January 5, 2025 • 50 mins
Here is a blast from the past---a members-only episode of a Dateline rewatch and recap! Happy New Year and we hope you enjoy our recap of a crazy episode of Dateline Unforgettable hosted by Andrea Canning.
In this case, an Alabama husband, Michael Reese, is murdered in his own home. His wife Cindy seems beyond reproach. That is, until she doesn’t eat her french fries before they get cold. Then, all eyes turn to her with suspicions of a torrid love affair and a murder done in cold blood!
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We love receiving your feedback and most of our case choices come from listener suggestions!
In this case, an Alabama husband, Michael Reese, is murdered in his own home. His wife Cindy seems beyond reproach. That is, until she doesn’t eat her french fries before they get cold. Then, all eyes turn to her with suspicions of a torrid love affair and a murder done in cold blood!
If you would like more of these members-only episodes and rid yourself of ads from all of our episodes, you can support and subscribe at tiegrabber.com/subscribe.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-brewery--4126935/support.
Record your voicemail at tiegrabber.com for our feedback segment or send us an email to truecrimebrewery@tiegrabber.com
We love receiving your feedback and most of our case choices come from listener suggestions!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery. Ty Grabbers, I'm Jill and
I'm Dick. Today we have a little bonus. We're going
to talk about a Dateline episode. We just got through
watching Dateline Unforgettable, and it's titled Even the Devil went
to Church with post Andrea Canning.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
So this thing starts off down in rural Alabama, and
the narrator says, as church is everywhere more common than
street lights.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So the narrator meaning Andrea, right.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I guess that was her or she was quoting someone.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, So she says that faith is a way of life.
Everyone goes to church. There Sunday services, church picnics, even
Wednesday services. So way into religion here. This is Morris,
the small town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and this is
where people come together to celebrate life and the Word
of God. So Andrea tells us there were some rumors
(01:20):
that started up among church goers and the people and
Morris hoped that these rumors weren't true, but it kind
of seemed like they were true, so they had to wonder.
She says, It's a town that looks like it could
have come from a Southern Gothic novel, but it's really
just a normal, small southern town. So this story, like
a soap opera come to life. All started on a
(01:41):
cold February night in twenty.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Fifteen, and that's when a nine to one one o'clock
came in from Cindy Reese. Cindy said she had come
home couldn't find her husband. He was supposed to be
home because they had both arrived home. That she went
back out for something, but he was supposed to be
there he wasn't. Plus some things in the house were
out of place.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, So the Morris Police called in help from the
Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and Sergeant Detective Brian Strait came
to the scene. When he arrived, the Morris police had
the scene taped off. He walked in the front door
and saw a table turned over right inside the door,
but he could see a victim lying in the back
door area through the hallway. This victim was a man
(02:23):
who had been shot to death. So it turns out
that Cindy's husband wasn't missing. He was lying dead on
the floor there near the back, and that's where they
were having some construction done. But you could tell from
the video and the detectives said that as soon as
you walked in the front door, you kind of couldn't
miss that her husband was lying there. Michael Reese.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, I mean you could see right through to the
back of the house where the construction was going on.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, it wasn't a big house, no, and there's a body.
But it's interesting. The house was right across the street
from the police station. So whoever killed Michael Reese was
pretty bold, indeed, I guess so murders are really rare,
and Morris no surprise there. So this was a really
big deal. Michael Reese was forty years old, so the
only potential witness was his wife, Cindy Reese, who had
(03:14):
called nine one one, but she said she wasn't there
when he got shot. She was just calling to say,
where's my husband. Maybe someone broke into my house something
like that. So when straight arrived, Cindy was outside of
the house with police officers, and he was from Jefferson
County kind of a bigger area. But he thought the
Morris police were just doing a fine job there. Nothing
(03:36):
was wrong as far as handling the crime scene.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
So Michael's body was found at the back of the house,
near where that the construction work was being done, right,
his feet were right at the back door, and he
was lying forward into the unfinished room. He'd been shot
once right in.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The back of his head, right, So Detective Street thought
it looked like a robbery. But now this is kind
of weird. Does a robber just go in shoot someone
in the back of their head? Not Usually, No, they
don't because if you're breaking into a house and stealing
things and someone comes upon you, you're either going to
run or if you are that violent, you're going to
be shooting them, probably in the front of their body. Obviously,
(04:16):
according to detectives Straight, it's an indicator that this was
not a self inflicted gunshot wound the house was consistent
with what Cindy had said on her nine to one
one call. At least at first glance, it looked like
a burglary, but then him being shot in the back
of the head was kind of weird. So we're looking
into it, right, Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
The detectives saw that Michael had probably been shot shortly
after he got home. His dinner from a popular fast
food place was still sitting on a table, untouched, and
the detective wondered if Michael had walked in on a
burglar or if someone had it in for him.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, like maybe someone was lying in wait for him.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
It would almost seem like that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah. So the Morris police officers knew Michael, they knew
who he was, but Michael's family and friends would have
to fill in the details of his life for them.
Andrea tells us that they would lay bare some secrets
that would really rock the small religious community. So could
one of these secrets lead the police to his killer?
I bet it could.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
The investigation into his death was just beginning as people
in the town were finding out about his death. One
of his best friends was a guy named Josh Freeman,
and he was just shocked.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Well, wouldn't you be I mean, you're living in this
small town. People probably don't even bother to lock their doors.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, it is never a murder there.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
This is a very modest home. It's right across the
street from the police station. In this tiny community, so yeah,
it had to be super shocking.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, and this Josh Freeman was very close to Michael,
and Michael had been like an uncle to Josh's kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
He was actually a big part of many people's lives
in Morris. His loss was devastating.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yeah, Josh had known Michael since seventh grade. That's that's
a lifelong friendship pretty much.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Absolutely, Yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Josh says that Michael was smart. He worked on it
at a hospital in Birmingham, so he was pretty much
known as a computer nerd.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, he was known as that, Like, if you had
a problem with your computer, call Michael, He'll come over
and fix it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Call that nerd guy.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, and he wouldn't charge because he was just kind
of a sweet, kind guy.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It was.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
He was very funny too, liked kids, just really loved
in the community, and people loved his wife Cindy too.
Delayne Mullins, a woman who was a cousin of Michael's wife, Cindy,
was really shocked and upset by the news, as everyone
else was. He was a kind soul and her heart
was really broken, especially for Cindy because poor Cindy had
(06:48):
already lost one husband to suicide eight years before this,
So she has a string of bad luck or something's
up here.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You know that, without even knowing anything else about this,
just knowing that her first husband died of the suicide
and her second husband was gutting down at their home
makes me want to focus on her.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh absolutely, And I'm sure they.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Did such a coincidence, Well.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, because I guess you can lose two husbands, but
for them to both be sudden violent deaths, yeah, that
doesn't seem right.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
According to Delane, Cindy was depressed and closed off after
her first husband's death, but that all changed in the
spring of two thousand and eight. Delaine had a friend
who is friends with Michael, and they thought Cindy and
Michael would be a good match. So Michael was family
oriented and he fell for Cindy and the two were
going to have a fresh start together the better. A
(07:45):
year after they've met, they got married. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Cindy's younger brother, Chris, says that he was excited to
hear that his sister was going to marry Michael. He
just thought Michael was great. He says, Michael was just
a really super nice guy and who wouldn't want him
as a brother in law. That's how he thought about it.
So he had to really think a lot of Michael,
if he says that, and he did, because he says
(08:08):
every interaction he ever had with Michael had been great,
never a negative moment with Michael.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Now, family and friends would say that they just hadn't
seen Cindy that happy in years, and like many couples
in the area, faith was the cornerstone of their relationship.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Oh, it really was.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Soon after they got married, Cindy asked Michael to join
her church that was sorry as Baptist, and she became
the music director. Michael had grown up as a Methodist,
but he decided to get baptized in the Baptist church.
He believed that this would help he and Cindy grow
even closer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I think all the family members and friends believe that.
They thought, well, he's going to move to this other
church where she's very involved, so this will keep them close.
They'll have a lot in common, be going to services
two or three times a week. You know, she's working
there being the music director. It just seemed all very
wholesome and great.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, it sounded like a good way to live your life.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
It really did. But then, just five years after they married,
the love story of Michael and Cindy ended in a
shocking act of violence. Michael was dead. It was Detective
Straight who told Cindy that her husband was dead, and
then he asked her for some help in finding out
who had killed him. So he certainly had to be
looking at her at least a little bit, don't you think.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Oh yes, absolutely, And in this.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Show they really try not to let on to that,
which we've really got in the hang of that. There's
a lot of red hearings thrown out and whatnot. But
I'm sure they were looking at Cindy because this is
just a very weird crime.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yes it is. Cindy told the detective that her day
had started out just like any other day. Michael dropped
her off at the courthouse, where she worked as an
accountant for the county. Then he drove to his it
job in Birmingham, and after Michael would come back and
pick up Cindy at five and they'd drive home and
have dinner and go from there.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yeah. So maybe a little too much together time. I
don't know, that's a lot to be going to the
same church, getting a ride back and forth to work,
spending every evening together. I don't know, it might have
been kind of a lot.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, it's five years they've been married, right, Well, there's
plenty of time for them to get tired of doing
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Well, sure, but you have to wonder was Cindy already
getting tired of it now? That day, Michael picked her
up as usual, and they went by her mother's house
to help her mother by taking out the trash. So
this is what Cindy's saying to the detective. She said
that after helping her mother, she and Michael went to
church from six pm to seven pm, So that could
(10:50):
certainly be proven. There'd be witnesses for that. But after
that they stopped at Milos. So we have to take
a moment here for Andrea to fill us in about Milos.
It's an Alabama fast food restaurant and they're known for
their delicious seasoned French fries and people love these fries.
So in this case, the fries are actual evidence because
(11:12):
it made investigators suspicious because the fries were sitting there
and hadn't been eaten while they were hot. Sounds funny,
but it's true.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
That's right, and that's as Andrea says, that's the one
of the big drugs for Milo's fries. You gotta eat
them hot, absolutely, that's the peak of their flavor.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Well, cold fries never are really good, and if you
try and microwave them, they kind of turned to mush.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Oh god, microwave.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So it's not just Milos. I think it's every French fry.
Then I would say, yeah, that doesn't microwave. Well, so, yeah,
the fries are at evidence here and that's kind of funny.
But Cindy says, as soon as they got home with
their food, she realized that they needed a few things
from the grocery store. So she goes into the house,
sets the food down, and then hollers out to Michael
(11:58):
that she's going to pick up something where at the
Pigley Wiggley.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Of course, so when Cindy did get home, she says
she saw a mess in the house, grabbed the landline,
and when asked if she had any idea who might
have done this, Cindy said she didn't have a clue.
