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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 DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. It was planned to look like a suicide, but even in the best laid plans, evidence is left behind. Joscelyn Brannham Earnest was found dead on the floor of her living room in Forest, Virginia. By her side was a gun and a suicide note, typed lacking a signature and with one fingerprint on it, A fingerprint apparently belonging to Joscelyn's estranged husband, Wesley Ernest, was a respected high school administrator poised to restart his life in a new community.
Parents entrusted their children to his care and believed he was above reproach, But the investigation into the life the couple once shared would reveal adultery, troubled finances, and shattered dreams, enough for one man with murder on his mind to travel hundreds of miles. The book that were featuring this evening is under Cover of the Night, a true story of sex, greed and Murder. With my special guest, journalist and author Diane Fanning. Thank you for Greenness interview, and
welcome back to the program. Diane Fanning.
Thank you, Dan, nice to be with you again tonight.
Well, thank you very much, and I've just got to say to our audience that you were the very first guest that we had on the program talking about your wonderful book, Baby Be Mine, and it was quite the beginning of the program, and I want to thank you very much for starting it off and being one of the great guests and especially a great guest to start
off this true murder. So now we're almost five years into the program and you're back here at about another five books under your belt in that five years, so
I want to congratulate you on this book. Fantastic, incredible tale, and so let's get right to that then, Diane, I give us a little bit of the history on this Bedford community you were living in Texas when we spoke to I don't know if it was the last time, but one time you were living in Texas to tell us how you came to be have something so close to home in terms of a book.
Well, the funny thing is Dan, that I actually signed the contract while I was living in Texas and had no plans of moving, and then things in life changed, in my personal life changed, and suddenly it seemed to be time to move back to Virginia, and we ended up buying a home, oh about twenty miles from the murder scene.
Wow, amazing. Now, just before we get into talking about this too, is you're with another publisher decided to publish this, and I thought that was an interesting story as well. Not take anything away from the last publisher, but why it came to be that you kind of were fighting for this story.
Well, I really believed in this story because it was another case of a woman who was well loved by friends and family, who was respected professionally, who was the major breadwinner in her home. She had everything going for her. There was no thing in her life that said, oh, she's taking risks, she could become a victim. There was nothing there, and yet this professional charming woman somehow ended up dead in her own home, shot by the one person who once promised to protect her and.
He seemed like a great guy. So let's go back and talk about Jocelyn. Talk about her early life and what basically shaped her to become the kind of really upstanding kind of person that she really was well loved by everyone. I know. That seems to be cliche, but this is a a very overachieving type person, very dynamic person. So let's talk about Joscelyn in her early life and what that was like and what shaped her well.
Joscelyn was always a very athletic girl, and she grew up basically as a tomboy and always wanting to to do something a little more and achieve a little more. She was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and she was a good sized baby, which she promised to grow up to be big and hearty, and she did come right become quite a robustly athletic girl. She participated in high school sports and then when she went to the University of West which she established one record after another. She
was a tremendous basketball player. She also enjoyed playing volleyball, and it was through a lot of her love of sports and her edge for competition that she found commonality with Wesley Earnest while she was at college. They used to watch sports together, they used to play together, they worked in school together. They both ended up getting MBAs, and after they married, Wesley also got his doctorate. So they seemed well matched. Athletic, ambitious, hard working, and very driven.
And that was the tragedy of it all. Two people who could have accomplished so much, we're now going to accomplish nothing more.
So let's talk about Wesley. Let's talk about Wesley and what his personality was. He was really, like you say, charismatic, good looking, successful. Sometimes those people have another side, So tell us what you found about his character.
Was very controlling, and part of the way he tried to control Jocelyn was by belittling her. He would not hesitate to do that in front of friends. He would talk about how the wedding band on his fingers showed his ownership. He tried to restrict her friendships and cut off caught her off from her best friend. He also did something that was very unusual. Neither one of them had been religious and suddenly Wesley decided to become a
Jehovah's witness. Now that was peculiar for someone who was married to Joscelyn, because Joscelyn came from a family where holidays were a big deal. Every holiday of the year was a big deal, particularly Thanksgiving and Christmas. They went all out to celebrate. They did everything from Black Friday shopping to going to parades of Christmas and Thanksgiving and every other holiday was just huge. And Wesley became part of a religion that did not believe in celebrating any holidays,
not even birthdays. Birthdays were also a big thing Joscelyn's family, so this was inexplicable to Joscelyn. She couldn't understand it why he would want to do that, And not only did he want to do that, but he did want to interfere with her ability to enjoy those occasions too. One time, he went with her to her family's house in West Virginia for Thanksgiving, and when she went in to celebrate with her family, he sat out in the car the whole time and would not even come in
and join in the holiday meal. It was very strangely rigid, and you almost thought he did that just because he knew the holidays meant so much to Joscelyn, and that was another way of controlling her.
Now, before we get into a little bit more of the controlling in terms of what he then suggests that they should do in terms of their sexual relationship. And again that creates problems. But how is it? What is the dynamic between him? Is he the guy? Is he the football player, handsome football player? And is this woman although she's athletic and success you know, successful and good looking, is still is that how he draws her in or does he do this transformation? What do you have in
terms of in your book? Is it more of a gradual transformation? It becomes more controlling once he has her in his lair, once he's controlled her to the point he's married her, he has her in a serious relationship. Or is there something that she has had in her relationship that binds her for a time with him, that tolerates his kind of behavior from him.
I think she had a little bit of social insecurity, and I think that made her a little easy to fall under the spell of this good looking basketball star, and he had a way of making her feel Initially not like he was controlling her, but that he was caring for her. And it was until after they were married that he really started trying to limit like, for example, her friends and who she was friends with and who she spent time with, and also with the holiday thing.
It was one of the reasons why Joscelyn decided she didn't want children with him, because she felt that their religious beliefs were so totally incompatible that it would only cause problems. And she also didn't think that his controlling behavior would be a good environment for a child.
Now, with this verbal abuse and this controlling attitude, does she believe that he is faithful? And what does she discover and what does his behavior in terms of allegations, What exactly does she find in terms of his faithfulness in this marriage?
Well, I think that she probably suspected a little before she knew, but he he had had a girlfriend that he started seeing and she didn't really know about her. But when he talked about her, he referred to her
as this fat girl that needed his help. And Jocelyn was having doubts about this that he seemed to be a little too focused on her for that if that was the only thing in their relationship, and he claimed that she was a cleaning lady, and so she and her friend Jennifer went out one night looking for his vehicle and they spotted him at parked at a restaurant, and in the car was a very small red leather jacket, and she knew then that that woman was not a
fat girl that needed someone to help, and so that was the beginning of finding out. But she was still willing to give him another chance, and he actually suggested to her, you know, that this should be okay, that he should be able to have someone on the side, but she didn't think that made sense to be married to someone that was doing that. So she then one night went with her friend Jennifer out to the home he had built on Smith Mountain Lake, and that's where
the final straw fell. She looked into this beautiful home with glass windows all around, and actually saw them going into bed together and starting to touch each other, and she screamed at them through the glass, and that was the final straw for her. She knew that, you know, all the lives were exposed, and she had to believe what she saw firsthand, and that's when she filed for divorce.
Was she concerned about financial arrangements, because we're talking about a nice home over a million dollars a million and a quarter, so there was some affluence attached to at least do they believe at that time with him. Was she concerned about that? Was she just trying to get out girl?
Well, she was not so much concerned about that. She thought, you know that in the beginning, all she wanted was a cozy little cabin on the lake. It was all his idea to build a huge masterpiece to his wonderfulness on the lake. And it was you know, the place was worth more than a million dollars, and she didn't want it. She didn't want to have anything to do with it. She was fine. She could keep their house in Forest and he could keep the place insist Mountain Lake.
There was a little problem though, for Wesley, in that he wanted to keep that house, but the market, the real estate market was down, so he couldn't get what it was worth, and he couldn't get enough to cover the mortgage. And with his salary alone, which was under one hundred thousand, he could not pay that mortgage. But Josson could, and for a while she was paying half
of it. Then when she died, he no longer had enough money for the mortgage because people were looking at him and he couldn't get to life insurance.
Now, what is the response once they realized with her best friend Jennifer and her you know, doing the undercover work and finding him to be fooling around with some woman and so his stories are nonsense, what is her next move? She files for tell us about the divorce itself and proceedings in terms of how, you know, how amicable is he did with the split?
It was kind of messy on the financial level because he wanted he wanted alimony, and he wanted her to cover some of his expenses because you know, technically she could afford it and he couldn't. And then it got even creepier. One night, while she wasn't there, he broke into her house and he found the document that she was preparing for her attorney that was basically a timeline of things that had happened in their relationship, and he actually wrote other things on there, and he wrote them
as if they were coming from Jocelyn. It was apparent when they found this that it was different handwriting, but he was writing things like Oh, Jocelyn told me to go she didn't want sex anymore, go out and get a girlfriend. And she was telling she was making he was he was writing notes that made it sound like she was praising him for being so understanding and such a good husband and and things like that.
It was.
It was really bizarre. Then another time he Uh came to her house late at night. He parked his car a long ways away. He was dressed all in black, and he came to her door and she would not let him in and she caught Instead, she called Jennifer, and Jennifer came out and talked to him and talked to him, and finally after a couple hours, got him to go away. But he was adamant that she gives some papers to Jocelyn that they stopped going through the
lawyers and work this out between themselves and uh. But really he was trying to manipulate the whole situation to get what he wanted. And law enforcement strongly suspects that that night his his real intention was to come up there and kill her that night, and that wasn't his intention. He was he was making a dry run to see if he could pull it off.
Now, she Jocelyn has a couple of friends, Jennifer and Marcy, And there's a maza which later.
But but.
And there's also the issue of does she write any of this stuff down? And who does she confide to? And what does she tell her friends in terms of her now suspicion and and and sort of fear, what what does that entail? And what does she tell her friends, and what kind of detail and tell us if there if she's writing stuff down, if she's writing any of her intimate thoughts down.
She had about seventeen handwritten journals that she kept. They found most of them in her home, some of them in her office, where she wrote about everything that went on between her and Wesley, everything he said and everything he did, and everything she found out. And she also told her family and friends that, you know, if anything ever happens to me, even if it looks like an accident, even if it looks like a suicide, Wesley did it. Yeah.
And that's not a light sentiment. That's not a comment that people can just dismiss. So obviously there was an interaction between her friends in that she definitely feared for her life and and told her friends, why.
Oh, we're told I don't understand the question, did.
Well, what was the reason she gave that she was other than these incidents? But why? What was the reason why she believed that her husband would kill her if anyone.
Well, she felt that he wanted the life insurance, he wanted her assets. He wanted to just get her out of his life so that he didn't have to fool with any of this divorced stuff anymore, because he didn't feel he was getting a fair shake out of it. He really thought that he should be getting support from Earth, and nothing was going the way he wanted.
Was he?
How rejected was he and how angered was he by that rejection?
Well, I mean she did reject him, and he was angered by that because he certainly was losing control and he wanted that control. He didn't really want her as a person. He was already involved with someone else and perfectly happy with that other woman. And he denied to everybody in his new job in Chesapeake, Virginia that he was even married. He said, no, I've never been married before. And he also was very dismissive of his current girlfriend to them, he referred to her as some chick I
met in the mountains. So he did not have a lot of respect for women in general, and even less for any woman who came under his control in any measure. And he really didn't see any problem with how he was because he's very narcissistic. He was always looking for people to look up to him, to praise him. He talked about how he didn't need to work. He told all the people there he didn't need to work because he was independently wealthy, and he had property in California
and had this beautiful lake home. And meanwhile out in Chesapeake he's living in the boarding house and he's living in a ratty little trailer on a campground. I mean, he didn't have much anything, but he was spoke in a mighty good.
Game before we get into the actual day. And I love how your book has the minute by minute texting between Marcy and Joscelyn and then the text fall away. So before we get into that, I just wanted to know, and again for our audience too, and this will be important, and of course obviously it would be important. What was written in the journal, say the last day or the last days? And it was it a cryptic message? Was
there something in there? Besides, you know, telling her friends that if something happens to me, was there anything in a premonition type way in those last few days in her journal.
She said, he will probably shoot me and then you'll shoot himself.
And what day was that or just days?
I believe that that was just days before she died.
Okay, now we're talking about the Christmas time, and Marcy takes a couple of weeks off. She has the ability where she works kind of important versus it takes a couple of weeks off to get all our Christmas shopping done and everything done for preparations. Like you say, Jocelyn's very much into the holidays and Marcy being being great
friends and Jennifer, everybody's into the holidays. So she has some time off and they're texting and we're I think this is around well, very close to Christmas, about a week before Christmas, decembern was nineteenth or so, and so tell us about the day and they, like many people text between each other at work, and so tell us about that day and the conversations that they had via text.
Well, they texted back and forth that day talking about getting together that evening, and that was definitely what they planned to do was to get together that evening, but the plans were a little fluid because Jocelyn had meetings at work. She was going to see her therapist after work, she you know, so it all depended on when she wrapped up her day, and Marcy was, you know, definitely
flexible since she wasn't working that week. She was in an unusual situation where she and her husband were still living in the same house, but they were technically separated and staying in separate bedrooms. So she had a babysitter there to take care of the kids, so she was
pretty free to come and go as she wanted. And she was out running errands and still not hearing from Joscelyn after the last message when they talked about getting together, and it was getting late, and it was getting a little late for dinner, and she was starting to get nervous about that, and she went to her office to drop off the Christmas gift she'd gotten for Jocelyn, which was a set of Christmas lights for her house, and Jocelyn wanted those but hadn't had them because Wesley wouldn't
allow them before. And then she started thinking, you know, maybe I ought to go out and check on her, and so she went out there and she noted said Joscelyn's car was there, but there wasn't any light one in the house. And she knocked on the door and didn't get an answer, and finally she just gave up and went home. But she was still troubled, very troubled. And the next morning she went to work and there's
still no Jocelyn. She called her there. They worked in different office, they worked at the same company, but in different offices, and she called for her and she wasn't there, and finally she just hid it that a little later in the morning, she just had to go out and something must be wrong. She was afraid she'd hurt herself or was sick, and so she went out there and couldn't get an answer at the front door, couldn't get
an answer at the back door. She knew there was a spare key hanging in a shed, but she knew that that Jocelyn had a security system and she didn't know the code. So she called another friend, Mesa, to get the code for the security system from her, and that's when she let herself in the back door and saw the body of Jocelyn laying on the floor. She rushed to her side and realized she wasn't breathing and
there was something she could do. She called Masa first, which kind of seems a little strange, but she was panicking, and they discussed it and both decided they needed to call nine one one, and they did.
Now, like we alluded to in the synopsis of the book, you can tell us how she was found. But right away when police are come there, they see a suicide note. So tell us about the suicide note and all of how she was exactly found, because this is, of course the very most important part of the evidence.
Well, one scene, the homicide detectives got there, the red flags started flying. For one thing, there was a long streak of blood went across the living room floor, and it looked like her hair had been drunk through it. The other thing was the position of the gun. The gun was sort of on one side of her body, on her coat, but it was on a way where if someone had used the gun to shoot themselves, it wouldn't have naturally fallen.
Right.
And they found this folded up note on the floor and they opened it up and it was all typewritten and it had no signature, and quite frankly, it was pretty kind to Wesley. And so they didn't know anything about the relationship at this point, but they soon learned when they started talking to her friends. But they also learned in searching the house that there were all these handwritten journals. So why would somebody that filled all these
notebooks with handwritten notes? Why would a person like that type the suicide note? And plus there was no functional printer in the home. None of the computers had a printer hooked up. There wasn't a typewriter there, So where did it come from? And that was sound for analysis, Yeah, and so there's.
Going to be some fingerprint analysis. We'll talk about that in a bit as well. So what did they determine with the streak of hair in terms of what did they conclude from that?
It seemed obvious when they could they examined the way the hair was laying with blood in it and the blood trail across the floor that at some point in time while she was still bleeding, someone moved her body. It was not the kind of movement that she could have made herself that indicate that wasn't a self implicted gunshot.
When police spoke to Marcy, did she have anything to say in terms of who she thought might have done this.
Marcy immediately appointed to singer at Wesley and told him that she was afraid of Wesley, and so was Jocelyn. Joscelyn was She would when she came home. She often would before she would get out of the car, she would look all around. Sometimes she would drive back her house and come back to make sure no one was there. And Marcy was very much in love with Joscelyn. Jocelyn kissed her once, but I don't think that Jocelyn was
inclined that way. I just knowing how Marcy felt. Joscelyn was just kind to her at that point in time, but there was not a relationship, a romantic relationship between them, although there were romantic feelings on Marcy's part, and Joscelyn told her enough about what Wesley has done that Marcy was afraid that if Wesley learned about how she felt about Joscelyn, that he would kill her too, So she wouldn't even go out and mowered lawn without having a weapon on her.
Was there any indication did Wesley have an indication that Marcy was lesbian preferred women or.
I don't think that Wesley knew that at all. And the only reason came out was because Wesley, in this suicide note, he composed as if he were Joscelyn talked about a new relationship.
And.
It is thought that he probably did that to implicate someone else in her life and take the heat off of him. Also, the peculiar thing they found was condoms and a drawer. No one else who had known her closely, like her mother and her sister and her best friend and I had ever seen condoms in that house after Wesley moved out. They just weren't there. They'd been in that particular drawer and they hadn't been there, So there was a strong suspicion that he planted those as well.
Also in the spare bathroom condom wrapper thrown in the trash, So it looked like he was trying to set everything up, that this was all caused by a romance. So if they didn't buy the suicide, they would be looking for this other man.
What was because we haven't you haven't said, but what was actually in that note? What was said in that note? What's the gist of that note.
The note talked about Wesley being a good guy and that she was sorry for what she was doing. She couldn't take it anymore, and she said she has always tried to appear, oh, like she was doing well, but everything was just so overwhelming and she felt so lonely so much of the time, and her new love wouldn't leave her, leave the family.
And.
Wesley had buried us in dad, and so she was just sorry. She just said she didn't have the strength anymore, and she was writing it to her mother and saying she was sorry.
Now, police look at all of the evidence. Obviously, like you say, the red flags were evident right in the beginning because of the left and right, you know, shot in the left, temple, gun on the right side, all kinds of things that are that they're not right, don't look right now. To compound that problem, they contacts and what does he have to say, how does what's his demeanor and what's his response to the news that his wife has been murdered or he kind.
Of was blase about it. He suggested suicide right away and said that he learned about it from his girlfriend's mother. Although police had been calling and leaving messages all day. I mean, he didn't seem to gather anything from that, and he just didn't seem to be as rattled as one would think he would be.
He was also asked to come in and to be questioned that night, and he refused. He said, I want to do it the next morning, and so they asked him again, and they said they commented too, that he really didn't ask too many Well, he didn't ask questions about.
Oh, he didn't ask questions. He didn't ask how did she die, he didn't ask where did it happen? He had very little to say and just couldn't be bothered to go to the police station that night. It seemed to me, even if you're in the middle of divorcing someone, if they're suddenly dead, I mean, you had all those years together, you spent all those years in the same bed, it seemed like you would get up the desire to do something right away, and you know not to Oh,
I'm just I just drove up from Jess Beak. I'm tired.
Just so, how do police proceed and how long is it before they make an arrest and what do they base the tell us about the details of the eventual charging and arrest. How long does that take? And tell us about that.
Well, it took. It took a little while because they had to get back you know, DNA results, and they had to investigate some other people, some that he had pointed out, and just other people that were in her life set like, for instance, the people the first person that found the body, the second person on the scene. Those things were just you know, the kinds of things
they needed to cover. They couldn't arrest someone and had have loose ends all over the place, and so they took their time looking into all the things and it was a little more than a month later when they finally did arrest him, when they had taken care of all the questions. And two things that made that very likely to happen was the result of the fingerprint test on the suicide note, which showed that it was Wesley's print.
And the other thing was the return of the autopsy report, which called her death homicide and not suicide.
How did they come to that conclusion? Why did they come to that conclusion?
The medical examiner came to that conclusion because of the way that the angle of the wound, the way it came in sort of in the back of her ear, which is a very awkward place to try to hold a gun, and it also was where the gun itself was. The death scene was part of that investigation, and so all of those things factored together and the medical exammer reached a conclusion of a homicide.
Now does Wesley how does he have the means? Does he the ability to get a high profile lawyer. Obviously he's smart enough not to have said anything and made any incriminating statements. So how does he proceed with his defense? And what is the theory of the prosecution, What do they think the motive is for this, and how do they sort of present their case.
The prosecution sees the mode of his greed that you know, Wesley wanted her money and her assets to continue his
style of life. In retrospect, he probably miscalculated because he ended up not only having to dump every bit of money he originally got from her dass into the lawyer, and then without her income, he was about to lose his house, and in all likelihood he was the one that set it on fire, because there wasn't intentionally lit fire at that one point two million dollars lay count, but they think she was just uh, not doing what Wesley wanted and not giving him the kind of support
in the separation and not letting things go his way. And he just thought it was going to be a whole lot easier for him in his future if she was just gone.
Now for the the the trial buffs that are out there in the audience, which I am a big, huge murder trial buff and how things are different in different places. How does it work in terms of the journals? Now what the police, the police looked at them, the prosecution has them. But what happens in terms of admissibility of those journals in this trial?
Well, because of law in Virginia, the judge ruled that the journals them the contents of the journals were not admissible or could not be seen by the jurors, because to present them as evidence would be to put up a witness that could not be cause examined by the defense. But he did allow the journals as an exhibit, and he did allow the testimony from the therapist who knew a lot of what was the journals, But the journals themselves were only an exhibit and not allowed to be
entered into evidence. Unfortunately, yes, go ahead. Unfortunately, during the deliberations in the trial, the journal were put in the wrong box and they went back to the jury room and the jurors sat in there and read through them. Now, the jurors didn't think they were doing anything wrong, because of course they were out of the courtroom when all this was argued between the lawyers and the judge, so
they had no idea that anything was going wrong. And they get to the end of the trial, they find Wesley guilty and all that's left is for Wesley to be sentenced. So in between the time that the verdict was given and the sentence was rendered, one of the jurors was defending the decision made by the jury because there were those in the community who were standing up for Wesley and were saying that there wasn't enough evidence.
And this juror said, I was a member, wrote anonymously as Bedford resident, said, I was a member of this jury, and we read through those journals and there was enough evidence in there to convict him. It was all right there, laid out clear as day. Well, when that was found online by Joscelyn's sister, she knew this was a problem, so she called the prosecutor, and the prosecutor he knew it was a problem too. He called in his investigator and the next thing they did was they had to
inform the defense and then informed the charge. And the judge really had no choice. This was a clear violation. So a mistrial was granted and his sentence was vacated. However, the judge felt that now that he has been convicted once, he is more of a flight risk, and no, he can't get out on bond, so at least he wasn't out running loose where a lot of the witnesses were frightened on him.
Really, now, what was the Now? How long is it before they have this second trial? And we won't give everything away, won't give everything away in terms of what happens. But when is it that Wesley's lawyer comes up with the idea that to cast some doubt on his client as being the murderer, and of course targets Marcy Shepherd.
Is that the second Well, No, that happened in the first trial. He was hammering away at Marcy or Mesa as being the perpetrator of the murderer, and he was really making that almost all of his case. And when it came time for the second trial, the judge says, hey, I let you do this because I thought you were going to be presenting proof, but you didn't. There is no proof that either of these women are. You can't buy Virginia law be smirched someone else unless you're offering
actual proof of their guilt. Yeah, so he wasn't allowed to do that. So his next tactic was to question the reliability of fingerprint evidence. Mm hmm.
Now, how you know what's interesting. I've done the show for almost five years, and just in the last six months, I've heard that fingerprint analysis and relying on fingerprint analysis as religiously might not be such a great idea. Tell us what you found and what this trial was trying to say in terms of fingerprint analysis and it's uh, its reliability.
Well, there are there are some problems with it because part of the process has to be subjective. The me For example, if you take a finger print sample from a crime scene, odds are you're not going to have a complete, perfect fingerprint, like if it was done on a pad or scanned on a computer. They is they just people smear a little bit, They don't set their whole finger down with equal weight. The size varies depending on how much pressure is used, so there are a
lot of variables. So when you get back possible matches from saying a computer, they're just that possible matches. Then everything has to be looked at one on one by an expert in figure print analysis. They can't are necessarily just it's not like it's going to be a photograph and they're going to be perfectly identical. They're going to be a missing piece and smudges and things. So it
does take something to subjective nature. And what has been found is there can be on occasion on expectation bias by these fingerprint analysts, so that if they are so much expecting it to be Joe's fingerprint, that they see what they want there and ignore what they don't want. It's sort of the same thing of Thomas Jefferson said something to the effect that as humans, if we have a belief and we are presented with factual information, we will accept what matches with our belief and disregard are
at anything that might contradict our belief. And it's the same kind of thing with this analysis that there is that subjective component. Now there are a lot of systems set up because of that in different law enforcement agencies where they don't just rely In most places now don't just rely on one person's analysis of the situation. They get someone else to go over the material, at least one other person, often more than that, to make sure they reach the same conclusion. And that's one way to
minimize that problem. But one of the parts that the defense was coming up with where they're concerned about matching size, which I don't think is something you can ever do because of the different pressure and things of that nature. And they were wondering, they were they were seriously questioning the total reliability of hinder prints evidence.
Well, there's an incredible amount of circumstantial evidence, and that's there's some compelling circumstantial evidence. Well, we didn't talk about what was his alibi.
His alibi was that he wasn't feeling so well and he had allergy problems and he just picked up a carry out dinner and went home and spent the whole night in Chesapeake, which is like three and a half
four hours away from where Johns from Tone was. But law enforcement found out that he borrowed another man's truck and was able there was enough time for him to drive to Jocelyn's place after work stage that scene, kill her in stage that scene, then drive all the way back and get to work in time the next day. And that is exactly what they're think he did well.
And the peculiar thing was when they found out that they saw him pull up in a different pickup truck when he came in to talk to the police and they asked him about that truck, and he got paranoid and went back to Chesapeake, took bart his friend's truck again and put new tires on it.
Interesting, it's suicious. What was his demeanor like at that first trial, and especially when he thought he had he had won.
Well, he was pretty cocky, he felt, I mean, Wisley is an arthecist. He thinks that he is smarter than everyone else, and he thinks the do not apply to him. So he got up on the witness stand and told his story with all the assurance in the world and very cocky, to the point that no one had evidence of how he could have gotten in to write on
Joscelyn's timeline. But he sat there in the witness sand and basically bragg about the window with a broken latch that he knew how to get into, and said Johnson would have never known it.
Yeah, his cockiness and smugness undid himself there on the stand.
Yeah. Yeah, And that is often the downfall is the arrogance. He smart people who commit crimes and are arrogant about it tend to slip up on account of their own hubris.
Now with the second trial, is there any major differences? Like what I found encouraging is that the judge did say, listen, I thought that you were going someone. I thought you were going somewhere with the theory of an alternate suspect, But he dismissed that for that second trial. Other than that, was there any major differences in what was let in and what was not let in? Was there any differences at the onset of that second.
Trial, Well, the defense wanted to bring in a witness, Jennifer Minukin, who is a professor out in California who in case there was anyone there with provincial sensibilities. They made sure everyone knew that she had been educated at the University of Virginia and they wanted to bring her in to testify on the lack of reliability of the evidence. However, they wanted her as an expert witness, and the prosecution objected because she never had done any fingerprint analysis, so
she couldn't be an expert on that. She had been doing an extensive study wool and analysts across the country, but that's not the same thing, and so she was not allowed to testify.
And so that was was out a huge blow to the defense. Obviously they had planned for that. Yeah, a big Keith Barts. Yeah.
So they had two big defeats in the second trial. I mean the first trial is they had a chance of winning, and it was there because they spread around so much as much reasonable that as they could by pointing to other people, and they didn't survive that. So it's no wonder that once they couldn't do that and couldn't get their other backdoor option in and they they just didn't have a whole lot of hope.
Is it an interesting and unique where you see a super flub Like you talked about how the journals got to be exhibits Again, I'm not quite sure how that could happen, But then the jury gets to read those, so there's inadvertent oops. Really helps in the case that they should have won in the first place. Really, for everybody concerned, it.
Was just simple human errors. Simply the journals were in the courtroom. They were being stored as an exhibit, an exhibit for demonstration purposes. Only then there's evidence exhibits. Once it's been formally intered as evidence, then the jury can see it. When it's just been interested, it entered sort of as show and tell. The jewelry can't see it, you know, they can't examine it afterwards. So it was just a simple slip up in what belonged in which box.
And you can see how really, when you think about all the exhibits stuff that the court clerk has to deal with, and how sometimes they're being numbered and tossed in so fast, how easy it would be to get something put into the wrong box because they ain't up Usually with both these trials, boxes and boxes of exhibits and reports and all sorts of evidence just end it up in the wrong place.
Very interesting, Well, we won't give the rest of it away. I want to leave a little tidbit for everyone to read in the second trial, because it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting two trials that's for sure, and
it's a big part of your book as well. But it's an amazing portrayal of the characters behind it, especially Joscely and Marcy and sort of the heroes of this book, basically because it takes a lot to put this guy away finally, and so it's a justice does prevail, but it takes a while, doesn't it.
It certainly did this in this case, most definitely, and it just you know, you've got to feel so badly for the victims' family and friends. You know, they suffered such a serious blow in losing someone they cared about so much, and then to have to go through one trial is it's really a torment. But when it stretches to two trials, it's ungodly on them. It's a horrible thing. And I surely would not want to walk in their shoes.
Yeah, certainly. And in the research of this book, of course, you spoke to Joscelyn's friends and tell us about some of the people that you did get a chance, because this really is your knack, is to be able to get to some people and they'll confide in you and so you can get the real draw, real picture and not just you know, newspaper accounts.
One of the people that was just a joy to talk to was Joscelyn's father. He told me just tons and tons of stories about Joscelyn and her sister growing up, far more than I could put in the book. But you know, it was just the law that man had for his daughters was so apparent. And although you could feel his pain when you talk to him, his joy
in having had that daughter was also so obvious. And uh, just listening to her and what she was like as a little girl and as a teenager and as an adult daughter was it was It was just very touching, and uh, you just wish that everybody had a father that cared about them as as much as Jocelyn did. And then another huge help to me was j Justlyn's friend Jennifer, who was ironically introduced to Joscelyn by Wesley, and uh, they they just Wesley said, I think you
too will hit it off, and he was right. They hit it off completely. They were both very athletic and competitive and they had so much fun together and they both loved the little cabin that Jennifer and her husband
had up in the lake in Canada. It was very primitive, and Joscelyn just loved it, and she did a lot of photography, which she had learned from her dad, and she took pictures up there of the beauty of the lake and people gathered around and the little house, and it just to no secondhand Joscelyn earnest through the eyes of her father and her sister and her best friend
was a gift. She was really a special, special woman and we have all lost something a great deal when she was taken from us at such a young age.
Yes, and I want to congratulate you too. I mean, you really do capture the friendship that these women had Masa and Jennifer and Marcy and even people in the office, and that really again it's it says a lot. I mean, it seems cliche, as he was such a wonderful person, but you really do have that in conversations and important events, and just how they they grieved, how they they their friendship was, how they loved each other and how they grieved and how they fought for this person to be
brought to justice. And so it's a you really do paint that a vivid portrayal of these women. And I think that that Jocelyn will not soon be forgotten by these people. And you've done a real I think service by doing this book too, and and sort of the tone and people that know of your work again, now this is isn't it your thirteenth true crime book that you have? This one?
I think so? Yes, yes, a lost track, but yeah, and I was very The wonderful thing was that I did get such nice notes from Joscelyn's sister and from her best friend when the book came out, with how very pleased they were with that I captured Joscelyn's essence. Yeah.
Well, I want to thank you very much, Diane. For those that do the Facebook, would like to be a Facebook friend or or would like to visit your website or find more about this case or other books that you have, can you give us your website and if if your Facebook, if you're trust in.
That, my website is www. Dianefanning dot com and my Facebook is you know, Facebook dot com forward slash Diane dot Fanning. And I also on Facebook have a true crime books page which is you know, Facebook dot com slash true Crime Books, and that's where I have stuff about my true crime books, including updates on any on news stories having to do with the cases I've written about,
and occasionally some other news that gets my attention. So and I love to hear back from people who read my books and and people who hear me on the radio, so I'm glad to take messages anytime.
Well, thanks very much, and for those listening, we've been talking about Undercover of the Night and true story of sex, greed and murder Diane Fanning. Thank you very much. Dan. You have a great evening and I'm sure we'll be talking to you again real soon. Thank you for this interview.
Great thank you, Dan, Bye bye, good good night.