Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
DNA Breakthrough: The Hunt for Angela McCraw Hester
Unearth the extraordinary twists and turns that define this case, including a bizarre link to a polyamorous pirate community and the unexpected clues hidden in Google location data. Discover how the team navigated a complex web of suspects and sifted through inconclusive leads until a breakthrough DNA match pointed them to the suspect. The tale takes a gripping turn as we explore the ex-husband's suspicious actions and the revealing behavior of his new wife, leading to a dramatic arrest in Idaho.
Experience the emotional toll of investigating such haunting crime scenes and learn about the therapeutic methods used to manage these intense experiences. Through a blend of personal anecdotes and detailed procedural breakdowns, this episode underscores the methodical and often arduous journey to uncover the truth. Listen as we unravel the story step-by-step, offering an in-depth perspective on the challenges and triumphs faced by those who work tirelessly to solve violent crimes.
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Well, hey, before we get into the show, I got to tell you a secret. So, instagram, at Murders to Music, you can actually follow this podcast. You can follow the audios, you can follow the videos, you can have links to YouTube. Did you know that Murders to Music is on YouTube and you can often watch the episodes, you can see the video, where I might have some additional video or pictures. I don't talk about it much on the show because people listening can actually see, but check us out on YouTube and on Instagram. Murders to Music Like us, follow us, find us and join the conversation. Now let's get to tonight's episode. It's a good one. Hello everybody, and welcome back to episode nine of the Murders to Music podcast. I'm your host, aaron, and I thank you so much for coming back for another week.
Speaker 1:So tonight's story and episode is going to be a little bit different. I'm going to share a murder investigation. We're going to break it down to the anatomy, the details of a murder investigation and how murders are solved. At least within my four walls of my agency, during the time I spent as a homicide and major crimes detective for my police department. This is an experience that you may never really get to see what the inside looks like the good, the bad and the ugly. I want to walk you through that, but if I had just told you the chronological steps of how to work an investigation and what to look for and consider, it might be very boring. It might not be something that you could really wrap your mind around or visualize. So because of that, I'm going to tell you and break down one of my murder investigations Further, if you find this case interesting because there are some twists and turns in this case, if you find this case interesting because there are some twists and turns in this case, if you find this case interesting, then I'm going to give you another resource where you can find out more about it. You can see videos, interviews, media news clips, et cetera, and I'll point you towards that at the end of this episode.
Speaker 1:Now I have to lay some ground rules. Not every murder investigation is ran the same way. Generally, we have an approach to it. We being me and the team of detectives that I worked with we have an approach and a style and a way that we do murder cases, and we do them that way because it's been successful for us. You see, a lot of cities have a high unsolved violent crime rate. That was not the case with my city. Our murder solvability rate was well over 90%. There's a good chance that if you were killed in our city we were going to solve your crime. So it's a good place to go and get killed, I guess, depending on which way you look at it. If somebody in your family was going to get killed or violently assaulted or raped or a felony child abuse, there's a good chance that you would want it to occur in our city and our city police department to be assigned to it. Because there's a good chance we're going to solve that and find the people responsible. We don't get paid to lose. We don't get paid to play games. We don't get paid to not provide details and to turn over every stone that we can to find the people responsible for these violent crimes. In fact, you're counting-ridden city that at times has been compared to the violent crime rate of Compton per capita. It took a team of people. So I want to explain to you how we work Now before I go any further.
Speaker 1:For anybody out there watching this, I need to throw this disclaimer out. The purpose of me doing this is to explain the process and the anatomy of a murder while talking about a real-life investigation. If you were involved in this real-life investigation prosecution, defense, witness, victim's family, whoever it may be Anything that I have said, read, written or testified to in the past on this case, that is the gospel. Anything that I say in this podcast. I may change names, dates, minor details. There may be things out of order. Some of that's intentional and, frankly, some of that is because I've been separated from law enforcement for two years and reliving these things is not something I really want to do, and I say that because this is a case that has haunted me over the years. This is a case that I've brought home with me and I'll explain to you, when we get to that point, how that has occurred. So please don't come back and try to shove anything up my ass that I've said, read or written in the past that is different from what I'm saying in this episode, because I know there's defense attorneys out there that are willing to do it. Don't be that person. Find the point of this episode.
Speaker 1:Here we go. So as a homicide detective, you are on call and we have a rotation. We have certain people who are allowed in our agency to lead homicides and they have certain times where they're on call and, essentially, if a violent crime occurs, their phone will ring and they have to respond to that. I'm going to take you back to June of 2016. I was on call and at about 3 o'clock in the morning, 3.02 in the morning, my cell phone rang. Morning, my cell phone rang and I woke up from a dead sleep and I was told that there had been an assault I believe it came in originally as an assault within the city and that officers were on scene, there was a female victim who was badly injured and they needed detectives to respond. So with that information and that the victim was on our way to the hospital, so with that information, I got out of bed, got dressed and I started in towards the police department. Now this is where the investigation anatomy starts.
Speaker 1:I was assigned as the lead detective in this case, meaning this case is my responsibility from moment one till the day this closes in court. That could be tomorrow, probably not, or it could be 10 years down the road, but whatever that is, it's my job to investigate the case today, to answer questions and close loopholes tomorrow. No-transcript, I'm the only one in court swearing to tell the truth, the old truth, nothing but the truth. The defense attorney's job is to create confusion and doubt in the minds of the judge and the jury. Create confusion and doubt in the minds of the judge and the jury. It's their job to take bits of the truth and twist them to their benefit. It's their job essentially to get their client off or a severe reduction in charges. Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. That is the defense attorney's motto. So I was assigned as the lead detective in this case.
Speaker 1:I respond to the scene. The scene in this case is an apartment complex. It's a multi-story, multi-unit apartment complex. It's in my city. It's about three quarters of a mile, maybe a mile from my police department, probably three quarters of a mile from my police department. It's in the heart of the city. It's surrounded by other homes. It's surrounded by other apartment buildings. It's surrounded by a plaid pantry convenience store. That's 100 yards away from the victim's front door. There are transients in the area. There's a trail system that runs behind the victim's apartment and that trail system is a home for transients, thoroughfare for transients and other ne'er-do-gooders.