She didn't know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Well, you wouldn't think so from what we've heard about
Michael so far. Yeah, So Cindy did say, though, that
there had been a contractor at their house who was
building an add on to the back of the house
right around where his body had been found. So this
was a lead for detectives. But there was someone else
who detective straight wanted to talk to Cindy about. He'd
(12:34):
heard the rumors and the gossip just a couple days
after the murder, and he thought that might be a
real motive for Michael's murder. So what were these rumors?
What was the gossip? Yeah, well, it was this gossip
that spread really fast through this small town. And the
detective spoke to Cindy for hours, taking her step by
step through that day and when she claimed she returned
(12:57):
to the house from the grocery store that night, she
said she saw the table turned over, but didn't see Michael.
So that was pretty weird. And when you put that
together with the rumors, you have to look at Cindy
pretty closely. He told Cindy he needed to talk to
her about some delicate things, some rumors and some complaints,
and the rumors were about a man who wasn't her husband, NNA.
(13:20):
There had been complaints that someone had been having sex
in the parking deck for county employees. That's where Cindy
worked in a pest control truck, and the woman having
sex in that vehicle was believed to be Cindy. So
this was a lead that Detective Straight shared with his partner,
Sergeant Ellen Shearer.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
So you gotta love small towns, right, Yes, I'm sure
there's people noticing this pest control truck rocking, rolling and
banging around in the parking garage or parking area.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Well, you say it like it's funny, but I think
it probably was because these were two big people. Not
gonna fect shame, but they were too very large people,
Cindy and whoever she was doing it with.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Oh yeah, because one of Cindy's friends said that story
couldn't be true because they're both too big to have
sex in that little truck.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, it just wouldn't work ergonomically, hape to see, Yeah,
which you know I can kind of see. I think
it's uncomfortable for anyone to have sex in a front
seat of a truck, and if you're weighing two fifty
three hundred pounds, it'd be even more difficult. Yeah, but
apparently Cindy was doing it with somebody in the truck.
(14:31):
Cindy's cousin, Delaine Mullins, when she heard about it and
said it couldn't be true. That was the end of
the story for her. Her and Cindy actually kind of
laughed about it. But who was she accused of being
in this truck with in the parking lot. But the
pastor of Cindy's church, a guy named Jeff Brown. And
Jeff had actually baptized Michael when he joined the church.
(14:53):
He too was a big guy.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, so we've got a little triangle going here. Probably.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, we don't know if Michael knew about that.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Now. Andrea tells us one thing that she's learned about Mars, Alabama,
and that was that the people have candor. I like that.
What she heard in an interview with Delane almost made
her flaw out of the chair.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Well, that's what you were telling us about, right, That
they couldn't do that physical act because of their size.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
That's Delane's take on it was that they couldn't have
possibly had sex in the truck because they were just
too big.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, And I don't think she said it to be
mean or anything. I think she really cared about Cindy,
it was just, you know, the truth.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
I think she was looking at as just a statement
of fact.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Absolutely. So, Jeff Brown had taken a job with a
pest control company and the truck just had this small
two seater cab. And that's why Cindy and her cousin
were just laughing about this rumor. They had actually discussed
the rumor quite a while before Michael's death, and Cindy
had told Delane that she and Michael were really working
things through in their marriage and that Michael didn't believe
(15:58):
these rumors either. He thought it was ridiculous. But after that,
Delane had begun to hear things that made her think
that maybe Cindy's relationship with pastor Jeff Brown had crossed
the line. So she was telling her things like, like what.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
She started to work out right, right, I wanted to
improve her shape.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
That's always can be a sign.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah, she said, she is walking with Jeff right, that was.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Part of her exercise routine.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
And that's when Delane started thinking, oh, you know, wait
a minute, something actually might be going on here.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
And the other thing that Delane was noticing is that
Cindy and Jeff seemed much closer than a pastor and parishioner.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Well, I'm not a church person, but I have gone
to church before, and I don't think it's very common
for a parishioner to be spending their free time with
the pastor, especially when they're both married people.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Right, you're right.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Whatever it is, it was strange. So let's go back
to Cindy's interview with Detective straight on the night of
My murder, because it was really interesting to watch it was.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Now. The detective first off apologizes for having to discuss
such intimate details with a stranger, and Cindy quickly admitted
that she and Michael had been having marital problems. She
said that Michael didn't want anything to do with her
and that they had stopped having sex. Well, I think
that's fairly significant problems.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Huh, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
I mean not so much that not having sex. He
just didn't want to do anything with it. So they'd
be like.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
She's saying that, but he's still driving her to work
and back and they're still going to church together. Okay,
So I don't know if that's really true. I don't
know if we can believe everything.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Cindy says, I'm taking her at face value, all right.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You might regret that, though. So Cindy said that Michael
had started spending more time on his computer and didn't
seem to love her anymore. So Cindy said she went
to Pastor Jeff just for someone to talk to, but
the more she opened up to Pastor Jeff, the closer
she and Jeff became. So she admitted that. She said
that their relationship had started out innocently, but the more
(18:05):
they talked and spent time together, the more they fell
in love with each other. So she said all this,
but still Cindy was adamant that the rumors about them
having sex in the park truck were false, but she
said that the elders in her church didn't believe her,
so it had to be more than just a rumor.
If the elders and everybody's believing it, yeah, there must
(18:26):
have been actual witnesses seeing them in the truck.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So Cindy left the church and left her position as
a music director. She said that she began her affair
with Jeff at about the same time when she resigned
from the church. I always think that she probably had
been having any affair with Jeff a while before she resigned.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Oh sure, but because why did she resign? She was
really into the church, so that was a strange thing.
So you have to think if she resigned, it was
probably from pressure or discomfort or something. He was clearly
a suspect, oh at this point for sure.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
But when asked if she had shot Michael, she said no.
She did admit to being an adulterer. She did admit
to being an adulter, but said that she could never
shoot anyone. She told the detective that she had no
reason to kill her husband because he already knew about
the affair.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Is that really true, though? So let's say you're having
an affair and your husband knows about it, you might
want to kill him if you're the killing type, because
you still have a motive. You don't want to get
divorced if you're in this church community for one thing.
Plus there's probably some money situation. So I don't think
that she had no reason to kill Michael just because
(19:41):
he knew about the affair. No, but that was what
Cindy said, and she was kind of teary and trying
to get him to feel sorry for her.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
It seems like, yeah, Cindy also said that she and
Michael were trying to work on their marriage. In fact,
they had recently taken a trip together to Disney World.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Now that I don't understand, But why two adults go to.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Disney World right after they got married or got married?
I know some people do that this was special to them.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I guess to me, though, Disney World is just a
place where you take kids. But when you're a Disney person,
that's a whole different world that you're in, right, It's
a Disney world, a Disney like world.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, Michael's dead, She's innocent. Now we've got to get
pastor Jeff In to talk. Absolutely, we talked to him
or whatever. We got to get his story.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Well, yeah, because he's a suspect just as much as
Cindy is, and maybe the two together even right. Yeah,
So in his interview with detectives, Jeff Brown said that
he was really shocked when he heard about Michael's murder.
Then Andrea takes a socide to tell us that she's
always found the art of interrogation fascinating. Now this is
a dateline unforgettable. So what they do is they sit
(20:51):
at a desk and sometimes the camera goes to them
and they explain why the case interested them or some
kind of you know, backstory. So what she says is
that sometimes what isn't said in an interrogation is as
important as what is said. So investigators are trained to
read between the lines. Is someone emotional enough? Are they
(21:11):
too calm? You know, the body language is a big deal.
So let's talk about Jeff Brown's interview.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, he's pretty defensive about his affair with Cindy. Plus,
his body legs was really very telling. He was gripping
the arms of his chair to the point where his
knuckles turned white, and he admitted to being in love
with Cindy. He said that he and his wife were
getting a divorce and he's waiting for Cindy to get
her divorce, right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
So, what the detective first asked Jeff was if it
bothered him that he was moving forward with a divorce,
but Cindy wasn't. She hadn't asked Michael for a divorce
as far as anyone knew, so Jeff admitted that that
did concern him. He also admitted that it bothered him
that Cindy and Michael were apparently still sleeping together up
until Michael's death. Now, remember Cindy had said that her
(22:00):
husband didn't want to have sex with her anymore. But
now Jeff said that Cindy had described having sex with
Michael to him, and he found this to be nasty.
He said, So, I don't know where that came from.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Nasty sex?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Was that something weird they were doing. We don't get
to hear about that, so I don't know. But he added,
that's no motive for murder, right, I'm not going to
murder her just because she's having sex with her husband
and won't leave him. What good would murdering him do
besides getting him out of the way, maybe getting her
some more money, and you know, she wouldn't be having
sex with anyone but me. Oh yeah, maybe it is.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
A motive, you think, yes, And Jeff did have a
good alibi, he seemed to. He said that he was
fifty miles away at the time that Michael was shot
and killed. He also said, when asked directly, he did
not shoot Michael, and when asked if he knew if
Cindy had killed Michael, Jeff said he had no clue.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
M so he didn't really defend her and saying, oh god,
she'd never do that.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Nope, So he was allowed to leave the police station.
While the detectives were suspicious of Jeff, they didn't have
enough for an arrest at that point.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Now, so now the detectives looked into Jeff's background. So
he was married, he was a father of two with
another one on the way, so a pregnant wife, oh boy.
And he had a really interesting past. He'd been in
the military, he'd actually been a marine, and he'd also
worked as a police officer for two years. Then he
had worked for a moving company, and he'd been a hairdresser.
(23:27):
So what's with this kind of as jack of all trades,
I guess so, but you have to wonder why he
was a police officer for just two years, what happened there?
And then he's working as a hairdresser at a moving company.
He was working for that pest control company. And he
was the church pastor, which I understand that doesn't pay much.
(23:49):
That's usually like a side thing in a small church
like that, anyway, I believe. Yeah, So yeah, jack of
all trades, master of none.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Is what it seems like. Yeah. Now, as you can
probably imagine, in a town the size of Mars, Michael
Rees's murder was the center of attention.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Oh yeah, the talk of the town.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the case. Jerry Vincent,
who is the town's building inspector, thought that Jeff Brown
had been obsessed with Cindy for a while.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, so maybe it was more than he was letting
on this thing with Cindy.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Well, you know, you got to present yourself in the
best face, best light.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Well, I guess so. But if you have nothing to hide,
that wouldn't be an issue. No, Now, Jerry was very
fond of Michael, and Jerry said that he saw Jeff
sitting on a bench in the park across from Cindy
and Michael's house quite often, so kind of stalking the place.
He thought Jeff may have been waiting for Michael to
leave the house so he could go in and be
with Cindy or something like that. I mean, that's really weird, right,
(24:52):
He's married with kids, and he should be working and
doing other things. Why is he sitting outside of Cindy's house.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, because Cindy has a job too, Yeah that she
gets driven to and from by her husband. So right,
I don't know if he's thinking he's going to go
have sex with Cindy. Well, Michael's gonna have but she
works too.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well, these could be in her days off and things
like that. Because Cindy was, you know, definitely having sex
with him. It's not like he was unwanted from what
I heard.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, right, it.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Seemed to be a two way street, definitely. So after
Cindy had left the church, she and Michael had moved
on to another church. But guess what then Jeff started
showing up at that church, and the pastor there said
that sometimes, when Cindy and Michael were already seated in
a pew, Jeff would come in and he would actually
sit in between them. How crazy is that? So Michael
(25:49):
definitely knew, and Michael must have been at least annoyed
with this. What the hell?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, it's just totally bizarre. Yeah, not that he has
to get into a fistfight or anything, but mine.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
You just don't do that, No, And it makes me
wonder about Jeff's mental state. Seems really weird, like not
something someone who's mentally stable would do.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
But it also shows you that Jeff was jealous, right,
why else would he be horning in.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Like that, Yeah, he's marking his territory out there.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Right, absolutely. And then the more police looked into Jeff,
the more they found that people just didn't like him.
Rumor was that Jeff was considered a man whore. Now,
if you saw this guy, it's funny because he's just
very normal, ordinary looking guy. So he doesn't look like
a man whore, at least not what I would envision
as such.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
So you want him to be wearing a shirt unbuttoned
to his waist with a bunch of chains and bracelets
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Not necessarily that, but maybe someone who's kind of handsome
and stands out a little bit is being charming and
handsome a bit, someone who has some sex appeal, I mean,
just a little sex appeal. I'm not asking for a
lot here. But the whole point of this is that
Cindy was not Jeff's only extramarital affair. So that could
kind of work in Jeff's favor because that would mean
(27:08):
maybe it wasn't that big a deal to him if
he'd slept with many women. Yeah, but then when you
think about him going and squeezing into the church pew
and sitting outside the house, pretty weird So then Andrea
speaks to Cindy's uncle, Roy Henderson, and he agreed that
Jeff was just no good. Not only was he a
man whore, he called him a con man. So I
(27:29):
can kind of see that, going from job to job, lying,
sleeping with other people's wives, just not a great person.
Kind of the opposite of what they said about Michael.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
According to Cindy's mom, Judy, Michael knew all about Jeff
Brown and his relationship with his wife. In fact, Michael
had told Judy that Jeff was trying to take his
wife away from him, and he also told Judy that
he had some fear of Jeff. He was afraid of
what Jeff could be capable of.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
So right there, that's alarming, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, he said that he knew Jeff had heard I'm
gonna try to hurt him if he got the opportunity.
Turns out he is probably correct.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah. Now, one month before Michael was murdered, Jeff had
asked two of his fellow employees at a moving company
to kill Michael. So there's a red flag for you.
He was actually offering his car and some cash after
Michael was dead, and these men were like no way,
and they'd reported Jeff to a different police department out
(28:30):
where the moving company was located. So that's why detectives
at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and the Morris Police
Department didn't know about this until after Michael had been
murdered and they spoke to these men. So at this point,
things were looking pretty bad for pastor Jeff. He's looking
like he could have done this. He's turning out to
(28:52):
be a real problematic person and a strong suspect in
Michael's murder. Still, Jeff was insisting that he had been
fired away when Michael was killed. Remember, his alibi is
that he was fifty miles away, so he couldn't have
done it if he was that far away.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
So detectives are waiting for just cell phone records they
want to disprove his alibi. In the meantime, they focused
on Cindy and one funny thing that they focused on
was the fast food for milos.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah it does sound funny, we told you, yeah, we
were going to talk about that. Well, the police thought
it was very suspicious that Cindy and Michael had not
eaten their fries. Right the fries are popular, and everyone
knew you needed to eat them while they were still
hot for them to taste good. And you know, Cindy
and Michael liked to eat. They enjoyed the fries, and
(29:40):
who doesn't enjoy fries, right.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Absolutely, But the deal with these particular Milos fries you
absolutely gotta eat them when Yeah, so there's some kind
of sacrilege if you don't.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Absolutely these are seasoned special fries.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So finding cold French fries in the scene of the
crime actually raised some questions in the detectives' eyes.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, it dead, but you know, even if it wasn't Milo's,
why would you go get dinner, leave it at the
house and run to the Piggly Wiggly. We'll get more
into that, because that doesn't make sense. There's only the
two of them there.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
They don't have.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Kids to feed, right right. So now things get even
more interesting because it turns out that pastor Jeff Brown
was a kept man.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Well SAIDI is a man who Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
But Cindy, even though she's very far from wealthy, had
been paying Jeff's bills, so that's strange. They would actually
find a file with the lease on Jeff's apartment, which
Cindy had rented for him. Also, she was paying his
car payments and giving him money.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I guess pastor Jeff had worked his magic on Cindy.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Maybe I'm underestimating Jeff.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Huh, you might be.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Detectives were hoping that Cindy and Jeff would turn on
each other and then the truth would come out, So
they reviewed Cindy again, going over her nine to one
to one call. There were some strange things they brought up,
like when the detective first walked into the house, he
immediately saw Michael's body. We talked about that a little bit,
but Cindy had called nine to one one saying she
(31:15):
couldn't find him. Now, the detective felt that it would
be next to impossible for Cindy to be looking for
her husband in that small house and not see him
lying pretty much right in front of her.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Yeah. Basically was basically, Yeah, you come in the front
door and straight shot down the hallway or whatever, there's
the body.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yes, the idea of a burglary gone wrong really wasn't
adding up.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah. The construction worker who was working on a house
obviously had access to it, had a solid alibi there
was no sign of a forest entry, so we're getting
more and more suspicious of Cindy.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, so this is when detectives looked into the death
of Cindy's first husband. He had supposedly died of a suicide,
and I believe it was a gunshot wound. So yeah,
so the case was reopened and investigated, but the detectives
couldn't find anything at this point to prove that she
had killed her first husband. But you know, like you said,
(32:11):
that's quite a coincidence, and most detectives don't believe in coincidences,
that's right, because things like that usually don't happen. So
why had she lost her first husband and now her
second husband had been killed. It's very suspicious, especially with
her having an affair and all that. But then we
go back to Milo's French fries because the detective says
(32:32):
they are absolutely the best French fries in the world,
in the world, Dick.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
In the world, not just in Morris. We keep coming
back to these French fries, not just.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
In Alabama, not just in America, but in the world. Yeah,
but you know, there's that one thing you do have
to eat them hot, just to remind you. So of
course the police were confused about Cindy dropping off the
fries and going to the Pigly Wiggly. It's funny, but
it was a red flag that Cindy did not stay
at home at least long enough to eat her fries.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Right, But there's other stuff. I mean, the police found
it suspicious that Cindy went out to the Pigley Wiggy
that night at all. Yes, Cindy had said that they
needed orange juice and lunch meat for the next morning,
but there was actually plenty of lunch meat and orange
juice in the fridge, so there wasn't any need to go.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
So this is what cracks me up about murderers, a
lot of them, because they say stupid things. Now, if
you're going to murder someone, you can't think of some
food that's not in your fridge that you needed, or
pour out the orange juice first.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, you know, it's just so stupid, And I would
buy for you.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, you know you're gonna say that, So why not
at least say that you went out for something that
you really are out of, or make sure you're out
of it before you go, right, Right, So she really
just kind of tripped herself up with that one.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
I'd love to know what she said when the detectives
pointed out that there was already cold cuts and orange
juice in the fridge.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I'm not getting a genius vibe off of Cindy, really,
so you know who knows. So the detectives explain to
Andrea how it's often the small details like this that
can lead to big moments in an investigation. So first
we've got the fries very suspicious, then the lunch meat
and orange juice. So this is a case that's very
(34:21):
food oriented.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
But wait, there's more. Cindy admitted that while she was
on her way to the grocery store, Jeff had called
her Jeff Brown he needed gas for his car.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
What a man hor he's a man.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Whore manhor reference. Yeah, so she'd met him at a
gas station and give him fifteen dollars for some gas.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, so she must have been way into him if
she was doing that.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Yeah, it kind of makes me think that she's not
actually trying to make her marriage work.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
No, it really doesn't seem that way.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
He doesn't.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
It checked out of her marriage absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
So police got a warrant and they searched Cindy's office
where she worked, and one funny thing they pointed out
was there's a picture of her and Michael on her desk.
But if you look on the shelf beneath that, there's
a picture of Cindy and Jeff Brown on her desk.
So you know, she's just being very upfront about it
in that way.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Yes, she is.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Also, detectives found a file in the cabinet that was
labeled Jeff Brown. Inside was the apartment lease and the
car note for Jeff's car, So she was really paying
his bills, his rent, his electricity, his car payment board. Yeah,
but Cindy's not wealthy.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
No, not at all, not at all. I wonder if
she has a allowance for them.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
You have to wonder, because she's bringing him cash for gas,
and you have to wonder, did Michael know about this?
Maybe Michael knew about this and was done with it.
Maybe he wanted a divorce and she was just one
of these people that thinks it's worse to get a
divorce than to murder someone, which we've seen often in
the religious communities. Could be Yeah, So by this time,
(36:04):
detectives are beginning to believe that Cindy and Jeff were
responsible for Michael's murder, and they don't know who shot him,
but they're looking at these two. So they went and
shared what they knew so far with the prosecutors, and
it definitely seemed like Cindy and Jeff wanted to be
together and to do that, they wanted Michael Rhese dead.
So there's your basic story there, an old story that
(36:27):
we've heard before. So looking into Jeff and Cindy's cell
phone data, they found many nude pictures and sexts. Their
sexting had continued right up until the day of the
murder too. When prosecutors looked at the cell phone records
from the night that Michael was shot, they found a
text from Jeff to Cindy that read keep me posted.
