So welcome back to part two of our next series of The Path with Chili, which I have titled Jules's Statement Analysis in case you didn't hear last week's episode.
Because we recorded this right before Christmas, Ashley was taking a break, so we decided to try something a little different where I didn't tell any details about the featured case to Jewles beforehand, and I instead sent her a statement that had been made by someone connected to the case from a police interrogation room, and she decided to perform a statement analysis of it to give her thoughts about whether or not the statement was true, And on
our last episode we went through all the details. She broke down each part of the statement one by one, but she still doesn't know any of the details of the case. So on this episode, I'm finally going to provide the full context of this statement and also share the details of the case and see if Jules now feels differently than what she's felt the last time when she made her analysis. So, Jules, I covered this one
on the trail we called four years ago. Have you ever heard of the nineteen eighty five disappearance of twelve year old Martha Jean Lambert's or had any recollection of having heard my podcast episode about it.
I mean, it's possible that I heard it four years ago, but the name isn't ringing a bell.
Well, the crazy part about this is that the person who made the statement from our last episode was her older brother, David, who would have only been fourteen years old at the time that he allegedly killed his sister. And what's also crazy is that I mentioned that it was made in a police interrogation room, but this was not the first time David had made this statement, this confession to the police, and this was a special moment where there were two detectors in the room and they
gathered David together with his mother, Margaret. So the statement he is making is him confessing to causing his own sister's death to his own mother. So does that change your outlook now that you know this information?
Oh my god, that is some dark, dark stuff. It's completely different when I'm thinking the victim is somebody who's not only twelve years old, but his sister. That's wild. I'm really looking forward to hearing the details here.
Yeah, because one of the things you mentioned about this statement in our last episode is that you thought it sounded very detached and unemotional, and that he's talking about a traumatic ordeal with not a lot of feeling. And that seems even worse when you consider that he's talking about causing the death of his own sister and he is telling his own mother for the very first time.
Yet at no point does he become emotional or break down crying, which I think adds maybe more credence to the idea that he is not telling the full truth. So it took place in Saint Augustine, Florida, in nineteen eighty five. Martha was twelve, David was fourteen, and they also had an older brother named Raymond, and their mother, Margaret,
She was thirty three years old at the time. And this was not a happy home life because Margaret's husband, Howard Lambert, was seventy four years old and was known for having alcohol problems and a violent temper. And when you do the math, you realize that Howard would have been fifty nine years old and Margaret would have only been eighteen when she gave birth to the first child. So right from the outset, it sounds like this was not a healthy relationship.
Yeah, if she was eighteen when she gave birth. Did they concede when she was seventeen and literally a child.
And he would have been like fifty eight to fifty nine, which makes it all the more traveling.
Yeah, it sets up some weird dynamics.
You know.
If somebody to say the age of like twenty five or something, and the person who's way older, I have much less issue with it. It's when somebody is still in their teen years and we have somebody who's near retirement age that there's a bit of an issue.
And yes, like I said, this was not a happy household. There have been three separate occasions when the children were taken away from their parents and placed in foster care, possibly due to abuse, but at this particular moment, they were back living with Howard and Margaret at a mobile home, but the neighbors would say that there was a lot of turmoil that they often heard loud yelling and fighting
coming from there. At the time. Martha was a seventh grade student, and even though the other kids described her as being friendly, she was very shy and did not have many close friends, and her grades were pretty poor, and she was known for showing up for school dressed in dirty clothing. And even though there are a lot of warning signs here that she was the victim of abuse in that whole soul, it has still never been conclusively proven, but definitely a lot of red flags.
That is truly heartbreaking. And to think, is it possible too that if both her and her brother are being abused and I guess we don't know the full extent of it, if this was physical, sexual just neglect. Obviously, if you're sending children to school in dirty clothes, that
is concerning. But we often do see, you know, as we saw with the Menendez brothers, there was one that became sexually abusive of the other because he himself was abused and that becomes that cycle, and it was really dramatized in the most recent Ryan Murphy TV show on the Menendez Brothers, and a lot of people thought that
was like really inappropriate. But I don't know if indeed in this situation, is there potential that we're seeing Martha be abused by David because David has himself experienced abuse. Do we know more of the dynamics about any specifics there not?
Really no. I know that Martha did not have a good relationship with her father, who was known for having a temper, But the sources did say that she seemed to have a good relationship with her mother and her two brothers and would sometimes act does the peacekeeper when her two brothers were fighting. So I didn't hear anything about any abuse in the relationship, But I don't our
last episode. When you looked at the statement analysis, you wondered if David was telling this fabricated story to cover up for something else, such as sexual abuse of the victim. And while that's never been conclusively proven, when you hear about their home life and their backstory, you start thinking that could be a possibility.