Speaker 1:When I arrived on scene. I approached the front door and was immediately told that I needed to come around and enter through the rear of the apartment, and the reason being is responding officers had observed some latent footprints stamped in blood on the linoleum just inside the threshold of the front door. So as I get there, I see a front door. I notice that the door is intact. It's not broken. The jam's not broken, the handle's not broken, it hasn't been forced. The door's a broken, the jam's not broken, the handle's not broken, it hasn't been forced. The door's a jar. There's, uh, linoleum. Just inside the threshold. On the linoleum are some thin blue medical type sheets like you would see maybe cover up somebody with if they're laying on a hospital gurney. I think you've probably seen what I'm talking about. So that is what I see.
Speaker 1:I make there's crime scene tape up. We use yellow crime scene and red crime scene tape. Yellow crime scene tape means it's an outer perimeter, this is the outside of what our immediately known crime scene is. Red crime scene tape means that this is where the crime occurred or we're getting very close to where the crime occurred. In this case there was crime scene tape up, both red and yellow, when I made my way around to the rear of the apartment it's a ground level unit there was a sliding door and there was a small wooden fence six foot wooden fence that encapsulated an outdoor porch area. Well, that fence had been torn down and ripped out, and I was told that was ripped out by the police so they could gain access with the ambulance and the medical crew to get the victim out, because they wanted to preserve the evidence located at the front of the apartment. Wanted to preserve the evidence located at the front of the apartment. There wasn't a whole lot known at this time.
Speaker 1:I could tell from my observations of the back of the apartment that this was a one-bedroom apartment. It had a one-bedroom and it had a living room area and a kitchen and a bathroom. It was about 600 square feet, 700 square feet. There was a sliding doors to the rear. The rear of the apartment faced another building of apartments. So it would be plausible that anybody in another apartment building could look in and observe what is occurring at the back of the victim's unit, at the back of the victim's unit.
Speaker 1:Now, the thing that I noticed that was strange is remember I said there was one bedroom. Well, the bedroom looking at the back of the apartment was to the right of the sliding door there was a window, a standard two-pane sliding window, approximately three foot by three foot, something like that by three foot, something like that. It was about 50 inches off the ground and hanging out of that window by a cord, by the power cord, was an air conditioning unit. It was dangling straight down under the force of gravity and it was presumably still plugged in inside the apartment because the cord was suspending it off the ground. Underneath that air conditioning unit I could see a cinder block. It was a gray cinder block. It had been turned up on end and I could see that window had been slid open.
Speaker 1:Based on just my observations, I was able to deduce and I should say the law enforcement said that's the way it was when they arrived I should say that based on my observations I could deduce that this was a likely point of entry into the apartment by the assailant. Assailant brought or found a cinder block locally to the crime scene, tipped it on end, used it as a stepping stool to get up to the window, to slide the window open, remove the air conditioning unit, climb through the window to effect the assault. So when I made my way into the sliding door, into the sliding door into that apartment, by this time we'd checked to make sure there was nobody else there and that there was nothing else we needed to be concerned with. There was a legal process that went on through application of a search warrant. That was applied for and we were in the process of obtaining a search warrant. Actually, we had to obtain that before I made entry into the apartment for any extent of time. Once we received the search warrant then that opened up the ability for us to continue this investigation. At about four o'clock in the morning I'd been on scene now for about 30 minutes and at four o'clock in the morning I received a phone call telling me the victim had died and this was now a homicide investigation.
Speaker 1:I remember calling my sergeant and telling him hey, this is what we've got. We've got a crime scene. What I can see inside the apartment is a very bloody crime scene. There's blood everywhere. It literally looks like something was slaughtered in this apartment. There is a bed in the middle of the living room. Imagine a fold-out couch, if you will. Bed, that's what it is. It's in the middle. It's obvious somebody sleeps there. The living room is set up as a bedroom. There's nightstands on the sides of the bed and there is blood everywhere.
Speaker 1:So I told my sergeant that there was a murder, I explained the scene to him and that we needed to activate the major crimes team. The major crimes team, that is where we bring in detectives not only from our agency but from all of our surrounding agencies as well. We bring in DAives, not only from our agency but from all of our surrounding agencies as well. We bring in DAs, district attorneys, and we all come together and we work this as a team. Remember, earlier I said that we have a very high solving rate of our murders and violent crimes and that's because of the effectiveness of our major crimes team. So we alerted the major crimes team and I asked them all to go to the office for a briefing. This is very common In the murder investigation world.
Speaker 1:For us, it's very uncommon for the lead detective to go out to the scene, get eyes on, understand what the circumstances are, those loopholes today for questions tomorrow, and I can't do that effectively without putting my eyes on exactly what is happening. I don't want secondhand information. I don't want to look at somebody's picture and try to infer what the scene looks like. I want to hear what's going on. I want to take a look on the approach and the exit for cameras. I want to smell the smells inside the crime scene. You never know when something like that might come up later and it may be critical evidence, and I would never know it if I just went to the police department and investigated it from behind the desk. So I left that crime scene and I left it under the care and control of our officers and ultimately I was going to have a detective assigned to that crime scene so they could monitor what was going on and secure it. So as I went back to the office, I left some officers at the crime scene and I asked them to canvas the area. I wanted them to knock on doors for all the neighboring apartments. It was obvious police presence there, the news was there, the media was there, the crime scene tape, the circus was in town and I wanted the cops to knock on doors and find out what people knew fresh in the moment. Here's what we learned pretty, pretty quickly, and I was able to take this information back to this meeting that I'm headed to.
