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indeed.com/mpodcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. [Music]
00:02:10
Welcome to True Crime Garage. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, thanks for listening. I'm your host Nick and
00:02:16
with me as always is a man who independently celebrates his independence. Here is Captain.
00:02:22
It's good to be seen and good to see you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for telling a friend.
00:02:30
We are still sipping on some brewree or die blood orange IPA by the great people
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over at 21st Amendment Brewery. This fed IPA is brewed just like 21st Amendments's West Coast style brew free
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or die IPA, but with an abundance of fresh blood orange puree and a touch of dry hops. It's refreshingly great. It's
00:02:56
refreshingly different. Garage grade four and a quarter bottle caps out of five. And here are some cheers. Very
00:03:04
much deserving cheers to our good garage friends. First up, a cheers to Michelle
00:03:09
from Indicott, New York. And a big we like your jib goes out to Angie Lloyd in Levvenworth, Kansas.
00:03:16
Here's a cheers to Reggie in Grand Island, Nebraska. And a big tall cans in there goes to
00:03:22
Rosemary in Scenic Dearborn, Michigan. Here's a shout out to Tristan Sakamoto in Happy Valley, Oregon. And last, but
00:03:30
certainly not least, we give a shout out to Jean and Dean from Akran, Indiana. Everybody we just mentioned, well, they
00:03:39
donated to this week's beer fund and for that we thank you. Yeah. BW are ruin beer run. Want to give
00:03:47
a big thank you to all the freak nasty True Crime Garage listeners that went to true crimegar.com and they clicked on
00:03:54
the store page, checked out some of the new merchandise, use the promo code, and
00:03:59
picked them up some swag. Colonel, that's enough of the B is nas. All right, everybody. Gather around. Grab a
00:04:06
chair. Grab a beer. Let's talk some true crime. [Music] to get to the scene. He drove down a
00:04:26
little private lane, little asphalt lane that that led off of the two-lane asphalt state highway uh into a wooded
00:04:36
area referred to as Bush Wildlife Area. Um and I think I at one point in time I was
00:04:43
told not to mention Bush Wildlife. They didn't want the bad publicity, but whatever that that's where she was
00:04:47
found. Everyone knows that now. Um, so the scene was uh treeine road on both sides. You couldn't really see anything
00:04:57
beyond the trees because it was so thick with trees even though it was the leaves
00:05:03
were falling or have had fallen off the uh the limbs. If you if that makes sense. She was found probably 20, I
00:05:12
don't know, 20 yards, 30 yards off the road in the woods. I think honestly I I worked that particular area pretty much.
00:05:23
And I I think to this day, even if I would have driven down that road in in the nine days that she was missing, I
00:05:33
had driven down that road several times. dead end road goes to the end of the it
00:05:37
goes back to where a schoolhouse had once been had since burnt down. I I would go as part of my patrol. I would
00:05:45
go down that road. I would check for hunters to make sure that their vehicles weren't broken into. There was nobody
00:05:51
back there uh dead in a vehicle. Uh it's a it was a it is still to this day a popular place for people to go to commit
00:05:59
suicide as as sad as that is. So I would check that that that was part of my patrol function. And I would go back
00:06:04
there, I would check for cars for various reasons. Uh, and then the point of that was I believe that had she been
00:06:11
sitting up leaning against the tree, I would have seen something that probably would have peaked my curiosity out in
00:06:18
the middle of the woods, if that makes sense. I could see that far. Yeah. The woods were thick, but I could I and
00:06:25
and eventually I I walked back there. So, it was a matter of pushing branches out of the way that you could walk back
00:06:31
there. So, she had uh a pair of jeans with her. I I don't know had if she had worn them
00:06:38
to school. I know there was some issues with her when she got ready for work or got ready for school that morning. She
00:06:44
had a skirt or some skirt or something on and it was too cold, mom said. So, she made her put jeans on. Um so, if you
00:06:52
if you can imagine the legs of the jeans, they were wrapped around a tree. They were looped through her arms that
00:07:00
were behind her back and just tied in a knot. Uh yeah, just um I don't know cuz she wasn't laying
00:07:12
she was against the tree. She was flat on the back. Yeah. Like laying Yeah. Yeah. Left side
00:07:19
of her left shoulder was like right at the tree. Arms were like swung to the side behind her. if that. And then so
00:07:28
like her her hands taped or or handcuffed as you said, they were uh on the left side of her body. She's 9 years
00:07:37
old. She's flexible obviously, but much more than me. Um but so she was laying on her back, left
00:07:48
side kind of against the tree, her left shoulder, and then the jeans secured her.
00:07:56
Uh I don't know if it would have normally the way they were tied if that would have kept anybody there that
00:08:01
wasn't you know near death anyway because of no food no nothing apparently for 9 days 7
00:08:09
days however long she lived I can tell you that she was definitely alive when she was put there because her
00:08:18
they were picture this in your head let's just say they sit her down at the tree they tie her hands behind or her
00:08:26
hands are handcuffed behind her back, whatever. And they tie her to that tree. You can see in the ground where she had
00:08:33
like used her feet and she tried to either sit back up or reposition herself. So you can see where the ground
00:08:39
was uh the scuff uh the scuff marks in the ground from the heels from her heels. Does that make sense?
00:08:45
Yep. Uh she's so she's on like a leaf covered ground because the leaves are falling
00:08:51
and she's pushing with her feet to try to reposition herself. I I could speculate she was trying to sit up. Uh
00:08:58
she was blindfolded or had duct tape over her eyes. I just can't imagine uh just what she was going through.