When you see like the cold, detached on emotional nature of David, and you speak to the fact that there was trauma and upheaval and some type of abuse in the household, it is possible that David could be experiencing something I'm obviously not diagnosing him, but antisocial personality disorder, which would now be encompassing of like sociopathy, and that could explain the reactions that he was having and why he wasn't emotional, especially given the trauma that was experienced
in the family home. But I don't want to give him an out here and say that, like, that's why he's that way. It could be he's that way because he's lying until you tell me more.
Yeah, exactly. And I don't have the answer to a lot of that questions, but you might come to different conclusions when you hear the full story. So Martha went missing on November twenty seventh, nineteen eighty five, which was the day before Thanksgiving, so she was away from school on a holiday, and she was planning to spend Thanksgiving
at her grandmother's house the following day. So on this particular evening, she went to a social gathering at a neighbor's mobile home, which was also attended by her mother, and at around seven thirty, Martha told Margaret that she needed to go back home, that she would be back in about five minutes, but she never returned, and when Margaret returned to her own home, she discovered that Martha
was not there. And the story provided by the father Howard, is that Martha did stop by while he was making tinner and asked what time the food would be ready, then she left again, but she never returned and he had no idea where she was, and the family decided to perform a search for Martha, and they officially reported her missing at three am, which would have been seven
and a half hours after she was last seen. And some people have taken that as a red flag that maybe the family knows more than the letting on because they took so long to officially report her missing.
Well, this seems to be a family of lower socioeconomic status, and then that brings into question what is their relationship with law enforcement? Is this an area where there's a lot of criminal activity. Is this something where you feel as though you can go to law enforcement and be taken seriously. Maybe they thought, oh, well, she's got to be missing for a few hours before we go, and reporter is missing. So I think you could read that
either way. You could read it as these people are hiding something and that's why they didn't come forward, or if this is a pattern of behavior, they could be thinking like, oh, she's just at one of her friend's houses. Let's just give her some time before we go and raise the alarm with law enforcement.
And that is true because the two brothers did have a prior history of running away from home. So if Martha was missing for quite a few hours. I can see how that might not instantly raise alarm bells because this was as a pattern of behavior in the family. But it seems like Margaret became paranoid that Martha had been abducted because apparently some neighbors were called seeing Martha walking west on the nearby cariy Lene Road and being approached by a suspicious looking green van which did not
appear to belong to any of the local residents. And apparently when Margaret heard about this van, she immediately suspected that her daughter may have been abducted.
Well, if you're assuming that your daughter, if you're thinking there's a great probability that she was abducted, I would think you would be hurrying to law enforcement and definitely pleading your case. Because time is of the essence. We know that there's like what the first forty eight hours that after somebody has abducted, the chance if you were taking a child, that the person could end that child's life is very high. So that had to be an incredibly scary time.
It was, And I'm not entirely sure when the family learned about the green vand but if they didn't hear until around three am, that could explain why they waited so long to decide to contact the police. I know that the pl did perform a search in the wooded area behind the mobile home, and that Margaret said, don't waste your time, she's not there, or stop searching. And some people have taken that as a sign of suspicion that maybe she was buried there or something and they
didn't want the police looking. But if Margaret genuinely believed that she was kidnapped by someone in a green van, I can understand why she would say, she's not there, stop wasting your time, look for this van. But we're talking about how David, many years later, would make this confession that he was responsible for Martha's death, and the police actually became suspicious of him almost immediately because he gave a bunch of contradictory accounts about the last time
he saw Martha. First, he told the police that he witnessed Martha climbing into a black vehicle, but they never found any evidence that a black vehicle was in the area, and they felt that David's story did not hold up, so he changed his story and that he said he last saw Martha walking down the street towards the Little
Champ convenience store on State Road two o seven. But then he later changed his story again, now claiming that Martha had I've been eating dinner with him at their mobile home before she told him she was going out, and when David asked where, she refused to tell him, and that he never saw her again. And Margaret would also say that when she came home late that night, she saw David walking outside and he was laughing for no apparent reason, but when she asked why he was laughing,
he would not tell her why. So that's why people were suspecting that David might have known more than he was letting on.
That's very bizarre behavior. I don't know what his baseline is, but I would take it the fact that it raised alarm bells with Margaret, that that was atypical for him to just randomly be laughing at nothing enough so that in the context of her daughter being missing, it was like, Okay, well, maybe he knows more, or maybe he did something to her, because it's a little bit unsettling, and it's giving me
like Burke Ramsey vibes too. You know, when you get somebody who doesn't necessarily react the way that they should, and their emotions are almost like incongruous the way that they're expressing them. And I know with Burke Ramsey, I believe that he's on the spectrum. I'm not one hundred percent sure, And I don't know what is the case with David, if he has any type of diagnosis or diagnoses. I'm not sure, but that behavior is a little bit bizarre, especially when your sister's missing.
Yeah, and as we're talking about in his statement analysis, he never mentioned anything when he was talking to his mother about coming home and laughing. It just seems to contradict like what he said in his statement. And I don't know if he's on the spectrum. I'm sure that a poverty stricken family in the nineteen eighties were not going to officially diagnose him, but it's certainly a possibility.