Speaker 1:At about 11 o'clock, neighbors heard a thud on the outside of the building, didn't know what it was. They then heard rustling and a commotion and noise. And this isn't one neighbor, this is like half a dozen. They heard sounds of an argument. They heard a woman screaming. Some of the neighbors turned up their music to drown out the sound. Some of them just merely ignored the thuds and the screams and the sounds of people falling at 11, 12, 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning until the cops showed up. Some people turned on their bathroom fans to drown out the sounds. Some people closed their window hoping that the sound would go away. What they didn't do was call the police. So now I'm headed back to the office with all of this information.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I had learned from talking to the officers who responded on scene this is what they told me. They told me they arrived on scene. They found an unlocked front door. Call they got was a person called female called 911 and reported that she had been stabbed and attacked in her apartment. She gave her name, she gave her address and, as she was on the phone with 911, she began agonal breathing and essentially was dying. On the phone with 911. Because the victim was able to have the wherewithal to call the 911 and report her own ultimately murder. Police officers were able to respond and investigate and quickly gain aid. Gain to that victim and get her aid. Now they found that unlocked front door. When they went in, they said they found a large woman, 350 plus pounds, laying on the floor naked, or mostly naked, and she had numerous stab wounds all over her. It appeared that somebody had tried to decapitate her. It appeared that somebody had tried to completely cut off her head. She had severe facial lacerations, essentially ear to the corner of the cheek, on one or maybe both sides, I can't remember. She was in very bad shape. She was unresponsive when they got there and they put her on the ambulance and sent her to the hospital.
Speaker 1:So now we all get to the police department. When we got to the police department, it's very common for us to have an initial briefing and that initial briefing is where we bring everybody together. That's part of that major crimes team and we talk about, I explain to them what I know at that point. This is the first time they're getting information From this point forward. Oftentimes and in this time, a co-lead was assigned to me, meaning that I have the final say in any decisions in this case. However, my co-lead in this case was very short-lived. My co-lead was distracted and was pulled off of the lead position, leaving me to be the sole person leading this investigation. Now I'm only leading the ship that all of my support team is riding on.
Speaker 1:Then we have a person that is our logistics person. They do everything logistical in this case, so they will set schedules, they will keep notes, they will manage leads, they will help make decisions in my absence and the co-leads absence. They are the ones that make sure all the ducks are in a row and that your T's are crossed and your I's are dotted. They spend more time in the war room or in the command center than the leads and co-leads do. They actually have a desk and oftentimes they might not leave there except to go home for weeks or months. This is their. Everything else that they were ever doing as far as case goes is dropped, and this is their number one priority.
Speaker 1:We'll have a search warrant writer Search warrant writers. Their job is to maintain knowledge of the facts of the case as they unfold, as they change, as they develop, and write any search warrants or legal documents that we need in order to progress this case. We may need to search a house, a person, a phone, a vehicle, whatever it is. That's what they do. If we need subpoenas for phone records, they write those subpoenas for phone records. They're the ones that take care of all the legal paperwork on this. We try to maintain the same warrant writer because we want them to have the same basis of knowledge for everything. In this case, if Johnny is a warrant writer one day and Susan is a report writer the next day, then it's a good chance they don't have the same information and therefore could change the text or the tone or the context of that warrant or that paperwork. Those legal documents and while you might not think that's a big deal today, because ultimately it'll get you to where you need to be when the defense attorneys, again, 10 years down the road, are trying to find loopholes and inconsistencies, that's a very easy way for wires to get crossed. Nobody's lying, nobody's saying anything wrong. The end result is the same. But words are important and therefore we want to keep everything consistent so we don't give a loophole to let this killer off. So we have the briefing and from there the case takes a turn of its own. We ultimately go out to the crime scene and we bring an investigative CSI crime scene investigators in and they investigate the crime scene.
Speaker 1:Here's what we know from inside the crime scene. From inside the crime scene, the evidence shows that entry was made through the bedroom window. The bedroom window came into a child's room. It was obvious it was a little girl's room, a kid's room. Now there was no child on scene when we got there, so we had to do some quick work and find out if we had a missing kid or an abduction or a kidnapping or a potentially second victim. It was determined that the female victim that resided at that apartment, she has a daughter, she has an ex-husband. It was the ex-husband's time to watch the little girl. So the little girl was safe and sound at the ex-husband's house during the commission of the murder. So we were able to put that to bed.
Speaker 1:As far as the crime scene goes, entry made through that bedroom window. It looked like there was a large saturation pool of blood on the bed. It looked like at the foot of the bed there was another large saturation pool of blood and at about 16 inches off of the floor 14 to 16 inches off of the floor there was blood swipes on the wall. It looked like handprint type blood swipes on the wall or contact marks, blood smears if you will and that told us that. I'll tell you what that told us in a second. So, also right there there was a series of round droplets of blood. Looked like it had been dripping off of something and those round droplets were right on the threshold of the carpet and the linoleum and they were within a foot of where those smear marks were on that lower wall. Then we see a set of bloody footprints that have a treadmark pattern that go into the kitchen. They go to a knife block that's located in the kitchen. There like a steak knife block. We can see that there's blood on the top of several of the knives and that a couple of knives were missing from that block. Then we could see that those knives were located one clean and one covered in blood were located near the drip marks, the wall smears and the threshold of the carpet to the linoleum.
Speaker 1:In my analysis of the crime scene, killer enters through the bedroom window. We know based on well, at that time we didn't know it Killer enters through the bedroom window, then an attack occurs, likely in the bed. We know that this was at 3 o'clock in the morning. There's a good chance that the victim's lights were out and this attack was started under darkness. So the victim is laying there and gets woken up to a violent, brutal, stabbing attack. From there the victim is out of bed and falls to the floor beside the bed, between the bed and the sliding door at the rear of the apartment in this one room. That is that area of saturation. That is where the victim is bleeding out. From there the killer goes to the kitchen and at that site of the first blood we saw a folding knife like a two inch pocket knife. It was there. So from there the killer goes into the kitchen to select another knife of opportunity to finish the job. The killer walks out of the kitchen back towards the living room area and when she does, that's where she encounters the victim who is likely trying to get out the front door.
Speaker 1:The victim falls to the ground again at the foot of the bed near the threshold of the carpet in the linoleum the bed near the threshold of the carpet in the linoleum and a second attack is perpetrated there. More stabbing, cutting events are likely to occur at that location. That's when the victim, from a low position laying on the ground, was able to reach up and touch the wall and provide those blood smears. There at the wall, the large pool of blood was an area of saturation where the victim was bleeding out. The killer stood there over the victim with the knife dangling straight down which caused those round blood droplets onto the floor and onto the linoleum. It's undetermined if the killer was facing the victim or facing away from the victim, as the killer stood there with the knife at the dangle at the side and the blood dripping off of that knife, making those round 90 degree blood drops on the linoleum. However, based on the positioning and the blood staining on the carpet, it's unlikely that the killer had their back to the victim. So the killer stands there looking over the kill and then leaves the apartment, drops the knives and leaves the apartment. So this is what we know based on the crime scene.
