The Investigation of Rebekah Gould’s Murder with George Jared

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
So I'm at Crime Con Orlando. I'm standing in the
lobby by myself. My husband and daughter have gone outside
to start loading our car because we had tons of
stuff that we had brought. There's a good looking guy,
young across the way of the lobby. We kind of
lock eyes. He starts walking towards me, and I hear
him say well, hey, honey, and of course in my

(00:30):
head I'm like, hey, honey. As he gets closer, he
says to me, You're the cutest thing I've ever seen,
and I'm like, well, you know, I do what I
can in my head, I'm not saying any of this
out loud. And then he gets right to me and
I realized he's talking to my dog, and so he

(00:54):
starts petting Traveler and we're talking and I'm of course
holding Traveler, and so we got a lab and he says,
can I help you with your luggage? Because I still
had tons of items to take outside. I was just
waiting for Walt and Caroline to come back. So I
go outside. We all have a big laugh of what
I was originally thinking, and then of course what was reality.

(01:15):
But it was such a Crime Conway for me because
everybody is so friendly. Everybody is so kind, everybody's so
willing to help. And this young man was no different.
He was so sweet to traveler, he was super kind
to Caroline, and of course he helped Walt Nye pack
up the van. And this young man was George Jarrett.

(01:37):
And y'all know him as a true crime author. He's
covered numerous murder cases, including the infamous West Memphis three.
He's an award winning journalist. He's been featured in The
New York Times and USA Today. He's consulted on two
different documentaries, and y'all have seen him on Discover I

(02:00):
d George Jarret, Welcome to his own seven.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Thank you for having me. In fact, seven is my
lucky numbers. So this is a great podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
For me, fantastic. I have been looking so forward to
talking to you. We got a lot to cover here, honey,
So let's get right into your background. You went to
college where and wanted to study what?

Speaker 2 (02:22):
I went to a small liberal arts college called Lion
College except in the Ozark Hills. My goal in life, Cheryl,
was to be a lawyer. You know, I took a
lot of pre law classes. You know, I wind up
some law schools, and my senior year of college, you know,
something happened to me. I met a lot of miserable
and broke lawyers. And so I told myself, I can

(02:44):
either be miserable or broke, but I couldn't do both.
And so so I did what anyological person would do,
is I opened up a newspaper and noticed that a
local newspaper needed a reporter.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
And I, you know, I.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
Just graduated from college, and so I thought, okay, I'll
go work at a newspaper for a while, even though
I really didn't have any background in it. I mean,
I was the editor of my school paper when I
was like in high school and stuff like that, and
I'd written some columns for a local newspaper when I
was younger i was in college. But so I went
into a writing test and the others like, hey, you

(03:17):
can write.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
He said, I'll tell you what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
I'm gonna let you cover cops and courts for a year,
and after that year you're going to it'll be clear,
you'll be ready to go to law school, and then
you'll have some experience dealing with some of that kind
of stuff. So the first six seven months of working
for him, I covered school board meetings and city council
meetings and you know, just all sorts of pretty mundane stuff,

(03:42):
civics legislation. On September twenty second, two thousand and four,
I got a phone call.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
So I went down to.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
The local sheriff's department where this twenty two year old
college student's family had gathered. And her name was Rebecca Gould,
and I met her father, doctor Larry Gould, met her sisters.
She was very close to one sister in particular named Danielle,
and also met her mother, Shirley Ballard, And so we
spent the next week trying to find her back a Ghould.

(04:11):
She was a college student and she would come home
to this little town called Melbourne, which is in kind
of in the north central part of the state of Arkansas.
It's up in the Ozark Hills as well, and she
would come home to instay at the sort of ex
boyfriend's house. His name was Casey McCollough. They were kind
of odd to give off again. And she was going
to college about three and a half hours away up

(04:31):
in Bedville, which is up in northwest Arkansas. And so
the day that she vanished. The story goes that she was.
It was a Monday morning. She drops him off at work,
she goes back to her his house to collect her dog,
her car, her personal effects, cell phone, and then she's
going to make the three plus hour drive back college.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Along the way, she's going to pick up her sister, Danielle.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Well, that day comes and goes, and she never to
pick up Danielle. Casey stays at work all day, and
then the story is is that he meets up with
four friends that night or after work, and then they
go out to watch a movie in an adjacent town.
They go out to eat, and then he ends up
spending the night at one of these other guys's houses.
Rebecca's family spent that night and the next morning trying

(05:20):
to find her. They called the Sheriff's department Casey the boyfriend.
The first story was that he stayed at the friend's
house and then he went straight from the friend's house
to work, and then that's when the Sheriff's apartment contacts
him to tell him, you know, that they need to
a welfare check at his house. Of course, I found
out later that he actually did go home that morning

(05:40):
to get some clothes.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
And what was peculiar about that Cheryl is that the
home his home. The bedding had.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Been removed from his bed, there were bloody sheets in
the washing machine, the mattress had been flipped. That were
pillows underneath with blood on them, underneath his bed. There
was blood strewed throughout the house. That was hard to
see in some spots, just because the carpeting was kind
of a red brown color, so it was kind of
hard to notice it first. But what was interesting is
that there's blood found all over this house. But her

(06:12):
car is there, her keys are there, her cell phone
is there, all of her clothes are there. Her uninjured dog,
a Pomeranian named Lady, was also in the house, but
she was gone. And so, you know, a natural question
I had for years was, you know, how did he
not notice all this stuff in his house? Because the
story is he went in and got some clothes to

(06:34):
go to work, and then he went back to work.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Now, the odds of a doul not coming right up
to you when you enter a house pretty slam, wouldn't
you agree?

Speaker 3 (06:43):
One hundred percent?

