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Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences.
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Listener discretion is advised. Was she crying out to you when you were beating her to death?
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Was she screaming? Because all those things we're talking about right now, you're going to have to live with those fucking dreams.
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So, I want to say something. and this isn't something anyone's told me to do by the way
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and this isn't one of those lame public apologies begging for forgiveness groveling to be accepted by the masses I've offended
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it's not that at all but I do feel it's warranted that I say something because I realized something this week
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a light bulb went off. Something that took me a while to figure out. I'm 50, I know.
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Here it is. I am way too quick to generalize. To group people together, especially regarding bad behavior.
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The bad behavior we continue to see week after week after week on this program. And despite numbers and statistics and data,
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It really just doesn't help anyone to spread those generalizations around. In fact, it's harmful.
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Very harmful. I spent the last week thinking about a lot of stuff. Thinking about how I perceive the world around me and why.
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And all I got to say is that there's going to be a few changes around here. Now, you may not even notice.
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And I'm still going to be an opinionated, loudmouthed asshole. Know-it-all. I mean, that's just my character.
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But I'm going to think long and hard next time before I make another generalization
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in my anger and frustration. Because that sentiment only leads to a perpetual spiral
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of self-destruction for individuals and for society at large. also for myself. We're going to employ the phrase
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do better. We're going to do better around here moving forward. That's a promise.
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And the proof is in the pudding. So stay tuned. And thanks to all of you that have stuck around so far.
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People make mistakes. People react emotionally sometimes. and don't think things through.
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And I'm no exception. So, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. For real. For real.
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Alright, let's get on with episode 304. This one's going to be... Ooh, boy. Oh, boy.
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Well, you'll see. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll see. This is Sword Scale. A show that reveals every week
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that the worst monsters are real. It's an overcast morning in the half-forgotten beach town of Port Bolivar, Texas.
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It's March of 2014, just seven months before the dawn of this program. The air carries a mix of salt, brine, and diesel fumes
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Inside Fisherman's Cove Food Mart Bonnie Sue DeVoe is getting into the rhythm of her day
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Same routine, same familiar faces Stopping in for coffee, gas, or a pack of smokes
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Bonnie's little store is the only stop along this part of the peninsula surrounded by a sea of marsh reeds that stretch all the way to the shoreline.
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Soon, a Budweiser truck pulls into the lot. The driver says hi to Bonnie Sue and unloads his crates.
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Before he leaves for his next stop, he does Bonnie Sue a favor and takes out the trash.
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Behind Fisherman's Cove Food Mart is nothing more than a lone dumpster and an abandoned hotel.
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The delivery driver takes a few steps out the back of the store and stops dead in his tracks.
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That's when he sees them. Two bodies were sprawled by the dumpster. For a second, they didn't seem real.
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But then, the details hit. A bullet hole above the woman's temple, with a gaping white and pink chunk of tissue peeking through.
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The other body lies face down, baggy jeans, boxer shorts, and combat boots poking out from beneath a dirty pink sheet that is twisted around the victim's head.
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Your eyes see the details and your brain takes a little while to sort them out put them in the right place It like all those movies you saw with all the violence It doesn seem real but this is real
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The delivery driver rushes back into the store and tells Bonnie Sue she's got to come outside.
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Bonnie takes one look at those bodies and calls 911. Okay, and how do you know that they're deceased?
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I went and looked at them. My Budweiser man was here to drop off an order. Uh-huh.
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And he walked to the dumpster to go dispose of some trash. Because it's at the back of my building.
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Where do you want to go? And he came in and told me to call 911. But he said, if you want to make sure they're not mannequins.
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And I walked back there and they're not mannequins. As Bonnie Sue waited for the police to make it out to her desolate food mart,
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She grew concerned about the customers pulling up. We're getting units en route while I'm talking to you, okay?
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Okay. Should I close my store or? Just definitely don't let nobody around the area.
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Yes, sir. Keep everybody back. I have to get people to talk to me. Ma'am, ma'am.
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Yes. Try not to spread that around, okay? Yes, sir. Clearly, this was the most thrilling thing that had happened to Bonnie Sue
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in quite a while. But murder is entertaining, right? Can you blame her? Could you tell her they both male or pro-female
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or male and female? Could you tell? I did not get that close because I didn't want to enter during the crime scene.
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I know they appear to be black in color. The victim who had been shot in the temple
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was clearly a female. She was on her back, but her legs were twisted up in the other victim's combat boots, bent in unnatural ways.
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Her white tank top was blotchy with blood, and her blue bra was sticking out. Her eyes were wide open under heavy fake eyelashes.
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Okay, but do you see any blood or anything on the ground around them? There's blood. One of the torsos has a lot of blood around it.
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It was so strange to find a double homicide on the outskirts of Crystal Beach. This unincorporated town was an hour south of Houston, at the tip of a peninsula.
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The nearest police department was Galveston, Texas, which is a ferry ride away. Detective Danny Kitchens was just starting his morning when he got the call about the bodies behind the dumpster.
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About 7.45 I heard the call come out on the radio, the police radio. So normally, and I was to go on call that day, that Friday, but it didn't start till eight o'clock.
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So I hadn't made it to the office yet. I picked up my phone, called dispatch and told them, I said, just go ahead and show me en route to this call.
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Well, where our office is located is on Galveston Island. And in order to get to the location where the bodies were discovered, you have to take a ferry across.
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It's about a 20, 30 minute ride over there. Of course, by the time I get to the ferry, several more detectives also showed up at the same time.
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And we get off the ferry on the other side. The first location that you come to is this store.
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It's probably a mile, mile and a half away from the Port Bolivar Ferry. It's on the Bolivar Peninsula.