Speaker 1:We went outside and we checked outside for blood. There was no blood. There was no blood droplets outside of that front door. There was nothing. It's literally like the suspect flew out of that apartment and never touched the ground because there was no blood transfer anywhere outside. So we brought in blood dogs, we brought in canines, we brought in chemical testing, all kinds of stuff. There was no blood outside. So the question goes to I mean, it's going to ask how did the suspect get out of there without leaving a trace? Lockhart's theory says the suspect always leaves a trace behind.
Speaker 1:So we searched that crime scene, we searched the area. One of the things we do is CCTV canvas. We're able to search for closed circuit televisions, not only on houses but businesses in the nearby area. And we went out and made contact with the ex-husband, with the child. When we got out to the ex-husband's house and we collected a lot of evidence, thousands of pieces of evidence we collected from the crime scene. Go out to the ex-husband's house, which is across town, about 10 miles away, and talk to him. And it's about nine in the morning and we explained to him who we are, why we're there and what had occurred and he uh seemed shook up. His wife was there, she was wrapped in a blanket and uh, so we asked him if he'd come in down and talk for an interview. He agreed and he and the wife came in for an interview.
Speaker 1:Many things are happening simultaneously. We're out interviewing the husband and new wife, we are making sure the child is okay, but we have detectives everywhere. We still have detectives at the crime scene, we still have detectives doing the canvas, we have detectives running all over the place, but we also have those detectives doing the CCTV review. Now we know, based on our witness statements, that while I said a moment ago this was at 3 am the attack, we know that, based on the witness statements, likely this could have started around 11 pm and went till 3 am. That's four hours of assault and torture that this victim likely could have sustained and ultimately did sustain.
Speaker 1:So we started looking for CCTV and you had to start at the crime scene, because that's what you know. So you take a look at all the cameras and you see what's coming and going from that crime scene and as you find cars, you leapfrog and you follow them backwards. And as you follow them backwards, sometimes you lose, but you'll find there's going to be one. That's a constant thread and you keep chasing that thread and ultimately we were able to be for looking at starting the crime scene, working backwards and then, uh, going out to the ex-husband's house Uh, that's where the car led us to and then we're like this can't be, it's never the ex-husband.
Speaker 1:So we start looking at CCTV the other direction from the ex-husband's house and the neighbors, and sure enough, we start to see this car's coming and going in the middle of the night. The lights are off. Sneaky through the neighborhood lights come on. That's about 11 o'clock. We're able to follow that car with CCTV, leapfrogging from 7-Elevens to convenience stores, to banks and ATMs along the way and houses. It takes us right to the crime scene at about 11 pm and then the car takes another route home from the crime scene at about 3 am and it goes and it passes all these residential cameras and ultimately circles right back around, gets back to the house, the lights go out, it sneaks up in the driveway, the brake lights go off and the car ends up back at the ex-husband's house. Well, that's strange. I wonder what they were doing.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we had learned that recently there had been a child custody battle that had lasted for 15 to 18 months and recently that battle was decided in court and the victim of this was awarded full custody. As a result of being awarded full custody, the victim was also awarded a large multi-thousand dollar settlement that needed to be paid by the ex-husband. This is for court fees and stuff like that. This is for court fees and stuff like that, child support, whatever. So the ex-husband lost full custody of the kid or lost the custody of the kid and was now in the rears of tens of thousands of dollars. So we have to start looking.
Speaker 1:We can't go down theory Thursday during murder investigations and just because something looks sexy or like it might be an avenue to have an explanation, we can't go chase those leads. We have to explore them. But we can't get a confirmation bias and say, absolutely the ex-husband did it. They always do. I've seen Dateline, I know who it is and you know, let's prove our case that it was the ex-husband. We don't do it that way. We take a look at victimology. Who is the victim?
Speaker 1:I assigned a detective to the victimology in this case. Tell me everything we need to know about this victim. I assigned detectives. As a lead detective I assigned people to investigate the ex-husband, the wife, all their friends and family, the hobbies, everybody's into the sports, the businesses where they work, the trail that goes behind their building, the transients in the area. So there's detectives out searching all of these and investigating and interviewing all of these different people. The ex-husband is just one of them.
Speaker 1:When he came into the interview, um says he didn't know anything about it. Wife his wife was interviewed separately. She says she doesn't know anything about it. Uh, it's, it's unfortunate. They'll take care of the daughter and essentially that's what they had to give us. There were some inconsistencies in their statements, but it wasn't anything where we could, you know, arrest them. In fact, I actually interviewed him and at one point I started to challenge him a little bit, push him a little bit, and he's like hey, if you had enough, you would arrest me. You don't have it, you don't have enough to arrest me. And he was kind of very cocky about that. So we let them go and they became, you know, not friends, not foe, but they were pretty neutral in the investigation and weren't real helpful.
Speaker 1:So, as time progressed, we're now weeks into this, months into this investigation. At that time things slowed down a little bit. We still maintained that major crimes team, but we're investigating all these leads. We're investigating the victimology things that came up in that. We're investigating things about the ex-husband and the friends and the family and everything else. So we understand that oftentimes murders are because of sex, drugs or money. There's usually a nexus when people get dead to one of those three things. So we have to take a look at who are the intimate partners. Who are their money debts to? Has she pissed anybody off? Is she involved in some scandalous sex thing? And maybe this is a sex act gone bad? We don't know. So we investigate those. We do find this out about the victim.
Speaker 1:We find out the victim is into the pirate community, and by the pirate community I mean that there are people in this world and maybe you're one of them, I don't know, no judging. There are people in this world that dress up, act like, talk like and have real pirate names. And they don't just do this on Halloween or for the Renaissance Fair, they do this every day of the year. We had people come in for interviews, an entire family of little pirates, from Papa Pirate to Mama Pirate, to Baby Pirate, to Toddler Pirate. All of them. They were all pirates. And you ask them their name and they're like Viper, like. What's your name, sir Sting? Viper, you're like, but you're 64 years old and couldn't kick your own ass. I doubt your name is viper, but whatever, whatever. So we go through these things with them, we interview them and we learn that in the pirate community get this.
