Welcome back to the Pathway Chili.
I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case.
February twenty sixth, nineteen eighty, Berkeley, California. Fifty one year old Al Mills, his forty year old wife, Jeannie, and Jeannie's sixteen year old daughter, Dapien are all shot to death execution style inside their home. Jeanie's seventeen year old son, Eddie, is left unharmed inside his bedroom, claims he didn't hear
the murders take place. Since the family is defected from Jim Jones's call the People's Temple and become outspoken advocates against them, there is speculation that surviving members of the cult orchestrated their assassination. However, investigators suspect Eddie of being the perpetrator, and while they make a failed attempt to charge him with the crime, twenty five years later, the Mills family murders are never solved.
After that, the path went Chiley. So today we're going to be covering a case in which three people were killed inside their home, the nineteen eighty murders of the Mills family. This story involves the fatal shootings of a couple and their teenage daughter. But what's truly unique about this crime is that it can all be considered an epilogue to one of the most infamous tragedies of all time.
I'm sure pretty much all of you are familiar with the notorious reverend Jim Jones, who launched a religious movement slash calt called the People's Temple and went down in infamy after orchestrating a mass murders suicide involving himself and over nine hundred of his followers at his Jonestown settlement
in Guyana. Well years before that, a couple named Al and Jenie Mills were high ranking members of the People's Temple, but they eventually grew very disturbed about Jones's cruel tactics and decided to defect from the group alongside their children. They soon became very outspoken opponents of Jones and his cult, publicly exposing their human rights abuses and launching a support
group for other defectors from the organization. Naturally, this put them right at the top of Jones's enemies list, so an Al, Genie and Genie's sixteen year old daughter were all shot to death inside their house fifteen months after the Jonestown massacre took place. There was a lot of speculation that they were killed by a vengeful hit squad
consisting of loyal surviving members of the People's Temple. However, the big complication is that Genie's seventeen year old son, Eddie, was inside his bedroom when the murders took place and left unharmed, and he always maintained that he never heard a thing. The authorities found enough suspicious discrepancies to make them believe that Eddie murdered his mother, stepfather, and sister himself, but they lacked the evidence to build a successful case
against him. Opinions are still sharply divided about whether the Mills family were murdered by intruders or if Eddie was the real perpetrator. So we're going to explore both sides on this series of episodes.
All right, Well, as soon as you started describing this murder, I immediately thought of Donnie Henson and the case where he survived the death of his two sisters, and they eventually you really were convinced that he had done the killing. His parents had survived, and so as soon as you described it, I almost thought we were talking about the same case, because you have a family who's killed, the teen son survives and supposedly doesn't even witness or understand
anything that's happening in this scene. So an incredibly eerie similarity to that case. And then when you tie in the People's Temple, well, that is one of the most tragic and heartbreaking cult cases I've ever researched. I used to teach a cult class, and I used to expose students to group think and different kinds of psychological tactics that we use and we see even in corporations and
things like that. But People's Temple takes the cake for me because of how incredibly significant that end tragedy was, where I call it a mass murder, that even the people who thought they were willingly taking their lives had been so brainwashed. Is that truly a suicide? But it's interesting to me because there is an idea of this
was a violent group. When they were pushed to extremes, when they thought that their group was in danger, they had this incredibly violent reaction where they're shooting the congressmen when they are attacking his team and then they start to actually execute and kill all the members of the People's Simple in Guyana. But I don't know that I would see people fifteen months later actually go after people who had stood up against that group. I almost feel
like that was such a shocking moment. Would people remember there weren't many survivors that actually were in Guyana. There were I think about eighty that survived, or it might have been even less than that because they happened to be away for the day. But I don't know that there would have been many people who truly said everything that happened is okay when that was the end result, even if they loved Jim Jones, even if they believed
in the mission. I think that an event rocked people that had stayed in the United States and still subscribed to his mission. So I want to hear more about this surviving sun and what happened there, because again, it's reminding me more of another case where we watched a son basically get away with murdering his two sisters.
If I recall correctly, yes that is true, because Donnie Hansen did go on trial, but he was found not guilty, so technically that case is still unsolved, even though the consensus is that Donnie did it and may have had accomplices as well. The key differences between the two cases is that in the handsome case, the home was set on fire, so there was chaos going around while he
was killing his sisters. But here Eddie was the surviving teenage son was just sitting in his bedroom and apparently his mother's, stepfather and sister were all killed right down the hall from him, and he didn't even notice, which some people found unbelievable. But at the same time, they were unable to turn up much of a motive for Eddie to have done this, and there was really not
much in the way of evidence. So it makes you wonder if it wasn't Eddie, if it wasn't surviving members of the People's Temple, then who actually could have done this.