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A fleet of cops and detectives descended off the ferry boat and into the sleepy beach town in a parade of sirens.
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We pull up to the store. The store is still an active store, but behind it is an abandoned hotel.
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And you can see that, you know, it's all trash. It's all been painted on. Almost all the doors gone off of every room.
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But there's a dumpster sitting in front of the hotel there and the two bodies are found laying outside of it.
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One of them had a sheet wrapped around his head so he couldn't tell the identity and the other one just kind of laying there.
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And lots of debris laying about to like window shutters and trim off of a house, along with mail and some kids toys.
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Detective Kitchens was staring down into a tangled mess. His career as a lead detective had just been kick-started behind the seedy hotel.
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And this is, while I'm here, my first murder case that I'm lead on working as a detective for Galveston County.
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Since whodunit, it was more or less I was thrown in the deep end of the ocean and told to swim.
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Detective Kitchen started in law enforcement to become a detective. This is what he wanted to do.
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He wanted to solve crimes, and he had a huge mystery lying right in front of him.
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So he jumped into the deep end and started swimming. When Detective Kitchens removed the sheet covering what they initially assumed was a male victim,
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they realized it was actually a woman. They had two bodies, both young, black, and female.
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Neither had any identity on them. We kind of looked around and, you know, we noticed that the one had her head wrapped up in the sheet.
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And the first thing I'm thinking of is whoever done this is embarrassed or doesn't want to look at the damage that he's done.
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It's the whole purpose in her head being wrapped up in that sheet. Trash was all around the bodies, but one thing stood out like a sore thumb.
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A piece of mail addressed to a woman named Brittany Cosby. The address on the envelope said Houston.
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Houston, Texas, that is. hey that's where I'm at great place if you like tacos and oil
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anyway amongst the soda bottles and random dirty socks this envelope could mean something
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it made as much sense being there as the women's bodies did so Detective Kitchens
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followed his first clue we followed the mail back to the residence when we first looked at the house
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there was a white and green shutter on the front of the the house which matched a white and green shutter that we found at the scene Of course keeping in mind we don know where the homicide actually took place at All we know is where they were dumped
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And we know that where it originated from had to be that house with that shutter in the back.
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That's when I approached the resident at the house. It happened to be a 92-year-old great-grandmother of Brittany Cosby,
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who was able to positively identify both of them for us. Annie Lee Cosby was Brittany's great-grandmother.
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She was a 92-year-old amputee bound to her wheelchair and very hard of hearing. Annie Lee identified Brittany as the victim in the men's clothing.
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Annie said the other victim was Brittany's girlfriend, Crystal Jackson. Brittany and Crystal were girlfriends to each other.
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Both of them carried on a lesbian relationship. They were about 24 years old. Brittany had just gotten a good job, and Crystal had too.
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Both of them were working and recently bought a new car. They lived together there at the house.
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Crystal had a young daughter, about five years of age. Crystal's father is a preacher who was very much against the lifestyle that Crystal and Brittany lived.
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Due to Crystal's family not approving of her lesbian relationship, the two lived with Brittany's grandmother, Annie Lee.
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Annie Lee had a home care nurse but needed help constantly, so the girls took care of her.
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After all, Annie Lee had raised Brittany from a child since her mother left the picture,
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and her father had been in and out of prison. Life had settled down quite nicely for Brittany and Crystal,
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who were working steady jobs and saving up to get their own place one day. But Crystal's father was a Baptist preacher,
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and that comes with a whole lot of religious baggage, because he had no tolerance for their lesbian lifestyle.
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The murder felt personal. Crystal had been shot in the head, and Brittany had been beaten to death with a blunt force object and then covered with a sheet.
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They had been dumped far, far away, like whoever did this wanted to make the whole thing disappear, like sand under the waves of the ocean.
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So they started with Crystal's father, Ivan Jackson. Of course, that's where our first thoughts went to was to Ivan, knowing that he was completely against their relationship.
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So later on that day, I was able to make contact with him and speak with him. And I noticed that when I told him that, it appeared to be a shock, you know, of what had happened.
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But he was almost like he knew. He kept telling me that I knew something bad had happened.
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I told her this something like this was going to happen. So, I mean, first thing we do is start looking at him.
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Brittany and Crystal had been surrounded by a lot of love, but Ivan's judgment was the shadow in their lives.
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I don't know why people have to be such dicks, you know? Just live your life. Who gives a shit?
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It's people like this that ruin things for everyone, really. But whatever. Her father, Ivan Jackson, was rigid and certain his way was the only way.
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Could a man who preached family and forgiveness actually spill his own blood? Or could this be a case of the most obvious suspect being the wrong one entirely?
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In the desolate beach town of Port Bolivar, two dead women had been found outside of a
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dumpster behind a convenience store. The victims, Brittany Cosby and Crystal Jackson, were both 24 years old and starting their lives
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as a couple, a lesbian couple. Again, nothing wrong with that. If you think there's something wrong with that, there's something wrong with you.
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Get over it. Anyway, they lived with Brittany's great-grandmother in a small brick house in Houston.
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Lovely city, except for all the oil wells everywhere. Also, you ever heard of zoning?
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Anyway, Crystal's father, Ivan Jackson, was really against their relationship. He was not a happy camper.
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This was his daughter, who he loved, and she was with a woman. a woman who dressed up like a man and wore pants too low what's up with that in fact he didn't
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really converse with britney all that much and he didn't allow her into his family home every time
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i saw her she i would come to the door and she would always have her pants off hanging off so i
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make her stay outside in a case like this it's not more or less saying he's one to done it but
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to rule him out you know if this is not the right person i want to rule him out but since his feelings
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towards the relationship those had, we kind of zeroed in on that point, thinking, is this a motive, you know?
