Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our series about the murder of Crystal Champagne. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up on what we talked about in our previous episode.
Well, this is a wrongful conviction case which took place in Westwega, Louisiana in nineteen ninety six, and the victim was a girl named Crystal Champagne who was only fourteen years old. She went out to go to the supermarket, but she never returned home, and twenty four hours later her body would be found in a wooded area and she had been badly beaten to death and strangled, but even though her jub shirt was pulled up and her pants were pulled down, it did not appear that she
had been raped. At the time. A step cousin of Crystal's name, Damon Thibodeau, who had originally lived in Texas, was visiting and staying with the family, and he was already in police custody being questioned at the time that Crystal's body was discovered, but they decided to relentlessly interrogate him for the next several hours, and because Damon was already exhausted by that point, he decided to make a confession of the crime, pretty much to make it end,
and by the time he was arrested in charge with the murder, he immediately recanted his confession, but in spite of this, they still went to trial even though there was literally no other evidence linking him to the crime scene.
All of the physical evidence did not match him, but in spite of this, the jury felt that the confession was strong enough evidence that they decided to find him guilty and he received the death penalty and Damon would have remain in prison for sixteen years and it would not get his conviction overturned until his defense team tryingly approached the original process secutter who put Damon behind bars at his trial, Paul Konig Junior, and he agreed to
do a joint investigation, and of course they found out
that none of the physical evidence matched Damon. A lot of experts testify that his confession had been coerced and was not legitimate, as a lot of the details he shared did not match the evidence, such as Damon claiming that he raped Crystal even though there was no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted, and Paul Konic Junior surprisingly decided to agree to the motion to overturn his conviction, and after serving sixteen years, Damon was finally released from
death row. He became an anti death penalty advocate for wrongful convictions, but unfortunately, in twenty twenty one, he wound up dying due to complications of COVID nineteen and he was only forty seven years old. And even though the investigation into the murder of Crystal Champagne was reopened, they have never found any alternative suspects, so the case technically still remains unsolved and we have no idea who actually
committed this crime. So, as you well know, wrongful convictions are incredibly sad stories to cover because not only does an innocent person have to serve time in prison for a crime they did not commit, but much of the time, the actual victim does not receive justice. Whenever someone goes through the ordeal of being wrongfully convicted and has many years of their life stolen away, I always hope that they received the opportunity to live their best possible life
once they are released from prison. So it's incredibly tragic when this doesn't take place. In spite of what he endured, Damon Thibodeau was only thirty eight years old when he was released from death Row, and he still had many years ahead of him. Prior to his arrest, Damon had already endured a very difficult, abusive childhood, but it sounds like he went on to enjoy nine very productive years
of freedom before he succumbed to COVID. The Innocents Project referred to Damon as an incredibly kind and gentle person in his obituary, as he was attempting to use his experience behind bars to do good. Damon was particularly outspoken against the practice of solitary confinement, deeming it to be
cruel and unusual punishment. During his time on death Row, Damon would spend twenty three hours per day in a small cell, and even after his release, he wound up suffering from frequent nightmares because of the experience, and initially at trouble adjusting to the outside world. At one point, Damon testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on human rights and admitted that the experience was so torturous that there were times when he just wanted the execution to
move forward rather than fight for his exoneration. He stated, quote, I did not want to live like an animal in a cage for years on end, only to lose my case and then have the state kill me anyway. I thought it would be better to end my life as soon as I could and avoid the agony of life
in solitary end quote. Unfortunately, Damon never received any compensation for his wrongful conviction because even though all the evidence against him was discredited, the Louisiana Attorney General's office stated
that he would need to prove his factual innocence. So even though there was no trace of Damon's DNA found on the victim or anywhere near the murder scene, it's not like they could perform DNA testing on a definitive piece of evidence, such as a semen sample, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not commit this crime. Damon did attempt to file a federal civil rights lawsuit, which was put on hold in twenty seventeen, and his claim was still pending at the time of his death.
There's so many things that made me so upset and frustrated by what you just said. When you look at Damon, when you look at the fact that he was wrongfully convicted. He lost not only those years of his life, but he lost time with his son. Didn't he have a son when he went to prison.
Yeah, we mentioned that his son was only about four or five years old at the time he was arrested, and because the mother had custody, he didn't really know him all that while, didn't spend much time with him. But when Damon was on death row, his son decided to reach out to him and they started corresponding, but Damon said, no, do not visit me because I don't want our first time to meet is me when I'm
inside a prison. So they did not actually meet for the first time until he was released, and they did develop a strong relationship, but unfortunately Damon died nine years after that.
Well, you know, you think about it, the ability for him to form a kind of relationship he wanted. Yes, maybe he didn't have one when he went into prison, but he had a lot of the ability to form a healthy relationship with his son if that was something they both wanted because he was behind prison bars. And then, like you said, they had this amazing relationship when he got out, but that was short lived. He passed away
a few years after he was released. But going back to what the state did to him, when you look at the Louisiana Attorney General's office saying you can't prove your factual innocence, all that is is we want to cover our own butt and not pay you money. It's infuriating because in the American justice system, you don't have
to prove your actual innocence. You have to just make sure that your rights were either not met and or the state didn't do their job, which was to properly prosecute you and show beyond a reasonable doubt that you did do it. So when you look back and he's advocating for please can you help me financially? I don't have years of experience, and I have this felony hanging over my head where I was on death row and people think I could have killed somebody even though I'm free.