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Okay, so this is two thousand and four. What's the
actual date.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
It is September twentieth, two thousand and four, is the
day that she allegedly vanished.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yes, and she was last seen at a convenience store
that used to be called the Possum Trot. Was there
anybody seen with her, any surveillance video anything.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
No, Sheryl.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
And for years we were told that there was video
of her in that convenience store. There's no video of it.
The only person who saw her was one clerk who
now tells me she's not sure if she saw her
on that day or not. She said she would see
Rebecca from time to time come into that store, but
she's not sure if she saw.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Her Monday morning or not.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
I mean, one thing I'll tell your listeners now about
this case in particular, is there is very possible she
was alive Monday morning. I'm not saying she wasn't, but
there is absolutely no proof that she is alive Monday morning.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
And the concern is, of course, her belongings and her
dog are at a location where there is blood, So
they did find her body? Where did they find her body? So?

Speaker 2 (07:53):
A week after she disappeared, some searchers were searching along
a highway Arkansas Highway nine it's like this rural thoroughfare
that connects Melbourne to her native town of Mountain View,
where she grew up. And when I say rural, I'm
talking very rural. There's no shoulder on this highway. There's
like a wildlife refuge area called Devil's Dead not too

(08:16):
far down into this area. And her body was found
down in an embankment about seventeen feet off the highway.
It's a very steep embankment, very very very wooded. I
was actually out there the morning that they found her body.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
I actually saw her. You know.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Obviously, now being a seasoned you know, true crime author
and journalist, I've seen, you know, lots of horrifying, this
terrible things, but that was the first time, so I
automatically would.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Never forget that.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
But as bad as that was, I had to go
back to the sheriff's department right after that, because her
body wasn't found that far from the sheriff's department in
that county, was only found about five miles away. When
I got to the sheriff's department, her father, doctor w.
Verry Gould, was there, and obviously there was a rumber
going around that they'd found a body, and so he
wanted to know if they'd found his daughter, and I

(09:08):
told him, At first I told him, you need to
talk to the sheriff. But then finally he really was
very adamant that he needed to know, and so I
told him, I said, we don't have anybody else that's
missing county, and.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
You have a really unique I'm just going to say
opportunity here, because to me, that's what it is when
you're looking at something that is going to become a
cold case, per se that not only were you there
this within the hour that she goes missing and the
families gathered, you're now on seen while the body is

(09:41):
literally being recovered. So you have this visual component to
your notes, You have an ear witness component to your notes,
like you have. To me, this is a gift when
you're talking about can I go back years later and
look at my notes and glean anything from it? Pulls

(10:02):
something out of it that even some members of law
enforcement aren't going to have.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's absolutely true, Cheryl. I mean, it's amazing because this case,
you know, went cold for so long. I'm talking they
went through two or three sheriffs in that county in
this amount of time. And I'm talking that the sheriffs
died like they had a couple of sheriffs who just
died from natural causes.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
It was that long.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Well, you worked on it eighteen years.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Actually I worked on in nineteen because I actually went
and interviewed the guy that has been convicted of her
murder just about a month ago in prison.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
So, well, let's clear that up, because every single day counts.
So when you're talking about nineteen years that you have devoted,
you're going to have a level of expertise on this
case that, again for the family, is a money tree.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
You know, as a journalist, my job is to be
an observer and to collect facts and things like that.
And so you know, Chaulan, you know this too, you know,
especially like when when someone gets murdered and they their
body's found and this whole thing is like the whole
family is collapsing right in front of you her very eyes,
like they don't know what to think or feel. And
you go back and talk to them years later, a

(11:12):
lot of these family members and they don't remember anything
that happened from the moment they were told, you know,
there might be two three weeks later, they still are
just in a foggy blur. And you know that happened
to doctor Gould in this case because I've been friends
with him every day since I've met him.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
I mean, I was at his house.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
I was at his house a month ago helping work
on a documentary film project about his daughter's case. Yeah,
I mean, it's it's a very it's I will never forget.
In fact, I still have the missing poster sitting right
over here next to my desk.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
This is a very important aspect of your work that
I want everybody to understand. You don't have the complete
case file. You utilize open source information. Talk a little
bit about not needing the case file to still investigate
a case.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
I've done it several times throughout my career, where you know,
we have a murder case, cold case. Obviously, I don't
know if there's a state in the in the United
States that allows people to have access to cold case files.
In my experience, most states don't allow that. Basically, you
have to develop, you know, information sources, you have to develop,

(12:29):
you have to do your own stuff basically to try
to figure out what happened, because unfortunately, you know, for
all the good work that police do you know, sometimes
what a case is cold, it's not and we actually
kind of found that out in this case. It's not
just because it's impossible to solve or they don't have
the evidence. Sometimes a prosecutor or a detective or an

(12:49):
agency will just get blinders. They will develop a theory
of the case, and if their theories are wrong, then
they're going to spend a lot of time and resources,
you know, searching for something that isn't there. And that's
exactly what happened in this case. You know, I was
fortunate because, like you said, I was onseen from the beginning,
so I was I went to the house where the

(13:11):
murder happened. You know, I looked around the property. I
had access. I did have some people inside the investigation
who leaked some things to me.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
That's another part of it, too, is she developed sources
and you know sometimes they'll say, hey, you didn't hear
this from me, but this is a part of the
case file.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
And so I did have some of that stuff leaked
to me through the years.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Doctor Gould eventually got her autopsy, which was given to me,
and then I actually gave it to a friend of
mine who's an expert and has access to experts in
forensic pathology because we wanted we found out you know
that you know, basically that the story was she was
hit once or twice in the head. Well actually the
in the autops reporter said she was hit once, but

