30 Years Gone

 In the final episode of season two, Catherine talks with former a FBI agent, who worked as a consultant on ABC's program about Janie's case. She also explores one last theory of how Janie could have died: rubbing alcohol poisoning. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. As I go through the case file
one last time, three moments stand out to me. It's
September eleventh, nineteen eighty nine, two days after Janie Ward died.
It's around noon at the Junction Liquor store in Big Flat, Arkansas.

(00:29):
A pickup truck pulls into the parking lot. Gary Don
is the driver, and he's hauling two kegs off the
back of the truck. He comes inside says that one
of the kegs is untapped and he wants a refund.
His request is denied. The keg is several days old
and it hadn't been on ice. Gary Don asks again,
more aggressively. This time he is refused again. He hadn't

(00:53):
even brought one of the keg taps back. Gary Don
gives up. He slams the door of his truck, annoyed
that he couldn't get the money back. It's April two
thousand and seven and investigators are asking Sherry, who was
one of the passengers in Ron Roses truck, about the

(01:15):
night Janie died and what she thinks happened. There's no
one down there fighting, There is no one doing anything here.
She had no one who did find her there was
no boy that she was dating someone else's life, and
you know all those unders that have always gone around.
So that's why I just don't believe that anything happened
there in all these hears in school, even saying they're

(01:35):
rum and rumors among the kids. No, the only ones
who've ever made allegations and who brought up rumor had
been her parents and adults, not the kids. There's no
way that if something bad had happened, it would have
not somehow gotten through the kids in school. Even teachers
here things. The teacher's never heard anything because we see

(01:56):
these outside. So I mean, I don't know. I'm times
that anything happened to her. That same day, Investigators interview Kim.
She says that September ninth, nineteen eighty nine, was the
worst day of her life. Fourth day in my life.
I I can understand. It's been thirty years and we

(02:17):
still don't know how Janie Ward died. I'm Catherine Townsend
and this is Helen Gone. Janie's third autopsy was filled

(03:01):
with observers. There was a representative for the Ward family,
a forensic anthropology, and ABC had their FBI consultant, Brad
Garrett in the room. Brad worked at the FBI for years.
He worked on tons of high profile cases. Because of this,
he got the nickname doctor Death. When he first started

(03:21):
looking into Janey's case, even before the third autopsy, he
didn't think anything pointed to a homicide. Well, it was
really unclear to me based on the initial evidence that
looked at you. And I will say that it struck
me that the Arkansas State Police really did a great
job of trying to figure out what really happened at

(03:44):
this cabin. And I started get in the flavor of
and I totally ABC this early on was I'm not
sure this is a homicide. It could be, but it's
not in my mind, not at least at that point
going together as sort of a clearcutter of an homicide

(04:04):
that it really could be something else. Is there anything
specific that you remember about this case in terms of that.
Is it more challenging than cases like it? Is it
similar to what makes it different? The important thing for
the public to understand is that people form opinions about
what happens in cases. Obviously, families God bless them, form

(04:27):
their own opinions because it's very difficult. And let me
tell you I've worked a number of child deaths. It's
very difficult for parents to accept that, you know, their
child in effect either died by accident or by their
own hand. In this case, I'm not suggesting at all
this was by our own hand, but the point being,
there's like this opinion form. Then then the parents in

(04:48):
a very rural county now are promoting that this was
a homicide. They're not really going to be interested in
anything but an outcome that says that. And you made it.
You said something in the program about talking to the kids,
and you said it'd be hard to have a conspiracy
if there were something like twenty people with a similar story. Yeah,

(05:10):
I mean, I find most conspiracies laughable because you know,
I used to hear these constantly that you know, the
FBI colluded to cover up. You can't get two agents
to collude on something, so let alone to get an
entire system too, and what would be the motive of
doing that? But I realized that there was, you know,

