From the Party to the Parking Lot

Catherine considers whether or not Janie even died at the party. She also talks with a forensic psychologist, who investigated Janie's death and also concluded it was a homicide. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans, Gabby and our field producer Miranda have
been driving around Searcy County trying to get people to
talk about Janie's case. Knocking on people's doors without warning
is the last thing we wanted to do. As we

(00:31):
talked about in season one, this can be dangerous for us.
We also run the risk of having a witness shut
down completely and be unwilling to talk. But in a
place where a lot of people have unlisted phone numbers
and addresses that don't show up on GPS, sometimes a
last resort is all we have. Hey, I stop to

(00:57):
call you. Well, we just went by Kim's house, met
her husband and gave a gave him the phone, and
then she called and said, don't talk to me, don't
call me, leave me alone. So Kim definitely not. We

(01:18):
went and saw Jamie yesterday and he seemed like, yeah,
Jamie seemed just kind of like, uh that thing again,
like I think he's He said something like I've turned
over every rock that I could and could never find
out anything, just like we found in season one. It
takes a long time for people in small towns to

(01:39):
trust an outsider, but in Marshall, we've had some additional
challenges Because there has been so much work done on
the case over the years, many people are reluctant to
talk unless they can be assured that there will be
progress in the case. Otherwise they see no benefit to
digging the case up again. Everyone you've heard about so far,

(02:02):
Jay Kim, Ron Rose, Gary Do. All of those people
who were at the party have been interviewed multiple times
over the thirty years since Jane died. They've been legally
obliged to show up for depositions served to them by
prosecutors and lawyers. They've been interviewed by journalists. They've had
articles written about them across Arkansas, and in two thousand

(02:24):
and nine, ABC broadcast their forty minute episode of Primetime
about Janie's death, bringing everything about her case to the
national stage. And so, when you have another group of
outsiders asking questions, what would you do? Would you want
to relive the same night thirty years ago again and again,

(02:45):
especially if you were being accused of her murder. I'm
Catherine Townsend and this is hell and Gone. It's two

(03:26):
thousand and four, fifteen years after Jane died, and after
a second autopsy, doctor Harry Bennell has determined that Jane's
death was a homicide. He found blunt force trauma to
the face and said her next snap back, her spinal
cord had been torn. She had fractures in her vertebra.

(03:47):
The second autopsy was meant to provide clarity, but it
ended up causing even more chaos. The Arkansas Crime Lab
is reviewing doctor Burnell's autopsy. Doctor Fami Malick is long
gone from the crime lab, and doctor Charles Cox is
the chief medical examiner. He gives a scathing review of
doctor Burnell's He writes, as there is no gentle or

(04:09):
diplomatic way to say this, I will be quite blunt.
Doctor Burnell's report, as far as its defects and observation,
documentation and conclusions are concerned, is grossly substandard. I am
frankly aghast at the numerous departures from standard forensic medical practice.
On the basis of a few poorly described autopsy findings
and five photographs, he would have the reader believe a

(04:32):
murder had taken place. I do not believe his report
should be given any serious consideration. Doctor Cokex's main point
is that the autopsy report is full of insufficient descriptions
and documentation. He says that's particularly important in this case
because it's challenging for even the most experienced forensic pathologists
to make a determination after a body has been previously autopsied, embalmed,

(04:56):
and buried. You have to be able to discern evidence
of the injuries that happened before death and figure out
which ones happen post mortem. It's also particularly importan or
when you rule a death of homicide where someone can
be convicted. Doctor Cox isn't convinced by any of doctor
Burnell's determinations. Doctor Coke says that the discoloration on Jannie's

(05:17):
skin is more likely from post mortem changes and not
contusions or abrasions from an injury to the face. Doctor
Burnell also says there is an extensive hyper extension injury,
but he doesn't document any hemorrhaging in that area, specifically
around the third and fourth vertebrae, which he said were fractured.
Doctor Burnell provided five photographs in his autopsy, all of

(05:39):
the body from a distance, and none of the actual injuries.
By comparing Benell's autopsy to the photographs in the original autopsy,
doctor Cox writes these injuries simply do not exist. Doctor
Cox also talks about the X ray. Remember, both doctor
Burnell and the pathologist who reviewed doctor Malix's autopsy said