Speaker 1:In the pirate community there's a sexual subculture that deals in polyamory multiple partners. If you've ever wanted to have sex with multiple pirates at one time, this would be the place to go. I mean, this is a club you might want to join, but in the sexual subculture they have a deviant side that deals with kink and kinky things like fleshing, flashing, flogging. Oh, you don't know what those are. Well, I didn't either. Let me tell you Flogging. You don't know those are. Well, I didn't either. Let me tell you flogging. That's pretty vanilla. You got, uh, leather straps with weights in them and you beat each other during sex, hit each other during sex and foreplay. That sounds like a good time. But wait till you get to this one.
Speaker 1:Flashing. Flashing is where you take a knife, the razor edge of a knife, and you tickle and you cut with the razor edge of a knife during sex. Imagine taking that feather. Remember, back in the day people used to use feathers and like tickle and you know all that stuff. No, this is the razor edge of a knife. So it brings you right up to that and it's called flashing, because you actually have capillary flash when the capillaries bleed.
Speaker 1:I had to assign detectives to become sex experts in this stuff. As a detective I never got that cool of a role, but they did. Oh, and then what is? Let's see? That was flashing Fleshing. What is fleshing Fleshing is where, say, we're having sex and I wipe white gas all over you and then light you on fire. That is flashing or fleshing. I can't even keep them straight. So, flashing fleshing, flogging.
Speaker 1:Deviant subculture, pirate community Holy shit, we got somewhere to go. Now this is a sex act gone bad. Middle of a sex act there's a cutting going on. Maybe there's some role playing. We don't know. We have to investigate it. So we investigate that. We interview all the sexual partners. We interview the pirates. We interview people in the pirate community. I interview the instructor for the flashing the knife thing. I interviewed that instructor that was that Viper guy I was talking about and we ultimately determined this is likely not a sex act gone bad, because what we saw by the cutting wounds did not match what a typical act would look like. Match what a typical act would look like. So that got ruled out.
Speaker 1:So then we got to look at the people on the trail. What about? A transient broke in and this is a violent act committed by them. The defense attorney in this case asked me once you know sex offenders, I need you to find every chronic masturbator on that trail in your city. And I'm like man if you were trying to get me to narrow down every chronic masturbator in my city, it's going to be a long list. So I understood what they meant, but I ultimately did not go to try to track down and do a survey on chronic masturbators, so the trail got ruled out. So we keep looking.
Speaker 1:The one thing we couldn't rule out was the money and the motive of losing the child, and it didn't help that on the day it was a couple of days after I want to say the day, a couple of days after the investigation kicked off the ex-husband is calling the insurance company trying to claim the insurance life insurance policy money for him and, lo and behold, he's told for the first time that he's not the beneficiary on this, that somebody else is and that was news and surprise to him beneficiary on this that somebody else is, and that was news and surprise to him. So I got a call from the insurance company saying, hey, why is this guy calling a couple of days after his ex-wife was brutally murdered trying to collect X amount of money on a life insurance policy he thought he was a beneficiary on? We think that's strange, like well, duly noted, these are pirates. He was also part of this community and these things. So I mean there's a couple things strange in this. Pirates do like knives. So I always had to keep going back to that, but we continued to try to chase the evidence. Remember, we don't chase theory Thursdays. We don't chase the pirates, all that sexy and fun and the sexual subculture and everything else. We don't chase the pirates, all that sexy and fun and the sexual subculture and everything else. We don't chase these theories. We have to investigate them, exploit them and rule them in or out. We could rule those out definitively. The one thing we could not rule out was the ex-husband, and he just kept making himself more and more noticeable himself, more and more noticeable.
Speaker 1:Now it's time for the funeral and during this funeral we actually hide cameras all over the funeral home. They're in pictures, they're in all over the place and we send detectives into the funeral. We actually have a female detective sitting right next to the ex-husband and the ex-husband's wife, and during the funeral we saw something extraordinary. You see, the female detective who is deep undercover looked over and saw fresh cuts on the new wife's hands. Now why is that important? That's important because, more likely than not, in a knife fight or in a violent attack with knives, both parties are going to get cut. So the fact that there are some cuts, fresh cuts on the female's hands, that's suspicious. So we got to go back and look at those videos. Remember when we did the interviews on day one and two, what we interviewed and we videotaped those. So we go, take a look at those and lo and behold the blanket that she was wearing at the house, she wore to the police department and she kept her hands tucked in that blanket the entire time.
Speaker 1:Now I didn't do that interview and I learned a very critical, I made a critical mistake and I learned something, and this is what it was. I was so excited this was my first homicide investigation that I led completely on my own, without training wheels, and one of the things that I wanted to do was interview that male the ex-husband because if somebody was going to get a confession it was going to be me view that male, the ex-husband, because if somebody was going to get a confession it was going to be me. In the meantime, I couldn't keep the 30,000 foot view of managing the case, where I needed to be and see all parties. See, had I been watching the interview of the female, her body language alone would have shown deception. She was hunched over, wrapped up in a blanket, hair draped in front of her face and at times turned completely away from the interviewer almost 90 degrees or even more away from the interviewer and nobody said, hey, sit up, take the blanket off, let's take a look, let's take pictures. Nothing. And I'm not blaming those interviewers, I'm blaming myself. I am the lead investigator on this case. It's my job to make sure that no stone goes unturned and I didn't do that because I was too busy getting wrapped up in my own investigation. I never let it happen again from there on out. So ultimately we couldn't prove or disprove the cuts were there. So life goes on.
Speaker 1:It's now about five months, six, seven months no, yeah, into it. And we do a review and they're say, hey, everything's been tested, we can't find any suspect DNA in that apartment. And I'm like holy shit. I mean, there's thousands of pieces of evidence, blood soaked everywhere. How can we not find suspect DNA? And one of the amazing criminalists. Scientists said hey, we have a new thing we can test, a new way of testing lower thresholds. Let's retest some specific items, specifically the knives and those knife blocks. Remember when I said there was smudges of blood on the top of all the knives, almost like somebody goes eeny meeny, miny moe and they take that one away. Let's retest those bloods and see if there's something, because that is clearly the suspect touching those.