There's so many challenges he has now that he's out, socially, financially, emotionally, and he's asking for some compensation and they say no, they messed up, or he would not have been released. We see it time and time again where people that are innocent are not released. There's a reason why Damon was pulled from death row and then sent back into society.
It's because they know they messed up. And to say, unless you can prove your factual innocence aka there's DNA linking someone else to the crime, you won't get any help is asinine. It is absolutely asinine. That is not the way our justice system worn't.
In your opinion, Ash, what is the landscape like across the US with regards to like which states are more likely to give compensation and which ones are like the most likely to hold back and not provide any compensation.
Okay, so there are laws on the books. I don't know state by state unless I looked it up, but there's there's laws on the books for every single state. There are some that are much more favorable to someone who is wrongfully convicted, meaning maybe they don't have a cap on the amount of money that you can get, but many states will limit no matter how long you
were in for, no matter why you were there. There's many many states that say this is the max value you can get, whether it was five years or forty years, right, which is crazy because you should account for the multiple years that someone's in prison. There are some states that, just like Louisiana said, unless you can prove your factual innocence, meaning we can positively link DNA to someone else and
prove that you didn't have something to do with it. Still, which is often where they'll go if they do have DNA evidence right, they'll say, well, you still could have been there, Well you still could have helped or participated, even though that's often not the case. So it almost is no matter what the laws are on the books, the state likes to have really clever ways to skirt around the boundaries that they put in place. Some say
blank money per year to a max of blank. Some say, here's a blanket amount we give to anyone who serves time in prison and is released. But it's very difficult. People think you're going to walk out of prison after a wrongful conviction and be thrown millions of dollars. It just doesn't happen that way, even in states where it says it should happen that easily. There's a lot of red tape that they have to work through to say, well, oh, I'm sorry, you actually falsely confessed and so you actually
contributed to your own conviction. That's not our fault, you misled us, and therefore you don't get confident. There's tons of laws in the books like that you aid in the wrongful conviction of yourself, you mislead the police, or you lied, and we can show you light at some point then you have to forego your rights. So it's very complex and it's not written in favor of the person being released.
Do you think that a separate body should be evaluating these wrongful convictions outside of the justice system as it is, because if it's a system investigating itself like therein lies the problem.
Yes, one thousand million percent, Jels, you absolutely nailed it. What the problem is here is ego and political clout and embarrassment. And so when you look at even people coming up and they have to go before the same judge who allowed them to be convicted, they're dealing with the same proscatorial office, it's nearly impossible to say all these people who have an ego and a political future are going to say, oh my god, we messed up.
Oh my goodness, we messed up. Sometimes you do have incredible people like the prosecutor here that says, let me look at this again. Do you guys think I wrongfully convicted someone like not okay with me, let me look at this again. But it's very rare because they're admitting that they messed up. And so when their election comes back around and they're trying to you know, elect the next district attorney and things of that nature, who wants
someone who makes errors right? Who wants someone who doesn't quote get justice right? And so judges, prosecutors, parole boards, all these people want to say, we didn't mess up blank happened that caused this and it wasn't our fault
even when it was. So when you have things like you know, conviction integrity units that are third body parties, or have multiple team players who truly do have justice at the heart of it, I believe you have a much better chance of having a unbiased look at these cases. Or innocent projects can't do it by themselves, right, they can raise suspicion and questions, but you have to have
a team on the inside. You have to have a team that truly wants to say, if someone's serving time and they didn't do it, what a travesty like that? That actually flies in the face of what our justice system should be, and that they're willing to take a
second look. So yes, yes, yes, you cannot have the same people who tried and prosecuted and convicted this person be the people to say, oh, let's see if we went wrong and what we should do about it, because they're always going to cover their own Mirrand.
One of the main reasons wrongful convictions happen is that when police are facing a lot of public pressure to solve the crime and focus on a promising suspect, they'll often develop tunnel vision and do everything in their power to make the case fit their suspect, even if the evidence points away from them. But in the case of Crystal Champagne's murder, there wasn't even time for public pressure, since Damon was charged within hours of her body being found.
The problem is that Damon was already in custody for which should have been a routine interview. Once things evolved from a missing person's case to a homicide investigation, the police decided to pin the crime on him, even though there was really no evidence against him. That he happened to be present at Crystel's apartment at the time she went missing. This seemed like a case of making a suspect confess and then worrying about finding proper evidence after
the fact. It seemed insane that, even with such a weak case against Gamon, the jury only deliberated for one hour before they found him guilty. But confessions, no matter how unreliable they may be, still seemed to hold a lot of weight with jurors who have a hard time grasping the idea that anyone would confess to a crime that they didn't commit. As the years go by, the public is becoming more educated on the issues of false confessions, but it wasn't a particularly well known topic back in
nineteen ninety six. In Damon's case, he had gotten virtually no sleep after Cris disappeared and was utterly exhausted by the time he was brought in for questioning, and after being badgered for nine hours, Damon said he reached the point where he felt that the interrogation was never going to end unless he told the police what they wanted
to hear. I think that many people who make false confessions assume that everything will eventually be straightened out once the evidence shows that they couldn't have committed the crime. But in most cases, once the suspect is charged with the murder. There's no turning back.