(13:53):
when you actually dug down and analyzed what they found,
she was actually struck twice in the head. And the
interesting part of that was that it wasn't just that
she was struck in the head. It's the only murder
in the history of the United States where the murder
weapon was a loose piano leg. Because one thing I
forgot to mention before. Of all this stuff that was
in the house, the two things that were not or

(14:15):
three things were Rebecca, one of her big suitcases, and
this piano leg off of piano in the living room.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
It was gone.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Now this piano leg would come loose Eryl, So people
who would come to that house would know that it
would come loose, but not very many people came to
that house, and not very many people knew about this. So,
you know, as this investigation is developing, you know, over
the days and the weeks after Rebecca's murder, you know,
they start looking at a myriad of suspects. Rebecca's like

(14:45):
she was in college, she smoked marijuana, she did stuff
like that. I mean, but there was no evidence from
her autopsy that she was involved in any heavy drug
use or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
But the lead detective in the case developed a.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Theory that someone that she knew from high school kind
of knew from around he was a drug eet. You know,
he had a long drug history and he had gotten
high on mets at a party one night and said
that he had done something to Rebecca. And so based
on that, this detective on the case spent years and
years and years going after this one guy. And you know,

(15:18):
from my perspective, you know, I'm a journalist. I go
on to write about other murder cases. I cover other
things in life. I cover everything agriculture, business, politics, you know, economics.
I do stories with entertainers. You know, it's about once
a year, I'm coming back to Rebecca's case, going okay,
you know what's going on. So then finally, after probably
a decade, her dad finally started to get aggravated.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
And he's very pro police pro.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
I mean, if you meet this guy, that's that's his
whole thing, Like you go into his house and he
gives you know, he's friends with the sheriff and his county,
like good friends, and he gives money to sheriff candidates.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
I mean, is he does all that.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Stuff, but he had no us And there was a
couple of reasons why, Cheryl, Because this is something that
was driving me crazy in this case. And again I'm
not in a detective I don't have a background in that.
But there was a couple of things that happened in
this case that I thought were noteworthy. Number one, as
I thought, okay, well, if this piano leg is the
murder weapon, how many people know about the penel leg?

(16:20):
That's the number of suspects you start with right there,
because it wasn't very many.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Absolutely, And that's what I was going to ask you about.
Did law enforcement zero in on this piano leg early
or did somebody kind of guide them toward that? Because
I'm thinking, as a crime see investigator, if I walk
into a place it's got blood all over it, and
I noticed a piano with three legs, come on home?

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, I mean, well, Cheryl, and I hate to do
this because there are some police officers who work in
that agency that I really like, But they didn't notice
the piano leg was missing when they did their original
sweep of the house. They swept the house for an
entire day. It was after they gave the house back
to Casey the sort of ex boyfriend and his dad
also lived there too. When they were able to go

(17:06):
back in the house, they noticed that the piano leg
was missing, and.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
They reported it to police.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Okay, good enough.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
So I'm not sure how they missed it. Also, one
of the pieces of evidence that was found in a microwave,
and this is after the fact, so the chain of
custody was broken. I want to clarify that the one
piece of evidence that they thought could prove that she
was at that convenience store was they found a breakfast
sandwich and an a cappuccino that hadn't been drank in
the microwave. But again, the family found this after the

(17:36):
house was swept, and there's no proof that she bought it.
I even talked to the league detective. Heminisent a lot
of time on the phone not too long ago, just
going back and forth on that because the receipt that
they say matches that doesn't. But anyway, so doctor Gold
finally got the addotypes of report, we were able to
figure out that she had been struck twice in the head,

(17:57):
not once. And also something of public detail we never
revealed was that her highway bone was found in pieces. Now,
the medical examiner thought it could be due to decomposition,
you know, But the problem is is that she'd only
been out there for a week, and it's really hard
for me to believe that ligaments would decompose like that.

(18:18):
She was pretty badly decomposed even for being out there
a week, but there was still a lot of flesh left,
you know, not to be too gory, So I didn't
buy that. But the other explanation is that she was
manually strangled possible, and so that does come into play
later on as the case developed. Now there was something else,
Cheryl about the case. It wasn't just a piano let.

(18:38):
The person who removed Rebecca's body basically drove her down
an ancient gravel road that's very, very treacherous to basically
come out about one hundred yards from where her body
was found on that main highway, but you can almost
go directly from the property she was on on these
old agent gravel roads where you won't see any cars.

(18:59):
There's like maybe one or two houses for an eight
mile stretch, lots of wet weather, creeks, very hard to navigate.
But the thing about it is is it tells you
a couple things. Number One, whoever killed her needed to
get her body out of the house, because somehow that's
going to tie them to the crime. It also shows
that the person who did it had to have cardinal
knowledge of this very rural or remote area. And so

(19:20):
that was a couple of other things that I couldn't
understand why the police weren't hounding in on. And there's
also one final detail. The killer tried to clean up
the mess. They put sheets in the washing machine, they
tried to wash the base boards. There's bleach everywhere. Whoever
did this tried to clean it up. And once again
I go back to the boyfriend who came home. I'm

(19:41):
still puzzled as to how he didn't notice all that,
but I digress.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
And again, that doesn't sound like a stranger. There's no
way you're going to come in and kill somebody you
don't know and say, you know what, I need to
start a load of clothes, because you wouldn't care and
to your point, I want to go back to the
piano leg again, because the only reason that thing was
taken is because you're DNA is on it too, and

(20:08):
her blood is on it. Just like you tried to
clean up. You realize you can, so you toss her
in the suitcase, you grab the piano leg, and you're
out because you realize, I'm not going to be able
to clean this up. And if you're talking about being
struck once or twice with an object that is that
heavy and that massive, the cast off is going to
be crazy, the initial blow with potential blood splatter going