Our story begins in Berkeley, California, in nineteen eighty Two. Of our central figures are fifty one year old Al Mills and his forty year old wife, Jeanie Mills, who are currently living in a suburban cottage, alongside Genie's two children from a previous marriage, Seventeen year old Eddie and
sixteen year old dayphen. At around nine twenty pm on the evening of February twenty sixth, Al's mother, who lived in a nearby rest home, arrived at the Millses Cottage for a visit, but made a horrific discovery when she entered the main bedroom and came across the bodies of Al, Jeannie, and Daphene. After she let out a scream, Eddie suddenly emerged from his bedroom across the hall and joined his grandmother, so the Berkeley Police Department were immediately contacted and summoned
to the scene. It turned out that all three victims had been the victim of an execution style shooting with a twenty two caliber weapon. Al was lying face down on the bedroom floor and had been shot through the back of the head. Jeanie was lying dead on the floor in the adjacent bathroom and was also shot in the back of the head. Daphene was lying on top of the bed with two gunshots to her right temple, but she was still alive and was rushed to the hospital.
She remained in critical condition for the next two days, but had suffered such extensive brain damage that she was neurologically dead and had zero hope of recovery. Daphene was kept alive long enough so that one of her kidneys could be used for a transplant before she was taken
off life support. Eddie claimed that after taking a long shower, he had gone inside his bedroom to smoke some marijuana and watch television, but maintained that he did not hear any gunshots and had no idea a crime had even taken place until he heard his grandmother screaming. When the Mills's neighbors and other local residents were interviewed by police, they also claimed that they did not hear gunshots or
anything unusual. Two family friends had visited the residents at around five pm and said everything seemed normal with the
Millses and that the atmosphere was friendly. There were no signs of forced entry or any struggle at the cottage, but one neighbors said that was not uncommon for the Millses to leave their front door unlocked so that their children's friends could enter and exit the house with these If nothing appeared to have been stolen from the residence, robbery was ruled out as a possible motive for the murders, but rumors immediately started circulating that the crime may have
been a professional hit, since the Mills family had an extraordinary backstory.
Okay, so let's take a peek at at Eddie. Eddie. Obviously there were friends that had visited the residents around five pm. The bodies are found at nine twenty, and basically Grandma has to run in and wake Eddie and say, hey, by the way, your whole family has been slain, and he says, I had no idea. There's a four hour
and twenty minute gap there. Do we know when the examinations were done on the bodies, about how long police believed that they had been in that condition before they were discovered by the grandmother.
It has never really been revealed the exact time of death. I mean, I'm sure they tried to make an estimate, but it's never been released publicly, so I technically don't know how long they were dead by the time before the were discovered. And I always think if Eddie was in the shower, then maybe he did not hear the gunshots. But you're also thinking, well that her intruders wouldn't They've got into the shower and heard it and killed Eddie
as well. So there are certain reasons like maybe he was listening to music with headphones on, where you think that he wouldn't have been able to hear the gunshots. But at the same time, he was just so close across the hall that you can understand why the police became suspicious of him immediately. Oh.
Absolutely, the fact that he was stoned could definitely be a contributing factor if somebody is just so out of it, and the fact that the neighbors didn't hear it. Is it possible that if somebody came in, they could have used a silencer.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, because nobody reported hearing gunshots, that if this was a professional hit, they could used silencers. And maybe they just would have been quiet enough that if Eddie was stoned or he was listening to music, that he just honestly did not hear the gunshots.
Interesting. Do we know if there was any kind of insurance policy set up where he would have been the sole beneficiary if his sister and his parents had passed away.
Not necessarily an insurance policy, but he was set to inherit. We'll talk about this later. Part of a sizeable estate, and because Al had other children from his previous marriage, he would have to divide it with them, but Eddie would technically get like the largest percentage because he was the only surviving member from Genie side of the family. So before they were known as al and Jeannie Mills, the couple used to go by their birth names Elmer
and Deanna Myrtle. Before they even met, Almer and Deanna had already both been married to other people and had a total of five children between them. Deanna had Eddie and day Feene, while Elmer had three children named Steve, Linda,
and Diana. They officially got married to each other in nineteen sixty eight, but within a year, Elmer had quit his job at Standard Oil so that he and Deana and their five children could join the People's Temple, a new religious movement founded by the Reverend Jim Jones, which was situated at Californi, Orny's Redwood Valley at that time.
As most of you probably know, it would turn out that the People's Temple functioned like a cult as its members were brainwashed by Reverend Jones, who forced them to turn over all of their property, possessions, and assets and swear their undying loyalty to him. According to Deanna. When Eddie was only eight years old, she believed that he
had developed in a regular heartbeat. While Eddie was never diagnosed by a doctor, Jones performed telepathy on him and convinced Diana that he had miraculously cured his condition, which played a major role in her family's decision to devote
their entire lives to Jones and the People's Temple. The Murders became key players in the organization, as Genie served as head of their publications office, while Elmer functioned as the official photographer, and they were both members of the group's governing council known as the Planning Commission.
This makes me so angry. The abuse of religion and using spirituality and spiritual healing and things like that as a weapon and tool to convince people to follow you and to donate their lives to you is so frustrating. You know, this was not the first time Jones did stuff like that. There's one case where Jones had a packed house. I mean, he used to have hundreds upon hundreds of mixed race individuals worshiping in his temples and
in his churches. And Jim Jones performed a quote miracle on a woman who could not walk, and she was very, very elderly and fragile, and by the end of it, she's dancing and running up and down the aisles. He's telling her, put one foot in front of the other, you can walk. Now you're healed. And it's this crazy celebration where almost everyone in attendance is giving their life
over to Jim Jones, not Jesus Jim. And when that happens, come to find out that was a secretary who was very able bodied and she was faking right, acting that she had been healed. But by convincing somebody that their child had been medically healed, I mean no wonder. They gave everything to that organization, to that church. They felt he was led by the Holy Spirit. He's being this man who's been blessed with the ability to perform miracles via their faith. And so it makes me so mad,
But I don't blame them. I think that was a tactic he used because he knew it worked. And you had this very successful couple who ends up quitting and using all their resources and talents to further the people's temple. And so what a crazy start for this couple. And now it's interesting they change their name and we're trying to live a life basically devoid of that history they had.
It totally reminds me of Rasputen and like the influence that he had over the Romanovs when he was treating their son Alexei. He was able to have these people like devote everything to him. It was so intense, and I think Jim Jones had a similar magnetism where he was able to convince people of almost anything, and he could sell himself. He could be what they needed him to be in that moment, and that was such a powerful thing.
Oh yeah, we're going to talk more about this later. But the Joneses would become friends with one person who said that I became convinced that Jones was the real deal because I saw him perform this miracle on a woman who was in a wheelchair and she just suddenly got up and walked. And of course it turned out that was a complete fraud. It was only used to learn new members in because they believed he could perform miracles.
And that's pretty much the same thing they did with the Mills family, where they thought that he cured Eddie's heart ailments even though he did nothing.
However, as the years went on, the Myrtles gradually became disillusioned with the People's Temple, particularly after witnessing Jones perform numerous acts of cruelty, such as frequent beatings of his followers, including the children. The breaking point occurred in nineteen seventy four when the Myrtles witnessed Jones used a two foot long paddle to spank Elmer's daughter, Linda, who was sixteen
at the time. According to Jones, Linda had embraced a friend of hers, whom he considered to be a trader, and spanked her with a paddle seventy five times as punishment. After spending the next year working up the courage to leave, the Myrtles finally decided to defect from the People's Temple with their children. When they originally joined the group, Elmer and Diana were forced to turn all of their properties over to Jones and grant him full power of attorney
over them. To prove their loyalty, Jones also demanded that his members signed false confessions to committing to such horrific crimes as molesting their own children, which he could use against them if they ever decided to leave in order to avoid all the powers Jones had over them. Elmer and Diana Myrtle officially changed their names to Al and Jeannie Mills.
I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine. You've given your life and your finances, and your belongings and your time and your family over to this church family, and then you start to see behind the curtains when it almost feels like it's too late, when everyone is trained not to speak of troubling issues, when they're all trained to look the other way or report when people are talking negatively about the group. So in many ways, they probably felt very stuck when they started to see these kind of
the facade fall down. And yet, just like groups like scientology and those other types of organizations that we see functioning that are able to keep their members so much in their palm right and in control of their lives because they use things like blackmail and confessions and these kinds of things where they're asking you to in this case, actually lie about things that you've done, and in other groups they convince you you've done these horrible things, and
if you leave, it's held over your head. And so I'm incredibly impressed because I know it took nothing short of true trust in one another to leave that organization and trust that they were going to be okay, because the fear and the psychological damage and the spiritual warfare being used against them couldn't have been anything other than absolutely horrendous.
So, after the Mills family moved to Berkeley, Alan Jini became outspoken opponents of the People's Temple and wanted to help others who followed their example and defected from the cult. The couple established the Human Freedom Center, a halfway house which functioned as a sanctuary for defectors and refugees from
the cult when nowhere else to go. The Mills has also worked alongside another defector named Timothy Stowen, a former People's Temple attorney who had once served as Jones's right hand man, and together they formed their own organization called the Concerned Relatives of People's Temple Members. It served as a support group for defectors and their families and sought to deprogram them and help them readjust to normal society again.
In July nineteen seventy seven, New West Magazine published an expose about Jones and his organization, titled Inside People's Temple, in which the Millses and other former members exposed the cruelty and human rights abuses which took place there. They continued to exert pressure on the media and the government
to take action against Jones and his group. Needless to say, Jones was outraged by the Mills' actions and would reportedly deliver angry rants to his followers in which he referred to the Mills as traders and vowed to get revenge on them. During this time period, the Millses claimed that they received a number of threatening phone calls and found
threatening notes on their doorstep. At one point, a bomb went off at the bank where the Millses kept a safety deposit box, and they soon found a note on their front porch in which the People's Temple took credit for the bombing. On one occasion, Al's daughter Diana, reported seeing eight or nine armed men in the yard of her home.
This is so sad, So this is this group of the concerned relatives of the People's Temple. They were people who were saying, look with my loved ones. Have been convinced that anyone who's not part of the People's Temple is evil. That there's some kind of danger to them if they're interacting with the general public, if they are speaking to people who are not in the group, if they support any of these quote traders, And so when you have that kind of tension and struggle where they're
saying this is no longer optional. For my family members who are there, I feel like they're stuck, that they can't get out. And you have people like the Millses who are sharing experiences where there's a reason we almost couldn't leave as well. We know that we're not the only ones who experienced these things. We saw it, and so it's not just people who are concerned, it's people
who know legitimate dangers operating inside this group. And it's it's the reason why this group is the reason why the big threat quote unquote to Jonestown down in Guyana started in the first place, is because this is where Congressman Ryan's going to fly down to investigate and try to give peace to these family members and show is there a danger or are these people happy? Are they
choosing to be there? And you guys know it goes at first this kind of angelic experience for the congressman and very quickly, he starts to realize maybe there are people who want to leave and can't.
The concerned relatives of People's Temple members eventually helped convince Leo Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from sam Matteo, to perform an investigation into the organization and their practices. By this point, Jones had already established the People's Temple Agricultural Project aka Jonestown, our most settlement in the Jungles of Guyana, which was the primary base of operations for Jones and his followers.
Ryan and his delegation, which included his staff, some media representatives, and several relatives of People's Temple members, decided to travel to Jonestown on a fact finding mission, but a devastating
tragedy would soon take place. On November eighteenth, nineteen seventy eight, after Congressman Ryan and his entourage paid a visit to Jonestown, they left the settlement with a group of People's Temple members who expressed their desire to defect, and traveled to an airstrip in Port Kaituma in order to board a
pair of transport planes to leave. It wasn't long before some People's Temple gunmen opened fire on the group, killing five people, including Ryan, and wounding nine others, and unfortunately, it wasn't long before Jones orchestrated a mass murder suicide at Jonestown, in which his followers were forced to drink
flavor aid laced with potassium cyanide. Four followers died the People's Temple headquarters in Guyana's capital city of Georgetown, while nine hundred and nine of them died at Jonestown, and the whole incident would become known as the Jonestown massacre. Jones elected to end his own life by shooting himself in the head, but before he did so, he recorded a final forty four minute piece of audio, which became
known as the Death Tape. At one point, he specifically made mention of Deanna Myrtle, who was known as Genie Mills by this point, blaming her and Timothy Stowin for causing the whole situation. He seemed to imply that surviving members of the People's Temple from their former headquarters in San Francisco would get revenge, stating quote, the people in San Francisco will not be idle. They'll not take our death in vain, you know. End quote.
So in this moment when there when Jim Jones is melting down, there had actually been a plan, right they went to Guyana because they had already felt the political pressure and he had convinced everyone that this was going to be a place where they could have refuge and they didn't have the American government kind of breathing down
their neck in the United States. And then you know, he gets down there and it's supposed to be heaven on Earth, but people who lived there said every time he came in it was like this dark cloud and almost like a storm was coming every time he came into town, because it was getting worse and worse with his paranoia, his drug use, those kinds of things. And so when this massacre occurs, there is this sense of
this congressman came, people are leaving. Now we're going to be exposed, and that kind of meltdown occurs and people are begging him, let's not do this. You promised we could move to Russia, that we could take our church to Russia and then no United States oversight would be there, and he's saying it's too late, right, We're going to have to go ahead and take care of our elderly
and our kids and kill them. And the fact that he literally blames Deanna known as Jeanie Mills now and then another individual who's also helping lead up this family organization back in the United States is so scary. But again, I'm wondering, by the time all this breaks and it starts to get dissected, how many people do you think still existed in the US that said that all was
something to be avenge? Like, I know, there's still people that would be radically influenced by Jonestown, but without their leader. And by seeing this horrific nine hundred and nine people which is laying dead covering the ground where you can't even see the ground from the aerial pictures, do you think that people were really there to quote get revenge or do you think that for most people would have sparked this. This is wrong. Something went dramatically wrong from what we had been promised.
Well, we'll talk more about this later, but during this time period, there were always urban legends about people's temple hit squads, about how these surviving members of the cults were going to go and wipe out all the Jones's enemies and it would essentially be a suicide mission for them because they had nothing else to live for since
the great Leader was now dead. But they were never able to find any real documented proof that these hit squads existed, Like even though the Mills family did get murdered sixteen months after the Jonestown massacre, they never found any other documented cases where people's temple survivors decided to get revenge on people who defected from the cult and try to get rid of Jim Jones's enemies.
And I think if he had been alive, that would have been more probable, you know, like if he had been able to continue the mission, then there's something to kill for. By the time sixteen months rolls around after this massacre, I wonder how much is left to defend.
And also, I mean, you do see these tactics, like you know, if you watch things about scientology and people who speak out against scientology, please don't come after me, but if you see people who speak out about organizations like that, you do see harassment and bullying and those
kinds of things too. You know, lawsuits where people can't afford to defend themselves and so they end up, you know, having to settle or take all their finances and invest in defending themselves against Scientology, and so I wouldn't be shocked. But without their leader there, I wonder what it looked a little bit different.
Yeah, like Scientology when l Ron Hubbard stepped out of the way, they had David Missgavige, who I think brought Scientology to a whole new audience and it seemed to just grow exponentially. So it looks a little bit different there. But when it comes to Jim Jones, he didn't have a successor, and basically all of the followers were gone. So it's just you're right, it's an entirely It just seems like a strange scenario that people would just be so fervent in their.
Beliefs still after all of those deaths, that.
They would go and try to exact revenge.
So, needless to say, Once worried about what happened in Jonestown reached Berkeley, the Mills family, along with other former members of the People's Temple and their families, were placed under police protection for a while. There was fear of potential retribution from Jones's most loyal People's Temple survivors, and there were rumors that a hit list have been circulated among the organizations remaining followers with instructions to kill as
many people on the list as possible. The FBI and the San Francisco Police Department would perform an intelligence detail to look into the possible existence of People's Temple hit squads, but never found any evidence to corroborate these rumors and ultimately came to the conclusion that the so called hit squads did not actually exist and were nothing more than an urban legend. In nineteen seventy nine, Genie published a memoir about her experiences titled Six Years with God, Life
inside Jim Jones's People's Temple. Both her and al would tour the lecture circuit in order to share their story. He continue their work assisting People's Temple defectors, but by early nineteen eighty Genie seemed ready to move on with her life, and only a few weeks before her death, she made this statement before a gathering of students. Quote, I pretty much put all that behind me now. I'm tired of being an ex member of the People's Temple. I really want to get on with the business of living.
End quote.
I have a lot of respect for that there's so much abuse and trauma that she's dealing with, not just for herself, but for her whole family. There had to be a mense guilt. I subjected my children's to children to this organize. I probably told on people in the organization and got them in trouble. I helped foster and grow this organization, and it's one that caused nothing but hurt and trauma and at the end, catastrophe and the
loss of almost a thousand people. So that weight and having to be known as a survivor of People's temple, and that being her identity, that's not all that she is. She had been a huge warrior for her family. She had skills that she wanted to turn into a career. She had a family she wanted to raise. So I can totally see her saying, hey, this was a wonderful chapter of my life getting to help people and to
kind of break away from this organization. But I need peace away from this to heal so that I can be just Genie and not the former cult member.
Right.
She wanted to be more than that, And then the fact that she lost her life shortly after that is so sad.
That is sad because I've always wondered what kind of life they would have lived if they had not been murdered. Would they have just gone on and experienced a happy retirement. I know this was like a time period when Eddie and Daphene were getting old enough where they could they could attend college or university if they wanted to, and
move into adulthood. And I think because they had such a traumatic childhood, I think Alan Jeanie probably wanted to devote more time to their children to make sure that they could become well rounded adults and put the whole People's Temple behind them. But unfortunately they just never got that opportunity.
Of course, once Al Jeanie and day Fene were shot to death, rumors started circulating again about them being the victims of an assassination from a People's Temple hit squad. By this point, Al's children from his previous marriage were no longer living at the family's residence in Berkeley, but around nine point thirty PM on the night of the murders, his daughter Linda claimed that she received an odd phone call at her home from an anonymous female who told
her a quote, Alan Jeanie are dead. If I were you I would the door. There would also be an eyewitness account from an eighteen year old former boyfriend of Daphine's who said that he was walking past the Mill's residence sometime between eight forty five and nine p m. And saw three young men exiting the home. They then climbed into a Pontiac grand Am being driven by a
fourth man before they left. Police apparently did not find this young man's account to be credible since he had a history of run ins with the law, but when they gave him a lie detector test, he did wind up passing. However, this would turn out to be the only sighting of potential intruders at the cottage that night.
Investigators uncovered an odd piece of evidence when they noticed the Millses had attached a tape recorder to a telephone answering device, which would automatically record all of their calls. They soon found a cassette containing an older phone conversation between Dayphene and one of her friends, where Dayphene was asked when she was going to get the family's cottage and she replied, I guess when I killed my parents. However, since day Fene was shot twice in the head, and
there was no gun found of the scene. Investigators discounted the possibility of the crime being a murder suicide.
How old was Dayphene sixteen?
Okay, so she's a brat at the time, which I'm saying that out of pure love because I'm a mom and when you have teenage kids, I think those kinds of comments come out of this kind of immaturity and frustration. It's like, I hate you, you ruin my life. Well, I'm just gonna kill them then, you know it's I think it's these comments that they don't think through and it's a reaction because they don't have the ability to
express themselves in any other way. So my thought is that it's her being an immature child who's expressing anger with her parents, because let's say she's grounded, there's incredibly strict boundaries on her, especially with what they've been through. So I would say her saying, when I kill my parents, that's a kid being a rotten child. That's not really a child wanting to kill their parents. In most cases, right, We've seen cases where you have children who do kill
their parents, But here, I don't see that. I see this being a frustrated teenager who says, hey, yeah, I guess when I kill them, I'll get to go out of frustration more than reality. But I'm fascinated because in the initial description, I really went with my gut. I thought, Hey, I've heard this case before. I bet it's Eddie. But there's a lot of other things happening here that point
away from Eddie. Where you have this anonymous girl calling another one of the children about ten minutes after the bodies are found and says that, hey, they're dead, right Alan, Jeanie are dead. If I were you, I'd lock the door.
That's terrifying. And then you have an eyewitness who passes a lie detector test, which has its limitations, but admits to seeing multiple people leaving the house, and that puts a whole nother like white on this case away from Eddie, or at least Eddie could have been an accomplice with these these three or four individuals. But this would have been about twenty minutes before the family was discovered de ceased, so definitely a valid possibility. Here.
We would be his motivation for lying and to fabricate that you would think that obviously he had nothing to do with it, so wouldn't he want to get to the bottom of what happened to day Feene. But I also agree that day Feene was speaking in a way that was hyperbolic. I don't think that she actually meant
that she was going to kill her parents. I think the kids don't have fully developed frontal lobes, and I think that they often speak so dramatically like that, and it's not something that you would go, oh, yes, every time you hear that, you need to be worried that a child is going to kill their parents.
Oh yeah. I think it's just one of those recordings which turned out to be an unfortunate coincidence where if she had just said it and her parents had not been killed for real, then nobody would have paid any attention to it, because it was just a teenager mouthing
off because she was angry with her parents. And since actually mentioned the Donnie Hanson case, that was one where there were some neighbors who saw a couple of other men outside the flaming house when the crime took place, and I think that was enough to generate reasonable doubt that Donnie wound up being acquitted at trial. And you can't rule out the possibility that those men seen outside were accomplices. I personally think that's what happened in the
Hanson case. I mean, I don't necessarily say that these men seen outside the Mills residence were Eddie's accomplices, but I do think that if Eddie was guilty, it probably would have been impossible for him to do it alone because the woman who gave the person who gave the threatening phone call to Al's daughter Linda around the time of the murders, that was a woman, and obviously Eddie himself could not have made the call, which makes me think that if he was involved, there were other people
around who had inside knowledge.
Refresh my memory in the Henson case, was the person that was spotted said to be like lurking in the driveway and then they ran away.
Yeah, pretty much where they didn't stick around for the police and the fire department to arrive. So, and I know that one witness thought they saw Donnie yelling get out of here at someone when the fire took place, which could be assigned if these were his accomplices and
he was telling them to flee the scene. So by this point, most of law enforcement's suspicion was directed towards the only surviving member of the household, Eddie, who continued to maintain that he had been inside his bedroom when his family was murdered and he did not hear a thing. Eddie was given a GSR aka gunshot residue test, which turned up microscopic traces of gunshot residue on his right hand.
A criminologist pushed forward the theory that Eddie could have washed or wiped his hand after firing a weapon, which would explain why there was such a small amount of GCR remaining. A Berkeley police spokesman addressed this issue by stating, quote, there was some trace of gunpowder on his hands, but it was such a small amount that it conceivably could have been come by innocently. The key word here is conceivably.
Eddie Mills is not a suspect in the case in the sense that we are actively focusing on him, but he has not been eliminated, and that is significant. A number of doubts we have have not been cleared up. Even though Eddie was a high school dropout and it experienced issues with adjusting to a normal life after spending his childhood with the People's Temple. He was described as a quiet, non violent person who was currently helping his stepfa the remodel old homes as student rentals, and show
no signs of being capable of murdering his family. The biggest obstacle in the police's investigation was that they couldnot find the murder weapon, and even after searching the properties of about a dozen homes located near the Mills residence that came up empty. The Berkeley PD even received a Department of Justice list of all small gun purchases which had taken place in the Bay Area in the six months prior to the murders, but after interviewing each person
who bought one, they still hit a dead end. Eddie hired an attorney who advised him not to take a lie detector test. Eddie would move to Oakland to live with his half brother Steve. Genie and al left behind an estate which included thirteen properties and was worth over seven hundred thousand dollars, and in nineteen eighty three it
would be dispersed among their surviving relatives. Since Eddie was Genie's only surviving biological air, he wound up collecting the largest portion of the estate and received around two hundred and ten thousand dollars. The investigation into the murders would reach a standstill, though the Alameda County District Attorney's office described all of the surviving Mills family members as being uncooperative.
Well, I mean, in some ways this is intriguing because when you look at it, Eddie ends up moving in with his half brother Steve, who would have been I believe Al's child could have been Genie child.
But it was Al's child, Okay, Al's.
Child, Steve right, So if Steve had any inclination that Eddie, who's a kid and I don't think could necessarily parade around and keep, you know, keep an appearance as well as someone who's thirty or something like that. It's interesting that, you know, Steve says you're coming to live with me, You're gonna live with me after the death of our parents,
and he knows the experiences that Eddie's been through. I think that speaks volumes in the relationship between Eddie and Steve, and Steve clearly didn't think that Eddie killed their family. And the fact that all the surviving Mills families being uncooperative, they've been through a lot, a lot of mistrust of authority, abused by authority. Yes it was spiritual abuse, but it's still abused by authority. And so the fact that this family's gonna shut down and reserved Eddie's been is a suspect.
There's concern for the only surviving person in that home. So I could easily see why the family becomes very insulated and quote uncooperative or at least putting up barriers between law enforcement and themselves.
Yes, that pretty much h be a recurring theme of this case, as all of Eddie's half siblings, where Al's children from his previous marriage, have always defended him, like they've never said that they believe he was capable of murdering Al Jeanie and Dave Fiend, and they've supported him NonStop for the past few decades and they probably know him better than anyone thinking that this is not someone who's capable of committing such a heinous crime like this.
And I think the fact that they were described as being uncooperative is not because he has something to hide, but I think they just feared that the authorities have developed tunnel vision on Eddie and are probably going to railroad him, So that's why they pretty much held the mindset, we're not going to talk to them at all because that could turn out badly.
So in two thousand and three, the Berkeley Police Department decided to reopen the investigation into the Mills murders, which would be led by Russ Lopes, a retired lieutenant who was specifically brought in to re examine unsolved cold cases. By this point, Eddie was living in Japan with a wife and two children, who was still the focus of
the investigation. His surviving relatives were reinterviewed and asked to turn over any additional evidence they might have had that Eddie was responsible for the crime, but most of them believed that he was innocent and maintained there was no evidence to give. On December third, two thousand and five, Eddie, who was forty three years old, decided to make his first trip to the United States in several years in
order to visit family for the holidays. But after his light landed at San Francisco International Airport, Eddie was detained by customs officials, and he would soon be arrested on three counts of murder and taken to the Berkeley City jail. Russ Lopes had spent the past two years putting together a case against Eddie and submitted it to the Almeda County District Attorney's office. If Eddie was charged, he would be prosecuted as a juvenile since he was only seventeen
years old when the crime took place. However, he could only be held for a maximum of forty eight hours while the District Attorney's office decided whether or not to charge him. In the end, they felt there was still some questions about the evidence and considered forty eight hours to be an inadequate amount of time to perform a
thorough review, so they ultimately declined to file charges. Eddie was released from custody and soon returned to Japan, where he continues to live with his wife and children to this day. Well reuss Lopes did not hesitate to express his belief that Eddie was guilty of the murders. Eddie's
half sister, Linda, publicly voiced her support. She did not think that Eddie was the perpetrator and openly criticized the police, stating quote, they don't want to do the flipwork to find out who really did this, so after forty five years, the Mills family murders continued to remain unsolved.
So I guess you could say the path went chili Okay.
So they arrest Eddie and then they say, wait a minute, I guess we don't have enough evidence. Did the district attorney initially say we're going to proceed with this? They issued her an arrest warrant for him.
I think it was just kind of a holding thing where they felt, because as Eddie is returning to the country, this might be our only opportunity to get him. We're going to hold him, and the district attorney is going to review the case. But they obviously thought that the evidence wasn't strong enough to proceed further. I think if there had been strong enough evidence, they would have gone through with it. But all they really had were minute traces of GSR on his hand, which was hardly enough.
That's incredibly interesting. I wonder too, when you look at that, is there another innocent explanation? Was he someone who operated firearms? Is there a way because if he was asleep and hidden away from the family, it wouldn't have been transfer residue, right, Or did he touch their bodies or anything?
That is possible. We're going to go into more detail in this angle in part two, but one explanation has been pushed forward that if Eddie shook hands with a police officer who had fired a gun or handled a gun earlier that day, minute traces of GSR could have gone on his hand. There are documented cases of wrongful convictions where people have been falsely accused of firing a gun because they innocently touched something and got small traces
of GSR on their hand. Anyway, I'm sure many of you are already familiar with the story of the People's Temple and the Jonestown massacre. We elected not to go into too much detail about it on this series of episodes because it has already been so well documented and their other true crime podcasts like case File, who have already provided a thorough account of this story. But I do have a major fascination with unsolved mysteries that have
a connection to famous events. Even though Jim Jones and most of his followers had already been dead for fifteen months by the time the Mills family murder took place, did the People's Temple still have leftover survivors who would have been loyal enough to get revenge by committing this crime. Now, I have to admit that when I first became familiar with this case many years ago, I initially believed that
there was only one possible explanation for what happened here. Generally, when an entire family is murdered inside their home and there is one survivor who is left completely unharmed, you have to be suspicious of them. I have seen a number of home invasion murder cases in which several victims were killed and the lone survivor decided to stage the scene by inflicting a wound on themselves to make it
look like they were attacked by outside intruders. Yet in this case, not only was Eddie Mills left completely unharmed, but he claimed that he was in his bedroom directly across the hall from the shooting and did not hear anything. And if that wasn't enough, there were traces of gunshot residue on his hands. On the surface, that seems pretty damning. But the more I thought about the case, the more I realized that it wasn't nearly as cut and dried
as I originally thought. I mean, this was a pretty brutal crime, and if you believe Eddie did it, you have to believe that a seventeen year old performed an execution style shooting of his mother, stepfather, and sister and did such a successful job at getting rid of the murder weapon that no one has ever found it after forty five years. As far as I know, the only evidence against Eddie which has been shared publicly is the
gunshot residue on his hands. When a case was submitted to the District Attorney's office to charge Eddie with the murders in two thousand and five, It's unclear what, if any new evidence they managed to uncover which compelled them to charge him after so many years.
Yeah, it's really interesting when you look at this, I mean, to arrest somebody for the murder of their family and to say that you're going to charge them with three counts of first degree murder, you would think that was a pretty flawless case that they had built, right, that
this is something that's huge. He has a family, this is already a trauma that's happened to he and his siblings and things like that, and so for Eddie to be kind of snatched out of his family and threatened with this idea that he's going to be charged with the murders. Yes, it's very possible that Eddie's one of the people who was involved, because he's the only surviving member in that home, but there's not clear cut proof, and so it seems pretty pretty powerful that they would
move forward and then have to take that back. It seems, I don't know, kind of kind of wild to.
Me, and I really think the only reason that they did it is because Eddie was living in Japan and they knew that this was going to be one of the rare times that he was going to be on American soil and they'd have a chance to take him
into custody. But I do think that they got really over zealous because regardless of whether you think Eddie is guilty or innocent, when you look at the evidence that has been released publicly, there's just no way you could have ever taken him to trial and got a conviction.
There's also a question of motive, but you also have to consider the fact that Eddie had an abnormal childhood. To see the least, he was raised in an environment where children were often subject to beatings and psychological torture such as sleep deprivation, and even though his family managed to escape the People's Temple, it sounds like both Eddie
and his sister had issues adjusting to normal society. But could the whole experience have messed up Eddie so much that it drove him to murder or his family before he even reached adulthood. Before we talk more about Eddie, we have to discuss the victims. If you search on YouTube, you'll be able to find a clip of Al Mills being interviewed during a news segment for k QUED in San Francisco, which aired on November twentieth, nineteen seventy eight,
just two days following the Jonestown massacre. You can tell that Al was completely shaken up by the whole situation, and he speaks directly to Carlton Goodlett, a civil rights activist who had worked as Jim Jones's personal physician. Al is obviously distressed by the fact that Goodlett almost seems to be acting as an apologist for Jones, even though it has just come out that Jones has been responsible
for the deaths of over nine hundred people. The Millses had played a role in convincing Congressman Leo Ryan to pay a visit to Jonestown, which is what ultimately led Jones to the decision to orchestrate a mass murder suicide. Even if Ryan had not made the trip, I think there's a good chance the whole tragedy was inevitable and that Jones still would have done the same thing at another point in the future. But I'm sure this still must have been a heavy burden for the Millses to
bear at the time the news interview was recorded. It's unclear if Al had found out that Jones specifically mentioned his wife on the final death tape and applied that his followers would seek revenge, but the Mills were genuinely concerned that surviving members of the People's Temple would come
after them. Even though Alan Jeanie both played prominent roles in their public crusade against the People's Temple, I'd say that Genie was the more high profile figure of the two, especially after she published her memoir Six Years with God one year later. If you go on YouTube, you'll also find a fascinating documentary title Deceived the Jonestown Tragedy, which was filmed in nineteen seventy nine and features interviews with Al, Jeanie,
and Daphene. It's quite chilling to see the three of them talk about their experience in the People's Temple and how they managed to escape, knowing that they would all be rutally murdered less than one year later.
My heart breaks when you describe Al being interviewed and you hear about the family you know, sharing their story and advocating for change and reform and healing for people. Because Al sitting there and he's listening to this person who's an apologist, an apologist who's making excuses for Jim Jones and defending Jim Jones, and Al's thinking, I saw it with my own eyes, the abuse you put people through.
And not only that, but the world saw right. This idea of the world is going to see this right. He's convinced this is before the massacre when he's having this interview, but he's having to basically share why he left and having somebody laugh at that and say that's
not true, that doesn't happen. And he knows it happened to his own family and again likely was part of it happening to other families in Jonestown, right, because you were told, or in the People's Temple, because you were told to tell on your neighbors, to tell on other people if they were speaking ill of the organization. And so I think the weight would have been enormous for this family. And then there's a massacre where nine hundred
and nine people lose their lives. Think about that. There's this idea that we asked the congressman to go, and it caused this trauma and this this tragedy, It did
not cause it. Jim Jones was losing control, and any surviving members that you see in documentaries talk about that his drug addiction had gone insane, that he couldn't even speak without slurring his words, that the audio recordings he played throughout Jonestown on a normal basis were all about threats and attacks and how they had to be ready to sacrifice or flee, and so that was already in his mind that this was not going to end well.
And then the congressman comes. So I think it was a ticking time bomb, like you said, Jules, that it was going to happen because of something because someone left, because there was no investigation. It was not at all a cause by Congressman Ryan's visit, it was just the icing on the cake, and it was the moment Jim Jones lost control of himself and snapped. So, man, the whole thing is just really pitiful. And like you said,
they broke free from that. They survived this organization that many people did not, and yet you go a little over a year and they're going to lose their lives and at this point we have no idea to who.
Yeah, and if you ever have time, I suggest going down the rabbit hole and trying to seek out a lot of these old interviews and documentaries involving the Mills family, because even though they were obviously filmed before these murders took place, they're quite fascinating to see all the work they did and how this had such a profound impact
on their life. And it's always haunting when you do a cold case and you're actually able to find old footage and interviews of the victims before they became the victims of an unsolved crime. So I think that about that brings an end to Part one. Join us next week as we present part two of our series about the Mills Family murders.
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 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
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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 bought 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.
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy