doesn't remember anybody else attacking her. Nobody else did this to her, basically acknowledging I remember holding her up, I remember her being on the ground.

I remember there being blood on my hands. Then I figured, Oh shit, I gotta get out of here and then took off running. Does he acknowledge the nine one one caller? Not initially. Ruby brought it up later, but initially no. I have this burning question about the baby.

Who's with the baby? Where is the baby? When you heard that there was a baby, did you guys go to the house? We eventually made it out to the house and her family was watching the baby. The sister was watching the baby and at this point the sister has adopted the baby. This is years ago. And I last time I saw a sister was just a couple of months ago and sister's raising a little boy now.

He's nine years old, eight years old. Oh, so this happened eight or nine years ago. Yeah. And the sister adopted the baby quite soon after the baby was born. And it changed her life. In talking to her, she was kind of at a point in her life where she didn't know what was going on. She's a little bit older than Molly.

but still was kind of an unstable point in her life. And she says the best thing that came out of this whole incident is it's got her stability in her life. It's caused her to be responsible and take care of somebody and She said that's the only blessing come out of this is she has now this baby in her life that she raises uh Molly's kid. My goodness, does that boy have a story about his parents? Yeah. That first night that all of this occurs, at some point you make it out to the house.

To check on the baby and you encounter family members, correct? Correct. Were you the one who broke the news to them? Yes. How did that go? I wasn't the only one where it was a couple of us there and they're upset, they're shocked, and all the things that come along, even though they can look back and see some issues with whether it's alcohol and drugs or

the relationship itself, the problems with the person, they can always look back on it and say, uh, not I should have known, but the more they thought about it, they weren't as surprised something tragic could happen. With Trevor specifically? Did they instantly assume it was Trevor who killed her? Not instantly. But we shared with them that you know she was a victim of murder and that Trevor was in custody.

And I think they did a little bit of what have we done? What could we have done to prevent this? Like anything. And we try to reassure'em whether it's completely accurate or not, there's not much you can do. You don't look back on it and try to what if it. Right. Was there an autopsy? There was an autopsy performed by our pathologist on Molly. She had numerous injuries, a lot of fractures to her face, neck, upper body, but she had a lot of lacerations, cuts, different impact wounds.

I think I mentioned this earlier. Both sides of her face were pretty damaged. One of her ears was essentially ripped off from the force. We're trying to reconstruct where she was at a certain point and it looks like she was laying on almost on her side with one side of her face on the ground and the other side of her face exposed to the air. She wasn't on her back necessarily.

at this point where the impact was, but one of the impact points you could see abrasions and marks to where the boot made contact with her face and ripped most of her ear off. It was hanging on by just a small part of skin. On the other side of her face you can see the impact with the ground, the marks on her face, as well as the injury that corresponds to the ground causing that side of it.

And it caused injury to her other ear as well. She was completely unrecognizable. Really? If you looked at and which I have her D M B photo and compare it to the crime scene photos, there is no way you would look at those two pictures and say it's the same person. No one could do that. Gives you a pretty good idea the rage and violence that occurred in that forty five seconds while the callers circled the block. Yeah. So in the absence of a

full complete confession from Trevor. I think it fell upon us just try to do as much background information as we could. And we have at this point, he's in custody. We're gonna have trial sometime in the future, year, two years down the road. So we spend time contacting friends and family, trying to build up background information on both of them.

And we learn a few things, most notably about his rage and jealousy. Other boys that she had contact with, other girls that she was friends with talking about his rage and jealousy issues. At one point, Trevor assaulted Molly's father during an argument at the house.

punched him one time. He had threatens people regularly. So we start digging a little bit into his past and find out he's got quite the arrest record. He's got issues in his past all the way down to his teenage years. He's none time in jail and prison in other states. For violence or for drugs? For violent crimes. Violent crimes.

We don't necessarily hold someone's prior bad acts against them except for to show a pattern of behavior. I think it shows a increasing pattern of bad behavior from talking back to mom and dad, that type of stuff to robberies to weapons offenses to assaults.

to show that this isn't his first radio and he knows he has problems. So he gets psychologically evaluated by the state, by the defense. He gives more detailed descriptions of what happened that night. A little more every time. His memory improves. His memory improves or he just feels like shearing more every time to the point where he acknowledges striking her, he acknowledges her falling to the ground and him knowing he's in trouble.