(20:35):
at a high velocity all over numerous items. I tell
people all the time, if you have ever dropped something
in your kitchen, like a bowl of spaghetti, you know
it is almost impossible to get it all in the
first time. Then you'll notice the next day a drop
or two on a cabinet, or on the bottom part

(20:57):
of the refrigerator, or even in the sea. Can know
how that happened. But when you're talking about blood, I
mean he could go everywhere, so it would be futile
to try to clean the scene up. I'll tell you that.
But again, this is somebody clearly she.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Knew, totally agree, and the police were like that their
primary suspect in this case for all those years. He
he said he had never been to Casey, He didn't
know where Casey lived. He had never been to that trailer.
And so I knew just from the fact that he
had never been arrested. I knew that they didn't have
his fingerprints or DNA at the scene. And you know,

(21:38):
and this is and this guy is not a sophisticated criminal.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
He he got in trouble because, you know, one of
the other suspects in the case was one of Rebecca's
like high school boyfriend, you know, she went out with
him some of college. He confronted him because he you know,
because everybody in this small town, they're all, you know,
all these different suspects, they're all thinking it's the other
or one because that's what the police have told him,
and he confronted him. He actually went down prison for

(22:05):
threatening this guy.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
You know, I think it's important for people to understand
the significance of the dump site, but that's not the
whole gig here. So if you look at the murder site,
the transport distance, and the dump site, what time, Taylor,
are you talking about? How far from the murder site

(22:30):
to the dump site would it be driven?

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Normal, it's about an eight mile trek, but it is
a very treacherous route. A lot of there's like it's
it's kind of like an old it's like an it's
like a gravel road, but it was more like a
timber road, you know, like the big timber trucks would
used to harvest timber. And so it's the funny thing
is if you if you looked at a map, okay,

(22:53):
where this happens. This happens in this little township called
outside of Guy, And so there are three routes you
could take to get to this spot where her body
was found. Now, the main route would take you all
the way through Melbourne in this town of about two
thousand people, which is the county seat in that county. Now,
it's one of these very traditional old southern towns where
every single business is lined up along the main thoroughfare.

(23:16):
So quite literally, if the killer took her this route
middle of the day, because you know, we're still assuming
she was murdered Monday morning, if the killer took this route,
it would take this person past every single business in town,
including you'd have to go through the only stoplight in
this town. And then toward the end of the route
is when you start getting out of town again. At

(23:37):
that pinch point is actually the turn off to go
to the Sheriff's department, which would have sheriff's deputies and
state police and Drug Task Force guys continuously coming in
and out. So it's really hard to fathom that this
person would drive this route, especially when if you see
the spot where her body was dumped the embankment. There's
no shoulder there, there's nothing there. So you're going to
stop in the middle of the road, unload this body,

(23:59):
throw her down this embankment. I'm not saying that that
route's impossible, but it's it's pretty hard to fathom.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
But George, here's the reality. In a small town like
where my parents came from, everybody knows your car or
your truck or your motorcycle. They can look down main
Street and tell you who's shop and where. There's no
way he would have taken that route with a dead
body in his vehicle.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
No chance, no chance. And here's the thing. So Casey,
obviously the boyfriend, he's a suspect, you know, I mean
whether you know he was a primary suspect in the case.
You know, police said that he had a kind of
a low riding, smaller truck. His cousin, William Miller, who
was interviewed as a potential suspect, he had a low riding,
smaller truck. Casey's brothers all had, you know, smaller trucks.

(24:50):
So it's even more than just like, let's say she
was in the trunk of a car. You know, that
would be brazen enough, But these guys don't even have that.
They have these lowriding trucks that quite literally you could
look into the bed if they were stopped at that
stop lot.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
So you start a Facebook page, tell us what occurred
with somebody named William Miller.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Let me back up just a little bit.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
So in twenty sixteen, I wrote my first book about
the West Memphis three, and I included the prologue to
the book was about Rebecca's case because it had been
twelve years at that point, and I wanted to try
to raise some awareness because her dad was working so
hard to try to find a way to find her killer.
During one of my book signings for that book, the

(25:34):
lead detective in the case at the time, came to
my book signing and he wanted to talk to me
about the things I knew about the case, and so
I told him next time, instead of sneaking into a
book signing, he could just call me on my cell
phone because he had my number. And so he and
I start talking and he keeps telling me, you know,
he's telling me this story about how there are facts

(25:56):
in this case that I'm not aware of, and that
all roads point to this guy. This this this guy
who's involved in drugs. And I told in the lead
detective's first name was Dennis. I said, Dennis, I said,
this is what I don't understand. If this is just
some drug deal gone wrong, and this is just some
druggie collecting a debt or something like that, why didn't
he bring a gun, put one bullet in her head

(26:18):
and then torch that place. Why would he clean up?
Why would he do all these other things that no
one else is going to do. These are all behavioral
aspects of this crime that I think you guys need
to study. And he dismissed it, said, now you know whatever.
So then a year later, I get an email from
a woman named Catherine Towns, and I'm sure you know Catherine,

(26:42):
and she wanted to do She said, I want to
start a podcast called Helen Gone, and I want my
first season to be about Rebecca Gould's case. And so
I agreed to come onto that and I did four
or five episodes with Catherine, and I just kind of
let her kind of you know, giving basically the same
synopsis has given you guy, you guys right here. Well,
what happened was is that podcast took off. It was featured,

(27:06):
I think it was Doctor Oz did an hour long
show on it. I think Doctor Phil talked about it.
It just it just it just grew legs and ran
all over the country. And so there was this national
following started following this case. When the hell of Goon
podcast came out, there was a bunch of Facebook pages
that were that were developed about Rebecca's case, and all

(27:28):
these people were getting on there, and of course the
helling Gon podcast started casting. You know, they started looking
back at the McCullough family, the whole family, because, like
you said, Cheryl, it's blatantly obvious that whoever did this
was familiar with that that house was familiar with her schedule,
with Casey's schedule, it had to be somebody that knew them,

(27:49):
or it had to be someone in their family.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
Period.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
That's the only reasonable explanation. And so these family members
would get on it, and of course every episode would
come out, it would make it look like it was
maybe more of this suspect than that. So of course
they got out there and they start fighting. But one
thing I noticed when these comments would get into the
you know, the comments and the likes would get into
the hundreds, you know, is that people, especially family members,

(28:11):
you know, they would start saying things they shouldn't say.
All of a sudden, I realized, I actually realized too
late on that phenomenon, that they were actually saying things
that might be permanent or have some value, you know,
that they may know things that they weren't letting on.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
That they knew.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Pretty soon after we start this Facebook page, I'm talking
with it. A week or two, a guy named William Miller,
who is Casey McCullough's first cousin, joined our page. This
guy was living in the Philippines at the time. He
was an American, he had married a Filipino woman. He
had some kids in the Philippines with her. I had
a plantation there. He worked around the world as an

(28:46):
oil rig worker. We would have no reason to suspect
that this guy would have anything to do with this
murder for a couple of very simple reasons. Number one,
he's just a first cousin. You know, everybody's got first cousins.
I mean, that's not suspectious. Another reason would be that
he lived in Arramsas Past, Texas, which is eleven to
twelve hours away from Melbourne. Okay, so this guy's, you know,

(29:07):
living very far away. On a coincidental side note, I
would go down to Ramsas Pass every now and then
and he lived there for years, even after the murder,
because my aunt and nuckle actually lived there. So I
would actually go down to this small town on the
Texas coast and he.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Was living there.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
He's on our page and he's giving theories as to
how she died, and he's sending people messages. In January
of twenty twenty, the detective.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
On the case. It is removed now.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
The official story from the state police is is that
he was getting ready to retire, which was not true.
What happened was is that because of all this public
pressure that had been applied through all these various podcasts
and Facebook pages and all this other stuff. The higher
ups in the State Police finally had added enough and
they decided to assign one of their better detectives, a
guy named Mike McNeil, to the case. I loved it

(29:56):
on dateline when they talked about Rebecca's case, they came
out and said, you're O, you know he was retiring
all this other stuff. Well, I flies personnel file and
guess what this was in January of twenty twenty, right,
he's retiring. Well in July, on July thirty first of
twenty twenty one, he submitted a letter asking for voluntary retirement,
meaning he was still employed there eighteen months later. So

(30:19):
I just and the reason I'm saying that, Cheryl is
is because there's some notion out there that if you're
on a podcast, or if you're in doing this work
in some other way than being directly like a detective
or working for an agency, that you can't have a
positive impact on these investigations. And that's just not you know,
they tried to play it off that you know, you

(30:40):
know that that they made the decision for him to
leave and the only reason they did it was because
he was retiring. It's not true. It's because they knew
that he was not a vestigators properly. Now, it might
mean Mule got assigned to it all of a sudden
things change because he started deep diving into the case file.
Because and he'll never I'm just he'll never admit this,

(31:01):
but I'm sure that some of the arguments we were
making about this behavioral stuff. I know it was having
an impact because you can look at the case file
now and see what investigative steps he was taking. And
he immediately even said it on the stand at a
suppression hearing months later, he said, my focus turned to
the McCullough family, and that's when everything changed.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
You now have a book, you now have nineteen years invested,
you've got interviews that you've done, You've been to the scene,
and I will tell you, everybody that has ever listened
to this podcast, here's me say it at nauseum. Nothing
takes the place of going to the scene. Nothing. It

(31:47):
gives you so much information because that killer picked that site.
And I'll just talk about the third crime scene, because
you had the first crime scene where the murderer car
the transport vehicle is a secondary crime scene. Then the
third crime scene here is the body disposal site. That

(32:08):
right there gives you insight to that killer like nothing else.
He picked the place, he picked, the time, the location,
the manor he selected whether or not he was going
to bury her, cover her, or leave her in the
wide open. All that was his decision. The actual location
that you have described so well, it's not just rural,

(32:32):
it's off the beaten path. To get there, you can
take these back roads where you're not going to be seen.
There's not going to be anybody around. There's no houses,
no businesses, nobody's out hunting. The only reason to go
there is because you know nobody's going to see you
or your car.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
That is correct. Couldn't agree with everything you said more.
Going to the scene is so vital. It gives you
so many clues. I mean, I can't tell you anytime,
you know, as a journalist or even just writing or
for whatever endeavors I'm you know, go into and we'll
tell you things that you will never pick up just

(33:10):
reading a report.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
So where did you go next? You've got all this information,
all these interviews, You've been to the scene, you've got
this person contacting you. Where are you now?

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Through this process, Cheryl, I would have people anonymously contact
me from time to time. Okay, So like I would
you know if somebody would contact me off like I'll
give you. For instance, I get a DM from a
woman who had dated Casey after Rebecca's murder, and she
wanted to talk to me, and all of a sudden,
talking to her led to some very interesting things. So

(33:44):
every now and then we would get somebody would give
us an anonymous tip or something. Well, in September of
twenty twenty, we had a guy Approachest and say, hey,
something really weird happened around the time that Rebecca Ghoul vanished.
And he had a relative who was a teacher who
worked for the Mount Pleasant School District, which was the

(34:05):
local school district where this all happened. He said that
his teacher relative and an administrator had a weird incident
after school one day where this man and his mother
showed up at the school and they wanted to take
this man's little brother, his name is Jeremy. They wanted

(34:26):
to take him out of school. He was like fourteen,
and they were moving back to Texas, where they were
duly from and so as he's telling this story, we're like, well,
who was this person? And it turns out that this
person was William Miller at his mother Linda. Linda and
Jeremy had moved to the Melbourne area Melbourne slash guy
in area about four months before this happened, and William

(34:50):
had come up that weekend to visit with him. We
didn't know that he was in town the weekend that
this whole thing happened. So as soon as we found
this out in September of twenty twenty, we told this
person who knew this story, we told this person to
contact Mike McNeil, who was the lead detective on the
case now, to let him know what was going on.

(35:11):
And in a bit of irony, so Mike McNeil, I
think he was like a resource officer for a local
high school before he got on with the State Police. Well,
when he became a detective with the State Police, he
already had an office in that school and the school
offered to let him keep it just for the simple
fact that they would have another police officer on campus.
You know, it's never a bad thing, you know, when
you're talking about safety, for students, so he kept that office.

(35:35):
That teacher and that administrator both worked for the Sarce
School District at that time, So quite literally, they just
walked down the hall to his office, walked in and
told them what they knew.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Okay, everybody that's listening, if you're a detective or you're
somebody that just wants to help on a case and
you're a civilian, George is telling you how to do it.
He's telling you how you cannot have a police file.
You might, like his friend, not even be at a
ground scene, you've never seen it, but you can pair

(36:06):
up with people that could still do such incredible work.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
And you know it's ironic.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Cheryl, as he didn't know that we knew who he was,
and he was still communicating on our page. I mean,
I think he had over six hundred comments total on
our page and personal dms to us I think at
either four to six hundred and something like that, so
he was on there a lot. He stopped communicating almost
precisely when we started figuring out that he was in town,
but he had no clue that we knew he was

(36:32):
in town. So what we think was happening is is
Mike mcneedil was putting together other parts of the case
against him, and then we were funneling, like we funneled
these people too, Mike, and I will mention this too.
Every single thing that we did in Rebecca's case, we
said that information to the police, if we interviewed anybody,

(36:52):
if we talked to anybody, we gave them phone numbers,
private cell phone numbers for ex girlfriends. Egg here because
ex girl friend, ex wife's always a good source of
information in some of these cases, and so we set
all that stuff to them. We have a very clear
record of it. So Mike decides that he's gonna he
wants to interview William, Linda, and Jeremy. Now I'll say

(37:13):
this just so for clarity for your listeners. So what
happened was is William comes up that weekend to help
his mom and brother move back to Texas. That's the story, right.
So they go and get a couple of U hauls.
They pulled Jeremy out of school on like a random Tuesday,
and then they leave. Before they even start search parties
out looking for Rebecca.

Speaker 3 (37:30):
They're gone.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Now the Monday that this murder allegedly happens, William initially
told police that him and his mom went and took
Jeremy to school and they went and picked him up,
and then his mom decided she wanted to go to Branson,
Missouri for some reason, and because she had never been there,
and she's moving back to Texas, and so she's closed,
and so she just wants to go, even though it's

(37:52):
about a four hour three and a half four hour drive.
So they drive it too Missouri, get some receipts. So
obviously they're establishing an alibum, I mean, clearly, and so
then they go they moved back to Texas. You know,
basically before anybody knows that Rebecca's missing, they're back in Texas.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Well.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
The state police did ask the local police to go
down there and interview them, and they did check out
their U hauls and they did interview them during that interview.
I mean, it's just so crazy to me, Cheryl, because
if I had this report, I would have honed in
on this guy immediately. It says in the report the
detective even says he's asking them questions and they've brought

(38:27):
Jeremy in, you know, he's fourteen. They said, was there
anything about in your cousin Casey's house is the anything
about surniture that's weird, and he goes all the pianola
comes off and as soon as he says it, the
officer notes in his report, he says, the boy then
turned locked eyes with his mother and never left her
gaze because he knew he had said something you shouldn't

(38:48):
have said.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
Well, have we talked specifically about the boyfriend and Miller
was the boyfriend shocked? Did he on some level want
to cover this up?

Speaker 2 (39:00):
He confessed to killing her to another guy. He said
that he hit her in the head and that he
got mad, or that they got into a fight and
that he hit her in the head and then he
didn't know what to do. And well, I'll just tell
you this right now. William Miller is a confessed serial killer.
Like he's killed five of the women. I don't know
that Casey was involved in her murder.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
I think he was.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
I don't know, But the bare minimum I know is
that he knew what happened to her because he didn't
go home that night because he was out of establishing
an alibi. Just like William was up in Branson with
his mom and brother, Casey was out with four friends.
Because this is what I didn't tell you, Cheryl. So
he goes out with these four friends that night. At
one point he gets on his cell phone, and this
is in the case file, and part of it was

(39:45):
leaked to me years ago too, and that also pissed
the state police officer that I wrote about this. He
gets on one of the friend's cell phone, not his own,
talks to someone, gets off the phone and says, Rebecca's missing.
All four reports, all four guys say the same thing.
When they were interviewed by police, he said that she

(40:06):
was missing, and all four said that he was obsessed
with her and they couldn't understand why he wasn't literally
running out the door to find her. All four reports
say it one, two, three, four, And in two of
the four reports it says the person said that she
had been missing for twenty four hours, meaning Casey said
that she had been missing for twenty four hours. And
in one report it's crossed out, but you can still

(40:28):
clearly read what it says. And then in another report
it says the same thing. So I know exactly what
happened is he said that she's been missing for twenty
four hours and two of the four remembered it that way,
and that's why they wrote it that way. But then
the detective came in and said, well, I can't be
true because we think she was alive Monday morning. So
the floor is that he knew and then because he

(40:49):
didn't go home, and even when he went back the
next morning, like because he was going to go to
Sonic where he worked. He shows up there, but he
doesn't have his work clothes on, and his manager sends
him home to get us cloth. That's when he shows up.
And see, he lied to me. And I asked him
one time, Cheryl, because I'm interviewed, I tracked him down.
I said, so, you never went back to your house

(41:09):
on Tuesday morning before you went with the police.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Anybody told me, No, I.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Never went back because he knew then that if he
went back and didn't notice all this blood everywhere and
all her stuff. There after, he told all of her
friends she was missing the night before. See that's the key.
He told all his friends she was missing the night before.
She was missing seven or eight thirty in the morning
on Tuesday morning. How did he know she was missing

(41:34):
twelve hours before she was reported missing?

Speaker 1 (41:37):
And here's the other thing. The whole gig comes down
to patterns. I preach this to rookies. If he and
Rebecca called each other every night to say good night,
that they weren't together, or takested each other, or however
they communicated, there's a clear pattern. If that pattern gets

(41:59):
broken for any reason, that should be highlighted. Why did
he not call to tell her good night when he
was spending the night with these guys. Why did they not,
you know, have some pillow talk over the phone. Why
did he not check on her to make sure she
was home safely like he did the weeks and months
and years prior. The other issue to me, he didn't

(42:23):
report her missing. But he's telling you he had knowledge
that she was missing, but he didn't call anybody, her daddy,
other friends. He didn't go look for her. So you know,
your girlfriend is missing, and you're just going to hang
out with these dudes and not report anything, not look
for her, do nothing.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
That's exactly what he did.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
And even the friends in their reports, like you're talking
about patterns, they said they were surprised that he wanted
to go out with them because he never wanted to
go out with them.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
He was a recluse.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
He was a homebody who stayed at home, and he
never wanted to go out. And you know what else,
he never did during that week that she was missing.
He never looked for her a single time.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
Patterns will lead you to the truth. And I'm going
to tell you something else I've told everybody before. When
you're going through that cold case file, ninety five percent
of the time the name is in there. It's already
in there, They've already talked to them. So the first
thing any cold case investigator ought to do is pull

(43:27):
out every single name, and then you go back through
can I get rid of this person or not? And
don't take the word of the other investigators or detectives,
You yourself include or exclude that person.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
That is exactly what Mike McNeil did. And he even
said that William Miller was the sixth person on his list.
So I guess going back to the story, and if
you want to talk about Casey, we can. I mean,
it's all in the case file.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
I mean the.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Person that he confess to, He confessed this person multiple times.
And here's the thing, Cheryl, the person who he confessed to,
contacted Catherine Townsend first, and as soon as she got
off the phone with him, she called me and played
the audio over the phone, and she's like, do you
think this guy's telling the truth? And this is back
in twenty eighteen, And I said, yeah, I know he's

(44:19):
telling the truth, and she goes, how would you know that?
And I said, because there's two things that he knew
that only the killer could know. Number One, Casey told
this person that she was struck on the head twice.
The auto Superport was not a public record at that time.
The only people who had it were doctor Gould, me,

(44:43):
I may be Danielle the sister. And again, but the
person that he confessed to, this guy named Tad, I've
never met Tad. I've never talked to Tad. Tad's never
talked to doctor Gould, He's never met him. Danielle the
sister before she passed away from brain cancer last year,
never talked. He had never talked to her. So how
in the world did this person know that she had

(45:04):
been struck twice in the head. And they also Danielle
had told me one of the reasons that RecA came
home that weekend was because she was going to end
things permanently with Casey. Well, guess what that friend knew
years after the fact. He said that Casey told him
the reason that they got into a fight was because

(45:25):
that she was mocking him because she was going to leave,
and that was the end of it.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
All right, George, let's talk about the real money tree.
Let's talk about that confession.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
So one of the problems that Mike McNeil the detective
was having interviewing everybody. It was easy for him to
get to Casey, his brother's Corey, Chris, the father Claude
because they all lived I mean, Casey lived in the
same house up until a couple of years ago, and
he still lives on the same property where this whole
thing happened. Getting to them was easy. But getting to

(45:56):
William Miller was going to be He was on the
list because obviously he he had been originally interviewed, and
Mike's process was he was just going to go through
an interview every single person that had been interviewed originally
in the case. The problem was is that William was
in the Philippines, obviously, so it's gonna be hard to
get there to interview him. Now, Linda and Jeremy the

(46:16):
mom and brother. They lived in Cottage Grove, Oregon. At
this point, in October of twenty twenty, Mike had William
Miller's passport flagged. What we didn't know is that he
couldn't get back to the Philippines because, as everybody remembers,
in October of twenty twenty, we were still in the pandemic,
and so only nationals could go home to the Philippines.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
So he would go out on these low rigs that
he worked on.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
You know, he'd be out for twenty or thirty days whatever,
and then he'd come home for a month. Well, he
was having to come home to Oregon to stay with
his mom and brother because he couldn't get back to
the Philippines. Mike had his passport flagged. They figured out
that he was going to be in town. So Linda
calls and says, hey, you know, William's here, Jeremy's here,
I'm here. If you want to talk to all three
of us at the same time, why don't you just

(47:00):
come to Cottage Grove, Oregan on November seventh, twenty twenty,
and we'll just talk to you and get this up
with And Mike says, that's great. So he flies out there.
They sit down for you know, he's interviewing you know,
the mom, brother and William, and then he does something
very very cunny. He had asked all the other McCullough's
to take a polygraph, right, they all agreed, and so

(47:24):
they'd all taken it. Well, you know, it's a Saturday
in Cottage Grove, and so he looks away him and he goes, now,
if you're ever back in Arkansas, would you agree to
do like a polygraph test? And mind you, William had
never gone back to Arkansas since the murder. So William's like, oh, sure, sure,
I'll do a polygraph test. Yeah, that'd be no problem. Well,
what Mike had already done is he already had a polygrapher.

Speaker 3 (47:46):
Waiting in another room.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
He goes, well, maybe Cottage Grove's gone a polygraph examiner
that could do it today, and so he pretends like
he's on the phone talking to somebody. So within a
couple of minutes, William's trapped, like he knows he has
to take it now because he's already read to it.
So he goes in there, he takes the polygraph, He fails,
and so then Mike comes in after the polygraph examiner
tells him that he failed. Mike comes in and he

(48:11):
does something very bold. He pulls out a picture of
a washrag that was found with blood on him from
the crime scene and he goes, I got to show
you something. And he pulls out the picture and he goes,
you see this right here, we have the killers DNA
on this rag. He goes, now, we wouldn't find your
DNA on this rag, now, would we? And he just

(48:32):
kind of like shakes his head like no, and you
can tell he's getting really quiet. Well, then Mike pulls
out a second picture. It's the truck that william was
driving in two thousand and four, and he went and
found the actual truck. He had the Texas Rangers go
and find this truck in South Texas and they took
pictures of the inside of it. And he goes, I've
got a problem here. We found Rebecca's DNA next to

(48:54):
this pedal at the bottom. And he said, why would
Rebecca's DNA be there? And so Williams starts to kind
of make up a story, and then finally he just
breaks down and says that he pulled his truck in
behind the trailer of that Monday morning, he walked up
to the door, knocked on the door, Rebecca answers, he
comes in. He's pacing around, and this murderous rage comes

(49:16):
over him. The piano leg just falls on the ground
and he just picks it up and he hits her
twice in the head and then he took in neck
tie and he strangled her until she Now when he
gave that confession, I knew it was true, or I
thought it was true because of the fact that he
mentioned the strangulation. And when you look at and you
look at later crime scene photos, there are pictures of ties.

(49:39):
There's at least one tie there, which I actually don't
think he used a tie. What I think he used.
I think he actually used his hands. I think he
wanted to use a tie and he saw the tie.
But we've developed information after the fact, you know, we
started talking to people who had relationships with him, you know,
people who had dated him, stuff like that, and we
found out that he was into a number of fetishes.

(50:01):
Because when Rebecca was found, she was so badly decomposed
they couldn't determine if she'd been sexually assaulted or not.
And so the fact that he said he strangled her.
Her high bone was found in pieces. I was like, okay.
And plus he said he hit her in the head twice,
which still wasn't like readily, No, it is interesting, Cheryl
like one of the reasons that it was interesting listening
to him to confess because I grew up about an

(50:25):
hour from Cottage Grove, Oregon. November seventh is my birthday,
and this was the first case I ever covered, and
so it was really I run for me and he
mentioned me my name and his confession. You talked about
how much he hated my guts and couldn't stand me,
and I was a joke and a cloud and all
sort of stuff because I was getting and I even
told him, you know, and to make a long story short,

(50:46):
when I actually interviewed him face to face, he told me,
he said, he goes, I owe you an apology for
all things I say, because he even texted his cousin,
Casey at one points in the case file that he
wanted to show up with one of my book sightings
and punched me in the face. When I walked into
the Wharton's office to talk to him, he said, I
owe you an apology, and I said, no, you don't
want me an apology.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
I said, you o, Abecca, apology, absolutely, one hundred percent.
And you might be a joke at a clown and
he might want to pudge you in the face, but
you ain't the one that murdered somebody, and you ain't
the one in prison.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
That's true. And the thing of it is Cheryl.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
During his confession, he also confessed to murdering five other women,
and so one thing we're trying to do now. And
of course he's claiming now that he didn't kill anybody
that you know that he's saying that his cousin did
it and he helped him cover it up and all
this other stuff, you know, And I don't know if
that's true or not. I told him, you're going to
have to provide some evidence because you've been convicted. He
took a plea deal where he will only get forty

(51:40):
years thirty if she's out in good time, and so
he's in prison now. But I think it's important though
that he did confess to these other murders. And if
people want to go to our Facebook page, the twelve
hours of his confession is on there. You can watch
every second of it, and he gave details, Cheryl about
the women that he murdered. In fact, I'm sure a

(52:02):
lot of your listeners are in Georgia. There's a case
there that we're looking into that we think that he
might have a connection to. And this was several years
before Rebecca's case. But again, he had a pathological history
of buying sex workers, and he said that some of
the women that he killed were prostitutes.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
And so.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
You and I both know that sometimes those cases are
not investigated with the thoroughness.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
They should be.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
So finding this finding these other victims maybe in the
old a haystack, but you know, there's I think the
FBI has got a VISCAP alert out on some potential states.
I think Texas, Louisiana, possibly Georgia, Mississippi, and Oklahoma are
some places where they're looking at some other potential victims
of William Miller. And I can tell you this right

(52:52):
now not to be too graphic or share things that
we can't share at this time, but this guy has
a history, and it's a deep history of doing some
of these things. I mean, Cheryl, when he walked into
that police department in Oregon, he had child porn on
his phone.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
Yeah, he wasn't hiding, he wasn't trying to be intimidated
by anybody. Outstanding work. I mean again, I just want
everybody to understand how you started, what limited tools you
were working with, limited information, and look where you are. Outstanding,
Outstanding George. Seriously, I'm going to end Zone seven the

(53:34):
way that I always do with a quote. My best
advice for cold case investigators is to read the investigative
reports last. If you read them first, you're more likely
to be led down the same path as the other
investigators were on. If the body dropped a day, would

(53:55):
you have access to the reports? No, So start with
the crime scene phone goes and move forward from there.
Joe jack Alone, retired Sergeant n y p D. I'm
Cheryl McCollum and this is his own set

Speaker 2 (54:27):
H

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