(36:48):
So that's pretty suspicious right there.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Well, that is, and if you look at the timing
of the things, Cindy and Michael had been in church
until seven that night, and that particular text, you'd come
in at six fifty seven before church let out. So
prosecutors believe that the text showed that the two applauding
to kill Michael that very night.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, they had more proof too, Cindy called Jeff after
church and left the line open so that Jeff could
listen to what was happening. So the line on her
cell phone remained open to his until the time that
Michael was killed. So that's pretty strange, kind of creepy,
it really is, because they had evidence that Cindy was
still on the phone with Jeff throughout the time when
(37:28):
she shot Michael. They also knew that when Cindy got
home from the grocery store, she was still on her
phone with Jeff, So even as Cindy called nine one one,
she was still on her cell phone with Jeff.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah. What Cindy didn't know was that nine when one
calls begin recording as soon as the ringing starts, so
you can hear her on the recording talking to Jeff
very calmly. Cindy tells Jeff that her phone is about
to die. Then when the nine one one dispatcher answers,
she starts acting all hysterical. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Andrew says that it was when covering this case that
she learned about this nine to one to one call thing,
And me too, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I
did hear of it a few months ago with a case,
but pretty recently I heard about that. I did not
know that. But in addition to this, the cell records
would show that Jeff was not fifty miles away from
the crime scene when Michael was killed. Either. The information
(38:21):
was specific enough to show that Jeff was within a
couple hundred feet of Cindy and Michael's house when Michael
was killed.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah, So the prosecutors and detectives believed that Michael was
shot and killed right after Michael and Cindy came home
from Milo's and put their dinner on the table. They
believed that after they got home, Michael went to the
back door to let the dog out, Cindy walked right
up behind him and shot him in the back of
the head.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
That's about as cold as you can get. That's very
cold blooded.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Didn't say anything, just go up and bim. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Now, they couldn't prove that Cindy was the actual shooter,
but it really didn't matter if it was her or Jeff,
because according to the law, anyone involved in the planning
or the process is as guilty as the actual shooter.
So the police were ready to make some arrests. They
arrested Cindy and Jeff at the same time. They were
(39:13):
returning to Cindy's office after going out to lunch together.
These people are idiots.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
They're keeping a low profile, aren't they.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Jeez, so you've just killed your husband. People know you're
having an affair with this guy, but you just keep
hanging out with them, paying his bills, going out to lunch.
It's really moronic. So what detectives were hoping for was
that Cindy and Jeff would turn on one another. One
prosecutor tells Andrea. The theory is that if one spouse
(39:42):
is killed, talk to the one who's still breathing. Pretty
clever quote there.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
So, now that Cindy and Jeff were both charge for
Michael's murder, we're hearing from Morris resident and building inspector Jerry.
Jerry says, the first win to squeal gets the best deal.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Bunch of poets there. But Cindy told Jerry that her
lawyer told her she had nothing to worry about because
the police couldn't prove a thing. He says he felt
like he was looking into the eyes of a cold
blooded killer.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Well, and you wouldn't expect it, right, she's kind of
a maternal, dumpy looking, middle aged woman, and she goes
to church all the time and takes care of the choir.
It's just really, yeah, not your typical killer.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Well sure, but I don't know what your typical killer
looks like.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, that's a good point, because there are many different ones.
But she just didn't seem as manipulative as she turned
out to be, because she turned out to be quite manipulative.
So a lot of her innocent woman thing was fake.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Yes, it was so.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
By August of twenty fifteen, when Jeff's trial was about
to start, neither he nor Cindy had shown any sign
of squealing on one another. But just minutes before jury
selection began, I've turned to his lawyer and said he
was ready to make a deal. So Jeff Brown finally
admitted that he had been involved in Michael's murder. He
(41:09):
was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter as long as
he testified against Cindy, so Cindy's.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Trial began in November of twenty sixteen. A large group
of Michael's friends were there for the trial, but Cindy's mother, Judy,
believed that Cindy could not have killed Michael, and she
blamed Jeff Brown completely for the murder.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Well, I don't blame her. I think most mothers would
feel that way. You wouldn't want to believe that, and
you'd want to protect your child. Sure, because she doesn't
know that Cindy did it, it's not like she has
evidence thrown right in her face of it. So she
still could manage to say that Cindy was innocent. And
you know, I guess her theory there was that Jeff
(41:49):
was stalking her and using her, and Jeff decided to
do this murder on his own.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Well, sure that'd be one way to present.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
It, right, Yeah, But the prosecutors felt sure that both
Cindy and Jeff had been responsible for Michael's death, and
they were convinced that Cindy was the mastermind. Now I
don't know about a mastermind, but I think she was
the one with the ideas to do it.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Well, maybe you could say that she is less stupid
than her her boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I don't know if that's less stupid. I just think, yeah,
maybe she could get people to do it she wanted
more easily than Jeff could.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah, but she could have gotten.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
A divorce, right, The thing is, I guess in this
religious Baptist community, divorces really looked down upon, but I
would think that murder would be even more looked down
upon than divorce.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Yeah, I was just going to say that, But we've seen.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
That with many couples where the person who kills their
spouse would rather murder them, thinking they'll get away with
it of course, than get a divorce. So that's really odd.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, we haven't done any case where the murderous spouse
is hoping they get caught. They always see it as, yeah,
if I don't divorce my spouse, I'll murder that person
and I'll get away with it.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Well yeah, I mean, of course they're not looking to
get caught, but they also aren't very smart about it,
and they do usually get caught.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It seems like.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So, rather than being exposed as someone
who was having an affair, Cindy decided she wanted to
look like a victim. She wanted to be a widow
of a murdered husband and that would come across much
more nicely than being a divorced kind of slutty girl.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
Yeah. But right from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors
were working to shatter the image of Cindy Reese as
is god feury music director and grieving widow. So to
prove this, they laid out all the evidence they had
against Cindy, which included the paperwork for Jeff's apartment and
car that had been found in her office. It also
included her affair with Jeff Brown, the cell phone data,
(43:55):
and of course the cold milot French fries.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, that was a big deal.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Jeff was the star witness and he filled in the
puzzle pieces by explaining how the murder actually happened. Well,
he was on the cell phone with Cindy, he heard
a pop. Then after the murder she met Jeff at
a gas station and told him that it was all dead.
Michael was dead. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Jeff claimed that he wasn't at the house when Cindy
shot Michael. He testified that Cindy gave him the murder
weapon when they met at the gas station and just
told him to get rid of it. But they did
have records that showed he was nearby. Cindy's defense attorney
wanted the jury to believe that Jeff had killed Michael
on his own, of course, and he was lying about
Cindy being involved at all. They claimed that the trajectory
(44:39):
of the bullet proved that Jeff was the shooter because
Cindy was too short. So I don't know about that.
We've heard that before. We heard it quite recently in
the Alec Murdoch trial, where they were saying the shooter
had to be like five foot two and he was
six foot four or something. But people don't just stand still.
People move and bend, and you know, I don't think
(45:01):
that's really that convincing.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
No, And I'm looking at bullet trajectories is kind of
being similar to blood spatter and that type of thing.
Kind of a nebulous science. Really, look what you just
talked about, Sure, people move a little bit. To me,
it'd be really.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Difficult well to tell who the shooter is. But I
think that the basic trajectory of a bullet inside the
body is real science. But how it came in from
that direction, I don't think so. Right, Yeah, Yeah. Cindy's
attorney said that Jeff, not Cindy, was the one with
the motive to kill Michael. He said that Jeff was
(45:40):
obsessed with Cindy because she was his meal ticket. Remember,
she was giving him money and paying his bills. So
Jeff needed Michael out of the picture so that Cindy
would continue to pay his bills. But none of these
seem really like a great motive to kill somebody.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
No, and how long had Cindy been paying the bills anyway?
Speaker 2 (46:00):
That I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
They never said, I mean, was about to stop. It
was Michael suspicious that money was going somewhere or what.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, I don't know. I think that Jeff was going
to get a divorce from his wife that was actually
in the works, and he wanted Cindy to do the
same thing, and that if he was with Cindy, she
could actually support him financially, So that could be the
whole thing right there.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Well, yeah, I'm just saying that he could be. There's
no reason for him to think that she's going to
stop paying for everything.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that's a motive.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
No.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
The defense attorney that puts Jeff in in the midst
of things.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Huh, yeah, I guess that's true. The defense took the
risk of putting Cindy on the stand to testify in
her own defense, and Cindy told the jury that she
had not shot her husband, but she did admit that
her marriage to Michael was pretty rocky. She was adamant though,
that she knew nothing about Jeff's plan to kill her husband,
(47:00):
and she was, you know, kind of whiny about it,
trying to look sympathetic, you know, sure bit of an actress.
So would the jury believe Cindy. Would they believe she
was a church going grieving widow or would they think
she was a church going cheating widow.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Well, my guess is that they believed the latter, Yes,
because the jury deliberated for just ninety minutes before they
came back with a guilty verdict. That's quick.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
It's very quick.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Take a quick vote to see where people stand, and boom,
it's unanimous.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Pretty much. Yeah. Most of Cindy's family thought that this
verdict was wrong, though, but Cindy's cousin Delane, thought that
the jury did get it right. Delane still isn't sure
if Cindy got caught up in the moment with Jeff
or if she really was a cold blooded killer who
planned the whole thing and possibly killed her first husband
as well.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Yeah, with his plea Yould Jeff Brown got a twenty
year sentence, Cindy got a forty year sentence, so left
to spend their lives without him. Friends and family of
Michael Reis were left with only memories of a kind
and gentle soul with a big laugh and an even
bigger heart.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, Andrea's winding down here, and she says that this
was a really salacious case. But what really stuck with
her to make it a dateline unforgettable episode was that
it was a senseless loss of a man who really
had inspired so much love. I don't know how many
people they talked to, but the people that were on
camera just seemed to think that Michael was really funny,
(48:31):
kind and just a great guy overall.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Yeah, just one of those and really loves.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
You liked to hang with, right, Yeah, So it just
seems especially cruel that someone he loved would do this
to him, it does. I mean, it's a really sad case.
It seems like this couple was living this simple life
and Michael was a good guy. I do feel like
Jeff Brown influenced Cindy quite a bit, But then Cindy
seems very cold blooded and the killing was definitely premeditated.
(48:58):
I think Jeff was very lucky to only have to
plead to manslaughter.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
Oh remember the advice one who talks first gets the
best deal.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Squeals got a rhyme o.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Squeal first, best deal.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Okay, all right, Well, I still have to wonder about
Cindy's first husband, because it's very curious that you would
lose two husbands like that.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
It is, and I was wondering how much they looked
into that.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Well, they said that they did open the case and
weren't able to prove it. That's all they said. They
weren't explaining it.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
A lot enough time had gone by, it might have
been very difficult to re examine the case.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Sure, well, maybe maybe.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
They looked at it and decided, yeah, he really did
kill himself.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Maybe, but they didn't say that. I think if they
said that, they'd say she wasn't guilty. Maybe Kelly and
her team on Cold Justice can head on down there
and have a look.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
We'll check with them.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
They like to solve the cold cases, and that, you know,
Morris seems like the kind of town they usually end
up in, a small town, a southern, small rural town. Yeah,
very homey. All right, Well, This was a good talk.
I always enjoy a good dateline. And we'll be back
with a regular episode soon and we'll see you all
at the Quiet Act.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Come on down, plenty of seats. Bye bye, bye, guys,
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery. Ty Grabbers, I'm Jill and
I'm Dick. Today we have a little bonus. We're going
to talk about a Dateline episode. We just got through
watching Dateline Unforgettable, and it's titled Even the Devil went
to Church with post Andrea Canning.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
So this thing starts off down in rural Alabama, and
the narrator says, as church is everywhere more common than
street lights.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So the narrator meaning Andrea, right.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I guess that was her or she was quoting someone.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, So she says that faith is a way of life.
Everyone goes to church. There Sunday services, church picnics, even
Wednesday services. So way into religion here. This is Morris,
the small town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, and this is
where people come together to celebrate life and the Word
of God. So Andrea tells us there were some rumors
(01:20):
that started up among church goers and the people and
Morris hoped that these rumors weren't true, but it kind
of seemed like they were true, so they had to wonder.
She says, It's a town that looks like it could
have come from a Southern Gothic novel, but it's really
just a normal, small southern town. So this story, like
a soap opera come to life. All started on a
(01:41):
cold February night in twenty.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Fifteen, and that's when a nine to one one o'clock
came in from Cindy Reese. Cindy said she had come
home couldn't find her husband. He was supposed to be
home because they had both arrived home. That she went
back out for something, but he was supposed to be
there he wasn't. Plus some things in the house were
out of place.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, So the Morris Police called in help from the
Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and Sergeant Detective Brian Strait came
to the scene. When he arrived, the Morris police had
the scene taped off. He walked in the front door
and saw a table turned over right inside the door,
but he could see a victim lying in the back
door area through the hallway. This victim was a man
(02:23):
who had been shot to death. So it turns out
that Cindy's husband wasn't missing. He was lying dead on
the floor there near the back, and that's where they
were having some construction done. But you could tell from
the video and the detectives said that as soon as
you walked in the front door, you kind of couldn't
miss that her husband was lying there. Michael Reese.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, I mean you could see right through to the
back of the house where the construction was going on.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, it wasn't a big house, no, and there's a body.
But it's interesting. The house was right across the street
from the police station. So whoever killed Michael Reese was
pretty bold, indeed, I guess so murders are really rare,
and Morris no surprise there. So this was a really
big deal. Michael Reese was forty years old, so the
only potential witness was his wife, Cindy Reese, who had
(03:14):
called nine one one, but she said she wasn't there
when he got shot. She was just calling to say,
where's my husband. Maybe someone broke into my house something
like that. So when straight arrived, Cindy was outside of
the house with police officers, and he was from Jefferson
County kind of a bigger area. But he thought the
Morris police were just doing a fine job there. Nothing
(03:36):
was wrong as far as handling the crime scene.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
So Michael's body was found at the back of the house,
near where that the construction work was being done, right,
his feet were right at the back door, and he
was lying forward into the unfinished room. He'd been shot
once right in.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The back of his head, right, So Detective Street thought
it looked like a robbery. But now this is kind
of weird. Does a robber just go in shoot someone
in the back of their head? Not Usually, No, they
don't because if you're breaking into a house and stealing
things and someone comes upon you, you're either going to
run or if you are that violent, you're going to
be shooting them, probably in the front of their body. Obviously,
(04:16):
according to detectives Straight, it's an indicator that this was
not a self inflicted gunshot wound the house was consistent
with what Cindy had said on her nine to one
one call. At least at first glance, it looked like
a burglary, but then him being shot in the back
of the head was kind of weird. So we're looking
into it, right, Yes.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
The detectives saw that Michael had probably been shot shortly
after he got home. His dinner from a popular fast
food place was still sitting on a table, untouched, and
the detective wondered if Michael had walked in on a
burglar or if someone had it in for him.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, like maybe someone was lying in wait for him.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
It would almost seem like that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah. So the Morris police officers knew Michael, they knew
who he was, but Michael's family and friends would have
to fill in the details of his life for them.
Andrea tells us that they would lay bare some secrets
that would really rock the small religious community. So could
one of these secrets lead the police to his killer?
I bet it could.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
The investigation into his death was just beginning as people
in the town were finding out about his death. One
of his best friends was a guy named Josh Freeman,
and he was just shocked.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Well, wouldn't you be I mean, you're living in this
small town. People probably don't even bother to lock their doors.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, it is never a murder there.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
This is a very modest home. It's right across the
street from the police station. In this tiny community, so yeah,
it had to be super shocking.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, and this Josh Freeman was very close to Michael,
and Michael had been like an uncle to Josh's kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
He was actually a big part of many people's lives
in Morris. His loss was devastating.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Yeah, Josh had known Michael since seventh grade. That's that's
a lifelong friendship pretty much.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Absolutely, Yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Josh says that Michael was smart. He worked on it
at a hospital in Birmingham, so he was pretty much
known as a computer nerd.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, he was known as that, Like, if you had
a problem with your computer, call Michael, He'll come over
and fix it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Call that nerd guy.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, and he wouldn't charge because he was just kind
of a sweet, kind guy.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It was.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
He was very funny too, liked kids, just really loved
in the community, and people loved his wife Cindy too.
Delayne Mullins, a woman who was a cousin of Michael's wife, Cindy,
was really shocked and upset by the news, as everyone
else was. He was a kind soul and her heart
was really broken, especially for Cindy because poor Cindy had
(06:48):
already lost one husband to suicide eight years before this,
So she has a string of bad luck or something's
up here.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You know that, without even knowing anything else about this,
just knowing that her first husband died of the suicide
and her second husband was gutting down at their home
makes me want to focus on her.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh absolutely, And I'm sure they.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Did such a coincidence, Well.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, because I guess you can lose two husbands, but
for them to both be sudden violent deaths, yeah, that
doesn't seem right.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
According to Delane, Cindy was depressed and closed off after
her first husband's death, but that all changed in the
spring of two thousand and eight. Delaine had a friend
who is friends with Michael, and they thought Cindy and
Michael would be a good match. So Michael was family
oriented and he fell for Cindy and the two were
going to have a fresh start together the better. A
(07:45):
year after they've met, they got married. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Cindy's younger brother, Chris, says that he was excited to
hear that his sister was going to marry Michael. He
just thought Michael was great. He says, Michael was just
a really super nice guy and who wouldn't want him
as a brother in law. That's how he thought about it.
So he had to really think a lot of Michael,
if he says that, and he did, because he says
(08:08):
every interaction he ever had with Michael had been great,
never a negative moment with Michael.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Now, family and friends would say that they just hadn't
seen Cindy that happy in years, and like many couples
in the area, faith was the cornerstone of their relationship.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Oh, it really was.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Soon after they got married, Cindy asked Michael to join
her church that was sorry as Baptist, and she became
the music director. Michael had grown up as a Methodist,
but he decided to get baptized in the Baptist church.
He believed that this would help he and Cindy grow
even closer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
I think all the family members and friends believe that.
They thought, well, he's going to move to this other
church where she's very involved, so this will keep them close.
They'll have a lot in common, be going to services
two or three times a week. You know, she's working
there being the music director. It just seemed all very
wholesome and great.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, it sounded like a good way to live your life.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
It really did. But then, just five years after they married,
the love story of Michael and Cindy ended in a
shocking act of violence. Michael was dead. It was Detective
Straight who told Cindy that her husband was dead, and
then he asked her for some help in finding out
who had killed him. So he certainly had to be
looking at her at least a little bit, don't you think.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Oh yes, absolutely, And in this.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Show they really try not to let on to that,
which we've really got in the hang of that. There's
a lot of red hearings thrown out and whatnot. But
I'm sure they were looking at Cindy because this is
just a very weird crime.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yes it is. Cindy told the detective that her day
had started out just like any other day. Michael dropped
her off at the courthouse, where she worked as an
accountant for the county. Then he drove to his it
job in Birmingham, and after Michael would come back and
pick up Cindy at five and they'd drive home and
have dinner and go from there.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yeah. So maybe a little too much together time. I
don't know, that's a lot to be going to the
same church, getting a ride back and forth to work,
spending every evening together. I don't know, it might have
been kind of a lot.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, it's five years they've been married, right, Well, there's
plenty of time for them to get tired of doing
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Well, sure, but you have to wonder was Cindy already
getting tired of it now? That day, Michael picked her
up as usual, and they went by her mother's house
to help her mother by taking out the trash. So
this is what Cindy's saying to the detective. She said
that after helping her mother, she and Michael went to
church from six pm to seven pm, So that could
(10:50):
certainly be proven. There'd be witnesses for that. But after
that they stopped at Milos. So we have to take
a moment here for Andrea to fill us in about Milos.
It's an Alabama fast food restaurant and they're known for
their delicious seasoned French fries and people love these fries.
So in this case, the fries are actual evidence because
(11:12):
it made investigators suspicious because the fries were sitting there
and hadn't been eaten while they were hot. Sounds funny,
but it's true.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
That's right, and that's as Andrea says, that's the one
of the big drugs for Milo's fries. You gotta eat
them hot, absolutely, that's the peak of their flavor.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Well, cold fries never are really good, and if you
try and microwave them, they kind of turned to mush.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Oh god, microwave.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So it's not just Milos. I think it's every French fry.
Then I would say, yeah, that doesn't microwave. Well, so, yeah,
the fries are at evidence here and that's kind of funny.
But Cindy says, as soon as they got home with
their food, she realized that they needed a few things
from the grocery store. So she goes into the house,
sets the food down, and then hollers out to Michael
(11:58):
that she's going to pick up something where at the
Pigley Wiggley.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Of course, so when Cindy did get home, she says
she saw a mess in the house, grabbed the landline,
and when asked if she had any idea who might
have done this, Cindy said she didn't have a clue.
She didn't know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Well, you wouldn't think so from what we've heard about
Michael so far. Yeah, So Cindy did say, though, that
there had been a contractor at their house who was
building an add on to the back of the house
right around where his body had been found. So this
was a lead for detectives. But there was someone else
who detective straight wanted to talk to Cindy about. He'd
(12:34):
heard the rumors and the gossip just a couple days
after the murder, and he thought that might be a
real motive for Michael's murder. So what were these rumors?
What was the gossip? Yeah, well, it was this gossip
that spread really fast through this small town. And the
detective spoke to Cindy for hours, taking her step by
step through that day and when she claimed she returned
(12:57):
to the house from the grocery store that night, she
said she saw the table turned over, but didn't see Michael.
So that was pretty weird. And when you put that
together with the rumors, you have to look at Cindy
pretty closely. He told Cindy he needed to talk to
her about some delicate things, some rumors and some complaints,
and the rumors were about a man who wasn't her husband, NNA.
(13:20):
There had been complaints that someone had been having sex
in the parking deck for county employees. That's where Cindy
worked in a pest control truck, and the woman having
sex in that vehicle was believed to be Cindy. So
this was a lead that Detective Straight shared with his partner,
Sergeant Ellen Shearer.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
So you gotta love small towns, right, Yes, I'm sure
there's people noticing this pest control truck rocking, rolling and
banging around in the parking garage or parking area.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Well, you say it like it's funny, but I think
it probably was because these were two big people. Not
gonna fect shame, but they were too very large people,
Cindy and whoever she was doing it with.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Oh yeah, because one of Cindy's friends said that story
couldn't be true because they're both too big to have
sex in that little truck.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, it just wouldn't work ergonomically, hape to see, Yeah,
which you know I can kind of see. I think
it's uncomfortable for anyone to have sex in a front
seat of a truck, and if you're weighing two fifty
three hundred pounds, it'd be even more difficult. Yeah, but
apparently Cindy was doing it with somebody in the truck.
(14:31):
Cindy's cousin, Delaine Mullins, when she heard about it and
said it couldn't be true. That was the end of
the story for her. Her and Cindy actually kind of
laughed about it. But who was she accused of being
in this truck with in the parking lot. But the
pastor of Cindy's church, a guy named Jeff Brown. And
Jeff had actually baptized Michael when he joined the church.
(14:53):
He too was a big guy.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, so we've got a little triangle going here. Probably.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, we don't know if Michael knew about that.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Now. Andrea tells us one thing that she's learned about Mars, Alabama,
and that was that the people have candor. I like that.
What she heard in an interview with Delane almost made
her flaw out of the chair.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Well, that's what you were telling us about, right, That
they couldn't do that physical act because of their size.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
That's Delane's take on it was that they couldn't have
possibly had sex in the truck because they were just
too big.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, And I don't think she said it to be
mean or anything. I think she really cared about Cindy,
it was just, you know, the truth.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
I think she was looking at as just a statement
of fact.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Absolutely. So, Jeff Brown had taken a job with a
pest control company and the truck just had this small
two seater cab. And that's why Cindy and her cousin
were just laughing about this rumor. They had actually discussed
the rumor quite a while before Michael's death, and Cindy
had told Delane that she and Michael were really working
things through in their marriage and that Michael didn't believe
(15:58):
these rumors either. He thought it was ridiculous. But after that,
Delane had begun to hear things that made her think
that maybe Cindy's relationship with pastor Jeff Brown had crossed
the line. So she was telling her things like, like what.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
She started to work out right, right, I wanted to
improve her shape.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
That's always can be a sign.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yeah, she said, she is walking with Jeff right, that was.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Part of her exercise routine.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
And that's when Delane started thinking, oh, you know, wait
a minute, something actually might be going on here.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
And the other thing that Delane was noticing is that
Cindy and Jeff seemed much closer than a pastor and parishioner.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Well, I'm not a church person, but I have gone
to church before, and I don't think it's very common
for a parishioner to be spending their free time with
the pastor, especially when they're both married people.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Right, you're right.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Whatever it is, it was strange. So let's go back
to Cindy's interview with Detective straight on the night of
My murder, because it was really interesting to watch it was.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Now. The detective first off apologizes for having to discuss
such intimate details with a stranger, and Cindy quickly admitted
that she and Michael had been having marital problems. She
said that Michael didn't want anything to do with her
and that they had stopped having sex. Well, I think
that's fairly significant problems.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Huh, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
I mean not so much that not having sex. He
just didn't want to do anything with it. So they'd
be like.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
She's saying that, but he's still driving her to work
and back and they're still going to church together. Okay,
So I don't know if that's really true. I don't
know if we can believe everything.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Cindy says, I'm taking her at face value, all right.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You might regret that, though. So Cindy said that Michael
had started spending more time on his computer and didn't
seem to love her anymore. So Cindy said she went
to Pastor Jeff just for someone to talk to, but
the more she opened up to Pastor Jeff, the closer
she and Jeff became. So she admitted that. She said
that their relationship had started out innocently, but the more
(18:05):
they talked and spent time together, the more they fell
in love with each other. So she said all this,
but still Cindy was adamant that the rumors about them
having sex in the park truck were false, but she
said that the elders in her church didn't believe her,
so it had to be more than just a rumor.
If the elders and everybody's believing it, yeah, there must
(18:26):
have been actual witnesses seeing them in the truck.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So Cindy left the church and left her position as
a music director. She said that she began her affair
with Jeff at about the same time when she resigned
from the church. I always think that she probably had
been having any affair with Jeff a while before she resigned.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
Oh sure, but because why did she resign? She was
really into the church, so that was a strange thing.
So you have to think if she resigned, it was
probably from pressure or discomfort or something. He was clearly
a suspect, oh at this point for sure.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
But when asked if she had shot Michael, she said no.
She did admit to being an adulterer. She did admit
to being an adulter, but said that she could never
shoot anyone. She told the detective that she had no
reason to kill her husband because he already knew about
the affair.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Is that really true, though? So let's say you're having
an affair and your husband knows about it, you might
want to kill him if you're the killing type, because
you still have a motive. You don't want to get
divorced if you're in this church community for one thing.
Plus there's probably some money situation. So I don't think
that she had no reason to kill Michael just because
(19:41):
he knew about the affair. No, but that was what
Cindy said, and she was kind of teary and trying
to get him to feel sorry for her.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
It seems like, yeah, Cindy also said that she and
Michael were trying to work on their marriage. In fact,
they had recently taken a trip together to Disney World.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Now that I don't understand, But why two adults go to.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Disney World right after they got married or got married?
I know some people do that this was special to them.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I guess to me, though, Disney World is just a
place where you take kids. But when you're a Disney person,
that's a whole different world that you're in, right, It's
a Disney world, a Disney like world.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Yeah, Michael's dead, She's innocent. Now we've got to get
pastor Jeff In to talk. Absolutely, we talked to him
or whatever. We got to get his story.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Well, yeah, because he's a suspect just as much as
Cindy is, and maybe the two together even right. Yeah,
So in his interview with detectives, Jeff Brown said that
he was really shocked when he heard about Michael's murder.
Then Andrea takes a socide to tell us that she's
always found the art of interrogation fascinating. Now this is
a dateline unforgettable. So what they do is they sit
(20:51):
at a desk and sometimes the camera goes to them
and they explain why the case interested them or some
kind of you know, backstory. So what she says is
that sometimes what isn't said in an interrogation is as
important as what is said. So investigators are trained to
read between the lines. Is someone emotional enough? Are they
(21:11):
too calm? You know, the body language is a big deal.
So let's talk about Jeff Brown's interview.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Yeah, he's pretty defensive about his affair with Cindy. Plus,
his body legs was really very telling. He was gripping
the arms of his chair to the point where his
knuckles turned white, and he admitted to being in love
with Cindy. He said that he and his wife were
getting a divorce and he's waiting for Cindy to get
her divorce, right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
So, what the detective first asked Jeff was if it
bothered him that he was moving forward with a divorce,
but Cindy wasn't. She hadn't asked Michael for a divorce
as far as anyone knew, so Jeff admitted that that
did concern him. He also admitted that it bothered him
that Cindy and Michael were apparently still sleeping together up
until Michael's death. Now, remember Cindy had said that her
(22:00):
husband didn't want to have sex with her anymore. But
now Jeff said that Cindy had described having sex with
Michael to him, and he found this to be nasty.
He said, So, I don't know where that came from.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Nasty sex?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Was that something weird they were doing. We don't get
to hear about that, so I don't know. But he added,
that's no motive for murder, right, I'm not going to
murder her just because she's having sex with her husband
and won't leave him. What good would murdering him do
besides getting him out of the way, maybe getting her
some more money, and you know, she wouldn't be having
sex with anyone but me. Oh yeah, maybe it is.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
A motive, you think, yes, And Jeff did have a
good alibi, he seemed to. He said that he was
fifty miles away at the time that Michael was shot
and killed. He also said, when asked directly, he did
not shoot Michael, and when asked if he knew if
Cindy had killed Michael, Jeff said he had no clue.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
M so he didn't really defend her and saying, oh god,
she'd never do that.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Nope, So he was allowed to leave the police station.
While the detectives were suspicious of Jeff, they didn't have
enough for an arrest at that point.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Now, so now the detectives looked into Jeff's background. So
he was married, he was a father of two with
another one on the way, so a pregnant wife, oh boy.
And he had a really interesting past. He'd been in
the military, he'd actually been a marine, and he'd also
worked as a police officer for two years. Then he
had worked for a moving company, and he'd been a hairdresser.
(23:27):
So what's with this kind of as jack of all trades,
I guess so, but you have to wonder why he
was a police officer for just two years, what happened there?
And then he's working as a hairdresser at a moving company.
He was working for that pest control company. And he
was the church pastor, which I understand that doesn't pay much.
(23:49):
That's usually like a side thing in a small church
like that, anyway, I believe. Yeah, So yeah, jack of
all trades, master of none.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Is what it seems like. Yeah. Now, as you can
probably imagine, in a town the size of Mars, Michael
Rees's murder was the center of attention.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
Oh yeah, the talk of the town.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the case. Jerry Vincent,
who is the town's building inspector, thought that Jeff Brown
had been obsessed with Cindy for a while.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, so maybe it was more than he was letting
on this thing with Cindy.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Well, you know, you got to present yourself in the
best face, best light.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Well, I guess so. But if you have nothing to hide,
that wouldn't be an issue. No, Now, Jerry was very
fond of Michael, and Jerry said that he saw Jeff
sitting on a bench in the park across from Cindy
and Michael's house quite often, so kind of stalking the place.
He thought Jeff may have been waiting for Michael to
leave the house so he could go in and be
with Cindy or something like that. I mean, that's really weird, right,
(24:52):
He's married with kids, and he should be working and
doing other things. Why is he sitting outside of Cindy's house.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, because Cindy has a job too, Yeah that she
gets driven to and from by her husband. So right,
I don't know if he's thinking he's going to go
have sex with Cindy. Well, Michael's gonna have but she
works too.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well, these could be in her days off and things
like that. Because Cindy was, you know, definitely having sex
with him. It's not like he was unwanted from what
I heard.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, right, it.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Seemed to be a two way street, definitely. So after
Cindy had left the church, she and Michael had moved
on to another church. But guess what then Jeff started
showing up at that church, and the pastor there said
that sometimes, when Cindy and Michael were already seated in
a pew, Jeff would come in and he would actually
sit in between them. How crazy is that? So Michael
(25:49):
definitely knew, and Michael must have been at least annoyed
with this. What the hell?
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, it's just totally bizarre. Yeah, not that he has
to get into a fistfight or anything, but mine.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
You just don't do that, No, And it makes me
wonder about Jeff's mental state. Seems really weird, like not
something someone who's mentally stable would do.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
But it also shows you that Jeff was jealous, right,
why else would he be horning in.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Like that, Yeah, he's marking his territory out there.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Right, absolutely. And then the more police looked into Jeff,
the more they found that people just didn't like him.
Rumor was that Jeff was considered a man whore. Now,
if you saw this guy, it's funny because he's just
very normal, ordinary looking guy. So he doesn't look like
a man whore, at least not what I would envision
as such.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
So you want him to be wearing a shirt unbuttoned
to his waist with a bunch of chains and bracelets
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Not necessarily that, but maybe someone who's kind of handsome
and stands out a little bit is being charming and
handsome a bit, someone who has some sex appeal, I mean,
just a little sex appeal. I'm not asking for a
lot here. But the whole point of this is that
Cindy was not Jeff's only extramarital affair. So that could
kind of work in Jeff's favor because that would mean
(27:08):
maybe it wasn't that big a deal to him if
he'd slept with many women. Yeah, but then when you
think about him going and squeezing into the church pew
and sitting outside the house, pretty weird So then Andrea
speaks to Cindy's uncle, Roy Henderson, and he agreed that
Jeff was just no good. Not only was he a
man whore, he called him a con man. So I
(27:29):
can kind of see that, going from job to job, lying,
sleeping with other people's wives, just not a great person.
Kind of the opposite of what they said about Michael.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
According to Cindy's mom, Judy, Michael knew all about Jeff
Brown and his relationship with his wife. In fact, Michael
had told Judy that Jeff was trying to take his
wife away from him, and he also told Judy that
he had some fear of Jeff. He was afraid of
what Jeff could be capable of.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
So right there, that's alarming, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, he said that he knew Jeff had heard I'm
gonna try to hurt him if he got the opportunity.
Turns out he is probably correct.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah. Now, one month before Michael was murdered, Jeff had
asked two of his fellow employees at a moving company
to kill Michael. So there's a red flag for you.
He was actually offering his car and some cash after
Michael was dead, and these men were like no way,
and they'd reported Jeff to a different police department out
(28:30):
where the moving company was located. So that's why detectives
at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and the Morris Police
Department didn't know about this until after Michael had been
murdered and they spoke to these men. So at this point,
things were looking pretty bad for pastor Jeff. He's looking
like he could have done this. He's turning out to
(28:52):
be a real problematic person and a strong suspect in
Michael's murder. Still, Jeff was insisting that he had been
fired away when Michael was killed. Remember, his alibi is
that he was fifty miles away, so he couldn't have
done it if he was that far away.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
So detectives are waiting for just cell phone records they
want to disprove his alibi. In the meantime, they focused
on Cindy and one funny thing that they focused on
was the fast food for milos.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah it does sound funny, we told you, yeah, we
were going to talk about that. Well, the police thought
it was very suspicious that Cindy and Michael had not
eaten their fries. Right the fries are popular, and everyone
knew you needed to eat them while they were still
hot for them to taste good. And you know, Cindy
and Michael liked to eat. They enjoyed the fries, and
(29:40):
who doesn't enjoy fries, right.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Absolutely, But the deal with these particular Milos fries you
absolutely gotta eat them when Yeah, so there's some kind
of sacrilege if you don't.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Absolutely these are seasoned special fries.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So finding cold French fries in the scene of the
crime actually raised some questions in the detectives' eyes.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Well, it dead, but you know, even if it wasn't Milo's,
why would you go get dinner, leave it at the
house and run to the Piggly Wiggly. We'll get more
into that, because that doesn't make sense. There's only the
two of them there.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
They don't have.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Kids to feed, right right. So now things get even
more interesting because it turns out that pastor Jeff Brown
was a kept man.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Well SAIDI is a man who Yes, that's true.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
But Cindy, even though she's very far from wealthy, had
been paying Jeff's bills, so that's strange. They would actually
find a file with the lease on Jeff's apartment, which
Cindy had rented for him. Also, she was paying his
car payments and giving him money.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I guess pastor Jeff had worked his magic on Cindy.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Maybe I'm underestimating Jeff.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Huh, you might be.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Detectives were hoping that Cindy and Jeff would turn on
each other and then the truth would come out, So
they reviewed Cindy again, going over her nine to one
to one call. There were some strange things they brought up,
like when the detective first walked into the house, he
immediately saw Michael's body. We talked about that a little bit,
but Cindy had called nine to one one saying she
(31:15):
couldn't find him. Now, the detective felt that it would
be next to impossible for Cindy to be looking for
her husband in that small house and not see him
lying pretty much right in front of her.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Yeah. Basically was basically, Yeah, you come in the front
door and straight shot down the hallway or whatever, there's
the body.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yes, the idea of a burglary gone wrong really wasn't
adding up.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah. The construction worker who was working on a house
obviously had access to it, had a solid alibi there
was no sign of a forest entry, so we're getting
more and more suspicious of Cindy.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yeah, so this is when detectives looked into the death
of Cindy's first husband. He had supposedly died of a suicide,
and I believe it was a gunshot wound. So yeah,
so the case was reopened and investigated, but the detectives
couldn't find anything at this point to prove that she
had killed her first husband. But you know, like you said,
(32:11):
that's quite a coincidence, and most detectives don't believe in coincidences,
that's right, because things like that usually don't happen. So
why had she lost her first husband and now her
second husband had been killed. It's very suspicious, especially with
her having an affair and all that. But then we
go back to Milo's French fries because the detective says
(32:32):
they are absolutely the best French fries in the world,
in the world, Dick.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
In the world, not just in Morris. We keep coming
back to these French fries, not just.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
In Alabama, not just in America, but in the world. Yeah,
but you know, there's that one thing you do have
to eat them hot, just to remind you. So of
course the police were confused about Cindy dropping off the
fries and going to the Pigly Wiggly. It's funny, but
it was a red flag that Cindy did not stay
at home at least long enough to eat her fries.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Right, But there's other stuff. I mean, the police found
it suspicious that Cindy went out to the Pigley Wiggy
that night at all. Yes, Cindy had said that they
needed orange juice and lunch meat for the next morning,
but there was actually plenty of lunch meat and orange
juice in the fridge, so there wasn't any need to go.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
So this is what cracks me up about murderers, a
lot of them, because they say stupid things. Now, if
you're going to murder someone, you can't think of some
food that's not in your fridge that you needed, or
pour out the orange juice first.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, you know, it's just so stupid, And I would
buy for you.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah, you know you're gonna say that, So why not
at least say that you went out for something that
you really are out of, or make sure you're out
of it before you go, right, Right, So she really
just kind of tripped herself up with that one.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
I'd love to know what she said when the detectives
pointed out that there was already cold cuts and orange
juice in the fridge.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
I'm not getting a genius vibe off of Cindy, really,
so you know who knows. So the detectives explain to
Andrea how it's often the small details like this that
can lead to big moments in an investigation. So first
we've got the fries very suspicious, then the lunch meat
and orange juice. So this is a case that's very
(34:21):
food oriented.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
But wait, there's more. Cindy admitted that while she was
on her way to the grocery store, Jeff had called
her Jeff Brown he needed gas for his car.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
What a man hor he's a man.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Whore manhor reference. Yeah, so she'd met him at a
gas station and give him fifteen dollars for some gas.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, so she must have been way into him if
she was doing that.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Yeah, it kind of makes me think that she's not
actually trying to make her marriage work.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
No, it really doesn't seem that way.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
He doesn't.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
It checked out of her marriage absolutely.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
So police got a warrant and they searched Cindy's office
where she worked, and one funny thing they pointed out
was there's a picture of her and Michael on her desk.
But if you look on the shelf beneath that, there's
a picture of Cindy and Jeff Brown on her desk.
So you know, she's just being very upfront about it
in that way.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Yes, she is.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Also, detectives found a file in the cabinet that was
labeled Jeff Brown. Inside was the apartment lease and the
car note for Jeff's car, So she was really paying
his bills, his rent, his electricity, his car payment board. Yeah,
but Cindy's not wealthy.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
No, not at all, not at all. I wonder if
she has a allowance for them.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
You have to wonder, because she's bringing him cash for gas,
and you have to wonder, did Michael know about this?
Maybe Michael knew about this and was done with it.
Maybe he wanted a divorce and she was just one
of these people that thinks it's worse to get a
divorce than to murder someone, which we've seen often in
the religious communities. Could be Yeah, So by this time,
(36:04):
detectives are beginning to believe that Cindy and Jeff were
responsible for Michael's murder, and they don't know who shot him,
but they're looking at these two. So they went and
shared what they knew so far with the prosecutors, and
it definitely seemed like Cindy and Jeff wanted to be
together and to do that, they wanted Michael Rhese dead.
So there's your basic story there, an old story that
(36:27):
we've heard before. So looking into Jeff and Cindy's cell
phone data, they found many nude pictures and sexts. Their
sexting had continued right up until the day of the
murder too. When prosecutors looked at the cell phone records
from the night that Michael was shot, they found a
text from Jeff to Cindy that read keep me posted.
(36:48):
So that's pretty suspicious right there.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Well, that is, and if you look at the timing
of the things, Cindy and Michael had been in church
until seven that night, and that particular text, you'd come
in at six fifty seven before church let out. So
prosecutors believe that the text showed that the two applauding
to kill Michael that very night.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, they had more proof too, Cindy called Jeff after
church and left the line open so that Jeff could
listen to what was happening. So the line on her
cell phone remained open to his until the time that
Michael was killed. So that's pretty strange, kind of creepy,
it really is, because they had evidence that Cindy was
still on the phone with Jeff throughout the time when
(37:28):
she shot Michael. They also knew that when Cindy got
home from the grocery store, she was still on her
phone with Jeff, So even as Cindy called nine one one,
she was still on her cell phone with Jeff.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah. What Cindy didn't know was that nine when one
calls begin recording as soon as the ringing starts, so
you can hear her on the recording talking to Jeff
very calmly. Cindy tells Jeff that her phone is about
to die. Then when the nine one one dispatcher answers,
she starts acting all hysterical. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Andrew says that it was when covering this case that
she learned about this nine to one to one call thing,
And me too, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I
did hear of it a few months ago with a case,
but pretty recently I heard about that. I did not
know that. But in addition to this, the cell records
would show that Jeff was not fifty miles away from
the crime scene when Michael was killed. Either. The information
(38:21):
was specific enough to show that Jeff was within a
couple hundred feet of Cindy and Michael's house when Michael
was killed.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Yeah, So the prosecutors and detectives believed that Michael was
shot and killed right after Michael and Cindy came home
from Milo's and put their dinner on the table. They
believed that after they got home, Michael went to the
back door to let the dog out, Cindy walked right
up behind him and shot him in the back of
the head.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
That's about as cold as you can get. That's very
cold blooded.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
Didn't say anything, just go up and bim. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Now, they couldn't prove that Cindy was the actual shooter,
but it really didn't matter if it was her or Jeff,
because according to the law, anyone involved in the planning
or the process is as guilty as the actual shooter.
So the police were ready to make some arrests. They
arrested Cindy and Jeff at the same time. They were
(39:13):
returning to Cindy's office after going out to lunch together.
These people are idiots.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
They're keeping a low profile, aren't they.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Jeez, so you've just killed your husband. People know you're
having an affair with this guy, but you just keep
hanging out with them, paying his bills, going out to lunch.
It's really moronic. So what detectives were hoping for was
that Cindy and Jeff would turn on one another. One
prosecutor tells Andrea. The theory is that if one spouse
(39:42):
is killed, talk to the one who's still breathing. Pretty
clever quote there.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
So, now that Cindy and Jeff were both charge for
Michael's murder, we're hearing from Morris resident and building inspector Jerry.
Jerry says, the first win to squeal gets the best deal.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Uh huh.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Bunch of poets there. But Cindy told Jerry that her
lawyer told her she had nothing to worry about because
the police couldn't prove a thing. He says he felt
like he was looking into the eyes of a cold
blooded killer.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Well, and you wouldn't expect it, right, she's kind of
a maternal, dumpy looking, middle aged woman, and she goes
to church all the time and takes care of the choir.
It's just really, yeah, not your typical killer.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Well sure, but I don't know what your typical killer
looks like.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, that's a good point, because there are many different ones.
But she just didn't seem as manipulative as she turned
out to be, because she turned out to be quite manipulative.
So a lot of her innocent woman thing was fake.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Yes, it was so.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
By August of twenty fifteen, when Jeff's trial was about
to start, neither he nor Cindy had shown any sign
of squealing on one another. But just minutes before jury
selection began, I've turned to his lawyer and said he
was ready to make a deal. So Jeff Brown finally
admitted that he had been involved in Michael's murder. He
(41:09):
was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter as long as
he testified against Cindy, so Cindy's.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
Trial began in November of twenty sixteen. A large group
of Michael's friends were there for the trial, but Cindy's mother, Judy,
believed that Cindy could not have killed Michael, and she
blamed Jeff Brown completely for the murder.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Well, I don't blame her. I think most mothers would
feel that way. You wouldn't want to believe that, and
you'd want to protect your child. Sure, because she doesn't
know that Cindy did it, it's not like she has
evidence thrown right in her face of it. So she
still could manage to say that Cindy was innocent. And
you know, I guess her theory there was that Jeff
(41:49):
was stalking her and using her, and Jeff decided to
do this murder on his own.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Well, sure that'd be one way to present.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
It, right, Yeah, But the prosecutors felt sure that both
Cindy and Jeff had been responsible for Michael's death, and
they were convinced that Cindy was the mastermind. Now I
don't know about a mastermind, but I think she was
the one with the ideas to do it.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Well, maybe you could say that she is less stupid
than her her boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
I don't know if that's less stupid. I just think, yeah,
maybe she could get people to do it she wanted
more easily than Jeff could.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah, but she could have gotten.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
A divorce, right, The thing is, I guess in this
religious Baptist community, divorces really looked down upon, but I
would think that murder would be even more looked down
upon than divorce.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Yeah, I was just going to say that, But we've seen.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
That with many couples where the person who kills their
spouse would rather murder them, thinking they'll get away with
it of course, than get a divorce. So that's really odd.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Yeah, we haven't done any case where the murderous spouse
is hoping they get caught. They always see it as, yeah,
if I don't divorce my spouse, I'll murder that person
and I'll get away with it.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
Well yeah, I mean, of course they're not looking to
get caught, but they also aren't very smart about it,
and they do usually get caught.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It seems like.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So, rather than being exposed as someone
who was having an affair, Cindy decided she wanted to
look like a victim. She wanted to be a widow
of a murdered husband and that would come across much
more nicely than being a divorced kind of slutty girl.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
Yeah. But right from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors
were working to shatter the image of Cindy Reese as
is god feury music director and grieving widow. So to
prove this, they laid out all the evidence they had
against Cindy, which included the paperwork for Jeff's apartment and
car that had been found in her office. It also
included her affair with Jeff Brown, the cell phone data,
(43:55):
and of course the cold milot French fries.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, that was a big deal.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
Jeff was the star witness and he filled in the
puzzle pieces by explaining how the murder actually happened. Well,
he was on the cell phone with Cindy, he heard
a pop. Then after the murder she met Jeff at
a gas station and told him that it was all dead.
Michael was dead. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Jeff claimed that he wasn't at the house when Cindy
shot Michael. He testified that Cindy gave him the murder
weapon when they met at the gas station and just
told him to get rid of it. But they did
have records that showed he was nearby. Cindy's defense attorney
wanted the jury to believe that Jeff had killed Michael
on his own, of course, and he was lying about
Cindy being involved at all. They claimed that the trajectory
(44:39):
of the bullet proved that Jeff was the shooter because
Cindy was too short. So I don't know about that.
We've heard that before. We heard it quite recently in
the Alec Murdoch trial, where they were saying the shooter
had to be like five foot two and he was
six foot four or something. But people don't just stand still.
People move and bend, and you know, I don't think
(45:01):
that's really that convincing.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
No, And I'm looking at bullet trajectories is kind of
being similar to blood spatter and that type of thing.
Kind of a nebulous science. Really, look what you just
talked about, Sure, people move a little bit. To me,
it'd be really.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Difficult well to tell who the shooter is. But I
think that the basic trajectory of a bullet inside the
body is real science. But how it came in from
that direction, I don't think so. Right, Yeah, Yeah. Cindy's
attorney said that Jeff, not Cindy, was the one with
the motive to kill Michael. He said that Jeff was
(45:40):
obsessed with Cindy because she was his meal ticket. Remember,
she was giving him money and paying his bills. So
Jeff needed Michael out of the picture so that Cindy
would continue to pay his bills. But none of these
seem really like a great motive to kill somebody.
Speaker 3 (45:56):
No, and how long had Cindy been paying the bills anyway?
Speaker 2 (46:00):
That I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
They never said, I mean, was about to stop. It
was Michael suspicious that money was going somewhere or what.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah, I don't know. I think that Jeff was going
to get a divorce from his wife that was actually
in the works, and he wanted Cindy to do the
same thing, and that if he was with Cindy, she
could actually support him financially, So that could be the
whole thing right there.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
Well, yeah, I'm just saying that he could be. There's
no reason for him to think that she's going to
stop paying for everything.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that's a motive.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
No.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
The defense attorney that puts Jeff in in the midst
of things.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Huh, yeah, I guess that's true. The defense took the
risk of putting Cindy on the stand to testify in
her own defense, and Cindy told the jury that she
had not shot her husband, but she did admit that
her marriage to Michael was pretty rocky. She was adamant though,
that she knew nothing about Jeff's plan to kill her husband,
(47:00):
and she was, you know, kind of whiny about it,
trying to look sympathetic, you know, sure bit of an actress.
So would the jury believe Cindy. Would they believe she
was a church going grieving widow or would they think
she was a church going cheating widow.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Well, my guess is that they believed the latter, Yes,
because the jury deliberated for just ninety minutes before they
came back with a guilty verdict. That's quick.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
It's very quick.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Take a quick vote to see where people stand, and boom,
it's unanimous.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Pretty much. Yeah. Most of Cindy's family thought that this
verdict was wrong, though, but Cindy's cousin Delane, thought that
the jury did get it right. Delane still isn't sure
if Cindy got caught up in the moment with Jeff
or if she really was a cold blooded killer who
planned the whole thing and possibly killed her first husband
as well.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Yeah, with his plea Yould Jeff Brown got a twenty
year sentence, Cindy got a forty year sentence, so left
to spend their lives without him. Friends and family of
Michael Reis were left with only memories of a kind
and gentle soul with a big laugh and an even
bigger heart.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, Andrea's winding down here, and she says that this
was a really salacious case. But what really stuck with
her to make it a dateline unforgettable episode was that
it was a senseless loss of a man who really
had inspired so much love. I don't know how many
people they talked to, but the people that were on
camera just seemed to think that Michael was really funny,
(48:31):
kind and just a great guy overall.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
Yeah, just one of those and really loves.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
You liked to hang with, right, Yeah, So it just
seems especially cruel that someone he loved would do this
to him, it does. I mean, it's a really sad case.
It seems like this couple was living this simple life
and Michael was a good guy. I do feel like
Jeff Brown influenced Cindy quite a bit, But then Cindy
seems very cold blooded and the killing was definitely premeditated.
(48:58):
I think Jeff was very lucky to only have to
plead to manslaughter.
Speaker 3 (49:03):
Oh remember the advice one who talks first gets the
best deal.
Speaker 2 (49:07):
Squeals got a rhyme o.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Squeal first, best deal.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Okay, all right, Well, I still have to wonder about
Cindy's first husband, because it's very curious that you would
lose two husbands like that.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
It is, and I was wondering how much they looked
into that.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Well, they said that they did open the case and
weren't able to prove it. That's all they said. They
weren't explaining it.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
A lot enough time had gone by, it might have
been very difficult to re examine the case.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
Sure, well, maybe maybe.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
They looked at it and decided, yeah, he really did
kill himself.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Maybe, but they didn't say that. I think if they
said that, they'd say she wasn't guilty. Maybe Kelly and
her team on Cold Justice can head on down there
and have a look.
Speaker 3 (49:52):
We'll check with them.
Speaker 2 (49:53):
They like to solve the cold cases, and that, you know,
Morris seems like the kind of town they usually end
up in, a small town, a southern, small rural town. Yeah,
very homey. All right, Well, This was a good talk.
I always enjoy a good dateline. And we'll be back
with a regular episode soon and we'll see you all
at the Quiet Act.
Speaker 3 (50:12):
Come on down, plenty of seats. Bye bye, bye, guys,
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