He tries to give a blackout defense at a certain point to say, I just blacked out. Well, there's no history of him blacking out. His intoxication level wasn't high enough for him to black out. The most traumatic point of this whole episode is the one point he doesn't remember, is kicking her a lot while she's down. He remembers her being on the ground and being above her, but he specifically blacks out that moment, but seconds later his memory kicks back in as he's running down the street.

So it became a uh a show for a judge and a jury in trial to show what happened and bringing these witnesses in that saw the dispute happen. So those witnesses that called 911 and tried to resuscitate Molly testified at Trevor's trial. Yes. For them to articulate seeing their verbal dispute, to articulate his aggressive behavior towards them and then describing the scene it was key.

This has been many years and I've talked to all of them just recently. And two of them are in the nursing field right now. after this incident they decided they're gonna get into nursing and that type of career field because they want to help people. They realized that night

Their calling was to help people. Wow. And they weren't like at a lost part of their lives or anymore. They're in their early twenties figuring life out. But it was then when they decided our lives gonna be about helping people. Was it the two people who tried to resuscitate her? Yes. And that's that point they decide we're gonna do something. And from that point on, they've been people of action. That's what they do, is help.

That's amazing. I hesitate to say thank God that they were there because Molly's still dead. But if it weren't for them, this would have been a much more difficult case and obviously the call may not have been placed so soon. uh he would have been harder to track down and that they stayed on.

And we're willing to testify in court is really impressive. If not for th I mean I tell them that every time. They're the true heroes in this case. They didn't save Molly. They they couldn't. There's nothing they could do. But they're the absolute heroes that most people in this situation are gonna see something happen and they're gonna keep on driving. They may call 911 even and say, I saw some dispute.

for these people. Took action. They're heroes for what they did. They held somebody accountable. If it wasn't for them, there may not be accountability. May we have still gotten to the point where we had him as a suspect and can link him Maybe, but it may have been days later.

And by then his clothes with the blood evidence is gone, the stuff in his hands, everything, all the physical evidence may not be there. And he could have been gone, gone. Yeah. He's not from this area. He could have gone to where he's from and gone out of state and we'd never Find him. It's entirely possible that happens. If it wasn't for these people. What came of the trial?

So we had a trial a year and a half, two years later. It was uh in front of a judge. And Trevor was found guilty of murder, sentenced to life in prison. First degree murder? There's not degrees of murder where we work. There's capital murder and there's a step below so there's murder where you get the death penalty.

And there's regular murder where you don't get the death penalty, I guess the best way to put it. And then the underlying manslaughter, things like that. He was found guilty of felony murder, which means no death penalty. There wasn't a another act He was covering up, there wasn't torture. There's a lot of different things I have to go into uh to get a capital case.

So he's sentenced to life in prison, uh, early release, the earliest release after twenty-five years, get evaluated, that type of thing. And he spent A few years in prison went through an appeals process. It went through the Court of Appeals in our state. Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and said everything's good to go.

It went to the next Supreme Court level for our state, not the national Supreme Court, our state Supreme Court. And the state Supreme Court found some technicalities in the trial they felt should have erred on the side of the defendant. So they ordered a retrial. So five, six years later, after the initial trial happened, we had a retrial. And this one was in front of a jury. Really?

So the first trial is just in front of a judge, right? Right. People have the choice to either go judge or jury. It's up to them. And it's totally a strategy. Who do they think they have a better chance with?

To me, I think their thought process would be if it's a legal issue, a judge is the best person to hear it. If it's emotional, a jury is the best one to hear it. Well, to them, it's just the opposite. If it's an emotional case, they don't want emotion to get the way. They want only facts and legal issues. So his initial trial was before a judge. I think their strategy was if a jury hears these details and see these pictures and all this stuff, they're sunk. So judge found him guilty.

Five years later, they said, Yeah, different lawyer, let's do something different this time. Let's do a jury trial and try this over again in a different way and see what happens.

This was probably one of the bigger challenges of my career as far as court stuff goes, is tracking down all these witnesses and getting it back in. By the time we had this trial, it was seven years later. After the murder happened. So we spend time tracking in all these witnesses and sitting down with them. A lot of good police work was done in this case by our officers and detectives

On a total side note, when we interview people, it's important that every individual interview is documented in its own report. It allows our witnesses to reread their own report later, seven years later, to see, hey, this is what you said back then to the police. Do you have a memory of this? So they actually can recall what they said and what's documented in that police report seven years later.