(05:31):
controversy if that's the right word, with a local judge
and a local judge's daughter, and you know, allegations made
with really nothing factually just supported. Of course, many of
the suspicions that get brought up in the news articles
about Jane and on the Justice for Jennie forums have answers,
but these are still questions that get brought up constantly,

(05:51):
and rumors continue in Marshall across Arkansas and as Janie's
case continued to get traction across the nation. You know,
anytime you have I suppose public exposure of a case
that draws particular conclusions, or you know, for example, when
you look at the second autopsy, which you know, sort

(06:15):
of reinforce the Wards belief that Godter was murdered, you know,
you then you know, sort of get an emotional reaction
from the community as to you know, well maybe that's
what happened, you know, whether it's really true or not.
But you know, we're all i think suspect or vulnerable

(06:36):
to the stories of others in driving our own narrative.
I mean, that's the problem today and trying to figure
out what's actually true, and certain people speaks to just
accept it or question it as to well, that doesn't
make any sense, it's probably not true. And so you know, people,
particularly folks like average everyday citizens, they don't really know,

(06:58):
I mean from the standpoint of what is it? What
does it take to actually prove these cases? Is there
really any evidence to support one's or the other other
than this sort of idle chat about it or what
some media outlet might say about it. I will tell
you because I've worked so many high profile cases that

(07:20):
I just sort of ignore all that because you know,
the facts are the facts, and wherever they drive you to.
Now you know, sadly the facts don't always because maybe
even the lack of facts or evidence, you know, they
draw you to not a really solid conclusion. When I

(07:43):
talked to the ward's lawyer, Jerry Sallings, he didn't think
the first investigation was done very well. But Brad Garrett
said he thought the Arkansas State Police did a pretty
thorough job investigating what happened, particularly because it was all
happening in such a small town. I know, I was
a little surprised the witness statement seemed really short, and
also they didn't I was surprised that weren't They weren't

(08:06):
separated in question that night and in a more fair away, right,
because I thought that made it difficult later. Right, So,
investigative protocol is supposed to sort of be the template
of how you investigate a case, separate the witnesses, sort
of locked down the scene, and basically you don't let
anybody leave, or you make sure you've got the names

(08:27):
of all the people that were there, which in a
place like Marshall, Arkansas, shouldn't be that difficult. But you
still have to understand that I doubt if they were
thinking that way. Let's face it, a deputy sheriff in
that county, I'm sure doesn't make much money. That obviously
affects the quality of person you're going to get. And again,

(08:48):
it's nothing against the people who were there who did this,
It's just that it's going to be hard to get
somebody that really has a lot of experience or super
qualified to work in a super rural county unless they've
got some passion about living there. On Janie's death certificate,
both the and the cause of death are still undetermined.

(09:09):
But because it's not definitive, can we say that the
Wards are completely wrong in their perception of what happened,
that their daughter was murdered, and can anything we find
support what the family believes. You're not going to make
any family feel better unless it fits the fact patterns
as to how they want it to be, and so

(09:32):
could anything else be done in this case to support
the family's fact pattern And I don't think there is,
because I don't think there's evidence to support that. You know,
like that one totally unreliable witness claimed that she was
struck with a board or a bat or a club

(09:55):
and that she went down. First of all, there was
no evidence, there was no forensic evidence on her body
to support that. But again, there's nothing to suitue that
any of that occurred. So you know, I've walked away
from a number of families basically telling them literally everything

(10:15):
I could tell them about a case that was appropriate
to tell them, and you know, they're just not happy
with what I'm saying, and I fully accept that and
say I totally understand, so that I can only be
driven by the facts, my own experience, what the forensics
tell me, and I have to go with that. So

(10:37):
you know, I'm open to if you or somebody else
could tell me that contradicts what this sort of general
conclusion is about this particular case. Great, but nobody has
ever come up with that because I just don't think
it exists. Now, I will say one thing about that
you know, every case is like a pie. Investigators have

