INNOCENCE LOST: What Really Happened to 3 Texas Sisters Found Dead in Pond? (Episode 89) TRUE CRIME

To all our listeners, this is another one of our podcasts for your listening pleasure. If you like our true crime podcast genre please find us on Spreaker and You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/@undersuspicionpodcast

Three young Texas sisters girls were strangled and left in a pond in east Texas, and no arrests have been made in a case that advocates and experts believe has been severely mishandled by local authorities.

Nine-year old Zi’Ariel Robinson-Oliver, 8-year-old A’Miyah Hughes, and 5-year-old Te’Mari Robinson-Oliver, known as the Oliver 3, were reported missing on July 28, 2022, in Atlanta, Texas. The girls’ cousin, Paris Propps, who was watching the three sisters and their siblings while their mother was at work, reported the girls missing around 9 p.m. Hours later, on July 29, all three bodies were found in a nearby pond. Initially, authorities said it was a drowning.

But in March of 2023, nearly eight months after the girls were last seen alive, the Cass County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that a homicide investigation is underway. Autopsy reports concluded the manner of death for all three girls was homicide, indicating evidence of strangulation. The girls also suffered lacerations to their faces.

Welcome to Season 2 of Under Suspicion, the weekly true crime podcast hosted by retired Crime Analyst and Police Officer Brian Long and Journalist College Professor Dave Rattigan. Each week they will analyze the Means, Opportunity and Motive of unsolved heinous cases in an attempt to solve the mystery.

Brian and Dave will cover everything from murders, missing persons to the nations most notorious serial killers. Under Suspicion is not your typical true crime podcast, its much more! It’s your weekly look into the complex world of criminology and victimology.

This podcast was previously released under The Crime Solvers Podcast. We have since changed our name to Under Suspicion. Podcast host Brian Long was previously referred to as Dale Lawrence (pseudonym)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Young kids when they go unaccounted for. You always look
at the innis circle because young kids are not supposed
to go unaccounted for. There's something definitely suspicious in that
type of a situation.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome just under suspicion where we pick a crime and
then analyze the means opportunity in motive to help solve
the mystery. Here are you hosts retired police officer and
crime analyst Brian Pete Long and journalist college professor Dave Radigan.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Friday, July twenty ninth, twenty twenty two. Shamanique Oliver Wilkerson
twenty eight year old single mother of six children who
went to work at approximately one o'clock in the afternoon
in Atlanta, Texas, which is located on the eastern part
of Texas, neighboring Louisiana and Arkansas, while her thirty one

(01:01):
year old male cousin, Paris Props Baby sat her six
young children at her residence in Douglasville, Texas. He had
been living with Schomanigue's family for about two years. He
does have a criminal history. Around nine thirty pm, Props
he was a neighbor's phone and called Shamani while she

(01:21):
was at work and told her, your kids are missing,
and that's what started this.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Kids go missing and Paris Props was a minor criminal record.
He approaches a neighbor, Josephine Webster, and according to Miss Webster,
Props is covered in water. He's soaking wet. Now, just
to kind of throw this to the side, the temperature
that day in Texas was anywhere from one hundred and
one as a high to seventy seven as a low,

(01:48):
so it could have been sweat, meaning he was frantically
searching for his cousin's kids. However, Miss Webster adamantly stated
that she did not believe it was and that he
was soaking wet and why was he soaking wet? And
we're going to see that going forward.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Chamanik called nine to one one as she rushed home.
She discovered three of her children safe and sound. Unfortunately,
she had three daughters nine years old, eight years old,
and five year old know where to be found. The
search began within a few hours. Shoes that a child's
bicycle were found in a field. There were a pond

(02:27):
that's about two hundred yards away from Chamanik's house. Footprints
were also found in the mud at the end of
the pond. Early the next morning, the Bowie County Dive
Team recovered the bodies of three girls from the pond.
This was at approximately two o'clock the next day, July thirtieth.

(02:47):
It was initially ruled an accidental drowning. However, six days later,
the family was informed that the girls were strangled and
thrown into the pond after being murdered. They had severe
lacerations on their faces and had been sexually assaulted. It
was a whole different thing.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Like I said, initially it was a drowning. Okay, Now,
the only one informed that it was not a drowning
six days later was the family, And that brings one
point of law enforcement contention. When if they drowned, everything
would have been people would have dealt with it. But
there wasn't a killer on the loose. But once they

(03:27):
found out six days later that they were killed, they
were murdered, not just murdered in a kind of a
simple way, but they were strangled to death. So if
you look at cause of death in any homicide, let's
go with three basic ones. Gunshot, which is a very
impersonal way to kill someone, meaning the person who would

(03:49):
shoot someone is not as psychotic of a killer as
the person who would personally walk up to someone either
from behind or in the front, and choke them and
watch the life come out of their body, look in
their eyes as they're about to die, or someone who
would grab a knife and plunge it into a person

(04:09):
and watch them gas for breath and watch them look
at them and beg for their life. So the type
of person that killed these three girls is definitely a
threat to society. So the first issue here with law
enforcement in Texas was they didn't inform the general public
that they potentially could be in danger. Because when someone

(04:32):
kills in that manner and the girls were strangled to death,
When someone kills in that manner, there are much more
of a threat to the general public than would be
someone who kills in a very impersonal manner kind of
with a gun, meaning a kid in a car, he
drives up to someone and randomly shoots someone. That person
while they're a threat, the person who kills in a

(04:54):
very personal manner up and close is much more dangerous.
So they should have informed the people in that neighborhood
that there's a killer on.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
The loose, Okay, because this is the stranger killer.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
This, Well, we don't know if it's a stranger Obviously
they haven't solved it yet. We're gonna get into that
as we go through the podcast. They don't know if
it's a stranger, but when young children die under the
age of six, it's typically someone within their social circle.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
Okay, the cops respond to the scene. What should they
have done? The first responding officers?

