Ei.
There, it's Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. I hope you're enjoying Death and Deceit in Alliance. We've got another new episode for you. Just one quick message. For access to all fourteen episodes, ad free and all at once, please subscribe with Apple Podcasts on our show page.
It really helps us. Previously on Death and Deceit in Alliance, Tylis, though she was very nice, very pretty.
I can see why you fell.
Loved them kind of a relationship behind the scenes because I was still dating somebody.
She's a really good person. She loves playing flowers into that lot we want for walks a lot. She loves coy and jokes.
They were good, but they had some bad qualities when they're together, saying that she's pregnant and I don't know if she is the real and I don't know if the.
Child is mine. She actually cheated on a couple of times.
And he said that she was murdered but her mom had found her, that she was safed down in a pool of blood. I'm hearing the words that he's saying, but they're just not making sense.
This is Death and Deceit and Alliance, a real time investigation into whether David Thorne killed Yvonne Lane. I'm Maggie Freeling. On April Fool's Day, nineteen ninety nine, Yvonne Lane's mother, Tanya arrived at nine to sixteen Divine Yvonne's house to take her grandson Preston to kindergarten around noon. Tanya testified she took six year old Preston to school every day. She'd seen Yvonne the day before, on March thirty first,
in the morning, alive and well. Sherman Lane, Yvonne's dad, testified that he saw her alive the day of her murder, although he could not place a time. It was routine for Tanya to arrive in the drive and beep for Preston to come out, but on April first, no one came outside, so Tanya got out of her car and knocked on the door. Still nothing. She noticed the door was unlocked. She opened and called inside, still nothing. Yvonne
lives in a modest three floor home. The house itself could be nice, but the condition and dated furniture portray a single mom without disposable income. You enter the house on the ground floor, which is finished but mostly unused. Just a couch a storage closet, and a crib one of the kids slept there. There's stairs to the second floor, which is the main living space and where Yvonne's body was found. Yvonne was found at the top of the stairs in the living room area, on a dingy blue
carpet in front of a raggedy seventies looking couch. Yvonne had it covered with a beige bed sheet, now stained with blood. Behind it is an unpainted, spackled wall on the couch, an ashtray with cigarette butts Yvonne's and an unknown brand. The files didn't list it. Moving through the house is a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and
a bedroom where two of the kids slept. There's a sliding glass door off to the left of the dining room, smeared and dripping with blood, leading to a balcony overlooking the front yard. Another set of stairs leads to the third floor, where Yvonne's bedroom was and where the youngest of the kids slept. So Tanya had opened the front door on the ground floor and four year old Vinnie came down the stairs from where his mother's lifeless body lay.
Vinnie was back with Yvonne at this point, when he got to about the third step, Tanya asked, where's your mommy, Vinnie. He responded, but she didn't understand him. Remember he was developmentally delayed and sometimes hard to understand. So she went up the steps and when she got to the top of the ste that's when she saw her twenty six year old daughter face down in a pool of blood.
We found in a pool of her own blood. Tanya testified that she was trying not to black out and she could hear the other kids, Brandon and Preston crying in the second floor bedroom. Baby Trenton was in his crib in Yvonne's room on the third floor. Tanya said she was thinking of going to get the kids, but wasn't sure if someone was still in the house, plus she would have had to have walked through the crime
scene over her daughter. In shock, she stumbled down the steps, trying not to fall, and ran to the neighbor to call nine one one. Officer Ralph Petty was the first to respond to the scene. He testified that he got the dispatch call at twelve thirty two and arrived about three minutes later. He said when he arrived and Officer Rick Miller, who'd also heard the dispatch call, pulled up at the same time as he did, and they both
found Lane outside. Officer Petty testified that he went upstairs and saw Yvonne face down on the ground right now.
They tell me it's a pretty body scene in there, so gloves and buoys on this one.
But that bad get that I'll be playing clips like this from A and E's Dead Again investigation. On David's case, they actually recreated the crime scene and had real investigators go in and process the crime scene from scratch. Lot of blood. I mean, there's just a massive amount of blood around her face. Look at all the coagulation right here. Petty testified that Yvonne was clearly dead, motionless in a
pool of blood, and he described her looking pasty white. Unfortunately, I do not have audio of anyone describing the scene, but I do have transcriptions, photos, and reports, and they are detailed and revealing. Crime scene photos show Yvonne in all white, making the red blood pooling around her even more striking. Her body was facing the stairs, her feet
pointing towards the dining room behind her. It looks like someone had tipped over a dresser which got caught on a baby walker and dumped the TV on her and her head was tangled in the cords. Between Yvan's legs was a plant and a photo of an unknown child and a razor blade. I will never find or get an explanation for this seemingly staged set, but the cause of death was clear. Once police flipped Yvonne's body over, they could clearly see her throat had been slit, gaping
eight by four inches. It looks as if the assailant had tried to cut her head off. Blood splatter was also on the walls and couch. The left arm of the couch also had a pool of blood on it. Near the sliding door to the balcony was a large streak of blood on the floor leading towards Yvonne. It looked like she'd been dragged across the wood floor from the sliding door to where she lay near the living room.
