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2023 [Music] welcome to True crab garage wherever you are whatever you are doing thanks for
00:01:46
listening I'm your host Nick and with me as always our nation turns its lonely eyes to you Captain that's cuz I'm so
00:01:54
damn handsome but don't blame me blame my parents it's good to be seen and it's good to see you thanks for listening
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thanks for telling a [Music] friend this week we are featuring Tangerine Wheat by the good Folks At
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is all right everybody gather around grab a chair grab a beer let's talk some true crime
00:03:39
[Music] [Applause] in recent years over 450,000 children were reported missing in the United States each
00:04:09
year children taken by strangers or slight acquaintances represent only 100th of 1% of all missing
00:04:19
children far more common are children who have run away gotten lost or injured have been taken by a family member
00:04:27
usually in a custody dispute or they simply aren't where they're expected to be because of a
00:04:36
miscommunication but still a very small percent of children reported missing remain
00:04:45
[Music] gone professionals who deal with missing children cases are primarily police
00:04:51
officers and local detectives train to locate young people and bring them back our case this week is that of Daniel
00:05:04
David henin or Danny Dany was born October 3rd 1986 on December 1st 1992 Dany living with his mother in
00:05:17
Paradise Pines California is reported missing Dany was just 6 years old his missing flyer describes Dany as
00:05:27
Caucasian 3' 8 in in tall 41 lb with a slender build he has blue eyes and light brown hair at the time of his
00:05:38
disappearance Dany was sporting a Buzz haircut Dany was last seen playing with a dog near his home in the afternoon
00:05:46
hours of December 1st his mother Jackie was inside preparing a meal for the boy when she
00:05:55
went to call him in he was nowhere to be found Jackie searched for the boy but to
00:06:01
no avail after the boy was only gone for a short period of time Jackie called the
00:06:07
police and the search for Dany began but hours turned into days and then weeks and months and still no one
00:06:17
knew where the little boy was the trail was going [Music] cold there was no evidence and little in
00:06:28
the way of leads detective Vern Kelch worked the case as good as any seasoned detective could he meticulously logged
00:06:37
and organized every bit of information collected from the search as well as things brought to
00:06:44
light by interviews and tips coming into the department but this was truly a mystery
00:06:51
and the FBI offered their assistance in the ongoing investigation in the public eye there
00:06:59
are some common misconceptions about when the FBI can get involved in a missing child
00:07:06
case either there has to be evidence that a victim was taken across state lines or that a ransom demand has been
00:07:15
made listeners of this show know that that is not the case as the bureau often offers their investigative of resources
00:07:24
and Technical assets to work hand inand with state and local law enforcement agencies on cases involving the
00:07:32
mysterious disappearance of a [Music] child in 1993 FBI special agent Jeffrey rck was
00:07:42
paired with Detective Kelch his role was to help investigate The Disappearance recover the child and
00:07:50
apprehend the person or persons responsible this is the case of the missing boy Danny
00:08:10
[Music] howenstein over the years Captain we have had several guests join us in the
00:08:22
garage we've had podcasters prosecutors private investigators this week we have a very special guest retired special
00:08:31
agent from the FBI Jeffrey rck he has been involved in many cases of missing children and many cases of
00:08:40
crimes committed against children and we asked him to join us in the garage this
00:08:44
week to discuss the missing persons case of Danny howenstein who went missing in
00:08:51
1992 well Nick and Jeff before we dive into the case Jeff could you tell our listeners why you got involved in the
00:08:59
FBI that's a great question and I think about it an awful lot I was born with physical birth defects I had a club left
00:09:07
foot and the doctors also determined that I had cerebal paly and for my first nine years of life I was the kid that
00:09:16
was picked on and beaten up separated from the other kids I couldn't walk right and uh so my life I wouldn't
00:09:26
consider it to be a lot of fun at the same time my parents were taking me to all these
00:09:33
doctors and I originally thought they were doing this because they wanted me to be right and I think they did but
00:09:39
I've learned in later life in in big part because of my relationship with my wife Lori that uh I think my parents are
00:09:47
somewhat embarrassed or offset because I look so different I had a club foot I walked funny and I think it troubled
00:09:58
them as as much as it was an inconvenience to me at 9 years of age I had experimental surgery that worked and
