WHISPERS IN THE WILLOWS-George Jared

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journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening. Whispers in the Willows is an anthology style true crime book that chronicles three unsolved murders, a series of death row executions, and the harrowings stories of two hologaust survivors. A twenty two year old college student, Rebecca Gould, vanished from a friend's house September twentieth, two thousand and four, near the town of Melbourne, Arkansas. Her partially clothed, blood and body was found near a rural road not far from the house

a week later. Her case has never been solved. It's been profiled on The Doctor Oz Show and was featured on the Hell and Gone podcast in twenty eighteen. Jareded has written about her case since the day she vanished. There's a glaring amount of evidence in the case that points in several directions, and he has dedicated another chapter about her in his newest work. Amanda Tusing, a twenty year old aspiring veterinarian, left her fiancees home on a

rain soaked night. A few hours later, she would be dead, and her case has baffled law officers for almost twenty years. Karen Johnson Swift was a mother of four that vanished just before Halloween twenty eleven in Dyer's Tennessee. Her body was found in the cemetery a couple of months later. Her killer remains free. Four men who committed unspeakable acts of violence and torture were set to die on death

row in April twenty seventeen. Jared was there for the planned execution and gives a detailed look into one of the darkest places on earth. The book also includes two Holocaust survivors and their tales of survival. The murders they witnessed cannot be imagined. Jared has also written two other two crime books, which Is in West Memphis and The Creek Side Bones. Those books included chapters about the internationally

famous West Memphis three case. Jared wrote more stories about the West Memphis three case than any other journalists in the world, and includes death row interviews with Damian Eccles. The book they were featuring this evening is Whispers in the Willows? Who Killed Rebecca Gould? Who killed the Mandatuzing and Why? With my special guest journalist and author, George Jared. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for green this interview. George Jared, I'm happy to be here.

classes to kind of reach that goal. And recently to that time went around the time that she vanished, she had become engaged to her fiance, Matt, and the night that she disappeared, she was at his house and there was a terrible thunderstorm rolling through the area, and she had decided to go home that night to her parents' house because they lived closer to her college and the town of Dell at that time was about an hour's drive.

preferred sitting position in the car. There was a cold beverage in the console. The car was in perfect mechanical working order when shield wipers were in midslap when they turned it on. There was nothing in the car to indicate that anything violent had happened to her. Everything was in its place in that car except for her.

She was she was compelled to stop her vehicle for some reason, and then you know, maybe somebody held a gun up to her or or did something that would scare her to the point where she would edit the vehicle without trying to fight back.

So they what happened was it was a Sunday after she disappeared, and a couple were out driving near some tributaries of the Saint Francis river and a woman thought she saw a pair of pants floating in the tributary. It turned out not to be a pair of uh, it did turn to be a pair of pants, but there was a body in those pants and it was a man. To test.

and so not a lot of water gets through. But if you don't, if you can't get rid of the mucus plug on your own you can, you will essentially have you will essentially die because you're in the water and you can't get the mucus plug out. So it's basically like drowning. And that's what the autopsy report said. There wasn't a lot of detailed information given out as far as the condition of her body when it was found.

There was a definitive conclusion though that she wasn't raped or sexually assaulted, and she was still it was such a it's odd because she was still wearing the hat on her head when they found her body that she had put on her head when she left her fiance house. So it was just it's just odd.

And then so they started interviewing some people possible people of interest. Of course, you know, the fiance would be automatically. The first one interviewed, and he took multiple polygraphs, and you know, and as I talked to Detective Editor, he you know, he was pretty firm of the fact that that he was not never really considered a suspect ever, because he was he had no motive to do it. He was the first one to immediately notify the family. I mean, she left his house and within two hours

they had found her car. And it takes about an hour to get there, so he only gave her an hour. And you know, then you're driving through a thunderstorm. You know, you've driven through storms before that, you know it could take you a long time to get somewhere. So he was immediately worried and notified her family. So she was eliminated.

The aspect, there was some thought that maybe you know, there's drugs or trafficked in a pretty high rate through there, and so there was some thought that maybe it was a case of mistaken identity and that maybe you know that that some druggies had pulled her over. But the problem is that in a situation like that, you know, I've covered things like that before, typically that's just a gunshot.

You know, they would just shoot someone, they wouldn't be going through all the trouble of you know, taking him out to the middle of nowhere and throwing him into the bayu.

The thing that I think even now, in one other detail I might need to mention to your listeners that we haven't discussed yet. One other detail was found on her body, and that in her front pocket of her genes was her life right. And so I think you can logically deduce from everything that we know about what happened to Mandy that that there was some type there was either a police officer or someone impersonating a police officer who was responsible for stop here.

happened again. So and the guy that the original blue light rapists had been in prisoned for a couple of years. But I think that there was a lot of people. There's a big reticence for people to say that an actual police officer did this for obvious reasons. You know, you don't want to make a call like that if it's not true, for sure. But the problem is is that all the motivations for a blue someone impersonating that blue light rapist, well he didn't do any of those things.

So there had to be another motivation, certainly.

so pretty early on, you know. But again we go back to even just the police reports from that time in that area, there was no no one was reporting, you know, anybody being stopped by somebody using lights like that. No one had seen anything like it. So I, you know, the most likely scenario is that she was stopped by a police officer.

any information about this guy? Well, I started researching another murder case that he was might have been connected to, and almost immediately I started getting messages from just scores of people, women who say that they had been harassed by him at night along that same stretch of highway, and I mean, the number of messages was just it was unbelievable, I mean, and so it got to a point,

and you know, and I tell people this. You know, obviously you can't trust a b lot of the things you read on social media posts, but just the sheer number of people who contacted me, you can still form a conclusion. At the very least, there was a thought in that part of the world that he was harassing

to my motors at night. And he also had this connection to a murder twenty years previous where a woman had been taken out of her car and shot and left on the side of the road, and so there was a thought that maybe, you know, he might be involved. And eventually he was released from his duties as a deputy with the Craiger k Sheriff's Apartment.

And literally there were you know, a couple of times before he died, were literally officers tried to go into his into the hospital room to try to get him to confess to it before he passed on, but he didn't.

ditch the next day not far from the house. And then within a I don't know, probably twenty four hour period, he had confessed to her a murder, gave some details that actually were somewhat accurate to a degree. But I always explained to people, you know, if I tell you that they found somebody, you know in a river, you know, dead, you know, it's pretty could you could just guess some of the details, you know, just based on just regular experience.

So this guy languished in jail for eight or nine months, and then they found one sperm cell on her body, and it didn't match him. It matched another neighbor who had come early from work. And this guy had kids that were her age and played with her, and he had obviously has no explanation as to why his sperm cell was on her. So eventually the murder charges were dropped against a seventeen year old, and eventually this other guy,

pretty sharp the third was convicted. And I included it because up until the sperm cell is tested, everybody knew. Everybody thought it was this other guy. And so to be fair to mister Williams and his family, you know, he was never convicted in a court of law, so he deserves, you know, that much. But also he deserves that much respect to that degree. But also it's I also wanted to write about Amanda's case because no one's

ever been named as a suspect or murdering. He's been early twenty years and she deserves she deserves justice too.

four of them were stayed. But then Liddell Lee, you know, who had been accused of killing several women, raping them. His crimes are pretty heinous, pretty brutal. He finally was set to die in April of twenty seventeen. He was going to be the first one. You know, I went down. I went down to cover it, you know. And of course, this whole thing made international news because you know, killing eight people in a span of about two weeks was

just about unprecedented in US history. And you know, there was a lot of celebrities who you know, opposed it. Uh Damien Nichols from the West Memphis three, you know, and I write about that. He came back to Arkansas because he would have been one of the eighth He would have been one of those that would have been executed in that batch. And Johnny Depp came with him and spoke at a rally in Little Rock, just trying to stop this from happening. But so now Ladell Lee's

execution did go forward. I tell people this, Neil Gorsich had just been appointed to the US Supreme Court. He cast a siding vote on the last stay to save Ladell Lee's life. So had Neil Gorsich been confirmed two weeks later, these guys might have several of them might have survived, so it's literally timing. So I mean, for the it's one of the I think it's one of the one or two first votes that Neil Gorssea Jeffer

cass is Supreme Court Justice. So anyway, the execution went off, of course, there were you know, just rallies all around the prison and people just really upset, you know, her anti death penalty. And I tell people, it's hard for me sometimes because I you know, sometimes I think it's it's wrong for a government to be executing its own people. And then I go and I have to talk to family members of these horribly murdered people, and it's it's

it's tough. I mean, you hear some of the some of these stories and then you hear you hear them or see them in the courtroom having to hear what happened to their loved one. I mean, I watched your grandmother one time, and she was a very very old woman, and I mean I never saw a lady run out of a courtroom as fast as she did when they started talking about what happened to her granddaughter. I mean,

it was just brutal. So that's literally an issue I can before or against literally within two breaths.

And she was like, okay, welly don't you just come over to my house? And she said, okay, I will hear in a little bit. Well, she didn't get the chance. She he broke into her house and he took I believe it was like a tire sumper. It's one of those tire checkers. And he literally beat this woman to death and he stole three hundred dollars from her so he could go pay his rent a center bill. And yeah,

just unbelievable. And well, a neighbor watched him go into the house and then come back out, so the neighbor notified the police, and so they were able to catch him pretty early. And one thing about it is her DNA and some other stuff. He had also been involved in at least two other murders, one involving a prostitute and then another woman who was kidnapped out of her house in front of her young child and she was raped and murdered. They found her body in a like

a trailer house somewhere. And those cases were years before that, and so you know, that was back in a time when you know, you don't have DNA and all the fancy forensics we have now to solve cases like that. So later on they were able to tie him to those other cases through forensics.

And then he's linked to other murders. As you say, tell us about these stays of execution and just everyone's reaction when these happen. Of course, we know these protests are going on. There's two camps, completely diverse ideas. Tell us more about your experience on death row.

there is definitely a level of anticipation. And I wrote about this It's really strange being in that room because you've got all these journalists literally all over the world, NN, BBC, New York Times, everybody's there. And when it the appointed time comes, when the execution hour arrives, you know, they take the the witnesses who are going to witness the execution, the journalism witnesses, and they take you know, they take them out. So when they get taken out, you're like, Okay,

it's getting closer. You know, we're within maybe a half an hour of the execution actually happening. And then a spokesman will come in and say, you know, you know, a circuit court somewhere has stayed the execution for another hour or two hours to consider some matters, and I just you know, I talked to journalist from CNN and I talked about her in my book, Jake Garcia, and she just said, this isn't just a really bad way

to do this. I mean, how should even as horrible and heinous as Ladell Lee was in his life, he shouldn't be sitting there on every hour wondering if he's going to live or die in the next few minutes. I mean, but when they decide to perform one of these executions. All those other appeals need to have been it needs to be completely exhausted and then have the execution. I don't know how we can get to a point where the system can operate that way, because eventually, what

you're doing is you're torturing him the whole time. And you're not just torturing him, you're torturing the victim's family because they, you know, a lot of them want to see justice done too. And then if you know, and then then they feel like he gets denied, if you know, if this guy somehow gets a stay. So I don't know. I just think that there's got to be a better way to do any.

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No reports of any type of domestic violence or anything that I'm aware of, and so, you know, it's kind of one of those situations where they still had the two girls. You know, they're obviously gonna have to sell her house and do all these other stuff, going to get divorced. Well, on October thirtieth of that year, she decided to go to a party with a friend and they go to this party where her oldest daughter had

gone to stay the night at a friend's house. Well, she called and said she didn't want to stay, and she asked her mama she could come pick her up, and so she did and they went back to the house and the daughter reported, you know, she told the police that when she went to better mom is around two o'clock in the morning, her mom was laying right next to her. Well, the next morning, Karen's cars found

about a mile or so from the house. And I believe I'm run about this look appears that maybe there was like a nail in one of the tires, one of the tires was flat or something like that. And again the car was in perfect mechanical working order, and she was gone, vanished.

blue eyed. She matched kind of a description of several women who had died in Western Tennessee around that time. You'll probably remember the Holly Bobo case. That was pretty big, and so there was kind of a thought process that maybe there was a transient serial killer out, you know, targeting women with blonde hair and blue eyes who kind of fit this athletic build, you know, that type of description.

So that was floating around for a while. Well then now two months, no less than two months, about a month and a half after she disappeared, they found her body. At a cemetery about eight miles away. Her body had been placed under some kudzu bushes, and when the bushes died off as the seasons changed, parts of her body were exposed, and so they knew officially she had been murdered.

have just been charged them. But anyway, I included, you know, just the gruesome description about how they this story came out that they had kidnapped Holly Bobo from her house and they drugged her, and they grew and they killed her. But when they went to go down her body and they were going to gut her and she sort of woke up and had to shoot her day. And so the story isn't super clear. A couple of at least one guy that was convicted in it so that he

didn't do it, he had no connection to it. But I included that story because the honest truth is, we don't really have any suspects in Karen's case, and so this was a prevailing sery or thought that there were other cases too of women disappearing in Western Tennessee that fit that description. So that's kind of why I included that.

and noticed this guy. Because what the deal was is she was getting ready to go to nursing school that morning and he looked. The brother looks out the window around the time that she's leaving and notices that she's being confronted by a guy. And and then he they well, he thinks it's her boyfriend, and so he didn't think

anything of it. Well, then she's she's led off into the woods and then gone, and he called his mother, or his mother called the house at that time, and he said, well, there's this guy with Holly, and the mother immediately told him you need to call the police right now and go get her, go get a gun and shooting and wherever this guy is. And yeah, and so, because the story was just kind of incoherent, you know, from his from the brother's standpoint, he was a suspect

for a while. So is it the Hollybumbo case is a really strange case.

It's hard to get them, you know, if you if you go over there, it's it's almost impossible to meet with anybody, you know, a prosecutor or the sheriff who is overseeing the case. And it's just it's been it's been frustrating. I'm not gonna lie because you know, the case is, you know, eight nine years old now, no one's been convicted. You know, she this woman did have four kids. I'm sure you know her her grade school daughters, are you know high school age now, and there's nothing

been released. There's never been a suspect named nothing. You know, a lot of fingers have pointed at the you know, the the dad, you know, her husband, and you know David and you know, but there's no proof that he did it. So I mean, we're just there's an old, sudden term up against it. Right now.

and that's our belief. And hopefully one of these days I'll get to be I'll get the chance to sit down and talk with her and we can go over that a little bit more.

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joinhney dot com slash murder. That's join Honey dot com slash murder. Now, George, we were talking about the next part of your book and you felt an important and I agree with you to put a couple stories in a couple harrowing stories of survivors of the Holocaust. Tell us a little bit about tell us a little bit about Henry Greenbaum and his family page and all the children. Tell us as you do in the book about Henry Greenbaum.

kids when it happened that they don't really remember. That was not Henry Greenbaum. He told probably the most tragic story I've ever heard out of a Holocaust survivor, which is saying a lot. Henry was a typical kid growing up in Poland. He had a a mom, dad, bunch of sisters, had some brothers, you know, played soccer, just a regular guy. And then of course he was probably I think he was tennish, maybe eleven when Germany invaded on September first, nineteen thirty nine, and so within a

few months him and his family are living. Actually his father passed away right before the invasion suddenly, and then his uh. But he what he did is he got his kids jobs working at a munitions factory because they knew the invasion was coming and it was just a matter of time. So he thought that there was a belief in the Jewish community there that if he if you worked in the munitions factory, you would be spared

because you'd be seen as a valuable worker. So the family, you know, worked in the munitions factory there inter near the ghetto in Warsaw. Well. Then slowly but surely you know these people as the years progressed, they were meted out to all these you know, concentration camps, and you know, Henry watched I believe it was at least murdered, basically murdered, you know. I kind of a couple of them died from disease that it was caused by the conditions in

the camps. But his through Phage, is probably the most absolutely horrific. So at this point, you know, his mom and his sister, who had two children, He watched them be placed in a line which obviously they were headed to the crematoria, you know, within and within minutes they were going to die. And so he'd watched this happen and then him and his sister, Phage decided they were

going to leave. And so Page had talked to a Jewish police officer in this camp that they were in, and they were going to make a run for it, and so there were some surgeons outside the camp who were supposed to turn the lights off so they could make it through. Well, the lights did go off, and so Phage and Henry and this police officer they went to this place in the fence where they had dug

a hole. Well, then the lights suddenly came on. The reason the lights ro off wasn't because the power been cut. It was because there were Allied bombers in the area and so they were shutting them down so they wouldn't notice the target area. So the lights come on, the bullets start flying. Henry his shot in the head and he runs towards the female barracks. He's pretty sure his sister got shot at this point, wasn't completely sure. Well,

he goes to female barracks. They don't want to let him in because they tell him if you come in, if we let you in here, we'll all die. They'll kill all of us right now. And so finally he got to one female barracks, so they were able to put some rags on his head to kind of cleaned up his wound, and so he was able to make it back to his barrack. And so the next morning during her roll call, he's out there and he's looking for a sister, and then he finally sponsored she had gone.

She had made it across just across the fence line, and all he could see across the fence line was her blonde hair, and that was in and literally when he's telling me stories. He was eighty three when I interviewed him, and I mean, it's almost impossible. Like I read that chapter that I wrote about Henry. I taught a creative writing class for the teacher's co op this summer and I just read them that chapter to kind of break up the class time, and literally the tears

in that room were everywhere. I mean, it was just it's awful. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of Holocaust survivors. Every one of the stories is bad. His was just the worst.

out some of these concentration camps like the Crematorius. You know, they were bombing a lot of uh, these places, and a good for instance is Auschwitz itself, because Auschwitz there was a major there were major factories around Auschwitz that those concentration camp, the people in the concentration camp were working in, and several of those factories were bombed well, and a couple of them, you know, you know, they were very close to that concentrated it was only a

few miles away. And I always wonder why they didn't just take up the crematorious. I mean, I know that some menaces and people would be killed, but then some people were being killed in the factories when they were getting bombed too, so that couldn't have been what stopped them. I almost want to think Dan that the reason that the the the Allies didn't go to the links to stop to I really think that they wanted the trop

They wanted the full scope of the atrocity. I think they wanted it to come out like they wanted they wanted to, They wanted the images. They wanted people to see just how truly horrific this whole thing was.

town that they were in. She goes back to the house and then she just liked several other women we've talked about today, she just vanishes and I find out about Okay, I find out that she's missing. On a Wednesday,

I head down to the sheriff's apartment. When I get there, she's got several of her sisters out there, and her mother, Shirley's there, and then doctor Larry Gould her father's out there, and they hand me a missing poster and I just started jotting down notes and basically, you know, she was in college. Everything I just told you.

On Monday, September twenty seventh, I was at the courthouse early in the morning there in Melbourne, and a lady was talking about there being a smell near her home down this very rural road and there were buzzards in the air, and so I went out there, and of course Rebecca's body was found out there. She was in a T shirt and panties. She had been out there for about a week, and she'd been missing a week. So then, you know, then the focus turns to trying

to find her killer. Well, I wrote about her case periodically through the years, and little the police would never release anything in her case. You are very tight lipped right about the investigation.

There was no stemens found, no pubic hairs her body. Her radiological reports came back they were totally there were no bone bruising on any part of her body. Her breasts weren't were totally normal. There was nothing there, So there was no proof of the sexual assault to this one and all and the other. You know, one detail is the fact that she was wearing her panties and a shirt when they found her. You know, they're not gonna killer's not going to go to the trouble of

putting her clothes back on everything. So that kind of eliminated, you know, several potential possible suspects. They didn't find any drugs in her system, and interestingly, in the house when they went into the house the next day. See Casey the boyfriend. He didn't go home that day after work. He went over to a friend's house and then they went out to a nearby town to watch a movie

and go eat dinner. And all this other stuff, and then he went back to that house and he stayed the night there, which was something he never did well. The next day, after the family has contacted the sheriff, they go to Casey's work, because he's gone straight back to work the next morning still hasn't gone by his own house. And when they get to the house, everything looked fairly normal. There were two little dogs in the house, a Pomeranian named Lady was and that was Rebecca's dog,

and they were perfectly fine. They had messed on the floor, that was about it. Then they start. The officer starts looking around some more and he notices some bloody sheets and the washing machine. He notices the mattresses and flipped. He also notices that the pillows, the bloody pillows on the bed are stuffed underneath the bed. And there's one item missing out of the house strangely, and it is

a loose piano leg. And there was only a few people who knew that the piano leg would come loose, and so but it was gone according to all reports, and so more than likely she died from one or two blows to the head from that piano legs Her closes are in the house, her keys were in the house, or her car was there, of course, And you know then I've got a couple of dogs, especially my little one. She if you, if you killed me and drugs dragged my body out the door, She's gonna follow me, and

she's gonna be out. You're gonna find her outside, or she's gonna be dead because she'll bark. You know, she'll go nuts on you. So to me automatically had to assume that the person who killed Rebecca was familiar with her dog and she felt comfortable enough to be around them in her panties and are underwear. She wasn't raped, there were no drugs or alcohol found in her system. So obviously, from my vantage point, I thought it was a love interest of some kind. Well, I wrote about

this case for years. They the police kept saying that her you know sort of ex boyfriend Casey, was not a suspect. He had an ironclad alibi. Well, in twenty sixteen, I wrote about her case in my first book, which is in West Memphis, which is mostly about the West Memphis three, but I included a chapter about her and I reconnected with her father, doctor Larry Gould, and so we started, you know, writing and trying. He had a

couple of private investigators that he had dealt with. We haven't had a documentary filmmaker at one point who was really interested in maybe doing a documentary about her case. Well, we would get together at his house and all of us would be sitting there and we would have like a board of potential suspects, you know, up and we would go through all the facts in the case. And you know, he always kept coming back to Casey and I was like, no, doc, there's no way, you know,

he's been cleared by the police, not him. We're gonna have to go in another direction. But he always kind of was in the back of his mind. Well, about two or three months after this whole thing started, we kind of hit a wall again. Someone had written anonymous letter detailing the murder. But the letter was very well written,

but it didn't match the autopsy report at all. So I didn't take you know, I wrote about it, but it was just more of a let's just get this story out there to try to get the killer to do to change behavior or something like that. Well that didn't happen, so I thought, you know, I'm gonna reach out to Casey. I'd interviewed him a couple times before. You know, he always would take a call from me, was friendly, you know, never had any problems. Well, I called the Sonic where he used to work, to try

to get contact information from him. Because it's a small town. I figured somebody there. I know he didn't work there anymore, but I knew somebody would have contact info for him. Well, unbelievably, his wife was there, his now wife, Yeah, And I talked to her, very nice, pleasant woman. We spent probably you know, five to ten minutes chatting on the phone. He had read the chapter I've written in my first book about the case, and I you know, I said, you know, my instinct is to think that, no, he

didn't do this. The police obviously have some very powerful alibi evidence for him because Dan, as you can just tell from what I've told you, this is this, this unbelievably points towards a love interest doing this. So I call. She gave me a cell phone number and said contact him through Facebook sometimes when don't get a good signal

at her house. Because they still live in the house where Rebecca was murdered, still sleep in the same bedroom and so I called him, called him, called him, called him, left messages, left Facebook messages, never would answer. So at that point, I'm starting to get a little suspicious about something, you know, because this is a change in behavior. So then I get a hold of the wife again. I'm like, hey, I've been trying to get ahold of Casey. He won't

ever call me back. And she basically said, he doesn't want to talk you, We don't want to talk to you. Don't never contact us again, and she pretty much hung up the phone on me. And mind you, up until this point, I had never written a single single word negatively about Casey mcculluugh. I had never written a word about him, and so that really shocked me. And I was really that then I started getting suspicious about something.

Didn't know what. But so then I in my second book, I wrote another chapter and I expressed some of those concerns in that chapter, you know, basically because of his change behavior. Well, then a few months after that book came out, I got an email from a woman named Catherine Townsend. She was a reporter for the Discovery Channel, and she wanted to do a story about one of the other murder cases I covered in the Creekside Bones.

And then she said that she also wanted to do a podcast here Revegga's case, and so I agreed that she came to Arkansas. I interviewed with her three or four times, and so then and in the fall of twenty eighteen, the Hell and Gone podcast came out as

an eight part series and it detailed Rebecca's case. Well, as this case is getting you know, retold, the Arkansas State Police start coming under you know, some heat for you know, not you know, not having garnered as a conviction in this case, or getting somebody arrested, and so all sorts of details start filtering to the surface that

are just kind of hard to believe. For instance, he went out with this guy, went out with five of his friends that night, and two of the statements that were given by two of his friends, the police actually sent those statements back to them to review them so that they could interview them again, which I couldn't believe, I mean, and but the statements were damning because in the statements they both said that he was already using the terms missing to describe her, and they both said

that he was in love with her, and they couldn't believe he wasn't running out the door to sign her. So right there, that's an alarm bell. Alarm bell is going off like crazy. So Danielle I mentioned her in the book. She's the sister her and I, you know,

we've become friends. I'll message her, talk to her periodically. Well, Danielle calls the owner of the Sonic where or the former owner of the Sonic where Casey works, and asked him if there was video of him work today, because that was the whole thing, was that there was video evidence that Casey was at work. And the owner said no, they missed getting that footage by three days or by a day, because it was one of those systems that recorded over itself every seventy two hours. So there's no

video of him at work. And so at that point there's no such thing as an iron cloud alibi. So at this point I'm getting real, this whole thing is just not looking right to me. And then I started hearing that the police had developed a theory early on that she was murdered that afternoon. Well, the only problem I have was that is is that inside the house they found a sandwich biscuit and coffee in the microwave. Rebecca was supposed to pick her sister up at noon,

and she was in a T shirt and panties. A stack of folded clothes were next to the bed, or on the bed next to bed, somewhere around the bed, and it was her clothes. The only other thing missing out of the house that they've never been able to find her, they've never admitted to finding it's her suitcase. So it's pretty obvious just from these, you know, minor details. And her sister, by the way, told me that mid morning that it was very common for Rebecca to take a shower.

qualified person. Even she did an analysis of the maggot activity in the autopsy report, and she worked at the Medical Examiner's Office in New York City for several years, since she was very familiar with all this stuffs. She teaches forensics at the American Military Institute, and even she said, yeah, this happened. It's not an exact or precise science, but she said, more than likely this happened before noonday.

thought was very very interesting. I don't think we stressed it enough, but I think you do in the book is that these people that he spent the night with, that he didn't go home, which was again, he wasn't that type of person typically he stayed out at these people's homes. They were surprised that he was wanted to come over there. So as a surprising, untypical behavior in a couple different ways, just coincidental that he wouldn't go back to his house, where again his girlfriend had gone

back to the house after she dropped him off. There was all that evidence that she had just gone to a corner store to get something biscuit, like you say, in a coffee and was in her panties. There's more than circumstantial evidence, it seems, especially if you say there isn't a solid alibi, then you were mistaken when you thought the reason why he was in charge is because he was cleared.

you know, because there is that evidence doesn't exist. And here's the thing, Dan, this is what you would have to believe if you're gonna this is this is the kill. This is Rebecca Gould's killer. The killer first of all, would have to know where this place is it's out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm talking the middle

of nowhere. And where her body was found. It was found at the end of an ancient gravel road that was used as a timber road years before, and it connects up to Highway nine, which connects Melbourne to a town called Mountain View. And so literally, and my friend Jennifer Buckolts wrote about this, So the killer left Casey's house, gets on this gravel road, which is which starts about a mile from his house, and the killer literally is is going down these creek beds and all those other places.

Her body's found at the very end of the road, just before you get back up onto the main highway. It's down an embankment. So what happened to the killer was he was looking for a good place to dump her and literally that was his last option before getting it back up onto the main highway with a body in the back of a truck or in a trunk. So psychologically the killer had to let the body go.

And whoever the killer was, this was a route that was out of town, so it was a route that you know, you know, if it was somebody you know who worked in town, they wouldn't have to go past it. And she said that's another psychological queue too, because the killer doesn't want to have to relive the stress of driving by that body every day. So this was an out of the way place. You'd have to know this. Well,

then the other elements come in. Okay, so the person who killed her more than likely killed her with this loose piano leg. So how did they know that piano leg was loose? Because I don't know about you. I've been in a lot of houses with pianos. Yeah, and I just thought, I mean, it's just it's bizarre. Yeah, right, I mean, you're not doing that. And then you go

to the motivations of the killer. Well, if one of the detectives has told people that he thinks that there's another guy who's a suspect, and the reason he should be a suspect is because he was sexually obsessed with Rebecca, which there's no evidence of. There's no evidence that he ever even was to the house, and when he was interviewed, he said he didn't even know who Casey McCullough was or where he lived. So there's no evidence plenty towards him,

and there's no evidence plenty towards the sex assault. Well, there was cash found in the house, so you know, there was some rumor going around that Rebecca owed money for drugs or whatever. Well, there were no drugs found in her system at all. There's cash in the house,

so how can that be a motivation. Well, then there was another motivation that was talked about, which actually I subscribed to for a long time just because I thought Casey couldn't be a suspect, and that was that this was a rage killing by a female, you know that because who would clean up the mess? You know, So

I thought I'd be a female. Well then, you know, but there were parts of it that didn't make any sense once I got a copy that I topched report, you know, because if if these if it was a female or females that killed her, she didn't have a lot more wounds to her body. You know, this ain't gonna be And Rebecca was feisty. Everybody, every single human being I've ever talked to about that woman said she was feisty, that she would fight you, she would she

she wouldn't let somebody rape her. She she you'd have to take her out. And so now you've got the situation where there's no motive, no clear motive, now unless there was some emotional connection to her that was ending. And so you got to believe that you know, somebody, you know, drove to that house out of no nowhere, just happened to find that piano leg while while she's awake and looking right at him. By the way, this

is a very small house. And then this person hits her in the head twice, cleans up, throws the sheets in the washing machine, cleans up the baseboards, wives blood off the back porch, drags her body off the back porch, which is surrounded by a fence with a gate, and then locks the doors behind them because the house was locked up the next day when the police arrived. And

here's the other detail that's just simply unbelievable. He admits he went back to the house before he went to work the next morning, and so all of her stuff, everything in the house.

can automatically assume that there's none of that. And there's also another woman who was a prime suspect in the case or not never named as a suspect, but she was interviewed multiple times. You can also deduce to her forensic no forensic evidence connecting her to the crime scene was found there either. And the lead detective in the case has told doctor Gould before that there's virtually no

forensic evidence in this case at all. And he told him this on the day this lead detective he had, he snuck into a book signing of mine and he he said, his quote to me was he wanted to figure out what I knew about this case. When I told him, you know, next time, just you know, give me a call and I'll tell you.

of your involvement in this. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Whispers in the Willows, who killed Rebecca Gould, who killed Amanda puzzling and why? Thank you very much, George. Is there a Facebook page or website for people that might want to take a look at your other books or these other cases and find out more information?