Like I said earlier, the level of violence seemed personal, like there was some kind of vendetta with the TV on top of her and the dresser tipped over her, and there were splatters of blood dripping down the glass doors and amidst all this devastation were the artifacts of little kids, a cradle for a doll and a walker for a toddler learning to take his first steps. It was like the windows got blood from here everywhere. It was a gruesome crime scene, a slaughter really, And it
was also strange. Not only were her kids there unharmed, but outside on the porch were a couple of puppies huddled together. Yvonne's German shepherd mix had recently given birth. There are photos of these puppies staring through the blood splattered glass door at Yvonne. It's a jarring site looking at the crime scene photos. The dining room is also striking. The chunky nineties wood dining table was flanked by two equally blocky chairs, and to me it looks like two
people had recently been sitting there. Both chairs are pulled out and turned away from the table, as they'd be left if the people sitting there pushed, got up and walked away. There's also a pack of cigarettes closer to the left side of the table, but the lighter is in the middle, as though people were sharing it. The cigarettes were presumed to be Yvonne's when Officer Petty came up the stairs, he saw bloody footprints between him and
the body. He says the blood looked mostly dry, so he and Officer Miller decided it was okay to walk through the crime scene with no shoe coverings and check the residence for a murder weapon or the killer. That's when Officer Rick Miller found Preston and Brandon in their bedroom.
The door locked from the outside, as if someone didn't want the boys to get out, maybe Yvonne, who was said to routinely do that when she had a visitor, or maybe the killer whoever locked the door seemed to know there was a latch to lock them in from the outside. Petty said he went to the third floor and found Trenton in his crib. All the children were unharmed.
Petty said that about ten minutes after he and Miller got there, Chief Dordia arrived and made his way to the second floor with a woman that Petty didn't know and was not law enforcement. Chief Dordia said she's a ride along, but in a book written about the case, the author says it was actually his date and he not only took this civilian to the house, but he
also allowed her into the crime scene. Petty testified they needed to get the kids out of the house, but there was no way to get out without walking by Yvonne. So Petty said that he and Miller took a blanket from the third floor bedroom and covered Yvonne's body with it. Again, he said that the blood seemed pretty dry, so he wasn't worried about corrupting any evidence. Then he said, the officers picked the kids up and walked them over Yvon's
blanket cover body and out of the house. I asked Yvonn's son, Preston, who was six at the time, what he remembered from that night into the morning. So what do you remember from that night?
Oh, I wasn't mid night on the talk outside my mom maybe and she asked them to get outstairs and locked the door. I got out a couple of inches away from the door handle, and I got scared. That's still in hell. I was going to scare of the dark anyway.
So he left the door unlocked.
So I ran back upstairs, and she asked me us to lock the door, and I told her yes, and we went to bed. Mea and brown well Brand woke me up. Probably somebody in the middle of the night and he was trying to get out of the room, and we got a latch on the other side of the door and the outside of the door, and usually our door wasn't locked from the outside, but that night it was, and he kept pounding on the door and nobody came down short, so then he was crying all
over it. So I just grabbed him and I took them to the side of the bed and went back to sleep. When we look up the police officers where there a whole bunch of people and a ton of people outside the house.
Now I would understand why the police might shield children from the crime scene. That makes sense, but it doesn't explain why so many decisions were made that compromised evidence in a murder investigation, civilians coming in, no shoe coverings, cross contamination of evidence. There is even a crime scene photo that actually shows an officer stepping over Yvonne's body,
leaving a bloody footprint between her legs. I thought maybe these were oversights caused in part by the officers worrying so much about getting the kids out of the house without seeing their mom. So I asked Preston about it, and the police said that they carried you and covered your mom with a blanket.
Let's say I hear that all the time, I mean doing it. I'm on that cover brain guyline walks.
Very Shortly after the kids were removed from the house, detectives John Leech, Lloyd Sampson, and Bill Mucklow arrived and ordered patrol officers Petty and Miller out.
The first major thing I've always learned is you have to preserve the scene so the evidence doesn't get contaminated or destroyed.