00:09:10
[Music] Very sadly, the body of Angie Houseman was recovered in the neighboring county
00:09:21
of St. Charles County. There was a lot of evidence at the scene, or at least a lot of items that detectives confidently
00:09:29
believed could yield some physical evidence. So, they spent days collecting and then even more time examining items
00:09:37
that were found on Angie and items found scattered at the scene. Some forensic clues were retrieved from the
00:09:44
examination, including a fingerprint on the duct tape that was covering her mouth. We need to
00:09:52
note here and this was very smart on behalf of the detectives. They refused to say how Angie died, right? We are we
00:10:03
are reporting it here today, it would eventually be reported for but for a very long time and as best as they could
00:10:11
keep this thing under wraps, they would they would simply just say that it was an extremely violent death confirmed
00:10:18
homicide. Yeah. and we have some big details. And if they would release those details like
00:10:24
the handcuffs or the duct tape or how she was bound to the tree, if they release any of that information, then
00:10:31
you can get false confessions. You can get, you know, bogus reports coming in. It can it can muddy up your
00:10:38
investigation, bog down the investigation, as I like to say. And of course, and they were
00:10:44
expecting because of the amount of local news coverage and how much media presence there was in this case from the
00:10:53
time that she went missing to the time that she was found. They were expecting that they would get some false
00:11:02
confessions or at least that they may get somebody calling in with bad tips or many many people calling in with tips
00:11:10
that are not great for your investigation. Meaning they're they're leads to follow up on but they don't
00:11:16
lead you to the suspect or to the person's or person responsible. you know, they they had good or believed
00:11:26
that they had good physical evidence and that it would only be a matter of time before they found the killer. So, let's
00:11:31
add this as well, Captain. A lot of what you were saying, I'm going to echo it here. because of the very specific way
00:11:38
that Angie was left, should the killer talk to someone else or and that person were to come forward to police with some
00:11:47
details? Well, then they would also know that they had a good lead, a great lead,
00:11:51
likely the best yet. Because if someone says, "Hey, I think so and so or so and so told me that they knew what happened
00:11:59
or were involved." Here's what they told me. There's specific details in there that would tell detectives right away.
00:12:05
This is this is our lead that we got to chase down immediately. Push the other ones aside just for a moment and let's
00:12:12
work on this one. The other thing, too, is keep in mind the fingerprint. When you're investigating and you find a
00:12:18
fingerprint that is pulled from an item that you know that the killer had to place on your victim and think about the
00:12:26
crime that we're talking about, the abduction of a child, sexual assault, homicide, this every one of those is
00:12:34
telling you that you are likely dealing with a person that has that was already in the system that's been picked up for
00:12:40
something else at some point, locked up for something else at some point, and you're going, "Aha! Ah, we got this
00:12:46
guy's fingerprint. We got the killer's fingerprint. We're going to find him in a database
00:12:51
somewhere. It's only a matter of time. Sadly, what happens here is, and I don't know that this was ever released to the
00:13:00
public, but sadly what happened with that fingerprint, they tested it and tested it and analyzed it, analyzed it
00:13:08
because they thought that they could pull that that over time it would get better because the fingerprint that they
00:13:15
pulled was simply this. It wasn't good enough to throw it in a database and find a match.
00:13:24
It was only good enough if you had a onetoone comparison to say that person not a match. This person yes is a match.
00:13:33
Right? People that know this case and if we have enough time we'll get into it. There were a lot of suspects in this
00:13:41
case. A lot of suspects. Now, many of them they were able to eliminate, maybe not off of their words or what else they
00:13:50
were being told about suspect A, B, or C, but they were able to eventually eliminate them based off of physical
00:13:57
evidence. So, some of that would be this one toone comparison of the fingerprint.
00:14:02
Remember, we also talked about there being fibers and hairs that were recovered from this scene as well. Now,
00:14:08
I mentioned bad tips. I want to be clear here. Most of the time that this is people with good intentions calling in,
00:14:15
phoning in, saying, "Hey, I think so and so did it or I saw this and it was weird."
00:14:19
It's the people aren't bad that are phoning those in or alerting police. If you see something, say something. But
00:14:27
what it what it then what then ensues is you have leads that detectives have to chase down ultimately to spend time on
00:14:36
those and efforts and resources on those only to figure out that well it didn't lead us to the person that we're
00:14:43
actually looking for. Right now let's flip the page on the monthly calendar here and go to December
00:14:49
1st. So we're still early on in our timeline here. December 1st, 1993. So this is now 4 days after Angie's body
00:14:58
was found. This is when another girl disappears. November was one of the worst months ever for this community.
00:15:05
And now December is right on par to be the same to be of the same dread here. For this we go to Hazlewood, Missouri.