00:10:05
caused me to work walk fairly normally and as I continued growing and developing after that surgery I was able
00:10:13
to run and do things and I was able to do a lot of I was able to do everything normally I thought it was something that
00:10:20
was behind the leftover effect on me was that I was very angry because of my first n years of being beaten up and
00:10:30
picked on and so I was somewhat volatile somewhat violent um it didn't take much
00:10:35
to get me to go over the edge I went through life um my parents expecting me to go to college and we decided that I
00:10:46
would go to law school I went to uh cheltonham High School graduated then I went to Albright College in ring
00:10:53
Pennsylvania graduated there and then realized that I didn't have enough money to go to law school so I ended up uh
00:11:02
just you know I was floating around I always wanted to be an FBI agent because my dad had been an Undertaker and during
00:11:12
one of the funerals there was this high ranking organized crime guy and I was fascinated by these guys that were
00:11:20
walking around taking license place and all that and at that early age my dream was to be an FBI agent which I never
00:11:29
really thought was possible for me after I was kind of without Direction after I
00:11:36
graduated college I needed to find something so I started applying to all these law enforcement jobs including DEA
00:11:43
secret service and then I applied to the FBI and they responded to me and made me
00:11:48
aware of a position where I would be What's called the clerk I went down for my interview and they said that if I did
00:11:54
three years as a clerk then I would be eligible to apply apply for agents class and for me that was totally
00:12:04
unexpected and that gave me direction so I went to work for the FBI as a clerk I
00:12:11
had an advantage because I had a college degree and you had to have a college degree to be an FBI agent so I went to
00:12:19
work uh doing menial things I used to make the clerk Badges and then I did Silk Screening in the exhibit section
00:12:29
of the FBI and 6 months after I got there the FBI stopped that program with the clerks
00:12:37
and did not grandfather anybody and I was once again uh in a deadend position so your chances of
00:12:46
getting into the FBI were made possible through this program they cancel the program now what are you going to do I
00:12:54
decided I went back to school at night full-time to gain the equivalent of an accounting degree because that would
00:13:04
enable me to apply to the FBI uh as an agent as an accountant and for the next 52 weeks that's what I did I also had uh
00:13:15
started running because it made me feel like I could run normally I enjoyed it it I could think and it made me feel
00:13:26
good so I kept running and so had this life of working as a clerk at the FBI and running every night and going
00:13:35
through to get my undergraduate equivalent degree of accounting and I completed it and sure enough I was able
00:13:44
to get into the FBI my new agents class was June 26th of 1978 and uh that's how I started that's
00:13:54
pretty cool not quitting the clerk thing so you're still working for the FBI but
00:13:58
you're running every night you're going to school you're going to find a way to make this dream a reality and at some
00:14:05
point Jeff you get involved in a a unit that specializes investigating crimes involving children can you take us
00:14:13
through that process sure Nick the the work I did with crimes against children didn't start until I had about 15 years
00:14:23
in or 12 years my first office was Chicago and in Chicago I worked violent crime and accounting and I was put on a
00:14:32
what they call a title three which is telephone surveillance on a a case everybody has seen the movie Casino and
00:14:40
I was one of the FBI agents listening to the earphones on the on the telephone surveillance with new agents um we were
00:14:49
pretty much worthless so they would assign us stuff like that and that would help us get acclimated to the job a
00:14:54
short time after my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer in pH Philadelphia and I chose to go back to the New York
00:15:02
office to be with him during his final years of life and that's where I met my wife Lori we ended up starting our own
00:15:10
family and I know this sounds like a long lead in but I think you'll understand uh in a short while Lori and
00:15:17
I uh we started having a family and our first son Joe was born and when he was three and A2 years old we had our Second
00:15:26
Son Jordan for the week before Jordan was born Joe looked like he was having a really bad cold and when we took Jordan
00:15:35
for his well baby visit uh we asked the doctor to look at Joe and Lori and I will never forget that the doctor came
00:15:44
in with this Ashen Sullen look on his face and he told us that Joe had a plus four protein spill in his urine and that
00:15:56
that was very serious and he made it clear to us that this was going to be a very difficult thing for us the next few
00:16:06