Speaker 1:So about 17 months after the murder, it's five o'clock in the morning and I get a phone call from the Oregon State Crime Lab. I'm at home, I'm in my kitchen getting ready to go to work. But if you receive a phone call at 5 am from the Oregon State Crime Lab, you take that call. So I answered it and he was like hey, aaron. He's like are you at work? I'm like no, he's like I sent you a report. Like, uh, you know, are you at work? I'm like no, he's like I sent you a report. You need to review that report and then get back to me. I'm like what does it say? He's like just review the report. So I live about half an hour from the police department and I remember driving to work that morning and I'm giggling and I'm crying and I feel like I'm going through menopause. I am, I'm an emotional mess. I don't even know what's going on with me because I know there's something good waiting. So I get there and it says that the DNA sample from what we collected I'm going to back up. Pause During the searches.
Speaker 1:We searched the ex-husband's house where his current wife lives. We found some blood in that house. The wife said that's my blood. I cut myself on some glass. I bled. That's my blood. We later asked her for a consent DNA sample and she says no, I'm not going to give it to you, you already have my blood. It's that blood smear right there. Those drops right there in my house are my blood. Take my DNA from that. Okay. So the report from the lab. It says that the contributor to the blood found inside the ex-husband's house, which rightfully identified by the new wife as being hers, cannot be excluded as knife, as blood or DNA found on the knife block inside the victim's kitchen. Well, there's no way or reason why the husband's new wife should ever be in the ex-wife's kitchen, much less DNA mixed in blood. I think we have our killer, and you know what the courts thought we did too. So they issued an arrest warrant, for Angela McCraw Hester is her name. Angela McCraw Hester is the new wife of Matt Hester. Matt Hester is the victim's ex-husband.
Speaker 1:By this time, matt and Angela had moved their family to Pocatello, idaho. So I put together a team of detectives myself US Marshals, idaho cops, idaho DAs, rdas and we went out and we did surveillance for about a week in Pocatello, idaho. We followed these people all around. Ultimately, we made an arrest based on the arrest warrant out of Oregon and I got to interview both Matt and Angela. Now, matt wasn't under arrest until he became a douchebag and tried to fight with the US Marshals. And when he tried to fight with the US Marshals and when he tried to fight with the US Marshals he lost that fight, because Matt is a pathetic human. But he lost that fight and found himself in custody for resisting arrest and being a general dick. But he's at the police department and Angela's there. I get a chance to interview them both.
Speaker 1:When I go in and interview Angela, she tells me, um, that she doesn't know what I'm talking about, doesn't know anything about it. We got it all wrong. Blah, blah, blah. She's kicked back in the chair. Her feet are up on the counter. She's in pajamas. She's as ugly as ever, sitting there in her smug blonde hair. Uh, telling me I've got the wrong person.
Speaker 1:So I start going through the case with her and as I start talking about the murder, I look and on the back of her hand she's got two scars in the exact same place. That undercover detective saw them. And when I start talking murder, angela subconsciously starts rubbing those scars and she's massaging them. As she's talking to me, her hands are clasped and she's massaging those scars. And this is some body language that doesn't go unnoticed by me. So ultimately she says, if you say I killed her, then I don't have anything else to say to you. I'm like okay, we're done so. She wanted a glass of water, so I gave her a glass of water. I left the room. When I left the room, we're still watching her on video. She takes that glass of water and she takes her napkin and she wipes her prints and her DNA off of that glass and then throws everything into the garbage. She did that because once she didn't want us to have it. But that's what she's been doing for 18 months is trying to clean her tail and get rid of her DNA. That was just a habit that she had formed and she wasn't smart enough to not do it in front of our cameras.
Speaker 1:I then go interview Matt. I lay the case out for Matt and I'm like Matt, this is what we got. I lay it out, I lay out all the avenues and the evidence that we have. The evidence was clear and convincing that Angela is the killer in this. Remember that pocket knife I mentioned that we saw on the floor. I showed Matt a picture of that pocket knife and I said hey, have you ever seen this before? And he's like oh yeah, I have, totally. I'm like whose is it? He's like it's Angela's. Where do you guys keep it? In the door pocket of our car? Well, I did, but I never saw it again, really after about the time of the murder. But that's where it was prior to that. And I'm like is there any reason that you and Angela would have been over to your ex's house? He's like no man, we don crazy. Angela's knife is on the floor in the first puddle of blood where the victim was laying the night she was killed Crazy. So we I lay it all out and ultimately, matt acknowledges that the evidence was clear and convincing and that Angela had to have been the one that killed his ex-wife. He said that later went on to tell me that he, angela and a third party actually had a meeting and the conversation between the group was a conspiracy to kill his ex-wife, and that there was money on the table and they had a killer selected, a hitman selected, but Matt and Angela couldn't come up with the money, so the hitman backed out. It just goes to show you that if you can't get a hitman to do it, you may have to take action into your own hands, and that's exactly what happened in this case.
Speaker 1:We were able to move forward. We were able to take this case to trial in I don't even know what year it was, 2020 maybe and we had a very lengthy trial. I can say that Angela had some very good defense attorneys and by good I mean attorneys, and by good I mean attention to detail, very meticulous. I have learned a couple of there's been a couple of defense attorneys in my career that have taught me lifelong lessons A gentleman named Rex Butler out of Alaska, and then these attorneys. You have to be on your game, your attention to detail. Closing those loops on day one that I closed was so significant because these attorneys would have caught it had I farted wrong at any point during this investigation. They probably would have caught it and had some kind of capture device to get the smell. That is just how good these women are. There was one part of the trial process that was pretty fun.
Speaker 1:So I'm on the stand. It's in one of the hearings and we're going over the video timeline. We're talking about the progression of Angela's vehicle from the time it leaves her house prior to the murder and bounces down the leapfrogging trail of video cameras, and then it's seen at one intersection and then it's picked up at the next intersection about eight minutes later, meaning and then continues on to the victim's house, meaning that there was a period of time for eight minutes where the car was unaccounted for and the defense attorney is coming at me with the angle that we're following the wrong car and that it's not her client's car. So she says Detective Turnage, do you believe this is my client's vehicle in this video? Yes, and this one? Yes, and this one, yes, okay. Now there's an eight minute gap. And what about this one after the eight minute gap? Do you believe that's my client's vehicle? Yes, and the next camera, yes, okay. So let's go back to this eight minute gap. What, what possibly could my client have been doing for this eight minute gap? I believe that you uh, you know that you may or shouldn't say I believe but essentially alluded that I'm following the wrong vehicle and I said well, you know, ma'am, I don't know what your client was doing during that eight minutes.
Speaker 1:And we've got a courtroom full of people. We've got DAs, we've got an entire defense team, we've got the judge, we've got the clerk, we've got witnesses, we've got civilians. We've got an entire defense team. We've got the judge, we've got the clerk, we've got witnesses, we've got civilians, we've got the guards who have Angela in there. Angela's in there doodling in her little coloring book, and the defense attorney says well, detective Turnage, can you please tell me what my client was doing, possibly could have been doing for eight minutes during this time that you said she disappeared?
Speaker 1:And I'm like, again, I'm like ma'am, I, I, I'd have to speculate and I don't know. She's like detective turnage. What, what, what even makes sense for my client to be doing? And I'm like, well, ma'am, I maybe she stopped because she was hungry, maybe she changed her clothes, or maybe she was sharpening her knives. I don't know what she was doing. And when I said the sharpening the knives part, like the entire oxygen got sucked out of the courtroom and there wasn't a whole lot of further questions. So, anyway, that was just a fun part of the trial process.
Speaker 1:The truth speaks volumes, and when you lay it all out, all the smoke and mirrors, don't let the you know facts get in the way of a good story. Uh, don't let that cloud things up. When you lay all the facts out there, they're clear and convincing. Now there's something I want to tell you that I haven't told you yet. This is a piece of evidence that pushed this over the edge here. It is Early on.
Speaker 1:We applied for a Google search warrant for the Angela's phone and for Matt's phone. We found that Matt's phone was at home and we found that Angela's phone was at home during the time of the murder. What we found was a couple of days later. You have Google tracks everywhere you go. Whether you know it or not, you're being tracked by Google and there's Google trails that will go out and it's like a breadcrumb trail. You leave your house, you go to the store, you come back, there's a breadcrumb trail, so on and so forth. Well, a couple of days after the murder, we saw some trail Google trail about 30, 40 miles into the middle of Mountain Hood National Forest. This was an outlier. At looking at the entire timeframe that we had been looking at Angela's phone, we found that Angela, a couple of days after the murder, took this mysterious trip into the middle of the Mountain Hood National Forest. Murder took this mysterious trip into the middle of the Mountain Hood National Forest.
Speaker 1:So remember when I spoke about the bloody footprints in the linoleum early on in this. You see those bloody footprints were made by a size nine and a half airwalk boot, not a shoe, an airwalk boot called the Myra. The Myra is a boot that is a winter style boot that looks like an UGG. It's a cheap UGG sold at Payless Shoes. So we know, and we know that based on the tread design. We also know that tread design was only used on a limited run of airwalk Myra boots because it didn't hold up to the conditions well, and we know that from contact in the factory and getting information from their experts. We also know that, just like a fingerprint, that boot had minor nicks and scratches and cuts and wear patterns that were stamped into that linoleum from day one, the same linoleum the responding officers found upon entry covered up to preserve and the same one they wouldn't let me trample on when I came to the crime scene. So we know that somewhere out there in this great universe there is, or was, a pair of Myra Airwalk nine and a half boots that are unique to the killer because of the nicks, cuts and individual characteristics on the sole of that boot.
Speaker 1:We know that we went to payless shoes and payless shoes says yeah, we sell those boots or we did, they're out of season. Now we know that when we went through matt and angela's phone we found pictures, pictures of Angela sending Matt a picture from a Payless shoe store of a pair of Myra boots and a pair of whatever boot X, and Matt said I like the ones on the right which were the Myras. So when we took that picture to the local Payless shoe store we were told oh, that's not. A picture was taken at the Clackamas Supercenter and we know that because Clackamas is the only one that didn't have the carpet redone that's old carpet in that picture. So we were able to go to the Clackamas store and find the exact tile square, carpet square on the floor where that picture was taken. And guess what it was? It was right in front of the airwalk boot section. So then we asked okay, on this date and time the picture was taken, did you guys sell a pair of Myra boots? Yes, we did To credit card number blah, blah, blah. When we run credit card number blah, blah, blah, guess who it came back to Angela McCraw Hester. So with all of this information, we have it in our back pocket. Now we're looking at these Google records.
Speaker 1:We have the outlying trail up into Mount Hood National Forest, a couple of detectives and the most brilliant detective, maybe man I've ever met in my life is our science cop, and as a street cop he and I butted heads. As a science cop man, I'll defer to that guy every day. He and another detective went out to the middle of Mount Hood National Forest. He, uh, he and another detective went out to the middle of Mount Hood National Forest, followed the GPS coordinates and stopped right at the exact same place that Angela did. There was a creek. That creek ran under the road. There was an uphill side and a downhill side to that creek. Knowing that Angela is likely the laziest person I've ever met in my life, they decided to go to the downhill side.
Speaker 1:Now it's snowy. It is March-ish. When this is going on, there's snow on the ground. This creek is flowing. There's a high water line in the trees around that elevates about four feet above where the creek currently sits, and the detectives decided to take a walk downstream. The downstream side was to the right side of the roadway from the way they were positioned. They walked down. They videotaped their path. In it's virgin snow. There's no footprints, no, nothing. They videotaped their way down this creek.
Speaker 1:About 150 feet down the creek and around a bend there's a log that's fallen down across the creek. In that log, staring at them, is the sole of a boot. When they get closer they find that sole is attached to a size 9 1⁄ half Airwalk Myra boot. You see, angela went up there and dumped off her boots that night or a couple of days later and it floated downstream until it got caught in a log jam. And then, three years later, we went out and found it in that log jam. We were able to take the boot back to the crime lab and we were able to determine that the wear pattern, the nicks, the cuts, all of that matched the impressions in the linoleum. We were able to find degraded DNA on those boots. Those boots were a match to Angela Hester, based on her credit card slips, based on the pictures, based on the wear pattern and based on the cell phone evidence.