But I think the big red flag is that he kept changing his story, and it was even contradicted by his father, Howard, because his story is that Martha came back home just briefly to see when the food was going to be ready, and then she left again. And David provides this story about them eating together in the mobile home before Martha left, even though the story provided by their own father is that she went missing before the food was even ready. So it seems a parent
that someone is lying here, And I don't know. I can understand why you would feel bad things about the father, Howard, because he may have been abusive, but at no point has anyone indicated that the police ever considered him to be a suspect.
So do we know anything about David having like a pattern of compulsive lying prior to this?
I know that many years later Margaret would say that David did have a history of making up stories for attention, So it is possible that maybe he just decided to come up with these fake stories at the time for attention as a cry for help. Maybe he was upset that his sister was getting all the attention because she
had gone missing. What I find interesting is that one of his stories involved him saying that he last saw Martha walking towards the Little Champ convenience store, and in the statement he made to the police years later, he talked about how they had gone to the store and Martha did give him the correct change back from the twenty dollars bill. So it is interesting that a piece of one of his original stories eventually wound up at his confession years later.
And I do find it interesting as well that he's got a pattern of lying and making up stories for attention. We know that he comes from an abusive household, and I know that memories that are laid down in childhood, it can become very convoluted over time, and one can almost convince themselves that certain things are true. And we
run across different cases like that. So I'm not saying that he's guilty or he's innocent, just that I'm keeping an open mind and thinking there's a possibility that he fabricated all of this and there was a van that abducted her, But also there's a possibility that he could have done this, and that's why he's lying and changing his story.
Yeah, And that's the issue of this case is that there really isn't any hard evidence it's to point in any direction. In regards to the oldest brother, Raymond, that really isn't much information about him. I know that Margaret has said that she believed he was in church that night and nowhere near the mobile home at the time
Martha went missing. So he has never been suspected, but Margaret would later say that shortly after Martha went missing, she got a call from a young girl who just said, Mom, I'm okay before abruptly hanging up, but she never said she was Martha, and Margaret thought that her voice, the caller's voice did not sound like her daughter, so it
could have been a prank. And then David said that he got a phone call from Martha who said she was later going to contact the police to let them know that she was alive and reveal where she was.
But this never occurred, and David's story was never corroborated, so for all we know, he could have been completely making up this story about receiving a phone call from Martha, either because he just felt like getting attention or because he was responsible for killing her and wanted to give off the false impression she was still alive somewhere.
Oh, this is so difficult because we now know that he is a pattern of this. So is he trying to get attention or is he trying to just completely change the narrative every chance he gets and includes certain details or exclude other ones. So he's trying to distract from the fact that he's guilty. It's a really difficult case because of the age of the perpetrator, but also because of the background of the trauma and the abuse in the household. It opens up a lot of possibilities here.
Yeah, because you could totally interpret like David's actions and his statements in either way. And that's why I said that. When I've looked at online discussions about this case on Reddit, the opinions about David's guilt or innocence are split fifty to fifty. Like I know, I've changed my mind many times, and you can just interpret them in so many different ways that it's hard to come up with a concrete conclusion.
So it's been reported that Martha's disappearance put more strain on the marriage between Margaret and Howard, which wasn't that great to begin with. So they eventually did get divorced, and Howard passed away a short time later because he
was already seventy four years old at this point. Margaret eventually moved to Illinois and got remarried, but when her second husband died, she returned to Florida sometime during the two thousands, and it's been reported that David and Raymond the two brothers have went on to have troubles with the law, and I don't know many much details about their crimes, but it doesn't sound like they had any documented history of violence or anything like that, or anything
to any warning signs that David may have been capable of killing his sister at the age of fourteen. But still, you could tell that this whole incident caused a downward spiral with the family, and that regardless of whether David is guilty or innocent, you can tell that losing his sister caused him to like go on a downward spiral throughout the next couple decades.
That's really sad, especially when you see there's a potential that he could be fabricating this whole thing. It could have just been for this need for attention, because he wasn't having a lot of his needs potentially met in a use of household where everything just seemed to be in constant flux and not in a way that was
supportive to his siblings and himself. So it's an odd way to act out, but I can definitely see a scenario where that's exactly what he's doing, and regardless of if he is responsible or if somebody else is responsible the death of his sister and you haven't told me yet. But do they go on to recover her body.
They don't know. So they have never found any corroborating evidence to support David's story. They do check the spot where he claimed he buried her, but found no evidence to prove that his story was true.
Well, that completely changes my perspective based on what we've been saying so far, I'm more inclined to believe that he's fabricating the whole thing.
