You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski. Good Evening.
Joseph Weldon Brown confessed to more than a dozen murders across seven states. He was convicted and sentenced for killing a woman whose body he dismembered and scattered across three Indiana counties. In prison, he hogtied and strangled his cellmate, then asked the judge to lock him up for life because if he was released, he would continue killing. Police Detective Rick Reid was on the scene when Brown led authorities to the scattered remains of Ginger Gasaway in two thousand.
After Brown's arrest, he confessed to a shocking number of other heinous crimes, the torture and murders of drifters and sex workers, the cold case of a naked woman's body found in a roadside ditch, even the murder of his own mother. Detective Reed was the one man Brown opened up to and the only one to cut through the
deceptions and lives and learn the terrible truth. In this newly updated edition, now retire detective Reed reveals his personal theories and insights into one of the darkest minds ever encountered and one of the most terrifying crime stories ever told. The book that we're featuring this evening is Blood Trail, The Hunt for a Serial Killer with my special guest,
retired detective sergeant and author Rick Read. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Rick Reid, Thank you, Dan, thank you so much, and congratulations on this new updated version of Blood Trail.
Yeah, that was a little bit of a surprise to me because the book came out in nineteen I'm sorry, two thousand and four, so it's almost twenty years old now.
Yes. Absolutely. You say that you were a newly appointed sergeant on the Evansville Police Department, you had spent most of your working years dealing with violent people, and you take us to this very first just in the prologue, just before we introduce Joseph Welden Brown and his history and Ginger Rose Gasaway. You're, like, I say, a newly
appointed sergeant on the Evansville. Evansville Police Department, and you're looking through some of these love letters, and what's characteristic of these love letters that it's it's all talking about a theme of reconciliation between Joseph Weldon Brown. The letters were written by Joseph Weldon Brown, the ginger rose gasaway
and it talks about reconciliation. But you say it stops just short of threats of violence if this love is not reciprocated, And so you talk about this case became the job of the Evansville Police Department to find out who was responsible for one of the most vicious crimes in the state of Indiana.
Evansville was a very quiet community. I think in two thousand we may have had ten murders. The entire time. There was a lot of violence, a lot of shooting, stabbing, those kind of things where people were injured and nearly died, but as far as murders, it wasn't really on the radar that much as it is now now at eleven is a monthly figure. So this was something very serious still is Back then when a ginger was attacked and killed and dismembered, that was something that hadn't been on
our radar for at least twenty or thirty years. Evansville, like I said, was pretty quiet. Everybody there was working, We had very low unemployment. It was a pretty calm community. I thought where my job was serious enough that I always dealt with the violent crimes, and I had enough of those to deal with. But then actually when this occurred, I was working in bunco fraud, which is like bad checks, fraud on banks, fraud on other people, charity frauds, those
kind of things. And this happened all because I got a notification by Old National Bank that a person that I was looking for had been in their branch that morning and was trying to pass a check on Ginger Gasaway's Citizens Bank account. The guy showed an Indiana driver's license for Joseph W. Brown, and the teller remembered I'd put out an alert on those stolen checks and for Joe Brown. The reason I had the alert, I was because he'd been passing bad checks all over town at
different banks. He would take a check from one bank, write it out, go to another bank and deposit it and open an account with them, and then he could use that bank account to open an up the bank account and take out all the money. So he was going pretty strong, and this was near the holidays, and I thought, you know, we need to put an end to this, and I put an alert out but didn't have any luck, and then all of a sudden, I get an alert that he had been in the branch.
So that's where it all started, was me trying to find him to arresting, and trying to find Ginger to have her make a complaint so I could do an arrest. The way the arrest works on these things, they have to almost be immediate where they had passed a bad check and you went and found him. Otherwise, we were pretty well advised to get a warrant and arrest him on a warrant later. Well, I thought we just needed to get him right now, So I tried to find Ginger to get her to sign a report, and it
all went from there. I couldn't find her, couldn't find him, and.
It looked like.
They'd either left together or it was a missing person, or there might have been some violence incurred with it. But I had no idea that she had been murdered until we found him in Ohio, and he confessed of murdering and dismembering her. So that went on for three, four or five days with me just looking for her and him.
What did you find in your investigation? At first? She hadn't shown up for work, and she had worked for years at this TJ Max fourteen years, so it's quite unusual for her not to show up at work. And her daughter also worked at TJ Max, or daughter Lisa. So tell us how you discovered that or thought maybe that there was something amiss in that, something like not showing up for work quite atypical for her.
When I was trying to find her, I had gone to her apartment and knocked on the door and there was a note on the door for her daughter saying that she would be back, and her daughter was expecting to help her pack her things to move to a new apartment, so that she had missed that date by a couple of days. Found out where she was moving to and went there and they said that she had missed the date to pick up her keys for that apartment,
and that was unusual. I talked to the daughter again and she said her mom was moving and that she was supposed to help her, and it was unusual because she'd been by there and she wasn't home. So I took another detective and went back to the apartment where she was living at Village Green and asked the manager if they would let us in the apartment to look around, because I thought maybe she has hurt herself, or she's
injured somehow or whatever. But I had to finally almost prod the manager into letting us get in the apartment because the manager was getting ready to go on vacation and she.
Didn't want to do it.
But when we got in, it just there were boxes packed all over the place. There were bills set out on a table with a calculator and a pin, and even on the stove there was a skillet with dried or congealed bacon grease in the bottom, and a pitch or a little fork thing where somebody had ate recently. I looked in the bathroom. The shower was dry, the tub was dry. The only thing missing was a shower curtain, but she could have used There was a shower curtain,
but the plastic one was not there. I didn't even know if she had a plastic one, so that wasn't a real tip off. There was no sign of any injury or a struggle or a fight taking place in that apartment, which later we found out that that's where he had actually killed her and cut her into pieces. So you would think there he would have left some kind of sign in there, but we didn't see anything, and found out.