Speaker 1:From there we brought out a dive team. We brought out a dive team that says, hey, if she dumped some of the shit here, maybe she dumped it all. So they dove in the creek. We did a huge, massive, massive ground search and there was one dive member. The dive search was done. There was one dive member. The dive search was done.
Speaker 1:There was one dive member who she didn't want to give up and she's studying the water and she's like, okay, slack water would be here. If there's anything, it's got to be here. She didn't feel confident that there wasn't evidence there. So she's on her hands and knees in two and a half feet of water and she's got her arm buried down to the elbow in silt and she feels something and she's like hey guys, I got something here. It feels like maybe a bag or something, but we need to excavate it. So they bring in.
Speaker 1:They were able to excavate this and, lo and behold, they pull out a black trash bag. When they get the trash bag out of the water, they can feel that there's a large rock in it and there's some other stuff. So we apply for a warrant for that bag and ultimately we open up the bag and here's what we find. We find a large rock was used to weight the bag down. We found a pair of Adidas slides. We found some remnants of clothing. We found some gloves with cut marks in the palm, in the palmatian area of the of the gloves.
Speaker 1:We found DNA on all of these, on the gloves and some other items. The DNA Um, I can't remember if it came back to our victim or not. It might've been degraded from being in the water. Either way, there was a sleeve of like. It looked like a long john sleeve. It was black with some skull prints on it.
Speaker 1:Now we recognize that because when we went and served the search warrant at Angela's house in Pocatello, idaho, she had some black long johns with skulls and there was a UPS tag on there. So during or not a UPS, a UPC tag. So during the investigation we were able to track down that UPC label and we determined that those pants were sold as part of a set a shirt and a pair of pants, and they were sold at Walmart and they were sold at the Vancouver Walmart but for a very limited time. Pair of pants, and they were sold at Walmart and they were sold at the Vancouver Walmart, but for a very limited time for some reason. So we were able to narrow down that that item was bought at the Vancouver Walmart in Vancouver, washington. Well, when we searched the house, we couldn't find the top anywhere. 18 months after the murder we could not find the top, and that's because we had to wait three years. We now found the top buried in the bottom of a Creek 30 miles into the middle of the Mount Hood National Forest.
Speaker 1:Remember the slides I mentioned? So, going through her pictures on her phone about six weeks prior to the murder, there's a picture of her and her family at Seaside, you know, at the pier where the little statue thing is, and she's about 30 feet away from the camera, walking towards the camera. She's not the subject of the picture. But guess what she's wearing in that picture? She's wearing those Adidas slides black and white slides with three stripes, black and white slides with three stripes. This is the kill bag.
Speaker 1:The bag of evidence that she thought would never be found was found three years later, 18 to 24 inches under the silt, under 24 to 36 inches of water, and it's only because of a dedicated investigative team that this evidence was found. You see, cases are not won and lost by one individual, at least not in my agency. We have a huge team of highly skilled, highly educated detectives that have the tenacity of a bulldog. They won't stop. They will keep going and keep going and keep going until they figure it out, and I owe all the success to the men and women that I served with in that detective unit.
Speaker 1:I was able to take this information back to court and I was able to tell the defense attorneys that of what we found and that was the clincher in the case we found the boot, we have the evidence, we have the clothes, we have the Google logs, we have the hitman, we have the blood, we have the latency, we have the DNA. You have no excuses. Ultimately, she was convicted of 25 years to life, with a chance of parole after 25 years. But she is so crazy she will never get paroled. I don't believe this is her first murder. I think that her ex-husband died of a suspicious suicide and I wish somebody would look into that earlier. I told you that I would give you some direction and guidance if you were interested in this case and seeing it actually play out.
Speaker 1:This case was made into a Dateline episode. It is called Dateline the Undoing, the Undoing by Dateline. If you guys are interested, please go find it. It's out there. You can go to NBCcom, look at Dateline the Undoing and take a look at it. You can see all the crime scene photos. You can see the videos. You can see interviews with me. That's going to be the good part. You can see interviews with me and it'll tell this whole story To the victim's family. We love you, we love your daughter, we love your granddaughter, the victim's child. I am very sorry that this had to happen.
Speaker 1:This is one of those cases I said earlier that haunts me. The smell of blood in the apartment was overwhelming. If you've ever gutted an animal, you know what that iron smells like in blood and if you haven't, you don't know what it smells like. Consider yourself lucky. I could smell that iron in the blood and for years the smell of blood brought me right back to that crime scene and the intrusive thoughts were unbearable. If I cut my head shaving because I'm not naturally bald if I cut my head shaving and I could smell the blood, I would have intrusive thoughts for days, nightmares. You'd bring it all back.
Speaker 1:Even talking about this case at one point was huge triggers. Remember I spoke about therapy and all and a lot of my other uh episodes. Therapy has allowed me to get past the emotional response of this case and be able to tell it in a very matter of fact way. As a police officer I could tell this all day long and I was interviewed and you can watch my interviews. There's no emotional reaction there. Once I started to have my feelings back and my nervous system starting to lighten up a little bit and I wasn't such an asshole I started to feel and that's a lot of times when I was having a hard time talking about this because I would break down. But through therapy, through EMDR, I was able to get past that and now I can discuss it just like I could. The worst case that I spoke about a couple weeks ago. I can talk about these things matter-of-factly, without having that emotional response or emotional narrative or baggage with me, and I thank God and I thank my therapist for that. Hopefully you guys have seen it.
Speaker 1:And the anatomy of a murder and the anatomy of a murder investigation Call comes out, lead detective is assigned, a team of highly skilled professionals are gathered, meetings are had, information is shared, resources, science, electronic CCTV, interviews, good old-fashioned boots on the ground, get off your ass, knock on doors. Type of police work leads to uncovering rocks, uncovering motives, uncovering missions that you can go on, investigate those, include or exclude them from the data pool that you need to be looking at. Do these things matter? Do they not matter? Are they red herrings? Is this a viable lead? Exhausted until your lead becomes no longer viable. And then don't waste time, don't chase a failed technique, don't go down Theory Thursday, follow the evidence. Ultimately, the evidence will take you to your killer and that is where you find justice.