(10:59):
part of it, The prosecutor obviously has a huge part
of it. The medical exam there and the medical professionals
for instant anthropologies, et cetera have a part of it.
But you have to take each one of them in perspective,
you know, And what if you put them all together,
then what do you have, you know, with all the
failings and biases and pinions and so forth. But what

(11:23):
do you have at the at the end of all that,
of that pie going together? And you know, and so
I say that in that when you take the first
or second autopsy, Okay, they found X or Y, fine,
is there anything beyond with the medical examiner, Let's face it,
that's a political examination of a body that's not with

(11:45):
all the facts and circumstances that cops, detectives, prosecutors are
finding through evidence collected through interviews with people at the sea,
people who saw her fall, people who thought she was choking,
people who poured beer on her. If that was the case,
all of these things, you know, the medical him were

(12:05):
supposed to stick to his or her lane. This is
what I found in the autopsy, and it great. And
then you go from there. So what you have in
this case is a third autopsy by a sort of
a seasoned professional and a forensic anthropologist to tell you

(12:26):
the fact pattern that she was beaten to death with
something is not there. We'll be right back. We've been
able to answer some questions about the circumstances surrounding Janie's death.
Our producer, Gaby and I sorted through what we know,
what we don't know, and at this point what we
can't know. One of the things that the family thought

(12:47):
was suspicious was the fact that Jannie's dad, Ron Ward,
said that he had seen Jane in a different shirt
when he saw at the morgue the night that she died,
versus what he saw in some photos that the investigator,
Bill Beach had showed him a couple of weeks later.
We did look into the shirt and we did figure
out some things about the shirt. So what were some

(13:10):
of those things. Well, we figured out first of all,
that Jane stayed the night before the party with her
friend Leslie, and according to Leslie, Janny borrowed that shirt
from her, and so she was wearing both. Multiple witnesses
said that they saw her wearing the black t shirt
over the white pin striped shirt, because, including ambulance attendants

(13:32):
who were trying to revive her at the scene, they
specifically remembered rolling the sleeves up and pulling up the
bottom of the shirt to expose her stomach, and rolling
up the sleeves to expose her arms. At some point,
someone must have removed the white pin striped shirt and
what happened to that item of clothing is a mystery
because we know that it was lost by law enforcement

(13:54):
at some point. And that's just another one of the
tragedies of this case because one of the biggest questions
that the family had was why how she got all
that debris under her clothes and what exactly that was.
And of course you know, now with forensic testing, who
knows what could be accomplished, But they lost the evidence. Okay.
So one of the other big questions that the journalist
Mike Master said brings up and his column is this

(14:16):
idea of the ninety missing minutes, And he brings it
up because there's a police dispatcher named Harold Young who
said that the truck in the route from the party
to the bank parking lot did stop at the police station.
So what have we been able to figure out about this?
It's very confusing. Well, I think the ninety missing minutes
is like a classic example of something that was it

(14:38):
was put out there and it's not necessarily correct because,
first of all, in a lot of the early reports,
I saw that the time of the sunset was wrong.
It was it was described as being around six thirty,
when in fact it was around seven thirty. And everyone
at the party basically said that they said when people
when things started happening, when things started to go wrong,
when all hell broke loose, it was around dusk, which

(14:59):
would have been around seven thirty, not six thirty. And
Harold Young made that statement, but he also said that
he called the ambulance service, and the two people from
the ambulance service who were interviewed by the police both
say they never received that call. So their discrepancies in
Harold Young's statement. And Ron Kim and Sherry, who were
all in the truck, they all told police that they

(15:21):
never stopped anywhere, so they are all their statements match. Now,
could three people have concocted a story, possibly, I mean,
but their statements do match. And Harold Young GE's an outlier.
He really is the outlier in that. And I think
another thing that we found that was really important is
that there may have been missing time, but I don't
believe it was ninety minutes. It wasn't hours. You know,

(15:43):
it may have been half an hour or longer, but
it wasn't you know, it doesn't seem that it was
an hour and a half. I think I do think
that's six thirty times probably could not have been right,
just based on what everyone at the party. Everyone else
at the party said they saw. Okay, So another one
of the big rumors is that she was hit in
the face with a baseball bat and killed at the