These people didn't have any problem remembering at all. They didn't need the police report. This is such a traumatic thing in their lives. It was helpful to just get the dates and a couple details, relook at maps again. But all these folks came back in, they all testified in the first trial. They came back seven years later, retestified again, did an outstanding job of just

saying what happened. I'm sure they would take a side in their own brain of what they think should happen, but they gave a really good independent recollection of facts that happened that day and painted a very vivid picture Keenine handler comes in, documents the map, the track he took to find this person, crime scene people, detectives, everybody recreate this first trial all over again. And the jury was out uh I wanna say fourteen minutes and deliberated.

By the time they made it to the room, they sat down, got something to drink, they picked a four person, and decided let's vote and see where we stand on this, did the first vote, and came back with unanimous guilty. They summoned the jury clerk.

Got brought back in the courtroom. Ended up being twenty four minutes later from the time they left to the time they came back. But they actually didn't really even deliberate, deliberate. They just did a okay, what do we say? And everybody was unanimous and came back and found him guilty again. Same felony murder.

Goes to prison for life. Did he ever testify on his own behalf? He did. Oh my God. Why? How'd he seem? We need to know about this. he didn't seem genuine He did a better job in the second trial than he did the first trial. He learned from his mistakes of what to say and what not to say and how to react. He was not good on the stand on the first trial. He acted very emotional. He was enraged. He pounded his fist on the witness stand when he wanted to make a point.

he came across as a total asshole. His rage was apparent, his jealousy was apparent. His truthfulness or lack thereof was very apparent and he was no way believable on the stand and when confronted with various things, he was flustered, he didn't have explanations for a lot of things. Come the second trial, he was more prepared. He had seven years to sit in a prison cell, do research.

work on his own self. I mean, if nothing else, our prisons can help people work on themselves if given the resources. And there's a lot of resources in our state to help people in prison. So he tried to better himself while he was in there somewhat, educate himself on a lot of things, a lot of legal things, a lot of possible defenses to say, Well, I think this is what happened, but tried to self diagnose himself. So when he came back in the second time he did a better job of articulating

himself. He kept his emotions a lot more in check. He still didn't have good answers for the lies, for the inconsistencies. Are you allowed to confront him with details from the first trial? Yes. Those are on the record facts. Everything from his testimony to the testimony of his own psychologist.

And we ended up doing a videotaped interview. We're able to play that video and say, This is what you said happened. Now you're saying something different. It leaves him very little wiggle room. Mm-hmm. And it's up to a prosecutor to pin him down on those things. But it's just so typical when you speak to these people how their story evolves.

And the time frame may be different. Sometimes the story evolves during that first interview. For this gentleman, Trevor, he's had seven or eight years to let his story evolve into what it has become. And I was there for the first day of this retrial. I sat in the gallery. I wasn't part of this investigation, but I got to see jury selection. I got to watch Trevor and his mannerisms and his demeanor when he was sitting there. It was poor.

And tell me about that. Did he seem arrogant? Arrogant. He was the star of the show and everybody look at him. He actually spun around in his chair at one point during a break. and just stared at me and I could tell he was trying to stare me down and I've played that game before with these guys where it's posturing. They want to dominate you. Why you?

Did he know you were a cop? No. I was wearing street clothes, but it's a way for him to exert his dominance over me. That's probably all he's done all his life to people. Yeah. And obviously throughout his life, based on his criminal history and his behavior with Molly and the family, he's been the big bully in the room and he's been able to exert himself over people and his dominance.

And this is a case where he's not able to do that. I stared right back into his eyes and I wasn't gonna break that stare for anything and he actually broke the stare. But still, why do you think he singled you out?'Cause you weren't in uniform and you didn't know you were a police officer, right?

I wasn't in uniform. I didn't have anything that would suggest that I was a cop. And I honestly think that he just likes to exert his dominance over people and try to get people to fear him. And I'm not that guy. It's funny your perception to him during the second trial. You should have seen him during the first trial.

He was composed when you saw him. During the first trial, if it wasn't for the tragedy it'd be laughable. When the judge was not in the room, he was spinning around in the chair, he was singing, he was rapping, he was joking, He would put on a show and I remember after the first trial, after he was found guilty, the judge left the courtroom and he sat in the chair and laughed and spun around and joked and sang, literally singing songs.