years we spent dealing with Joe who was diagnosed with pediatric nephrotic syndrome and this is where this is kind
00:16:16
of the format of time for both Lori and I because dealing with our son and the prospect that he might not survive and
00:16:25
the hardship of dealing with his symptoms l had more emotional strength than I did
00:16:31
she dealt with a lot better than I did shortly after we arrived in Sacramento there was an Abduction of a
00:16:39
seven-month-old baby named Frankie Proctor and uh I was assigned to it and it was like an outof body experience for
00:16:48
me it was nothing like I had ever experienced before in the terms of the drive the
00:16:55
passion and then I got I wor worked with a detective at Sacramento Police Department named Greg Stewart who great
00:17:03
detective and and I was able to partner up with him and so I learned a lot from working with him and I also experienced
00:17:14
something was very unique in that I didn't want to go home I just kept going and four days later uh Greg and I and a
00:17:24
few tactical guys broke into an apartment and we rescued little Frankie Proctor the FBI being a bureaucracy it
00:17:32
is like every other bureaucracy uh they started assigning me all of these cases and that's how my work in the crimes
00:17:40
against children began Jeff don't worry about the long answers we hear we appreciate the details we're just lucky
00:17:46
that you're talking to the two schlubs in the garage well let's dive into this week's case because at some point you
00:17:53
were asked to take a look into a missing person's case and this is 6ear old Daniel David howenstein better known as
00:18:01
Danny by the time you got involved this was considered a Cold Case yeah no this is um thank you for asking that during
00:18:10
this time it was in the early 1990s the FBI had a new director whose name was Louis free and Louie free was very
00:18:19
strong in his belief that the resources of the FBI could help in investigating uh missing and Ed children
00:18:29
and as a result of that uh every field office in the FBI was ordered to go through their closed cases and any
00:18:39
closed case that had a child that was not recovered we were supposed to review it and look to see if there was anything
00:18:48
that we could use to try and and bring it back to try and find the child that's a pretty awesome initiative by the FBI I
00:18:57
reviewed the case case on Danny hollenstein who had disappeared in November the end of November of 19 I
00:19:06
think it was 1991 or two I you know it's been so long now my notes say that Danny
00:19:12
disappeared December 1st 1992 okay December 1st that that's right and I looked at that case now now we're
00:19:20
in the end of of 1993 or a year later and in my review of the case Danny had disappeared
00:19:28
there was no sign of him anywhere it was if he simply vaporized and ceased to exist and and this really bothered me
00:19:38
because that doesn't happen and as I read the file I saw that the but County Sheriff had a very very good uh search
00:19:48
and rescue uh team and the detective that was working it his name was Vern Kelch and I could tell that Vern
00:19:58
had a problem with Dany disappearing as well the search and rescue folks and the
00:20:06
managers believed that Danny had wandered into a very rugged canyon near his home and he met his end either being
00:20:16
lost in the canyon or being attacked by a predatory um animal in in the woods as
00:20:25
I looked through the search and rescue reports there was no evidence of him any evidence of him at all ever being into
00:20:35
the canyon there was nothing and it was just too much for me that a child could disappear in a period of 20 minutes and
00:20:45
not exist and I could tell that the detective Vern felt that way my supervisor was a guy named Don Pierce
00:20:53
and Don uh just an amazing person he had this Talent where he could recognize what people were good at everybody on
00:21:03
our Squad was engaged in things that were excelling at and that's because Don could recognize these things he was
00:21:10
really was intuitive I told Don I didn't think it just bothered me that Danny had
00:21:16
disappeared and nothing existed so he arranged for uh Vern um couch and Vern supervisor to come down and and Vern's
00:21:28
supervisor's name was Perry Reni who later became the bu County Sheriff they came down to the FBI office and we sat
00:21:35
there reviewing the case I said at the risk of looking like an idiot I said you know something's wrong because a boy
00:21:44
like this doesn't just disappear to the point where search and rescue can't find
00:21:49
any evidence of him ever existing and Vern agreed with me and that's the way he had felt so don Pierce my supervisor
00:21:58
and per Rena Fern supervisor gave us permission to reopen this case and start looking at it and that became this uh
00:22:09
unbelievable Marathon for Vern and I looking to find out what happened to Danny in a way when you review these
00:22:17
files and you're thinking about these things you're almost transported back in time and you realize that the better the
00:22:26