Yes, and he could be fabricating it because he's innocent, or he could be fabricating it because he did something else to her and just doesn't want to reveal the real truth. But well, we'll talk more about that when we get to that confession. The state than we analyzed in our last episode was from two thousand and nine, but believe it or not, David actually made a second confession nine years earlier, in the year two thousand, which
had different details. It came about after he was arrested for passing a bad check, and while he was in custody, he told police that he was responsible for killing his sister and that he had disposed to verbody in a Kokuena mine on Holmes Boulevard which was known as the Pits, and this is a different location that he confessed to in his second confession years later. But they did perform a search of this mind, but they did not find
Martha's remains or any evidence to corroborate his story. So David was not charged and the police at that time pretty much thought he was making the story up for attention. But it was only after a pair of cold case detectives named Sean Tice and Howard skip Cole took over the case several years later that they decided to make a take a fresh look at David and that's when he went on to make his second confession.
Well, that's really interesting. I think the fact that there's no corroborating evidence to support any of the locations that he's saying it just further reinforces It's like what I just did a little while ago. I think he's making this up. He's coming up with this information. If you're going to be continually confessing to investigators, I would think that at some point you're going to give accurate information.
And we have to ask ourselves, how is a fourteen year old going to have the tools at the ready to be able to dispose of a body you don't have a vehicle, or were you going to put her on a bike and then ride your bike with a body somewhere. It just doesn't seem.
Likely exactly, And it seems like the different detectives had different outlooks on that. Like the detectives who heard his confession in the year two thousand pretty much just wrote him off, saying this is not believable. I don't think a fourteen year old is going to jump a twelve year old's body into a mind, So they just wrote
them off. But I think when these new detectives Tice and Coal to Cover, they wanted to take a fresh look at David and brought him into be reinterviewed, and they took his new He has a completely different story in this new confession, but they take him a lot more seriously. So the confession, his new confession took place in two thousand and nine, and by this point David
was thirty eight years old. And now I'm going to provide you with the full context of the story he shared in that statement that we talked about in the
last episode. He claimed that they were at their mobile home together, but their father became angry because the Thanksgiving turkey had gotten burned, so they decided to leave and walk to the Little Champ convenience store on State Road two oh seven, which, as I mentioned earlier, which was one of the stories David provided of the last time he saw Martha, and he said that while he was there, David gave Martha a twenty dollars bill to purchase some items,
and after leaving, they walked to the former grounds of
Florida Memorial College. And you'll probably remember that in his statement he mentioned the college as the spot where Martha's dead death took place, and this is because Florida Memorial College had relocated in nineteen sixty eight, so this site that they went to was just a bunch of dilapidated, abandoned buildings, but it was referred to in the neighborhood as the poor Kid's disney Land because some of the local children would go there to hang out and play.
And David said that while they were hanging out there, he got angry because Martha did not give him the
correct change for the twenty dollars bill. He gave her, so this led into an argument and things escalated to the point where Martha punched David in the face, so he responded by pushing his sister, and then when she fell backwards, she hit her head on a piece of metal which was sticking out of the ground, and once he checked Martha's body, he discovered that the metal had impaled the back of her skull and that her head was gushing blood and that she was dead.
Okay, but again we have to ask ourselves, if your twelve year old sister is not giving you back the change and you get into an argument over this, is she just gonna punch you? Is this a typical way that these siblings would come to blows during arguments. Do you know anything about their history?
It doesn't sound like it, because it says that much of the strife in that family was from the father, Howard. But it doesn't sound like there was a lot of fighting between the siblings because the sources say Martha got along well with her mother and her brothers, and that most of the strife was between David and his brother Raymond,
but not really between him and Martha. So it sounds like it would have been very out of character for them to get into such a conflict that they would start punching each other over change from a twenty dollars bill. And I've also believed that the twenty dollars bill detail doesn't sound believable because this was a family that was living in poverty, and it does not sound like Howard was a guy who would generously give money to his
children to buy stuff at a store. So I'm wondering, would Tavid really be in possession of a twenty dollars bill at this point.
Well, I thought right from the beginning of the statement when I did the analysis, that the twenty dollars was fabricated or this wasn't the motivation like he's saying that it was, if he is indeed responsible, And also if his sister fell and impaled her head at this college or poor Kids Disneyland, which, by the way, if there was an abandoned college somewhere to go and explore like that sounds really cool, So I can see how the
local kids were really into it. But how would he remove her body and how would he do so without being seen?
Well, now I'm going to share the details about how he said he got rid of her body, like he said in his statement that he just went into a panic and that he originally called out for help, but nobody in the neighborhood heard him, so he didn't know what to do. And because he hailed from a troubled household, he was very paranoid about how his parents would react if they found out who he had killed his sister.
So he responded by grabbing a broken piece of a road sign and used it to dig a three foot shallow grave, and that after burying Martha, he returned home. And you mentioned that he said in a statement that he said he cleaned himself up, But I'd have to think that this would be a lot more noticeable, that if this fourteen year old dug a hole deep enough to bury his sister, that he would be sweaty, it would be dirty. But he never heard that account from
either of his parents. All we have is the weird story from Margaret that she saw David laughing for no reason. But he obviously didn't give off any warning signs that he had just committed a murder and buried a body.