And I made observations of this notes and everything. I told the DA what he's doing. So that was shared with the judge when we came back in the next day for the sentencing. By the way, this is how he's acting in your courtroom and she was quite upset by it. There's nothing she could do about it. You can't punish people for acting up. But it just shows his arrogance, his demeanor.

He doesn't care. And did you get to bring those details into the second trial? We didn't talk about his behavior in the courtroom during the second trial because it wasn't really relevant to the case itself. the facts of the case. And I think the jury members picked up that when he's sitting there, even on breaks, he's acting like this. During the trial, there are still moments where he reveals his true self.

Where you hear an occasional pff scoff or a smile or a chuckle. He was much more composed. He didn't bang his fist on the table and stuff, but You can only control so much. Yeah, you couldn't hide his true nature. No, it's very very apparent. Did that judge from that first trial have any words for him when delivering his initial sentence? She did.

She let him know that she was unimpressed with his behavior. But I think as a judge you have to be careful not to make that the reason for any findings. But she let him know that she felt he had no remorse for what happened. He was not believable. She lets him know things like that, the factual stuff about the case.

She's not gonna go into I think he misbehaved in my courtroom. But she was not the judge for the second trial. Uh we had a whole new judge to go in front of. It was a very clean, fresh start as much as we could. I mean this case got a lot of press when it came out. So it was tough selecting a jury and making sure we had people in the jury that didn't know the facts of the case, didn't know the results of the first trial. We couldn't even tell the jury, by the way he was found guilty before.

We couldn't tell them that. Really? We couldn't even insinuate that. Now if they happen to put that together on their own, whatever happened the first time, that's on them. But we can't present them with assumptions of guilt. He has to be treated as

innocent until we're able to prove guilt. And what was his expression when he was found guilty the first and second times? The first time it was laughable to him. He sat there and literally laughed out loud. The second time, much more composed, he sat there relatively stoic. had an expression on his face that, okay, I'm not surprised by this, but got a trip out of prison. I'm not in prison anymore. I had to come down to Stane County jail.

He stayed in jail for almost a year. He got transferred from prison back down to our county, stayed in this county for a while, reconnected with some people, Yeah I think he almost treated it like a field trip. Wow. I hate to say it, but I think he treated it as eh, at least I'm not in prison for a year. Come out of here, gave it a shot. Got found guilty, but I was hoping for not guilty, but it didn't happen. Oh well.

really emotionless about that whole thing, treated as a oh well we gave it a try. And was Molly's family at either of the trials? Yeah, they were both trials and there's a color purple that's associated with domestic violence awareness. And during both trials they would wear I think their initial trial was T shirts.

this time I think it was a little more subdued, ribbons, hair ties, maybe a purple scarf. But they brought a picture of her to the trial every time they had a little framed portrait of Molly. But they had an indicator of their purple every time.

And that was the other tough thing is preparing them for the retro about how to deal with this and what happened. And they were not upset at law enforcement, not upset at the court, not upset at the DA for what happened the first time. It is what it is. We work in a profession, we're constantly a second guess.

And we should be. We have the power to arrest people. We have the power to to shoot people with guns. We need to be second guest and we need to have people look at what we do and review it and make sure we're doing it right. So while we're not offended by that, the family understood. That's just part of the process and sometimes

a court, even a a third court is gonna re look at something and find something that they wanna appeal and bring back. They're extremely professional. They stayed composed during the trial. There was no outbursts. There was no finger pointing and yelling at him. They stayed composed and they knew

We gotta play the game right. We gotta play the game by the rules and we've gotta behave the right way. And they did an outstanding job of just being there and being uh emotionally composed. That had to be the hardest thing for them. is the possibility of this person getting found not guilty, looming in the future. What a heartbreaking story.

For our listeners, please consider visiting the resources and information page on our website for helpful links relating to domestic abuse. George, as always, thank you for sharing this case with us. Yes, thank you, George. Thank you. Small Town Dix is produced by Zibby Allen and Yardley Smith and co-produced by Detective

Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Yardley Smith, and Zibby Allen. Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Aaron Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Quark. Cornwell. If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com and become our pal on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at SmalltownDicks.

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