(16:04):
party by another Marshall High School student. People would often
say it was Sarah, who was a popular cheerleader who
came from prominent family in the town. Her dad was
the judge. But it seems in our investigation that there's
very little evidence that supports that theory at all. We've
really looked into this theory and the possibility this could

(16:26):
have happened, but we just can't find any evidence to
point to it. I mean, there are a lot of
rumors about, you know, something that happened to the party,
but again, when you go back and look at them,
You look at the statements, you find the people. It
turns out that, oh it's just something I heard. And
usually they didn't even hear it secondhand. Usually it's third
hand or fourth hand. And you know, were there was
there some truth to it, Yes, I mean Sarah, I

(16:47):
think because she was a she was a judge's daughter,
because she did have a temper. She'd admittedly like assaulted
a couple of other girls, and she got in a
fight with a boyfriend slapped him in the face. I mean,
there's there's she had a temper. And also she told
the police, she lied to the police about who she'd
come to the party with, and they were inconsist since
he's in her story. So I can see where that

(17:08):
all taken together could lead people to conclude she had
something to do with it. And also a lot of people,
you know, they just didn't like her. They didn't like her,
they didn't like her attitude, and that led them to
believe that she could have had some role in this.
But again, like none of the forensic evidence points to that,
not one person that the party said they saw anything
like that. The one witness that we did find who

(17:28):
said she saw Jane's struck with a baseball bat. We've
talked to her, you know about how problematic her testimony is.
She's had a couple of different stories, and again, if
she was struck with a baseball bat, you would see
much more catastrophic injuries to her face. When I talked
to the neurosurgeon the first autopsy, one of the biggest
tragedy was such a simple mistake and something that should

(17:49):
have been corrected really early. Fami Malick referred to the
injury as a hyper extension injury rather than a hyperflection injury,
which you know, they're two completely different things. Then you
have all this confusion about whether her head snapped forward
or backward, and that led to, you know, the rumors
that she was hit in the face with something which
would have snapped her head backward, and that led to
you know, who could it have been? And the doctor

(18:12):
branella autopsy. So I just think you can just really
see how one little simple thing can just have this
catastrophic effect on an investigation if it's not caught early
and not dealt with. So throughout this case, a lot
of what we've seen is that the wards will say
one thing and then other people will say something else,
like you know, they said they saw a clear fracture

(18:33):
in the X ray when they visited the crime lab,
but then in the X rays that they got sent
to them a few weeks later showed the spine blocked out. Also,
they said that they received death threats, And there's just
sort of some of these these sorts of things that
it doesn't see. There's doesn't seem to be any way

(18:54):
to prove one way or another because it is what
they saw versus what other people heard and saw. Yeah,
I think that there are some things that we it's
very difficult to prove one way the other. Like, for example,
we can never know what Ron actually saw when he
saw Janie's body. He described it, but obviously we can't

(19:14):
know that we weren't there, and we also can't know,
you know, when Ron Amona saw the X rays and
they say that the X rays they saw later were different,
We really have no way of knowing that either. But
what we can say is that they definitely felt that
the system was not working, and they felt people weren't
helping them, and they felt that people in power were

(19:35):
being treated differently, and they also were afraid and they
were so afraid that they moved and they put their
other daughter in a different school and said they were
getting death threats. So there was definitely they seemed to
feel that there was an atmosphere of fear in the town.
When we talked to Richard Walter from the Vedok Society,
he described a similar environment in Marshall, and a lot

(19:56):
of other people did too. Several reporters said that people
weren't cooperative or weren't helping. And then there was another
journalist we talked to who said they received threats too.
So it's only it's a few people's word, but we
can't get inside their head and know their experience. We
can only report what they said to us. One of

(20:19):
the most frustrating things we can't know is Janey's full
toxicology report. Some listeners brought up this theory from the beginning.
Could Janey have been poisoned by accident? At the party,
the host Jay made PGA that's pure grain alcohol punch,
and in it he put orange slices that had been

(20:40):
soaked overnight in rubbing alcohol. Here's his interview with Bill
Beach again describing the punch. There's been some discussion about
the fruit that would put in time. Was there any
special preparations taken of soaked the fruit for to over
twenty fires reven alcohol? What was the purpose for that?