Speaker 1 (05:34):
What's the responsibility the first thing in this case. If
I was the first responding officer to this scene, I
think my mindset would be, you know, the young girls,
they could just be out playing. I know it's dark
and it's an a wooded area, but that's where they live. Yeah,
at least the nine in the eight year old could
be out playing, just kind of goofing off. So the

(05:55):
cops probably thought these girls, they're just out having a
good time. So when they arrived at the scene, they
didn't treat it as a crime scene. So they called
in a lot of people. So whenever you have a
missing person, you're going to call in as many law
enforcement professionals as possible. They're going to come on foot,

(06:15):
they're going to come in ATVs, they're going to come
and pick up trucks, especially Texas, they're going to come
with dogs. So you could have thirty forty people on
that scene within an hour. And if that scene turns
into a crime scene, what's going to happen is you're
going to contaminate the crime scene with all the footprints.
So anything that was left at that crime scene or

(06:37):
potentially left at the crime scene by the killer, it's
going to be destroyed and it's going to make the
case going forward going to be very difficult to solve.
And that's where we're at with this case. It's unsolved.
It's very difficult to solve because they don't really have
any evidence at this point that we're aware.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
Of, right, but they've also been pretty close mouthed what
they had and what they didn't have.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
That's pretty common in law enforcement, meaning they're not going
to show their hand. If they have an idea who
the suspect or suspects may be, they're not going to
show their hand because they don't want to tip it
to the suspect. They don't want anyone to know what
they have. But we're going to go back to what
I just previously said. They probably should have told the

(07:22):
general public, Hey, lock your doors, watch your kids more
than you would typically watch them, because we have someone
out there who we don't know who they are yet,
and they just hideously killed three young girls.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
Horrible, horrible. Okay, So question this, what should the police,
what might they have? What should they have?

Speaker 1 (07:46):
Well, with any type of like a good crime scene,
first of all, you have the bottom line. With any
crime scene, it's going to be the experience of the investigators.
Meaning I've been to crime scenes and I've seen very
experienced forensic scientists show up there and do an outstanding job,
meaning extracting DNA, blood evidence, fiber evidence, fingerprint evidence. So

(08:11):
if you have that type of a person coming to
a crime scene, then whatever evidence is available, you're going
to be able to get it. So I don't know
what type of persons or type of crime scene analysts
they had coming there, what their experience was. So the
question initially was did the cops do a thorough investigation

(08:32):
once they found out that a crime had been committed?
And I think my answer to that is, I think
initially when they showed up Dave, they thought the girl
was just missing. And I think what happened in this
crime scene was that most of the evidence, like the
fiber evidence, any blood evidence. The big thing here is

(08:55):
the foot print evidence. Okay, because the kids are in
the woods. So if you have three girls walking in
the woods with someone else, whoever, that's someone else's someone
either who will either lured them away from their house
or took them knowingly, possibly their caregiver. Paris all right,

(09:16):
they would have gone with him willingly, so you would
have had four sets of footprints. But when the crime
scene people showed up, when the cops showed up, that
was all trampled. So you're not going to know what
footprints you have in that area. And to talk about footprints,
if you weigh around two fifty.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
Right, Dave, If that's a little heavy, but if you
were walking, theoretically weigh that okay.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
If you were walking through the woods and it was
a dirty area, not necessarily money, but a dirty area,
you had a pair of boots on or a pair
of shoes, at two point fifty, you're gonna have an
impression of probably a quarter inch if you're carrying something,
possibly a body, And now that body weighs eighty pounds,
let me do the MA three point thirty. That footprint

(10:03):
at three thirty might be a half inch into the dirt.
Another child could have weighed one hundred pounds, now it's
three point fifty. Now that footprint into the dirt, now
it can be three quarters of an inch. I don't
believe they have that evidence anymore because of the way

(10:23):
they initially responded, meaning they thought the girls were just
playing around, being goofy, being nine and eight year old
girls just running through the woods at nine thirty at night.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
We said, it's a small town, population.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Two hundred and ten, give a take a few dave yep.
So when in a small town, So a murder happens
in the town where we live forty thousand people, do
you have forty thousand suspects? Not really, but you have
a very large group of people that you might have
to look at. In a town of two hundred and ten,
you have a very small sample to kind of try

(10:57):
to figure out who could have who could have done this.
It's only two hundred and ten people. And another thing
about small towns like that, in a small town, everyone
knows each other. So if there's a stranger walking through
a small town, most people will probably I'm not going
to say confront that stranger. But then the word might
be heyd you see the stranger in town, then the

(11:20):
drug store, what was he doing here? What was she
doing here? Or a strange vehicle because it's a pot
of the country, those small little towns that most cars
don't deviate off their route to go into a small
town like that. So I guess initially your initial suspects
in a case like this a people in the neighborhood,

(11:41):
people in the town. Okay, Now, also you could they
could have done to find evidence could have been you
can do a cell phone search. You can ping all
the cell phones in that area and try to determine
if there's a cell phone that doesn't really belong meaning
an outsider. But you can also ping the cell phones
and see who was in that myriad immediate area, who

(12:02):
was in that immediate area at the supposed time of
their disappearance.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Let me ask you this theoretically, Yep, I'm the killer.
I've got the cell phone on me. I take each
girl individually that into the pond.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, I dump them in the pot.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
Is my cell is a if we checked my cell
phone history, will it show me going to the pond
three times?