Jewels are absolutely right when you look at this idea of people who falsely confess. I think one of the mannerisms of a false confession is this idea that I know there's nothing factually going to prove my guilt. So if I just say what they want to hear right this second, I can go home, I can get some help, I can have somebody help sort this out, and everything's
going to be okay. But you also have to think about the fact that in that moment, Damon might not I have just been thinking that he could have actually started to believe that his reality was skewed or wrong, because remember, they were not only just having him in a situation where he was exhausted and that he was being confronted with the fact that he was a murder suspect, but he also is being told, Hey, those people that you say are your alibi witnesses, they're actually in the
other room telling us that you weren't with them. We actually have evidence that links you directly to this murder. And they're continuing to tell him, Look, I know you're a good guy, but what happens if you weren't cognizant at the time. What if you had passed out or you had blacked out, and you did this when you weren't even aware that you had done it. We know
you're good. If you can help us, now, we can help you on the other side, and he's literally going back and forth thinking, oh my god, could I have done this? And the more and more they lie to him, the more and more his reality is questioned. And it's almost, like I said in the first episode, like you're being gaslighted, and you keep questioning, am I crazy? Did I misremember the events of that night? Because they're telling me that even my friends are saying what they believe and that
I could have done this. Maybe I did so in some ways, I wonder if Damon was in that state of just psychological torture where he starts to believe he actually could have not that he believes he did, but he's starting to teeter on this idea of could I have done this? And therefore he's able to get caught up in a false confession and or he believes I gotta say what they want so I can get out
of here. It's really, really a slippery slope. That's why it's so questionable that, yes, if you had a suspect that your confident killed somebody, some of these tactics are amazing ways to get them to truly confess to a crime. But those same tactics, when used on an innocent person, can elicit a confession. And unfortunately, even though we have more information and more things that tell a jury, hey,
this happens, here's how it happens. Very much progress has been made since nineteen ninety six, people haven't really changed their mind about confessions. When they hear that someone confessed, even today in twenty twenty five, they sit there and they say, I would never do that. There's no way someone would confess to something they didn't do to this magnitude. And still even when experts are telling them the breakdown of what and why this happens, they sit there and
they go listen, he confessed. He had to have done it, because I would never falsely confess to something.
And you were saying our last episode that you even had a discussion with Rebel a while back where you're talking about this topic, and even he had that mentality saying, why would someone confess to something he didn't do.
He's like, there's no way. Like I was telling him about a case where a father actually confesses to sexually abusing his own daughter and hurting her to where she was hospitalized and all this stuff, and he didn't do it, and it was this horrific case that I was telling him about. He's like, not in a million years, you would have to kill me first before I said I hurt my baby, and I said, I don't think that's true.
I started to tell him, you know, look, Rebel, when you look at the read techniques, the way police are actually trained in their academies and in the real world of how to interrogate somebody, they are pure psychological coercion. Yes, they're incredible techniques. Yes they get confessions from really horrible people or people who have done really horrible things. But
they also are manipulative. And when you have someone who's tired, when you have someone who has, you know, mental health issues or maybe a lower cognitive ability, or are young, it's very easy to manipulate people's memories and so it's scary. My students always start the semester by saying, I would
never ever, just like Rebel did. And by the end you have rebel who now says, please don't die or I'm going to be falsely accused, and who knows what they'll do to me if I'm held in an interrogation room. So once people do sit down and understand the facts, I think over time they can see how it happens.
But I think a jury who's thrust into a decision box and said, hey, in the next week, you're going to decide this man's fate, I just don't think you can convince them in that short time that this happens.
Another issue with Damon's trial is that he was represented by a public defender who happened to be a former
police detective. Damon did not know this at the time, but his lawyer was actually in the midst of arranging a transfer to the District attorney's office, and well, you probably can't rely on someone like that to provide you with the best defense on the other side of the coin, One thing which really stands out about this case is the fact that the prosecutor who put Damon away, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick Junior, actually worked with Damon's
legal team to help get his conviction overturned and had no qualms about dropping the charges once it became apparent to him that Damon was innocent. As sad as this is to say, it's extraordinarily rare for prosecutors to admit they made a mistake and put the wrong person in prison, as they will often double down and stick to their
guns even when faced with overwhelming evidence. Ironically, one prosecutor who had a notorious reputation for doing this is Paul Konnick Junior's uncle, Harry Connick Senior, the former District Attorney of Orleans Parish whose office has had a long checkered history of wrong convictions and sending innocent people to death row. And yes, Harry Connic Senior also happens to be the father of the famous jazz singer slash actor Harry Connick Junior.
But thankfully, Paul Konnick Junior seems to have a much different attitude about justice than his uncle. To be fair, even though he presided over Damon's trial, he did not actually get elected to the position of District attorney until six months after Damon's arrest, so it's not like he was personally responsible for railroading him, and he genuinely believed that he was doing the right thing at the time. Many prosecutors are unwilling to admit to their mistakes for
fear that it will damage their career. But here we are in twenty twenty five, and Konik has been reelected several times and is now entering his twenty eighth year as Jefferson Parish District Attorney. So I'm taking this as a hopeful sign that honesty does pay off.
Sometimes I would prefer to vote for someone that I know truly holds justice at the core of their moral and ethical beliefs. Right that you are someone who says, I'm always going to fight the hardest to have a safe, healthy community. But if I get it wrong, if I happen to look at evidence in one way and years later it's shown to me that that way I looked at that evidence is not accurate. That I'm mature and moral and ethical enough to say something went wrong and
I'm going to fix it because that is justice. Right. You can't ever make up to Damon and his family what you did and what you took away from him. But if you're always operating in a transparent light of saying I fight hard, but I'm gonna fight fair and I want to make sure the right person's behind bars. To me, wow, that makes you incredibly more attractive as a candidate and as a prosecutor. But I do think
you look at all kinds of institutions. Usually it's cover your own rear end you do not fess up to having any kind of problems or any kind of issues within your institution or your position or things like that, and people often put their career over what's ethically right. The other problem that you mentioned, Robin, is that Damon had a public defender who in and of themselves had issues being about to be transferred to the district Attorney's
office and things like that. But when you have a public defender, there's a lot of amazing human beings who are in that position, and they do the best they can, even if they don't have these other ulterior motives and things happening like this this man did. But their caseloads are so overwhelming in most jurisdictions that rarely do they
have time to go sit down with their client. Rarely are they investing resources to go interview people to go you know, spend time to uncover evidence for their you know, the person they're defending, and so unlike a team that's getting paid bookho's of money because they're a private attorney for you. When you have a public defender, they're basically picking up your file saying like, oh man, I'm sorry, Look, this is going to be a pretty tough case. Here's
our best bet. Let's just go stand before the judge and see what happens. And in Damon's trial, it's very very apparent no one fought to uncover the truth because had his attorney really said I believe you, Damon, then you would have seen the ability for this case to turn out very, very differently because I believe enough reasonable doubt in questions could have been raised in his case.
And if they had somebody like you on the stand, they could have brought up something like Elizabeth Lostess's research which was available to them at the time, and she focused mostly on like the malleability of memories, and she did a bunch of different studies and they all showed that we as human beings, our memories are fallible and
you can implant memories. She did one study I think it was called the lost in the mall technique, and she found out that it was basically telling people that they had been lost in the mall, if I'm remembering correctly. And then at the end, seventy five percent of people were like, no, I wasn't lost in the mall. You basically just told me that. But then twenty five percent
of people believed that it actually happened. And those are likely the people, in my opinion, who would be susceptible to false confessions, and they had access to a lot of this information prior. It was just knowing which expert to be able to bring to the stand, to be able to share that information somebody would be incredibly valuable. But like Ash just said, and I think it is such an important point in these cases, is that public
defenders just aren't equipped. They have an incredible case load, they're so busy at overworked, and they don't have the budget in order to be able to get these expert witnesses to come and testify.
And think about it too. Let's say it wasn't there weren't any political issues or anything going on. You have seventy five cases on your desk, and it's time to go to Damon's trial, right, and you go meet him real quick. All you have is that he falsely con or that he confessed to this crime. And so in the back of many people's head you'd be like, oh
my gosh, this guy's guilty. I'm just going to try to represent him the best of my ability so that his constitutional rights are met, and let's just get this over with. It's one more case on my desk.
Right.
There just isn't that loyalty to say, Okay, I'm going to do this deep pursuit of justice, not because there isn't a desire to, there isn't the time to do that. And so I think when they saw that Damon had falsely confessed, but that had he had a confession on the record, and then now he wants to pull that back, a lot of people would assume, well, that's because you're you're literally up for the death penalty and things like that. So sorry, buddy, we just got to get through this
case the best possible. Maybe you won't be given death. And here he was.
But even though Connick was willing to admit the error of his ways, it appears the same can not be said for the Jefferson parish Sheriff's office, who continued to stick to their guns and insists that they arrested the right man even after Damon was released from prison. As you might recall, Damon claimed that he raped Crystal during his confession, even though no semen was found on her
body or anywhere else at the scene. And I must say that the state's explanation about Meggot's consuming all of Damon's seminal fluids before Crystal's body was found is one of the most laughably absurd things that I've ever heard in a wrongful conviction case. When the British newspaper The Guardian published an article about this, they perfectly summed up
the situation with this sentence. And lest there be any remaining doubt, a forensic expert on maggots such people do exist, testified that the theory of Stephen destroying maggots was balderdash.
Absolute balderdash. I agree, this is absolutely insane. Damon when he said that he had raped her, it's because the police had added that into the narrative that they had him say. Remember, they only recorded what the last forty five minutes of a nine hour interrogation, and so when you have this story that Damon tells at the end. It has been crafted over and over again, and every time he tells it, the police recount and say, hey, why don't you try that again, Damon, that's not how
she was killed. Tell us the truth, Damon that come on, now, her clothes were up around her breast and you know her pants had been pulled down. Come on, go ahead and tell us that story again, what you really did to her. And so they'll add in these details or say that's not right, tell me again, until you're telling them a story that fits the evidence that they believe
that they have here. They thought that Crystal had been raped and or there was a high potential and so so when you look at this idea that he says that, and then when they find her there's no evidence of that, they have to somehow explain away how they could be wrong and Damon could still be the killer. And it's just it's kind of asinine. But that's why we should record every minute of an interrogation. If I have to tell you twenty five versions to get the story you like,
as a police officer, something's wrong. That should raise red flags for everybody.
And yes, That's why you check the evidence before you bring in someone for interrogation to make a confession, because obviously if they say I raped the victim and there's no semen found, then you have to run circles and twist everything in the knots trying to fake the evidence match your case. And I was almost hoping that Jewels would have read that last sentence in a British accent, because I love the term baldadash.
So.
Like I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest tragedies of wrongful conviction cases is that there's so much focus on the person who is unjustly sent to prison that the actual victim of the crime is often overlooked. Damon Thibadeau's story has been well documented, but there's really not all that much information out there about Crystal Champagne and her life.
All I know is that everyone who knew Crystel described her as a good kid, and it seems like she just happened to cross paths with the wrong person on what should have been a routine trip to the supermarket. I get the impression that after Damon was charged with Crystel's murder, her parents Don and CJ were convinced that he did it, even though there was a good chance that Damon was actually at the apartment at the exact time Crystal was killed, and the timeline would have made
it impossible for him to commit the crime. This case was featured on forty eight Hours in March of twenty fourteen, and it featured interviews with Don who was still emotionally distraught about the loss of her daughter, but it's unclear if she changed her mind about Damon's guilt after his conviction was overturned. It sounds like Wendness is recalled seeing Crystal at the wind Dixie supermarket on the night she was killed, so she likely cross passed with her killer
after she left. And since Crystal was found in Bridge City, which is five miles away, it's reasonable to assume that she was taken to the location in the vehicle. But was she forcibly abducted or did she climb into the vehicle of her own relition. Could she have been offered
a ride by someone she knew and trusted. It's interesting how Crystal's body was partially nude, as her shirt was pulled up and her shorts and underwear were pulled down, but that perpetrator never actually went through the act of raping her, something obviously drove them into a violent rage, since they severely beat Crystal before. Stranglier, though, it is odd that they would leave the murder weapon the red industrial wire tied to a tree at the scene.
It's really bizarre. I definitely it feels like Crystal would have known the person that abducted her.
Right.
This should have been just a normal routine walk to the grocery store, like you said. But if she had gotten into someone's vehicle, it's very possible she knew them and maybe they said like, hey, we'll give you a ride up to the store, Hey, do you want us to give you a ride home? And she went with
them because why not? I trust you. It's also possible that someone you know, asked for help or said, you know, hey, can you give me directions somewhere, and they overpowered her when she was leaning towards the car, or something of that nature. But it's very, very possible that this is someone that she knew, which is why I think they immediately went to Damon. Although his connection was quite loose to her, like they weren't best friends or anything like that.
He had asked her to or she had asked him how did that work? She had asked him to hang out.
She had asked him for a ride to the supermarket, and he said no. When you're thinking to yourself, if he was looking to like, sexually assault her, he would have said yes instantly and then drove her out to this location.
Right, And he didn't. He said no, I'm actually going to hang out here, and so I don't think then he would go, oh, I'm going to go find her and assault her and you know, accidentally kill her or purposely kill her. To me, it seemed like it would be somebody else who had been seeking after Crystal and or, like I said, some one who happened to see her as just an opportune person to abduct at the time.
Now, because Damon was charged with the crimes so quickly after Cristel's body was discovered, police never really performed a thorough investigation into other potential suspects, but there were apparently multiple individuals who lived in the area who appeared to be more likely candidates to have committed a crime like this.
There aren't many specific details about these individuals, but there was apparently one relative of Crystal's who lived in an apartment two blocks from the crime scene, and he was a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of drug abuse and violence against women. Crystal also had friends in Bridge City, and one of them would later go on to receive a life sentence in prison for the aggravated rape of
a juvenile. However, the one alternate suspect who has risen the most eyebrows is the person who found Crystal's body, John Tomlinson.
So when you look at John Tomlinson, of course he's someone the police should have a questioned and talked to you because he found the body. I don't know any other details yet about who and how John Tomlinson would be linked to Crystal and her murder, But anytime you have the discovery of a body, you have to at least start by exploring that individual or the individuals who found the body and see how you can eliminate them from being the person who could have injured that person.
Because again, especially if their bodies found not in a very public location, how and why did you happen to go to that area and find her? That needs an explanation.
Okay, so here's some more information about John Tomlinson. We already mentioned his name in our last episode, but here's some more backstory about him. At the time, he was the boyfriend of Stacy Mulanson, the family friend and neighbor who called the police to report the discovery of Crystal's body, and John also lived in the same apartment complex as the Champagne family. On July the eighteenth, Stacey had actually gone out drinking with Damon, Don and CJ and paid
Crystal to spend the night babysitting her children. Stacy then brought Crystal home at two pm the following afternoon, just over three hours before she left to go to the supermarket. Sometime between five thirty and six pm on July the twentieth, while Crystal was still missing, Stacy picked John Tomlinson up at a shipyard as he worked as a deckhand on
a tugboat. They proceeded to continue searching for Crystal by handing out missing persons flyers, and when they stopped at a Circle Cake convenience store in Bridge City, two eye witnesses recognized Crystal from her flyer and told him they had seen her walking along the levee next to the Mississippi River the previous night. But here's where things get odd.
It was John's idea to drive Stacy to the levee to search for Crystal, but even though the witnesses said they had seen her about a mile away from the Huey Plung Bridge, John drove directly to the wooded area underneath the bridge. He told Stacy to wait in the car while he performed his search, and after walking down
a path into the wooded area, John soon discovered Crystal's body. Now, the main reason we know this information about John is because he agreed to be interviewed on the aforementioned forty eight Hours episode, where he said that he had a unique ability to dream things which came true. John claimed that he once had a vivid dream where he found Crystal's body and looked up to see the Huey p Long Bridge above him, which is why he felt compelled to stop the car and search for her body in
the wooded area underneath the bridge. Of course, at the time this happened, John never told the police about his so called dream and instead said that it was his quote unquote intuition which helped him discover Crystal's body. To their credit, they did find this statement to be suspicious, so John was taken to the police station and interrogated
for hours. The problem David was interrogated right down the hallway at the exact same time, and when he confessed to Crystal's murder, John was no longer the focus of the investigation, right.