investigators documented what they had done the further back you can go and with the intensity of actually feeling
00:22:36
like you're there that was a real lesson to me and my paperwork was usually not very good but because of that and from
00:22:45
learning from Vern I started trying to do much paper in my own paperwork because I knew that it it could mean the
00:22:52
difference between having hope or losing hope in a case like this Jeff tell us a
00:22:57
little bit about about Danny's home life Danny lived in a small town named mallia
00:23:03
mallia is a very rural area it's just east and north of A Town Called Paradise your listeners might be interested to
00:23:13
know that paradise and Melia were two towns that were completely burned to the ground in the campfire from last summer
00:23:23
and so nothing exists there anymore but Danny grew up in Melia or he lived in Melia Melia he didn't live there he
00:23:30
didn't grow up there his mom was um an alcoholic and so her life circulated around
00:23:42
alcohol and because of that she wasn't the most responsible parent she could have been and Danny was frequently
00:23:52
reported to be in the neighborhood unsupervised there was one incident that really got to me emotionally where a
00:24:03
neighbor who was interviewed described that on a cold snowy morning uh Dany was at her door by her kitchen asking to be
00:24:13
let in and he was in his pajamas he didn't have any outer garments on and she described how she brought him in and
00:24:21
fed him breakfast and there were other incidences that were like that there was um teachers in his kindergarten class
00:24:32
reported that Danny would fall asleep early in the day and they determined that his mom was feeding him ice cream
00:24:40
and he didn't have a very nutritional diet his teeth were deteriorated because again his diet was so bad so Danny was a
00:24:52
child who was neglected that's pretty sad one of the reasons that Veron and I would one of the things
00:25:00
that Aid at us was because uh you know here Danny goes missing and because he's neglected in the first place no one
00:25:08
really or they easily give up looking for him and so that that was eating at us and one of the things that I'm really
00:25:15
proud of that was happening during this time is that Vern and I were developing a very close friendship with each other
00:25:24
and Vern was a guy who didn't really have great feelings about the f I so this partnership we were developing was
00:25:31
a lot of fun and he really took advantage of me in terms of I was a street guy and he I didn't know anything
00:25:37
about the country so he he would tell me these crazy stories that I would believe that were
00:25:43
not true just to get me can you describe the man that they partnered you with for
00:25:48
this case detective Vern Kelch ver was about 6' five he was if you think of John Wayne in one of his
00:26:01
westerns that's Vern Kelch he was massive he was his hands dwarfed my hands he had a a deep voice
00:26:14
and he was a non-nonsense guy quite frankly when I started working with him I was intimidated because I
00:26:21
wouldn't want to be on his bad side and as we got to be better friends um it just you know I felt a lot safer people
00:26:29
people have the misconception that Police or Sheriffs in rural areas aren't that good ver had kept this
00:26:41
unbelievable documentation of the case he had volumes of loose leaf binders that were organized in all different
00:26:50
ways and you could give him a date and time and he'd be able to look back in his records and find out what happened
00:26:59
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00:29:04
Captain special agent Rik could you take us through the known events of the day of December 1st 1992 yeah the day Danny
00:29:14
goes missing yes and I I'd like to tell you that um this is when you talk about working cold
00:29:22
cases the events and the day that your victim is last seen they become imprinted in your mind and in your heart
00:29:34
and your soul because it's the starting point of where you begin and they end and you try very hard to cause one to
00:29:43
overlap with the other so you get some type of uh idea of what could have happened and so in Danny's
00:29:55
case that day was a cold rainy chilly day there was a house being built near where Dany lived and because he was
00:30:06
always out and about he would always hang over watching the house be built there was a dog in the neighborhood that
00:30:15
was always at Danny's side and the dog's owner was in jail so the dog like Danny
00:30:22
had no place to go so the two of them found each other and hung out to together and Danny hung around there for
00:30:30
the day and about 3:00 or so the workmen were getting ready to go home and the uh
00:30:40
supervisor uh told Dany to go home and and he actually told them you know you got to get a a coat on a jacket
00:30:48
so Danny went home and got a coat his mother remembered him coming in and getting his jacket and running out again
00:30:58
and the uh supervisor said that Danny came back with his coat on and then these guys were packing up getting ready
00:31:07
to go a short time later Danny's mom went looking for him and couldn't find him and so this is what we know about
00:31:15
Danny's last day he was hanging out in the area where the house was being built he had a dog at his side he interacted
00:31:24
with the uh Carpenters that were building the house and so this is where you start uh and what happens is you not
00:31:33
only try and get a an idea of the logistics and the goings and comings but you also get an idea of what Danny was
00:31:41
like because these guys are telling you what their impression is at the same time you're getting impressions of these
00:31:47
guys and that slowly gives you the ability to start building this mental picture of what that day was like now
00:31:56
Danny's mom mom was as we said an alcoholic and there were many times reported when she would be asleep during
00:32:05
the day probably recovering from the previous night on one occasion before this she had actually misplaced Dany she
00:32:14
had left Dany with a friend and forgot who she left him with and couldn't find him so of course she met with a lot of
00:32:24
uh negative um critic ISM because you know she wasn't really being mindful of her
00:32:31
child but it was also important to consider that if she could have lost her child for three days that time how do we
00:32:39
know she didn't do something this time how do we know she wasn't pulling out of the garage and maybe hit him while he
00:32:46
was standing behind all these factors come into play as possibilities but in what really got to
00:32:54
ver and I was that here here you have the mom who had lost him for 3 days and she never called police and now Dany was
00:33:03
missing for 50 minutes and she called police so the question becomes why is she so diligent this time and this is an
00:33:12
example of where you start you have to find a reason there's something going on there and because her son was missing
00:33:21
she became very helpful and tried very hard to the best of her ability to help us find her son and what we learned is
00:33:30
that on that day Danny was supposed to go over that evening to be with his father and his mother was going to have
00:33:39
the evening to herself to go out and do what she did mindful of this she uh when
00:33:48
she couldn't find Dany she was concerned not because she couldn't find Danny but because she was
00:33:55
going to go out and she knew she couldn't go out until she had Danny accounted for over at his dad's and the
00:34:01
way the logistics worked out that day is that she was going to feed Dany before she took him over to his dad so she
00:34:08
cooked him uh a pot of macaroni and cheese so she remembered Dany coming in to get his jacket as she was starting
00:34:17
the pot of of macaroni cheese and then when she finished cooking it that's when she started looking for him a time of
00:34:25
approximately 20 minutes couldn't find him so whatever happened to Danny happened in that 20
00:34:31
minutes then uh she started looking for him and she spent another half hour looking for him and then she called the
00:34:39
police she called The Bu County Sheriff's department and Vern responded with the department and they began what
00:34:45
they do so well which is search and rescue and looking for Danny and this is where we get to the point where there's
00:34:52
never any trace of him including his clothing his shoes his possessions anything that's ever seen from him again
00:35:02
the dog is located in the neighborhood running around by itself but Dany is gone and this is what we had to work
00:35:10
with right so we don't have any evidence suggesting where Dany went but do we have any other kind of evidence
00:35:20
another thing that we had is we talked about how Danny was neglected because of his condition of his hygiene Danny had
00:35:31
contracted a an infestation of what they call scabies which I think are like um I
00:35:38
don't know they're like I it's scabies are like these bugs that make you wish they're like bed bugs if you will and
00:35:46
because of the scabies uh Danny's mom had to do a complete cleaning of the house doing all the laundry that was
00:35:55
located in the house and she also had to have Danny's head shaved because the scabies would I guess live in the hair I
00:36:03
don't know that much about it but I remember the scabies was a big issue and when we were looking for Danny his hair
00:36:10
was a crew cut and there were some strange tips that were coming into the police department regarding The
00:36:16
Disappearance of this small boy do you recall any of those Vern Vern and I we decided that we would interview his mom
00:36:26
very thorough we would interview his sister uh Shannon and his brother Brandon and we would
00:36:35
slowly take everything we could extract from them and we would verify and run out each specific
00:36:43
thing and when it came to Danny's mom the crowd she hung with wasn't the best and so we started looking through her
00:36:54
friends and one one guy in particular uh we we determined from Jackie's friends that this guy was very
00:37:04
sexually active and also very sexually aggressive and while there was nothing to indicate he preferred children we
00:37:13
were going to give him a good you know look and we eventually found him he was down in the LA area and we arranged for
00:37:25
a polygraph oper from the Los Angeles Division and uh Vern supervisor Perry and M Don arranged
00:37:34
for B Vern and I to get the funding so we could uh go to La and have him have this guy polygraphed and this is where
00:37:44
uh as new investigators you start learning the ups and downs of working these cold cases and Vern and I got
00:37:53
ourselves worked up thinking this guy could be a good contender and so we had a lot of expectations and hopes when we
00:38:00
drove down to LA and the polygrapher we had was a guy named Jack trarco really really good guy who got some he in his
00:38:09
own right was was well known and thought of and uh we got the guy and had him do
00:38:16
a polygraph with Jack we told Jack that we thought he would be a good Contender because of his behavior incidents that
00:38:24
had been described the associ ated with them with inappropriate sexual um you know forwarding with women things like
00:38:32
that and uh Vern and I what happens with the polygraph is it takes several hours
00:38:38
and Vern and I waited in a lobby area while uh Jack had taken this suspect into uh one of the motel rooms where and
00:38:49
and polygraphed him and Vern and I are sitting out there and shortly after a few hours the guy comes out
00:38:57
and he looks suen and his eyes are on the ground and he is really shaken up so of course Vern and I get really excited
00:39:09
thinking oh you know this could be it and Jack came out a short time after him and we said you know like how to go and
00:39:16
he goes it's not him so we got ourselves so wound up thinking it would be him it
00:39:23
it took some time for it to settle in that it wasn't him but Jack said even though the guy passed his polygraph he
00:39:30
thought he would interrogate him anyway and the result was this guy coming out of the room the way he was Jack had
00:39:38
really uh gone after him and I got to tell you it makes me proud to be an FBI agent to know that you know the guys you
00:39:45
work with are are so good and so dedicated and passionate that just because we were talking about the
00:39:54
whereabouts of a missing six-year-old boy You Know Jack was not going to let this go until he himself was uh content
00:40:02
so when he let the guy out he was pretty convinced the guy had nothing to do with
00:40:06
it so uh Vern and I uh thanked him but we had to get going because the guy literally walked out and kept walking
00:40:13
and we were losing him and we wanted to just touch paas with him and uh we found
00:40:20
him a couple miles away from the hotel and we offered them a ride home and uh he was crying and refused our our ride
00:40:30
home because he was so upset and shaking up uh by the interrogation and it's an example of how
00:40:39
you can get your hopes up as an investigator and then come crashing down when it's not what you think and as you
00:40:47
work these cases Nick what happens is you put so much of yourself into each lead and things start working working up
00:40:57
that when the lead falls through it not only comes as a shock and disappointment
00:41:03
but it kind of saps your energy for a day or two we talked a little bit about Jackie Danny's mother and her lifestyle
00:41:11
and Danny's home life when you start looking into this cold case there was reason to have suspicion regarding
00:41:18
Jackie yes this is really a special uh time for me before I had even met Jackie from
00:41:28
reading the files and realizing the life that Danny had I was already angry at her bear in mind Nick that I had myself
00:41:39
a uh a six year old boy same ages Dany who was going through the after effects of a disease that threatened his life
00:41:50
has almost took him from us Lori you know had handled it with more emotional strength that I did and so here's a mom
00:41:59
I'm talking to that's got a boy who's healthy and she neglects him so before I even met Jackie I was prejudicial
00:42:07
towards her I was angry so I I went with ver and we went to Jackie's house and the door opened and Jackie came out and
00:42:16
she and Vern gave this huge hug and I felt myself get a little upset with ver I'm like why are you hugging this woman
00:42:25
after what she's done and she was also considered by many to be a suspect it was believed that because of her
00:42:35
inebriated State she may have done something to Danny accidentally and and caused him to to die or whatever and
00:42:43
then gotten rid of him so there was a lot of Suspicion and I didn't see any reason that she should not be considered
00:42:51
in that light but Vern did not think she had anything to do with it and I learned a huge lesson
00:43:00
from Vern that day I learned that when you treat people with respect and you don't judge them they become a lot more
00:43:11
truthful honest and reflective trying to help you figure out what's going on because as we sat there that day it was
00:43:22
clear to me that Jackie knew that she was part of the proc that she knew she had failed Danny's
00:43:29
welfare she knew that this probably might not have happened if she had been a more Hands-On mother and it was very
00:43:40
hard to maintain that level of anger that I felt before I met her seeing her this way and I also saw that the Vern
00:43:48
was just so amazing with her that I believe strongly that Jackie not only only had not been in involved but
00:43:59
was um being treated with such a a Cavalier like oh she did it and he's gone and we're never
00:44:08
going to find him and from being with Vern that day I I was like we need to we need to go through Jackie and either
00:44:17
find out if she did this or or stop prioritizing her and so we arranged for Jackie to come down to the FBI office
00:44:26
office in Sacramento and uh she was polygraphed in Sacramento and it was a female
00:44:33
polygrapher who I worked with was really good I really liked her and uh she came
00:44:39
out of the polygraph and said that Jackie um had passed her polygraph that one of the problems with
00:44:46
the previous polygraphs is that the polygraphs were done in such a way as to cause her to become emotional and that
00:44:54
threw off the result and and this might be a good time for your listeners to understand how a
00:44:59
polygraph works because a polygraph measures physical function there's it measures your pulse it measures your
00:45:08
blood pressure it measures your heartbeat and it also measures the conductivity of your skin so if you
00:45:16
start sweating for instance that conductivity goes up and all these things together are then go through an
00:45:25
algorithm them and give the polygrapher an idea of the whether the person is TR is is speaking truthfully or not but
00:45:34
consider this Nick I have never met a victim parent whose child has gone missing that passed a
00:45:42
polygraph they all fail because they all feel responsible for The Disappearance they all feel that they let their child
00:45:51
down and so they all feel like they're the reason the child's missing and so the polygraph indicates to them
00:45:59
you know shows them as as failing when in reality they're blaming themselves so you always have to take into
00:46:07
consideration the total environment all all of the uh a facets of what you're dealing with I I hate to say it but I
00:46:17
did see in one instance a uh a father pass a polygraph and what I realized in time about that father was that he
00:46:28
really didn't care about his child being missing so all of the emotional aspects
00:46:33
that would have caused the polygraph to show its its results weren't there because he really didn't care a person
00:46:41
who doesn't have a motion um he's more likely or he or she is more likely to pass a polygraph because the polygraph
00:46:49
is based on our ability to feel and have emotion and react and the and of course
00:46:56
the philosophy is that if you tell a lie if you mislead that's that you're going to
00:47:02
react to that you're going to you know you're doing something wrong and your body reacts physically to what your mind
00:47:08
is doing mentally right and during this interviewing process and and sifting through this information there are other
00:47:15
leads that are coming in yeah I believe there was one if I recall correctly that
00:47:20
involved a victim of molestation that indicated that possibly their father could have been involved in
00:47:29
The Disappearance of Danny yes it's amazing you know I uh I remember writing about it now in the book when you're
00:47:38
looking for a missing child the natural belief is that whoever took the child or killed the child was doing more
00:47:49
than just taking the child that there was a sexual motive we got a tip in from a guy who believed that his father could
00:47:58
be a suspect and I don't remember exactly now but I remember that he was able to give us enough supporting
00:48:08
information that we were able to put this guy in close proximity to Danny and possibly he could you know maybe he
00:48:19
needed to be looked at further he turned out to have an alibi that that didn't you know that caused him to
00:48:28
be cleared but the thing I remember the most about that lead which really stays with me even
00:48:37
now is that this man described to me that as a boy he would try and stay up all night
00:48:48
long and sit in the hallway to keep his father from going in and assaulting his sister and he felt responsible that he
00:49:00
couldn't do that it left a seed in me of the realization of how hard this is for the
00:49:12
family members not only the victim's families and that when something happens to another person many times victims of
00:49:23
similar crimes and victims families of similar crimes will re-experience what what they did and it
00:49:31
will it will reffect them and I've always taken that with me [Music] [Music] since for all of our old episodes
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00:50:04
the HBO documentary of Adon Sayad all right we will see everybody back here in the garage tomorrow until then be good
00:50:12
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