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Usually not because in those small towns cell towers are
not as prevalent as they are in big towns. Okay,
So the ping of a cell phone, the location, the
GPS location of a cell phone, there might be within
a five hundred meter okay, are so, Yes, it's definitely
more difficult in a smaller area with less cell phone coverage.

(12:49):
All right, how about DNA, the DNA on that is
so DNA in and of itself. Now, let's say, under suspicion,
who do we think is under suspicion at this point?
I would say Paris.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, I know who you think.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
The caregiver. No, his DNA, And.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Again we stress we don't know, we don't know that,
but we're just saying theoretically.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Theoretically, but his DNA. Initially, he lives in the house
with the girls. His DNA could be in their hair,
could be on their clothing. But yes, DNA in an
area where it shouldn't be. These girls were allegedly sexually assaulted.
His DNA shouldn't be anywhere near those parts of their body, hair, fibers, fingerprints.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
They were in the pond, yes, for twelve hours, thirteen hours,
ten hours.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
The most time they were in the pond. The mother
went to work at one o'clock. They found the body
at two am. That's a thirteen hour difference. If they
were killed at one o'clock, then thirteen hours. So but
in reality, I believe the girls were seen somewhere around
eight by their other siblings. So you're talking seven hours, right,

(14:05):
And most DNA and most fingerprints in water, if you
read a lot of the research on it, it's a
seventy two hour window. Of over seventy two hours, you're
going to see it degrade and it's going to be
difficult to find if in fact it's on the body
to begin with.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Right, So if it's on the body and it's just
you know, if it's on the body, it's under water.
But then they take the they remove the body. Did
it take six six days for them to get the
autopsy results.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's a that's a difficult one. It usually doesn't take
six days for an autopsy. I'm not sure why it
did in this case. It's a small town. Maybe they
had a pot time medical examiner, which they do in
small towns, right, they have pot time medical examiners, So
six days is a long time. They could have found
out on day one to two. But they were trying
to figure out how they should release the information.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Think they could have could they have waited, could they
have Could the body have just been in the so
the body could have the bodies could have been.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Just in the morgue.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
They just didn't realize.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Well, no, I think they. I think initially they might
have just set out to drowning. Then someone with some
aptitude in regards to dealing with this probably said, you
know something, let's do a thorough autopsy because maybe it.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
Wasn't well, severe lacerations in the face, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
What is severe? I'm not sure what they're their definition
of severe is because, like I said, up until this point,
and it's been over two and a half years, there's
very little information being released by Lauren, which is.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Which is the norm? I mean, law enforcement doesn't release
more information than it has.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
To because they don't want to show their hand to
the person who's the killer. They don't want them to
know what they may have. Okay, so they want it
to be a surprise. If they're going to interview someone,
it has to be a surprise in regards to what
they have and what the killer may think that they have.
You can put someone in a bad situation, let them
think they don't have no information, or ask them a

(16:05):
few questions, let them make a statement. Then based on
that statement, you can counter that with, well, this is
the evidence we have. How did you know that?

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Okay, and so, and let me just one more thing.
We're pulling this, We're pulling these these girls in this
horrible situation out of the pond. Yes, do we have
lights everywhere and a well lit area like a like
a movie set late at night. We do.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Absolutely. You have to have it at a small town, absolutely, Well,
they got to call on the Feds of the state,
so the state state will have all those all those
I've gone to many car accidents at night and they
light up the area, especially one in the morning, two
in the morning. You're not going to wait till five
in the morning to start the investigation because the geography

(16:54):
of the area, the climate, heat, cold, rain, whatever the
case may be. You have to get the evidence while
it's still there. You're not going to wait three or
four hours to try to extract the evidence.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Okay. So we've got the cell phone location, we've got
the DNA evidence.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
The footprint evidence, footprint evidence, possibly the water the evidence. Yep,
So paris comes out of the water, right, Yeah, according
to the witness, it wasn't sweat. Now that water if
that was pond water, because the girls were in a pond.
How did they get into the pond. Someone had to
put them in the pond. So if he's wet and

(17:30):
it's not sweat, okay, then you can safely assume that
he probably was in that pond. Every Body of water
is going to have its own type of pH value,
mineral value, it's going to have organic elements in it
that would be on his clothes. So if they had
taken his clothes when they first arrived on seeing, if

(17:53):
they had spoken to the witness, Mss Webster and she said, hey,
see that guy right there, He was soaking wet when
he used my cell phone, and a stute cop would
have said, hey, grab that guy, put him in the cruiser,
grab his clothing, put it in an evidence bag, throw
a blanket on him, and let's check that clothing. Because
that clothing, the water in that clothing, if he was

(18:15):
in that pond, would be the same organic matter that's
in the pond. Not saying he killed him, he could
have very easily said, hey, they were drowning. I tried
to save them, but I can't swim and I had
to pull out of there. Now, that would have put
him in the crime scene because initially it was a drowning, correct,

(18:36):
So you want him to say something like that, you
want him to put himself in that pond. And obviously
they haven't even interviewed him to my knowledge up to
this point two and a half years later, formal interview.
But the water on his clothing could have been the
inn to at least put him in an interview room
and say, hey, why is that pond water on you

(19:00):
your clothing?