I mean, here you have again, you have John who says, hey, I had this dream that her body would be located here. Do I believe there are people who have a gift to see visions or have you know, even a gift from the Holy Spirit or or whatever you believe that says hey, here's a vision of what I want you to know and see. Yes, does is that a common gift? I don't think so, And so I'd be very very
suspicious if someone raised that to me. And like you said, you know, we talked about this just a minute ago. If it was in a public location, let's say she's not on a park bench in the French Quarter, it's not that suspicious when someone says, hey, there's a body. I just found a body. But this was a very bizarre, hidden away location that he just felt quote compelled to
go check. That is highly suspicious. And like you said, what would have happened had Damon not been the one that they had already laser focused and narrowly focused their view on. What if they had been open minded at the time and said, Damon's one possibility, we really need to dig deep into John, who's across the hall Instead, I think they had blinders on, and I think they went after Damon with this laser. You know, we know he's guilty. We're gonna prove it, instead of saying, just
do things automatically line up with Damon? Are there some questions here? Maybe we should be widening our net. What would have happened They had a person right across the hallway from him who might have also had some issues that they needed to explore further, and they just didn't.
Yeah, it's just pretty mind blowing to me that they have two people in custody and one of them seems to have an alibi who can place himself in the company of other people during the time period when Crystal was murdered, and this other guy, John Tomlinson, who says that he found her body in a concealed location because of a dream and his quote unquote intuition. So obviously, if you compare the two, John obviously looks a lot more suspicious, but I guess because Damon was taken in
for interrogation much earlier. He was the one who confessed, and I do believe that led the investigation under the completely wrong direction.
Okay, on the basis of his interview on forty eight Hours, John Tomlinson definitely comes across as an odd individual. There are numerous documented cases where a murder victim's body wound up being discovered by their killer, and they'll sometimes arrange this because they believe finding the body will help take
suspicion off themselves. But this case is particularly troubling because the eyewitness who reported seeing Crystal placed her on the levee, about a mile from the location her body was found, Yet John did not even bother to search there and instead drove straight to the wooded area. Her body was pretty well concealed, and there's no way anyone could have seen it from the levee unless they made a calculated decision to walk down a path into the trees, which
is what John decided to do. He otherwise should have had no reason to believe Cristel was there, except that he was supposedly following the whims of a dream. This is a big enough red flag, but what's even more disturbing is that, unlike Damon, John was a document sex offender, as two years before Cristel's murder, he served time in prison after being convicted of indecent behavior with a juvenile.
Now during his forty eight hours interview, John explained this by claiming that he had sexual contact with a girl that he picked up at a bar, whom he believed was eighteen but did not realize that she was actually fourteen. But given the Crystal was fourteen at the time of her death, this might suggest a pattern of predatory behavior.
Since the Champagne family was close friends with John's girlfriend and he lived in the same apartment complex, John certainly would have known who Cristel was, and is reasonable to assume that she might have trusted John enough to climb into a vehicle with him.
And also he could have been in a position where he watched her and fantasized about her and had this kind of you know, she is a part of his quote circle and he wanted it to be something more than that. So he definitely had more access and ability to to kind of pervert the relationship that he had with her. I could see her one trusting him, But I could also see him being in a position where he said, I know her well enough to manipulate her, and he could he could have been the one to
hurt her again. What's interesting. Do I believe that people can be given a vision? Absolutely, I truly do. My faith. My faith preaches that, right, But it's not something that a lot of people have. And in this case, John doesn't seem like the kind of person who's, you know, using this in any kind of other situation, except for the one moment he needs to walk down a unique path that the hidden location and find her body where most anybody else would have passed by it or never
seen it. It just seems very very suspicious, right. It's not like everyone would be like, oh my gosh, we know that about John. You know, he's always the one telling us I feel this, I sense this, I worry about this because I have this feeling. We don't. No one has said that about John. Right, This is just this one time he seems to have this divine gift and it led him to the body of someone he knew.
Yeah, that's a very good point, because I've seen many other documented cases where these so called psychics will read about a case in the paper and say they have a vision where their body might be. Well, they'll do it multiple times because they just want to insert themselves in the investigation. But like you said, I don't think there are any other documented cases besides this one where John Ever said that he had a dream that he knew where someone had been murdered.
I will say that I have had psychic dreams on several occasions that have accurately predicted things that I've told people about before they happened. But I wouldn't consider myself to be a psychic. It's not something that happens often. It's just something that has happened to me on several occasions. And I think all human beings have that ability, particularly when it's things that are tied to our own lives
and our subconscious is interfering. I mean, if we think of time as this artificial construct, it isn't linear in the way that we humans perceive it, according to Einstein and according to physicists, So if everything is happening all at once, then potentially we're just tapping into something that we already know but we just don't have access to because we experience time in a linear fashion. I don't know how to explain psychic phenomenon, but it does happen.