00:15:13
Hazelwood is about seven or eight miles from St. An with daytime traffic. The quickest route would be about 14 minutes
00:15:21
drive time. This case that we're about to get into is not only nearby in both time and proximity, but right from Jump
00:15:28
Street, this case is eerily similar to that of Angie Houseman's case. So, here we have 10-year-old Cassidy
00:15:38
Center. Everyone calls her Cassie. On Wednesday, December 1st, she arrived home from
00:15:44
school and then she left on foot to walk to a friend's house. This meeting was known. So, the friend
00:15:50
became somewhat alarmed when her friend did not arrive, but they're I mean, they're little kids. That happens. The
00:15:56
little girl, Cassie, never showed. When Cassie didn't return home at 5:00 p.m., her mother called the friend's house to
00:16:03
learn that the daughter never arrived. Now, here is something that's quite unique. I don't know that we've found
00:16:09
this in other cases. if we have I don't recall. But little Cassie, 10-year-old, she had this little yellow
00:16:20
alarm that she would keep with her. Now, I don't know the specifics of this alarm, but I remember these from when I
00:16:29
was a kid, and sometimes adults would carry them, like if if a lady was out jogging or walking and known to walk in
00:16:37
parking lots late at night, these were often ones that you could strap on to like your purse or you could put them
00:16:44
even around your neck and it was just this little kind of picture like a a little tiny flashlight. They kind of
00:16:51
look like that. and and you you can hit a button or you can pull them. Some of them you would pull and then it would
00:16:58
send off this like very annoying loud earpiercing alarm, right? The it it's not monitored. It's not like um the old
00:17:08
commercials of I help I've fallen and I can't get up, right? Life alert. It's there's nobody
00:17:13
monitoring it. So, you're not paying for any type of service. You used to be able
00:17:17
to buy these things for like $10. And so people would carry these and you could pull them. It's it's almost like a a
00:17:25
rape whistle, right? But a battery powered alarm that you could pull them or hit a button and this very loud
00:17:33
annoying alarm would just keep going and going and going. And it's meant to draw
00:17:38
attention or scare persons off. She had one of these on her the day that she went missing. Now remember, the Angie
00:17:47
Houseman case was big news. A lot of people were following it. A lot of people were afraid, especially people
00:17:53
with kids. So, I don't know if this was purchased because of the news of Angie Houseman's case or if she was already
00:18:01
arming herself with one of these, but I saw other news articles stating that a lot of these types of items were being
00:18:07
purchased around this time because of the Houseman case. Again, here in this case, like the Houseman one, we have a
00:18:13
rather small amount of time in which something happened to this little girl. same age roughly, nearly identical
00:18:19
victimology. And of course, after this little girl goes missing, police feared that there
00:18:26
was a serial predator in the area. We already talked about the major crimes unit working Angie's case, the FBI being
00:18:35
brought in, but they also were using something that was a little bit of a new strategy back then. This was an FBI
00:18:43
strategy, and it was a program called Rapid Start. So, I'm going to read a little excerpt here from the great book,
00:18:51
In the Light of All Darkness. This is page 168. From the notes, it says, "Rapid Start was used in the November
00:19:00
18, 1993 kidnapping of Angie Houseman and the December 1st, 1993 abduction of Cassidy
00:19:07
Center. Investigators feared that a serial killer, a child serial killer was active after both bodies were found
00:19:16
separately. So very sadly, Cassidy Cent's body was recovered the next day. They used this rapid start program and
00:19:28
strategy. This was, from my understanding here, Captain, this was something that the FBI put together when
00:19:34
there was a bomb case going on somewhere in the South, I believe just a year or so prior to these two kids going missing
00:19:44
and then being found killed. And it was a way to collect and organize tips that were coming in from the public and a way
00:19:54
to help them strategize and prioritize chasing down specific leads and also a way of making it easier for detectives
00:20:04
to communicate with one another, but also communicate with the FBI and work hand in hand. We know we we saw how
00:20:12
difficult the lack of communication made things in the 70s and early 80s with some of these very difficult cases to
00:20:19
work where you have multiple jurisdictions or multiple agencies. What we're seeing here in the late 80s early
00:20:25
90s is an effort an effort by these agencies specifically the FBI to make it so that that the barriers that were once
00:20:35
there for communication are no longer there. eliminate those barriers. Open door communication can only help should
00:20:42
help your investigation. The point is the object is obviously is to catch these bad guys as quickly as possible
00:20:51
because we know how the likelihood of sexual predators to reaffend, especially child sexual predators. And now in quick
00:21:01
succession here you have two kids roughly the same age go missing for a period of time later recovered dead and
00:21:08
obvious signs that it's a homicide obvious signs of an abduction and you have a community two communities a whole
00:21:14
area region that is terrified about a serial killer potential serial killer operating in this area.
00:21:21
Not only do we have two abductions but remember that we had the abduction attempt before the first abduction.
00:21:28
Exactly. Now, the St. Louis Post Dispatch did fantastic coverage of these two cases. One of the more interesting
00:21:36
articles that they put out was from January 23rd, 1994. So, we will go to there real quick here
00:21:45
to kind of explain what was going on at the time in the area and how police were
00:21:52
working, try to figure this out very quickly. So they reported that the headline was cases at ground zero
00:22:01
woman's killing investigated with those of two girls. This was by Kim Bell and Bill Bryan of the Post Dispatch. And I'm
00:22:11
not going to read the entire article here, but the key points are that there was a third victim. So a
00:22:21
woman who was killed, she was 20 years old. her name is Amy Bond. And there was thoughts that there were things in that
00:22:30
investigation that made it seem like it was possibly connected to the Houseman case. And then
00:22:38
Houseman and Center because the victimology is so similar and the proximity is so close in both time and
00:22:48
distance. There was a lot of people that thought they were connected. So, if Amy
00:22:53
was connected to Angie, then she was connected to both in many people's minds. So, part of that is 20-year-old
00:23:01
Amy Bond, she was working at a Casey Masterpiece restaurant and she got off work.
00:23:10
This would have been in the month before Angie was abducted. when she got off work. It everything is telling us that
00:23:20
she was intercepted between the time she left the building, the restaurant, and and getting to her car.
00:23:27
And when she was later, her body was later found and recovered. The killer had used a considerable
00:23:35
amount of electric tape to bind her and even used it on on her face and head in a manner similar to that of Angie's case
00:23:44
with the duct tape. And because there were sexual assaults in both cases, there was a lot of thought that maybe
00:23:50
they they were connected. So this article is telling us that the task there was a task force that was formed
00:23:57
because of the panic that was going on. And the task force was made up of detectives from across many different
00:24:06
jurisdictions and agencies working together because you also had three different jurisdictions where these
00:24:12
crimes took place. Plus, the victims are found in other locations from where they
00:24:17
were abducted. So, you can see how complicated this whole thing gets very quickly. They were saying openly in this
00:24:24
article here, Captain, that police don't even know if there is one killer, two killers, or more, saying detectives have
00:24:31
interviewed hundreds of pedophiles and peeping toms. You had asked about the old pervert roundup. It sounds like they
00:24:37
absolutely did that. And they took it a step further. They've even questioned convicted murderers and rapists. And
00:24:43
because of how much work was spent on this and talking to all those people, rounding those people up and chasing
00:24:50
down leads, they even solved a string of burglaries, car thefts, and assaults thanks to leads that were de developed
00:24:57
during the course of talking to these people in these inquiries, right? All of this effort, it did help to
00:25:05
develop a profile of the killer. We'll get into that here in a minute. But when being interviewed, the the task force,
00:25:15
the man in charge of the task force, he openly said, "Look, we got all these detectives working this case. There's a
00:25:21
lot of different opinions here. There's a there's there's many different theories across the amount of detectives
00:25:28
that are working this case." Yeah, you got to you got to go, "Hey, perverts, come come gather around. Take your hands
00:25:35
out of your pocket. Stop playing pocket pull. We got some questions to ask you little perverts.
00:25:41
So, according to the article, it says each morning about 45 detectives from St. Louis County, the city of St. Louis,
00:25:48
and the major case squad huddle at the county's police academy for a briefing. They then break into three teams, one
00:25:57
for each victim. I I really think this is a very smart strategy. This is something we talked about when the then
00:26:04
when there had before there was an arrest in the Long Island serial killer case because you had agencies that could
00:26:12
not come to a consensus an agreement if all those victims were from the same killer or same group of killers and we
00:26:20
had said the same thing back then you you you can investigate this in a way that they are connected and also not
00:26:27
connected all at the same time. You just got to be smart with it. when Cassid's body was found. So Cassid's body was
00:26:33
found on December 9th. The there was a whole bunch of tips that came in, of course, and there were
00:26:43
thousands of leads, thousands of tips that were police were doing the leg work on it. FBI lab experts were sifting
00:26:52
through crate loads of evidence that had been shipped out to Washington for analyzation and testing. And in this
00:27:00
article, so keep in mind this is from January 23rd, 1994, they're saying, "Look, at this time, it's been about six
00:27:08
weeks since these these two girls were abducted and murdered, and we we haven't found a killer yet for all three of
00:27:15
these victims. Amy Bond was 20 years old, lived in Chesterfield. I want to make sure we throw that out there." and
00:27:21
it was the parking lot of the CA the Casey Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill on Chesterfield Parkway South and she was
00:27:29
abducted October 4th, found October 5th in a wheat field in Montgomery County. So now you can see we have multiple
00:27:36
counties involved in this investigation. Going back to the Cassidy Center, the Cassie case, that personal alarm, a
00:27:47
yellow device, this article says the size of a transistor radio was found sounding off,
00:27:54
screeching in a neighbor's yard. Whatever happened to her, that alarm was activated. She may have activated it,
00:28:01
likely activated it herself, but when it's found, it's found in a neighbor's yard, and she is not found
00:28:09
right away. She's not found until December 9th when two teenage boys found her body wrapped in a bedspread and
00:28:16
quilt in a St. Louis alley. She had been beaten severely and the task force that
00:28:26
we have referenced a couple of times was formed the same day, December 9th, that
00:28:31
her body was found. and police in this article go in and out of saying, "Look, there are some there are similarities
00:28:40
that are striking. There's also some considerable differences." And I did like one of the quotes
00:28:48
that came from one of the detectives that was saying, you know, they're saying some think it's a serial killer
00:28:56
that that they're all that they're all connected. But to be clear to the reporters, he's saying it's a gut
00:29:04
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Download the free app today. [Music] All right, we are back. Cheers, mates, to the windows, to the walls. Cheers to
00:33:30
you, Colonel. Cheers to you, Captain. We had mentioned that there was a profile that was put
00:33:35
out. This was released to the public, but just real quick, we have a sketch in the first abduction, but do we have a
00:33:43
sketch for the second abduction? So, we end up with a a a different composite sketch that comes that stems from
00:33:51
something else. So, to be clear, the first composite sketch that came out was from the attempted abduction one week
00:33:58
prior. I believe it was 10 days prior to Angie Houseman being abducted. Of course, you got to wonder, is that a
00:34:05
that failed abduction attempt? Is that connected to Angie's case? Yeah. Let's let's get into this profile
00:34:11
real quick. And because this case is very complex, so we'll stay and try to keep things in chronological order here.
00:34:20
It looks like this profile was compiled and then released to the public on December 4th.
00:34:28
Uh the article we just referenced came out in January. So we're jumping back just a second here. I found short
00:34:35
versions of this profile. And profiles are weird, aren't they? Like we've reviewed a whole bunch of them and it
00:34:42
doesn't seem to be any real template out there for an FBI profile. And then a lot
00:34:48
of times they they may have a lengthy profile and then only release a portion of it to the public.
00:34:53
Yeah. They could have hold back information within the the profile. Correct. There may there may be parts of
00:34:59
that profile that they want to share with law enforcement, but not the public in general for for a multitude of
00:35:04
reasons. Now, rather than go through a handful of of the shorter versions, it seems like the the lengthiest version I
00:35:12
could find was from J Tiger Tale on Reddit, who has many good write-ups on other cases, who wrote that the profile,
00:35:21
they predicted that the murderer or murderers was an intelligent white male between
00:35:27
the ages of 20 and 45 who may have recently started living alone and owned more than one vehicle. They described
00:35:34
him as a loner who didn't get along with women and may have experienced a recent
00:35:39
major stressor in his life like the death of a loved one or losing his job or a divorce maybe.
00:35:47
Yeah, exactly. Divorce that would go along with recently started living alone. Yeah.
00:35:55
And look, I don't want to get into the psychology of this profile. There's a lot there's a lot of things that I could
00:36:02
uh duck and weave on on this profile and what I'm seeing and the way that things
00:36:06
line up for this profile, but we can say this. This is going to greatly affect the investigation. I personally think
00:36:12
that looking back, this may have had a huge negative effect on the investigation, but look, there's they're
00:36:18
they're panicking, right? They're they have a an area community that is freaking out and rightfully so. Children
00:36:27
are being plucked off the streets. They're throwing everything at the wall here. And I think that's also something
00:36:32
you want to show the killer killers. We're pulling out all the stops here, man. We are doing everything we possibly
00:36:39
can. We have more resources than you, bad guy. So eventually we will catch up with you. We outnumber you. We will
00:36:46
eventually hone in on you and bring you in. Well, and these again this scenario,
00:36:53
these stranger on stranger abduction, it's rare. So when you have a situation where you have three that are possibly
00:37:01
connected, two attempts that were actually committed and one that wasn't. But again, if these three are connected,
00:37:13
then this sicko is something has snapped and he's just going to keep doing what he's doing until he gets caught. That
00:37:23
that's what it makes. That's what it seems like to me. Or we do we have a scenario and we've talked about this
00:37:29
like in the the Long Island serial killer case. Was there more than one killer happening? Was there all this
00:37:34
stuff in the news and somebody went well now when I kill somebody I'll just dump
00:37:39
them in this area because then they might confuse this victim with another killer. And so is there other sickos,
00:37:47
other perverts sitting around touching their little wee wee wee going, "Hey, this guy uh somebody out there abducted
00:37:55
a girl." Well, had this fantasy and and now if I do it, maybe they'll pin it on somebody else.
00:38:02
In the Amy Bond case, too, the adult, the 20-year-old who was abducted and killed there, there there's some signs
00:38:09
there, too, that that show me similar things like the Angie case where the person went to great lengths. And we
00:38:16
also get a clear motive, I believe, in Amy's case because she's a restaurant worker. They you leave with cash in hand
00:38:25
at the end of every night. So this is clear the way that she was found, what was done to her, that the motive was a
00:38:31
this was a sexually motivated crime because the money she made that night was found in her car. That that was
00:38:38
overlooked by her abductor and killer. And one other thing that it's believed that the killer did in that case was
00:38:46
moved the vehicle to make it look like maybe she w had been ab abducted elsewhere. that that cases is a
00:38:52
complicated one and remains so to this day. Just like these other two cases with this profile that comes out, they
00:39:01
very quickly get all these tips that come in. They have 100 suspects, 200 suspects, 400. Now, in total in the
00:39:07
Angie Houseman case throughout the years, there was 500 men roughly that were considered to be suspects and ruled
00:39:14
out as the perpetrator in Angie's case. and they could be ruled out for a number
00:39:19
of different ways and reasons. Most of the time it was the physical evidence that they had to compare to what was
00:39:24
found at the crime scene. Now, back to something that we talked about earlier. You brought up the composite sketches on
00:39:32
December 17th. We have a guy down in Texas who was picked up for that first composite sketch. So, this is So, this
00:39:42
guy lives nowhere in the area. Yeah. He travels around for work. How do What leads them to him is they didn't I
00:39:50
couldn't find this so I don't think it was public record. They had a partial plate. Remember that we we got the
00:39:57
description of the guy and he was driving a vehicle. They had a partial plate and I think what they did was they
00:40:04
must have run that plate in all of the possibilities that come up and they find a guy that matches the description with
00:40:11
a plate that would line up to match the partial. Yeah. They go down and they talk to this
00:40:17
guy and he confirms he was in the area. So, he tra he traveled for work, but he also had a relative. I can't recall,
00:40:25
Captain. I apologize. I think it was his mother that lived in the greater St. Louis area.
00:40:31
Well, you know what? Maybe get your [ __ ] together. Get your [ __ ] together. So, this guy's name is Gary Stuffbean.
00:40:39
And of course, immediately guilty. He is claiming that he was innocent and that they're telling him
00:40:45
like, "Look, we think you're good for this attempted abduction and we also think that you're good for murdering
00:40:52
these two girls." So, they arrested him and what was released to the papers is they were saying he said incriminating
00:40:58
statements. He gave incriminating statements after we questioned him, right? And his rebuttal to that is,
00:41:04
well, they questioned me for something like five or six hours over the course of a 12-h hour time period,
00:41:13
and so I was, you know, a little disheveled and worked up during the course of that. But he says, "I also
00:41:22
they they also kept threatening me, saying that um you know, you're good for these two murders until we find it until
00:41:28
somebody else turns up dead." You know, until until somebody else turns up dead,
00:41:33
we're convinced you are the killer. So now he's got to shift because he's absolutely guilty of attempting to
00:41:41
abduct this little girl, but now he needs to he and we know that because he plead guilty. He may he may
00:41:48
have claimed innocence in the beginning. His wife and his kid were standing by him. His mother was standing by him.
00:41:54
They're all speaking out in the paper that he's been wrongly charged and uh they're dragging his name through the
00:42:00
mud and this is this is terrible what they're doing to my husband and father and son.
00:42:04
What we learned this year in the true crime community is that if you confess to your wife or your mother, it doesn't
00:42:11
count. No, I'm not. He didn't conf I'm he they're standing by him and claim that
00:42:16
he's innocent as well with what he confesses in court. Eventually he pleads guilty in court and he and he he he has
00:42:25
to go on the flip of this because look he admits to being a pedophile and attempting this abduction.
00:42:32
He's saying I didn't kill those but I didn't kill those two kids. And so the short of it is he was able to prove that
00:42:39
he didn't kill those two kids. He wasn't even in the area when they were abducted. Again, he lives in Texas,
00:42:44
another state. And he gets So, so, so basically he gets charged and sentenced for the
00:42:50
attempted abduction, right? And and basically law enforcement then believe this guy because based off
00:42:58
of his whereabouts and his alibis and stuff, he's guilty of this crime that he has admitted to being guilty of and
00:43:05
these other ones he couldn't have done because he wasn't in the area. But to to have to admit that you're a pedophile
00:43:12
and you try to abduct a kid. Well, you're he traveled for work and he traveled for
00:43:19
family and the in reality it looks like he was traveling just to to be a piece of [ __ ] because he there were other
00:43:27
accusations once his face and name were were put out there. There were accusations from people in other
00:43:33
locations, even in other states that came forward. And then he ultimately admitted to committing other crimes. He
00:43:41
never admitted to killing anybody, but he admitted to commit committing other crimes. And these accusations and other
00:43:47
crimes were were children and uh grown women as well. So, um thankfully they got that guy. Unfortunately, he's not
00:43:56
the guy for the Angie case or any of these other three cases as it would appear. Now, Cassie's case, it's
00:44:04
February 3rd. This is shortly after about 10 daysish after that article, big-time article comes out about the
00:44:12
task force, the 45 detectives in the area working together on this major case squad, working all three of these cases
00:44:20
separately and in unison. But it is on February 3rd that they make an arrest. This guy was in his late 20s.
00:44:28
His name is Thomas Brooks. He was arrested for murdering Cassidy Center. And the case is it's very weird because
00:44:37
what happens is I the way I understand this is that some a good tip comes in that leads them to this guy. He lives in
00:44:47
a house in the neighborhood. He lived with his sister. I believe he was renting a room from his sister and his
00:44:55
sister had a roommate as well. Somehow he I don't know if she knocked on the wrong door,
00:45:03
but his story ultimately is that that he abducted her with the intent to rape her, but she fought back so much that he
00:45:12
that his reaction was to beat her to death. Jesus Christ. It's believed that the
00:45:18
alarm was sounded, her little personal alarm that she was carrying, that she either pulled it or or set it
00:45:26
off and that he had tossed it into a neighbor's yard. So, he lived in the neighborhood. Somebody when they found
00:45:36
the victim, when they found little Cassie, remember she was wrapped up concealed in a bed spread and quilt or
00:45:45
some other item. The caller, the tipster had recognized one of those items and pointed them to
00:45:52
that house. And very quickly, this I mean I the amount of disturbing details in this story across the three
00:46:05
cases are incredibly hard to fathom. Even Even having been looking at this for 2 weeks, it it looks like
00:46:14
the sister and the roommate were aware that there was a dead girl in their dwelling for a couple of hours or 24
00:46:24
hours, however long it was, until he moved the body. And why didn't they call law enforcement?
00:46:30
Because they are pieces of [ __ ] They are horrible freaking people. That's why. I I mean there's I we can examine
00:46:36
it as much as we want, but it doesn't take a doctor to come to that diagnosis. So they don't they don't turn in their
00:46:44
brother or roommate or whoever, whatever their relationship is to Thomas Brooks,
00:46:48
they don't turn him in. It's not until they are being pressed by police and being charged. They were charged with uh
00:46:56
obstruction of justice with multiple charges and then both of them say, "Yeah, this is what happened. This is
00:47:02
what we believe happened. This is what we think happened based off of living with this guy. So the the Cassie center
00:47:10
case ultimately gets closed. There was an arrest and conviction there after a trial and they were able to confirm this
00:47:20
is after questioning and the physical evidence that they had in Angie's case. They were able to confirm that he had
00:47:27
nothing to do with Angie Houseman's murder. as as as many similarities as there were.
00:47:34
Yeah. He had nothing to do. Now, back to the composite sketches. We already cleared
00:47:40
one of them with Gary Stuffle Bean. What a bad name. Well, Stufflele Bum. I hate to make fun of it because we
00:47:48
don't unfortunately we don't get to choose our last names and rarely do we get to choose our first name. So,
00:47:54
you can change it. Yeah. But there's other stuff beings out there, I would guess, that are that are
00:47:58
not terrible, horrible people like old Gary is. Uh Preston, it's an odd name. The there was a
00:48:07
composite sketch that was released to the public on February 8th. This was detectives announcing that they were
00:48:13
looking for a a different man. Uh this would be a heavy set man between the ages of 38 and 45 with brown hair, wavy
00:48:22
brown hair. And the police were very clear about this. They were saying he's not a suspect. He could turn into a
00:48:31
suspect. He's just a person that we're interested in talking to because he was spotted multiple times in
00:48:40
Angie's neighborhood prior to the abduction, on the day of the abduction, and since the abduction. On one
00:48:48
occasion, an eyewitness says that this man matching this description was seen with
00:48:54
another man. So, here here's the quick descriptions here, Captain. The man they're looking for is the heavy set man
00:48:59
between the ages of 38 and 45 with wavy brown hair. And then the man that he may
00:49:05
have been seen with on another occasion was tall, slender, caucasian. Both of them are Caucasian. And but the tall
00:49:13
slender man appeared to be in in his late 20s with either light brown hair or possibly red hair.
00:49:22
The vehicle that they were in or he was in was reported to be possibly a blue older model sedan. Police were looking
00:49:31
for the car, looking for this guy because it was somebody that they wanted to talk to. One thing that they did
00:49:36
announce to the public that I found was quite interesting was, and this has to be based off of the information that
00:49:44
they get from eyewitnesses about this vehicle, and I bet you they got some pretty specific information. and
00:49:51
description of this vehicle because they went into the neighborhood casing the neighborhood looking and looking and
00:49:57
looking to try to find a guy that looks like this asking people, "Have you seen a guy that looks like this? Have you
00:50:05
seen a car that looks like this? Can you direct us to a car that looks like this?" They couldn't find it. I'm basing
00:50:10
that off of the fact that they did state to the public that this guy's not local
00:50:16
because we we can't find him. We can't track him down. We're hoping he would come forward or somebody knows who he is
00:50:23
so they can direct us to him. We just want to talk to him about things he may have seen during his time in and out of
00:50:29
the neighborhood. I hate to bring up that weird 13-year-old boy that says she's going to be found tied to a tree.
00:50:38
There's going to be a blue car. Doesn't make any sense. Well, this is where this story comes
00:50:44
about, right? Because the way that that story works is that he made those statements during the Thanksgiving Day
00:50:51
football game when he was at the the house of a friend. At the time, none of this was reported to police. When it was
00:50:59
reported was when this request by police was out in the public with the second composite of the guy that they wanted to
00:51:06
talk to. when they gave the description of that vehicle to the public, somebody that was there on that Thanksgiving with
00:51:13
the 13-year-old boy called in because they remembered the boy saying something about a blue car,
00:51:19
right? And so this is how that story comes to light and makes its way to us because
00:51:24
you'd go, "Well, how Nick, how do you know that that happened if it was never reported?" Well, it was reported, but it
00:51:29
wasn't reported until after February 8th. So, this was well after Angie was found in late November. This is one of
00:51:38
those things that this case receives so much local news coverage, and we've seen
00:51:44
this with other cases. It just seems like some people, for whatever reason, want to be a part.
00:51:50
Yeah. I I call horseshit on this story. Yeah. Well, so they they go and pick up they go and pick up the boy. And of
00:51:58
course, he actually I don't think it was ever publicly stated as such, but he had to be considered a person of
00:52:04
interest or or even a suspect at some point. He just knew too much, right? May maybe he's not responsible. Very likely
00:52:11
he's not responsible. But why does he know this information? Again, he says it's something that came to him in a
00:52:18
dream. There was another family member that that told police, "Our family seems to have a history of having strange
00:52:26
things come to us in dreams that this might be the first for him, but it's not the first for our family tree." They I
00:52:34
mean, they questioned this kid. They had him submit fingerprints, hair. They really looked at this kid and he he
00:52:41
couldn't be connected to Angie's case again. Well, it's kind of weird that the again, how true is that story? I mean,
00:52:48
It could be complete horseshit. Yes. Or but but it is strange that family members would go, "Hey, look, this is
00:52:56
No, I I've witnessed things like this where I I couldn't explain it. You know, somebody just knowing something that
00:53:03
they shouldn't know and knowing that that person had no connection to it." So, I I don't want to say it's
00:53:09
completely, you know, I don't I'm not smart enough to think that I know everything about the world or how
00:53:17
everything works. And so, is this a possibility? Could there be certain people that are clairvoyant? Sure. Uh
00:53:26
but it also could just be a horseshit story. Yeah. I mean, there's and I don't want
00:53:31
to the I I find it fascinating. I truly do. So, there are some people that will roll their eyes when we bring up the
00:53:38
psychic stuff because when you go back to these old cases, and this one's not that old. I mean, 1993,
00:53:45
but when you go back to the 70s and the early 80s, you'll see a lot of this psychic communications and activity.
00:53:53
Some of them are just terrible people that are trying to build money or get money or notoriety. But then there's
00:54:00
other people that I think are legitimately either trying to get involved in the case for whatever reason
00:54:05
or they're trying to help or maybe they did dream something or or they think they sense something.
00:54:13
I'm with you. I don't know that it's any of that's real. I find it fascinating. I
00:54:17
find it an interesting part of these different troop crime stories. But the other thing too is you could dream
00:54:23
something or sense something and it's the same as a lottery ticket, right? it a million dreams. One of them is going
00:54:30
to be accurate, right? One of them, it just will be. Um, now the spec the specificity here of his
00:54:38
claims if if in fact this wasn't completely made up after the fact seems seems jarring to say the least. Now, we
00:54:47
we had mentioned holding back information and the best that they could. When you have this many people
00:54:54
working the case, it gets very difficult to to hold back everything. Information
00:54:58
has its way of leaking and making its way to others and and the public at large. The uh best way to keep a secret
00:55:09
in my opinion is don't tell anyone. Um and that's simply not possible with an investigation of of any type of homicide
00:55:17
investigation. I don't know if you want to get into some of the other people, the names that are kind of always been
00:55:25
tethered to this murder investigation because there's there's a bunch of them. Now, one thing I will say, so I spoke
00:55:34
extensively with Detective Lieutenant Ed Copelan from the St. Charles County Police Department. He was the one that
00:55:44
was first on the scene that found Angie Houseman. I also spoke with Captain John
00:55:49
Langford of the St. Anne PD. So he worked for the outfit that uh where she lived where Angie lived and and was
00:55:58
reported missing to. Both of these individuals worked this case for over 20 years. And then later another detective
00:56:06
joined Detective Mickey Morris who is retired from St. Charles County Police Department as well. All three of them
00:56:13
said the exact same thing. Now, they they weren't the three the only three to work this case, but Ed Copelan and John
00:56:20
Langford worked this case more than anybody else. Mickey Morris came in and worked this case thoroughly for
00:56:28
almost the entirety, if not the entirety of her career. All three of them said the same thing. One thing that
00:56:33
complicated this investigation for detectives over the years is no matter what time period they were in in their
00:56:41
investigation, there was always two or three really good suspects. Two or three guys that
00:56:47
all that looked really good for this. And they weren't always the same two or three guys throughout the history of the
00:56:54
investigation. Those those names changed throughout time. But you can understand
00:57:01
how that would complicate an investigation because you're spending so much time vetting your flavor of the
00:57:08
month or flavor of the year guy or guys who look really good for it. Yeah. But can I just point something
00:57:15
out? We So there's three cases, right? Mhm. Two actual abduction, one attempted abduction. Two of the three get solved,
00:57:28
but two of the three are stranger on stranger abductions. Well, even Amy Amy Bond's case was uh
00:57:35
abduction and murder, and that was stranger. That was stranger on stranger, right? So, wouldn't it statistically it
00:57:42
would tell you that in Angie's case, it wasn't stranger on stranger? Well, in any case, statistically, it
00:57:49
wouldn't be stranger on stranger, right? But but also because we have these other cases within that area that
00:57:55
were I just wonder if that changes the statistics and how you approach that being law enforcement.
00:58:03
Yeah. I I can't give a great answer for that. I I mean I really can't. And look,
00:58:08
you're get your together. Well, you can say that, but I'm offering up a lot of information here in the
00:58:14
course of this two hours. So, I think my [ __ ] is pretty well in order. But the
00:58:18
when you are trained when you're trained to be an investigator, you're not trained to there's a methodology to
00:58:24
finding connecting victim to perpetrator and it that methodology does not involve
00:58:32
much in the way of training of well the person's a complete unknown, right? Because then there would be there would
00:58:38
be little to tie them to the victim if that makes sense. Um, so that that is not something that is often trained.
00:58:47
That's why you see shows like Minehunter where they had to take a whole new approach when they started to see an
00:58:54
uptick in stranger on stranger crimes and violence and murders where they had to send around a couple of guys that
00:59:02
that understood this better than anybody else to teach the local police department and the local sheriff's
00:59:09
office. Hey, you got to start thinking outside of the box on some of these. If if you're working your investigation the
00:59:15
way that you've been trained to and it doesn't lead you anywhere, you need to start thinking that it was somebody that
00:59:20
didn't know the victim at all, right? And now here's what you do and and here's here's what we can attempt to
00:59:28
do. And a lot of times what was great about those guys and it goes, you know, that show is great, but it goes well
00:59:35
beyond Douglas and Wrestler going out and teaching these um other police departments because at some point what
00:59:42
they started doing was they started going around uh bringing in individuals from the different FBI field offices and
00:59:49
training them. So then they could go out and have a designated area that they would work in and they would train local
00:59:56
law enforcement in their state or in their region. And what happened in so many cases as you see on Mine Hunter is
01:00:06
that when they're there and they are educating these and teaching these courses, if you will, oftent times
01:00:12
they're being somebody's telling them, "Hey, we got this case and we've never been able to connect it to anybody.
01:00:18
Could you help us?" and they would work it briefly while they were there or when
01:00:21
they had to return they would work it from afar. And that's how some of those cases got solved and people got locked
01:00:28
up in cases that we may have never had uh a conclusion [Music] and the the weather also. Nick had had
01:00:49
to do with Ed's always said this that determine how long she was out there because there's no So Thursday night,
01:00:57
Thursday uh was Thanksgiving and there's always Dallas always plays football on Thanksgiving. You follow me?
01:01:09
Yep. So during that Dallas football game in my area where I live, which was 5 miles from where she was found, it we
01:01:18
got freezing rain. Uh or it was freezing rain. It was coming down as sleep or whatever. Uh when she was found, she's
01:01:27
laying on her back as I described. And then like the the lowle areas, her eye sockets, her stomach, um all of that was
01:01:36
she was pretty much covered with snow, freezing rain, whatever. So that occurred on Thursday and she was she was
01:01:45
in a in a prone position or whatever that is uh whatever. She's on her back lay down uh supine, but she's covered
01:01:54
with the precipitation that fell during the day on Thursday. And if she was sitting up, if she had been put there on
01:02:00
Thursday, she obviously wouldn't be covered with that stuff. I I've always said she was placed there on Tuesday or
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Wednesday and died from hypothermia. Although it was cold enough for her to die from that for the entire time that
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she was missing. It got nice during the day a couple times, but the nights were too they were too cold for anybody to be
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naked and survive that. [Music] Stick around for episode three of this case. More information coming. Join us
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back here in the garage. Until then, be good, be kind, and don't [Music]