That he had cleaned it all with bleach.
He scrubbed everything down but a wall by the bed, and when we got in there later after he confessed to the murder. We got in there later and we found with the blue light we found bloodstains up a wall where it looked like it had been spattered all up a wall and on the mattress. It kind of looked like a slaughterhouse in there with the lights, and that I should have had it done immediately, but like I said, I had no idea that she'd been heard.
I just thought we had a missing person. Part of the reason for that was they were both addicted gamblers. They had had themselves evicted from the casino there in Evansville so that they couldn't come back, but they had spent a ton of money. That was one of the reasons that Ginger had gotten a divorce from her husband, and she had lived with Joe for a while because they were both gamblers and every dime that she made went into gambling.
Didn't work.
But the daughter told me she was working at TJ Max and I called them and they said she hadn't been there for at least two days, that she hadn't shown up for work on her schedule days, and they were kind of worried about her, but they said she'd never missed work before. I found out from them that she had also worked at the airport, in a little
restaurant there in the airport in Evansville. And I talked to them and they said she hadn't been to work for three or four days, and that wasn't like her either, because she needed the money, so she was always working, and come to find out, she was really supporting Joe Brown with all the money she was making working extra jobs. And the daughter really gave us a lot of information.
But the daughter had told me Melissa told me that it was possible that she and Joe had left together and gone off gambling somewhere because that's what they'd done in the past, right, And that kind of it made me back off a little bit about her being hurt or anything like that. But I was still looking for her pretty seriously and had contacted the apartments and everybody I could think of. If it work all of those, if she shows up or calls or anything, you call me,
here's my home phone. Didn't hear from anybody. The daughter told me when we were looking in the apartment, I've called her. She said that her mom had a green Ford Taurus and a red Mustang. Well, the green Turus was the one the mom drove, and the red Mustang she had bought for Joe Brown to drive. And the Mustang wasn't there. The green Turus wasn't there, and there was no way we could prove anything. So I put a bl out on the cars and on Ginger and on Joe, and later that day I think this was
oh maybe let's see that. The second I got to call, the second of September in two thousand, I got a call. Officer had found the cars on the parking lot of a grocery store, maybe a thousand yards from her apartment. The keys were still in the ignition. He looked inside. He didn't see anything in their blood or anything obvious where there'd been a fight.
The car. But it's very unusual for a.
Car to be left with the keys in it near there because there were a lot of apartment complexes and there were a lot of thefts in that area, carjackings and car thefts, et cetera. So we didn't know how long the car had been setting there and sitting there with the keys in it. It should have been stolen, but it wasn't. So we looked in the trunk and there was a piece of carpet in the trunk. Blow and behold right, And it was the same color as her carpet, and almost the same type of carpet, but
it was just a square of carpet. There wasn't anything on it. It didn't look like it had been cut out of anything. And so I tried to check the apartment again, but we didn't really get any luck. And I had put a bol out on her and him, and I'm looking through their records again and I found out Joe had beat her up, like in nineteen ninety something when they had gotten together.
He beat her up once.
There was a battery report on it, but she didn't pursue it. And there was a theft report on something and a stalking report, So there were a few things on him that looked like he was a serious criminal that was messed up with her and he wasn't about to.
Let her go.
I didn't know any of that until I got really deep into the case. And like I said, I was working bunko fraud. I'm looking at the checks end of it, mostly where I'd worked quite a few murders at that point, but nothing like this where somebody had been missing. But I found out that he had beat her up at the apartments that she lived in, and the manager there was going to kick her out if Ginger didn't go down and clean up the laundry room where there was blood on.
The floor, which I thought was very callous of them to do.
And that was why Ginger was looking for a new apartment, because Joe had beat her up in there and he thought he left her for dead. After he beat her up, he had fled to one of his family's house and said that him and Ginger had a big fight and he didn't think she was okay or he was worried about her, and nobody reported that to us, so the only thing we had was that report later from a
battery at the apartments and there wasn't much too. It was a mist in her battery, no real details in it, and it was pretty sketchy, and it was still keeping fingers crossed it. Maybe they had had a fight again and maybe he beat her up, maybe he stole her checks, and that they she was still okay somewhere, maybe beat up in a shelter or whatever. So I started checking
shelters and I didn't find her. And then I had a family reunion coming up on September second that I had set up for like six months to a year, and I just had gotten to the family reunion because I was off duty for about two days of this and working it all my time off, and I just got to the family reunion, I got a call that told me the Taurus was found on the parking lot
there at Great Scott. So I went out and looked at the car, and then I started putting out bols and I didn't get anything back on that, and then I had a chance to do a news conference, so I put out a conference and put the car in there, both cars, well, the one car, the Mustang and Ginger and Joe, and that I was looking for her. She was a missing person and might be an endangered person. And that was about all I could put out because
I didn't really have anything else to prove it. At that point, I thought it was going to be done. I went home and tried to get some sleep. Everything was done, and I got a call again like six o'clock that morning by Ohio State Police. They'd found Joe. They found the red Mustang and a truck stop in e Lebanon, Ohio, and he was very agitated and almost fought the take trooper there and they had taken him in on I put out with the bol I put out an arrest warrant and get this failure to here
for anger management. That was the only thing I could find on him, which I thought was kind of iran. But I had put that out with the warrant just hoping that maybe he'd get stopped and they could arrest him on something, because I knew about all the checks. But like I said, they didn't want us to make an arrest on these checks unless we got a warrant. Well, prosecutor wouldn't give me a warrant on the checks.
Yet, Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now you talked about that you only had this misdemeanor warrant in which potentially be able to arrest him. So let's fast forward to his arrest, as you say, but then the request to speak to you, and how this confession came to be.
Ohio State Police had arrested him and took him to Elebanon, Ohio, to the jail there in Warren County, and we got the call and me and another detective drove to Elevenon. It was about a five hour drive from Evansville. They got Joe back in a classroom with like stadium seating for the state police, and he was I'm sorry. It was the jail's classroom and he was sitting at a table by himself, and the two street troopers I talked to said he won't talk to you. He's pissed off,
he's cussed everybody. He got a fight in the jail. He said he won't talk to anybody. They had him handcuffed, sitting at a table for me, and I looked and they had a video of him being read his rights and he refused to sign anything. He said, I know my rights, and that was about it. So we walked in the door and I took the state troopers in with me and another detective. And protocol, says one detective one interview, you don't have several people disturbing or distracting.
But I wanted this troopers in there because he hated them. So they set up in the stadium seats where he could look over and see them. But they weren't disturbing, but he was really angry that they were in there. And he looked at me and he goes, you might as well get the f out of here. I'm not talking to you, I'm not talking.
To them, blah blah blah.
And I had taken a class from this guy with State Department, and I just kind of leaned over and held my arms out like wow. And I've said, Jesus Christ, Joe, my ex wife doesn't talk to me like that. And I could see him starting to smirk. So I had opened the door to an interview with that, and I told him, you don't have to say a word. I just want to sit down and talk to you. I'm
from Evansville. I'm looking for Ginger. I'm afraid something has happened to her and I have to find her, and so he let me sit down and he said, I'm not talking to you, but you can tell me. After about maybe two and a half three hours, he looked at me and he goes, you don't want to find her, and I said, what did you say? And he said, you don't want to find her. Believe me, Rick, you don't want to be the one to find her because I had come off during the whole interview as the
week Nelly. And he actually protected me a couple of times during the interview with my other detective who was getting on my case like good cop, bad cop, right, and he would get on that other detective and go, no, he's doing a good job. And I've told Joe I said, I don't know why they sent me. I'm a horrible detective. I shouldn't be doing this. Something's going to happen to Ginger and I won't be able to find out and
that just makes me sick. I need to quit, and he go that's when he said, you'll never find her. And so we went from there and he finally confessed that he had killed her and did all curious. I go, what do you mean you killed her? What did you do? And he said I killed her, and I said, no, you didn't, and he goes, yes, I did.
Rick. I said, well, what did you do?
And he said, well, I cut her into I strangled her, and I cut her into pieces and spread body parts everywhere.
So that kind of shocked me.
And we went from there and he confessed to how he did the murder and where, so we knew we had a murder involved. We didn't have a body, we didn't really have a crime scene, and all we had was him in the car and his record. But I contacted our prosecutor back in Indiana and he went ahead and issued a warrant for the bad checks for me, so i'd have some reason to arrest him. The Ohio State Police luckily charged him with fleeing prosecution, leaning the
state to avoid prosecution. And that was better than our misdemeanor charge because with a misdemeanor charge could pick him up, but they couldn't hold him unless we told them to a misdemeanor, it's really hard for them to make an arrest and make it stand unless the agency issuing the warrant or the charge will stand behind it and ask for extradition. So with a felony warrant. Now you have
a lot better grounds to stand on. So we got the felony warrant and I told Joe, I said, well, we're going to have to do an extradition hearing, and it has to be in the court here in Warren County. And then if you will, I want you to come back to Evansville with me and show you where, show me where you put these body parts. And he goes, I'll show you, but I won't. I won't go tomorrow. I'll go right now. He said, you got to take me out of here now. He said, I can't stand
this place. So I called my prosecutor back. They called Warren Counties prosecutor and they agreed that if he agreed to go, he could sign a paper and I could sign it like I was checking him out to take him out to eat. So I signed it and we got in the car. And there's one little side thing I wanted to tell you. When we left with him, I handcuffed him behind his back, set him in the back seat. I got in the back seat of the
car with him. The other detective is driving. I had not taken a gun into the police department with me, I just had a phone call and I didn't I didn't carry a gun off, did he because I wasn't playing on shooting anybody. But I'm sitting in a back seat with him, and I don't even have a gun, and it's pitch blackout you can't see anything. They've had us follow them to State Police headquarters where they filled us up on gas because we were almost out.
And while we're sitting.
Under dark and my partner is in the State Police office getting some coffee and waiting for them to come out and fill the car up, sitting next to me, and he goes, I'm not going to jail Rick, And the way he said it, I felt my heart start pounding because I thought he's got out of the handcuffs and he's going to kill me. I couldn't see whether he did or not. I couldn't even see him. I just had a voice, So I told him. I said, Joe, you know you're going to jail.
You have to. You told me what you did to Ginger. You have to do this.
I said, I'll be nice to you, but you have to do this. That's up to you. I said, you're doing the right thing. Keep doing the right thing. So he didn't say anything else, and come to find out, he button't out of his handcuffs. But we went back to Evansville, and when we got almost into town, we were on Highway I sixty four Interstate sixty four. You could look off to the right and there was this
abandoned gas station that had a huge parking lot. It used to be a truck stop, and there must have been twenty thirty police car in there, canines, crime scene units, ambulance, all kinds of things in this or rescue squads in this parking lot, and most of them had their lights going because they knew we were almost there. Joe looks over and he goes, is that for me? And he grinned, and I thought, you sick person.
So he.
Was really wanting to He was really wanting to be something special. And I told him, I said, yad, Joe, it's all it's all there for you because you're doing such a good thing here. I said, can you imagine somebody doing what you did, confessing to it, and then going to help us find all the body parts so that we can bury her. I said that just amazes me. And he said, I think God has abandoned me, and I had to stop him because you can't always be the weak person. And I said, Joe, you know that
that's not true. You abandon God when you did this. You know that, don't you And he kind of hung his head and he goes, yeah, I know. So after that I was kind of in charge. But he took us out with different departments, like in Gibson County and Posey County and Warwick County. He took us with officers from each county and they're crime scene people and pod ever dogs and he would take us down a country road or out in the cornfields and.
He'd go with his head.
He'd nod right over there, you're going to find legs, or right over there, you're going to find the head. And it was very gruesome because it was still pitch blackout. All we had were flashlights and we're walking through cornfields and wheat fields and just junk fields with him. It was like being in a horror movie with him out there.
I had him the arm, he was still handcuffed, and I'm walking him too all these places and we'd almost walk up on the body part and he'd go right over there, and crime scene would take pictures and lo and behold there was a bag with arms in it, and it had butted open because it'd been on the ground so long in that heat that the asses that build up had the bag explode, so you could see
these half decayed arms. When we found Ginger's head, he had actually beheaded her, and her skull, most of the hair was hanging off to the side, and the skin had come off her face. Animals had eaten all the skin off her face, in her nose and all that, so it was partly a skull and then partly hair. And I asked him, why did you do that? Why didn't you behead her? He goes, I'll put the head here because her daughter, Misty, lives right over there across
these fields. And I always hated Misty and she hated me, and I wanted her to look out and see her mom every time she went in her backyard.
Wow, this is the guy.
That's the reason I'm saying all these things is he has this killer instinct in him, but he's also got this evil part of him that doing all that was for a reason, But it was for a sick reason, and it wasn't just I'm mad at her for kicking me out, or I'm mad at her for not having money. I'm going to hurt her. I'm going to hurt her family. I'm going to hurt her. And cutting her up meant nothing to him, which you would think that that would be very hard for even a serial killer to do,
but I know they do. But for him, he didn't seem like that kind of person initially, And the more we got into it, the more I could see it. And I tried to keep him talking, which I had to tell him how he was doing a good thing. And I had told him, I said, we found all these parts because we want to be able to put her in a casket and have the family bury her. I said, you told me that your brother died, and your father died, and your mom and you never got
to go to the cemetery. He'd been there maybe once. And I said, so you didn't really have any place to go and grieve them, to say, there they are, they're in the ground. I can get rid of that thought in my head that maybe they're not dead. I said, So I'm trying to do that for Ginger's family, I said, and her one daughter really likes you, and talks good about you, which was not true, and she just thinks she's surprised, she shocked that you would do this. She
couldn't believe that you were like this. So we need to get all these body parts so we can bury her and let Melissa go and grieve her mom and know she's right there. So he was very cops have took us to all the parts.
And later.
He said, well, since they're going to be able to get all the parts of her, all her body pieces, do you think they'll have an open casket?
Yikes?
I don't think he was joking. I said, I don't think so, you know, because even the face was gone.
But I've got.
Pictures of all of these crime scenes in the autopsy, and I still had nightmares about this because that was probably the case I've ever dealt with where I had that many, that much parts of a body of a dead body. And I've seen almost everything, but that was a first for me.
Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now let's take it too, because there's so much to go further in this story. We've just only unfortunately Begne. You talk about the first appearance the preliminary or Joe Brown as his September sixth, two thousand and this is only a preliminary, so nobody expects anything to
happen unusual. And yet right at that preliminary Joe Brown with his attorney standing by him, a judge Helt is presiding, and his defense attorney's Bury Standley, and right away he gets up and says, I'm guilty. I killed her and I cut her up, and even the judge tells him to sit down and let his attorney speak for him.
Yeah, he was very angry that they wouldn't let him confess because he told me he didn't want to go to court. He would admit all of his crimes. He didn't want to go to court. He didn't want to waste his time. He wanted to go on to prison. And so when they started reading the charges to him and telling him his rights and all this stuff, and this is a preliminary, they just tell him what he's
charged with. They didn't even have a bond hearing yet, and he jumped up, leaned over the table and he goes, I'm guilty of your owner. I just want to go on to prison. I killed her I cut her up. He said, if you don't send me on to prison now and you let me out, I'll kill again. He said, I'll just keep killing. So the judge kept telling him to sit down and shut up, and the attorney was trying to get him to sit down, and Joe looked over.
At me, like, see, I told you I would confess.
Let's fast track to the trial, which was eventually set for February twenty sixth, and now he has some defense team, including an attorney, John Goodrich and a private investigator, Mark Maulbray. But basically the trial comes down to they have a two pronged approach. You approach you right, that basically they're going to attack the constitutional rights of Joe Brown, his rights being violated by not being properly mirandized. And so let's just go to what happens at this trial, because
again the story almost has a new beginning. Afterwards.
I went to court, oh like.
For a week at a time, maybe five days at a time, and I was on the stand most of that time. They had Ohio State Police come in and testify too, because they had read him his miranda rights in the police car with the camera on him. And he told him he knew his rights and he wasn't going to talk to them. He knew his rights and they were wasting their time reading them to him, so he just refused to sign. You just have to prove
that you read them their rights. They don't have to sign and waive their rights, right, You just have to prove that you read it to him. Now, he said he didn't want to talk, so at that point he should have said, I want an attorney, but he didn't ask for an attorney. He knew he was going to be arrested. He just went on to jail because he'd
been there so many times. So we had that videotape of him confessing, had the state police officer saying that, and the other Both of those state policemen were in an interview room when I read his rights to him and he refused to sign. He did the same thing to me he did to them, except he didn't say I'm not talking to you, or that I want an attorney and I'm not talking to you without an attorney present.
He didn't go through that. But their biggest thing was the extradition, and I was worried about that to begin with. That's why I called our prosecutor. Usually for extradition, you would make the arrest and then the next available court date, which this was like ten o'clock at night, nine or ten o'clock at night or maybe earlier that he was arrested, but we didn't charge him with a felony or say we were going to bring him back, and extra died him until late that night, so there was no court.
The next court available was the next day at eleven am, so we had until eleven am to talk to him, and he confessed a course, and he said he wanted to come back and he would go back with me, but he didn't want anybody else talking to him. And I had to sign him out of jail, so it was in my name, which made me culpable. But the prosecutors had both agreed that we could bring him back to Evansville as long as we got him back in
Ohio for that eleven o'clock hearing. And that's what the law says, is that they have to be in court by the next available court.
Date, and we made it.
But he showed us body parts all night, and.
The defense was that if he hadn't, if we.
Hadn't taken him illegally from Ohio, we wouldn't have had the body parts to prove that he'd killed her. It was just a confession at that point, right, And so they had they had a good case. But this went on for almost a year and I would have to go to court and set through four or five days of six hours on the stand, right, uh, defending myself. And I found out they'd also they were Joe told
me this anyway, I don't know it from the attorneys. Joe, I had put him in a different county in jail because he hated Vanderberg County, and he said if I put him in Vanderberg County jail, he would get in a fight every day. And I didn't want to do that to them. So I called Posey County and I said, well you take him over here. He said, he'll come here. If he gives you any problems at all, you call me at home and I'll come and get him. And so he went to Posey County jail. But then he
would tell his attorneys on court dates. He'd go, I don't want you.
Coming to get me.
I want Rick Reid and Larry Nelson, who were the detectives. I want them to come and get me and take me to court.
So we'd have to go.
Over and pick him up from a jail and drive him to Evansville Court, And on the way to court, he would just run off at the mouth about all this, tell us what his attorneys were doing, what their defense was, and he would laugh about it. And he said, I keep telling them I'm guilty. I want to plead guilty. I want to go on to prison.
He said. They shouldn't be doing this, he.
Said, and they're talking about putting you in prison, Rick, for taking me illegally from Ohio. He said, they're going to file federal charges against you for kidnapping. And I thought, only cow. You know that if they had, I would have been in a world heard. I probably would have been out of a job for a long time until that was done. But that was their defense, was that we had taken him illegally against his will to another state.
And that would have been true because there was a lot of in the past, a lot of problems arising from extradition because one county in a different state would just be mad at this person and have them extra diided back where they would hurt him, and I knew all that. You know, I was already teaching some of the stuff at the time, and I just didn't want
to go through all that. But you know, as it turned out, that's what we had to do until they finally decided that I hadn't violated his rights and all the evidence stood, and that's when he got to plead guilty and got his sentence.
What was the sentence.
He got life without parole, which a life sentence in Indiana is twenty five years, but you get good time with that, which most people do, like seventeen of that twenty five got life without parole, which means or possibility of parole, which means he would never ever get out. He's in prison forever. He was telling me that day that they sentenced him. I had to take him back to jail, and we transported him to prison, even when he was riding to prison from work or from Posey County.
He told me on the way there, he said, I got some other things to tell you, but I can't tell you.
Now because they'll give me the death penalty.
He never did tell me until a couple of years later he told me what he was talking about I suspect that he had done more, but you know, you can't beat information out of a prisoner, and he was afraid of the death penalty. He didn't want to die, so we were never able to get it out of him until later, and he contacted me and wanted to confess to thirteen other murders, which it really didn't surprise me, but he would do that and give me the information.
He did.
Kind of surprised me that he would be so open about it, but he was in.
Prison for the rest of his life. He didn't care.
He actually had been in prison for long enough that he said, I don't want to even live anymore. I just want to get this over with.
This as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. You write in this book that you categorize or characterize Joe Brown as a newshorre and that's evident when he contacts Maureen Hayden and this isn't a letter in August two thousand and three, and he starts off with this is no prank, this is no joke. Contact Detective Rick
Reid at the Evansville Police Department. I have information on thirteen murdered women between nineteen ninety five and two thousand and He also talked about if the time is right, I'll turn over the IDs I have of these murdered women and I'll confess to all thirteen murders. So tell us about this letter that you also received as well, and what happens as a result in terms of trying
to determine the truthfulness and ID these victims. Apparently he has all these identifications, Say tell us what happens.
Yeah, this was like.
Two thousand and three and he'd been in prison for a little while. He contacted Mariene Hayden. He actually called and they had to accept charges for him to talk to her in any center letter, but he talked to her on the phone and told her that he'd committed all these murders and she should check with me. And so she called me and talked to me about it, and they wanted to be involved in interviewing him about this and put it on the news, and I didn't want to go with that, obviously, but I had not
contacted him back yet. He contacted another news station reporter, I think Channel fourteen or forty four, and she was a very good looking woman, and he had he liked her a lot, like the way she looked, and so he wanted her to come and interview him about this
and put him on TV. And she called me and we talked, and I finally ended up going to prison and talking to him, and I took another detective with me and a crime scene officer to videotape everything, and we talked to him over about a two week period.
Every day he was in isolation what they called B East Unit B on the East Side, but everybody called it the Beast, and that's where they kept him alone in a cell and away from everybody, and the only way he got out was for thirty minutes a day to take a shower and maybe use the phone.
But they had a.
Dog leash on him, handcuffed behind his backs or around his neck ankle chains. They led him that way to the phone in the shower because he would fight him and if he got squirrely with him, they would jink that leash and he'd go down on his face. That's how they controlled him, because he was like a mad dog. He told me about that and when they when we went up to get him and talked to him, and at prison, they had him hooked up like that with the leash coming down from his arms between his legs,
and it was about eight foot long. And they handed it to me and they said, if he gives you any problems, you just yank this and he'll go down.
And cow.
So we got him in a room and I said, I need all this off of him, which was kind of risky, but they took everything off, including or they left the handcuffs on him in the front. He said, in her and he confessed all thirteen of these murders, and he went through them briefly, all the way through once, and then I stopped him and I said, let's go
back one at a time. And he gave me all of these murders in order, thirteen of them, and then we went back and I said, now, when you were in such and such city, which might be murder number five, tell me about that one. And he would be able to tell me all about that one. And I took him back and forth in time between these things in different states, and sometimes just a description and I'd say, this girl looked like this or that and the other.
Tell me what happened, and he could come up with the entire story like he told me, but he made one mistake in the timeline and he said he stopped and he said, no, that's not right. He said that was before this one. And he said, I'm so sorry, Rick. He said, I apologize. He said, you'll never believe me anymore. And I said, Joe, you caught your own mistake, told me about it. That's fine, just let's go on. And
so he told me about all the other ones. Well, that went on, and he told me about a murder that he had done in Evansville, a couple of murders in Evansville, and we were able to find a case that kind of matched what he said, and we looked into it, and this was after he had already gone to prison, of course.
We looked into.
It and found a murder of a known prostitute that happened the same year that he said it happened. The description he gave was exactly her. And told me where it happened. Well, we didn't know. We couldn't prove that it happened right where he said, but that was a street block that a lot of hookers and prostitutes frequented
and they got picked up there. He told me he found her there and he went to a motel right there, and that he'd killed her in the motel because after they got done having sex, she got in his wallet and took more money than he gave her, and so
he knocked her down and killed her. And he stripped her naked again, put her in the boot of this little car and drove her out in the county to a Gibson county and threw her out in this ditch dark naked, said how she was laying in the ditch, and that he had details like she had very small breast, almost not having breast, and this victim was the same way. He told me what her hair looked like, about how tall she was. All that stuff matched, and he said he'd turn her out in this ditch and just left
her laying on her side. Well, that's what their police report said when they found the body. And he told me her he only knew her by the name slick right, But we were ever enable. We weren't able to find that name. But we showed him a lineup of six women, and one of them was a policewoman that did that detail sometimes, and they all looked real similar. Well, he picked her picture out immediately and he goes, that's slick. Yeah, So that one I still believe he did that one.
The Gibson County Sheriff thought they had good suspects. They found DNA seamen in a car that was owned by these two guys that admitted they'd had sex with her that night or the night before, so they were wanting to charge them, but they didn't have enough to charge them, so they just cleared the case. They thought that they were the ones and they were done, and they wouldn't believe that Joe actually committed that murder. Joe was really pissed.
He wanted to come clean and he wanted to us to know about all of them and find one so he could prove that's what he did. But we had DNA run on the DNA that they had and DNA from Joe. That was a special test, and it didn't really show anything because there was so much material when they took it from her that.
It could have been anybody.
You know, she was with maybe five or ten guys a night, so it was hard to say what was whose or if you could even say this was somebody's right. We were pretty well done with that and we never got a conviction on it. They didn't want to press charges, and our prosecutor said, well, if they're not going to do it, we don't want to bring him over here and lose the case.
You talked about. The person you mentioned was Andrea Hendrik Steinert. And one of the other compelling reasons you believe that it was her that Joe was talking about is that he mentioned that he thought she just had a baby,
and then this woman had previously had a baby. But in the two thousand and three as opposed to the two thousand confession, Joe Brown also talks gives a different story to you about the motivation and some of the things that occurred at Ginger Gasaway's apartment and the reason for the murder in the first place. The two different stories tell us what he said in two thousand and then the change in two thousand and three and the details he included.
Yeah, he he was pretty well wanted to come clean about the whole thing. And when I was talking to him, he said that he had gone over to her apartment. He knew she was going to move, and he knew where she was going to move to. He'd followed her and he had stopped outside of her apartment in the parking lot and saw her ex husband's car pull up and her giver ex husband a kiss and get out.
So he thought that she was getting back with her ex husband, and he was really jealous of that because she was his meal ticket.
He had been in prison.
Since nineteen seventy seven, I believe nineteen seventy five or seventy seven, and he'd been in boys school quite a bit before that, so he had a lot of problems with violence.
He was very angry with her.
Plus she was wanting her car back, that Mustang, and he was in love with at Mustang. He thought it made him look cool, and he said women really liked it. So she wanted the car back because he wasn't paying her for it, which he promised to do, and she had told him, I want the car back, I want you to leave me alone. He had a work truck.
She'd set him up in business Dingane and he was stealing all the money and going gambling with it, and so she took he sold the truck and she got it back, and so she wanted the car because he
wasn't working and she'd kicked him out. He was pretty angry about that and then seeing her ex husband with her set him off, so he said he went to her apartment and waited until he knew she was asleep at about three o'clock in the morning, and he waited and outside her door, crouched down until he knew she was going to get up and go to work at TJ Max. It was about four o'clock in the morning, and he heard her getting in this closet by the door,
which kind of squeaked. It was a metal folding door, and he heard her go into that, and he knew from habit that she'd be opening the door going to work, and he said as soon as she opened the door, he yanked it on her and knocked her backwards and got her by the throat and drug her back to the bedroom him or pushed her back there by the throat and told her she knew what was going to happen because she had cheated it on him or whatever, and he was going to kill her, but she talked
him out of doing that because she told him she still loved him and pretty well tried to talk him down and begged him not to die. But he had her get naked completely and they had sex couple of times, and she told him that she loved him, and then he said, well, if you're going to get back with your husband or your ex husband or whatever, I'm going to do this. And he was going to kill her anyway, and she got mad and she said, me and Hobert spent the night together. I don't want you ever to
come back. Get out of here and don't come back. And that's when he strangled her. So I found out later from the autopsy pictures that we found all of her body parts and they were all She had been naked when he cut her up. But he used a sawsle. I don't know if you know what that is, yes, yes, yeah,
Like it's got a long blade on it. Well, he cut her up with that and a butcher knife on that plastic shower curtain that I never found on the floor by the bed, and he that's how the blood got all up the wall was from him cutting her. And he said that the sawsole wasn't doing a job because it wouldn't go through the meat and the bone. He went back to home depot where he got the saw, got the sawsle and told him this didn't work, and this blade doesn't work. And they said, well you cutting
up and he said bones. And so the guy said, if you're going to cut up bones, you need this blade, and they gave him a different blade, and he went back to cut her up. But he he took all of her clothes and bagged them, threw them away in one place, like some of them at Vanderberg, some in Warwick County. He threw the sawshole in a pit that was left over from coal mining, and it was full of water, so we never found that.
We found the box to it.
And he threw all the clothes in a dumpster there by, the apartments or some of them, and we never found those because it had been too long and the dumpster's had been emptied. But that was another thing, was him saying he took all the clothes to a dumpster by where he killed her, And that turned up later in the two thousand and three confessions to the other murders.
He disposed of some of these bodies and dumpsters, Yes, And I had a hard time getting other detectives to believe that that could possibly happen, because they said, if a body is in a dumpster, they're going to find it. When they empty it, well, not necessarily no, and you know, so that was really their reason for thinking he was
a liar. But I really believe that he killed this Andrea Hendricks for sure, and a couple of the other ones because he told me too much detail that he remembered, and he remembered it like he was enjoying it, like it was something to be proud of. And that's what he did when he told me about killing Ginger. He acted the same way. So it wasn't like he was just sitting there going, uh.
You know. Then I.
Was telling the whole story like better than I'm talking to you. So we found we found all the body parts and stuff. And he said that after he cut her up, actually after he killed her, he sat on the edge of the bed and he wondered what he was going to do. He had no idea what he
was going to do. And he had been in prison and he heard somebody in prison say, if you ever kill somebody, you cut them into pieces and throw the pieces in different counties and they'll never find all the body parts because the animals will take it away.
So that's what he did because that's what he had been.
Told that Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages you talk about right after he does this heinous crime, and he distributes these body parts all over the place. You say that he takes about fifties. He says he takes about fifty thousand dollars of Ginger's money and blows it on gambling immediately after this, and then
that's the beginning of his further spree. You talk about that in two thousand and four, just when you think you're not going to hear from Joe Brown again, and you've investigated these murders, and like you say, many police don't believe his stories at all because the only body you found other than Ginger's body parts were this Andrea Hendrick Steiner. So were you surprised or alarmed or dismayed when you got notification September thirtieth, two thousand and four from Joe Brown.
A little bit?
And during that talk, that interview, he told us about a girl that he almost killed, but he said she was the one that got away, so she wasn't in the thirteen. She was another one. And he told us when that one happened, and all he knew her by was the name September because that was her dancer name and she was a hooker also.
He picked her up.
And offered her one hundred dollars to have sex with him, and he took her to Read Kentucky had rented a motel room and it was a really rundown dump that I don't think they had anybody there. He took her there and we found her and she led us to the motel room and she said, he took me in there, and I was going to have sex with him, but when I walked in there there was plastic lane on the floor, clothesline on the counter, and a knife.
She said.
She told him a sob story about how her life had been miserable and her parents had mistreated her and her dad had molested her, and she said none of it was true, but I just wanted to feel sorry for me, and she said it worked. He said, I'm going to take you home. He says I had a life just like that. He said, I am so sorry or something, and he took her back to where he picked her up and left her. Which she never reported any of that to anybody, but we got it later.
He was definitely going to do what he did before. He picked a hotel room and he was going to kill her and cut her up like he did Ginger. But it was it was pretty scary what she she found out that he had done this to Ginger, and she almost fainted because it's like, oh my god, I almost.
Did I.
You get this letter and he's requesting you again, but he wants to tell you some information and it does have some relevance to the Ginger Gassaway story in terms of where these bodies supposedly are that he's reaching out to you about. Tell us about what he says and the search.
Yeah, we had contacted the FBI their profiling unit, a unit called VISCAP program and entered all the information we had on his case, body parts, what he said he had done to all the victims, what they looked like, all the things that were pertinent to a search, a computer search of other cases around the US, because he said about these murders he had done them all the way across the United States, and so we were looking for other murders that matched what he had told us
that were unsolved, and we found a couple that were pretty close, but they didn't really have anything that we could work with to prove that he had done them. And he never did give us the IDs that he claimed he had from all of them because he said, after I killed him, I kept their driver's license to their ID card or something like that, right, and we never found those.
Well, basically, he tells you details of where these bodies are buried in relation to where Ginger Gasaway's body parts were buried, particularly her head. So what happens with the search for the veracity of what he has said and what he has claimed.
He took us back to several of the places where he had disposed of Ginger's body, and one place in particular he was certain that he had buried a victim like he did. One of his first victims was a farm with cornfield, and he told us about how far he'd walked out in the cornfield, and he dug down about three feet and he put the body in it and buried her in the cornfield, thinking that she would
be dug up and eaten by animals. And we had a backo come out and we dug up an area that was probably twenty by twenty foot and six foot deep.
Found nothing. It didn't mean that.
That she hadn't been there, but we had kadaver dogs go over the area and never found anything. So we never found any of these things. And I had the feeling when we were doing that one they don't allow him to smoke in prison, you know, legally anyway, and he was wanting to go and have a smoke and
go for a trip. So he used me and the fact that I believed him to get out of prison again and go riding around different counties and relive what he had done, because we drove by a couple of places where he had left Ginger's body, so that was what he was wanting to do. I think I believed at the time that he might have been telling the truth about the one, or I wouldn't have gone to that much work. But my thinking at the time was
I have him confessing to thirteen murders. All of these people are the type of person that would not be missed very badly because if they disappeared, people would think they were either a hooker and they left town, or they had just disappeared because they wanted to stay away from family and everything. So they were kind of disposable people, and that's what he was killing, was people that nobody
would miss. And all the people that he was telling us about were that way, and you really couldn't find anything on them. It's not like somebody was killing somebody's mother and the daughters are missing her. The only one that he did like that was Ginger. And I asked him why was Ginger different and he said, because I
hated her kids. He said, I knew that you would find me eventually because I was connected to her, And that gave me a little more truth and to his other confessions, because he was not connected to them, but he was connected to Ginger. He had a history with her. The other thing he said was when he went to Ohio, he said his mom, he's telling me about his family dying and worried man and getting a dishonorable discharge when he was like nineteen teen, seventeen, eighteen nineteen.
But he said he.
Was molested as a child and his mom found out that he'd been molested and did nothing about it except tell his father. And the father was a bricklayer two and the father was a drunken, abusive and his father just beat the hell out of him and called him names like he had asked for that like that's what he was. So he hated his mom for that, and his sisters, he said, we're pretty much the same way.
Where one of them woke up with a knife buried in the floor by her bed and she told the mother that he did it, and he got a beating for that too, and he said he didn't do it, but the way he said it out that he did. He said when his mom died, she had drowned in the bathtub and he was the one that found her. And this was when we were in Ohio still, and I asked him, did you kill your mother? And he goes, I can't say that. Wow, So I knew did that one too. He hated his mom and she was found
dead drowning about TB. He's the one founder his dad supposedly committed suicide with a gun. He hated his dad for beating him all the time. He hated his sisters because they had turned him in for probably trying to molest him. And he hated his brother because none of them had come to prison while he was in prison and brought him money for commissaries so he could get cigarettes.
That was back when they could still smoke, and so he hated all of them because they had never given him money for anything, or helped him or visited or answered mail or anything. And he had told me this was in Ohio. Still, he said, it's a good thing you caught me when you did, because I wasn't done yet. And I said, what are your names? You weren't done? What were you going to do? And he said, my brother lives in Zanesville. It was about ten miles away
from where he was. He said, he lives in Zanesville, and he's married and got two kids. He said, I was going to go kill him and his wife and the kids.
Wow.
And then he was going to go down to marry out to Georgia and kill his other sister. I don't know whether any of that was true, but he was very close to his brother's house.
To have you gotten there.
You say in the end, in the afterword, that you say you believe strongly that of course he killed Ginger, he killed Andrea Hendrix Steinhert, but also you believe he killed his mother. But also it's very, very a good glaring example of how dangerous this person continues to be. Just tell us briefly about the cellmate and his fate.
This was after he had burned himself out with us. You know, we weren't going to take him out of jail anymore unless he would tell us where a body part was or a body and then we'd find it, we might get him out. He knew he'd burned up any chances of getting out with us, and he had been transferred to another prison where at doc Department of Corrections they allowed him to have a cat, and he
wanted to have a cat. But when they send him to this other prison, I think it was Miami facility up north, they wouldn't allow him to have animals, and he was in solitary a lot of the time, and then they put him out in population and he was really pissed about not being able to have a cat, and he couldn't talk to me anymore. I refused to talk to him, and nobody believed him about anything, and he was going to be in prison the rest of
his life. So his salemate, he said, was a child molester, and they put him in with this guy, and he didn't want to be in there with him, and the guy got on his nerves.
So Joe used the rope.
From their laundry bag and strangled this guy, left him on the bunk, strangled, made coffee, and then sat on the bunk and hollered over the speaker system. You better come and get him because he's going to start stinking. And this is what I heard from the prison. I didn't talk to Joe. I was in New York at my publishers at the time that the prosecutor from there called me and he said, Joe Brown wants to talk to you, and I said, well, I don't want to
talk to him. And he said, well, he's killed his cell mate and the only one he'll confess to is you. And I said, he was in a cell locked in with this guy.
And killed him, right.
He goes, well, yeah, if you don't need me, no, I don't want to.
I don't want to do that.
I'm in New York and I really don't want to. So I didn't, and they found him guilty and he got another life without parole.
Sims.
Yeah, it's a fitting end to the story. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about Blood Trail the Hunt for a Serial Killer, and this is the new updated version release just recently this twenty twenty four tell us when it was released, and if you do any social media and if you have a website, you can refer us to.
Okay the book. It's got a new cover, of course.
It was released as a paperback in two thousand and four two thousand and five and ran for a long time, and then it became an ebook only and now it's a paperback and an e book. It was released in July this year. If you need to contact me or you want to, this book is pretty exciting. It's got maybe ten or twelve pages of pictures, yes of the scenes, and I think I describe some of the love letters that he wrote in it and some of his reasoning doing these killings. So if you need to contact me,
you can get me through my website. It's rickreadbooks dot com. And I've also got a Facebook page. It's just under rickread and you'll see my picture on there as a writer, and it'll show all my books. So you can use either one of those to get links to Amazon. All of my books are for sale at any of the bookstores as an ebook or paperback. You have to order them. At this point in time, there's no hardback hardcovers, but
it's still a very interesting book. The story has still bothered me to this day where I have nightmares like I'll wake up in the middle of the night's sweating and wanting to fight. Wow, because I believe that Joe Brown has gotten out of prison and he's found me because he's mad at me, because I don't want to talk to him anymore.
Incredible, incredible, the enduring legacy of this crime on so many people, but especially you, Rick Reid. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this very very personal story for you, Blood Trail, the Hunt for a serial killer. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night. Thank you, thank you,