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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. Barbara, you say what you did, but you don't know why you did what you did,
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and you can't, you don't accept any responsibility for what you did. Welcome to Season 11, Episode 259 of Sword and Scale,
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a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. So here's the thing. I can't talk about the
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because otherwise you guys go crazy and start making up rumors online about where to find it out in the wild.
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I'm talking about the app, of course, which we're working on and I don't know what to say
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about it because we're in this weird period of time where we put out these episodes a week ahead of time on
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Plus and then they come out to everybody else a week later so the information changes after a week.
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I don't know what to say to you right now other than I don't know just sit tight I guess
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and the app will be here eventually by the way in the meantime we have a store we're working on
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with all kinds of brand new merch and stuff it's partially functional right now but there's that
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so if you want to support us head on over to store.swordandscale.com and take a look
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Starting a business sounds exciting until you actually do it. Then suddenly you're the product guy, the website guy, the shipping department, the marketing department, customer service, all of it.
00:02:27
And if you're anything like me when I started, you're thinking, am I doing this right?
00:02:32
Is anyone going to actually care? That's where Shopify makes a lot of sense. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.
00:02:44
They give you hundreds of ready-to-use templates so you can build a clean, professional online store that actually looks like your brand.
00:02:52
And once you're up and running, Shopify has tools for inventory, payments, analytics, returns, and international shipping all in one place.
00:03:00
They even have AI tools to help you write product descriptions, improve page headlines, and enhance product photography.
00:03:08
Plus, easy email and social media campaigns to help customers actually find you.
00:03:13
It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 a month trial today at shopify.com slash sword and scale.
00:03:26
Go to shopify.com slash sword and scale. That's shopify.com slash sword and scale.
00:03:34
Cha-ching. There's no denying it. Teachers hold an immense power and influence in shaping the lives of their students.
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If your kid is anything but homeschooled, they spend a good chunk of their week with their educators.
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A good teacher creates an environment where open communication and trust are fostered,
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allowing students to confide in them about their experiences, fears, or concerns.
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This is necessary because, as we know, teachers are mandated reporters. Because of the vast amount of time spent with their students in a routine-based environment,
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teachers are likely to notice if something seems off or if a child is showing signs of abuse.
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They become the ears and eyes tuned in to the well-being of their students beyond just the academic performance.
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And when they suspect something isn't right, they are mandated to take action and report it,
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ensuring that these children get the help and protection they deserve. Ultimately, once a teacher turns a case into Child Protective Services, it's up to that agency to deal with it.
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And the teacher who reported it doesn't get any updates on the case. The story we're about to tell you is, indeed, about a teacher opening up a CPS case.
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But this case went a little differently than most others. I have taught mathematics for 33 years I just recently retired during the pandemic This is Tammy Cooper She spent her long career teaching math to wait for it middle schoolers
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Can you imagine what a pain in the ass that is? And this woman did it for 33 years.
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Back on the 1st of October, 1997, Tammy woke up early in the morning and got ready for another day of turning adolescent chaos
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into calculated brilliance at Joseph Kerr Middle School in Elk Grove, California.
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I had been teaching middle school at Joseph Kerr Middle School for 10 years when Jessa came to me the day she came to me.
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And so I was an experienced teacher, but it was shocking what she had to tell me.
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Interestingly enough, this is one of those rare cases where we have nearly every single important perspective directly from the source.
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This girl Tammy is talking about Jessa or Jessica is now in her late 30s. Her name is Jessica Rail.
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And at the time, she was just starting 8th grade and Tammy Cooper's math class was Jessica's final class of the day.
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Because it was all very early in the school year, Tammy didn't have more than an acquaintance level relationship with her students in the classroom.
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She was just starting to get to know them. It was six period, and this is the end of September, so I'd only known her for, you know, maybe six weeks.
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As the kids began slowly filtering into the room, Tammy noticed Jessica timidly walking toward her.
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She came up to me right before class started and said, I can't go home. I need to find my granny.
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And I said, what? I was confused. She goes, I can't go home. I can't go home. I got to find my granny. And, um, and then she said,
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they poured bleach on me. And in my mind, I'm going, what the hell's happening here? And I
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literally said, sit down, we'll finish class and then we'll, we'll address it. I didn't, I didn't
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even have the, and I was very experienced teacher, but I still didn't have the wherewithal at that
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moment because she showed me the bleach stains on her arms and it just it took me that 50 minutes
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of class to just kind of take a deep breath. Bleach. This poor girl had just told her brand
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new math teacher that someone had poured bleach on her hair. It was clear the longer Tammy looked
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at Jessica. Her hair was changing colors. It was crispy and fried. Her clothes had bleach stains
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all over them, and she smelled strongly of the chemical. She was absent a lot in just that short period of time, and it probably was closer to five
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weeks, maybe, but she had a B in the class. She always did her makeup work, and the ironic thing is I knew she had a friend who had ran
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away, and it came out, you know, on her email at the middle school, and so I came up to
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her and said, hey, do you know anything about her? I can't remember the girl's name. And she said,
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no. At that moment, I would never have in a million years even crossed my mind that she was in trouble
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herself. It was just at that moment, the way she told me and the burns on her arms, it just was,
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it just hit me. Upon further investigation, the damage was even more shocking than anyone realized.
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Jessica's clothes had disguised the chemical burns on her skin throughout the day.
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I just remember feeling dirty and wanting to brush my teeth but couldn't go into the house.
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And my hair was like, I couldn't see it, but it felt like straw. It was just changing texture as the hours went on.
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And I was in a lot of pain from the bleach burns. And then I got dressed, got my backpack, and rode the, I think it was like three miles to the junior high and went to school.
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My first class was supposed to be gym, and I was like, I can't change to gym clothes, and they'll see all these burns.
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So I went and I told them that I fell in bleach. but I think they thought I said I fell off the bleachers and that I hurt myself and I couldn't
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do gym class and then they let me get out of it and then I went through most of my classes
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just I knew I smelled but I don't know if other people noticed it and then I saw my face in the
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bathroom and my hair was like changing colors as the day was going on um and at lunchtime I told my
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only friend that I had at school what had happened and she was trying to convince me to
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tell someone but I at that point I wasn't 100 convinced but right before my last period class
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I was like this is it either now or never like I either tell someone and see if maybe someone will
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actually help me and believe me or I go home and face whatever's going to happen. We waited till the
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end of the period and then I had taken her up to the counseling office and I just recently saw
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her counselor like a week ago and updated him so this is 25 years later and he had in fact checked
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on her earlier in the days as some student had reported that he or she got something was wrong
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so the counselor did check with her and she said nothing she doesn't remember that but he did just
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recall that to me So we sat down sheriff was called I took her into the bathroom and took pictures I mean her bra was burned You could see the burn marks where the bleach had burned her bra to her back And it was just all of her hair It was yeah it was really really shocking
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Then we came back. We finished all the CPS report. And the sheriff came. And then the next place she was going was to the hospital.