This is a fourteen year old kid digging a three foot hole to fit a twelve year old in is no small feat. I think it's something that an adult would be exhausted. I mean, you watch movies and you see two people digging like a six foot hole, and this takes hours and hours and hours and hours. It's not an easy thing to do. So to picture him doing this, not with the proper implements, with a road sign.
It's just a makeshift shovel that would take forever unless you're digging like sand out of there or something.
Yeah, exactly. And we talked about this in our last episode that the average fourteen year old, if they did something like that, would probably just run away in panic. Like they wouldn't immediately think a few minutes afterwards, I'm going to bury my sister's body, and they're not going to have like the wherewithal to think, Well, I don't have a shovel. I'm going to use a piece of a broken road sign and then do it so thoroughly that no one ever found her body for like the
next twenty four years. And yes, if you're wondering, they did perform a search of this area after David make his confession, but at this point, a lot of the abandoned buildings have been demolished and it had turned into like an overgrowed wooded area that was pretty much condemned to the public. And they said they did bring some cadaver dogs to the location, and it said that they showed a quote unquote behavioral change when reacting to a
certain spot. So they spent like two days excavating the site, but they failed to turn up any trace of Martha's remains. And they pretty much said that because they had done such extensive demolition work over the past twenty four years, that if Martha's remains were buried there, they may have been moved or scattered away inadvertently. So even if they some remains were still buried on the they were pretty skeptical that they would ever be able to recover them.
So that's why they felt confident on accepting David's confession even without any corroborating evidence. Though at the same time, could he really have buried her that thoroughly that no one noticed her body during like the uh subsequent construction work that took place there over the years.
All right, called, Yes, I don't think that happened. I think he's completely fabricating and I don't think that he murdered his sister, and I don't think that he disposed of her body there. He definitely didn't dig a three foot hole with a street sign. And I get why they're saying, oh, her body could have been moved. The dog showed behavioral change. We've seen dogs show behavioral changes in a lot of scenarios. There could have been something.
This was an old college kids played there, they called it the Poor Kid's Disneyland. Somebody could have cut themselves in an area and bled significantly. You could get a behavioral change from a dog. So unless they're giving a full alert and you're excavating something that is going to be corroborating to what David said, then I don't think that we can go off of this and go, oh, well, they excavated a lot, so yeah, they could have moved
the bodies. So yeah, like basically she could have been here and he's probably telling the truth.
Yeah, that's what's so troubling. It really seems like these cold Caate detectives wanted to get like an unsolved missing person's case off the books, so they were willing to take David out his word because he was willing to confess even though there was no evidence to implicate him. So the statement analysis I provided to you, Like I mentioned,
this is not David's original confession to the police. This is in a police interrogation room where they decided to bring in Margaret for the first time so that David could tell her the full story about what happened. And the interrogation video is from a surveillance camera. It was released on YouTube by the local newspaper, the Saint Augustine Records, so that's how I was able to say it. And
it's a total of fifty six minutes long. And what's interesting is that there's a long stage in there where they bring Margaret inside and David inside and they sit at the table, and then the two detectives take David outside for the next six minutes and it's pretty much just dead air after that, with Margaret just sitting there doing nothing. And then after that that's when David comes in and he makes the full confession to his mother, which is the statement we shared on the last episode.
And I've always wondered when looking at that, what did these detectives say to David before he confessed to his mother, And you have to wonder could he they have influenced him somehow before he finally decided to spill the beans.
I don't know. I'd be more inclined to believe that. Yeah, there is definitely a potential that they did that because David coming forward with these details and just the unemotional nature of everything, the lack of detail. It's utterly vague. Even the details that you're giving me now that he told Margaret. It's not indicative of somebody who's recalling events that actually transpired, because while telling his mother, why would he be leaving out these details if it were true?
Is there a possibility or a world where David, maybe in some capacity, feels guilty for what happened to his sister. His sister's missing, he's sad. We saw him spiral, and somehow he feels like he needs to be punished for what happened, and maybe in that there'll be some kind of atonement. Maybe he should have been watching her, maybe he saw her get abducted. I think that there's got to be some part of David, because personally I believe that he didn't do this, that he is looking for
some kind of atonement. He's looking to feel better. And sometimes you see it in religion too, where think of what is that Dan Brown movie, the da Vinci Code, the Dvinci Code, Think of it where you've got the monk that like whips himself right, where sometimes people will go through pain in order to try to atone for something that they feel was their responsibility. And so if somebody dies or your sister is abducted, there can be
a lot of complex emotions attached to that. And the way that a child processes it might not be typical. The brain isn't finished developing at the age of fourteen, so we might see some reactions that aren't what we would think would be typical reactions.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, that maybe he had some sort of guilt about what happened to Martha, even if he was not directly responsible. Like maybe he knows more than he's letting on. But if you watch the interrogation video, like David gives his confession in kind of a flat on emotional tone which is very vague, where he's not giving specific details, and that wouldn't make sense if he was making this confession to some police detectives.