(06:00):
the side view of Janey's X ray looked like a
male skull. Doctor Cox writes much has been written about
this death, both the mainstream media and on the Internet.
Much has been written that is simply and categorically false.
The most egregious example here is the purported switching of
Jane Ward's autopsy X rays with those of a male.
As part of this review, we compared photos of X

(06:23):
rays taken at the time of the nineteen eighty nine
autopsy with X rays of the exumbody examined in two
thousand and four. There is no doubt that the two
individuals are one and the same. I can't wrap my
head around this. I've read over both doctor Malick and
doctor Burnell's autopsies dozens of times, and neither one of
them present enough evidence to answer the question what actually

(06:46):
happened to Janie's spine. The two pathologists who reviewed doctor
Malik's work in nineteen ninety two weren't even convinced as
spinal injury was present, but the spinal cord has become
central to what people think killed Jane. During his autopsy,
doctor Malik removed part of Janie's spine. He provided color
photographs of the portion of the spine that he removed,

(07:09):
with an arrow pointing to the hemorrhaging that indicated an injury.
These are the same photographs that doctor Mallet gave Ron
Ward when he visited the crime lab. Both Awards and
Mike have placed a huge amount of emphasis on the
fact that doctor Mallick gave ron those photos. They believe
that these photos show that the spinal cord is torn.

(07:30):
Here's Mike and he had sent them color photographs of
his autopsy, and one of those photographs was of the
spinal canal opened and in the center of it was
the spinal her spinal call on. Her spinal cord torn,
not cut, you could say its shredded. It is torn,

(07:50):
which was obviously the fatal injury. That's why she couldn't
move and she fell out in the yard. She just
laid there until she just couldn't breathe, and that's what happened.
Respiratory system shuts down and you're done. The fact that
the spinal cord word was torn according to Mike, means
that Janey suffered a catastrophic injury to her spine that

(08:11):
night at the party. The spinal cord being cut would
indicate that it was an artifact of the autopsy, something
that doctor Malak had cut in order to remove a
portion of the spine. We're going to come back to
this later, but we need to figure out if there
is any way of determining exactly what happened to that
spinal cord. We'll be right back. The news of the

(08:41):
second autopsy spreads throughout Arkansas with the help of Mike
Masterson's weekly columns, ABC also sends people down to Arkansas
to start following the case. Over four years, they developed
their research into a forty minute program called Primetime. The
case is making national headlines. That's when the Wards held
a two hundred person rally at the Capitol that we

(09:02):
talked about in the first episode. People started someting hundreds
of tips to the Justice for Janeye Forum and in Marshall,
the crusade between Jerry and Sarah and the Wards split
the town. Some people think that Sarah or someone else,
or multiple people killed Jane with a baseball bat. One
user even claims that Jane didn't even die at the party.

(09:25):
They said she was six miles away from the cabin
down at the Buffalo River, a popular party spot for
young people in Marshall. There was an altercation, she was
hit in the face, she was unconscious, and she was
drowned to make sure she was dead. She was then
brought to the cabin where the story was made up
about the fall. After that, she was taken to the

(09:46):
car wash to remove evidence and dressed in different clothes.
A lot of the wilder theories presented on the forum
can be dismissed just by looking back at the evidence.
Investigator Bill Beach interviewed more than thirty people who were
at the party. All of them said that they saw
Janeye there, alive and well. In episode two, we found

(10:09):
discrepancies in the timeline and the witness interview that was
the biggest outlier was the one from police dispatcher Harold Young.
He said that Ron Rose had passed by the Sheriff's
office and alerted him to Janeye in the back of
the truck. He said that that was around six thirty pm,
but no one in the truck said that happen. Most

(10:29):
of the witnesses said that Jane fell closer to seven thirty,
even if Harold was slightly off on the time. I
can't help thinking that every stop that ron Rose made
meant that minutes were ticking by as Jane lay dying
in the back of his truck, Minutes that could have
been used to save her life. A lot of people
witnessed Janie lying on the ground and saw her getting

(10:50):
loaded in the truck. This illustrates an important investigative principle.
It is suspicious if witness accounts are too divergent, but
it's also suspicious if witness accounts are too similar, because
they can sound rehearsed. In Janie's case, investigators concluded that
the witness accounts were similar and dissimilar enough to indicate

(11:13):
that people were telling the truth. In ron Ward's recordings,
we find a tape of ron and Mona talking with
prosecutors and investigators about the witness statements. One of the
officers there explains this idea about the witness statements in
this particular case. It is my recollection that the that

(11:33):
the witnesses are the people who were there at the
party were interviewed something like three times and I believe
that I look back over this myself many times to
satisfy myself. That's good. But if you've got a bunch
of people who all tell you wildly divergent stories basically,

(11:56):
well how about I know. But what I'm saying is
if you'd have a bunch of people that they all
tell wild and divergent stories, you know before out there
any other com well somebody's mistaken, okay. Or if you
have a bunch of people and they all tell you
exactly the same story, I think you got a round

(12:16):
in this. The statements that were given all of two
to be basically consistent in the main but they if
they did her in just those ways that you might
suspect the statements to differ. If you had a bunch
of people standing around, everybody game became pretention. We bring

(12:43):
this up because these outlier theories like that Janie was
not at the party and was struck elsewhere, are highly
unlikely because there's a consensus of witnesses. So what we
know is that Jane was at the party at some point,
she collapsed, she was on the ground, and when she
was loaded into the pickup truck she was still alive.

(13:04):
But by the time time she was in the bank
parking lot, she was dead. So what happened between the
party and the bank parking lot We talked to someone
who tried to figure that out. His name is Richard Walter.
The Wards found him through Parents of Murdered Children, along
with a second opinion service that led to doctor Bonell's autopsy.

(13:26):
That organization also hosts support groups for parents and has
an annual conference. The Wards attended one and that's where
they met Richard Walter. He's the founder of the Vidock
Society in Philadelphia. The VEDOC consists of a group of
investigators and forensic scientists who meet once a month to
discuss unsolved cases. He's an expert in forensic psychology and

(13:48):
he's been involved in multiple high profile cases. Ron and
mon Aneu instantly they needed to talk one on one
with Richard in the hopes he could help with Janie's case.
I also belonged years ago to the National Board of
Parents and Children, and so I was at one in
the meetings, and I would go and I would give

(14:09):
a little chat to the parents, and this and that,
and the words were there. They took a liking to me,
and particularly as to what I had to say, and
they felt that I was an honorable guy, apparently, and
then they told me their case about Damy and it
sounded and many parents will they blame law enforcement, and

(14:31):
they blame this, and they blame that or whatever else,
and sometimes it's not so I thought, well, I went
to beat On and said to them, this is their tale.
Law enforcement there apparently is not willing to come here
and discuss the case in chief, and so I would
like to go there and have a look. See. In

(14:53):
November of two thousand and one, Richard went down to
Marshall to see if he could shed any new light
on the case, and he ended up having a really
bizarre experience. I then obviously saw the wards, and then
a state trooper showed up who liked the words, amongst

(15:13):
other things. We became quick friends. And that's a damn
good thing, because I found the environment extremely hostile and
the only place that I could rent allegedly before my
week stay of three days day or whatever, it was Okay,
it was a house inside a wald environment. It was

(15:34):
a citadel inside a wald environment. They just didn't want
me there. One person in particular stood out to Richard
gary Don. He was the one who provided the beer
and the booze for the party, and the story Richard
said he got from gary Don is completely different than
what we read in the police file. The two drove
up to the cabin and in a private conversation, gary

(15:57):
Don told Richard there was some sort of conflict between
Sarah and Janey that then got out of hand, and
there was a conflict. She went off the porch. Uh,
then somebody decided that they should call the police, and
so the police. Now then they got into panic, and
everybody was trying to hide their drugs and do all
these other sorts of things. Okay, So they decided then

(16:18):
to get rid of Jane, and from that then they
put her in the back of the pickup. He then
told me that she was none verbal, but she was groaning.
She was moaning. She was doing all these other sorts
of things instead of going the shortest way back to
town and to the hospital and whatever else. If you

(16:39):
are exiting the party place and you turned left, that
was the fastest way back to town. They turned right,
and we turned right, and they then took me through
Hilldale Valley, muddy spots and this and that. Then you
also had. We also had to forge a creek that

(17:02):
ran across across the road. It was suggested be because
of the crawdads and the other sorts of things that
were found in their clothing and hair and whatever. Okay,
that she had been further beaten. She wasn't dead when
she left the party. Somewhere before she got back to town, though,
she was dead, and it was believed that they stopped

(17:27):
along the way at the creek, put her in the creek,
beat the hell out of her, send me far off,
and from that then go into town. Allegedly, then the
driver of the vehicle of the pickup then drove through
a car wash with her in the back, and then

(17:48):
they called the police. Going back to the paramedics and
to what ron Ward saw in the morgue, they all
agreed that Janey was covered in sand. She even had
sand under her clothes and stuck in her bra strap.
It was also stated in their affidavit that she was
covered in Beggar's life. Beggar's life is a plant that
has little hooks that very easily get attached to fur, clothes,

(18:11):
or in this case, hair, and Ron said it's often
found near the creek beds in Marshall, but there was
no mention of crawdads. This theory would help explain why
Jane's hair and body were wet and why witnesses said
there was a puddle of water under Ron Rose's truck
in the bank parking lot, But again, in any official

(18:32):
police record, no one in the truck mentioned taking this route,
nor did Gary dah ever give this explanation to police.
In the end, Richard told Ron that he couldn't do
anything to help him get justice for his daughter, and
so ultimately, then I said one, I said, I hate
to hear myself say this. Then I'm going to tell

(18:53):
you what as a friend, and when we're else, I
believe you. I believe that your daughter was murdered, and
I believe that we know the story. But it is
so corrupt in Marshall, Arkansas that it will never, never,
never come to fruition unless a miracle takes place. That said,

(19:17):
I'd love to see it all, but I said, I gotta,
I gotta tell you, I just have to. I just
had to drop out now, I said, I'll be back
in a heartbeat. They're good to back to another investigation.
You need me I'll be there, but until you can
get the poond things sorted out by spinning my wheels
and I can't do that, We'll be right back. This

(19:40):
theory that Richard presents also says that Janey was at
the party and that something happened there, but that something
also happened in the truck en route from the party
to the bank parking lot. So we need to find
out which direction the truck took. From reading witness reports,
we had been assuming that the truck went the most
direct route, which would be to the left out of

(20:02):
the driveway. The three people in the truck, Ron Rose,
Sherry and Kim All said that they didn't make any
stops between the cabin and the bank parking lot. Anne
that they went there because of its proximity to the
ambulance service. But in the mayhem of leaving the party,
there was a car accident reported. We read about it

(20:24):
first in Sherry's statement. She had actually left the party
with another Marshall High School student named Brian, and Brian
apparently ran his truck into a tree while leaving the cabin.
He had gone to the left out of the driveway,
and other people leaving had to help him pull his
car out of the way. This road is narrow and
it was blocking the rest of the people who were

(20:45):
trying to leave. Mona and Cristel heard that Brian was
so upset on the night of the party that he
had to be sedated by his father, who was a
doctor in town. We need to know if Richard's theory
is plausible and if they went by the creek bed
or ended up driving down Rockier roads. Was the truck
diverted to the right or was this another delay in

(21:07):
getting Jennie to help Ron Ward continues to call and
talk to people on the phone about the case. On
the night Janie died, it was Ron's cousin, Steve, who
came and picked Moan and Ron up to take them
to the police station, where they got the news about Jane.
Stephen Ron grew up together. They were close, but over

(21:28):
the years their relationship grew tense. Steve owned the cabin
his son Jay through the party. Ron accused Steve of
not being truthful early in the investigation, which is revealed
in one of the conversations that Ron had with investigator
Bill Beach. Tell me that she had some more names.
Oh yes, sir, I do okay. I was like, you're

(21:52):
very important. Have Steve war not other than that first night?
But not good quurtion me, how did he act? So
that was just the first night that I was down there, Ron,
that was the first night that it happened at that
particular time. You know, they only think Steve said was

(22:14):
that he hadn't been there, that he was at his
home in Delphunt and he didn't have any idea what
had happened. You know that Jamie was the one that
had the use of the house, and that was basically it. Well,
just the way Steve's actually we came to us. Ron
is saying that Steve has told him plenty of ideas
about what happened to his daughter, but she choked on

(22:35):
an orange piel and suffocated, that she tripped and felt
that she was drunk. Ron is also not clear on
where Steve was that night. It made stir telling us
there's no fell play, that he was not there, that
he was home sick in bed with the sore throat,
and then his wife tells us that he was at
a party at Mass Merchandise. Fifteen hundred people can swear

(22:58):
up and down, and his whole attitude for it since
Stephen I was real quot for lot brothers. You know,
my respact that helped you build the very house up
there for this ancident to flee. And then he just
completely turns one hundred and eighty degrees away from me.

(23:22):
The people here at the house we tell him he's
lying to you, be lying to you, And I told him,
I said no, I said he wasn't lie to me.
It didn't come tinned out. Everything he told us was
a law. Ron said everything he told us was a lie.
But Steve has also been trying to figure out what
happened and had an emotional phone call with Ron. I

(23:44):
wasn't there, Ronnie. I'm not saying you only know what
I think has happened in a speculations from what I've
told you, has only led up the hardship. And I
don't want that no more. I'm tired of it. I
don't want to know the truth like you do, and
I don't want you to accuse me nothing, and I'm

(24:07):
not I'm excused you with now thing in your mind.
The only thing I said was that you knew what happened. No,
I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't have no
idea that this world what happened. Steve proposes another theory.
Jannie was at the party and after the chaos of

(24:29):
the party line call an announcement that the police were coming,
Jane was pushed into a post that was on the porch.
Steve thought that the force of that could have bruised
Jannie's face and body. She then fell onto the ground.
Steve suggested that Sarah might have been the one who
ran into Jannie, or another Marshall High School student who
was fleeing the scene to avoid the cops. Brian, the

(24:51):
kid who crashed the truck is another possibility. Running out
of the house and she is standing there by the
cag fit and get her a bear, and somebody run
over and shoved her into that post. And they said,
when she turned around, I heard a When they turned around,
she read chapter grabs the post and she sprung around
and fell off the porch. That ain't nobody took him

(25:13):
from the river or done nothing else to her. This
phone call between ron and Steve is charged. Whenever Ron
starts speculating, Steve implores him to stop. Ronnie my honest
opinion was, I'm sorry to say that it was a
pure accident and nobody could help it, or somebody wouldn't nobody.

(25:34):
It wasn't no good. It was in an accident, But
it didn't happen at when I'm saying I did. It
had to you couldn't have. Janie was there at the party.
She went out there with Ronnie and them, and she
was there. She probably went out behind the house. Steve
suggests that the debris that Janie was covered in either

(25:56):
came from his yard or from the bed of ron
Roses truck, and he pleads with ron to believe it
was totally accidental and that everyone was doing the best
they could help his daughter. Remember that doctor Burnell said
that Jane's spine was broken, and he confirmed the injuries
Ron had seen on Jane the night she died, a
broken nose and bruising on the face. Steve's theory that

(26:19):
Jannie ran into a post matches these injuries. After doctor
Burnell's autopsy, the ward's petition to change the manner of
death on Janie's death certificate from undetermined to homicide. People
across Arkansas are now thoroughly invested in the case. It
appears on local news stations and everyone is waiting to

(26:42):
see what will happen. Mike Huckabee is governor at the
time and gives ten thousand dollars to hire a special
prosecutor to work on the case. The case is reopened
and a new investigation begins. All statutes of limitations have
run out, all statutes except homicide. I'm Catherine Townsend and

(27:04):
this is Helen Gone. Helen Gone is a joint production
between School of Humans and iHeartRadio. It is written and
recorded by me. Katherine Townsend. Taylor Church and Gabby Watts
are our producers and story editors. Executive producers are Brandon Barr,
Brian Lavin, and L. C. Crowley for School of Humans

(27:25):
and Connell Byrne and Chuck Bryant for iHeart. Our field
producer is Miranda Hawkins. Theme and original score are by
Ben Sale, available wherever you get your music. Please visit
us at Helen gonpodcast dot com or follow us on
social media. School of Humans