(21:03):
He seemed like a higher content. Danny koorol rode alcohol out,
pray pulses or over the Very little alcohol and no
drugs were found in Janie's system. Her blood alcohol level
was point zero five. That's about one drink, but that's
ethyl alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is isopropyl alcohol, and in the

(21:26):
first autopsy, doctor Malick didn't test for it. One of
the pathologists who reviewed doctor Malik's work in nineteen ninety
two pointed out that the toxicology screens were limited to cannabis,
ethyl alcohol, drugs, and lead. Rubbing alcohol poisoning is rare,
but it can be fatal. According to the National Library

(21:47):
of Medicines Hazardous Substances Databank, it's acute potency as a
central nervous depressant is about twice that of ethanol eight
ounces as a lethal dose, but as little as one
hundred millilters or just over three ounces can be fatal.
So I had her producers Gabby and tay or do
an experiment. We wanted to see how much fruit Janey

(22:08):
would have had to consume to ingest eight ounces of
rubbing alcohol. So they follow Jay's recipe and soak the
fruit for twenty four hours. Okay, so basically what we've
done is we have three different oranges. We have an
orange that's cut into pieces of four, we have eight
pieces smaller pieces, and then we also have one that's peeled.
With these three oranges cut into different quantities, we're trying

(22:30):
to see if it's possible for one orange to absorb
enough rubbing alcohol to be fatal. Basically, can the oranges
absorb a lethal dosage of rubbing alcohol? That's a lot
about rubbing alcohol and not very much orange. It's been

(22:51):
twenty four hours and we take a look at what happened.
Doesn't look like that much of the rubbing alcohol was
actually absorbed in them, and that was in our different
control environments, and it looks like only about three yeah,
about three ounces was probably absorbed by the fruit pieces.
We determined that to get to the lethal amount of
eight ounces, Janie would have had to eat around three oranges.

(23:15):
That's not impossible to imagine, but that's a lot of oranges,
especially considering the fact that they smelled so strongly of
rubby alcohol. But with one hundred millilters, she would only
have to consume about one orange. In several witness statements,
partygoers mentioned that Jane was chewing on the pieces of fruit.
In fact, Ron Rose specifically said she ate a cup

(23:38):
of the fruit. He said she may have thought that
this would be weaker than just drinking the punch, and
in a police report, investigator Bill Beach said that when
he went up to the cabin that night, he found
orange piels on either side of where Jane had fallen,
and though the orange PILs were bagged and logged into evidence,

(23:59):
they were never tested. In that first autopsy, doctor Malick
said that Jane had ten ounces of digested food matter
in her stomach, so Jane was drinking and consuming the
fruit on a relatively empty stomach. He wrote, though that
in the stomach tomato particles are encountered, no oranges are noted.

(24:21):
We reached back out to doctor Grace Duke's, the pathologists
who had reviewed the three autopsies for us in the
last episode. First off, we wanted to know if doctor
Malick could tell the difference between tomatoes and orange particles.
No one else mentioned tomatoes or a food of any
kind at the party, And since doctor Malick only did
a visual inspection of the food particles, could he actually

(24:42):
tell the difference between tomatoes and oranges that had been
soaked in the red PGA punch. Sometimes you can tell
exactly what it is, sometimes you can't tell it all.
But if she were not chewing well, it'd be fairly
obvious what was in there, especially if it were a
mix with just liquid where it could separate out easily.
If he says that he saw pieces of tomato, I

