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You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. 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 Zupansky.
Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about them. On October twenty nine, nineteen ninety seven, hooker Andrea Slick Hendrix's beaten, naked body was discovered in a roadside ditch near Stuartsville, Indiana, with no leeds for police to follow. The case eventually
went cold, but it wouldn't stay that way. In two thousand and three, sadistic sexual predator Joseph W. Brown claimed to have strangled Hendrix with his favorite murder weapon, a shoe lace from a woman's size eight shoe. Ginger Gasaway fifty three met Brown at a gambler's anonymous meeting. She didn't know that when she took up with him, she was gambling with her life. On August thirtieth, two thousand, Brown murdered Gasway and scattered her body parts across three
Indiana counties. For this grisly crime, he would be sentenced to life in prison without parole, but it wouldn't be his first time behind bars. In nineteen seventy seven, Brown had been sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping an arm robbery. In nineteen ninety five, he was released despite the fact that he'd beaten a fellow inmate nearly to death. Brown later confessed that during the next five years, he indulged in a Seventh State rampage of torture and murder.
His victims female hitchhikers and prostitutes. Now doing time in Walbash Valley Correctional Correction Center, Brown maintains that he'd murdered no less than thirteen other women. The book that we're profiling this evening is Blood Trail, with my special guest, Rick Reid. Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview and welcome to True Murder.
Rick Reid, thank you for having me.
Thank you very much, and congratulations on this book. It was written a few years ago, but still an amazing story and a great book, great really great read. Now, first off, let's give our audience a little bit of the background. How you came to be such an integral
part of this book. Like I had mentioned in our earlier conversations, there is seems to be a trend towards a lot of true crime authors partnering with homicide detectives police officers to get the invaluable information that needed necessary to write the book even more effectively than they would normally write the book. So tell our audience who you are, what your background is, and before we start taking some questions here asking some questions about the book specifically.
Okay, I've or I was a police officer since nineteen eighty. I was on the Vanderberg County Sheriff's Department here in Evansville, Indiana for six years, and then I went on to Evansville City Police and was on there for twenty years before I retired and went into teaching. It was during that time on the Evansville Police Department that this case
came up. So my background basically, I had six years on the county police as a deputy and went into law enforcement and immediately within just a couple of months, coming on the police department. I went in through the detective's office, so I was in detectives for about seventeen years and ended up with my last three years being in internal affairs. The most hated position on the police department.
Why is that.
Internal affairs have to investigate their own So it's really a tough position to be put in where you have to investigate other police officers for suspected or complaints of wrongdoing. And the position that it puts you in basically is on the outside of everything, where the other officers don't like you. The chief of police doesn't really like you because every time they have run across you, there's a problem. So it's kind of like being a black cloud.
Okay, Now, this story when we're talking about Ginger Gasaway and you start the book, we're talking about Ginger, but what was your position as in the police department at the time that you were investigating or the disappearance of Ginger gas Away? But that's not originally what you started with, but the bad checks of Joe Brown. What year was that and where was that and what was your position within the police department?
Right?
This basically all started for me around two thousand when Joe Brown came to my attention as somebody that was writing a lot of bad checks, doing what we called kiding with checks between banks that were no good And at the time I had moved from violent crime section to white collar crime. We called it the buncle fraud unit, and I was working primarily with the banks and with that type of crime, paper crimes, So that's what I
was doing. It seemed like for some reason in that position, though, I ended up working four or five other homicides while I was in the white collar crime unit. Also, the one thing kind of led to another. Money sometimes breeds violence, so in this case, I was looking at Joe Brown for several months prior to this incident occurring, because he had opened several bank accounts and was kiting bad checks from bank to bank to bank and was in about
fifty thousand dollars to the banks. At the time, we have such a large number of those type cases coming in that every detective that worked in the white collar unit might be carrying a caseload of eighty to one hundred cases at a time, so you couldn't really focus your attention on one person and go after them unless
something merited that kind of attention. In his case, Labor day was coming up and he was hitting the bank's pretty heavy, and I had put an alert out to all the banks asking that anybody that had any contact with Joe Brown to let me know because I was going to go ahead and arrest him on several bad check charges that I had. But the surprise was that when I got a call from one of the banks,
it was an old national bank here in town. They said he had been there, but he'd been there several hours earlier, and they hesitated to call me, But when they did, they told me the check that he was trying to pass was a large check written on the account of Ginger gas Away off of a fifth third bank. So it got me interested to try to find out what he was doing with one of Ginger Gasaway's checks that wasn't one that he had normally used. I didn't know he had any connection to her. I thought it
was probably stolen, it was such a large amount. And the whole case then began because I tried to find Ginger gas Away to confirm that she hadn't written him that check so I could arrest him.
Now at the time time when you have an arrest warrant for Joe Brown. You're looking for Joe Brown? What was in your discovery? What did you discover was the background of Joe Brown.
Okay, basically, what we found about him all came about later after we knew that Ginger was missing and something was horribly wrong in her situation. But we didn't really know at first that he and Ginger had any kind of connection other than that check. But what I did find out I went to the bank that issued her checks, the Fifth Third Bank, and was able to talk to them, and they said that he had stolen checks from her once before, and that she had opened an account for him,
Joe Brown Masonry. He had his own little company, and she had set him up. And the bank was able to tell me that she had actually cashed in her four oh one K from a job that she had had previously and took about fifty thousand dollars to open an account for him, and that those were the bad checks. That he was right and he had cleaned that account out and was writing bad checks to other banks. So
now I had the connection between Joe and Ginger. I knew that she had been supplying him with money that he had stolen from her in the past, and so I had a real good reason to go and look for her to get her to go ahead and file a formal charge against him for this check that he tried to pass. We had him on film doing it. Unfortunately, when he saw the bank looking at him funny, he grabbed the check and his ID card and fled the bank.
So we didn't have the check itself, so we needed to find her and get information from her to be able to proceed the way it worked pretty much here in Evansville, and I'm not sure about other agencies. If you have an old case that's say over two or three days old, and you want to make an arrest on it, you have to get a an arrest warrant issued first. If you have something that's current within say thirty six to seventy two hours. If it's that current, you can make an on side arrest, which is a
warrantless arrest. And that's what I was wanting to go for, was to just be able to arrest him and not have to go to the prosecutor's office and get papers drawn up and go to a judge and get a warrant to arrest him on some of.
The old charges.
We thought we would be able to wrap that up very quickly, and it didn't turn out that way.
Now, what I thought interesting too is some of the talking about this specific law here, that this is a certain class of felony, and I'll get you to explain to our audience what the class of felony is. But also that what I had asked is that kind of what criminal background did you were you already aware of
or were you already aware of about Joe Brown? And then what were you aware of in terms of likely would in terms of sentence that this man would receive if he were actually convicted of these frauds, these bad checks.
Okay, what we had done when this all happened, it happened so fast. We left our office in contact basically with everybody trying to locate Ginger, trying to locate Joe, and we really didn't know a whole lot about any other background on him other than that he was writing bad checks. So at that time I hadn't done much of a background check on him as far as old charges or what we would call the Triple I. Its an interstate index that shows you felony charges that a
person has all over the United States. I hadn't gone to that link yet because I had so many cases that I was working. Joe was way down the line. He was way down my list until the day that he showed up at Old National Bank, so I really didn't have much of a background on him other than that I knew if we didn't arrest him, he was going to continue to write bad checks to the banks, and then when we came back to work after Labor Day, we'd have one hundred thousand dollars loss or more. So
we decided to go after him on that. We didn't really find out about his criminal background until probably the next day, and that's when I started really delving into his background to find out what kind of person he was. And the reason for that was because Ginger Gasaway was missing and we weren't able to find her, and the circumstances around her not being present in her apartment or in town began to look suspicious, but it took a
while for that to develop. It took a couple of days before that really developed because the things we learned about her and about Joe, even the family thought that she might possibly be off with him gambling someplace, So the fact that he had tried to cash a bad check lost a little bit of its appeal if she was maybe in this with him. So we didn't really know what we were dealing with at that point, but after we couldn't locate her for a while, then it
started looking more suspicious. The only real troubling background we had on him, but it didn't come to light right away, was that Joe had beaten her up at one other time, and he beat her very severely, and it was over him taking money from her, and she had decided press charges and then changed her mind, And it was more or less a domestic violence case at that point, where he was ordered to do not a community service, but go to domestic violence classes. Anger management, they called it,
and Joe failed to do that. He didn't go to anger management. The warrant that was issued for him was very minor and all it said was, you know that he had to appear before a judge to explain why he didn't go to anchor management class. So what would happened if we'd arrested him on that he would appear in front of a judge and go, I'm sorry your honor, I'll go tomorrow, and they would have let him go, so that it really wasn't enough to hold him on. I didn't think.
Now, you were trying to find out the location of Ginger Gasaway, so you can ask her what the details and circumstances were regarding this check. It looks like it doesn't look good, but you don't know very much information. But in this process you find out gradually the character of Ginger gas Away and a little bit of her background. Tell us about Ginger Gasaway what you found initially she was fifty three years old. But tell us what you
found out from friends, relatives, coworkers. What did you What was the picture that was being drawn about the character of Ginger Gasaway.
Yeah, what we found out during the investigation led us to believe that she was somebody that was fairly easily led. She was lonely. She was in rather an unhappy marriage. Her and her husband had been having some issues, but it was mostly family type issues where he had a little bit of a drinking problem, she had a gambling problem, and so they weren't getting along real well. And that was when Joe came into her life. She met him at a gambler's anonymous meeting, and that was really one
of the first things we found out about her. She felt sorry for him. He told her that he had a past, criminal past and that he was trying to overcome it and he was living in a shelter and he needed help. And he pretty much indicated us too, that he had charmed his way into her life, convinced her that he needed help and that she was the one that could do it for him. He kind of looked at her as a older mother type figure, but he was romantically inclined towards her also, and then he
more or less took over her life. He started getting into her bank accounts, he moved in with her, and he moved in with her while she was still married to her husband. She had allowed him to come in the house while her husband had just had open heart surgery, so Joe. We found out from a husband that Joe had been threatening the husband that if he didn't stay out of the way, he'd take care of him, and the husband said, I was in no physical condition to hardly even talk to the guy, much less get in
a fight with him. So the husband ended up having to go into town and get a restraining order to have Joe moved.
Well.
When Joe was ordered out by the Sheriff's department and told to move, then Ginger told her husband, well, if you're making him leave, I'm going with him. So she left with Joe and file for divorce from her husband, and her and Joe moved in together. It was kind of poor judgments all around. She felt like she had a kinship with him because they both had gambling problems and she was unhappy, and Joe made her happy, at
least for a while. He was the kind of person typical of a serial killer, where he can maintain a relationship. He can be very charming like Ted Bundy or someone be very charming for short periods of time, but eventually that face kind of fades away and they become who they really are. They act out. They're very dominating, controlling, violent, and he showed her that side one time too often.
She continued, though, to work and pay the bills, continued to gamble and spend her money and steal from her She was At one time we knew she was holding two jobs, one at TJ Max here in Evansville as a forklift operator, and then her second job was working out at the regional airport, and so she was bringing in two paychecks and working a lot, and Joe was spending all of his time gambling. I really felt sorry
for her that she was unable to detach him. She tried several times to throw him out and would get him out of the house, maybe even have to call the police, and he would leave, but he would stalk and harass and write letters and promise, cry all these type things to get his way insinuate back into her life again. And with the domestic violence type situation, eventually it's easier to give in than it is to continue
fighting them. And that's what she did. She would just give in and let him come back, and then eventually it would be so bad she would have to kick him out again.
Now let's go back for our audience to the background the early life of Joe Brown, his troubled childhood. Tell us how and where Joe Brown grew up and under what conditions. What type of person was Joe Brown as a child and a young young adult.
Okay, Joe, in some ways, if you looked at his childhood, it wasn't much different than anyone else. He had two brothers. He had two sisters. His dad was a bricklayer. Mother was just a housewife that sometimes took in sewing, did things like that. We were told that the mother had a drinking problem and prescription medication problem, and that the father had an extremely violent temper, and some of the stories that we heard from witnesses and family members. We're not very.
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We're pleasant about the way Joe was raised, but he wasn't the only one in that family, and always had to look at that aspect of it that he wasn't the only one that was being treated bad an angry father or a drunken mother. But he turned out the way he did, and that's often the case in serial killers. There could be two brothers and one of them be a serial killer, not both. So he was raised pretty rough.
When he was eight or nine years old, he was being molested by a neighbor boy that was I think around age twelve that was coming to the house, and Joe had gone to his mother and complained and told her that this guy was coming to the house doing things to him, and instead of his mother protecting him, and this is the story from Joe, instead of the mother protecting him, she told his father about what was going on, and his father just erupted basically accused him
of being homosexual and beating for that. So Joe said he never forgave his mother for that, that he went to her for help and instead he got a beating and the abuse continued. Then, you know, the neighbor continued to go at him and he never really got any
help with that. I think for somebody at that age, that was very confusing for him and it would really mess him up as far as his sexuality is identity what he was, and he resisted that pretty much up into this part of his life now where he claims that he hates homosexuals and that he wants to kill him. But while he was in prison, we found out he was having homosexual relations in prison. He had a boyfriend
in prison in Pinky. But then on the other hand, he would make these remarks that he wasn't you know, so he was very confused about it.
Yeah. Interesting point in the book too, is that he said that he'd always had had horrible teeth and so he while he was in prison, he had all of his teeth taken out. And then the surprise was that this was also, according to your research, the benefit to him servicing men in prison.
Right, he was making money with it to be able to do sexual favors for the other prisoners. And that's how he bought things in prison. It was a barber system basically. You know, they don't allow him to smoke in prison, at least here in Indiana, So if you can get your hands on a pack of cigarettes, it's worth gold. And they still get stuff like that in there. So Joe trading what he had to be able to get things.
Now, tell us about, just briefly, what were the circumstances that he landed in jail and what kind of sentence did he get. Tell us a little bit about that.
In nineteen seventy seven, he was still a juvenile or seventeen eighteen year old at the time. He knew of a farmer that lived in the area, and he said he had done some work for this guy on occasion on his farm and he needed some money. He wanted to go gambling and he needed money, and so he goes to the guy's house with a gun and threatens a guy and wants money. The guy's home with his wife, and he gives him I think four or five hundred dollars and told Joe that's all the money he had.
And Joe said, but you can get more. So he threatened him that he was going to take him to the bank. He wanted the guy to go in the bank, cash a check and give him more money, or he was going to shoot him. So Joe gets a guy in the car to take came to the bank and on the way there, now this is out in the county,
out in the cornfields on a farm. While they're going down the road, I think the gentleman was driving, and he just bails out of the car and rolls away and runs off in the cornfields, leaves Joe in the car. So Joe gets scared and takes off with the car and goes to Las Vegas with the money that he had already gotten. And that's where they caught him, was
in Las Vegas. So they charged him with battery and kidnapping and robbery because I believe he beat the guy a little bit too, And so he was charged with some very serious crimes and he got a life sentence, and Indiana, a life sentence is fifty years. It's a class A felony. They go by ABC and D felonies. It's a class A felony. So it's the worst. And he got a life sentence which is fifty years, but you get a day for a day credit for good time if you don't create problems in prison. You get
a day for every day that you're in there. So he would only have to do twenty five years in that case on a life sentence. So it's kind of deceptive when they say life sentence, it doesn't really mean that. Sure at the time they didn't have I don't believe they had life without parole. They have death penalty, they had life sentence and so forth. Now they have what they call life without parole, and that means you actually
do your life. You never get out right. So he ends up getting the twenty five years and goes to prison. But five years into his sentence, he gets angry with another guy that he claimed was making sexual advances towards him.
Yeah, and.
I always wondered if it was like a failure to pay or something like that. He gets one of these industrial can openers. He worked in the kitchen and they make these huge can openers weigh about three pounds. It's a square metal bar that's about and a half long, with a screw type thing on top, a handle, and like it would be in a cafeteria in a school or something. Well, he pulls that out of the table
and beats this guy almost to death. It took several prisoners and guards to get him off of the guy. He was going to kill him for that. He only got five years tacked. I didn't get tacked onto a sentence that was run concurrent with the time he was doing, so it was nothing.
You know.
It was basically like getting slapped on the hand. Probably more paperwork and cost to the state than any inconvenience at all to Joe. So that taught him a lesson.
And the other thing that they give you, even though you're supposed to do twenty five years, if you go to certain programs, you go to alcoholics anonymous, you take classes, you join church programs, any of these kind of things you do, you get additional time off too, So you could be released as early as like fifteen sixteen years on a twenty five year sentence or a fifty year sentence,
I should say, so he got out. He went in in seventy seven, he got out in ninety five, and he shouldn't have been released for a while, but he got out early. As soon as he got out, he started a little rampage and started killing women.
Now getting back to Ginger gas Away and the hunt for her and to get them from information from her. And you have your suspicions that foul play has occurred. How do you proceed with Ginger gas Away in trying to locate her and what are your results?
Okay, what happened to us was we found out where she was living from the bank, and we went to her apartment to try to talk to her, and it was a note taped to her apartment door that's it was a note to her daughter or from her daughter to her that said, I'll be over Saturday to help you move. So we knew she was in the process
of moving to another apartment. So we went to the office and found out where she was moving to, and we went to those apartments thinking maybe she was over there, and she had been there a couple of days earlier and made arrangements to rent, had picked out an apartment and was supposed to come and get her keys in the next day or two. So we spent about three or four days basically running back and forth different places
trying to locate her. It didn't really at the time, it didn't look like Joe had done anything to her. It looked like they may even be together, so we weren't. We didn't really have anything solid to go on to issue an alert at that point, and at the risk of looking really stupid to the public, I finally had
to make a decision. You know, I would rather her be mad at me for looking for her more strongly than that something happened to her and I didn't look for So I made the decision on my own to go ahead and issue a all points bulletin basically for her, her vehicle, and Joe. And it was only maybe an hour or two later after we put the bulletin out that her car, one of her cars, was located about fifteen blocks from her apartment, if that far, maybe not
even five hundred yards from her apartment. Joe had taken the car and left it in a parking lot in a real high traffic area that's a lot of apartment complexes, a lot of cars stolen in that area, a lot of thefts out of cars in that area with Joe left her car there with the keys in it and the door unlocked, and it set there for three or four days, and nobody stole it. I think the people in the area were afraid it was a trap set by the police, you know, like sting. So nobody took
the car. It was good for us, and once we found the car, that changed the game. If she was gonna run off with Joe and go gambling somewhere and go on a vacation and not show up for work for a day or two, it was very unlikely that she would also leave a nice car. It was a newer Ford Taurus, leave it sitting with the keys in it near her apartment so I could get stolen. So we had to change the face the investigations that time. We started looking a lot harder.
For then you also spoke with her. She has a couple daughters, and so you spoke to one of her daughters as well. Thompson, is it Lisa.
Thompson, Lisa Thompson.
Yeah, So you spoke to co workers, you spoke to her daughter, tell us what the picture was slowly evolving into and what your conclusion was after speaking with these people, and what did some of these people have to say about Ginger Gasaway and Joe Brown and concerning your investigation.
Well, I think once they saw that we were becoming more concerned about her whereabouts, the family got more concerned. Friends were more concerned also, And then we started hearing stories of domestic violence, and we started hearing stories of Joe beating her. We heard about him threatening her and her being afraid, and the family members were also afraid. That's when we heard about her husband or ex husband
have to get a restraining order against Joe. And so we started tracking down other apartments that she'd lived in and talking to those managers and found out that there'd been some horrendous fights in those apartments and they'd been made to leave because of the disturbance to the other neighbors. It began to look more and more like Ginger didn't leave on her own, but that maybe he had had injured her somehow, maybe she had gotten away from him.
We didn't really up until almost the last two days of the investigation, believed that something more serious may have
happened to her. We knew she was missing, We knew he had a violent temper, We knew that he had beat her up once before and put her in the hospital, but he wasn't a murderer at that point, and we didn't really and she was somebody that was just such a nice lady, but she had a gambling problem, a little bit of a drinking problem, and even the family was telling us it's possible that she went with him
and there gambling somewhere. So given the fact that their relationship was one of those on again, off again all the time, we didn't know where it was at what stage it was in, and when we finally got on his trail, then it was something that we had to
kind of decide to do on our own. The other detective that worked with me primarily prior to finding Joe and getting him into custody, we put in a lot of our own time over the holidays, talking to people and taking trips and making reports out and entering things in the computer, and we finally ended up putting a bulletin out that would look a little farther through other states. It went through a wireless system that went through several states to look for Joe. Look for the car, and
look for Ginger. Still, we were looking for Ginger all this time. We didn't know that he hadn't taken her like kidnapped and he tried to kidnap this other guy. We didn't know that he maybe hadn't just stuck her in a car and took off. So we were looking for them to try to get her home and make sure she was okay. What we found out was kind of surprising, though.
You also put out this sort of all points bulletin in neighboring states in case Joe Brown was arrested, and because he was really only wanted on a misdemeanor, you put out this all points alert with the express purpose of making sure that he was held so that you could be questioned so he wouldn't be let go. Isn't that correct, right?
And it was very risky to do that because the only charge we had on him was failure to appear for anger management, which is kind of like a rit of attachment type thing. It was very small. It was a misdemeanor. But the way the law works, basically, or the way the system works in Indiana, is that if you have a misdemeanor charge against you and a warrant. You can be arrested anywhere within Indiana, but there's no guarantee that the county that's wanting you will pay to
have you transported here. So if he had been caught, say up north in Kokomo or up around Gary or something like that, the county Vanderberg County may not have paid to even have him shipped back down here. They may have just told him to let him go. So that's statewide what we're looking at, and the chances of having somebody arrested in another state on a misdemeanor charge
or very slim. Most police departments in a neighboring state will refuse to serve a misdemeanor warrant, partly because they know that the state that's looking for them won't honor the warrant and they won't transport them. So it's a loss. It's a big amount of money that they're looking about manpower things like that to hold somebody court time, and so we really didn't think that they would pick him up.
While we had that all points bulletin issued, I was contacting our prosecutor's office trying to get warrants issued on the bank charges. Which were Class C felonies. He was looking at like ten years on each one of those, but we never got the chance to get those warrants issued before Ohio caughting.
Right now, tell us about the circumstances of him finally being arrested, where he was arrested, and just tell us the circumstances.
The thing that worked out really good for us is on a Sunday, I contacted all the news media here in Evansville and told him I wanted to meet with them all at the same time at police headquarters. I had a news release on a missing person, and I gave them all the same information at the same time. Picture him, picture of her, picture of the car we thought they might be driving, plate numbers, all this kind
of stuff. Put it out on the news media. We didn't have any luck with the All Points bulletin yet, and so we put all this out the news media. Well, within about an hour of the news going out, we get a call from somebody that is like second or third cousin of Joe Brown in a little town north of here about an hour called Buckskin, and this lady
called and said, I just saw the news. Joe was here about an hour ago, and he parked way down at the end of our drive, like one hundred yards away from the house, and came up and he really looked bad, and he was shaken, and he was almost crying, and he said, I got to have some money. I got to get out of here. I've done something really bad. And she said it scared her so bad that she gave him money, even though she didn't want to, just so he would leave. She didn't really have any idea
where he was going. So since she was a family member, we talked about family and where people lived, and I'm trying to think if he hit one family member, he might go looking for another. So the only thing she knew was that he had a brother. He had a sister up in terror Hate, which is north of here a couple hours, and he had a brother in Zanesville, Ohio,
but she didn't know the name. She just said he had a brother named David, and he works for Colgate Colgate Paul Mallive and being a wonderful detective that I am, I'm thinking toothpaste toothpaste tubes. It says Cincinnati and all that on it. So I called several departments over that way. And found out, you know, that there was a cogate
plant there. And so when we put our bulletin out, we specifically concentrated on the interstates that would go through Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus in that area, and that's when we finally got some luck on it. As it turned out, he was going to his brother's house and the brother lived in Zanesville, Ohio. Well, Joe made it as far as levin In, Ohio, which
is about a five hour drive. He made it to levin In, Ohio, and he was tired, so he pulled into a truck stop and crawled in a back see that the car had stolen from Ginger, and went to sleep. Well was he woke up like five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning with a state trooper tapping on a window from Ohio. That's where we got lucky.
Now, from there he is transported back to Evansville. Is it? How is he what happens after his arrest? How does that work? Or you go towards where he is?
Yeah, we ended up have to go to him. The way the law works due process under constitutional rights, all your rights and stuff. Due process says that if you're arrested for a crime, you have to appear before a court at the next convenient court date, the next available court date. It doesn't say you have to go immediately in front of a judge, just the next available court date. It has to You can't put it off, you know,
and wait three days. So he's in Ohio. The way the law works is you have to extradite from another Even here in Evansville. We're just right across the bridge from Henderson, Kentucky. If somebody makes it across the bridge and I want to arrest them, I have to have Kentucky authorities arrest them, and then I have to extrad ite them back to Evansville, like ten miles away. Yeah, but that's the way the law works. Well, he's in Ohio, which is a couple of states away.
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And so we have to extra dide him. What the law doesn't say is that I have to. It just says I have to get to court at the next available court date. It doesn't say that I have to leave him in Ohio until he goes to court. I just have to get him in front of a judge
to answer the extradition charges. So we talked to when we found out he was there, we talked to our prosecutor, we talked to their prosecutor, and between the two of them, they agreed that we had the right to check him out of the jail in Ohio and bring him to Indiana temporarily to do what we did. And I'll get into that in a minute. And then we had to take him back to Ohio as soon as court was open so that he could go in front of a jemach and do it formally. It didn't violate any of
his rights. Due process is just a process. It's not a constitutional requirement. Every case is different. They always look at the totality of the circumstances before they make a decision whether you violated somebody's rights. And basically the whole case in the end took a whole year in court for all the hearings and stuff to decide whether or not we had violated due process by bringing him to
Indiana prior to extra hiding him in Ohio courts. And the ruling was that we hadn't, that we had had played fair and done what we were supposed to do. But there were a lot of reasons for that. The primary one was that it was Joe's idea. Joe wanted to come here. He said, if you don't take me now, I'm not going to show you anything. He said, I want to go right now and go to Indiana and I'll show you where all the body parts are. And so we didn't have much of a time frame to
do it. We barely had time to get him here, find the body parts, and then get him back to court. And that was what we did.
Okay, sorry, let's go back just a little bit to this incredible confession that you elicited from from Joe Brown. You speak about in your book that you have. Your own philosophy is based on Maslow's theory of hierarchy of needs. Please explain this philosophy and what it has to do with how you deal with criminals and how it played into this your mentality and basically your philosophy beforehand of interviewing Joe Brown to try to elicit a confession and try to get the truth out of Joe Brown.
The mesows hierarchy of needs theory says that you have everybody has the same needs. On a very basic level. You have the need to feel safe and to not be hunted. You have to feel like you're able to defend yourself. And once you feel like you're safe, where you're at your feet are on the ground, then you can start looking to satisfy other needs, like if you're hungry or you're thirsty, and so then your bodily needs
will come second after that. So you start finding that once you've satisfied your thirst and your hunger, then you're looking for other needs and they build like in a pyramid to where the very top need. Once you get to the very top, you self actualize. You become the person that you always wanted to be. But you have everything that you need. The foundation has been laid for you to become the person that you want to be.
Whenever one of those little blocks is knocked out from under you, you start from there and build up again. And so everybody basically has the same type of needs. And that's something important to know. When you're interviewing someone for a crime, especially anything very serious or sex crime. People do not want to admit their part in something horrible. Sex crimes are one of the worst because we have such a stigma against that they don't want to say
that they did something. And with Joe, if he was going to admit that he killed somebody, he's looking at probably getting a death penalty or getting life without parole. Now he's already been down once and got a life sentence. Second time, it would be much harder on him, and so he has a lot of reasons not to talk. And we knew this before we went into the interview. We knew he'd gotten a twenty or a fifty year sentence. We knew that he had a lot of experience with
the police. And the other thing that I knew too, was that the Ohio troopers that caught him for me had tried to interview him and had ready with Miranda Rights, and he spent the entire time cussing and threatening them. Got a fight in jail before I got there, within like six hours, he'd already gotten a fight in jail, and he was really cranked up, and he was ready to fight us too. He didn't want us coming, didn't want to talk to us. Everything was a cussword coming
out of his mouth, and he was very mad. The way that I was a hostage negotiator for quite a few years for our department. And what you do when you deal with somebody that's angry is you become calm. You get quieter, You talk softly because that makes them quiet down to listen to what you're saying. They may yell for a while, but eventually it'll blow over. It's just like steam. So you don't buy into that. You
let them play your game instead of playing theirs. And as long as they're talking, you let them talk, no matter what they're saying. If it's all cuss words, it's still words. You just let them go. But using the Maslow's theory as a basis for that, says, I know that Joe needs things he's in jail, he's scared, he thinks he's going to go to prison. So what I want to do is try to allay some of those fears, to get his feet back on the ground to where
he has some foundation to talk from. And so we have to address all these little base needs first before we could ever ask even the first question about where's Ginger was a real good question. We didn't get to ask it for a long time. It had to put him in a position where he would talk first, where he would even speak to us. His mind was five questions ahead because he was angry and he was scared. So I had to bring him back into the present again.
And you use all those little things, these little tools to do that. And part of it is just establishing a relationship with them where they don't have to be afraid of you. You can't promise him anything, of course, I can't go, Joe. If you tell me where Ginger's at, we won't file charges on you. We'll let you go, because we didn't know that that was going to be the case. So you can't make those kind of promises. You have to make them want to tell you.
So you started befriending him, You talked about his brick laying job. You talked about everything bought, mentioning ginger gassaway for quite a while, for at least half an hour, was just small talk. Now, not everybody that you worked with was in agreement with this as well, but you were not the only person in the room. So tell us just how you set this up in the first place, how many people were in that room, and tell us how you proceeded. What was the subject matter of for
that first while. Let's get right into that confession, because I think it was brilliant how you did it and the events that sort of created, even for you, the surprise utterance of the four words that we'll talk about in a bit. So tell us the dynamic of the officers in the room itself, and what your strategy was, and what you particularly chose to speak about for the for more than a half an hour in this do with Joe Brown.
Okay, when we first arrived in Ohio, there was a state trooper that had stopped Joe and brought him in and they arrested him on our misdemeanor charge and Ready's rights. I was really surprised that they would do that and because of the nature of our concerns. They also charged him with flight to avoid lawful prosecution, which is a felony, and it's also a no bond They can't bond out of jail for that right. And they ensured by doing that that he wouldn't be released until we got there.
If things went different after we got there, he probably would have been released. But I had to really give credit to the Ohio Police Department for doing that. That's way above and beyond what most police agencies would do, because you know, there's a lot of political things going on.
They did a really good job. But one thing they showed us was that he had been read his rights in the back of the police car on the way to the station, and again at the station in the police car, and each time all he responded to was was cussing them and saying, I know my rights, I know my rights, You not have to tell me my rights,
and giving them a hard time. And so after viewing that tape, they showed me the video before I went in to interview him, and there was a lieutenant and sergeant with the Ohio State Troopers that had had Joe in custody there for me. Holding him, and they go, how are you going to interview this guy? All he does when we ask him a question, he cusses us. He's got nothing to say. He keeps his arms folded, nose in the air, and he has nothing to say,
and he hates us. And I said, well that's good, because now I got you to deflect all that anger and hatred. So I said, what I'm going to do. I'm not going to interview him. I'm going to go in and negotiate with him like a hostage negotiator. I'm going to go in and talk to him that way, because negotiations is about satisfying needs, it's about train it's being a car salesman. Basically, he has something I want, I got something he wants. Let's trade. And so I've
decided to go at it from that angle. And one thing you never do as a detective. You go in a room with a prisoner. You either go in alone and another detective on the outside takes notes, watching the video or listening, or you go in with another detective and only one of the detectives talks. The other one takes notes and watches what's going on, and that's it. So you really don't. You don't have more than two people in a room. That's the rule. It just doesn't
work any other way. A negotiation is different. I thought I needed to distract Joe. He's mad. He's mad at them. He's not mad at me yet, so he's really mad at them. And I wanted to use that anger and deflect it towards them and get it off of me so I could talk to him. So I told him, I said, I appreciate it if you guys would come
in a room too. So I brought both the Ohio troopers in and my partner and we all were in the room together, and me and my partner sat down the two troopers set kind of across the room in a corner, out of the way, but where he could see him. And it worked out perfect because Joe immediately started pointing and threatening them and go on, I already told these you know what's that, I'm not going to talk and I'm not talking to you either, and he called me a bunch of names and he yelled, and
I mean, he's very animated. And another thing you do as a negotiator is you try to deflect anger. The best thing to deflect anger as humor. If you can make somebody laugh, they can't be mad and laughing at the same time, right. So I looked at Joe, and the other thing you do is you become whatever you have to be to get them to talk, you know, if you have to be nice or mean or whatever. And I looked at Joe and I kind of leaned over and held my hands out like I bleeding. I
go Jesus Christ, Joe, nice mouth. I said, I can't believe you said all that stuff. I said, my ex wife didn't cust me like that, laughing, and I could see a smirk come on his face. It was like I got to him immediately, and he looked away real quick, and I could tell he was trying not to grin. He goes, well, I'm not talking to you, and I said, well, you don't have to talk, Joe. But don't you even
want to know why I'm here? I said, I'm a white collar crime detective of Evansville Police Department, and I need to ask you some questions. I said, I'm here to ask you for help. I need some help. And I said, you're the only guy that can help me. I hope you're not going to turn me down, and so he goes, well, he says, I don't like the way these guys have been treating me. I said, I wouldn't like it either. I said, I understand, and I kind of pointed to them, like, you know, they are
a bunch of jerks. I said, but I need some help and I just want to sit down and talk to you for a bit. He goes, well, you can sit down, but I'm not talking, and I go, okay, that's all I can ask. Just listen to me then, and that's what got the conversation started, basically. So at that point, he's still mad, he's trying not to like me. He thinks he might kind of like me, but he's interested now I got him curious what am I doing there? You know, what, do we really know? How deep is
he in this? And really, to be honest, at that time, I wasn't sure that he had done anything bad to Ginger. I thought she might he might have dumped her out of the car somewhere and she might be hurt, she might be in a hospital. I didn't really think he had killed her. I really didn't believe that yet. So we're talking and we're talking about school and jobs he's had and brick laying and how hard the work is.
And then we start talking about the apartments that he lived in with her, the apartment that we had been to where she was moving out of. And we talked about the apartment quite a bit, and I've been out there numerous times on other runs, so I remembered where the swimming pool was and the club of the recreation room and all that kind of stuff. And so I saw while I was there too, there was ashtrays near the porch, and so I'm building this picture in my head of what it would be like with Joe and
Ginger on the porch of that apartment. What would they see? And we talked about that what did they do? And it turned out he did sit out there a lot with her, and they'd watch people come and go and people go into the pool and smoke cigarettes and talk and so he started telling me stories. But what he always did was depersonalized Ginger. She was never Ginger, she was her she those kind of things. He would never say her name, And that was another thing that you
have to do, is overcome that. So we worked on that for a while, and I eventually got him to look at a picture of her. But every time I would pull this picture out of her, he'd turn his head away and he wouldn't look at it, and I'd put it back in the envelope, and next time i'd catch him looking at me, I'd pull it out a little bit and he couldn't help himself. He'd look down and then he'd yank his head away. It's kind of conditioning to get them back to where that person becomes
a person again. They're not about it. And we talked about her for a long time, and he finally I thought, well, I'll give him an out where he can blame this on someone else. So he said, if you need if you want to know where Ginger's at, you're going to have to ask her ex husband, Hobart. He's the one that would know where she is. I don't know, right, And so to bond with him, I go Hobart. I said, I'm not talking to Hobert. Hobert said, no, good, you
know what. I've talked to him. I'm not talking to him again. He really pissed me off. I don't want to talk to him. And so Joe gives me a look like yeah, that's right. I don't like him either. So we worked with that for a while and I thought, well, let him blame it on Hobart. At least he'll keep talking, right, And so I would ask and then, well, what do you think Hobart might have done to her? And he goes, I don't know what he would do. He's crazy, He's
liable to do anything. He's violent. So that kind of made me feel a little uneye because I thought, well, maybe Joe did do something to her. But the more we talked, we just kind of beat around the bush on this conversation about where Ginger was. And I kept telling him. I said, look, Joe, I'm not the world's best detective and I am struggling with this case. But I can tell you this much. I can't quit until I find her. I'm not going home till I know
where she's at. I can't stop. I said, you understand how I feel about that. And he's not in his head. Yeah you know, And I said, you're like me. You're not a quitter. You're like me. Well, that's the other thing you do. You become a team. You and him become the team to fix the problem, and you can do it together. It's hard to do things alone, but it's easy to do things together type thing. So I kept talking about us and I need your help, you know,
and me and you can do this. And then I was also bringing in the fact that he was in love with Ginger at least for a while until he tries.
Pardon me, that's the question you asked, but he gave you. You asked him, do you love Ginger? And what was his response? Which was kind of he was revealing it.
Was It was pretty revealing that he still did love her. The look in his eyes and stuff said he did. But he said she threw him out all the time and he didn't know where she was. She just left. So he wasn't real concerned or he didn't act like he was concerned with that part of it for a while, but you could tell by the look in his eyes that it was starting to weigh on him a little bit. But he really spoke.
But he spoke to her in about the past tense. He said, do you love her? And he I did love I did love her.
Yeah, he said, I did love her and I and when you think about it at the time, it meant a lot to me. But when you think back on it, it could be. Yeah, I used to love her, but then she kicked me out and none of o her no more. So, you know, I didn't want to read anything really big into it, but it was hard not too yeah at that point. And at some point we got to talking about this so much. The other detective was sitting there having a fit because he liked to
smoke and he liked to drink coffee. And this had been hours of just talking about nothing, and he wasn't telling us anything that would convict him, but he was talking, you know. And I've been known to go nine ten hours into an interview before, you know, I'll take breaks, go to the bathroom, get something to eat, that kind of stuff. If I got to go twenty four hours, I'll do it, you know. And as you can tell, I hardly ever shut up.
Do I.
So he he wanted to keep talking. But the other detective, it was with me, he was getting fed up. I could tell by his body language. He was getting tense and he was tired. And we'd driven for like five hours and now we'd set for about three hours, and he was wanting me to ask the tough questions you know, did you hurt her? All that kind of stuff, And I'm beating around the bush with it because I want Joe to bring it up.
Yea.
And so he finally blows up the other detective did, and he goes, he's not going to tell us nothing. Let's just lock him up. Blah blah blah. He's going to go to prison. We're not going to be able to do anything with him. He's not going to say anything. And so I'm hollering at my partner, going, shut up, sit down, you want to have a cigarette, Go get a cigarette. Just leave me alone. I want to talk to Joe. And he's yelling back at me. And in the midst of all that, you hear Joe kind of
pipe in real quietly, you'll never find her. And you could have heard a pin drop in a room. The other detected the state troopers. I could see them sit forward, you know, listening. My partner shut up. He forgot about his cigarettes. And I looked at Joe and I said, what did you say? And he goes, Ricky says, listen to me, you'll never find her. You don't want to be the one to find her. And I could feel my heart almost stopped because I knew something really bad
had happened. He pretty much gave it away right then.
There was enough of a rapport built. It was fascinating that in that three hours and the car ride, there was enough of a rapport built that he, as you state in your book, he really didn't want to harm you. You had built enough of a relationship that he really wanted to spare you finding that body. Isn't that right? Oh?
Yeah? I had convinced him. And this is another thing in negotiations, is you become an actor. If you have to cry, you cry, you know. If you have to get mad, you get mad and you spout off and you blow steam whatever it takes to get the situation back in their court where they feel willing to talk again. You never put words in their mouths. You never suggest things to them, because then you're going to have a problem in court. Sure, but anything else is fair. You
can lie about. You know, I've been married twenty five times. You know you can. Yeah, I'm I'm a lester too. You know, anything that you have to say, it's fair to do that because you want them to feel comfortable talking to you. And in his case, like I said, when I told him, I said, I can't stop looking for her, Joe, I've got to keep looking for her. I said, you have to realize I suck at this job.
I'm a horrible detective, I said. And I've let you down, and I've let Ginger down, and I've let her husband down and her daughter. I said, her daughter is just beside herself, and I don't know what I'm going to do. I said, I can't stop till I find her. I said, this is killing me, Joe. I don't I need your help. I don't know what else I'm gonna do. If you can't help me, I'm done. And he's just sitting there
watching this. Well, then when me and my partner got into it, I think Joe felt like he had to step in and protect me because my partner was verbally abusing me and he's a lot bigger than me too, and so Joe was kind of mad at him. He was like shutting him up, wanting to protect me, and he goes, you'll never find her. And then he looked at me and he's like, because I'm already in tears about not finding a Ginger, and he goes, you don't want to be the one to find her. Do you understand?
And I go, oh my god, I go, what did you do?
Joe?
And he says, I killed her? And I said you killed her. I said, no, you didn't. He goes, yeah, I did. I said you killed her. What did you do? He says I cut her up and I said, you mean you cut her with a knife. He goes, I cut her into pieces. And I thought, you know, oh my god. I said no, you couldn't have done that. I said, you're not like that. He goes, yeah, I did it. He said, I cut her into pieces. It
was almost funny in a way. He wouldn't let us tape the interview so we didn't have a tape recorder running this, which was really unfortunate. But I got three other police officers in the room to testify what was said. I felt pretty safe with that. It was was funny to hear the like I said, the expression in his voice he was looking out for me.
Yeah, incredible. You also played upon you said that you still regardless of whether this guy is a psychopathic killer, he still tried to play to his sense of decency by saying, listen, the family needs to have a burial you don't want animals to carry off her body or bugs. So you tried to play to that and were successful as well with that, breaking him down to get him to the point supple enough that this you know, event happened. And he just spilled the beans and said, yeah, I cut her up.
I killed there right, And he what he did. He was telling us that he he could show us where he disposed of the body parts, but he couldn't tell us which was true. I mean, they were like out in fields that we would.
Have never found true.
And I knew that his mom was dead. I knew his dad was dead, and his brother was dead. By that time, one of his sisters had been talking to me, and she was very, very helpful, just a fantastic lady. And she said that Joe had told her once that he'd beat Ginger up real bad and he thought he'd killed her, and so she was very forthcoming with information that we got on the way to talk to him. So what I brought up, I said, well, you know, your sister has talked to me and she's told me
that you're really a pretty nice guy. I said, And I know that your mom and dad are gone, and that you've been there to visit their burial site. I said, what are we going to do about Ginger? I said, the family will never believe that she's really dead until they know she's in the ground. I said, it's not fair that they go to an empty coffin to pay their respects because they'll never believe that she's really dead. They'll think she's out there somewhere hurt. I said, so
we have to find her. We've got to put her back in a coffin so that the family can bury her and put this behind them. He goes, well, her daughter's never did anything for me, and that was true. They didn't like him at all. They were kind of mean to him because he was a jerk. But what I told him then I told him another lie. And I said, well, I hate to hear you say that, Joe, because Alicia had nothing but good things to say about you and the way you treated her mom and how
you were in love. I said, and I hate to hear you say that because that's not true. It's not right to talk about her that way. I said, she's a good girl and you shouldn't be talking about her like that. And he goes, I know I'm sorry, and he goes, well, he says, you know, I could show you where they're at. He said, but I can't. I can't tell you. He said, I can show you, and
I said, well, well, can you draw a map? And he goes no, Because I'm thinking I've got to extradite him the next day too late that day, we'd have to wait till the next morning to get him. And so he come up with the idea. He goes, I'll go with you right now to show you where the body parts are. And I said, well, Joe, I can't take you. I have to extradite you first. He goes, if you take me to court first, forget it. He said,
I'm not I'm not going to show you nothing. I'm not going to talk to you no more if you don't let me show you right now. So that's when we had to hustle and try to find out if we could, and we found out we could. We were told by the prosecutors. But guess who gets to sign him out of jail?
Rick Reed.
I thought, oh my god.
You know I'm going to go to prison for the rest of my life for this. That was kind of scary. That's probably The scariest thing I did was taking the risk that I wasn't like a constitutionally violating this man, sure, because I just didn't know. I mean, I knew enough about the law that I thought I was okay. But basically what I was doing was the humane thing to do, the right thing to do, you know, get the woman body back to her family. And if you get in trouble, you get in trouble.
Right right now, we won't get we won't have time to go into the trial, but maybe you can tell us what were the circumstances under which Joe Brown confessed and claimed that he had killed these other women.
About oh maybe. It took about a year to go through all these hearings before he was able to plead guilty and got life without parole. So during that entire year I had quite a bit of contact with him and his attorneys, and at one point they tried to file kidnapping charges on me for bringing him from Ohio to Indiana with that extradition. So they had gone to the FBI to see about filing charges against me, and Joe thought that was funny. He goes, I can't believe
they're doing that to you. So he was writing me, calling me all kinds of stuff. And about a year or two, maybe two years after he'd been in he had been writing me letters periodically, and he sends a letter to the prosecutor, to one of our newspapers and me, saying I'm ready to tell you now about these other murders. I didn't know there were other murders, kind of suspected. But before he went for his ride to prison, before he left, he said, Ricky says, I've got something to
tell you, but I can't tell you right now. He said, this isn't the time, he said, but I'll be in touch with you when i'm ready, and I've got something really important to tell you, and you'll want to hear this. And I tried to get out of what it was, but he wouldn't tell me. So then I get this letter and he says, I'm ready to tell you now. I murdered thirteen other women. And that's when all that started.
So we started looking into that. But it was bad timing because I was involved in a case that turned very political and very ugly right after Joe's arrest, and I kind of gained the disfavor of the city and the police department, ended Attactives office, and pretty much everybody else because I didn't want to play politics with a murder case, and so I didn't get very much cooperation when I was looking into the thirteen other murders. That kind of got shoved at the side.
So in terms of verification, it's still sort of there's still open cases. There is no verification that what Joe Brown had said it is true or or.
Not, except for the one Andrew Hendrix that was founding up north of us. Here. He identified her. He told us about the murder, told us how he left her by the side of the road, and gave us great detail, so much detailed things that weren't even in the Corners report. But the family verified and we were able to look at the coroner's picture and identify some of the marks he said he left on her, things that only the killer would have known. And Joe picked her out of
a lineup. We gave him a lineup with six women in it, and she was one of the women and he immediately goes to that picture and he goes, that's slick, that's her the girl I killed. So we know that he did that. One the others. We just never really got to look at him very hard because most of them were prostitutes, and in Evansville, prostitutes come to town all the time, disappear, they move from place to place to place, and a missing prostitute is not a priority.
Nobody has a report, nobody knows they're missing, nobody knows their name to begin with. So it's kind of like looking for invisible people. And that's the problem with it. You know, if they're not dumping a body where you
find it, then you don't have a case. So there's no telling the things that he told me about how he killed Ginger and why he killed her, and the fact that after he killed her, he put her underwear back on her torso he'd cut her arms and head and legs off, and then he takes her underwear and puts it back on her torso before he dumps her, because he said, I didn't want her to be found naked because she was a very modest woman. Yeah, that's
kind of a crazy statement. But with Andrew Hendrick, he stripped her naked and threw her out beside the road, kind of facing up because he said she was real flat chested and she was humiliated about it, and he wanted God and everybody to see that she didn't have any chest and he wanted to humiliate her. That kind of makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, when you put those two things together, this is a guy that's telling you the truth, the facts. You know, there's bodies.
There were bodies in you know, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Mississippi. I was never able to go to those locations and talk to anybody. So the offer of assistance by the FBI that was made to me was turned down by might have partner, and I never had to go and look.
But in your in your mind, did you if you talk about the serial killers sort of mentality, Uh, And you know I've I've read a lot of these books and you know, I'm up on the subject as well. It seemed that even though it wasn't maybe as blatant as some of these serial killers wanting to relive their crimes, he seems to have quite a bit of that characteristic as well, that he didn't.
Want it to do and was reliving it by talking to me.
Yeah, exactly when he could show me.
All about it again, he was going through it again. You could see the look in his on his face. He was there again. He transported back, and uh, I didn't want to really do that for him. I wanted him to tell me where they're at. But I've still got a little bit of hope that somewhere down the line, Joe will break and tell me the truth. Were you aware that he killed his cellmate back in June? Yeah, Yeah, he strangled his sellmate, just like he did these women
back in June. And he was telling them that he wanted to talk to me, but we didn't never get to that point. I didn't want to talk to him about that, and I didn't want him using that as a way to get me back up there and relive all this stuff. If he's not going to do me any good. Yeah, if he's going to find these women, then I'll go for it, But I don't want to dig all it up again unless it's going to help.
Yeah. I could see what you mean being I mean from my own experience too. I don't want to enable these people with their fantasies getting to the crimes that themselves and solving them. That's one thing for sure.
And I think he's got the evidence. I think he knows where it is, the driver's license and things like that. I believe he knows where it is. But if he gives that up, then it's gone. He's not in control anymore. He doesn't dominate them. If he doesn't have their license, we don't have the body, we don't have their ide, so we can't prove it. So he's still in charge. And if he gives that up, then he's lost that control.
And I don't think he's ready for that yet. It may be a couple of years, he may never do it, but I kind of expect one of these days to get a call from one of the prisons that he wants to talk, and I'll probably go if he does. I would really like to find the rest of these.
Of course, absolutely well, Rick, I also want to tell their audience too that you've gone on to write some nonfiction, and tell us the titles of your nonfiction books, and just give us just briefly you're what you're doing, what your writing career is, and tell us about the couple books that you have written already.
Okay, after a Blood Trail, that was the one about Joe Brown. I really didn't feel like it was very cathartic for me to write about true crime anymore. It didn't help me get this out of my system. But fiction is just totally made up. It's like they say, no animals were injured in the making of this film. So I can create anything I want and I sleep like a baby at night. So my two books, the first one is The Cruelest Cut, came out last year
and it's a psychological murder mystery. There's serial killer involved in it, and a detective named Jack Murphy here in Evansville, Indiana, and he's kind of a wise guy that doesn't let department policy or anything else stand in his way as long as he solves the case. He's all about the victims, all about solving the case. And so the second book in that series then is The Coldest Fear, and it's
continuation kind of. There's standalone enough that you could pick up either book and read them in any direction, but they're all about Evansville, Indiana and surrounding areas and Jack Murphy and his partner Ladell Blanchard. I'm planning three more at least in the series. Right now. I've got the third book almost finished in the series, and I'm hoping to do at least five. Uh, that remains to be seen.
I'm in about a week, I'll be living in California, moving from Evansville and quitting my job and going into writing full time. So I'm regulations, well, thank you.
Yes, yes, it's been a long time coming. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting. I speak to some true crime authors that have started in other careers and a little bit later in life. And one guy in particulars he's written about twenty or something books already. He's writing a couple
of year and he's just loving it. He's writing true crime, though, But given you your situation and your occupation, I also see true crime authors at say, geez, I just need a break from this, you know, because, like you say, it's very hard to write this stuff that's nonfiction. It
takes a certain amount out of you. So I think I can understand you're you're wanting to write fiction where again, like you say, you're not so personally involved and and it's it's not something that you have to relive just to write the book.
So I still have some compassion, some feelings for Joe Brown. He was like an injured animal, and you know that he turned out like he did. There was probably no doubt he was going to be that way. But I'm not saying that he should be excused in any way for what he did. But down deep inside him there was still something good that could be reached, yeah, and brought to the surface. And he in the end, he
did the right thing. He told the truth, he found the body, and he tried to tell about these other murders. You know. So I think, way down deep there's still a good person in there. He's just he's not in control of himself. Yeah, he kind of about That's why I don't like doing that kind of writing. I don't ever stop feeling these things about my job. And that's
another reason I'm leaving Indiana. I can't drive down the street in this town without finding a spot where I picked up a dead baby, or somebody's brains were in the street, or you know, and it just is hard to take. So I want to get someplace new.
Yeah, absolutely, in California visa place for sure. Oh wow, yeah, absolutely. Well, like I say, I want to thank you very much for number one for pending this book. Blood Trail. Amazing book, fascinating story, and the real bonus of this is the detail in the confession. I mean, this is not the first book where the police claim to have had a
brilliant investigator. I don't know if you're familiar with the Colonel Williams case in Canada, but there was an officer that had again a similar approach in that he did not confront them. He tried to build a rapport and then played upon the person's conscience to do the right thing despite having done the wrong thing and been a rapist and a murderer. But again at the detail in
this book, it shows exactly how that was done. And then that turning point where your partner said, he's not going to tell us nothing, and then you say, hey, listen, why don't you go for a coffee, And then the surprise of surprises, the good work that you've done. That's the big results. So very very fascinating to get so inside and so intimate in that room with Joe Brown
and those officers. So again, congratulations on a great book, and thank you very much for coming on True Murder and talking about your book Blood Trail.
Thank you for having me well, thank you very much.
You have a good evening for our audience. You've been listening to the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that are written about them, with my special guest Rick Reid talking about his book Blood Trail. Thank you very much and good night,