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Tell us a little bit about your daughter. Tell us about her. Well, Crystal was quiet.
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Crystal was, she was smart. She finished high school. She finished college. So she had a good education.
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She was just quiet. Didn't have none. I get them in the world. Everybody in the neighborhood loved her.
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You know, where she went, church members was a daughter. They've been knowing her since she was
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born into the world. And she knew she had some loving parents, so that's why she would leave the
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baby with us all the time, because she knew we were going to let anything happen to the baby.
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Crystal had a daughter from a previous relationship named Zaniah The child father was absent and ran from his child support payments so Crystal was raising Zaniya alone with the help of her parents Then she met
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Brittany and fell in love. But, like all couples, sometimes they fought. And Ivan told the police that about a year ago,
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one incident steered the course of their relationship into a new direction. As a matter of fact, on one instance,
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about maybe a year ago, Brittany put Crystal and the baby out in the cold. So when I got out of church, Crystal was calling me and asking me to come over there on Outro to pick her up.
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Ivan picked up Crystal and Zania. He was angry that things had gotten so out of hand, especially in front of the baby.
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And I told her, I said, I'm coming to pick you up, but that baby ain't going back with you.
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so you might as well just stay here with your daughter. Okay, but two weeks later, Crystal was back over there.
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So I made my decision. I didn't even talk to my wife about it. I said, I'm going to get my grandbaby, and she's coming home.
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Ivan put his foot down. Since that day, Zania had lived with Ivan and his wife. Crystal and Brittany would take care of her regularly,
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but her home base was Ivan's house. According to him, Zania didn't even like going to Brittany's house.
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I would have one of my church members to pick her up and take her over to Brittany's house.
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And it got so bad to that my grandbaby didn't want to go over there no more. And she told me that I feel sorry because that baby cries when she gets out of my car because she knows I'm taking her over there.
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So that's when I made my decision to go over there and get that baby out of that situation that she was in.
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But despite the tension between Ivan, Brittany, and Crystal, it became clear that Ivan truly loved his daughter.
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He wouldn't hurt her. And even though he didn't approve of Brittany, he saw how happy she made Crystal.
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Who would you say would be Crystal's one of her best friends? Brittany. Besides Brittany, did she have another, who was she really close to?
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Brittany. Does she have any close male friends? No. Crystal was crazy about Brittany.
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Even though, like I told you, I didn't never condone them being together. I didn't like her changing her sexual orientation.
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But it wasn't nothing I could do because she was wrong. Throughout the whole process with him, he's just been on the straight and narrow the entire time.
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There was nothing that really made me look at him any harder because I felt like we were looking at the wrong person when it came to him simply by his personality.
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And I could tell that when we did talk to him, he appeared to be genuinely heartbroken over the loss of his daughter.
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I loved my daughter. It's hard. And I tried to bring her up the right way, but somewhere else she went to left field.
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After we ruled out the preacher, we didn't know which direction to go at that time.
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We started to look at maybe ex-boyfriends, a jealous lover somewhere. We had nowhere to go.
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We didn't know which way to turn. Detective Kitchens and the Galveston team went back to the drawing board
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and started canvassing anyone connected to Brittany and Crystal. We start talking to everybody, find out who the little girl's daddy is.
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We go to Crystal's job, you know, things of that nature, and just speak with everybody she worked with, speak with people around them,
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try to find out if there's anybody angry at them with something going on we don't know about and
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we kept hitting a dead end we never could get to anything to solidify but started leaning back
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towards britney because britney's head was the one that was covered up with the sheet they were at a
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loss britney and crystal's vehicle had not been found yet either how did these two women who
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basically kept to themselves end up brutally killed and left behind a dumpster in a far-off
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Peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico. Or, sorry, Gulf of America. This attack was not random.
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Someone who knew them did this. As Detective Kitchens wondered if the rest of the investigation
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would be a series of hopeless dead ends, the forensic team made a bone-chilling discovery.
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If you recall, at the dumpster where the bodies were found, Detective Kitchens had not only
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He discovered that piece of mail with Brittany's name on it, but also a green shutter that had been precariously placed on the abandoned hotel.
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This shutter was leaned up against the abandoned hotel wall. But in between the wall and the shutter itself was a piece of paper, almost like he used it like a glove to pick the shutter up to set it down to keep his prints from being on the shutter.
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This piece of paper had been analyzed by forensics, along with every other piece of random trash at the crime scene.
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The detectives were leaving no stones unturned. Well, the print was actually on the paper,
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probably not knowing we could lift that print off the paper. And since he wasn't using a glove or anything else,
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you know, his fingerprint was right there. So when I found out about this print,
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one of my partners and I were on our way to Houston talking to somebody else that might know something about it.
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Turns out that was a dead end too. But the forensic man called me, he said, who is James Cosby?
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Because he don't know who the players are at this time. All he knows is the evidence.
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I said, well, James Cosby is the father of Brittany Cosby. I said, why? He tells me because we lifted his print off that piece of paper
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that was holding the shutter. So about that time, I tell my partner on our way to Houston,
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I said, as soon as we get finished with this interview, we need to go back to the residence.
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Brittany's father, James Cosby, had recently moved back into Annie Lee's house after being released from jail. He was tall, slender, and very calm. When he returned
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to Annie's house after the detectives told him his daughter had been killed, he was shocked.
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What's going on? Are you the father? Yeah, I kind of give him a little bit. Sit down,
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please sit down. You just haven't seen him. What happened? That's what we're trying to find.
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I know. They were found on the bottom of the peninsula. James sat down at the kitchen table next to Annie Lee, put his head in his hands, and cried.
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James, I know we're hitting you with a lot. Take a minute. But we're going to really need to talk to you so you can help us so we can find out who did this.