But it is a little bit of a red flag when we think of this, isn't something like Ashley said that people are bringing up often being like, yo, yes, he is a psychic, he's very sensitive. He has these dreams on a regular basis. But then it just all of a sudden happens when it's discovering the murdered body
of Crystal Champagne. That is a red flag. So just the context of it all, and then him going to this wooded area, it's like either he has this gift that just touched him once or he's the one that's responsible.
Now we're not necessarily saying that John murdered Crystal, but if he was the killer, it's pretty mind blowing that he was being interrogated at the exact same time as Damon and the police may have wound up charging the John even admitted that they pushed him pretty hard during his interrogation, so it's possible he could have eventually cracked and confessed to the crime. If he was guilty. For all we know, Damon may have unknowingly let the real
perpetrator off the hook by confessing. I certainly don't blame the police for looking at both men as potential suspects, but considering that there was zero evidence against Damon, you think they would be more focused on the guy who actually found the victim's body and was unable to come up with a logical explanation to account for it. However, before we bring the hammer down on John, we have to acknowledge that he did have an alibi for the time period when Crystal was murdered, which is why he
was not investigated any further by the police. We mentioned earlier that John worked as a deckhand on a tugboat which was cruising down the Mississippi River on the night of the crime. The boat's logs showed that John was on board, and he said he was sleeping when Stacy
called to inform him that Crystal was missing. But there's been some question about how reliable these logs were because, by John's own admission, it wasn't uncommon for crew members to sneak off the boat without their supervisor's knowledge and cover for each other all the time. So theoretically John could have left the boat while it was doc and snuck back on without anyone noticing.
And also keep in mind, he has a girlfriend, so there's a big reason for him to have this kind of secretive, you know, secretive missions that he's going on or trying to escape without anyone knowing for a few hours. So I think it's very possible. Yes, he might have been a deckhand that night, but also he could have left. Like you said, people could have covered for him. They
might not have even known he was gone. So I think him having the girlfriend makes it where he had to make sure that his actions were very secretive, very purposeful, easy to cover up. And so I don't know, can we prove that he didn't know because the police didn't do their job and include him as a very probable suspect From the start, they considered him someone they just needed to talk to, and by the time Damon's in there, they said, well, we have our guy, and they let him go.
It's interesting how John seems to contradict himself will discussing his alibi during his forty eight hours interview. So at one point Aaron Moriarty asks, now, at the time, though, you were told that it was impossible to get off the boat, and it wasn't, was it. John then replies, well, sure, you know. I mean, no, it's not. It never is, you know, But I always let my boss know when
I was getting off that boat. End quote. However, later on, Moriarty asked John if he ever snuck off the boat to see Stacy, and he confirms that he did so on a few occasions, and spent the night with Stacy instead of sleeping on the boat like he was supposed to. But this admission seems to be a sharp contrast to his previous claim that he always let his boss know
whenever he got off the boat. Of course, John denies that he's snuck off the boat at any point on the evening of July nineteenth, nineteen ninety six, and if he is telling the truth, then he can be ruled
out as having any involvement in Cristel's murder. While we know that Crystal left her apartment at five fifteen PM and was likely killed sometime between seven and eight, we don't have any specific details about the exact whereabouts of the tugboat during this time period, so for all we know, it may have actually been impossible for John to have
committed this crime. Even if he sneaked off the boat and killed Crystal, he still would have had to sneak back on at some point, and if Stacy called him on the boat later that night to let him know Crystal was missing. Also, since Crystal was found five miles from the location where she was last seen, she probably would have needed someone with a vehicle to transport her there, and it's unclear if John had access to a vehicle
at that time. Given the circumstances, it's possible that the logistics make it too difficult for John to commit the crime. But the issue is that Damon was charged with the murders so quickly, John never got the thorough investigation that he deserved.
Exactly. He could be innocent too. He could have been in the same boat that Damon was in, and if Damon hadn't been pulled in, John could have been innocent and shown hey, look, we know you've snuck off before, we know you're a liar, we know you knew where the body was, you did it, and who knows, John could have been the one falsely confessing, or it's possible John did it. But again, because the police so quickly jumped on Damon, we just simply won't ever know now.
At the time I released my original Trail and Cold episode about this case back in twenty twenty one, I had no idea of John's current whereabouts, but I was later contacted by a source who confirmed me that John has since passed away. But I've always wondered if his DNA was ever collected. Even though there was no seman found at the murder scene, there was a sample of blood with a male DNA profile on the red wire
used to strangle Crystal. We know it did not match Damon, but I would really liked to see it compare to John's DNA, as even if he has already deceased, this could still prove that he was responsible for the crime. Unlike with many other wrongful conviction cases. The Jefferson Parish District Attorney's office said they would reopen the investigation into
Crystal's murder following Damon's exoneration in twenty twelve. Thankfully, they did not go the traditional route of closing the case and maintaining they got the right killer all along, But it's unclear how much investigation has actually been done. It's possible they did take a closer look ato John Tomlinson and uncovered enough information to officially clear him as a suspect. But if not, I really wish investigators would do a DNA comparison so we can finally put this matter to
rest once and for all. While Tomlinson's discovery of Crystal's body is still incredibly suspicious, there are way too many unanswered questions to say with one und present certainty that he is the guilty party. Crystal may have simply been abducted by a random stranger with no personal connection to her, But if John could be conclusively ruled out as being
the killer, we can move on to other leads. As it stands right now, it's hard to believe that we're nearing the thirtieth anniversary of this crime and there are still no conclusive answers. Yes, Damon Thibodeau was technically exonerated, but his name will never truly be one hundred percent cleared unless the real perpetrator of the crime is identified.