But he is telling his own mother for the first time, and Martha even starts crying right in front of him. I mean, when you did your statement analysis and didn't have any knowledge of the case, did you ever dream that he was making this confession to his mother or a family member.
No, I assumed it was to an investigator and they were sitting in a room. You know, you just kind of picture that in your head. But the fact that it's his mother, it's is he even more bizarre Because of emotion, You would think you would be filled with shame, remorse, guilt, just everything would be bubbling up. It would feel very visceral, and it just doesn't feel like that at all.
No, Like you think that if he was telling the truth, he would well up and say I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I hope you forgive me. But it's just kind of vague saying that, Well, I wish it hadn't happened, but it did happen. And it's kind of like you would think that if he was begging for forgiveness from his mother, that he would show like a lot more remorse rather
than just something very vague. But when you watch the whole video, like she starts crying and she kind of gets me angry for a little while, but then they kind of have a conversation where it says, this is going to be difficult, but we're going to work through this, and I'm glad that we got this all out. And
what's interesting is that there's no context for this. But at one point during the interrogation video, the detectives make mention of a man who apparently inflicted sexual abuse on Martha and David when they were kids, and apparently also abuse their other brother, Raymond. And they don't say who this person was, but they kind of implied that this
might have been one of the Lambert's neighbors. And they say that I know this was traumatic for all you, but now that you're getting out in the open, we can still talk about it. And it makes me wonder. I think that these kids were probably being abused by someone in their personal lives, and that even if it has no relevance at all to Martha's disappearance, that it just caused like a lot of trauma. And this could explain why David might be making this story up all
these years later. Maybe he's feeling I should have protected Martha for being abused by this man.
I think that's a very real possibility because we have to factor in the trauma, and we think of his reactions and him claiming responsibility, and it becomes a lot more nuanced and a lot more complex when you're adding in children that are experiencing abuse and neglect in the home, and the potential that, like you said, there could be other people in their orbit that are abusing them as well, not just the neglect that they're experiencing in the home.
So him reacting way that he's reacting and everything, it's just so difficult to say, Oh, this kid, he obviously did it, and this is him being guilty and or
feeling guilty and just copying to it years later. I think, like you said, the way he's not asking for forgiveness from his mother, I truly think, unless you hate your mother and you're like shoving this in her face, like yeah, I did this, and there's some contempt there, I think under normal circumstances, most people love their mother, and even
if they don't, they seek her approval. So in a situation where you would have caused such strife and such pain to not ask for your mother's forgiveness, to not be wailing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, over and over again.
It feels odd, it does yeah, And of course if this is where the story had ended, then this would consider to be a solved case and we might not be discussing it. But you watch the video and at the end they ask Margaret do you believe him? And she says yes, and it sounds like she's finally accepted that her son killed her daughter. But they're going to
try to work through it. And it was not until January of twenty ten where all this information went public and the state's attorney's office said that we are not going to file charges against David because there's no evidence besides his own confession. But we're also aware of the extenuating circumstances because he was only fourteen years old at the time, and if he is telling the truth, the crime would be considered to be manslaughter, not murder, so
there would be a statute of limitations on it. So they said, we consider this case to be closed, even though we don't have Martha's body. We're convinced that he's telling the truth and that's going to be the end of it. But shortly after this went public, Margaret made a statement to the press saying that I don't believe my son's story. I think he's innocent. I don't think
he killed Martha. And she pretty much said that he was always very protective of Martha when they were kids, and that she doesn't think he would be capable of doing this to her, and that he had a long history of emotional problems, he had issues with the drugs, he had a criminal history, and he had a tendency to make up stories in order to get attention. So she flat out told the press, I don't believe he
did this. I still believe that Martha was the victim of an abduction and that it might have been the person in this green van.
I'm inclined to agree with Margaret.
Well. Sure enough, shortly after Margaret said this, David publicly recanted his confession himself, saying that he even described himself in the press as quote unquote mentally uncompetent and said that he was facing such pressure during his interrogation with detectives Tyson Cole they eventually reached the point where he just decided to tell them what they wanted to hear.
So he fabricated this whole story about killing Martha, that he wasn't actually responsible for her disappearance, and that it was completely one hundred percent true. So after they made their recantations in the press, they sought comment from Detective Tice, and this is the quote he used, saying that it wasn't just this one confession. We interrogated him for a total of like twenty three hours. So he said, quote,
we have twenty three hours of video. If someone wants to sit down for two or three days and watch it, then have at it. And if you can draw another conclusion, god bless you. End quote.
Well, they sound very certain.