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and right then as a teacher that was the moment that was a pivot for me in the sense of
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I decided to go to the hospital with her and that's not what teachers do teachers are supposed
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to report it to CPS and then step back and allow the system to do it's you know what it's supposed
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to do and for whatever even my voice is kind of chipping for whatever reason I decided differently
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and I told her I would be there. And I assured her I would be there. Though at first it was unclear to Tammy what exactly had happened to Jessica,
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the confusion quickly dissipated as she shared more of the horrifying details with her teacher.
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According to Jessica, who lived with her biological mother and stepfather in a nice-looking single-family home in Elk Grove,
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it was her stepfather who had poured bleach all over her the night before. This was not an accidental thing.
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This was very malicious and very intentional. Not only that, but it later became clear that Jessica had actually been sleeping in a shed in the backyard when this occurred.
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Though it appeared relatively normal from the outside, there was something evil happening behind closed doors.
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No, it was probably the third or fourth time I was made to sleep out in the shed.
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Eighth grade had started and I was already at school and I was made, I woken up in the middle of the night, told to go out there because I couldn't be in the house.
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So I went out there and I was sleeping on the lawn chair. And in the middle of the night, Larry comes out, opens the door and pours a bottle of bleach all over me,
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screaming about, hey, you like that, don't you demon? And then they left me there covered in bleach for I don't know how long.
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And eventually they came in and sprayed me off with the ice cold hoes. And then I got up, changed and went to school.
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I was lucky because it did have multiple windows because we used to have the animals in there.
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So it did have like a cross breeze and it was early September, so it wasn't terribly hot.
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Jessica's mother, Barbara Carrasco, raised and bred French bulldogs at one point,
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keeping up to 10 dogs crated in the shed at a time. It smelled like old wet dog because there were still dog kennels in there and like old dog food.
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And it just smelled dirty because it was a storage shed now. But it wasn't terribly hot or uncomfortable.
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It might be worth noting here that though Jessica says now that the shed wasn't particularly hot or uncomfortable, her threshold for discomfort is likely a lot different than those of us who had even somewhat of a normal upbringing.
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For example, though she was sleeping out in the shed, you might assume her parents would allow her to come inside and use the restroom during the night, or at least before going to school.
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Right. Oh, there was a bucket, a five gallon bucket in the shed that I was to use to go to the bathroom.
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We are we are trained every year to recognize what we look for. And I'm trying to think if I did file a report before her.
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I filed several after. I honestly can't remember. And if I did, it was nothing of this violent nature.
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But we got to the hospital. She had to strip and shower and do a rape test. And I knew immediately when just by her body movements that she had been molested.
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And she has denied that to me forever until just this last year. and I knew it was just not the kind of movements that a 13 year old girl would do when they're
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being tested for rape like oh okay no big deal and I expected her to be nervous or kind of you
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know like what's happening I don't understand because she probably had never been to a doctor
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before and she didn't she was just like okay whatever and um i asked her you know now why
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she didn't tell me she said there was so much going on it's just one more thing i didn't want to
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deal with jessica hadn't been molested by this current stepfather 49 year old larry carrasco
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but she had been abused by her mother's former husband charles who is also the father of the
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rest of Jessica's siblings. It had been seven years since Jessica, her mother, and grandmother
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bounced around different states before settling down for a while in a motel across from the Santa
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Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California. Charles owned the motel, and Jessica's grandmother worked there.
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She and Jessica stayed in the attached apartment that was reserved for the motel manager,
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which had become her grandmother's job. Well we always kind of always lived together. I was born in New Jersey.
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I know we did maybe a year in Florida when I was little but she was there too And then we drove cross country ended up in California in multiple different places But I always been with my grandmother and my mother
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But my mom would always leave to, when I was little, I would call them her adventures because I didn't know what she was doing.
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But it usually evolved a new man. When we moved to Santa Cruz, it was always been me and my grandmother anyway.
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so it wasn't any big change for me to be just kind of left with my grandmother. Things were relatively normal for me.
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My grandmother made a good life for us. I went to school, had friends, socialized, all of those things.
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And my mother would come around whenever she felt like it or wanted something from my grandmother.
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And eventually she had my brother Chad and then dropped him off to live with us.
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he was probably two months old when she dropped him off for a permanent stay. I mean, she came back once in a while.
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I mean, not often, but she did come back from time to time. Every city they lived in, Jessica's grandmother lamented Barbara's erratic and negligent behavior.
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I mean, honestly, at that age, I didn't really know anything different because my grandmother basically raised me and I used to call my grandmother mom
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because my mother was so sporadically in my life that her not being around wasn't any different.
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I did have moments where when she would come around and I would try to get her attention,
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I would feel bad because she would always say, don't hang on me. Don't touch me.
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Like, just go away. And I'm thinking, why are you even here? Like, if you're not coming to see us, why are you even here?
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But she was never really a mother. So it didn't really make a difference. Soon, Jessica, her grandmother, and her new brother, Chad, who was dressed in a tiny baby tuxedo, attended Barbara's wedding to Charles.
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Charles, by the way, was already married with three kids when Barbara got pregnant.
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When I first met him, I mean, I thought he was weird because he was Asian and they had different cultural things.
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Like he scared me because he ate fish eyes and he told me he was going to make me eat them if I didn't quit sucking my thumb.
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That was like the most vivid memory I've ever had. I'm like, I barely even know this man.
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And he's like branding this whole fish at me with eyeballs. And I'm like, it was just I wasn't used to the cultural differences, but we didn't really spend much time together before they got married or even after they got married.
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it wasn't until he basically lost everything and they all decided to move to nevada that i actually
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lived with him and spent any minute of time with him she saw dollar signs because he owned the
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motel he had other homes and you know it was in mountain view which is very like a fluid area in
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california so my mother saw dollar signs so but the only problem is um my brother chad was proof
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of his affair. So he lost everything. She didn't realize he was going to lose everything in the divorce.
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By the time Chad was about to turn one, Barbara dropped off another of her and Charles' babies.
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This time, it was a little girl named Alexia, born on September 23rd, 1991. Yeah, after Alexia
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was born, within a few months, she was dropped off to live with my brother and I,
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my grandmother was now raising three children and running a motel. Early the next year,
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everyone, including Barbara and her new husband, moved to Stagecoach, Nevada. The six of them, three adults and
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three children, lived in a double-wide trailer, if that surprises you. That summer,
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Barbara gave birth to her third baby by Charles. This one, a boy named Michael. She knew his name was Michael because the guy who was adopting him is named Michael.
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So they knew while she was pregnant that they weren't keeping him. I don't know if their relationship was already starting to fall apart or what was happening at that point.
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I know Charles became weird and more distant because his oldest daughter was killed in a car accident.
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So it kind of just changed him and he just locked himself in his office most of the time.
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I just think it was a downward spiral after the move and after her death another baby just wasn't going to be feasible
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Just a few weeks after he was born once the doctor cleared him to fly Barbara sent Michael off to live with this old friend of hers
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who lived in Pennsylvania Eventually Barbara also sent little Chad to live with the same man
00:22:53
So this timeline tells us that at one point Jessica had three siblings. By the time the incident with the bleach happened,
00:23:04
Jessica was the only child living in the home with her mother and her second stepfather, Larry.
00:23:12
So, where were the other children? Were Michael and Chad really with a man in Pennsylvania?
00:23:21
And where was Alexia? Starting a business sounds exciting until you actually do it.
00:23:42
Then suddenly you're the product guy, the website guy, the shipping department, the marketing department, customer service, all of it.
00:23:49
And if you're anything like me when I started, you're thinking, am I doing this right?
00:23:54
Is anyone going to actually care? That's where Shopify makes a lot of sense. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.
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00:24:14
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00:24:22
They even have AI tools to help you write product descriptions, improve page headlines, and enhance product photography.
00:24:30
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It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 a month trial today at shopify.com slash swordandscale.
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Go to shopify.com slash swordandscale. That's shopify.com slash swordandscale. Cha-ching.
00:25:10
In early September 1997, 13-year-old Jessica Rale confided in her math teacher that she was being abused at home.
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lifting her shirt to reveal horrible chemical burns on her skin. Jessica's teacher, Tammy Cooper, stuck by her through her hospital evaluations and all of the CPS paperwork.
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Tammy and Jessica both knew she wouldn't be returning home to her mother, Barbara, and her stepfather, Larry Carrasco.
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She'd been shuffled right into the system. By this point, Jessica's mother and stepfather had forced her grandmother out of the home, leaving Jessica with no protection from their atrocities.
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Jessica's grandmother wasn't in a position the court saw appropriate enough to place Jessica in her care, so she instead went to live in Sacramento Children's Receiving Home.
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Sounds like a much better option, I guess. When I walked in, I didn't realize even what a receiving home was.
00:26:21
But when I walked in, it almost looked like a doctor's office in the front. All the chairs lined up and a front desk where you could check in.
00:26:29
But it was quite a large facility that housed 70 children ages 0 to 18, boys on one side, girls on the other.
00:26:38
And we were separated by age groups. And it was just supposed to be temporary care until they can either go home
00:26:44
or find foster placements. I think was after the hospital or before the hospital, but we did go to the sheriff's office
00:26:52
and they called Barbara Real, who is Jessica's mother. And Jessica was on the phone, me and the
00:27:01
sheriff could hear. And she was saying, why did you do that? Trying to get her biological mother
00:27:07
to admit to what she had done. It became obvious that she was not going to admit anything. So the
00:27:14
sheriff had Jessica stop the conversation. And then the next thing we did was go to the receiving
00:27:20
home. That was the last thing. And I was told because I was a family, I would not be able to
00:27:26
see her for three days. But I promised her that I would see her as soon as I could. And then her
00:27:34
mother and stepfather were arrested that night about two o'clock in the morning. The average stay
00:27:39
and the receiving home is less than 30 days. Because a lot of people just get other family members who can take them.
00:27:46
Or, you know, their parents just had some simple charges and they'd get a parenting class or whatever and send them home.
00:27:52
But most people don't stay more than a month. In total, I ended up being there almost a year.
00:28:00
During Jessica's first month at the receiving home, there was an FBI agent in Sacramento
00:28:06
who was just starting to investigate this case. Not because of the child abuse, but because Jessica's grandmother had called into the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office worried about her grandchildren.
00:28:19
We know that little Chad and Michael were shipped off to live with a man in Pennsylvania, and this was confirmed by the authorities.
00:28:28
Alexia, however, was reportedly living with her father, Charles, in Chicago. The FBI agent who helped Sacramento County with this case is Jeffrey Rinnick.
00:28:40
And we talked to him, too. The way Alexia started, and the guy in the, in fact, I just saw him the other day.
00:28:47
His name is Steve Hill, and he was a missing persons detective for the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department.
00:28:54
I got a call from Steve. And at the time I got the call, what I was told by Steve Hill was that they had received a call from a woman in Pennsylvania.
00:29:06
And the woman in Pennsylvania claimed to be a grandmother of a little girl down around Elk Grove.
00:29:12
She was calling the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department because she couldn't reach anyone.
00:29:19
And she was worried about her granddaughter. And that's what they started with. And then when they got that, they called me.
00:29:27
All we knew was that we had this little girl that was unaccounted for. And all I knew was even though I had no business in it, I was going to go with Steve.
00:29:36
I mean, he was one of my best friends. And I know the guys I worked with, we cared about those guys.
00:29:43
So if it was an issue or a concern for backup, we would be there for each other.
00:29:47
So that's how I started, just being backup for Steve Hill. Jeff has had a long successful career in the FBI Before getting involved in cases of missing children Jeff was actually the agent who pulled a murder confession from Cary Stainer a Yosemite killer If you know or remember that case
00:30:11
Cary was the older brother of Stephen Stainer, a teen who was kidnapped back in 1972 and held
00:30:17
captive for seven years. Eventually, Stephen escaped, bringing with him another little boy
00:30:24
who had also been kidnapped by the same man. Stephen went on press tours and was a veritable celebrity after his escape,
00:30:33
but was tragically killed riding his motorbike home from work in 1989 when a car hit him and drove away, leaving him to die of his head injuries.
00:30:46
Ten years later, in 1999, Stephen's older brother, Kerry, began murdering women near Yosemite National Park.
00:30:54
It's a fascinating story that the brother of a kidnapped teen would turn into a murderer.
00:31:01
But here we are. He murdered four women between February and July, but authorities quickly caught on and he was arrested on July 24th of that same year.
00:31:14
Jeff went through all the training at Quantico many, many decades ago. His training on interrogation consisted of a two-hour class.
00:31:24
Most of Jeff's tactics, though, seem to come to him naturally, even mirroring the read technique in some ways.
00:31:32
You know, it's funny because, you know, you read about these other techniques and they teach you how to feign like you care, you know, how to act so they believe.
00:31:42
I don't I don't act. I mean, I mean, if it's if I'm interviewing you and I tell you I'm going to do something for you, I'm going to do it.
00:31:51
In Stainer's case, you know, I promised him that his family had no idea what was coming and that I needed to go down there and tell him.
00:32:01
And that was one of the things that he was considering before he started confessing.
00:32:07
Now, everybody thinks killers to be monsters and mean people. But before I retired, I helped with a interview of a young boy, about 19.
00:32:20
he had drowned deliberately drowned a 15 year old boy for some he wanted to talk to me
00:32:27
and uh i was leaving i had promised that i wouldn't do any more um interview issues but
00:32:35
they came and got me said he was asking for me so i went back in so i i went in and i took his
00:32:40
confession but here's the thing like when i do my interviews like i want to know about this person
00:32:46
What's his story? So like in this guy's case, I said, you know, if you could have anything in the world, what would you want?
00:32:57
And, you know, you could see him going through and going through and he looks at me and says, you know, if I could have anything in the world, I would want someone to love me and someone to love.
00:33:10
Now, this is coming from a kid who just killed a 15 year old kid. So, you know, it doesn't fit.
00:33:15
It doesn't make sense. How do you explain it? And I think that's one of the things that wears out investigators and detectives, because, you know, there's just some things that are not going to make sense.
00:33:28
And when you see them in conjunction with crime scenes that are beyond the ability to to tolerate, you know, it just does what it does.
00:33:39
There's a lot of confusion around the FBI's protocols, specifically when it comes to cases of missing children.
00:33:46
In the 1990s, the director was Louis Freeh. And Louis Freeh determined that he was going to enable the FBI's resources and people to be utilized if a child is harmed or goes missing or whatever.
00:34:08
And so he took away, for some reason, everybody always says, oh, you got to wait 24 hours for the FBI.
00:34:14
That is, no, you don't wait at all. And I think a lot of what determines how the FBI is going to answer is going to be the person that you're dealing with.
00:34:26
For instance, in our office, because I was, you know, the coordinator, if we got cases in that, you know, I didn't care who worked them.
00:34:37
And what started happening was that we started seeing that what would start out as a runaway would end up as an abduction or a false imprisonment because the child had changed their mind and wanted to come home.
00:34:51
And then the adult wouldn't let them come home. When you talk about the difference between, you know, local cases and FBI, this is an example.
00:34:58
The FBI doesn't go, you know, we don't do that. It's not that it's below us or anything, but we are required by law to address what the law tells us to address.
00:35:08
And those things are going to be federal crimes or any other such thing that is legislated.
00:35:16
So that's why, you know, normally we wouldn't get calls like this. But because of the relationship we had, we did.
00:35:24
So when they got the call, basically, there was me, I think one or two other agents from the office.
00:35:31
We went with their squad, the Child Abduction Squad, or they call themselves the Child Abduction Bureau.
00:35:38
And then we were down there with them just covering them. But what we found, we were unprepared for.
00:35:45
maybe two weeks into me being into the receiving home late September, early October,
00:35:51
because they had verified that Alexia was not with her father in Chicago He said he hadn seen her or talked to her in months So they were coming to me to try to figure it out And he was one of the FBI agents Jeff
00:36:06
He was very mean. Like, he made me feel like total crap. We'll get to that in just a little bit.
00:36:13
You might be thinking, why would this guy try to scare or guilt a child who was a victim herself?
00:36:21
as we were conducting investigation looking for the little girl. We saw there were pictures in the house with her face cut out of them.
00:36:32
So that was not a good feeling. And then as the day went on, we learned that the victim's older sister,
00:36:42
her name is Jessica, it's our Jessica, had reported to a teacher that day at school that her stepfather had poured bleach on her
00:36:54
while she was sleeping in a shed in the backyard. And because of that, they had removed her from the house and were holding her at the child's receiving home.
00:37:07
we realized on the first day based on learning and talking with the detectives, the sheriff detectives, that something really catastrophic had happened here.
00:37:22
And so at that point, as the day unfolded, we realized that we had no evidence that Alexia ever existed.
00:37:35
and so we would stop at nothing to look for her and to find her. So from that point on, it became a situation
00:37:47
where the sheriff's department was bringing up the resources, bringing up their people, and we were helping them.
00:37:54
If interviews need to be done, that kind of thing, we would do it. As we know, when it came to interviews, Jeff was the man for the job.
00:38:03
This is really hard for me because I'm not proud of it, but I will tell you what happened.
00:38:09
We spent a day looking for Alexia. I was with my partner who was a new agent. And we were heading back to our office and I decided the children's receiving home was right across the street from our office.
00:38:21
So I went into the children's receiving home and we asked the administrators if we could see Jessica.
00:38:28
So they put us in a room with Jessica, glass door, you know, it was glass, and they left us there.
00:38:38
Jessica's opening remarks were utter profanity. As a law enforcement person, one of the hardest things in life is to try and convince a person that is afraid of you that you're there to help them.
00:38:53
It's really, it's not only hard, but it becomes emotionally just really taxing. And in this case, she refused to tell us anything.
00:39:04
She would throw profanity at us like it was, you know. He told me things like, who do you think she was calling for when they were abusing her?
00:39:15
You were her only person to help. We know you know what happened to her. Like, it was some harsh tactics.
00:39:22
And he remembers her differently than I do, but I don't remember telling him what happened.
00:39:27
And I remember walking out of that meeting. This is how Jeff remembers that interview.
00:39:33
I don't know. Something clicked inside of me. I wasn't going to. I believed she was the only one who could tell us where that child was.
00:39:43
And I wasn't going to leave there. Yeah. According to the FBI agent, when I spoke to him not too long, a few months ago,
00:39:50
they found not a single solitary DNA strand, not a hair, not a fingerprint, no toys,
00:40:01
nothing to indicate that a child lived in that house. Every picture she was in, her face was cut out of it.
00:40:09
I started back from the beginning with Jessica, and I started taking every memory she had
00:40:16
and establishing from her which of the memories had Alexia in them. And so she had to do nothing but think about Alexia.
00:40:28
And she's smart. She knew I was getting a little, we were getting upset. She said something that indicated she was there.
00:40:36
I heard her say something like that. And I just very nonchalantly got up, and I locked the door to the room.
00:40:43
and I went back to Jessica and I started having her describe for us her favorite times with Alexia
00:40:53
which invariably would turn out to be the two of them cuddling in watching tv we knew about Alexia but the only person who could tell us is you and she was
00:41:07
screaming and yelling. They were trying to get in the room. I wouldn't let them in. And so they were
00:41:16
very, very angry. But the end result was that Jessica described everything that had occurred.
00:41:26
It started when she was very, very little, even when we were still living with Charles
00:41:30
in Stagecoach, Nevada. I remember coming out and she's, like she is in a height chair,
00:41:36
probably eight, nine months old. And Barbara's just taking a lighter to the bottom of her feet.
00:41:44
Walked out, saw her doing it, and the baby's obviously crying. And my mother had a look, and if she gave you that look, you didn't say anything back.
00:41:52
So I just turned around, walked out. Another memory Jessica can recall from her childhood really puts Barbara into perspective My mother would love to tell me that I was ugly and fat and worthless and that I would never amount to anything
00:42:07
I'd be pregnant in high school. I mean, it was just, I never got any racial slurs.
00:42:12
But, you know, I was called a bitch and a cunt, anything. I mean, she took all my awards that I saved and all my cards for, like, birthdays.
00:42:21
and she burned them all in the fireplace just because they meant something to me.
00:42:27
Barbara and Charles obviously didn't work out long-term as a couple, so they split.
00:42:32
And Barbara quickly went on the hunt for another man, as Barbra's often do. We moved again. We were in another city in California.
00:42:44
And I was in sixth grade going to school. Chad finally started kindergarten. and she was off all the time supposedly working or looking for work and she came home one time
00:42:56
and she's just like I met a man and we're we got married and you're we're all moving into his house
00:43:01
in Elk Grove and my grandmother tried to convince her to let us um finish out the school year so we
00:43:08
didn't have to change mid-year but she was hearing nothing about it she's like they're my kids I'm
00:43:13
taking them. So we ended up moving while I was in my sixth grade year. Whenever she could show us
00:43:19
off to some boyfriend or at some event, she would. But when it came to actual parenting or being there
00:43:26
for when we needed her, she wanted nothing to do with it. By this point, only one of Jessica's
00:43:32
younger brothers had been sent to live with the man in Pennsylvania. So it would be Jessica,
00:43:39
Alexia Chad and their mother Barbara and grandma making the move. They'd be moving into
00:43:47
a home in Elk Grove, California owned by a 49-year-old man named Larry Carrasco.
00:43:53
I didn't even know how he met her, if it was at a bar or just down the street. She never gave us any information.