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yeah, and he said that it's sweat.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
He said it was.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
He said it was sweat.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Witnesses are far and few in between.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah, yeah. And how accurate are witnesses?

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Typically not so accurate? But that's more or less when
they say, hey, how tall was the guy? Was he
six feet or five eight? Was the African? American or Spanish?
Did he have gray hair or white hair? Did he
have glasses or was he wearing no glasses? And if
you put five or six witnesses in a room and
they all witnessed the same thing, you might get five

(19:34):
or six different answers, So historically eyewitness testimony is not
that accurate.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
Okay, But something like this where they say, oh, he
was wearing he was soaked through, Let's say, yeah, he
was soaked through and his clothes were wet. It could
have been it could have been sweat, or it could
have been something.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
That's more of an opinion. That's an opinion. But he
was wet. I think most people will say, yeah, he
was wet, he was wet. Why was he wet an opinion?

Speaker 3 (20:02):
Okay, let's look at the three things we always look at. Means, opportunity,
at motive. Yes, the girls were strangled. What was used?

Speaker 1 (20:18):
How were they strangled? Was it a rope, a shoelace, clothing, hands? Now,
if it was hands, if someone choked them from the front,
the impression of their hands should be on their throat.
That's somewhere their handprint should be embedded on their throat.
So we don't know. Does law enforcement know how they

(20:40):
were strangled? If they do, know, they're not tipping their hand.
But if they had a fingerprint from the child's neck,
and they can match that fingerprint and a fingerprint database,
they might have solved this case, So it might be
safe to assume they either have a fingerprint that doesn't
match with anyone or they have a partial finger print

(21:01):
that isn't going to work in regards to this case. Okay,
so a partial fingerprint unless you get another partial, it's
very difficult to match partial fingerprints without a baseline fingerprint.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Is it. Is it tough to determine how likely somebody
is to be Let's say this case the killer based
on a partial or is it just tough to get
a conviction?

Speaker 1 (21:25):
I don't know that we even want to get that
far with it. If you can get a partial and
then you can pull someone in, then it's up to
an astute investigator to speak to them and try to
make a determination on whether they're being truthful.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
All right, so you need more You need to.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Absolutely need more information.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Okay, so it's a we have a I don't know,
is it a stage crime scene?

Speaker 1 (21:48):
I think on the surface, staged crime scene. Let me
give you a definition of a staged crime scene first
of all. So, first of all, in any crime scene,
if you're going to stage it, the manner of death
must match the staging. For example, someone gets shot in
the head, you can't dump them in the pond and
say that they drown because the cause of death was

(22:11):
gunshot wound to the head. Yep, same scenario here, boyfriend
girlfriend have an argument. Boyfriend strangles his girlfriend with her sweater.
He stages it, wraps the sweater around her neck, ties
the sweater to the bedpost, ties it to the door.
Knob calls the cops. Hey, I just came home. I

(22:34):
found my girlfriend. She just hung herself. Now, through an investigation,
they might be able to determine, Yeah, she didn't hang herself.
She was already dead when she was hung. You can
tell that by certain impressions on the body. You can
tell that by certain wounds, broken bones in the neck.
So a stage crime scene must match the manner of death.

(22:57):
So in this case, I believe it was a stage
crime scene because if you go back to the beginning, initially,
what was found their bike and their shoes. So if
I'm going to go swimming in a pond, what am
I going to do? Take my shoes off, I'm going
to walk to the pond, I'm gonna jump in the pond,
and I'm gonna go swimming. So I'm stage in the

(23:17):
crime scene. I take their shoes off. They're already dead. Potentially,
I take their shoes off and then drag them or
carry them and put them in the pond, and they
find them five or six hours later. Through the autopsy,
they determined that no, they didn't drown, they were killed.
Now I'm much sure what they saw during that autopsy,

(23:40):
but my point is this, if they hadn't have been
sexually assaulted, if they didn't have the abrasions on their face, maybe,
just maybe the medical examiner, who might not have been
as astute as he or she was, might not have
found that, might not have found the injuries to the neck.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
Okay, but let's let's go on a different. Yeah path,
the cop who pulls the kid out of the or
whoever it is who pulls the kid out of the pond,
they've got severe lacerations on the face, they've got they've
been killed by strangulation. They're not going to notice this.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Well let me, Yeah, I've been to domestic situations. And
you go to a domestic situation and a guy and
a girl get into a fight, and the guy grabs
a girl by the neck. If she's a Caucasian girl,
you're going to see a lot of scratches on their neck,
you might see the red mox if they are dark
skinned individual. You initially might not see those until a

(24:39):
few hours later is when they'll pop up. So you
can very easily as an investigator be confused, especially at
night in the dark. YEP, three dark skinned girls come
out of the water, and initially at that lighting, the
lighting that was on scene there, they might not have
seen that. But when they bring it into a controlled
environment with good lighting, then they're going to see those injuries,

(25:00):
especially on a dark skinned individual.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Okay, a department in a small town like that, are
they more likely or less likely to notice details like that?

Speaker 1 (25:14):
I don't even know if it's it's an apartment in
a small town. I think it breaks down to an
individual police officer who is motivated focused on finding out
the answer to this particular situation. I think historically small
towns like that with maybe three or four cops probably
don't deal with a murder a week or five murders

(25:38):
a week like they do in say Chicago and New York.
So those cops are very astute. Cops down here might
not be as experienced, but you don't have to be
experienced you just have to have the desire to solve
the case, and you have to be able to look
outside the box.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Okay, and it's also be too I guess again, if
you don't think it's a if you don't think it's
a murder, and you're just thinking you're just dealing with
the tragedy of three kids who drown in a pond,
you might not be looking for those things initially.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
You might not be. And if you initially don't look
for it and the crime scene gets contaminated and you
lose all that evidence, you can't bring the evidence back, right, right,
you can't bring it back. So a lot of times,
a lot of cases that they do in true crime,
the reason why they do these cases is because initially

(26:30):
the law enforcement investigation, sometimes it's negligence. Other times it's
just we have to do it this way because we
have to find these kids. It's not negligence. But there
are many cases out there where law enforcement is negligent
in their investigation, meaning they don't do anything. They don't
control the crime scene, they don't call in professionals, accident

(26:51):
reconstruction professionals, they don't call in forensic scientists, they don't
call in doctors on the crime scene to look at
a body before they move.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
It, because they think that what they're seeing is one thing,
even if it's something.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Else, it's an illusion. And it's also David. It's also
the motivation of the individual officer. There are some who
are not as motivated as others. I hate to say.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Okay, obviously, the first thing you do is when a
child goes missing, you suspect the cop, suspects the parent,
the caregiver.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Typically, if you're going to go statistically, kids under the
age of six, over eighty percent of kids under the
age of six when they go missing and they are
found deceased, more likely than not it's their parent or
whoever the caregiver is at that moment. Now, I'm going

(27:49):
to kind of go off the cuff here for a second,
because this case is unsolved. All right, it's an unsolved case.
We're presenting some evidence and under suspicion. Paris, He's definitely
under suspicion. Let's take a look at the mother for
a second. Now, she worked in Atlanta, Texas, thirteen miles away,

(28:09):
so is it a fifteen minute drive? Could she have
gotten her car and for whatever reason, unbeknownst to us.
Could she have went to her house, lord her kids
out of the house, turk her kids out of the house,
and done something to them. Absolutely, she could have. There
are historical cases out there where her husband goes away

(28:32):
on a vacation or a retreat, or he goes away
for work an hour and a half two hours away
from home. Midnight, he leaves the hotel unbeknownst to any
of his friends, He drives home, he kills his wife.
He gets back at the hotel at four o'clock, six
o'clock in the morning, the cops come there, Hey, your
wife has been murdered. How did that happen? I was

(28:54):
in my hotel all night. If the cops take that
on face value, don't check his phone, don't check cameras
in the area, don't check his car, don't check the
fast pass that he might have gone through a toll
if they don't check his alibi. If they didn't check
the mother's alibi. Was she at work? Did she leave

(29:14):
work early and then go back to work. You don't
want to accuse anyone, But it's an unsolved case. So
if it's if it's an unsolved case, and guess what
everyone's under suspicion in a case like that, to include
the parent.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
Okay, But of course, like we said, as we said before,
we don't know if the police are not saying none
of the investigators are saying. So it could be that
police have checked her alibi and easy enough to check
if somebody goes to work.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
You don't know that. But as an investigator, you'll look
an objective. You get to run three or four parallel
investigation a stranger, a known offender, and then a secondary
known offender, and then someone from the neighborhood, so that
might be four different investigations. You get to run all
the same time, and you exclude people as the investigation

(30:01):
goes on.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
And as individuals that are always suspicious, you.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
Mean police officers, investigators, investigator you have to be suspicious,
you absolutely have to be. It's been said that some
of the best investigators would make great true crime novelists.
Absolutely they would. I used to read the Nancy Drew
misfile when I was a little kid. I probably read
a hundred of them. So if you have to be

(30:26):
able to think outside the box, you have to really
be able to cover every possible angle and just look
what is. What's in front of you isn't always what
happened or how you believe it to happen. You really
have to think. You have to think like a criminal,
but you also have to think like a true crime writer.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Okay, absolutely, you did all right, sounds like you're writing
a serial for a television series.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
I'm just building my alibi, David.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Let's talk about the concept of on accounted for a time.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, unaccounted for a time is what that means is
young kids. You had a couple of young kids growing up, Dave.
You're home. Yeah, little seven year old Jimmy's out in
the backyard. You and your wife are home. You look
out there. Twenty minutes later, he's not there. You ask
your wife you've seen Jimmy. I don't know where he is.
Maybe he's walking around the neighborhood visiting friends, or maybe

(31:18):
he's up the store. He's seven years old. Kids usually
under the age of twelve, depending on their maturity, they
have no unaccounted for a time. You know where those
kids are twenty four to seven. If you're a caregiver,
a babysitter, whatever the case may be, those kids are
always in your site. So How did those three girls nine,

(31:41):
eight and five go unaccounted for? How long were they
unaccounted for? Who was in charge of them at the time, Paris,
what's his excuse for why they went unaccounted? And on
the same note, kids thirteen, fourteen, fifteen else, always go
unaccounted for. Your daughters in college. You call her on

(32:04):
a Friday, I'll talk to you on Sunday. Forty eight
hours later, you don't get the phone call. You call
the school. We haven't seen we haven't seen your daughter,
and mister Radigan in two days. Now she's unaccounted for.
Now she's been unaccounted for for forty eight hours. That's
why missing persons cases, when you're talking about teenagers and

(32:26):
adults who go unaccounted, the killer gets the head stop
forty eight hours. You could be from Boston all across
the country to California in forty eight hours easily. So
young kids, when they go unaccounted for, you always look
at the inner circle because young kids are not supposed
to go unaccounted for. There's something definitely suspicious in that

(32:48):
type of a situation.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
What about secondary suspects.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yes, secondary suspects would be anyone in the neighborhood. Now,
I hate to throw the first witness under the bus,
but let's look at it from a law enforcement perspective.
She says that Paris comes to her house as to
use the phone to call nine one one. All right,
he came to the house, he used the phone. What

(33:14):
if her son was involved? But she said Paris looked
wet to me. His clothing was wet. Now the suspicion
should be thrown on Paris because his clothing was wet
while she's covering for her own son. So everyone in
that area, anyone could be out in that da Hundreds
could have been out in that area. People could have

(33:35):
just been wandering out in the area, even though I
did look up one of the hunting hours in Texas
and the sun sun up and sun down. But you
never know who could have been out in those woods.
So kind of anyone in that area who lived in
that immediate area would obviously be a suspect. And it's
nothing against them. Just because the cops come to the
door and knock on your door and start asking you

(33:56):
about a homicide, people get offended by that. I mean,
maybe they should, but you have to cross every t
and dart every eye to include the witness, because there
have been witnesses to crimes who have fabricated the story
to take the suspicion off of them. So it's good
to be a witness, but sometimes they're going to turn

(34:18):
the table on you and put you in the corner
and put the screws to you. And now you're going
to gee, I was a witness. I'm trying to help
the cabs and they're blaming me. They think I did it,
And you have to dispel every possible scenario, and the
only way to do that sometimes is to put someone
against the corner and say, hey, what do you know?
What are you not telling us? Are you sure his
clothes were wet? Where was your son at the time

(34:40):
of this this incident?

Speaker 3 (34:44):
What about this? Is something else? You had told me this?
You have a friend who worked in Texas, Yes, and
Lauren Force. Small town, small town, thousand people, and he
told you something about it, right, Yeah?

Speaker 1 (34:55):
I asked him. I called him. I said, hey, I'm
doing a case in Cass County and he left. He goes,
no one's gonna give you any information because I work
close to Cass County. And he said that in southern
justice right. You see it on the in the newspapers,
you see it in the movies. Like, no one gives
you any information. You try to get information. I made
a couple of phone calls, Dave, in regards to this case.

(35:17):
I made a few phone calls and I got click,
sent a few emails, no response. I called my friend
and I said to him, Hey, do you think I'm
going to get any information on this case? He goes,
No one's gonna speak to you. It doesn't mean that
they're covering anything up. But it's small towns. They keep
everything close to the cuff. You're not gonna have any

(35:37):
press conferences out there. I'm not gonna be able to
call some of my old buddies who worked in Cass
County because it's actually Cass County, like Essex County where
we live, Cass County down in Texas. He goes, I
know the area well, I know cops from Cass County.
I could probably call one. I already know what they're
going to say to me. Don't even get involved. Let
them handle it with taking care of business down here.

(35:58):
No information sports being released in this case. No information
is it because they don't want to release it, or
they just have no evidence. It's one of the other day.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Will people not talk to the police same?

Speaker 1 (36:12):
You know, I've seen some of the investigative reports out there,
and they've interviewed a lot of people in that area,
and a lot of people want this solved. But I
don't know who they have interviewed and who will and
will not talk to them. Yeah, some people don't trust
law enforcement, so they won't speak to the cops. Absolutely.
I don't know if that's the case down there, but

(36:33):
I know there is a racial component to this case.
The three young girls African American. There was a press
conference about a year ago and they blatantly threw that
out there that the cops doing this investigation are not
doing one hundred percent of the job because it's three
African American girls. Okay, that's definitely some tension in that area.

(36:55):
I don't know the area myself, but that was brought up.
It was supported by some local news agencies down there
that yeah, that's a potential issue in that part of Texas.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
Yeah, well that's an issue nationally too. I mean, you
were over and over again.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, you would think that a law enforcement professional wouldn't
even look at it that way. But the human beings.
If you have one investigator who is prejudice, a bias
towards a certain race, and he's calling the shots, so
she's calling the shots that could happen down there, you
may have three or four other investigators who don't look

(37:31):
at it that way. But now it's up for them
just to step up and make a statement and go
out there and try to solve the case on their own.
I've been in situations where the investigator has been kind
of nonchalant about it, and me and the other investigators
were like, We're just going to do it on our own.
I'm all listening to this nitwith. You have to be
able to do that, especially if you think you can

(37:53):
solve it. The solveability of this case.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Let's go to the next thing. We did. Motive we did,
I'm sorry we did. We did opportunity. Now we get
to do a motive. Let's talk a little bit about this.
Some motives in a case like this are more common
than other motives.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
Absolutely. The first we're gonna the first the first four
we're gonna talk about revenge, cover up, a crime, a hatred, kill,
or just an evil psycho. So revenge. And you see
this all the time in the news. Husband and wife,
boyfriend and girlfriend, custody issue, they're getting divorced, who has
custody of the kids. One of them takes them to
the weekend, brings them to a cabin up in Maine. Murder, suicide.

(38:39):
If I can't see the kids, if you're gonna divorce me,
then you're never gonna see the kids. Just a really
disturbed individual. They use the kids as pawns in a relationship. Now,
is there an ex boyfriend here of one of these kids?
There is there an ex husband? Is there some sort
of a custody issue that we don't know about, and

(39:01):
that person slipped in under the cover of darkness and
lured those kids out, And that's the killer because that
is definitely a motive, right.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
But the sexual abuse, sexual abuse, could I guess my
next question, could they be separate things, the sexual abuse
and the murder. Could they be two different things?

Speaker 1 (39:20):
Or that would be that would that would kind of
fall into the next category cover up, meaning someone is
sexually abusing these girls, someone close to the inner circle.
Because like I said, as a parent, you don't let
people in your inner circle. So the only people in
this inner circle is the mother, some unknown friends that

(39:42):
we haven't heard about, and the caregiver that night Paris. Now,
did one of those girls make a statement, We're gonna
tell on you, or did two of them make a statement,
we're gonna tell on you? Was somebody sexually abusing those
girls for a long time in the home and they
were murdered because they wanted to cover up. They didn't
want to get caught for the sexual assault, so they

(40:04):
murdered the girls to cover up their past behavior.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Sure, and that's a and that's that would be one
of the I don't want to say, well, yeah, I
thought that would be one of the common motives.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
That's a pretty cool when you talk about the death
of young children. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not rocket science
when you're dealing with that type of type of stuff
because when you're dealing with the death of an adult
or a teenager, there are so many influences in their life.
There were so many people they come in contact with.
The motive is infinite. But with young children, it's revenge,

(40:38):
it's a cover up, it's a hatred kill. You've seen
parents they're just sick of their kids. They didn't want
to have kids. They had them when they were young.
Susan Smith drove the kids into a lake, right, but.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
That was there was mental illness well involved there. I
know you can argue that the all over.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
This case too, right, but there's there's other issues where
parents are just the kid. The kid takes them up
every night, they get no sleep. They're just so frustrated
with the kid that they hit the kid. They throw
the kid to the ground, a brain injury, a spinal injury,
the kid dies, A hatred killed, A hatred kill. They
have such hatred for the children for whatever reason. It's

(41:18):
always an irrational reason because most people they bring their
kids up, they deal with what kids go through in life.
But it's that small percentage for some reason can't deal
with that and they go to the extreme and they
kill them all.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
Right.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
Now, our fourth category is I don't know, maybe it
isn't more extreme though what you've just talked about, but that's.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
It's like an evil, psychotic serial killer. Just someone randomly
roamed into the town, just came into the town and
no one saw him or her, and they just killed
the kids. Because when you look at serial crime, a
lot of serial crime. It's hands on killing, it's stabbing,
it's choking, and then they also have a sexual component. Obviously,

(41:59):
the autopsy said these young girls was sexually assaulted. That
would be an earmark of someone like that, but it's
also an earmark of a family member. So is there
a serial killer? Is there a murderer out there? Well,
if that's the case, I kind of looked into some
of the other murders that happened in the area. There's
no law enforcement connection, there's no media connection that's stating that, hey,

(42:24):
over in Louisiana. In other parts of Texas, there were
similar crimes that happened here, So that's not being stated
at this point. But there's also a thing called ViCAP
Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. What that means is throughout the country,
jurisdictions that have unsolved mysteries, unsolved murders such as this

(42:46):
sexual assault murders, they put them in the computer and
the FBI looks at all the cases and their crime
analysts try to link certain crimes to certain areas that
hasn't been linked yet. There's no ViCAP linkage of this case.
I'm not saying that someone didn't kill these kids. That's
not associated with the family. Because sometimes when people kill kids,

(43:07):
they have what's called post homicidal depression. They kill someone
for whatever reason, or a few people and then guess what,
they commit suicide. So now they're dead. No more killings.
They could have been arrested, they could be in prison, yep.
But in situations like this where people are strangled and
you have three people killed, it's either an unknown killer,

(43:30):
an evil psychotic killer who will probably kill again, which
we haven't seen that yet, or it's someone in the
inner circle who's in the inner circle. We've spoken on
the circle in depth.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
We know some of the people in the inner circle.
We don't know all the people in the inner circle.
There's something else, and there's a note here that the
mental health community likes to say, Well, there's making an
excuse for the killers. Cops will tell you something very different.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, cops will tell you that sometimes people are just evil.
There's a great book out there, read years ago, The
Evil that Men Do, and it just talks about certain
crimes and it breaks it down to, you know, something,
mental health people can try to explain it. He grew
up in a broken home. He was abused by his family,

(44:22):
kids abused him. In school, he had no friends, he
failed out of college, he had drug and alcohol issues.
So the mental health community is going to say, well,
you know something, Yeah, he killed someone, but fifty percent
of it is because of his upbringing, so they want
to give him a little bit of a pass. But
cops don't look at it that way. They look at
the crime. Some evil person did this to these kids.

(44:45):
That's all they are. I don't care what their background is.
They're just evil and you have to deal with that
person on that level. And that type of person needs
to be taken off the street. And they're still out there,
assuming they're still alive. So yeah, law enforcement and the
mental health community usually don't mix that well.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
In my experience, in your experience, solvability of this case
up to now. This happened in twenty twenty two, in
July a year, a year and.

Speaker 4 (45:12):
A half, two and a half years, day, two and
a half, two and a half years, so it's been
two and a half years and no potential suspect information,
suspicious vehicle information, or other information regarding the case has
been released to the public by investigators.

Speaker 3 (45:28):
Typically in these types of DEATA end cases, the investigators
reach out to the public and the hope that they
can help them solve the case hasn't happened.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
So what type of evidence do I think they have?

Speaker 3 (45:40):
If they had it, is the case going to be solved?
That's the big We're.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
Going to end with that day. If if they had evidence,
let's say they had camera evidence of a suspicious vehicle
in the area, they would have put that out there. Sure,
if they had camera evidence of a suspicious person, they
would have put that out there. Where could they have
gotten that. I'm the local convenience store. People hunt in
that area. Hunters have cameras in the woods. If there

(46:07):
was an unknown person wandering through the woods, if hunters
have their cameras, they could have put that out there.
If they had a foot impression, and I've seen this
in a couple of cases before, a really rare foot impression,
and they find out that that foot came from the
sole of a Nike shoe, in which only one hundred
of them were made in this country, they would put

(46:29):
that shoe out there on TV. Do you know anyone
who has a Nike shoe like this? Only one hundred
of them were made. That hasn't been put out there. Right,
they've put out nothing means one of two things. They're
keeping everything close to the cuff, or they absolutely have
next to nothing as their evidence. So when you have

(46:50):
next to nothing as your evidence, you have no DNA,
you have no blood evidence, you have no seman evidence,
you have no fiber evidence, you have no fingerprint evidence,
you have no foot print impressions. And we talked about
the footprint impressions as they would be at different heights
in the dirt, because if the killer was carrying the bodies,
there'd be different footprint impressions. If they had the water

(47:13):
from Paris's clothing, if they could have matched that up
with the water from the pond, the organic matter that
would have been on his clothes that's in the pond,
do they have that. If they had that, they might
have solved this case two and a half years ago.
So they have very little evidence. When you have very
little evidence, now that comes up to the investigators. You

(47:33):
have to have very inept as you were. You have
to have very astute investigators. You have to have investigators
that have obsessive looping thoughts. All they think about is
how can we solve this case? Where did we miss
a potential piece of evidence, Where did we miss interviewing

(47:56):
a specific person. A lot of times they'll interview people
three or four times, and what they'll do is they'll
see how inconsistent they are in their interviews. So a
lot of times when you have cases like this, cold cases,
they reinterview everybody and they compare their first interview with
their second interview, then their third interview, and if it's inconsistent, okay,

(48:18):
then they'll pull that person in and they'll work on
the inconsistencies. Why did you say you weren't home at
the time when you were. Why did you say you
were out with your friends when none of your friends
corroborated that story. Why did you say you were at
work when we have your cell phone within a mile
of the crime scene. Those are the things that an

(48:41):
investigator has to do. No evidence comes down to the
dogged determination of an investigator who hates to lose and
loves to win. That's what will solve this case.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
And there was a case in Moscow, Idaho.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Moscow, Idaho Brian Coberger case that was solved through some
DNA evidence and through some video evidence of a motive vehicle.
But that was solved because the cops in that case
needed to solve that case because they had a murderer
on the loose. They were personally invested in that case.
So that's why they solved, because they left no stone unturned.

(49:18):
The cops in this case should also have a personal
point in this case because if they have young children
in that area, people who have young children in that area,
and you have someone who killed three young children, wouldn't
you be in fear until that killer was taken off
the streets. Hasn't happened yet. The answer or the answer
the question is why hasn't it happened yet? We don't

(49:41):
know the full answer to that because they're not't releasing
any information. We're just trying to speculate. We're trying to
do it based on fundamental investigative theories. So who knows,
So who knows? I guess The final statement here is
do I think it'll be solved? I think if you
have one or two police officers out there who are

(50:01):
real dogs and they just love to win, and they
have to win, they have to get this guy out
the streets, it will be solved. At some point two
and a half years, isn't a long time. There are
unsolved cases that have gone thirty years, twenty five years,
so two and a half years. Yeah, the family has
no closure, but two and a half years isn't a
long time when you talk about trying to solve a case.

(50:23):
So do I think it's going to be solved. I
think it's probably fifty to fifty at this point.