THE MURDER GENE-Karen Spears Zacharias

loving musician and fellow marine from Coleman, Alabama. The friendship set off a series of events that would eventually lead Luke to Pendleton, Oregon, where he brutally murdered nineteen year old Amy jan Brand Higgen in August twenty twelve. When Luke attempted to kill another woman almost a year later, Pendleton police knew they had a serial killer wannabe on

their hands. Some forty years prior to Amy Jane's murder, Luke's maternal grandfather, Jean Dale Lincoln murdered a young Michigan woman and attempted to abduct the twelve year old girl. The similarities between the violent actions of grandfather and grandson compels the question is there such a thing as a murder Jan. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Murder Jan, A true story with my special guest, journalist and author Karen Spears Zachari. Welcome to the program,

and thank you very much for this interview. Karen Zacharias, Thank you, Dan.

brand Again was murdered in August twenty twelve. I actually knew Amy Jane, you her family very well. My daughter had baby, said Amy Jane when she was younger, and so much like the Carly Shehan, I had this connection to the victim. I called up Chief Roberts and as could be for coffee shortly after Amy Jane's murder. So we did, and at that time no arrest had been made, and very little details about the murder had been released.

And when I questioned Stewart as to whether there was a story in all of those he told me then in twenty twelve that yes, there was a story, and he feared that what they had on their hands was a serial killer because of the low cow of Pendleton. It's located right along the Interstate four that runs between Boys Idaho and Portland, Oregon, and it would be very easy for someone to jump off that interstate do a crime.

In Amy's case, so it's the middle of the afternoon on our bright sunny August day, and the killer had walked away completely unseen.

what was Luke's grandfather in prison? Pork And Chief Roberts didn't even know at that point that he had been I had just come across, said in a brief note in pages and pages of documents, and then he came back and told me that he had been arrested and put in prison for murders. So I began collecting the information on Luke's grandfather, and that immediate led me to think what an oddity that was to have a grandfather and a grandson both committing pretty violent murders of women

neither one of them knew or having connection to. I was immediately traut to the fact that there might be a genetic connection to that kind of violence. And so I'm not a scientist, not an expert in DNA. I began researching, and of course it took me ten years of research. DNA is, as you will know, changing hour by hour the discoveries that we are making in DNA.

And the first person I got a hold of was specialist at Florida State University, doctor Kevin Bick, and he explained to me that it is an uncomfortable subject for us to talk about that there might be a connection of violence in families, that we prefer to think of

that as all environmental. But the way the doctor explained it to me was that it's very much like if you say, have a grandfather who has diabetes, you won't necessarily get diabetes, but you will have a perpensity toward diabetes, right,

And it's the same with violence. It doesn't mean if your grandfather is a serial killer that you're going to be a serial killer, but you have a higher propensity for aggression and violence as significantly higher according to doctor Bacon and the others that I interviewed.

the mother's line and past. Like I said, all of us have the moa m aoa gene, but we don't all have the to are variant, and we see it most commonly and meant it's highly valued and referred to as a warrior gene because it makes men more aggressive, more willing on the battlefield. That kind of thing is the light it has been up until this point put into a very positive light as being that thing you

want your warriors to have. Well, it would be really interesting to know how many of these white supremacists we're dealing with and these mass shootings are dealing with that to our variant right now.

The same thing with this mutant ensign or marker on the gene is influenced by those environmental factors.

that he was discharged from the army for unknown reasons. Anyway, he had had a variety of jobs and seemed like the kind of guy who would live next door to you. That he and his wife got into a huge fight and he left their home, left the kids and went to see a friend, and did you know, just explain that they had a disagreement and drank and so did she, And I think the alcohol certainly was a contributing factor

and probably their fighting and their resulting imprisonment. But after staying with a friend, he then went off and campaign at King's Lake. It's a lot of popular campsite. Our recreation site did not have a lot of campsites. Nancy Laws grew up in Waukeshaw and was very well known in Waukeshaw. She was the college co ed attractive, she had a great voice, was a singer and an artist, and she it was getting to be break time for her,

and she had made arrangements to meet some friends. And she had this hobby where she liked to go and visit what we considered ghost towns. We have a couple of those in our area in Oregon. You probably have some too, all settled areas where the housings and things still remained, but nobody's particularly living in them. So she

had left Waukeshaw. She had packed up to go camping, and she went up and she had gotten to the campsite later than she had planned and was setting up her campsite when she came over and introduced himself and offered to help her. There were only ten, i think ten campsites. There were some fisher some people out fishing, but it was getting on towards dark. They got her tent set up. He had offered her a beer and they had been talking. At some point in the evening,

he made a pass at her. She had thought he was married because he had a wedding ring on, so she didn't realize he was out there camping alone. I'm not sure she would have pitched her tent there. Had she known that he made a pass setter, she rejected him. He ended up killing her violently and then sexually assaulting her after she was dead, put her body in the trunk of his car, driven around first day and disposed of it very far away from the camps.

your lifestyle. She knew the area very very well, and like a lot of teenagers, she was spending her summer at the lake. She had gotten permission to spend the night with her girlfriend, Pam, who also lived up to the lake, but they were actually spending the night at Pam's house, like Dony's parents thought she was. They had made arrangements with a friend to stay at his campsite. He was gone, so they were just going to use his tent and stay at there at his campsite that night,

and that is what they did. And at some point, this was a very crowded campsite, by the way, there are lots of people there. A lot of people lived in the lake year round. And in this case, they had asked the man at the campsite near them to help them with problem they were having with their kerosene lamb or not their kerosene, but their camp plan, and he had helped, and they were kind of repulsed by this guy. Was obviously not clean and kind of scary

all of that. But at some point they went to bed, and the next morning, nearly before daybreak, they had heard a noise outside their tent, and Tony got up to see what it was, and at that point Jean Lincoln

grabbed her and began the process of an abduction. She was twelve at the time, but TONI, you know, was a twelve going on eighteen, right, so very attractive and because she was at the lake all the time, very athletic, and she was able through She believes the intervention of God and I believe the stream of her sure will to make an escape. Had she not made the escape, he would have killed her. But she escaped the abduction and then began an all out pursuit for this man.

I don't know that they had initially put his connection to Nancy Laws together, but they because it was different jurdictions, jurisdictions. There was Waukeshaw, Kingsleg, Newago, Baga, there were different counties and different jurisdictions all working on these two cases. But at some point the police were a law enforcement I think it was the state police actually who picked him

up for age hiking. He was charged initially with the abduction of Doni, but eventually, of course, was charged with the murder of Nancy Laws.

he drank too much, but then so did Bill. Sure, so it was just as drink advite anyway. It wasn't until after the young girl was abducted, and I suspect, although I don't know this for sure, but I suspect what most have come to Bill's mind was the timeline of things. You know, that Jean would have come to see him after the fight with Doris, his wife, and then a girl ends a murdered, and then Jean comes to see him again, leaves his trunk, and a child

is abducted. You know, these kind of things. The timeline began to seem suspicious to Bill. He had not opened the trunk, but after the abduction of Doni, he did go in the trunk, and in it was a shoe box. And in that shoe box had been those shoes Nancy

Law's mother had bought her right. And it was really when he called police and said, you know, there was women's clothing in those which he knew not to be gen Del's wife, sure, because it was teenager, you know, young girl, co ed kind of clothing, couples, sketch books, some identification kind of things, not driver's license, but you know, just things that would not have belonged to missus Lincoln.

And so at that point he called police. And it was when the police showed the shoebox to Nancy's mother that they positively identified the belonging. Since belonging to Nancy you.

for the great wrongs they have done. And what happened in this particular case is that the prosecutor had offered Jean Lencoln a deal to find out where Nancy's body was, but he had not done that with the court's approval. The judge had not agreed to this ahead of time. There has been no discussion, so he's just offering this on his own to get to that body. And Gene

does reveal where Nancy's body is at. But then the judge is furious over the deal that has been cut and he rejects it because the deal was to charge Gene with the abduction of Doni, but to let him off lightly on the murder of Nancy, which had been extremely violent. As I pointed out, he's sexually assaulted her after she was murdered. He probably assaulted her before she

was murdered, but he didn't want to say that. He didn't really want to say that he had assaulted her after she was murdered either, but he said he couldn't remember. But in this case, the judge threw it out and said, no, you know, we're not going to cut that deal because this is too light of a sentence. It was ten years for an extremely painous act. And so the judge and the attorneys got into it in the courtroom and

the judge just rejected it. Well, that put the attorney in the bands situation with the Jean, who had already told them where the body was at. So what happens is the attorney then gets moved to a different judge who then does approve it.

with had been her grandmother's. She had only she could only remember seen Doris one or two times. Apparently she was quite an alcoholic and it was Leah's mom, Heidi, who became the primary, you know, maternal figure in the household, having to do a lot and take care of a lot of things, and their lives were completely disrupted, as you can imagine with any situation where head of a household that's in prison. So LEAs said, she didn't know

she had any grandfather's. Her contact with her paternal grandmother was limited because her paternal grandmother was a Harmong refugee from South Vietnam and did not speak English, and Lanne did not speak come Up or Vietnamese, so whatever contact she had with that particular grandmother was very limited. Leya's father, Jay, had moved the family to Morganton, North Carolina, from Illinois, where his family had emigrated to following the Vietnam War,

and they and Heide had gone to Morganton. Initially, Jay was called to be the pastor there at the Baptist church there in Morganton for whatever reason that nobody would

talk about, including the church folks. He did not last in that job for more than a year and began working instead at one of the many furniture factories there in foothills of Appalachia, and so all of a sudden you know, when Lea' is about four or five years old, her grandmother shows up out of nowhere, arrives on a bus, and her mom and family then just go and welcome him like you would any long lost relative you hadn't

seen it in a dozen years. And he comes and lives at Leah with the Chain family there for a while until he gets out on his own. There's never any mention of the of why there had been no contact, and if you take Leyah's story at face value, she claimed even during our many many interviews, that she nor Luke knew why their grandfather had ever been in prison.

for each episode. It's like, if you own a growing business and need to hire, ZipRecruiter makes hiring so much easier because they do the work for you, and right now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. ZipRecruiter uses its powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job. You can easily review these recommended candidates invite your top choices

to apply. Additionally, ZipRecruiter has a complete suite of tools that makes it easy to filter, review and rate your candidates. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. No wonder. ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G two satisfaction ratings as of January first, twenty twenty two. In fact, the hardest thing you have to do to remember our special url ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. That's

where you go to try ZipRecruiter for free. Once again, that's ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r der. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, we just introduced that the grandfather, Jean Lincoln, came to live with Leah and Luke, Luke being six years six years old and Leah, his sister, being four years old. Tell us, as you write in the book a little bit about their life living with

their parents and what that consisted of. You talk about poverty that you talk about them their parents being missionaries tell us about life growing up.

So they had met there and their marriage had been bonded in a large degree by the shared values they had as evangelical Christians, and Jay had long felt the call to be a pastor and missionary, to return to the countries and to the peoples that he had grown up with prior to his dad's death during the Vietnam War.

So they took that call and came to Morganton, North Carolina, had a huge among refugee community during that time that it was a large settlement and you could see why there's a lot of similar ilarities geographically culturally to the kind of community that Jay was familiar with. So they moved there, but like I said, didn't work out very well with the ministry. So he began working in a furniture factory. He did not make a lot of money.

Heidi and Ja part of the Jack Hyles ministry. It was extremely fundamental and what happens with fundamentalism is that there comes a deep isolation. It's built on an US and them paradigm. And so it's the notion that my beliefs are right and your beliefs are wrong. And in order for me to raise my family, I have to protect them from beliefs that are in what I would consider contrary to the Word of God. So their family environment was very exclusionary. According to Leah, they had bought

property out just outside of Morganton. It's some beautiful piece of land. There was a branch house on it. Leah talked about, you know, having wooded areas, about an acre of woods to roam through. Not uncommon for a lot of kids growing up in those rural areas of Appalachia to talk about their you know, connection to the land. And so what happened is they were not in enrolled

in school that Heidi homeschooled. Now Lea would say they would get their homework done, our school work done within the first couple hours of the day and the rest of the day, Sheet and Luke roamed those woods, played outside, explored. They were just together all the time. They were only I think eighteen months apart. They are what you know, I would refer to as Irish twins. They even look quite a bit alike both our care dark eyed, great smiles,

very cherub looking children. And she recalls those days fondly as being a great time togetherness and family. But Leah was much more social than either her mother or her brother, and she felt the need to be with other people, to have connections and friendships outside of just the family. But that was not something that Heidi was open to.

Heidi did not want her kids engaged in a broadway with other kids, particularly so for any kids who would not adhere to the kind of protective evangelical view that she and Jay had for their kids. So there was a lot of loneliness to that environment as well. Luke built that loneliness with books. Leah felt that loneliness with

a longing to be with friends, to have girlfriends. They were always very actively involved in a church, and the church they settled on was a church it's still in operations called New Manna and it is about forty miles maybe thirty thirty to forty miles from their home there in Morganton. The church has a large Christian school, and eventually when Leah's in high school and Luke is a senior, Heidi and Jay Do enrolled them in that private school.

into the computer to change grades. I know the reason why he hacked into the computer, but he did get caught and he got expelled. And at that point how he told him his only option was to join the military. Well, you're already in North Carolina. Your closest military base for that group. What's going to be the Marines at Camp Lajune. So while Jay did not want his son to join, the Marines had no desire for Luke to do that. Because Jay had lost his father's South Vietnamese soldier to

the war in Vietnam. He was opposed to it, and Leah was not included in on that decision. But Luke decided to do what his mother recommended and joined the Marine. So you've taken a kid who has had this very isolating, very strict environment, and now you've put him in Camp Pleash. You I've been to Camp Plash, and I don't know about you. I know a few Marines, Dan, I mean, it had to be quite the culture shot for Luke.

like that. He's a quiet guy and Casey's a fun, loving, friendly guy. They decide to move in together, and he is married to a woman named Megan. I know when we're compressing this into a short period of time, but tell us the dynamics. What happens to put these people all together in one place.

which is a great town. I've been to him many times and it's a fun, loving, very social, very hospitable community. Casey was the very first friend Luke ever had, and Casey made it his goal to introduce Luke to all the ways of the world, and he did so. It was with Casey that Luke started drinking. It was with Casey that Luke started smoking pot. It was with Casey that Key and Desiree and Megan all started using the spice, which at that time was a drug. You could go

down to the seven ELEVENU pick it up. It was not considered in those days. It was not considered unlessit drug. The Marines didn't even test for it, but they began doing that. Desiree was born with diabetes had been sickly most of her life. She had come to California just for the adventure to get out of Culeman, Alabama, but she had extreme diabetes and did not have health insurance.

So the four of them devised the plan that Luke would marry Desiree that would give him the ability to live off base, because if you weren't married, you didn't get to live off base. Right, so he could live off base and Desiree could have health insurance. Now, according to Desiree, they never consummated that marriage. That it was just a contractual marriage period. It was not something that Luke had told his parents about. He had told Leah, but even Leah understood it to be a contract marriage.

But it was understood by all involved that Luke had feelings for Desiree that Desiree did not have for Luke.

could not seem to get over. We do know now, We didn't know it at the time, but we do know now that spice, especially the abuse of spice, can cause all kinds of psychotic problems for yearss. And so Casey goes back to Coleman because he's kicked out of the military for his drug use. He goes back to Coleman but doesn't get in touch with Megan, who's moved back with her family, and he has an overdose hooked up with his friends back in Coleman and he ods and dies and does. Ray and Luke are are still

living together. Luke still carrying a lot of the financial although it does Ray at this point as a job, but she is seeing other people. They're not divorced, but she has seen other people and made it clear you know that she doesn't want a relationship of any romantic

nature with Luke. Luke is still attracted to her. When she finds out through Facebook that Casey has odeed, she calls Luke and tells Luke that she's crying, she's upset that she's leaving, that she's going back to Coleman, that you know, she's going to go be with Casey's mom and family and do what she can to help, and she invites Luke to go along with her. But then she never hears from Lok again, and Luke goes a wall from the Marines and he he's told no one.

It's like he's had some sort of mental break at that point, and he just disappears. He doesn't tell it. He doesn't get in touch with his family, he doesn't get in touch with any friends. He writes a Facebook post about how much he loves Casey and how Casey turned him into University of Alabama fan, and he signs

it off roll time, and he disappears. He doesn't show up again and un till sometime later when he's found sleeping on benches in the yu Matilla River there in Pendleton, and police get him from loitering, but he has no idea on him so they don't know him as anyone other than Danny Wu. Danny Wo's the name he gives for himself. But we know now that what happened was following Casey's death, Luke gone on a bus and went

as far as Pendleton, Oregon. He has told police that the reason he chose Pendleton was he ran out of money. But I believe that he stopped at Pendleton, Oregon because he had left and gone a wall from Camp Pendleton. I think the familiarity of the name this what drew him.

has romantic or relationship connections with so many people. So very much like a police investigation, they have to start at family, boyfriends, friends, ex boyfriends, and they have to follow every lead, whether it's good or whether it's bad. They have to make sure that this lead is not something to their advantage. So with this, it takes quite a bit of time to lead up to finding Luke and his responsibility for this. How does that happen?

all gone to the same church. As matter of fact, Karen Lane had told her husband she was going out for a walk. It was August again in twenty thirteen this time, and she didn't return home from that walk, and so Dan, her husband, got worried. They called out a search party then evening, but it was getting on dark. They searched for hours in the dark and never found anything again. As soon as daylight rolled around the next morning, the police have started searching for her as well, and

ball games are going on. It's summer morning and the walkway again is busy, but a police officer has gone you know, it's a river walkway, so there's a lot of vegetation. He has gone over and around from a ballpark area on one part of the walkway where the cameras did not catch and he's looking through that and he hears us. He hears something and looks in the brush and he sees Karen Lane there. She's almost bled out.

She had been beaten badly with the metal pipe and so all of this ebolms and through cameras they're able to see this guy that they know as Danny Wu, exiting onto the walkway shortly after they had seen Karen Lang on the repeat video. And then they see him again exiting from the bathrooms. Looks like he had gone

in and cleaned up and then come back out. Because he had had numerous contact with the police over that year period, always as a Lloyd, always without ID, one time being jailed, but fingerprints weren't taken through some CAROLSS police where someone one of the police officers who had previous contact with him, recognizing him, called him Danny Wu, which is actually a martial arts star, and so they put out an all points bulletin throughout oreon throughout the

Pacific Northwest in search of Danny Wu, who has disappeared once more. Karen Lang has been life flighted to the hospital at OHSU in Portland, where she's given a one percent chance of survival.

August and September, because the rodeo is in September. So the women who were working there started noticing food missing from the kitchen and they are in the employees fridge and one afternoon they walk in and there's this Asian guy sitting in a chair eating from employee fridge. They knew immediately who he was. Of course that frightened them. He just stood up very calmly and said time to go, and he bolted out the door. They called the police

in right away. The police brought in the dogs and the guns and a swap team and they surrounded the round up crowns and it was actually with a dog who had helped find Luke. He had been hiding up in the ceiling, you know, moving the ceiling tile and had been living up in the ceiling of the rounded ground facility and convention center facility. And they found him with one leg hanging out of that ceiling tile. And

I think he was afraid. I think the officer told me he was afraid they would let the dog out on him. So he came down and he identified himself.

had not sexually abused his victims. So there was that component that was totally different. And in his you know, confession about it, Luke was proud of what he had done and he admitted that, you know, he just felt compelled to.

lot to do with our DNA connections. We know, for instance, now that the trauma of slavery can be carried on passed through those gene markers to offspring and their offspring and that offspring. So trauma that happens to you can be carried forward. You know, if you believe in the Bible, it's to your children's children. So we know that these things can be carried forward. We are seen every single day the variety of health impacts that are inherited or

shaped by our DNA markers. So of course it makes perfect sense that if we have violence in our history, that there's an inheritability factor toward violence.