(25:03):
would imagine that that would mean something fairly specific to
a tomato, like either the seeds or a large piece
of food. In terms of the oranges, it's kind of
like if you were to again people choose their food
to varying degrees. It's kind of like if you were
to put food in a blender and blend it up
a little bit. If you only blended up a little
you could definitely still tell that there were orange pieces,

(25:25):
you know how it has that kind of fibrous look.
But if it were, you know, if it were chewed
beyond recognition, or it spent a lot of time in
her stomach. You would potentially not be able to tell that.
So the answer is maybe, maybe not. But people frequently
will report which type of food items they've seen in
the stomach contents. Doctor Duke's described some of the effects

(25:49):
of ingesting rubbing alcohol. The thing with rubbing alcohol being
isoid propyle alcohol rather than ethanol, which is what we
think of as you know, drinking alcoholic beverages would be
ethanol isodprople alcohol. The effects of that would essentially be
the same as ethyl alcohol. There would be the same

(26:13):
sort of in an inebriated person, you know, impaired balance,
slurred speech, things like that. The difference is that with
isopropenol you're going to have more of an intoxicating effect
than with ethanol. So really the effects you see would

(26:34):
not be different, they just might be more pronounced in
someone who's ingested isopropenol. The level of alcohol that is
fatal in a person varies quite a bit. There are
some limits that have been set previously as sort of
the norm, as in, you know, this is a lethal
level when this is not, but that can vary according

(26:55):
to tolerance. Most teenagers haven't had enough, you know time
to build up their tolerance, but it can certainly vary,
so really the answer is that there's no specific limit.
With this in mind, Janie could have had even less
than eight ounces and had enough in her system to
make her sick. Her mom, Mona, and people who knew

(27:16):
her so that Jannie wasn't much of a drinker, so
she most likely had a low tolerance. Isopropyle alcohol has
a lot of the same symptoms as being drunk, drowsiness,
slurred speech, stumbling, headache, and vomiting. If someone is over intoxicated,
their heart beat slows down, their breathing becomes more rapid,

(27:39):
blood pressure drops. They may have seizures or collapse. They
may experience pulmonary swelling or inflammation of an excess fluid
in the lungs. This can make breathing difficult and cause
oxygen deprivation. If not treated in time, it can cause
cardiovascular collapse and death. The body rapidly absorbs isopropyle alcohol.

(28:01):
Symptoms are at their height from thirty minutes to two
hours after consumption. The bottom line is isoproble alcohol hits
fast and hard. Doctor Mallet noted in his autopsy that
there was intense congestion in Jennie's lungs and in her liver.
I wondered if this could be a symptom of alcohol poisoning.

(28:22):
So those those autopsy findings are not specific to an
alcohol poisoning. And when you say alcohol poisoning, that just
that just means over over intoxication, right to the point
that it's toxic to your body. But there aren't going
to be necessarily specific findings associated with it. It's essentially

(28:44):
a It has a CNS depressant effect, and then if
one were to keep consuming and consuming and consuming, then
it would potentially cause general, generalized sort of organ failure.
But it's primarily based in the CNS depressant effect, meaning
you know, depressed sensorium, which would eventually contribute to decreased breathing,

(29:08):
which would potentially progress to death based on what doctor
Dukes is saying. Just like we've seen before, so many
of Jane's symptoms are not specific to her particular cause
of death. But rubbing alcohol poisoning is possible, yes, So
if it were president at a high enough level, it
would certainly be a potential cause of death. The issue

(29:29):
is just that we don't have a level reported if
it were present at all, Doctor Duke said that if
it were to the point of being lethal, Janie would
have been visibly intoxicated. In the witness statements, only a
few people mentioned that Jane seemed drunk. One was Sarah.
Sarah said that when Janie called her a snob, Jannie
was stumbling up to her and warned her not to

(29:51):
eat the fruit. Ron Rose said that Jane appeared to
be intoxicated shortly before her death. Jay said the same
thing in his reenactment video. We may never know for
sure what killed Janie, but we have to look probability,
and we found some other pieces of evidence in the
investigation that do suggest rubbing alcohol poisoning. Lividity or darkening

(30:15):
of the skin due to blood pooling sets in at
around two hours after death, but more than one person
noticed that Janey started turning blue almost immediately. One partygoer
said she started turning a darker color all over. Then
one of the ambulance attendants who treated Jane at the
scene in the bank parking lot made the comment, she

(30:37):
was not as blue as my genes, but she was
getting blue, turning blue, especially blue coloring of the lips.
Or cyanosis is an indicator of oxygen deprivation, which is
one of the symptoms of rubbing alcohol poisoning. Ron Ward
said that when he saw Jane in the morgue, she
had blood around her mouth. Blood in the mouth can

(31:00):
come from gastric distress, which is yet another symptom of
isoprobe alcohol poisoning. Another thing was that one of the
ambulance attendants had smelled a faint perfume on Janie. A
fruity smell can indicate keytnes in the urine, which is
again another symptom of alcohol poisoning. As we said, alcohol
poisoning can also lead to cardiovascular collapse, and in the

(31:23):
third autopsy, doctor Plus did suggest that Janie could have
died from a heartarrhythmia. If Janie collapsed from alcohol poisoning,
her condition might have been exacerbated at the party. She
was lying on the ground gasping for breath when at
least one person, in an attempt to revive her, threw
a cup of beer on her. Another person had mentioned

(31:45):
a cup of water also being thrown on her. This
could explain the fluid in her lungs that doctor Malick
had noted in the first autopsy. So if Jannie was
already suffering from over intoxication and central nervous depression, she
wouldn't have been able to expel this fluid from her lungs,
an she might have experienced some symptoms of drowning. One

(32:06):
is that your throat closes up to prevent any more
fluid entering the lungs, and when your throat closes up,
that can cause hemorrhaging, which was noted in the third autopsy.
It's possible that at that point she blacked out. I
hope so, because the alternative is that she was on
the ground, helpless, paralyzed, and unable to ask for help

(32:28):
while everyone continued to party around her and pour beer
down her throat she lay dying. We'll be right back.
The reason I'm an investigator is because I want to
answer family's questions. But in Janie's case, I can't definitively
answer the big question of how she died. Remember Parents

(32:51):
of Murdered Children. That's the organization where the Wards found
doctor Burnell and the v doc's Richard Walter. When we
talked with their executive director, Bev Warnock. We also spoke
with their volunteer coordinator Sherry Nolan. She became involved with
the organization when her daughter, who was pregnant, was killed.

(33:12):
I was talking about and one of my goals as
an investigator is to help families. But when I mentioned closure,
she told us that isn't something we or anyone can
provide for a family. Well, we make sure we don't
use the word closure. No one likes to hear the
word closure. We hit someone here that used to say,
the only thing that closes is the list of the coffin.

(33:34):
The grief is so devastating to them. You know, it's
not just have the funeral and then you try to recover.
They have to go into the justice system, and then
years later the pearl block system. So it never ends
for them. It never you know, and it's not something
you can you know, after a couple Montiers, you know,
you can kind of feel like you're moving on because

(33:55):
you can't. You know, your mind is just consumed with
guilt that you didn't say they loved them before they least,
or you know, any other kind of guilt. There might
be a lot of survivors. The healing process is to
talk about it and to be with other families is
to be able to talk to them because they understand
no one else would understand. But we also make it
very clear that we understand the grief and the pain,

(34:17):
but we don't understand individually their grief and their pain,
because no one knows exactly how I feel. It was
my daughter, my granddaughter, But I understand the pain and
grief that we all go through, and I never you know,
a lot of questions that survivors ask is when does
it get better when you get over it. I think
that they answer that because other people say it, and

(34:38):
so I always say, it's not that it gets better,
it's just that it's different. Never say that they'll be healed.
It's a healing process that will never ask never tell
them that they'll be over it at any point in time,
because that grief's journey is a journey that you'll always
be on. At the beginning of this investigation, I thought
that people might be more forthcoming because so much time

(35:00):
is passed. I also thought more people would come forward
with renewed pressure on the case. But the thing is
they might have already come forward with everything they know,
and over the years there has been a lot of
pressure on the case. It was reopened in two thousand
and four, reinvestigated, and was a high profile case in

(35:21):
the state of Arkansas. I wondered if anything could have
been done for her at the party, could she have survived?
I asked ABC's FBI consultant Brad Garrett about this in
all the stories, I mean, do you think that there's
anything that they could have done more to help her? Well,
you know, when you talk about people helping other people,

(35:42):
you have to get to look at it in context.
Where are you. You're sort of in the middle of
nowhere in Arkansas, which means, you know, the luxury of
where you all are, Like I'm in Washington, d C.
If you started to choke on something, you could probably
get an ambulance and or the fire department to your
house in five or six minutes. Probably not realistic. In

(36:04):
martiall arc and they did in my view, and you
know other could they have done something at the scene?
Maybe maybe not. I mean, if you believe that in
affect Janie choked to death. If you believe that that,
I'm not sure what they could have done unless there
happened to be a paramedic or an EMT. But you're

(36:26):
talking a bunch of high school kids. So the odds
of that weren't great. And so they did really what
I would think is the next best thing. They didn't
wait for emergency services to come to them, if in
fact they even exist. They put them in the back
of a pickup truck. Now, it was sort of unclear
about how much of a lag there was between when
she went down off the porch of this cabin and

(36:50):
when she was actually taken. You know, I got different
time periods. But at some point they said, we've got
to get her to a doctor or to somebody that
can take a look at her. So what ultimately is
Jane's story. Janey's story is a tragedy. It's a story

(37:12):
about a town where there was enough distrust between some
of its citizens and the authorities that wild rumors could
be believed. It's also a tragedy that a lot of
the people in Marshall, Arkansas are tired of hearing about.
And it's a story about a family who never got answers.
Jane died in nineteen eighty nine at the age of sixteen,

(37:37):
and her father, Ron Ward, spent thirty years investigating his
daughter's death, which was almost twice as long as she
was alive. Ron is gone now as well, and I
can't help but admire him. He wanted the truth, He
wanted to live in a world that had answers and justice.

(37:57):
He wanted his daughter back. Throughout this season, people have
continued to reach out to us about unsolved cases. Parents, siblings, friends, spouses.
They are all desperately trying to find out what happened
to their loved ones. I think about season one and
Rebecca Gould's father and sister, Larry and Danielle, who were

(38:18):
still trying to get justice for her. I've learned a
lot from ren Ward. He shows us that you can
go a long way if you don't give up. You
can get a case reinvestigated, a special prosecutor appointed, and
even another autopsy conducted. You can also get the information

(38:39):
made public so that other people can come in and
try to get answers. I've learned the importance of never
losing faith in the fact that one person can make
a difference. With enough pressure and time, anything can happen.
It's a lesson that I'm taking to heart as I
continue to investigate Rebecca Gould's murder. At the beginning of

(39:01):
the season we talked about time travel. On that fateful
night in nineteen eight eighty nine, many of the partygoers
were teens themselves. Thirty years later, a lot of those
kids are adults with kids of their own. A lot
of them have teens who are the same age as
they were when Jane died, and right now those teens

(39:23):
might be heading out to parties and cabins in the woods.
I'm Katherine Townsend and this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone
is a joint production between School of Humans and iHeartRadio.

(39:44):
It is written and recorded by me. Catherine Townsend. Taylor
Church and Gabby Watts are our producers and story editors.
Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, and el C.
Crowley for School of Humans and Connell Byrne and Chuck
Bryant for iHeart. Our Field producer is Miranda Hawkins. Theme
and original school are by Ben Sale, available wherever you

(40:08):
get your music. Please visit us at Helegoon podcast dot
com or follow us on social media. School of Humans