It's the least that can be done for Damon's legacy now that he's no longer with us, and of course Crystal should not be forgotten either, as she definitely deserves justice. So if you happen to have any information about the murder of Crystal Champagne, please contact the appropriate authorities. Jules Ashley any final thoughts on this case.
Oh, this is one of those where justice is such a complex term. Here you have not just Crystal who is yet to receive justice and her family who's sitting there thinking what happened? Who did this? Why? Right? Can we have some kind of answers and have the actual person held to justice, But you also have Damon and his family. Damon passed away, so but his family who knows. In some ways, it's possible John has suspicion around him for no reason. But we don't have an answer yet.
And one of the main reasons that we don't have an answer is because there was such a rush to judgment. Police officers kept Damon. They used techniques that manipulated and convinced him to tell a story that he knew was not true or maybe was starting to question, you know,
is it possible that it's true? And by the time he had clarity and could say, hey, I need help, he was given a public defender, which did nothing to help his case, and thank god, like you said, you do see an ounce of ethical behavior by a prosecutor who's willing to look at the case years later and say, oh my gosh, I think I could have made a mistake. Let's look harder at this, and then actually advocated for Damon to be released. That is rare, super rare for
somebody to do, and so many kudos there. But you also have to think about Crystal's family when they thought that someone that they knew killed their daughter and he serves time in prison, so in their head, the right persons behind bars, he confessed, he's in prison, and then he gets exonerated. So there's a lot of guilt and kind of grief that re arises when you say, did they have the wrong person? Oh my god, the wrong
person was sentenced for her death. There's a lot of trauma that goes into that and having to relive this idea that they thought they had gotten answers. Those answers were then reversed and they're still left wondering what happened, really really tragic, difficult case. At this point, we simply don't know because not enough questions were asked in the original investigation.
My heart really hurts for both Damon Thibodeaux and Crystal Champagne and both of their families. Because Crystal was found murdered, she deserved a proper investigation. Everybody should have been investigated all at a You might have a suspect who's confessing, but that doesn't mean that you should shut down the investigation.
Crystal deserved more. And it's so fortunate that this prosecutor, was it Chonic senior or junior junior, that knic junior decided to go okay, like, I'm willing to look at this and potentially if I was involved in a wrongful conviction, I want to write that wrong We so infrequently see that, So I just commend him so much for what he did here. But it's such a tragedy that Damon his life ended for complications from COVID. But before that, like Ashley had mentioned before, he had to deal with the
stigma of having this charge hang over his head. And that is just so unfortunate because proving that somebody else did it is really the only way that he would have been able to receive any compensation. The system makes it so difficult for those who have been wrongfully convicted to be able to get that compensation that they deserve and to be able to really truly clear their name
and to be able to remove that social stigma. So my heart breaks the fact that he died without being able to do that, And it's just so incredibly frustrating that the system is set up like this. And I'm so thankful that we had Ashley weighing in on all of these things. I just love hearing from you on these wrongful conviction cases.
Yeah. I remember learning about this case many years ago, long before I started podcasting, on the episode of forty eight Hours, and thinking that it was one of the
more egregious wrongful convictions I ever seen. I kind of forgot about it for a while, but then I remember reading the news during the summer of twenty twenty one that Damon had died from complications from COVID and he was only forty seven years old and only got to enjoy nine years of freedom after he was released from death row, but by that point he had already lost
sixteen whole years to of his life. And of course this was one of those cases where literally the only evidence against him was a false confession, but that was enough to send him to death row. So I decided to take a fresh look at the case, and I'm glad I did. And the main reason I wanted to cover it is because this murder is still technically unsolved, because even though Damon was finally exonerated, we still don't
know who killed Crystal. I mean, John Tomlins. It seems like a good candidate, but he may have had an alibi clearing them of any involvement. So, for all we know, maybe Crystal cross paths with someone else who coursed her into climbing into a car, or maybe forcibly abducted her and then proceeded to take her to this remote wooded area before attempting to sexually assaulting her and then murdering her.
But sadly, this just shows like how badly an investigation could go when the police get tunnel vision because they wanted to bring in Damon for what should have been routine questioning, and then suddenly, after Crystal's body was found, they decided, hey, this must be the guy who did it, and they coursed him making a confession, and then later discovered that none of the other evidence matches him. So he never should have been convicted in the first place.
So yeah, I do hope that one of these days that Crystal's family can receive justice. We can find out who actually killed her, and it would also be great for Damon's family and his loved ones. Like we also, we talked about how Yida's son that he reconnected with while he was on death row, and I'm sure he would like his father to be one hundred percent cleared by having the real perpetrator brought to justice because sadly,
these wrongful conviction cases are just too common. And like I mentioned, we love hearing Ashley's thoughts on these wrongful conviction cases. And I think sometime in the future, I've got another egregious story like this from Louisiana that was prosecuted by Paula Connick Junior's uncle, Harry Connick Senior, and unfortunately, he did not have the same mentality as paul did. He was unwilling to admit that he made a mistake, and unfortunately he railroaded another poor innocent person and sent
them to death row. So I hope we can talk about that case in the near future.
On the Path with Chile, Robin do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail went Patreon.
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not featured on the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon, and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsawved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download commentary track at which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor than be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jeweles and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those patreons.
We'll link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciate it. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and Chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy