00:00:07
[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to true crab garage wherever you are whatever you were doing thanks for
00:00:45
listening I'm your host Nick and with me as always is a guy that just like Michael Scott
00:00:50
he knows that st. Patrick's Day is the closest thing that Irish have to Christmas
00:00:55
he is our beloved captain it's good to be seen and it's good to see you thanks for listening and thanks for telling a
00:01:00
friend this week we are featureing tangerine wheat by the good folks at Lost Coast brewing tangerine wheat is
00:01:14
brewed with the perfect balance of wheat and crystal malts tangerine wheat delivers a perfectly crisp finish it's
00:01:20
got a good citrus kick to it garage grade four and a quarter bottle caps out of five and we got beer in the fridge
00:01:28
because of these great garage friends so let's give thanks and Cheers to the following first up cheers to Cassandra
00:01:35
up in Ottawa Canada a big shout out to Shiloh and Farmington Connecticut next up here's a cheers to Lydia in Knoxville
00:01:44
Tennessee the big we like your jib to Melissa and Dallas organ and shears this Sheldon in Manitoba Canada and a big
00:01:51
thanks and cheers to Mitchell from Calgary Canada everyone we just mentioned went to true-crime garage comm
00:01:57
and kicked in for this week's beer fund and for that we thank you and if you'd like to give us a little
00:02:03
change a little cash a little good day guvnah then go to the web page click on the donate button but we also have
00:02:11
koozies and coffee mugs and t-shirts for sale so if you want to give us a little
00:02:15
love get something in return go to the store page and that is enough of the business all right everybody gather
00:02:21
round grab a chair grab a beer let's talk some true crime [Music] Danny Hohenstein was just six years old
00:02:59
and he was last seen playing with a dog near his home in the afternoon hours of December 1st 1992 his mother Jackie was
00:03:07
inside preparing a meal for the boy when she went to call him in Danny was nowhere to be found
00:03:13
eventually she called the police and the search for Danny began after the case went cold about a year into the
00:03:20
investigation the FBI joined forces with the local detective we've been talking with special agent Jeffrey rynek a
00:03:29
30-year FBI agent who assisted in the search for Danny Hohenstein and as you guys are doing your investigation you're
00:03:37
actually gonna get a tip or a lead from Danny's sister Shannon I learned from the FBI the FBI was doing training and
00:03:47
because I was working these cases I was being sent for in-service training and I
00:03:52
was learning about the profiling stuff although I was not a profiler at this time
00:03:57
one thing that the FBI drove home to us was that a lot of times a person may have knowledge and not be aware of that
00:04:09
knowledge especially a family member so Bernie and I were constantly telling Jackie and Shannon to think of anything
00:04:20
and to add some I'm a practical joker I love humor I live on humor and I I you know I'm sure you can edit this out but
00:04:32
I said to Shannon Shannon if you have a fart that comes out the wrong cheek you call us about it we want to know what
00:04:38
happened yeah and sure enough at some point she called me and she said that her mother had a friend
00:04:49
and her friend had a son who was charged or associated with assaults on children
00:05:01
and she wondered if her mother's friend's son would have any meaning to danny's disappearance and so verna and i
00:05:13
we started working this up I couldn't find the kid at all he was a kid too he was he was in California the governor I
00:05:24
forget the government knew his name but at one point in California before I got here I think it was like in 1919 90s the
00:05:32
California governor enacted something that caused a lot of people in the mental institutions to be released this
00:05:41
boy the Chanin was talking about was one of those people he had been in a mental
00:05:47
institution and then he was released and because he was a minor his records were
00:05:55
sealed and I could not even identify a record that indicated he was alive Vern on the other hand through his contacts
00:06:05
and through his work and because he's so amazingly good he found them he found the boy and we didn't use his name in
00:06:15
the book because he wasn't charged so I forget what name we used for him in the book but Vern found him Jonathan and we
00:06:23
started working up Jonathan I started working up Jonathan from my angle he started working up Jonathan from his
00:06:30
angle and what we learned is that Jonathan had recently been taken into custody because he had assaulted a
00:06:43
six-year-old boy on a school bus and there was a time before that where Jonathan had assaulted a young six or
00:06:51
seven-year-old boy near some dumpsters in the apartments where he lived and so we were very interested and Vern and I
00:07:00
both we realized that Jonathan was in one of the state facilities for developmentally
00:07:08
delayed children and so we started making enquiries and Nick it was unbelievable we could not get any
00:07:17
information even in a situation like this where it was we had a six year old boy missing that the state would give us
00:07:26
nothing so Bernie and I we found one of the workers an investigator and we we both went there personally and just
00:07:38
begged for help and this investigator helped us and we learned that Jonathan had an extensive history of this and
00:07:49
that Jonathan was currently in the State Hospital he was originally at and she arranged for us to go down and meet him
00:07:58
and talk to him and at the time he was 17 I mean doesn't this feel like a gaudy moment guiding well in the interesting
00:08:08
thing about this information that comes to Special Agent rynek they're actually years into the investigation Danny has
00:08:17
been missing for years by this point by the time they tracked down Jonathan but who's now 17 years old living in a state
00:08:24
hospital but the other interesting angle about this information not only does Jonathan have a history of assaulting
00:08:32
other children and children younger than him Jonathan lived with his mother Diana
00:08:38
around the time that Danny went missing Brighton and the two of them lived near somewhat near Danny and Danny's mother
00:08:46
Jackie right and just when you hear them talk about how he attacked this six-year-old boy that lived by him by a
00:08:53
dumpster you go well is this the same thing it's not too far of a leap right from what possibly could have happened
00:09:01
regarding Danny in his situation Danny would have been about the same age as these other two boys that were assaulted
00:09:08
by this this older boy so you and your partner now have contact and now you're going to go
00:09:15
to the mental institution to question him and we invited his doctor to stay in the interview with us because we felt if
00:09:26
he said something doctor there wouldn't be an expectation of privilege since we were there we sat with him and started
00:09:34
talking to him and he said he knew Danny and he was talking about Danny the Danny
00:09:41
that he knew and Vern had a picture of Danny that was taken in a group before Danny had the scabies and so he had long
00:09:53
hair and he showed that picture to Jonathan and Jonathan said oh that's Danny and that's the way he looks now
00:10:04
that's strange now I could not have picked Danny out from that picture and Byrne got real
00:10:11
red-faced because at the time Danny disappeared or I'm sorry before Danny disappeared he would have had the
00:10:19
long hair and that's exactly how he would have looked so we started concentrating on Jonathan and we took a
00:10:28
statement from Jonathan and Jonathan told us that he and his mother knew Danny and went to Danny's house
00:10:38
frequently and then he would play with Danny and Danny's room where Danny had a video game and this is all accurate and
00:10:47
Vern knew to a greater degree than I did because he had drilled down to the details on the two of us you could just
00:10:57
feel a ball of electricity in your stomach start to rise and he says that they were driving past Danny's house one
00:11:07
day which would have been the day disappeared and they saw Danny in front of his house and they stopped and picked
00:11:15
him up and Danny went with them and then they went to a park and at the park Danny had to go to the bathroom and
00:11:25
Jonathan said he went with him and he hurt Danny we believe that he's telling us that he
00:11:30
assaulted them and might have you know killed them so this is just it's just unbelievable what's going on at the time
00:11:39
this is happening I'm in my mid-40s and Vern is about 20 years older and he's about 65 and we finished our interview
00:11:50
with Jonathan and we decided to head right up back to mahalia from down near LA where we were and I remember the two
00:12:03
of us I mean between the excitement and the exhaustion we eventually had to stop
00:12:08
and we got a room and slept for a few hours and then continued back up to Miguel yeah we found Jackie and asked
00:12:17
Jackie about this boy's mother and Jackie knew the mother but said she had never met the boy and so we asked her
00:12:25
explain to us now how he knew the layout so well and of course she couldn't and then we talked to Danny's sister and
00:12:33
Danny's sister explained to us that you know the mom may not want to talk about it if she realizes what might have
00:12:41
happened and then we found Jonathan's mother dun dun dun and we ended up polygraphing Jonathan's
00:12:47
mother and of course she did not do too well the statement that Jonathan had given us could not be used because he
00:12:57
had a very low IQ he was not aware of good and bad he did not know that what he might have done to Dani was bad and
00:13:08
we didn't even know if we could rely on what he said because he had such a low level of intellect so I remember I
00:13:19
called back to the FBI's behavioral science unit and I asked them for guidance a guy named Roy Hazelwood said
00:13:30
to me that you just have to keep going back and eventually there will be consistencies that you can pick out
00:13:37
Bernie and I ended up going back about eight or nine times and and just like we were told there are
00:13:43
consistencies another thing that we learned was we were able to talk to the people at the facility and learn about
00:13:52
the relationship between Jonathan and his mother Jonathan at 6 years of age had been sexually assaulted by a
00:14:01
boyfriend of his mother and cysts that time he started acting out sexually and he was acting out with other boys and
00:14:11
men sexually so his mother in the hope of bringing Jonathan back to being the way he should be started having a sexual
00:14:23
relationship with Jonathan so Jonathan and his mother started engaging in a regular behavior of having sex 1 this is
00:14:34
where the story gets pretty twisted yeah so just just a quick recap for myself here so I know that where were where
00:14:43
we're at in the stage Danny goes missing six years old missing for a few years before this lead from Danny's older
00:14:52
sister Shannon Falls to agent rynek and his partner Vern couch they follow up on
00:15:00
this lead they've had other good leads leads that they thought were good and they follow up on this lead even
00:15:06
tracking down this boy where it's almost impossible to track him down because the
00:15:12
state won't provide any information regarding this kid because he's only 17 by this point right but when they get in
00:15:17
contact with them they get a confession pretty quickly very quickly yes he's pretty much honest and after
00:15:25
seeing a picture or two of Danny the weird statement is this is how Danny looks now coming from Jonathan and then
00:15:34
you also find out that to dig a little deeper that this boy himself now at the age of 17 he's causing problems and has
00:15:44
been for years but he initially is a victim himself of molestation one has a low IQ and then you have to you know is
00:15:53
he saying is this this is what he looks like now and is that just because he's mixing up
00:15:58
present tense and past tense yeah I mean like is it something where it's like well this is what he looks like now or
00:16:05
did he mean that's what he looked like back then because it's like like they said he has a pretty low IQ it might
00:16:13
also be some indication of his comprehension of what is has actually taken place right so but then the fact
00:16:22
that we you know we have these detectives that interview the mother or she does bad on the polygraph test now
00:16:30
you start wondering did her son do something bad and is she covering up for her son the other thing that I want to
00:16:37
point out here and this is not super clear in our interview portion but when Jonathan the boy at the hospital states
00:16:48
that he had gone to Danny's home and played a game a video game with Danny in his room because you have these
00:16:57
situations where when you have investigators interviewing someone especially in this particular situation
00:17:05
you wonder could they be feeding information could there could this be a bad interview could this be a bad
00:17:13
confession maybe this kid doesn't fully comprehend the questions he's being asked one it's sad too because with
00:17:21
Danny's mother she doesn't even know how this other boy would know anything about
00:17:25
their house but we also know that she's very neglectful of her son I mean to the
00:17:31
point where yes when you have to shave your kid's head to try to get the you know some kind of a healthy hygiene
00:17:41
system going because you've neglected him so bad that's pretty awful yeah the but this is a little bit of truth in
00:17:48
information I believe in what Jonathan's statement is to the FBI and to the local
00:17:54
detective mm-hmm when he says that he had been in Don Danny's home and played a video game with Danny in his room
00:18:01
that's interesting to me because that's something that only someone who had actually been there would know that was
00:18:08
one of the things that the investigators knew about Danny that he he had very little in the way of
00:18:15
possessions as we stated he was neglected but one of the things that he held dear was he had like a Nintendo
00:18:23
video game right and that was in his room and that was something that he probably spent a lot of time playing at
00:18:29
night when his mother was not around right so of his babysitter this is your breadcrumb if you're the investigator to
00:18:36
know that hey there's there might be some truth in what this young man Jonathan who's only 17 is telling us we
00:18:43
learned that Jonathan and his mother would go to the bathroom together and they were caught several times having
00:18:51
sex and so this just all it was almost all too much but at the same time we felt like we had something we could work
00:19:02
with that we could try and work up as what happened to Danny in the process of talking to him Jonathan described that
00:19:16
after he hurt Danny in the bathroom his mother came in and checked Danny and said Danny was not alive anymore and
00:19:27
they took Danny's body back to his mother's car and they tried to find a place to leave Danny and Jonathan said
00:19:37
to leave Danny to sleep he said that one of the times they were doing this they ran into other people who had
00:19:44
flashlights who were calling out to them well Verne went back and reviewed the search-and-rescue records and found that
00:19:52
at one of the points in the search a couple of the rescue workers came upon a strange vehicle in the woods and when
00:20:02
they called out to the occupants the people got back in the car and drove away and this was right in the area of where
00:20:11
they were looking for Danny [Music] sticking to a weight-loss plan can be hard especially when you don't know how
00:20:27
to handle the obstacles that hold you back from making progress let me tell you about noon and how they can help you
00:20:34
live a healthier lifestyle Noom takes the agony out of food tracking with one of the biggest food databases available
00:20:41
track your meal habits visualize portion sizes and see calorie density at a glance Noom doesn't say you can't have
00:20:50
certain foods it just teaches you about moderation and when you do go a little overboard there's no shaming just tips
00:20:57
on how to get back on track access noon on your phone whenever and wherever you need it all it takes is 10
00:21:04
minutes a day I just signed up with knew last week and here's what I've experienced so far it's not just about
00:21:10
weight loss it's really about living a healthier lifestyle and setting goals to help you achieve that healthier
00:21:16
lifestyle and you can check in with just a few minutes every day to keep you on track and that's what I love numa's
00:21:23
designed for results it's out with the old habits and in with the new sign up for your trial today at noon that's in
00:21:30
oom comm slash garage what do you have to lose visit Noom comm slash garage today to
00:21:38
start your trial again that's Noom comm slash garage Noom n oh oh em calm slash garage start losing weight for good
00:21:50
support for today's show comes from hellofresh hellofresh makes conquering the kitchen a reality with deliciously
00:21:58
simple recipes and fresh pre-measured ingredients delivered to your door all meals come together in 30 minutes max
00:22:05
call for less than two pots and pans and require a minimal cleanup plus with three plans to choose from including
00:22:12
classic veggie and family there's something for everyone so get out of that recipe rut and start cooking
00:22:19
outside of your comfort zone I love hellofresh the captain loves hellofresh cooking with hellofresh for
00:22:25
quite some time now now I fancy myself a decent so I didn't sign up with hellofresh
00:22:30
because I needed the help in the kitchen what I needed was the convenience of hellofresh they're saving me trips to
00:22:37
the grocery store the ingredients are fantastic super fresh they're super great but the thing I love the most it
00:22:44
was getting a little stale in my kitchen captain I was cooking the same stuff over and over again and now now I'm
00:22:50
cooking even better with hellofresh some of the meals coming out of the Colonel's
00:22:54
kitchen with Hello fresh hot honey chicken meatloaf Tuscan sausage and pepper spaghetti sweet and smoky pork
00:23:02
chops and Southwest stuffed poblanos keep it fresh with hellofresh for 80 dollars off your first month of
00:23:09
hellofresh go to hellofresh comm slash garage 80 and enter promo code garage 80 that's hellofresh comm slash garage 80
00:23:18
and use our promo code garage 80 for $20 off your first four boxes I'm telling you take it from the colonel and the
00:23:26
captain you're gonna love hello fresh check out hello fresh calm slash garage edie today if there's something
00:23:32
interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals better help online counseling can help
00:23:38
but our help offers licensed professional counselors who are specialized in issues such as depression
00:23:44
anxiety relationships trauma anger family conflicts LGBT matters grief self-esteem and more connect with your
00:23:53
professional counselor and a safe and private online environment and get help at your own time and at your own pace
00:24:00
everything you share is confidential better help is so convenient you can schedule secure video or phone sessions
00:24:07
as well as chat and text with your therapist if for some reason you are not happy with your counselor you can
00:24:13
request a new one at any time for no additional charge best of all this is truly an affordable option true-crime
00:24:20
garage listeners even get 10% off your first month with the discount code garage so why not get started today go
00:24:28
to better help calm slash garage then simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched
00:24:36
with a counselor you'll love that's better help calm slash garage [Music] then we learned from Danny's mother that
00:25:01
we're we're Jonathan's mother lived and we went there and we went there we found
00:25:08
in the backyard there was what could be best described as a shrine and in the shrine which was to a little boy
00:25:16
there were keys in a plate nothing but our guts which isn't enough we learned from the shrine and from talking to
00:25:27
Jonathan that Danny's body was placed in that cart and this was the time when there was the explosion of forensic
00:25:37
science and they were doing mitochondrial DNA and trace evidence and we the FBI had just started off these
00:25:47
evidence teams called evidence response teams and we got the Sacramento evidence
00:25:53
response team we found the car that had belonged to Jonathan's mother and we took the evidence or we went a guy from
00:26:04
our office our fleet guy named Ralph Lux he went and we got a search warrant for
00:26:10
the car and we took the car and we took the card back to our Sacramento office and there our evidence response team
00:26:17
went through the car they recovered all the trace evidence from the trunk and backseat and all that there was nothing
00:26:24
that would flag this as a big development and they sent the trace evidence into the FBI laboratory and
00:26:32
they were working on it I was in contact with them and then in 1998 hikers in the area of where Danny
00:26:43
had disappeared came upon a skull and the skull taken to the California State University Chico
00:26:55
that had an unbelievable forensic anthropology department and they had developed special software that let them
00:27:02
superimposed the skull onto a picture of Danny and it fit so we began to think that this was Danny's skull I was in
00:27:15
touch with the FBI laboratory the DNA was a his name was Jonathan Jeb Stewart and he was working mitochondrial DNA and
00:27:27
I was trying to get him to look for DNN in the trace evidence recovered from the
00:27:33
car the FBI lab was really busy at the time and they they didn't have enough time or resources to go through every
00:27:44
little thing that was found so he said I sent him a picture of Danny and he picked out a few of the hairs that could
00:27:53
be construed or could be considered as part of Danny and he did mitochondrial DNA examinations on that the
00:28:00
mitochondrial DNA unlike nuclear DNA that's a DNA we get from our mother and it won't give us a
00:28:07
unique person identification like you can't sit there on the stand and say oh this DNA match this person and therefore
00:28:14
it's him it tells you that the person you have is an offspring of a certain woman and so the best we could do was to
00:28:24
say that the trace evidence recovered from the car belonged to the person who was an offspring of a woman and the they
00:28:35
did the mike mitochondrial DNA testing on the hairs and because Danny's remains were being recovered they are they had a
00:28:44
leg bone that they can compare it to and I remember I got a call one day from Jeb
00:28:48
and he says it's the same mitochondrial DNA between the hair the leg bone and Jackie
00:29:00
and I'm telling you this Nick now I mean I feel myself welling up I couldn't believe it
00:29:06
and then I I thanked them and then I hung up and I tried to compose myself and I called Vern and mmm I said fern
00:29:17
are you sitting down and he you know he's like yeah I'm sit down I said Vern I just got a call from
00:29:23
the lab and they said that the mitochondrial DNA from the leg bone that was recovered and the hair that was in
00:29:35
the car comes from Jackie and since we knew where Jackie's other offspring were we could say that it was Danny and I
00:29:47
said Vern it's him and just like I'm about to do with you he started not being able to talk and he's I heard a
00:29:58
lot of sighing and he said look I play back a few minutes and he hung up and I think the two of us were each sitting at
00:30:05
each phone crying and then he called me back and you know we just we just we just tried to accept the reality that we
00:30:17
had found them and we found out what happened to him of course the next step would be to
00:30:21
prosecute Jonathan for what he had done and his mother but the reality was Jonathan believed that when he left
00:30:30
Danny in the woods he left him sleeping he did not know the concept of death versus life and he didn't know the
00:30:38
concept of good and bad so he couldn't even understand what he had done and this meant that he would never be
00:30:47
competent to stand trial and because Jonathan's mother was an accessory the statute on that had
00:30:56
expired already so Jonathan was never prosecuted but the prosecutor sits with the files in his office and if they ever
00:31:08
decide in California to let these people out of the mental hospitals again don't prosecute Jonathan for what he did
00:31:16
well some of the things that I find interesting regarding the interaction between you and Jonathan and in his
00:31:24
statements during the course of your interview process is that he's able to accurately describe a few things that
00:31:31
you have to believe that only the person possibly responsible for his disappearance would be able to describe
00:31:39
and part of that is the shirt that Danny was wearing on the day that he went missing he also references a Nintendo
00:31:48
game inside of Danny's home he also accurately states that Danny had two different hairstyles two different
00:31:55
haircuts longer hair and then the buzz cut at the time of the disappearance what was the importance of the scabies
00:32:03
that we discussed earlier regarding this case well the important role of scabies
00:32:08
was that at the time Danny disappeared he had this shaven head Jonathan said to us and I probably left us out that when
00:32:20
he looked at the picture he said that was the way Danny used to look but not the way Danny looks now and and I don't
00:32:27
think I explained that well because but that was him the importance of the scabies was to give us the ability to
00:32:35
know that he had seen Danny in two different postures of appearance and on top of Dan Danny having scabies that
00:32:46
there's believed that Jonathan also had scabies around that time that Danny went
00:32:52
missing yes there was a strong indication that Jonathan also had scabies and we believe that was related
00:32:58
but it's one of those things Nick where you have to take what you can hold best first and everything else comes
00:33:10
afterward and the scabies yes is a very important thing but we could not prove that Jonathan had had scabies when Danny
00:33:20
disappeared now Jonathan and of course that's a made-up name a fake name for real person but yes to your knowledge he
00:33:31
still he's not out walking around on the streets no no and what was the aftermath
00:33:40
for this murder investigation with Jackie and with Danny's family this is when we get an answer like this it was
00:33:53
frustrating for the family because Jonathan could not be prosecuted and there could not be an actual event or
00:34:04
series of events in time that would acknowledge the information that we had learned and be able to say that Jonathan
00:34:14
was the person who had done this with the assistance of his mother but with all victims families and Jackie was no
00:34:25
different they do love the ones that are missing and Jackie and Shannon and Brandon the brother they wanted to have
00:34:37
a memorial for Danny they wanted to acknowledge his existence believe it or not because of the wife Danny had lived
00:34:47
he there was no pictures of Danny the only picture we had of him was a picture of him at the dentist's office with that
00:34:56
you know how they put that apron around your neck with the chain and so I got a hold of that picture and I took it to
00:35:06
our photo guys at the FBI and I asked them if they could crop out anything that would reveal the dentist office and
00:35:15
just give us the best picture they could and my intent was to take that picture and for Vern and I to have it framed and
00:35:25
for Vern and I to put a little plaque at the bottom of the picture saying that this was for you know Shannon from Bern
00:35:37
and Jeff or this is from for Brandon from Bern and Jeff and when the FBI found out what I was doing they
00:35:44
actually picked up the cost of it and our photo guys took you know did what they did
00:35:50
and and that was our way of marking it there's a wonderful newspaper article where Vern and I are at Danny's memorial
00:36:01
and Shannon you know hugs each one of us called us up and acknowledges us to the
00:36:08
crowd the people that had come and then Danny his burro Jackie died right around
00:36:15
that time of you know her her lifestyle caused a premature death and so Jackie and Danny are buried side orden not
00:36:24
there they're encased side-by-side in a mausoleum and ironically that mausoleum is right in the area where this campfire
00:36:33
happened so one thing settled down i I want to drive up there and see if it's intact
00:36:38
now did you become a profiler later in your career I did yes I I did and I'm very proud of that could you take us
00:36:48
through the process of becoming a profiler what that entails and what training is involved in that oh yeah
00:36:56
absolutely let me start off by saying that right now the profilers at the FBI they're in
00:37:04
a unit called the National Center for the analysis of violent crime it that's what what it's known as now and I've
00:37:13
been retired now for 12 years so that's that's what it was when I retired it used to be the Behavioral Analysis Unit
00:37:22
it used to be called the child abduction serial killer unit Cask you it's going through different names but the
00:37:32
beginning of the profiling started with John Douglas and his peers working at the FBI and they worked on the theory
00:37:43
that if they went around interviewing serial killers or serial rapists or these people that have committed crimes
00:37:52
that they might be able to identify certain things about them that would help identify other killers
00:38:03
so in TV now your listeners probably see that while they bring in the profilers and the criminal minds and all that
00:38:09
criminal profiling does not give you the person who did the crime it it gives you
00:38:17
the potential personal picture of that person so it's it's and it's based on in my opinion and this is my opinion it's
00:38:30
based on statistics as an example one of the things I did in my career to be a better investigator was once a month I
00:38:39
attended law enforcement meetings where offender sex offenders coming out on parole agreed to be interviewed by law
00:38:48
enforcement and if you take that and you compare it to what John Douglas and the
00:38:57
initial mind hunters as people like to call them were doing it's very similar they were going and talking to people
00:39:05
who were still in prison but they were talking to them about the crimes how they committed their crimes
00:39:11
why they committed the crimes how they chose their victims things like that and we were doing that here in Sacramento
00:39:18
with guys coming out on parole you learned there are certain things that you can identify with behavior one of
00:39:29
the examples I love to use is that when I was attending the parole interviews they would give us a document or a
00:39:41
briefing document that would describe what their crime was but it would also include their criminal history well I
00:39:49
learned from going to these things from interacting with the other guys that a lot of these guys that commit sexual
00:39:57
offenses will have a history of burglaries in their criminal record we're not talking about
00:40:05
two or three we're talking about 1015 a lot of them the question becomes or people say well why or burglaries
00:40:12
important when you consider a sexual offender and what I learned and there was another guy working with named Steve
00:40:20
Hill from the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office who made so much available to me but what I learned was
00:40:27
that a lot of these guys if not most of them they're pleading out their sex crimes down to burglaries these are guys
00:40:37
that are going into homes they're standing over a sleeping woman or child and they're fantasizing doing what
00:40:47
they're doing and they get caught and nobody wants to be charged as a sexual crime so they're allowed to plea bargain
00:41:01
it down and they get charged with the burglary there was one guy I remember that we interviewed who had about 20
00:41:08
burglaries on his rap sheet I asked the guy you know oh so you know these did you do these burglaries because oh yeah
00:41:16
yeah and he was proud of it I said but you know really if he did these 20 just what you probably did 40 right and he
00:41:24
goes yeah and so if you did 40 I said so um what did you do with all the money I
00:41:31
mean you must have really nice things at home if you did these 40 burglaries you've gotten several thousand dollars
00:41:38
not to mention the jewelry and things like that and the guys would say I don't have a cent to my name so then the next
00:41:45
question becomes logically well if you don't have the money and you were going into these homes why were you going into
00:41:51
those homes and that's where you know they don't want to tell you you know oh well I was going in and I just didn't
00:41:58
find anything whatever and then you're like you remind them you know you're here for a reason what did you do when
00:42:04
you went into the home and then they start describing what they did and how they did it and you learn that a bunch
00:42:10
of these guys will stand outside windows and they'll look in we call them peeping
00:42:15
toms but you learned that where you a lot of reporting's of a peeping tom sometimes you'll find that they urinated
00:42:23
or defecated outside the window that they're looking in at I don't know what the reason is or I don't understand the
00:42:30
sexual motivation but they do it so this is an example where you know a normal or
00:42:36
not a normal you you know a behavior that someone will do while they're doing something wrong and you can look for it
00:42:42
and it helps you understand things so this is an example of your understanding what motivates the person um you take a
00:42:52
sexual offender for instance and in my opinion what I learned from the profiling training and from going to
00:43:00
these meetings is that a sexual offender offender has a fantasy and I'm talking about mostly guys right now and that
00:43:08
mostly these guys will have this fantasy in their head of what they want now if it's a fantasy of doing something
00:43:20
illegal like a murder or a rape they realize that their fantasy is of behavior that is criminal and they'll
00:43:31
make a conscious decision not to do it but some guys will also make a conscious decision to do it so then what becomes
00:43:42
important in terms of the profiling is understanding what their fantasy is what is their fantasy and this is where you
00:43:49
find we you where your listeners watch the shows and they see like with the victim there might be a breast that's
00:43:58
bitten or or the victim is posed in a certain way this is part of the offender's fantasy and this gives you
00:44:07
certain information about the offender they learn statistically that most offenders that do serial murders like
00:44:14
this they're normally white they're normally middle-aged they have very good intelligence
00:44:20
some of them function normally in society and have their own families if you look at the BTK killer he's a great
00:44:27
example if you read the information about BTK and what he did you'll learn about his fantasy but
00:44:34
you'll also learn that he had a fantasy in fact I mean he had a family and I think my wife gets People magazine and I
00:44:41
saw recently there on the cover there was a headline you know I was raised by a serial killer and I think it's BTK
00:44:51
Dennis Rader's daughter being interviewed and talking about her background and so these this is examples
00:44:58
of and so it also leads you to come in to crime scenes and make certain you know suspicions based on the crime
00:45:09
scenes if you go into a crime scene and the victim is posed well you know you have a sexual fantasy guy if you go into
00:45:20
a crime scene and the victim their face is covered well that's a person who may or may not have known the victim most
00:45:29
times the the killer will know the victim or have seen them before and so these are things that all come into play
00:45:37
when they then take this and they process it and they come out with okay this is what we think your fender is all
00:45:45
about I hope that was helpful Jeff we want to thank you for joining us here in the garage and discussing the
00:45:50
missing persons case of Danny Hohenstein today before we wrap up could you tell us a little bit about your book that you
00:45:58
put out okay the title of the book is in the name of the children and it's of course it's written by myself and my
00:46:07
co-author Marilee strong this book was not intended to be a book my wife Laurie who is the keystone of my life asked me
00:46:22
to write an accounting of myself for my sons and for the members of our family that come later so they'll have
00:46:32
something to have to know about me and I sat there for several months with a laptop and I crying and I wrote an
00:46:46
of my life as if I was speaking to my sons themselves so if you read my book you'll you'll get the feeling that I'm
00:46:54
talking to you and what I do in my book is I tell to everyone in a way of explaining my life I talk about my
00:47:05
childhood how it felt to be bullied and beat up all the time how I felt when I had my surgery and I was angry most
00:47:16
importantly working these crimes against children caused a lot of emotional damage to me and I didn't know it at the
00:47:26
time but I learned that it caused a lot of emotional damage to my family and I try and describe in the book The effect
00:47:36
of this crimes on me and what I learned from my family and what I learned that I
00:47:44
did to my family I got to the point where I became a a danger to myself I became suicidal in the book I described
00:47:55
two incidences where I did try and take my life but I also try and help the reader understand why I reached this
00:48:06
point and when I finished writing this manuscript and I gave it back to Lori to read she believed that if we did make
00:48:15
this a book it might help other first responders or other investigators like me that worked these cases because Lori
00:48:24
and I are at our best when we're helping people and we thought maybe this book can help and I can't begin to tell you
00:48:31
Nick the calls and contacts I've gotten from other law enforcement and even from
00:48:37
victims the I've been contacted by victims in other states who said that this book too spoke to them on the level
00:48:45
that they had never experienced before and it has helped them there if your readers get the book and I recommend
00:48:53
they do there's a chapter named the 22 and in that chapter there is a girl that's described
00:49:00
who was you know various assaulted and I gave the manuscript to every victim family I could find that was in the book
00:49:10
I would not have agreed to the publishing of the book if I didn't have the approval of the people in this
00:49:18
instance we gave the book to this one girl and she got back to his feet several weeks later just crying and she
00:49:25
said she was obsessively reading the chapter and over and over again and the reason was because she never realized
00:49:30
how I saw her and I saw her as a warrior queen and it made her feel better about
00:49:39
herself that made her it made her understand that even though she was a victim that she had fought her
00:49:49
victimization and she had a lot to be proud of and these children in the 20 to the chapter 22 my wife Lori and I are
00:49:58
still in contact with them we attend their weddings and their baby showers and their graduations at one point
00:50:06
during the case one of them said you know are we just another case to you or and you're going to go away or and I
00:50:14
promised them I would be there for them for the rest of my life and Lori and I have have made that promise and we've
00:50:21
been living up to it if your readers read the book they'll see that each chapter is named after a victim the
00:50:29
first chapter is me I described myself as a victim for what I experienced from my birth defects and my cerebral palsy
00:50:37
and then after that the chapters are names of the cases that I worked that provided transition in my life in terms
00:50:48
of working these cases the final chapter is named Lori Jo and Jordan and this is
00:50:54
my wife and my two sons and it describes the harm I caused to them and how proud
00:51:01
I am of them and we are still very close as a family Lori and I Laurie retired this past year and sin
00:51:13
she's been retired it's been the happiest time of my life and the thoughts in my mind are still there the
00:51:21
post-traumatic stress but I'm better able to deal with it because I have the love of my family and of my wife Lori so
00:51:31
I think that your readers will experience what it's like to be in the head of an investigator not only in
00:51:38
working the case but how the case affects them whatever struggles you are facing from depression and anxiety to
00:51:58
trauma and grief better help can connect you with a professional counselor and a
00:52:03
safe and private online environment best of all it's a truly affordable option true-crime garage listeners even get 10%
00:52:11
off your first month with discount code garage so why not get started simply go to better help calm slash garage fill
00:52:19
out a questionnaire to get matched with your counselor you'll love today check out better help calm slash garage and
00:52:25
captain how about a little recommended reading how about it we have some highly recommended reading for you today pick
00:52:31
up a copy of in the name of the children an FBI agents relentless pursuit of the
00:52:37
nation's worst predators by Jeffrey rynek it's also available on audiobook so if you're making a note that's in the
00:52:44
name of the children by Jeffrey rynek if you can't write that title down just go
00:52:48
to true crime garage comm and click on the recommended page and we will have that there for you at the top of the
00:52:54
page make sure you tell a friend make sure you tell your mother make sure you get everybody you know listening to the
00:53:00
garage so we can stick around until next week be good be kind and don't litter [Music]
00:53:26
[Applause] [Music]