00:44:00
She just said she married him and here we are. I thought he was just completely normal, everyday guy.
00:44:07
one of the most well put together guys I've ever seen my mom date. I thought, well, maybe this will be good.
00:44:13
Like, maybe we'll stay here for a while and, you know, mom will be all right and we'll get to be a family.
00:44:20
These hopes didn't last long. Barbara never enrolled Chad in kindergarten and sent him to live in Pennsylvania that same summer.
00:44:30
Just a reminder, because these names can get confusing. Michael was the name of Jessica's little brother, and also the name of the man their mother sent the boys to live with.
00:44:43
When Barbara was pregnant with Michael, she knew she would be sending him off for this unofficial adoption.
00:44:51
So she named the baby after the man who would be taking custody of him. How thoughtful, I guess.
00:44:59
Chad was shipped off a little bit later and was slightly less planned. After he's sent to live with Michael, things got weird.
00:45:12
My grandmother was noticing more and more of the, I guess, the addictive behaviors and the odd punishments and the meanness towards Alexia.
00:45:23
And she was speaking out about it more and threatening to call the authorities to get us taken away.
00:45:29
so Barbara and Larry decided to kick my grandmother out. And once my grandmother no longer lived there,
00:45:37
I missed a lot of school taking care of Alexia because Barbara wouldn't come out of her room.
00:45:43
From time to time, she would tell me to stay home just because she didn't want to deal with that Chinese bitch,
00:45:48
is what she would call Alexia a lot of the times. But then other times, she's like, you have to go to school
00:45:53
because if not, the cops are going to come after me for you missing too many days.
00:45:57
It was hit or miss with her. But some days I would stay home if Alexia was feeling emotionally unstable, I guess you could say,
00:46:06
because there would be some times where she would be like, I just don't want to be here alone.
00:46:10
She's always told me when I came home from school that they don't feed her. Nobody comes out of the bedroom and they don't feed her while I'm gone.
00:46:16
So it made me not want to go to school because I didn't know what was happening to her when I was gone.
00:46:23
Just like Chad, Alexia approached five years old and was never enrolled in kindergarten.
00:46:30
She was pretty smart. I mean, I think she would have been a highly intelligent little girl.
00:46:33
I mean, I will never know because she didn't even get to go to school to see if she could read or anything like that.
00:46:39
But when you grow up in the household like I do, you grow up quicker. So she was well beyond her years with her verbal and emotional development.
00:46:50
Things were getting weird. not only because Barbara's own addiction to methamphetamine was getting worse
00:46:56
but because she had gotten Larry on meth as well. He once had a stable job before a workplace injury
00:47:05
but was unemployed by February of 1997 and had begun skulking back into the bedroom
00:47:12
with Barbara on a daily basis. At one point Larry, before his accident, he agreed that she needed to get help
00:47:20
and he kicked her out. Both my grandmother and him decided to kick her out. And within like a few hours,
00:47:27
she was back at the door just crying and begging to come back, swearing that she was going to do better
00:47:32
and go to rehab and all of this. And they both let her back in and no rehab ever happened.
00:47:40
Soon, they were making paranoid accusations claiming the girls were possessed. every day held a new
00:47:49
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00:49:43
Thirteen-year-old Jessica Rale sat in an interrogation room in late 1997, rehashing every single detail of what happened to her little sister,
00:49:54
five-year-old Alexia. There was not a crumb of evidence that Alexia even existed in the Carrasco home,
00:50:02
but she had lived there with Jessica, hidden within the confines of the deceivingly normal-looking outer walls.
00:50:12
As she began to divulge more of her story, police officers and FBI agents couldn't believe what they were hearing.
00:50:19
Especially because they didn't have any evidence that could corroborate that Jessica's story was even true.
00:50:26
This would soon change. Very shortly before the worst part of Jessica's story, she told detectives about her mother and Larry's drug use and increased paranoia.
00:50:39
Something that eventually led to the couple accusing both Jessica and little Alexia of being possessed by demons.
00:50:48
It's important to note, though, that Barbara's behavior can't be mitigated by her drug use.
00:50:54
It would be easy to blame everything on drugs. Of course it would. But Barbara's personality was poison from the very beginning.
00:51:04
Meth just, you know, added a little spice to the mix. A little chaser on your cocktail, if you don't mind the comparison.
00:51:16
My grandmother raised her with her father. And I know she was very spoiled. My grandmother had my uncle and then she had like eight miscarriages over like 13 years before she got pregnant with my mother.
00:51:32
So she spoiled the hell out of my mother. She had everything under the sun. Like, I don't think she ever worked for anything in her life.
00:51:40
High or not high, my mother was it was always what she wanted. how she wanted it, and only if it benefited her.
00:51:51
Fearing for her little sister's safety, Jessica began missing more and more school
00:51:56
so that she could stay home and keep an eye on her. Though she stayed home as often as she could,
00:52:02
there were, of course, still days when Jessica had to be away at school all day long,
00:52:09
anxious the entire day, knowing that Alexia was without her protection. I think that was one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed is I came home from school and she was in her room and she was playing and the door was slightly open.
00:52:23
And I see her just playing with the stuffed dogs. And I'm like, well, where's your baby dolls? And she's like, they're under the bed. And I'm like, why? She goes, well, because babies are babies are bad and they need to be locked up.
00:52:38
And I just was like, then why are we playing with the puppies? She goes, because everybody loves puppies.
00:52:44
And I was just like the most heart-wrenching, saddest thing I think I've ever witnessed.
00:52:48
And I was like 12 at the time. And that's what the first thing I thought was, well, if she's playing this with her dolls,
00:52:56
something has to be happening while I'm at school. All I really got out of her is the fact that they left her alone and they never fed her
00:53:04
and she was always hungry. once summer started i got to witness a lot of what they were doing and it was a lot of locking
00:53:11
her in a closet cutting all her hair off one time because she my mother didn't want to deal with it
00:53:17
and that was a an emotionally hard thing to watch because i hear her crying and i go
00:53:24
find them in the in their master bedroom closet and she's got alexia taped like duct taped to a
00:53:30
four poster chair while she's just cutting all of her hair off. And I'm like, I don't, didn't understand why would we need to do that?
00:53:39
And Barbara's excuse was she didn't want to take care of her hair. And then I, with my smart mouth said, well, you don't, I do like, leave it alone.
00:53:46
Like I'll take care of it. It didn't work out. She still cut basically all of her hair off.
00:53:53
She would said lots of nasty things to her while she was cutting her hair off The demons and the vampire talk started probably right after my grandmother was kicked out but it wasn on a regular basis I finished my seventh grade year
00:54:06
and then during that summer, more and more talk of the demons and the vampires. Apparently,
00:54:12
Alexia and I were demons, and Barbara thought she was God at one point, and she was pregnant with
00:54:20
Jesus, and she told me that I had to die because I was sucking the electricity out of her baby.
00:54:27
It was just random, out of nowhere things. And I just, I never said I was, I never said I wasn't,
00:54:35
I didn't go against her. I just let her talk. On two different occasions, someone,
00:54:42
probably Jessica's grandmother, called CPS or the Sheriff's Department to go out to the Carrasco home
00:54:48
and check on the girls. Of course, Barbara and Larry had prepared the girls for events like this,
00:54:56
and they behaved accordingly. It was in the summer, like the very beginning of summer,
00:55:01
right after my grandmother was kicked out. The cops came, and I told them everything was fine.
00:55:07
But I wasn't going to say things were horrible or anything was going on because Barbara and Larry were standing right next to me,
00:55:14
and the cops weren't even coming in the house. They just stood in the doorway. So I just went with it.
00:55:21
Everything's fine. I'm good. We're all good. And then the more talks of demons and vampires and Barbara putting like cameras in the ceiling to watch me because apparently I was trying to sneak out or kill her or whatever she thought I was doing.
00:55:37
We had the my bedroom windows was bolted shut. There's really no escaping that house.
00:55:44
She took the phone out away so I couldn't call anybody. and it was summertime so it's not like I had a reason to leave the house.
00:55:52
And then all of a sudden she and Larry sit us down and tell us that they figured out how to get rid of the demons and the vampires
00:55:58
and that we would need to drink these bleach milkshakes three times a day for eight days to rid us of our demons.
00:56:06
Three bleach milkshakes per day for eight days meant that each girl would have to consume 24 total milkshakes,
00:56:15
which were often mixed with garlic and other spices. Jessica was a middle schooler, but Alexia was a tiny little five-year-old.
00:56:27
Jessica knew there was no way Alexia would be able to survive all 24 of those shakes.
00:56:33
It was very intimidating process because Larry and Barbara both sat at the table with us
00:56:38
and stared us down and we weren't allowed to leave unless we drank it. But initially I had refused and Larry punched me in the face and gave me two black eyes because I refused to come out of my bedroom to go drink this concoction.
00:56:54
After he did that, I realized I had no choice and that if I didn't, I was probably going to end up beaten.
00:57:00
And so I started drinking them, but it was chalky and it burned and you wanted to throw up.
00:57:12
And it was just a horrible experience. And Alexia had to drink the same amount as me and obviously would have major effects on someone being so little as opposed to me.
00:57:27
It was a little bit heavier as a teenager. And a little 40-pound-year-old big kid drinking the same amount.
00:57:36
It burned my throat and burned my stomach, but it didn't last long for some reason.
00:57:42
And it didn't make me nauseous or anything. After the third day, it was horrible tasting, but I was able to just get them down.
00:57:50
The first couple times we had those shakes, I was able to sneak Alexia and I off into the bathroom and throw up.
00:57:59
I had to basically put my fingers down her throat because she didn't understand the concept to make her throw up.
00:58:06
But Larry and Barbara caught us doing that. And then after that, we were always kept separated and weren't allowed to go back to our rooms until they determined it to be safe.
00:58:19
Or they would just put us directly in our rooms and lock us in there so we had no way of throwing up unless we wanted to puke in our beds.
00:58:27
I think we barely made halfway through the second day and we were separated the rest of the time.
00:58:37
For most of the time, honestly, I didn't get to see or know. I mean, I would hear her like crying and whimpering
00:58:42
so I knew she was still alive. But a lot of times, unless both of them were there,
00:58:49
we weren't allowed to be together. As if the bleach milkshakes weren't bad enough,
00:58:54
Barbara and Larry began doing the unthinkable. They did bring us out together sometimes
00:59:01
to add additional fun torture. When she put bleach in our ears and our eyes on a daily basis,
00:59:12
we got to do that together. But other than that, she was normally, I pretty much believe, locked
00:59:17
in the master bedroom closet. I mean, I just remember every time Barbara did it to her, she just screamed,
00:59:23
like uncontrollably screamed. And yeah, it was horrible, but I honestly, I blocked a lot of stuff out.
00:59:29
I didn't allow myself to think or feel about a lot of things because I just, I felt just so defeated because there was nothing I could do anyway.
00:59:38
No matter what option I thought of, none of them ended well. So if I thought of escaping, like, how do I get Alexia out?
00:59:48
Because I can't leave without her. I can't get to the phone. It eventually just became too much.
00:59:53
And I kind of honestly gave up. It was nearing the end of the eight days and Barbara had even more in store for the girls Jessica in particular At this time Barbara and Larry still had their ten French bulldogs back in the dog shed
01:00:11
And Barbara loved those dogs more than her own children. Even so, she killed them all.
01:00:19
We probably had two days left, maybe three days left of the bleach shakes and Barbara made me come outside.
01:00:24
and watch, well, help her. I guess it didn't help, but she made me bring the dogs out one by one,
01:00:30
and she drowned each one of them in a bucket of bleach water in the backyard. In the middle of summer, nobody knew a thing.
01:00:38
Nobody heard a thing. No neighbors called, and it's not like we live far from other neighbors.
01:00:45
It was residential. They were right there. You could have looked over your fence and seen your neighbor.
01:00:50
She loved those dogs. One of them, she loved us, and they were her income. So I don't understand why she just drowned all of her income.
01:00:59
That was more the reason. Like, she just wanted to show me that she could do this,
01:01:03
and if she could do it to these dogs that I know she loved more than us, it would be easier for her to do it to us, too.
01:01:10
Just as Jessica feared, Alexia didn't make it through the full eight days of bleach shakes.
01:01:17
Each time Jessica saw her, on the occasions they were both dragged from isolation for torture sessions,
01:01:23
Alexia looked more pale and sickly. Her skin had a grayish cast and the sparkle had left the little girl's eyes.
01:01:36
It was day seven and Alexia had failed to drink her milkshake. She was, after all,
01:01:43
nearly catatonic by this point. Barbara dragged Alexia out of the kitchen by her hair
01:01:49
and locked her in the master bedroom closet. When lunchtime rolled around and it was time for another round of milkshakes, Alexia was absent from the table.
01:02:02
When I walked down the hallway to come out to have my, who knows, 20th shake, Alexia was completely naked in the bathtub and there was an enema bag in the bathtub with her.
01:02:19
and she was making small sounds but she wasn't really moving i wanted to go in but larry pushed
01:02:26
me and told me to go sit down and have my shake so i'm sitting with larry at the table having my
01:02:34
shake and barbara goes into the bathroom i don't know what she was doing to alexia while she was in
01:02:41
the bathroom but then she brings alexia out of the bathtub lays her naked on the floor and realizes
01:02:48
that she's not breathing um she swears she you know she's already died so she leans over her
01:02:56
and gives her like one half-assed attempt at cpr like one breath no compressions no nothing
01:03:05
and then just smiles and realizes she goes she's dead and i'm freaking out like asking are you sure
01:03:15
because isn't there a way to save her? Like, how do you know? You're not a doctor.
01:03:22
But nobody did any further attempts to save her or make sure she was actually really past.
01:03:29
So that was it. Axia was gone. And Barbara and Larry seemed relieved. Barbara had killed her own little girl
01:03:41
and ten of her own dogs. What would stop her from killing Jessica, too? My mother was always looking for a way to keep me locked up.
01:03:53
She told me that there was bad men out there, that they would take me and do worse things to me.
01:03:58
She told me that the cops were on her side and they would just bring me right back.
01:04:03
She also told me that nobody would believe me, because who's going to believe that this is happening?
01:04:09
They would just think you're crazy and lock you up. she had a lot of reasons and I
01:04:15
you know not really having much contact with the outside world for quite a long time
01:04:20
maybe she was right so I didn't even attempt to try to leave even praying to God as her
01:04:28
grandmother had taught her seemed like a futile effort she had tried it before and God
01:04:34
clearly hadn't heard her or hadn't cared for a little while I was in my room because I guess they were discussing what to do with her.
01:04:42
But immediately, before they made the huge plan of what to do with her, they put her in a black trash bag and put her in the freezer in our garage.
01:04:53
I didn't believe in God because how could a God allow things like this to happen to children?
01:04:59
And then I was also highly confused because Barbara said she was God and then pregnant with Jesus.
01:05:05
And while I knew that wasn't right, I also thought, well, why would my mom lie? Like, moms aren't supposed to lie to you.
01:05:14
So it was very confusing trying to, like, you know what's not right, but you want your mom to love you so much,
01:05:22
and you want your mom to take care of you, so you want to believe her, and you go with what she says
01:05:28
because it makes it easier. It was just a mess. In the time before they finally disposed of Alexia's frozen body,
01:05:37
Barbara and Larry made a game. out of sending Jessica to the garage to get sodas for them,
01:05:43
sometimes even requiring her to get meat and other things out of the same freezer that held Alexia's corpse.
01:05:52
She was in the freezer probably for about a week before they really decided what their process of elimination was going to be and their backstory I was brought out of my room one day and sat down and told that if anybody asks what happened to Alexia
01:06:09
we're just going to tell them that she lives in Chicago with her biological father.
01:06:13
And as they were telling me this, they're bringing me into the master bedroom, into the closet,
01:06:22
and that Alexia's body in the trash bag is on the closet floor. And I'm forced in the closet with Larry standing by
01:06:32
and sitting next to me with a gun pointed at me, telling me to repeat the story over and over again
01:06:37
while they work on dismembering her body. They had a whole set up. All of the clothes were gone.
01:06:45
They had redone the floor, so it was like linoleum on the floor in the closet and they have the trash bags and plastic tape to the floor.
01:06:55
And there was a meat cleaver and an axe and some kind of saw and extra trash bags.
01:07:01
They had it all set up and ready to go. And they, at first, Barbara couldn't do it.
01:07:07
She couldn't start dismembering her. So Larry gave her the gun. She kept the gun trained on me.
01:07:14
And Larry removed Alexia's head from her body. and then after that point Barbara was like oh I think I can do this
01:07:21
and she takes over dismembering her thoroughly I didn't know you could make a body look the way
01:07:30
she ended up looking and just handfuls of her in a trash bag at a time until there was
01:07:39
nothing left they more or less made it like she went through a meat grinder though they had a huge
01:07:46
mess to clean up. Barbara and Larry were on meth. So just imagine a couple of meth heads
01:07:54
cleaning up a crime scene. What I'm trying to say is they left not a single stray hair
01:08:00
to be found by law enforcement. They got everything. I mean, they should start a business
01:08:07
for cleaning homes. Just immaculate, really. And they also had a plan for what to do
01:08:18
with the remainder of Alexia's body. Once they were finished in the closet, they had placed all of her remains in her trash bag.
01:08:26
I was allowed to go take a shower finally, which was well needed because I had bits of body pieces
01:08:32
that flew from the force of her chopping. all over me. So I was allowed to take a shower.
01:08:41
After my shower was brought out into the family room, and they burned her body in the fireplace,
01:08:51
literally Larry one handful at a time. And after, throughout three or four hours,
01:08:58
they eventually burned the whole bag. Just a reminder. This all occurred in the middle of July.
01:09:09
The smoke from a burning body looks and smells much different than any other kind of smoke.
01:09:17
It's not like a burning pile of leaves or a cozy fireplace. It's not even like a backyard barbecue cookout.
01:09:27
Not even a pellet grill. Me, I like the Traeger. It's easy to keep your temperatures regulated.
01:09:35
And there's all sorts of different flavors of pellets to choose from. I like the hickory.
01:09:40
A lot of people like apple. But I like hickory. It smells pretty good. It leaves a nice, sharp, smoky taste on your meats.
01:09:50
Anyway, this must be part of California that has a lot of cookouts because nobody complained about the smell.
01:09:56
or the fact that there was even a fireplace on in California in the middle of July.
01:10:03
Despite these oddities, nobody bothered to call police. Not even one anonymous tip was left.
01:10:12
I guess people in California are so used to seeing just horrible fucked up shit that they just don't even bother anymore.
01:10:19
In any case, in the middle of the night, the three of them drove off in Barbara's white Ford Bronco
01:10:25
to dump Alexia's ashes into the Sacramento River, along with all the tools they used to dismember her,
01:10:33
and also the ice chest that held her frozen body. And then on the way back to the car,
01:10:41
they realized that they locked the keys in the car, so they had to break the window to get in so we could get home.
01:10:50
This would be the one detail in Jessica's story that corroborated evidence found by law enforcement.
01:10:59
This meant that police could believe what she was saying, even though Alexia's body and the rest of the physical evidence were long gone.
01:11:09
Jessica had told us that Larry and Barbara had locked themselves out of the car at the Sacramento River
01:11:15
and that they had to break the window to get in. And based on her description, there was a ton of glass right there.
01:11:22
So the labs took the glass and it turned out to be from their car. Just a side note and something that is totally on brand for Barbara.
01:11:32
In case you missed it, she drove a white Ford Bronco in 1997. The same exact kind of Ford Bronco that OJ Simpson was famous for driving.
01:11:47
This was no accident. I hated that car. she had to buy one when O.J. Simpson went up for
01:11:55
trial and he had that white Bronco she had to buy one and Loved driving it because it was around the same time as the trial was going on.
01:12:03
And everybody would be like, go OJ as we're driving. And she just got the biggest kick out of being like the center of attention over this stupid car.
01:12:12
As we know now, Barbara and OJ have a lot in common. She too would soon become the center of attention.
01:12:21
Not just because of the Ford Bronco, but because she had murdered someone. First, law enforcement had to make sure the case would be prosecutable.
01:12:32
The lack of physical evidence would certainly make that a challenge. Alexia's case, I never was successfully able to guess where we were going ever.
01:12:45
Mona Fjord was the detective in charge of the case. And I think she went back and got like five search warrants.
01:12:52
I mean, she just was absolutely determined to go back there. And we brought a crime scene investigator who literally peeled the paint off the walls looking for residue of blood or anything that could have been there underneath it.
01:13:12
We also sent the fireplace from the house back to Quantico and had that tested by the FBI lab.
01:13:23
And that didn't give up anything either. I knew that I deliberately caused Jessica to experience an emotional upheaval.
01:13:36
And I knew it was my fault. the choice I made that day was was it more important to leave Jessica alone
01:13:46
or was it more important to try and find out what happened to Alexia I chose Alexia
01:13:55
and I'm glad I did and I think Jessica's glad I did but you know when Jessica's demeanor
01:14:03
and how she described things, there was no question that she was telling the truth.
01:14:09
Both Larry and Barbara's convictions would rest on Jessica's testimony and the broken glass from the car window.
01:14:17
The testimony was fine, but they also said because I lied for so long, the jury would try to make it seem like I wasn't credible
01:14:24
because I had lied for so long. But once they did serve Barbara and Larry with the arrest warrant for the murder,
01:14:32
they both started like basically telling the same story just blaming it on each other.
01:14:39
Both Barbara and Larry still pleaded not guilty which meant both of them would go to trial.
01:14:47
Larry's trial was first in February of 2000 and it lasted three days. The jury found him guilty
01:14:55
of second degree murder and ten counts of child abuse and torture. A month later, he was sentenced to 40 years to life.
01:15:05
Barbara's timeline was a bit different. Her first plea was a not guilty plea, but then she changed it to not guilty by reason of insanity.
01:15:18
On the day of jury selection for both of their cases, Barbara changed her plea to guilty.
01:15:24
In May, a judge found her legally sane when she committed the murder. which meant she'd spend her sentence in prison,
01:15:34
not a mental institution. She finally did take a plea deal where they dropped basically all of the torture charges and she took her I believe it was murder one and got sentenced to 15 years to life
01:15:49
I was pissed off because, yes, she, I guess, technically admitted to killing my sister,
01:15:56
but she wasn't getting any time for what she did, the other torture that she did to me or my sister.
01:16:03
If you have an insane attention to detail, and most of our listeners do, unfortunately,
01:16:08
maybe you've done the math by now. It's been well over 15 years since Barbara's conviction.
01:16:17
She's already been up for parole several times. Jessica and I both thought, because California law right now is to let people out of jail,
01:16:27
and that's, you know, the politics. And so we really are surprised that she has been in there still 25 years
01:16:35
and again was denied parole. we have thought for a good the last two or three hearings that she would be released and prepared
01:16:45
for that to happen the thing what the reason that they always give at the end of when they make their
01:16:52
decision they come in and they'll takes 20 minutes or whatever they come back in and they say no
01:16:58
So, Barbara, you say what you did, but you don't know why you did what you did. And you can't, you don't accept any responsibility for what you did.
01:17:10
Barbara's been up, I think, four or five times. The first one I wasn't aware of.
01:17:16
I found out about her being denied through a newspaper article because Tammy saw it in the newspaper in California and sent it to me.
01:17:24
And then I, after that, I requested through victim services to be notified whenever she had a hearing.
01:17:30
So I would attend them via the phone because I didn't have a local courthouse to actually do it via teleconference.
01:17:40
But her most recent one was last December, December of 22. And I did that one via Zoom from my house because COVID allows us to do it that way now.
01:17:51
So I got to see her and hear about all of her wonderful successes and how, you know, she's got her education and she's found religion and she's mentors all the new lifers.
01:18:06
And she's just this wonderful human being now. And I get to tell my piece and debunk everything she says.
01:18:15
and she still has not taken full responsibility for her part in my sister's death.
01:18:23
And she still has no remorse whatsoever for anything that happened. And basically the only truthful thing I got out of her in the last hearing
01:18:32
was that she never wanted us and never loved any of us. Despite spending her entire adolescence in the foster care system,
01:18:41
Jessica now has three children of her own, a college degree, and her own business.
01:18:48
Yet further proof that you do not have to be confined by where you come from. There is a way out if you put in the work.
01:19:01
Nowadays, Jessica strives to be a good mother by deliberately avoiding any resemblance to her own mother.
01:19:09
A common tactic by many who come from abusive homes When Jessica had her first child, a girl, she wanted to memorialize Alexia
01:19:21
So she named her firstborn after her little sister Jessica math teacher from all of those years ago Tammy Cooper still keeps in touch with her
01:19:33
And they visit each other's families regularly. I'm really glad I picked Miss Cooper, Tammy, to be the one to tell out of all my teachers.
01:19:42
She made a promise to me that day that she would stay with me and she would always be there as long as I wanted her in my life.
01:19:49
And I didn't believe her because nobody ever stuck around. But then she did. She stayed.
01:19:54
Do the hospital visit, she stayed while I was getting registered in the receiving home.
01:19:59
She started visiting me afterwards, and she was instrumental in getting my grandmother,
01:20:06
because she didn't have a car, getting my grandmother able to come see me, because she would pick her up for me or take me to my visits.
01:20:13
Everything she said she was going to do, she did. And she really did end up becoming like my best friend as a teenager.
01:20:19
Jessica I never gave Jessica any money I never supported her as a mother or father would
01:20:29
I gave her money here and there for her birthday or whatever but never supported
01:20:35
her as my child and so I'm her teacher and that's the role that we agreed kind of without talking
01:20:45
and I followed her I did several GoFundMe pages when she was at a really bad time, like being kicked out of her home that she was renting.
01:20:57
And we got her through everything. But she never once depended on me as her advocate to change her life and make her life better.
01:21:10
All that she ever, I think, wanted from me was what I could give, which was my love and respect.
01:21:17
and that shared history. I'm the only person who's known this. I'm the only person that she has known since this happened.
01:21:25
There's nobody else. And so, you know, we have that connection. And I am so, just so proud of her.
01:21:34
Just really, really proud of her. Jessica wrote a book that she self-published this year.
01:21:44
She only began therapy for her traumas in recent years and went through something called memory regression.
01:21:51
After every session, she began writing journal entries recalling each and every detail of her horrible experiences.
01:21:59
When she was done, she figured she'd turn it into a book. It's called I'm Not Broken, Surviving the House Demons.
01:22:09
and you can pick up your own copy if you're interested at Amazon. The link will appear in the show notes at swordandscale.com.
01:22:20
Jeffrey Rinnick also has a book detailing his most memorable cases throughout his 30-plus year FBI career.
01:22:28
It's called In the Name of Children, an FBI agent's relentless pursuit of the nation's worst predators.
01:22:36
If you found this episode entertaining, are interesting. You'll love their books.
01:22:43
Barbara and Larry Carrasco tried to erase the very existence of five-year-old Alexia.
01:22:52
But she is forever memorialized in Jessica's oldest daughter, in Jeffrey and Jessica's books,
01:23:01
and in this podcast episode you're listening to right now. Now all of you know Barbara name also So if California ever does let her out more of us can be aware that she is and will forever be a child murderer
01:23:36
And look at that. Another one wrapped up. Every week, just like clockwork. Isn't that weird?
01:23:53
How they just keep coming? Head on over to swordandscale.com to support us and keep them coming if you want to.
01:24:02
And until next time, stay safe, I guess. Thank you. I want to start off by apologizing.
01:25:00
I was siphoning Jordan's skill greatness for many years, and I realized This is amazing. I need to be supporting this.
01:25:10
I paid for stupid Netflix and it's nowhere near the amount of time and information that I've gotten from anywhere else at Sword and Scale.
01:25:19
So I started out at $10 level. Stop telling people about the $10 level or if you already have the $5 level.
01:25:26
Forget it. Pay more. 25 bucks, bottom line, support the show, Sword and Scale TV.
01:25:32
Holy shit. This is amazing. I cannot wait. I screamed when you announced that. You're such a sweet soul.
01:25:40
So excited. Fastball for life. Funny what happens when we turn off RSS feeds, huh?
01:26:06
Thank you. Thank you.