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What happened? You grieve. We understand. What happened? What happened? What happened?
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That's what we need your help with. That's what we need to help. Detective Kitchens and his partner hadn't thought much about James after that day.
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He acted like a grieving father, and he was visibly shaken up. But now, with the news of this fingerprint, they had to take a closer look at him.
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They would start at Annie's house, where the shutter had come from. So we do go back over there. That time we get there, one of the cousins is there taking care of Grandma.
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So we speak with her outside the house. I'm going to draw you a picture of the house.
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It's a small brick house. The garage has been converted into a den, which is where James Cosby was staying.
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He had it almost set up like a prison cell. It had a sheet that separated the room.
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Everything was just set up like it would have been if he was still in prison. On the side of the house is a carport with a wheelchair ramp.
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Well, Grandma sits in a wheelchair since she's had one leg amputated, So that's where she would go in and out at.
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So whenever we pull the lady outside to talk to her about what she may know or what ideas she may have,
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she looks around the carport and tells us something's wrong out here. And my partner says, what is that?
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She said, well, it's clean. It's never clean out here. They don't lift a finger or do anything.
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But at that time, I go around and I look by the wheelchair ramp, and I noticed it the other day.
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I didn't think much about it. There's four bricks sitting at the end of the wheelchair ramp kind of off to the side.
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And I thought, well, this is a little bit odd. Let me just take a look. So I kicked the bricks out of the way, and I see about four drops of blood right there underneath it.
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Another bloody piece of the puzzle was staring Detective Kitchens right in the face under those loose bricks.
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Called my partner over. I said, look at this. And he starts looking up that ramp, and closer to the door, we see small blood smudges that we had not seen before because we didn't know where the crime scene was.
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Well, fortunately, I had done a search warrant on the house just in case. and I called my forensic partner.
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I said, you guys need to get over here. You need to get over here now. He said, why?
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I said, because we're standing in the crime scene. The forensic team rushed over and started executing a search warrant.
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They started in James' makeshift bedroom in the den. When we went into the den, which is more or less his bedroom,
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this is where we see a broken lamp. We start looking closer at everything since we found the blood drops,
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and we start seeing blood drops on the floor. Not only that, we see where he has taken rugs and put over the bloodstains on the carpet and it has seeped through, the blood had.
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So there was blood all over his bedroom. The room was ramshackle, but his things were neat.
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Like Detective Kitchen said, he organized his belongings like he would have in prison.
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He had just been released a few weeks prior. He was serving time for a warrant he ran from.
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He had a Bible on the table and a copy of the Koran next to his neat row of sneakers.
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Like a good little criminal. We spent several hours over there. We find out later that night that he's at a vigil for the death of his daughter.
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And I think he's even interviewed on television, you know, about his feelings on that case.
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Well, since we have found this, I tell two of my partners, I said, hey, go pick him up.
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We need to convince him to come to Galveston and talk to us. to let him know we found more information.
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He didn't realize it was going to wind up being an interrogation at the time. James walked into the Galveston police station, still dressed from the vigil.
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His Kangol hat, black jacket. The whole look was that of a middle-aged man trying a little too hard.
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It's kind of the look I go for. But Detective Kitchens and his partner weren't fooled.
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He had to be their guy. The blood evidence from the room was like the secrets of the shoreline at low tide.
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Dark red circles of blood settled into the dirty carpet like forgotten tide pools.
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Now, they just needed to make James break. I have to before I interview anybody or go over anything with you.
00:29:00
I've been watching up TV shows and know that they say Miranda Rice, that means you under arrest.
00:29:05
No, it doesn't mean you're under arrest. It sure don't. All it is, you've been given your rights.
00:29:10
That's all I see on Perry Mason. Yeah, that's, believe me, TV is a bunch of crap.
00:29:16
James waived his right and agreed to talk. What was your relationship? Tell us about your nature of your relationship with your daughter.
00:29:25
She's my daughter. No, but I mean, you know, did you stay together? Oh, yeah. We didn't have a traditional father-daughter relationship
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for a long period of her life. I was not around. She was five. She was five when I left. She
00:29:48
was 15 when I came home So during those years I kind of you know I missed those years Came home in 04 Started working at the waterfront me and her and granny stayed at the house together We had a
00:30:05
I actually talked to Brittany one time. I told her, I said, you know, I failed you as a father.
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I should have been here. A lot of things that you're going through, not really all your fault.
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I look at it like it's my fault. James wasn't a good father to Brittany. He was in prison for most of her young life.
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And they never developed a bond. Then he got out and wanted to play dad all of a sudden.
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And there's a teenage girl, all grown up, with a butch lesbian girlfriend. James had a hard time accepting this.
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Clearly he thought that fathering just kind of happens on its own. And he wasn't happy with the fathering that had been going on in his absence.
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It was either accept that or don't have your daughter at all. Right. So, you know, it kind of grew on me.
00:30:52
He works with it. Yeah, she's my daughter. What do you think happened to your daughter?
00:30:58
The best scenario that I've heard was the morning that they left, that maybe they went to the convenience or whatever.
00:31:09
Like I say, that's not out of the ordinary for her to do that. Run to the store, grab a Coke or grab a cigarillo or whatever she grabbed and come right back.
00:31:20
Now that's normal. James had told police that on the morning Brittany and Crystal disappeared,
00:31:26
they were ready to drop Zania off at school and then head back to work. But first, Brittany and Crystal needed to run to the store.
00:31:33
They got in the car and never came back. But Detective Kitchens and his partner had evidence.
00:31:41
They had all the blood that was all over his bedroom and the carport. They knew that Brittany and Crystal had been killed in that house.
00:31:49
More importantly, they had James' fingerprint on a piece of paper ditched beside the shutter.