Yes, I mean, I will admit I have not watched all twenty three hours. I've only seen this one fifty six minute confession video, which doesn't sound convincing to me. So maybe if I saw all these twenty three hours of interrogation videos, I would think David's story is more believable and I might have a different outlook. But it does not sound like David ever revealed any details about
the crime which were not public knowledge. It's still this very vague story with a lot of vague details, and it still involves him like digging up and burying his sister's body so thoroughly that no one found it in twenty four years and he never provided any other evidence to corroborate his story. So if you want me to believe that David's confession is true, I will need a lot more than that.
And basically, what you're releasing, these clips, these fifty six minute clips, is going to be the best of the best. What they're going to release and what they're going to kind of give the public to chew on is going to be the most convincing, the best part of it. So I'm assuming that it's all lesser the other you know, twenty two hours or whatever, that they have a footage that you haven't seen is going to be lesser footage.
So yeah, he may be saying something to the effect of what he's already been saying, but maybe to a lesser degree. And it sounds like these two really had confirmation bias, and like you said to me personally, it sounds like they really wanted to close a cold case and they had a confession, and it was of the attitude and the idea that like, why would you confess
if you weren't responsible? But there is just so much to this because like we said, there was behavioral issues, drug issues, We've got a pattern of compulsive lying, we have trauma and neglect in the house, and then we could have an insurmountable amount of guilt that he has associated with. I couldn't protect my sister.
And what's sad about this case is that they're no longer obliged to take any other action because we've seen so many cases that wind up in wrongful convictions after a suspect makes a false confession. But if that happens, if they go to prison, then you're going to have like attorneys in the Innocence Project, fighting to get them out of prison and keep them the story in the spotlight.
But here David was not charged. They just basically said he was a minor at the time, there's no evidence to support his story, so they can just close the case without filing charges and say that we're satisfied that he's telling the truth without needing to provide any evidence to support this. And they have said that they still consider the case to be closed, but they have acknowledged that we have Martha's DNA and dental records on file, So if we happen to find who remains. We will
reopen the investigation. If we get any new leads that suggests that Martha was the victim of an abduction or something else happened, we'll we'll look at it again. But until that happens, they're just going to keep this case closed and just publicly say that we still believe David did it, even though he's a free man today.
Wow, I truly feel like a killer got away with murder. Somebody else abducted Martha, and it was just really easy to point the finger of David and be like, oh, case closed, We've got our guy here. But in my personal opinion, there's somebody out there that did something to her and they're not being held to account.
Since you talked about your statement analysis that you figured that David might be like telling partial truths, that maybe he did kill Martha, but what actually happened was not an accident, maybe there was sexual abuse, or the truth was completely different. Do you still feel that is a possibility that maybe he was guilty and just did something different, or are you now one hundred percent certain that he was innocent and that someone else did this.
I think, based on the information that you've given me, like Okay, let's say I'm ten percent that that's a possibility. I'm ninety percent that he didn't do this. And what I really come back to is, well, everything is vague. His statements are utterly vague and almost entirely fabricated. In my opinion, it was just that one part of like
washing up and that I thought was interesting. But that's just one thing, and when you take it and put it in the entire context of this, I think it's much less likely then David is just fabricating this entire thing, because we would have found her body if it was David, Like he gave us two locations where her body could be both were checked. There's nothing to corroborate what he said.
Yeah, and that's what I always thought myself, that even if the truth is different, if he killed her because of a sexual assault or something like that, I don't think he would have been capable at age fourteen of digging up a hole so deep and bury her body so thoroughly that no one would have found her at all. Like,
it's very impossible. He would have to be like a criminal mastermind, like a young Dexter Morgan in trading to get away with this, But even though he has been arrested a few times and has a criminal history since then, he has never been charged for any other violent crimes
or any other murders. So I don't think he's like a very He's capable of something like this and maybe just decided to confess after pressure or some sort of subconscious guilt, maybe because he felt he should have protected Martha and feels guilty that he was on to do.
So, Yeah, that sounds really accurate to me. I think that it comes down to guilt, And like we've discussed throughout, there's just so many complexities to the situation and with his behavior, socioeconomic status, the neglect, the trauma. We don't know if there was neighbors abusing them or if it was just in the home, but we do know that these children went through a lot. And if he is indeed innocent, then he's a victim too because his sister
is gone. He was pushed by detectives at a later date to confess again, and then we have his mother and father and the other brother, and they don't have the answer about what actually happened to Martha and about who did this to her, and they're not being punished and they don't believe that David did it. I don't believe that David did it, Like I said, I think there's like a ten percent chance, but I'm pretty convinced that he's fabricating everything out of guilt.
And one theory I have seen push forward is that maybe a family was orchestrating a cover up, that maybe if she was killed in the home, that they all conspired together to get rid of her body. But I'm thinking that if Margaret herself was complicit in what happened or new, then she never would have publicly come out and said I don't think my son did it, because she technically had it out because the police said, we think David did it, but we're not going to file charges.
So if she was involved, she would have been scott free. So the fact that she decided to speak out and say that my son did not did this indicates to me that she has no idea what happened.