This is Detective Mucklow in a two thousand and eight deposition.
So on a murder homicide scenario, the first thing we would do is called the Star County Crame Lab, and they would send over a technician to go over and do the initial collecting and finger preying.
Crime scene texts. And the coroner arrived and the investigation began. It's worth mentioning that animal control also came and took
Yvon's dogs from the crime scene. Detectives collected bed sheets, pillow cushions and couch coverings, scrapings and swabs of blood from the living room and stairs, kitchen knives, sections of flooring with bloody footprints, opened coke cans from the bedroom and kitchen, a Marlboro cigarette pack and cigarettes from the kitchen table, a lighter, unopened condoms and penthouse magazines from
Yvonne's bedroom, and two packages of Swisher Suitees cigars. Detectives also lifted and preserved fingerprints from the coke cans and a glass on the table. A neighbor also called in a large kitchen butcher knife in the road a few blocks away from the crime scene. The knife appeared to match the set they'd found in Yvonn's kitchen, and the knife had a print on it. Outside, neighbors and family
members crowded the scene. A newspaper article from the time describes a neatly manicured lawn splashed with children's toys and a red sandbox cording off by yellow police tape. At about five pm, a neighbor walked by the bustling crime scene and stopped to talk to officers and his police report. Officer Sampson noted that twenty year old George Hale told officers that at about nine thirty ten am he noticed Yvon's house. He heard the puppies barking and looked over. Here's Sampson.
Reading his report, he advised he saw a white man about five foot nine abot one hundred and eighty pounds in his mid to late twenties, wearing blue jeans and a short sleeved shirt with medium lengs hair exit the residents carrying a garbage bag. He said that the white man walked around the west end of the house. He said it did not look like anything out of the range, and he kept walking.
Samson noted this in the report. Detectives were also canvassing the neighborhood. The neighbor across the street said she saw Yvonne on the night of the thirty first. She said yvon was outside around five thirty pm crushing soda cans, talking to a forty year old white man about five foot seven in a plaid shirt with curly, graying hair. Detective Mucklow said he tried to speak with Tanya.
And it was just you know, and I know, it was a tough time and I had to extract information about who Yvonne was hanging around, you know, what contact she had, and you know what happened prior, and you know, just just basic information on her daughter. And yeah, she wasn't too much help at all. I mean, she was just the best way to describe it is like a zombie. She just wasn't She wasn't there. I mean every time I had contact with her as she was the same way. It was just like a shell of a person.
Eventually, Tanya and Sherman left with all four boys. While in the car, Tanya said that she asked Vinnie who hurt Mommy, thinking that since he was walking around the house, he may know something. Vinnie is the mystery here and maybe the key. The four year old said he saw a Josh, Jimmy or Jeremy push Mommy. He didn't say all three names, he said one, but the name was hard to make out because of his disability. So Josh, Jimmy or Jeremy has always been taken with a grain
of salt. When they got home, Tanya said she called David's grandfather and told him to tell David what happened and to have David come pick up two year old Brandon, the son he shared with Yvonne. She testified that David was already supposed to pick up Brandon that day. Remember when David got the news, he was at work, his grandfather called him.
I have good if you need me to do, and he's like, I need you to go over her parents house and pick up Brandon because they're there and they got and everything in her house. So I mean, I just pulled my ball to son right there. I was like, you know, I gotta go, and I'm I'm half explaining that going as I'm walking out the door and he's following out to the car.
David said he left work around to to go pick up Brandon.
So I shoot over to assuming and Tanya's I get there, I walk in the house, her dad coming up out of the basement with a load of laundry long past me, and he was like, Kanye's up there. They have like a bi level house. But whenever I go up into the room, Kanya's face since mankept her, she was crying. I started talking to her what's going on? And you know, she could only tell me what.
It is that she knew that Yvonne was dead. So David took Brandon and waited for updates. What were you thinking when all of this went down? Like what was going through your head? I mean, I can't even imagine.
Well, whenever I initially got the call and then I go over and I pick him up. I mean, just.
Like shock and awe.
It's like as if it's not even real, like something has to be wrong, you know what I mean, it can't be true.
And then the.
Realization of it coming in that this had actually happened. I mean, I felt bad for the family and of course for my son.
David went down to the police station the day after Yvonne was found. His grandfather retained David an attorney who joined him at the station. As one of Yvonne's recent ex boyfriends and one of the fathers of her five children, it's reasonable detectives wanted to speak with him, ask is alibi, see what he knows about who any suspects could be. But David says, that's not what happened.
And I mean was the first question all of a suddenly there after me how our relationship was, you.
Know, where I was that and everything, and so I said, I'm here to help you, and then he said I've helped you, and I'm like, literally, I kneed help for.
Right Then David's lawyer shut the interview down, but the police now had their antennas up. They thought David was uncooperative and suspicious, and that really sealed David's fate as the person of interest. A single dad who has to pay child support and lawyers up after the woman he has to pay child support to is murdered. I totally get it, But David wasn't the only ex with a motive in Yvonne's life. Eric Cameron is the father of
three of Yvonne's kids. Maybe he found out about the rekindled affair between Yvonne and David, or maybe he wanted custody. Here's Detective Samson in his deposition.
So you remember speaking with Did you speaking with Eric Cameron, the father of three of her children?
Did you yourself speak to him?
He was ruled out as a suspect because he was in jail at the time.
Eric was in jail, so the detectives went back to David. As I mentioned in the last episode, by all accounts, David and Yvonne were on good terms. Even Yvon's parents testified at trial that David and Yvonne had an agreeable visitation. David could take Brandon whenever he pleased, and David also had a solid alibi. The night of the murder, David was at his shoot fighting class with his lion cub.
David was taking a martial arts class that night, like three four counties away, and he did it every single Wednesday night. He had been for a couple months, and they knew where he was. He had a lion cub within that night, and so it was memorable to the people that were in the class that David brought his lying cub with him.
Even though both Eric and David had alibi's, police still zeroed in on David. They started questioning his friends. Maybe there was an accomplice. Apparently, David's alibi just meant he had to have help.
They needed a co conspirator, so they interviewed two of his other friends, the guy that was within that night and another guy and tried to get them to say they did it.
They spoke to a few of David's friends but got nothing. One of those friends was Josh McComb.
Oh, you know, and you just need you to come down to the to the station and we're just gonna, you know, take a couple of pictures of your car and you know, no, no bigg And then they like interrogated me.
He tried to like.
Catch me up.
You know.
He would ask me one question that was, you know, like, is your name Josh Macomb? And I would say get ready to say yes, and then he would say did you murder Yvonne? And I had to be like yes to the first question, oh to the second question.
Josh is a longtime friend of David's. He said that police were questioning him hard about the murder, but his mother was with him, so law enforcement and did the interview.
And so mayk I'm Joe, and Joe was eager to please, and joj just like a cheek jab.
Eighteen year old Joe Wilkes, almost a decade younger than David.
Who was a young flood that didn't really have many friends. You know, he was kind of the underdog. For the lack of a better word.
Joe was a drifter. He had an incredibly rough childhood. His biological father was abusive, so he went into foster care, and allegedly his foster parents abused him emotionally, physically, and sexually. Joe had a severe learning disability. Although I Q an emotional trauma, you guys know, well, yeah, no, I.
Mean I knew him, and I knew him for quite a while. I was introduced to him through some other friends. I met him at parties, you know, through some mutual friends and everything, and he lived approximately one and a quarter miles away from me.
Joe eventually wound up homeless as a teen in ninety seven or ninety eight.
I threw him I'm driving into down up seeing walkings. I'd picking him up. I'm taking in the town I've taken into work, and he was he was just slooping my car outside because his mom had kicked him out. God letting in hit sleep on the caps.
At the time of Yvonne's death, Joe was actually staying with other friends. He was brought into the police station on July fourteenth, and by this point the police had said on record that the case was cold. There were really no leads. They liked David for the murder, but with his alibi, there was nothing they could do. But as soon as they got their hands on Joe, the entire case took a turn.
He's always been talking to me how she was since that one of the ones out of his wife, and that he could have a little boy, and then I for years I told him to keep me out, that I want nothing to do with it. And then what was that Wayne?
Okay?
And then one day I just watched everything and I didn't care about life no more, and they just knew about it ind of me.
That's next time coming up on Death and Deceit in Alliance.
We are in the take a bureau at the Alliance Department. We're in a vestigating on the side of Yvonne Lane. Can you tell us your part in this?
And I asked him what it was and he said to kill Someboddy And at that point.
I really didn't care about what for not then, So.
Why did David want this done?
So David could have this little way and you wouldn't have.
To pay so much money?
Did David? Hey?
You?
Hey, you didn't do something for me?
He asked me if I would do it back to it?
Are you sorry for fortunated?
I can't play, Okay.
Death and Deceit in Alliance is produced and reported by me Maggie Freeling, with editorial consulting from Amber Hunt. Aaron Case is our legal researcher. Our executive producer is Steve Fishman. Our engineer and production coordinator is Austin Smith. Eric Axelrod is our assistant producer.