00:31:54
Did some of that wood and that blind, fake little blind that was up on the front of that house,
00:32:01
that's been off that house for a long time, obviously, wind up with those girls' bodies?
00:32:08
I cannot grasp how on Jesus Christ's earth can that happen. Tell me what's your thoughts.
00:32:18
I can't make sense of that. I can't either. I can't either. There's other stuff that was there with those two girls' remains that came from that house.
00:32:31
Wednesday night, that wood was not in that vehicle. Okay. And how do we know that?
00:32:37
Because I'm another witness. James sat in that cold, gray interrogation room for five and a half hours.
00:32:46
Detective Kitchens and his lieutenant pressed him about the blood, the shudder, and the fingerprints.
00:32:53
They told him that they knew he had done this. They shoved gruesome photos of Brittany's body lying on the concrete,
00:33:01
her head cracked open, her eyes black. They showed him close-up prints of Crystal's face
00:33:07
and the gaping gunshot hole in her head. James just took his time and stayed calm, not revealing anything.
00:33:18
They left alive. They died in that room. They left that day, that morning. We all agree about 830, right?
00:33:27
Okay. Okay. And then sometime after that, they died and were killed in your room.
00:33:34
Something fucking happened in there. Something happened with them, and you got in the middle of it here.
00:33:41
What happened? No, I don't get in the middle of their tips. Well, then you got into something with them or something happened here.
00:33:48
To the point where I would, no. I don't know. I'm telling you no. I'm telling you no.
00:33:54
The biggest sign that I know of that he felt like he was getting defeated is when he would start to put his elbows on his knees and drop his head.
00:34:03
That's usually a good sign that they're on the edge or they're on the verge. but he would be there for a minute and then he would lean back and sit straight up and cross his
00:34:11
arms again and that's when i knew we were fixing to have to start all over i know you did this
00:34:15
you know you did this lieutenant knows you did this the whole world's fixing to find out you did
00:34:22
this and you're gonna make all of them suffer not explaining why you did it but it's up to you how
00:34:28
it's presented do you just think that we're all ignorant do you really think that prosecutors
00:34:35
even juries are just so ignorant that they're going to fall for your bullshit and your lack of remorse and putting your family through this?
00:34:46
Do you think they're not going to see that? James, do you think they're not going to see that?
00:34:50
Yeah, they're going to see it. Had we interviewed the little girl before we spoke with him,
00:34:55
I would have had a better timeline. We were close to getting him to crack, but my timeline was off and he knew it.
00:35:01
They had made one big mistake. The detectives thought that the suspect had murdered Brittany and Crystal in the evening the day before they were found.
00:35:10
They were certain until they talked to Crystal's daughter, Zania. Mama had put her in the vehicle getting ready to take her to school for that day and had gone back inside the house.
00:35:23
Now, I can't quote everything she said, but the main things was that she told me that she could hear the bad guy behind her and she could hear a taser.
00:35:32
or what she called was a laser. Amongst Brittany's belongings in the house, they found her Michael Jordan backpack
00:35:39
with her laptop and taser gun in it. Zaniya said she heard the laser. She sat in the car seat, buckled in and ready to go,
00:35:49
but neither Crystal nor Brittany came back to the car. Eventually she freed herself and walked inside She actually got out of the car on her own and went back inside into the living room and asked where her mama was her mom and Crystal And James told her that they walked to work
00:36:07
that they just left and walked to work. So she stayed with that grandmother all day until the other grandparents came and picked her up.
00:36:14
Had Detective Kitchens known this before interrogating James, he might have been able
00:36:19
to crack him. But James was a seasoned criminal. He spent his entire adult life behind bars. He was
00:36:26
not a normal person. The people behind bars, you don't want them walking around in your neighborhood.
00:36:33
Trust me on that. You know, even after he's arrested, we're still investigating,
00:36:37
and we're still gathering details about him. I had found out, you know, he's had a pretty
00:36:43
extensive criminal history, pretty much lived his entire life behind bars, from his ag assaults,
00:36:49
sexual assaults, you know, the fights he had with his ex-wife, the whole nine yards.
00:36:54
One of the things that, one of the reports I read where he was arrested in Houston
00:36:58
for aggravated assault, for assaulting his ex-wife, when she described what she had
00:37:03
experienced with him going through that assault, was exactly the picture that was painted in this
00:37:10
homicide. The beating that James had given his ex-wife was the reason he had served Brittany's
00:37:16
whole childhood in prison. She said that, you know, ordinarily he's just a calm-natured person
00:37:23
and then would just flip out and go crazy. As a matter of fact, I think I remember her stating
00:37:27
in the report, she called him the devil or Satan. It was like he was the devil or Satan just beating
00:37:33
on her. They talked to his girlfriend who had been with him the entire morning on the day prior to the
00:37:39
bodies being discovered. While James and his girlfriend had been driving around Houston,
00:37:44
they got into an altercation with her ex-husband on the road. James called 911. James' girlfriend gave a full rundown of that day.
00:38:08
She said that on the morning of the murders, she saw James driving in Brittany's car towards a desolate road in Houston.
00:38:16
She just happened to be passing by, so she pulled a U-turn and followed him. Detective Kitchens thinks this was the original place he planned to dump the bodies,
00:38:26
but he was caught by his girlfriend. As they tried to leave, her car got stuck in the mud, so she joined him in Brittany's car.
00:38:36
He drove her back to the place she was staying, and that's when he re-evaluated his plan.
00:38:42
He decided to catch a ferry that evening to Port Bolivar. He went back to the house and loaded up on all the pieces of evidence he assumed would have blood or DNA on them.
00:38:54
Then he put Brittany in the trunk as well. When the bodies were out, Crystal was on top of Brittany at the dump site,
00:39:02
and all the blood that was on Crystal actually belonged to Brittany. James waited for the dark.
00:39:08
Then he took off to Port Bolivar. Surveillance footage confirmed this was all in line with their theory.
00:39:15
We could show and prove that he was the one that moved the body, so we could still get a first-degree felony tampering with evidence,
00:39:22
which is altering the courts, two counts of it, with both of them being a $250,000 fine or bond each.
00:39:29
James stuck to his story and claimed he was innocent. He would sit in jail as they continued their investigation.
00:39:36
Then they found Brittany in Crystal's car. It had been abandoned at a strip club in Houston, and we found that on April the 17th.
00:39:45
So we were able to bring that back. We processed the vehicle, which had his DNA in it, and we knew he was never allowed to drive that vehicle.
00:39:54
And the bullet was embedded in the back seat of that vehicle. It hit a piece of metal on the frame and it stopped right there.
00:40:02
Also, that bullet had a piece of synthetic hair on it, which was same stuff that Crystal had been wearing in her hair.
00:40:10
And once again, they did the autopsy. They connected even more physical evidence back to James's bedroom.
00:40:18
What's really interesting about that room as well is once we did pull back the sheet and start looking at other items around that room, there was another sheet there that actually matched what was wrapped around Brittany's head.
00:40:37
And my forensic guy started running the numbers on it and found out that that was a match to the sheet we actually found.
00:40:43
Not only that, during the autopsy, we found royal blue fibers in her hair and on her face.
00:40:51
Well, there's also a blanket there with this royal blue. It's almost like a, not a fleece type, but kind of a loose type blanket.
00:40:59
And it had those same royal fibers on it. With all this new evidence, they could officially charge James with double capital murder.
00:41:07
But the question of how and why still remain. Brittany's murder was so savage, the first blow to her head broke her neck.
00:41:20
There was a very clear mark, an indention in her head where he used a blunt force object and hit her.
00:41:26
And it actually separated the suture in her skull when that happened. James wasn't giving them anything.
00:41:31
No confession, no motive, no murder weapon. Not a single witness. Just silence. All they had was forensic evidence and theories, pieces of the story.
00:41:42
he refused to tell but was it enough to finally put James Cosby back behind bars
00:41:49
this time for life either way the world would soon learn what happened that morning even if James never spoke a word
00:42:25
Brittany Cosby and Crystal Jackson were found brutally murdered and dumped by an abandoned hotel in Port Bolivar.
00:42:41
Detective Kitchens and his team at the Galveston Police Department had followed the haphazard clues to nail down Brittany's criminal father,
00:42:50
James Cosby, as the culprit. But when they brought James in, he didn't crack. after five hours of intense interrogation.
00:42:59
The guy was a machine. My partner that was helping me with the interrogation, he'd been in law enforcement for over 40-plus years,
00:43:05
and he told me he is probably one of the most psychotic people he's ever met. What would they do to anybody to kill them in your room?
00:43:13
Your grandma didn't do it. The five-year-old didn't do it. And you just admitted that you were home.
00:43:20
So the only other person in that house, in your room, is you. You know what I would do if it was my daughter?
00:43:31
Well, what do you think I'd be doing? You would probably call and call and call.
00:43:34
No, I'd be burning the streets up looking for my daughter. Okay, I understand that.
00:43:40
My relationship with Bringer might just be a little bit different from yours. I would say so, yes.
00:43:44
but blood, fingerprints, and other forensic evidence told them that he was the one who did it.
00:43:51
You see, as the great Dr. House once said, liars lie. Duh. Still, the only people in the house on the day of the murder
00:44:03
were Crystal's five-year-old daughter, Zania, and matriarch, Annie Lee Cosby. Annie Lee refused to believe that her grandson James did this under her nose.
00:44:16
And then even when we told her what we found in there, she wanted to deny every bit of it.
00:44:19
She wanted to take up for him. She said that was Brittany's menstrual cycle. I said, no, that's impossible.
00:44:25
With James in jail, the case was taken to the state attorney's office, and that's when prosecutor Paul Love became involved.
00:44:34
Paul has been a lawyer for almost 20 years and has worked for both the prosecution and defense.
00:44:39
So at the time that this case came about, I was the chief prosecutor in the 212th District Court.
00:44:47
And my bureau chief at the time was Bill Reed. So Bill Reed was the lead prosecutor on the case.
00:44:54
And because I was the chief prosecutor in that particular court, But he had asked that I sit with him and assist him on prosecuting the capital murder case.
00:45:04
So that's kind of how I got tagged in. James had a criminal record as long as the Texas shoreline.
00:45:10
And that's pretty long. But it would not be mentioned at trial. Paul had to work with what Detective Kitchens had given him.
00:45:19
And though it was a lot, it was only circumstantial. This is the ultimate piecing a puzzle together.
00:45:26
What I do is I read the entire case and I try to tap into what is it that I feel when I first read a case.
00:45:38
When I first look at a case, what human emotion comes out of me? Because that's what I'm going to have to relate to people in that jury box.
00:45:47
So when I first read this case, it is why? Why? Why would a father beat his daughter and kill his daughter in such a brutal fashion?
00:46:00
Like, there's just no explanation. So I just knew when I read that, it's just like it makes no sense that, you know, people are going to question, like, how could a father do that?
00:46:11
And we don't have to prove motive as part of our case in Texas is a criminal case.
00:46:18
But still, there's a lingering question. So I knew that that was going to be the number one question because that's what I thought.
00:46:26
But like Paul said, the prosecution did not have to prove motive. They just had to cover all their bases.
00:46:32
I am trying to make sure all our circumstantial evidence lines up to show that there is no other person who could have committed this crime other than James Cosby.
00:46:46
The defense argued that without motive, a confession or a witness, there was reasonable doubt as to James's guilt.
00:46:54
James maintained his innocence and his lawyers argued that not only was James the wrong guy,
00:47:01
but no one could prove that Crystal and Brittany died at the same time. And it's true, they couldn't.
00:47:08
Even though the state's evidence was a messy puzzle, they had put the pieces in place.
00:47:15
When this case originally occurred, so you had the FBI working on the case because they thought it was a hate crime.
00:47:23
And so they used federal resources to kind of assist in the investigation. The FBI specialists worked with Detective Kitchens to ensure that James's phone followed a strict and narrow path that matched the surveillance footage.
00:47:39
So what he was able to do is use that cell phone number and he traced the route from Houston to Bolivar.
00:47:49
And he was also logging the cell phone towers that were pinging off that number as he's
00:48:00
that route. One of the things we also did is after we got that cell phone report, my partner and I
00:48:06
went at the same time of night and ran that exact route, keying into our dispatch entire time once
00:48:14
we got to certain points. And we were able to get down there, you know, imitate dumping bodies and
00:48:21
get back all at the same timeline as what he had. Is it easy for a defense to say, oh, anybody could
00:48:28
have had his cell phone and driven that route. Well, remember, now we're looking at 7 a.m. to
00:48:35
9 p.m. time period. So when James Cosby is coming back towards Houston, he meets up with his
00:48:43
girlfriend. She happens to have a crazy ex-husband and he's following them and he tries to ram the
00:48:51
vehicle, James Cosby calls 911. So now we have another time locked in of him making a 911 call
00:49:02
with his cell phone. So it rules out the possibility that anybody else could have
00:49:08
handled his phone during that time period. Paul Love says that call was the nail in his coffin as
00:49:16
far as the cell phone forensics go. You're listening to this and you're thinking,
00:49:21
What are you doing? You know, you of all people just got back from dumping two bodies and you're going to call the police from the prosecutor standpoint.
00:49:31
I'm thinking I'm thinking thank you. But if you just kind of step back, you're like, what the hell were you thinking?
00:49:37
Like, that just makes no sense. You know, you've just now created more evidence against yourself.
00:49:44
As slick as James was, there were many things he did during his cover-up that the state just couldn't wrap their heads around.
00:49:53
Like the shutter. That lone piece of shutter. A clear missing piece off Annie Lee's house.
00:50:01
Why did James leave it against the hotel wall, fully intact? Why didn't he just throw it off the ferry into the sea, never to be seen again?
00:50:10
Was he trying to leave a message or something? or better yet why not dump it wherever he dumped the gun that he used to kill crystal
00:50:18
or the weapon he used to break his daughter's neck he obviously hid those weapons well because
00:50:24
we don't know where they are but the shutter this shutter was the key and james had just left it
00:50:31
right there right for the world to see and the police to find but as far as him leaving it there
00:50:37
the way he did that being the only piece that was left up against the wall is kind of crazy i can't
00:50:42
I can't wrap my head around why he would do that unless he eventually wanted to get caught.
00:50:46
The trial opened in the summer of 2016. Paul Love had poured over every case detail, dedicating his life to getting justice for Brittany and Crystal.
00:50:58
The case had exploded in Houston, drawing intense media coverage. But Paul kept his focus.
00:51:05
this was for the girls to make sure their lives hadn't ended in silence he had to speak for them
00:51:14
so you just never know you just never know how a jury is going to receive your the evidence and
00:51:21
how they're going to receive your presentation of the case so there's a lot of pressure as trial
00:51:25
prosecutors that we put on ourselves but there a lot of pressure because you accountable to family This case has garnered a lot of media attention So the courtroom is packed nearly every day so everybody watching There is never a moment when in particularly in a circumstantial
00:51:42
evidence case, there is never a moment when you feel as though we got it. The prosecution laid out
00:51:49
the evidence piece by piece, driving home the sheer brutality of Brittany's death. Detective
00:51:56
Kitchens was unraveling. This was his first lead homicide case, and he'd grown close to Crystal's
00:52:03
family. He wanted nothing more than to give them closure. He found himself replaying every moment
00:52:11
from the interrogation room with James, wondering if he'd missed something crucial. Even today,
00:52:18
he still views that interview with more clarity. The unique thing about it is now,
00:52:23
knowing what I know now and the experience I have now when I go back and I watch that
00:52:26
video over again he was telling me he'd done it and I just didn't catch on to it you know especially
00:52:32
when we started entering in how a father could do that to their daughter and he says well you have a
00:52:38
different relationship with your daughter than I have with mine and right there he told me he'd
00:52:42
done it and I never picked up on it. After a week of testimony and 290 pieces of evidence
00:52:49
the state rested the jury returned to deliberation and stayed there for three hours
00:52:55
in that three hours you're questioning every decision that you've made uh throughout the
00:53:02
the case because you're thinking maybe if i would ask this question or maybe if i didn't ask that
00:53:08
question or maybe if we would have put that witness on so going into three hours of deliberation and
00:53:13
we understand there's a lot of evidence to kind of sort through. But as prosecutors waiting for
00:53:19
the verdict, that's probably the most difficult time of a trial because you have no control,
00:53:25
all in the hands of 12 people. And now you sit there, sit back and question all your decisions.
00:53:32
Then the jury came back guilty. Did they say guilty? They said guilty. They did say guilty.
00:53:41
Okay, now you can finally breathe and like, wow, you know, we did it. But I think the biggest emotional time for me at that point was when the verdict was read.
00:53:53
Because I won't lie, I broke down in tears when the verdict was read. It was very emotional for me and I knew we had to get it right.
00:54:00
If there's going to be any justice for these girls, we had to get it right. James Cosby would be sentenced for the double capital murders of Brittany and Crystal.
00:54:09
He would receive life without parole. But that question of how and why was still hanging in the air.
00:54:17
Paul Love and Detective Kitchens have their theories. Brittany, I'm going to say, is the head of the household.
00:54:25
And now he's coming back and he wants to be the head of a household. Like he wants to make the decisions.
00:54:31
He doesn't want to share that co-leadership in that house. So I believe that there was some conflict in egos.
00:54:39
Brittany was pretty well running the show there at the house. And then here he comes, he's stepping in, probably wanting to take over.
00:54:45
And it just didn't sit well with either one of them. We know that an argument broke out between them.
00:54:50
You know, she had a great job. They were going out to eat every night. Her and Crystal, they had two bedrooms in the house that were theirs.
00:54:57
One more or less a closet for them, the other one they slept in. And he reduced down to eating bologna sandwiches no job and having to live in the den And I think there was a lot of jealousy involved like you said with the way her life was going That morning an unexpected fight started in James bedroom between him and Brittany
00:55:15
She probably did stand up to him, and I think he just blew a gasket. Emasculated by his young daughter, James snapped.
00:55:25
In an instant, that same demonic rage his ex-wife had feared came roaring back. Only this time, it turned on his own flesh and blood.
00:55:35
The monster was unleashed. To me, this was a rage killing because you also look at how he beat her.
00:55:44
He didn't just kill her. I mean, he beat her. And when Crystal come back in, she saw what was happening, ran out the side door.
00:55:51
He followed with a handgun. The lift gate was open on the vehicle and he shot her in the head right behind the vehicle and tossed her in the back.
00:55:59
Crystal was just collateral damage. It's nothing that he had planned. I don't think he planned on killing Brittany,
00:56:03
but when Crystal came in and saw it, she just collateral damage. Had to get rid of her.
00:56:07
These were all just theories based on the evidence. Detective Kitchens did some interviews on the case
00:56:13
and laid out his theories again, plain and simple. Then one day, years later, he got a call from a deputy in jail
00:56:22
who was on the same block as James during TV time. I mentioned this on a TV show that I did,
00:56:28
my theory while he was in the jail watching that show and a deputy overheard him say yeah that's
00:56:35
pretty much what happened so we nailed it this was a horrific unnecessary murder in all the mess
00:56:43
one family the Cosbys lost two people and the Jacksons were left without a daughter
00:56:50
Zania was left without a mother but she gained something unexpected in the grief process
00:56:58
Now there's been good things that has come out of this case and I hate that it took this to get it there
00:57:05
but Zania is now my goddaughter and we spend holidays with the grandparents and her every year
00:57:12
Beyond gaining a goddaughter and a lifelong bond with the Jackson family Detective Kitchens walked away from that interrogation with lessons
00:57:21
that cut deep They're lessons he still carries with him etched into who he is as a detective.
00:57:30
The biggest part about I learned from him is, hey, keep your mouth shut. Let him do the talking and watch.
00:57:36
You know, watch him listen to the words that he says closely and don't talk so much during that interview.
00:57:41
James Cosby was a man shaped by steel bars and concrete walls. Years of institutionalization had hollowed him out,
00:57:51
leaving behind a husk clung to the familiarity and comfort of captivity. Kind of like Brooks.
00:58:01
Y'all saw Shawshank, right? Even in the free world at Annie Lee's house, he replicated his prison cell in his bedroom.
00:58:10
This was the only life that he knew. This was the only thing that had been taught to him,
00:58:16
via our glorious educational system. When James returned to his grandmother's house, it was not to open arms, but to disgrace.
00:58:27
A disgrace that he had earned, I might add. A failed father with no money, no future, no claim to respect.
00:58:37
And here he is finding his daughter Brittany thriving Unlike him she had built a life rich with purpose and love He was unnecessary as both a father and the man of the house She had taken his place
00:58:56
Well, James didn't like that. Brittany had everything he never could. Ambition, resilience and a partner who was truly in love with her whatever the fight was and whatever led
00:59:10
to her tragic end i'm sure it was something really stupid we can only imagine what it was though
00:59:16
because this idiot won't talk this bigot this hypocritical piece of shit maybe it was britney's
00:59:24
words sharp and unrelenting holding up a mirror to james's failures in life and he just couldn't
00:59:32
take it. Instead of facing his reflection with remorse, regret, and maybe some learnings,
00:59:38
he let his fury and jealousy consume him like dumb people do. Dumb people never better themselves.
00:59:46
They never look in the mirror. They just keep believing their own bullshit. You know? Now
00:59:53
Apple's going to censor me for this one. Because even though the message is good, the words are
00:59:58
wrong. That's what I fucking hate about censorship. Anyway, James, real piece of shit.
01:00:04
Do we agree? Who you are is defined by your actions, and in that fateful moment, James unleashed
01:00:10
a rage born of self-loathing, a desperate need to silence the voice that exposed his own inadequacies.
01:00:18
It was not Brittany's defiance that truly killed her, but James's inability to bear the weight of his own
01:00:26
shame. We need more shame. We need to stop telling people they're perfect and start shaming bad behavior again.
01:00:36
Perhaps if we had shamed this guy a little more earlier on, he wouldn't have become this thing.
01:00:44
Now he was just a piece of shit, just an ex-criminal who'd been emasculated by his own
01:00:50
daughter. The devil he carried inside found its way out like it always does, and he extinguished
01:00:57
the very light that could have redeemed him. Once again, thank you so much for being here.
01:01:23
If you like this sort of content and you want to have your heart broken into a million little pieces,
01:01:28
go watch our latest Sword and Scale television episode. Kyle Yorlitz. Holy crap, is that a sad one.
01:01:37
Stay safe. Outro Music