I think if there was a conspiracy with the family, we would have seen these details leak out with David, because, like you said, David is not some criminal mastermind. He's not somebody with an extremely high IQ that is going to have this propensity to be able to elude authorities and to be able to manipulate. I don't see that
in the information that you've given me. So to think that this conspiracy of many within the family could hold up over all of this scrutiny and so many years, it just doesn't seem And like you said, if that was the case, Margaret would not be rushing to defend him.
Yes, And when watching the interrogation video and you see her emotional reaction when David confesses, it's genuine like it sounds like she's taken by complete surprise that her son is admitting to this. And I think that if she knew the truth about what happened, she would not be
reacting in that fashion. I mean, I guess my only concern is the father, Howard, because he was known for being abusive and he died only a few years later, but he was seventy four years old, and I think that if he killed Martha, it would have been difficult for him as well to thoroughly bury her body and ensure that no evidence was left behind.
I guess it depends on the physical health of Howard and if he had a vehicle available and what is exact alibi was. It's hard because there's just a lot of information lacking. We've got the information about a green van. I think there's so many child abductions that happen. It's possible that she was abducted. Statistically, there's a higher probability that she was killed by somebody known to her, But it's not always what is statistically most probable that is the actual outcome.
Yeah, sometimes families are under suspicion for years and then it turns out that it was a complete stranger who had no personal connection to her at all. But when you consider that she was last seen in a mobile home park and that there were been a lot of witnesses, it seems very unlikely that something could have happened to her there without anyone seeing anything. So I do think it's a good pousibility she walked off down the road
cross paths with a predator who abducted her. On One detail I've not mentioned is that Martha was wearing a two peece bathing suit that night, That is all she was wearing. So because even though it's November, it was Florida, so the weather was still warm, and she had been swimming earlier that day, and so of course it seemed very unlikely she would run away wearing nothing more than
a two piece bathing suit. But if she walked and a predator saw a girl dress like that, he might have decided that she would be the perfect victim to abduct. And if they managed to escape the area without anyone seeing anything, then they essentially got away with a perfect crime.
That's a really interesting detail. I could definitely see through the eyes of the predator if they saw somebody dressed like that, for sure, they could be enticed to pull over and to try to abduct her. So this is just a really sad case.
It is, yeah, and it's just sad to think that the police will not do anything to try to solve it unless they have a new lead or new evidence just jump completely in their lap. Or if Martha's remains turn up somewhere, because I personally do not believe they are they're buried at the site of the former college, I think that they're probably somewhere else, and if that's the case, there is a chance they can be recovered.
So any further comments on your statement analysis anything that you said before that you've now changed your mind on after hearing all the full facts of the case.
I think the things that maybe were paused for concern, like his mentioning of washing up. I don't think in the context of all of the information that I necessarily believe that had anything to do with sexual abuse or a rape. But I think that in my analysis, pretty much everything I would stick to aside from that that I believe that pretty much everything that he said is fabricated, that the motive is fabricated, all of the actions that
he took or fabricated. It's missing emotion, there's jumbled up time references, there's pauses, there's uses of words like the unique words like just he says basically after like, there's a lot of missing time and missing things, and it just is very incongruous statement in general. And now that I know all this information, I personally am ninety why I feel as though I'm ninety percent sure that he didn't do this.
Yeah, I definitely agree. And when you gave your original statement analysis without knowing the facts of the case, I was thinking, yeah, you're reading this well, because I think most logical people would look at a statement and say this is not truthful and I decided to pick this case because the circumstances are so unusual that we have someone admitting to what he did at the age of fourteen, killing a sister and making a confession in front of
his mother. So when you asked me to find a statement from a cold case we covered, I thick this one just because it is so out of the ordinary.
Well, we'll definitely have to do this again. This was fun. I don't want to use the word fun. This was like a unique way to structure an episode because I really loved going in blind and having no idea and then looking back and seeing what in the statement analysis I believe to be correct and what I would then change once I had some more contextual clues.
Yeah, because this was definitely not a cut and dried case, so I thought it would be the perfect one to choose, And I think we should definitely do this again on another case on another week where Ashley is absent.
Absolutely, So that about.
Wraps up our episode on the Disappearance of Martha Gen Lambert. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will probably have Ashley back for us for our next series of episodes. So until then, see you next time.
Hey, guys, I just wanted to drop in and let you know that I spoke with Mark and he listened to both parts to the audio, so my initial statement analysis and what you just heard right now both Robin and I talking about the details of the case. And he said I did an excellent job with the statement analysis and he laid out all the points that I got correct and so I'm really happy with that. And
he said that Robin had great insights. So I just wanted to let you guys all know that he co signed on the statement analysis and Mark is truly the expert. And if any of you are interested in statement analysis, I'm going to provide a link to the training that Mark offers in the show notes. Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold 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 signed 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 case, 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 a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jeweles and ashy Patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Path Went 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 will link them in the show notes.
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy