Mills Family Pt. One

February 26, 1980. Berkeley, California. 51-year old Al Mills, his 40-year old wife, Jeannie, and Jeannie’s 16-year old daughter, Daphene, are all shot to death, execution-style, in their home. Jeannie’s 17-year old son, Eddie, is left unharmed inside his bedroom, but claims he did not hear the murders take place. Years earlier, the Mills family had defected from the Reverend Jim Jones’ infamous cult, the Peoples Temple, and become outspoken advocates against them. Following the Jonestown Massacre, rumours circulated that surviving members of the cult were going to target the family as revenge. However, investigators suspect that Eddie was the actual perpetrator and make an unsuccessful attempt to charge him with the crime 25 years later. Did Eddie Mills murder his own family, or were they victims of an assassination by outside intruders? This week’s episode of “The Path Went Chilly” explores an unsolved triple homicide and its potential connection to the Jonestown saga.

Additional Reading:

Support the show: 

Patreon.com/julesandashley

Patreon.com/thetrailwentcold

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannie_Mills

https://people.com/archive/the-mills-family-murders-could-it-be-jim-jones-last-revenge-vol-13-no-11/

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BERKELEY-Man-jailed-in-family-slayings-from-25-2557794.php

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2005/12/09/son-wont-be-charged-in-1980-slayings/

https://archives.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2015/11/12/yesterdays-crimes-peoples-temple-hit-squads-and-jonestowns-last-victims

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yesterdays-crimes-jonestown-was-just-the-beginning-for-one-peoples-temple-family/https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/articles/199203/the-truth-about-jonestown

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome back to the Pathway Chili.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm Ashley. Let's dive right
into this week's case.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
February twenty sixth, nineteen eighty, Berkeley, California. Fifty one year
old Al Mills, his forty year old wife, Jeannie, and
Jeannie's sixteen year old daughter, Dapien are all shot to
death execution style inside their home. Jeanie's seventeen year old son, Eddie,
is left unharmed inside his bedroom, claims he didn't hear

(01:00):
the murders take place. Since the family is defected from
Jim Jones's call the People's Temple and become outspoken advocates
against them, there is speculation that surviving members of the
cult orchestrated their assassination. However, investigators suspect Eddie of being
the perpetrator, and while they make a failed attempt to
charge him with the crime, twenty five years later, the

(01:22):
Mills family murders are never solved.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
After that, the path went Chiley. So today we're going
to be covering a case in which three people were
killed inside their home, the nineteen eighty murders of the
Mills family. This story involves the fatal shootings of a
couple and their teenage daughter. But what's truly unique about
this crime is that it can all be considered an
epilogue to one of the most infamous tragedies of all time.

(01:48):
I'm sure pretty much all of you are familiar with
the notorious reverend Jim Jones, who launched a religious movement
slash calt called the People's Temple and went down in
infamy after orchestrating a mass murders suicide involving himself and
over nine hundred of his followers at his Jonestown settlement
in Guyana. Well years before that, a couple named Al

(02:08):
and Jenie Mills were high ranking members of the People's Temple,
but they eventually grew very disturbed about Jones's cruel tactics
and decided to defect from the group alongside their children.
They soon became very outspoken opponents of Jones and his cult,
publicly exposing their human rights abuses and launching a support
group for other defectors from the organization. Naturally, this put

(02:31):
them right at the top of Jones's enemies list, so
an Al, Genie and Genie's sixteen year old daughter were
all shot to death inside their house fifteen months after
the Jonestown massacre took place. There was a lot of
speculation that they were killed by a vengeful hit squad
consisting of loyal surviving members of the People's Temple. However,
the big complication is that Genie's seventeen year old son, Eddie,

(02:54):
was inside his bedroom when the murders took place and
left unharmed, and he always maintained that he never heard
a thing. The authorities found enough suspicious discrepancies to make
them believe that Eddie murdered his mother, stepfather, and sister himself,
but they lacked the evidence to build a successful case
against him. Opinions are still sharply divided about whether the

(03:15):
Mills family were murdered by intruders or if Eddie was
the real perpetrator. So we're going to explore both sides
on this series of episodes.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
All right, Well, as soon as you started describing this murder,
I immediately thought of Donnie Henson and the case where
he survived the death of his two sisters, and they
eventually you really were convinced that he had done the killing.
His parents had survived, and so as soon as you
described it, I almost thought we were talking about the
same case, because you have a family who's killed, the

(03:46):
teen son survives and supposedly doesn't even witness or understand
anything that's happening in this scene. So an incredibly eerie
similarity to that case. And then when you tie in
the People's Temple, well, that is one of the most
tragic and heartbreaking cult cases I've ever researched. I used

(04:06):
to teach a cult class, and I used to expose
students to group think and different kinds of psychological tactics
that we use and we see even in corporations and
things like that. But People's Temple takes the cake for
me because of how incredibly significant that end tragedy was,
where I call it a mass murder, that even the

(04:28):
people who thought they were willingly taking their lives had
been so brainwashed. Is that truly a suicide? But it's
interesting to me because there is an idea of this
was a violent group. When they were pushed to extremes,
when they thought that their group was in danger, they
had this incredibly violent reaction where they're shooting the congressmen

(04:49):
when they are attacking his team and then they start
to actually execute and kill all the members of the
People's Simple in Guyana. But I don't know that I
would see people fifteen months later actually go after people
who had stood up against that group. I almost feel
like that was such a shocking moment. Would people remember

(05:12):
there weren't many survivors that actually were in Guyana. There
were I think about eighty that survived, or it might
have been even less than that because they happened to
be away for the day. But I don't know that
there would have been many people who truly said everything
that happened is okay when that was the end result,
even if they loved Jim Jones, even if they believed

(05:32):
in the mission. I think that an event rocked people
that had stayed in the United States and still subscribed
to his mission. So I want to hear more about
this surviving sun and what happened there, because again, it's
reminding me more of another case where we watched a
son basically get away with murdering his two sisters.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
If I recall correctly, yes that is true, because Donnie
Hansen did go on trial, but he was found not guilty,
so technically that case is still unsolved, even though the
consensus is that Donnie did it and may have had
accomplices as well. The key differences between the two cases
is that in the handsome case, the home was set
on fire, so there was chaos going around while he

(06:12):
was killing his sisters. But here Eddie was the surviving
teenage son was just sitting in his bedroom and apparently
his mother's, stepfather and sister were all killed right down
the hall from him, and he didn't even notice, which
some people found unbelievable. But at the same time, they
were unable to turn up much of a motive for
Eddie to have done this, and there was really not

(06:32):
much in the way of evidence. So it makes you
wonder if it wasn't Eddie, if it wasn't surviving members
of the People's Temple, then who actually could have done this.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Our story begins in Berkeley, California, in nineteen eighty Two.
Of our central figures are fifty one year old Al
Mills and his forty year old wife, Jeanie Mills, who
are currently living in a suburban cottage, alongside Genie's two
children from a previous marriage, Seventeen year old Eddie and
sixteen year old dayphen. At around nine twenty pm on

(07:03):
the evening of February twenty sixth, Al's mother, who lived
in a nearby rest home, arrived at the Millses Cottage
for a visit, but made a horrific discovery when she
entered the main bedroom and came across the bodies of Al, Jeannie,
and Daphene. After she let out a scream, Eddie suddenly
emerged from his bedroom across the hall and joined his grandmother,

(07:25):
so the Berkeley Police Department were immediately contacted and summoned
to the scene. It turned out that all three victims
had been the victim of an execution style shooting with
a twenty two caliber weapon. Al was lying face down
on the bedroom floor and had been shot through the
back of the head. Jeanie was lying dead on the
floor in the adjacent bathroom and was also shot in

(07:47):
the back of the head. Daphene was lying on top
of the bed with two gunshots to her right temple,
but she was still alive and was rushed to the hospital.
She remained in critical condition for the next two days,
but had suffered such extensive brain damage that she was
neurologically dead and had zero hope of recovery. Daphene was
kept alive long enough so that one of her kidneys

(08:09):
could be used for a transplant before she was taken
off life support. Eddie claimed that after taking a long shower,
he had gone inside his bedroom to smoke some marijuana
and watch television, but maintained that he did not hear
any gunshots and had no idea a crime had even
taken place until he heard his grandmother screaming. When the
Mills's neighbors and other local residents were interviewed by police,

(08:33):
they also claimed that they did not hear gunshots or
anything unusual. Two family friends had visited the residents at
around five pm and said everything seemed normal with the
Millses and that the atmosphere was friendly. There were no
signs of forced entry or any struggle at the cottage,
but one neighbors said that was not uncommon for the
Millses to leave their front door unlocked so that their

(08:56):
children's friends could enter and exit the house with these
If nothing appeared to have been stolen from the residence,
robbery was ruled out as a possible motive for the murders,
but rumors immediately started circulating that the crime may have
been a professional hit, since the Mills family had an
extraordinary backstory.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Okay, so let's take a peek at at Eddie. Eddie.
Obviously there were friends that had visited the residents around
five pm. The bodies are found at nine twenty, and
basically Grandma has to run in and wake Eddie and say, hey,
by the way, your whole family has been slain, and
he says, I had no idea. There's a four hour

(09:37):
and twenty minute gap there. Do we know when the
examinations were done on the bodies, about how long police
believed that they had been in that condition before they
were discovered by the grandmother.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
It has never really been revealed the exact time of death.
I mean, I'm sure they tried to make an estimate,
but it's never been released publicly, so I technically don't
know how long they were dead by the time before
the were discovered. And I always think if Eddie was
in the shower, then maybe he did not hear the gunshots.
But you're also thinking, well that her intruders wouldn't They've

(10:09):
got into the shower and heard it and killed Eddie
as well. So there are certain reasons like maybe he
was listening to music with headphones on, where you think
that he wouldn't have been able to hear the gunshots.
But at the same time, he was just so close
across the hall that you can understand why the police
became suspicious of him immediately. Oh.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Absolutely, the fact that he was stoned could definitely be
a contributing factor if somebody is just so out of it,
and the fact that the neighbors didn't hear it. Is
it possible that if somebody came in, they could have
used a silencer.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, because nobody reported
hearing gunshots, that if this was a professional hit, they
could used silencers. And maybe they just would have been
quiet enough that if Eddie was stoned or he was
listening to music, that he just honestly did not hear
the gunshots.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Interesting. Do we know if there was any kind of
insurance policy set up where he would have been the
sole beneficiary if his sister and his parents had passed away.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Not necessarily an insurance policy, but he was set to inherit.
We'll talk about this later. Part of a sizeable estate,
and because Al had other children from his previous marriage,
he would have to divide it with them, but Eddie
would technically get like the largest percentage because he was
the only surviving member from Genie side of the family.
So before they were known as al and Jeannie Mills,

(11:27):
the couple used to go by their birth names Elmer
and Deanna Myrtle. Before they even met, Almer and Deanna
had already both been married to other people and had
a total of five children between them. Deanna had Eddie
and day Feene, while Elmer had three children named Steve, Linda,
and Diana. They officially got married to each other in
nineteen sixty eight, but within a year, Elmer had quit

(11:49):
his job at Standard Oil so that he and Deana
and their five children could join the People's Temple, a
new religious movement founded by the Reverend Jim Jones, which
was situated at Californi, Orny's Redwood Valley at that time.
As most of you probably know, it would turn out
that the People's Temple functioned like a cult as its
members were brainwashed by Reverend Jones, who forced them to

(12:11):
turn over all of their property, possessions, and assets and
swear their undying loyalty to him. According to Deanna. When
Eddie was only eight years old, she believed that he
had developed in a regular heartbeat. While Eddie was never
diagnosed by a doctor, Jones performed telepathy on him and
convinced Diana that he had miraculously cured his condition, which

(12:31):
played a major role in her family's decision to devote
their entire lives to Jones and the People's Temple. The
Murders became key players in the organization, as Genie served
as head of their publications office, while Elmer functioned as
the official photographer, and they were both members of the
group's governing council known as the Planning Commission.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
This makes me so angry. The abuse of religion and
using spirituality and spiritual healing and things like that as
a weapon and tool to convince people to follow you
and to donate their lives to you is so frustrating.
You know, this was not the first time Jones did
stuff like that. There's one case where Jones had a
packed house. I mean, he used to have hundreds upon

(13:11):
hundreds of mixed race individuals worshiping in his temples and
in his churches. And Jim Jones performed a quote miracle
on a woman who could not walk, and she was very,
very elderly and fragile, and by the end of it,
she's dancing and running up and down the aisles. He's
telling her, put one foot in front of the other,

(13:32):
you can walk. Now you're healed. And it's this crazy
celebration where almost everyone in attendance is giving their life
over to Jim Jones, not Jesus Jim. And when that happens,
come to find out that was a secretary who was
very able bodied and she was faking right, acting that
she had been healed. But by convincing somebody that their

(13:53):
child had been medically healed, I mean no wonder. They
gave everything to that organization, to that church. They felt
he was led by the Holy Spirit. He's being this
man who's been blessed with the ability to perform miracles
via their faith. And so it makes me so mad,
But I don't blame them. I think that was a

(14:13):
tactic he used because he knew it worked. And you
had this very successful couple who ends up quitting and
using all their resources and talents to further the people's temple.
And so what a crazy start for this couple. And
now it's interesting they change their name and we're trying
to live a life basically devoid of that history they had.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
It totally reminds me of Rasputen and like the influence
that he had over the Romanovs when he was treating
their son Alexei. He was able to have these people
like devote everything to him. It was so intense, and
I think Jim Jones had a similar magnetism where he
was able to convince people of almost anything, and he

(14:56):
could sell himself. He could be what they needed him
to be in that moment, and that was such a
powerful thing.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Oh yeah, we're going to talk more about this later.
But the Joneses would become friends with one person who
said that I became convinced that Jones was the real
deal because I saw him perform this miracle on a
woman who was in a wheelchair and she just suddenly
got up and walked. And of course it turned out
that was a complete fraud. It was only used to
learn new members in because they believed he could perform miracles.

(15:23):
And that's pretty much the same thing they did with
the Mills family, where they thought that he cured Eddie's
heart ailments even though he did nothing.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
However, as the years went on, the Myrtles gradually became
disillusioned with the People's Temple, particularly after witnessing Jones perform
numerous acts of cruelty, such as frequent beatings of his followers,
including the children. The breaking point occurred in nineteen seventy
four when the Myrtles witnessed Jones used a two foot

(15:51):
long paddle to spank Elmer's daughter, Linda, who was sixteen
at the time. According to Jones, Linda had embraced a
friend of hers, whom he considered to be a trader,
and spanked her with a paddle seventy five times as punishment.
After spending the next year working up the courage to leave,
the Myrtles finally decided to defect from the People's Temple

(16:12):
with their children. When they originally joined the group, Elmer
and Diana were forced to turn all of their properties
over to Jones and grant him full power of attorney
over them. To prove their loyalty, Jones also demanded that
his members signed false confessions to committing to such horrific
crimes as molesting their own children, which he could use
against them if they ever decided to leave in order

(16:35):
to avoid all the powers Jones had over them. Elmer
and Diana Myrtle officially changed their names to Al and
Jeannie Mills.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine. You've given your life
and your finances, and your belongings and your time and
your family over to this church family, and then you
start to see behind the curtains when it almost feels
like it's too late, when everyone is trained not to
speak of troubling issues, when they're all trained to look

(17:05):
the other way or report when people are talking negatively
about the group. So in many ways, they probably felt
very stuck when they started to see these kind of
the facade fall down. And yet, just like groups like
scientology and those other types of organizations that we see
functioning that are able to keep their members so much

(17:25):
in their palm right and in control of their lives
because they use things like blackmail and confessions and these
kinds of things where they're asking you to in this case,
actually lie about things that you've done, and in other
groups they convince you you've done these horrible things, and
if you leave, it's held over your head. And so

(17:48):
I'm incredibly impressed because I know it took nothing short
of true trust in one another to leave that organization
and trust that they were going to be okay, because
the fear and the psychological damage and the spiritual warfare
being used against them couldn't have been anything other than
absolutely horrendous.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
So, after the Mills family moved to Berkeley, Alan Jini
became outspoken opponents of the People's Temple and wanted to
help others who followed their example and defected from the cult.
The couple established the Human Freedom Center, a halfway house
which functioned as a sanctuary for defectors and refugees from
the cult when nowhere else to go. The Mills has
also worked alongside another defector named Timothy Stowen, a former

(18:32):
People's Temple attorney who had once served as Jones's right
hand man, and together they formed their own organization called
the Concerned Relatives of People's Temple Members. It served as
a support group for defectors and their families and sought
to deprogram them and help them readjust to normal society again.
In July nineteen seventy seven, New West Magazine published an

(18:54):
expose about Jones and his organization, titled Inside People's Temple,
in which the Millses and other former members exposed the
cruelty and human rights abuses which took place there. They
continued to exert pressure on the media and the government
to take action against Jones and his group. Needless to say,
Jones was outraged by the Mills' actions and would reportedly

(19:16):
deliver angry rants to his followers in which he referred
to the Mills as traders and vowed to get revenge
on them. During this time period, the Millses claimed that
they received a number of threatening phone calls and found
threatening notes on their doorstep. At one point, a bomb
went off at the bank where the Millses kept a
safety deposit box, and they soon found a note on

(19:36):
their front porch in which the People's Temple took credit
for the bombing. On one occasion, Al's daughter Diana, reported
seeing eight or nine armed men in the yard of
her home.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
This is so sad, So this is this group of
the concerned relatives of the People's Temple. They were people
who were saying, look with my loved ones. Have been
convinced that anyone who's not part of the People's Temple
is evil. That there's some kind of danger to them
if they're interacting with the general public, if they are

(20:10):
speaking to people who are not in the group, if
they support any of these quote traders, And so when
you have that kind of tension and struggle where they're
saying this is no longer optional. For my family members
who are there, I feel like they're stuck, that they
can't get out. And you have people like the Millses
who are sharing experiences where there's a reason we almost

(20:32):
couldn't leave as well. We know that we're not the
only ones who experienced these things. We saw it, and
so it's not just people who are concerned, it's people
who know legitimate dangers operating inside this group. And it's
it's the reason why this group is the reason why
the big threat quote unquote to Jonestown down in Guyana

(20:55):
started in the first place, is because this is where
Congressman Ryan's going to fly down to investigate and try
to give peace to these family members and show is
there a danger or are these people happy? Are they
choosing to be there? And you guys know it goes
at first this kind of angelic experience for the congressman
and very quickly, he starts to realize maybe there are

(21:18):
people who want to leave and can't.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
The concerned relatives of People's Temple members eventually helped convince
Leo Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from sam Matteo, to perform
an investigation into the organization and their practices. By this point,
Jones had already established the People's Temple Agricultural Project aka Jonestown,
our most settlement in the Jungles of Guyana, which was

(21:40):
the primary base of operations for Jones and his followers.
Ryan and his delegation, which included his staff, some media representatives,
and several relatives of People's Temple members, decided to travel
to Jonestown on a fact finding mission, but a devastating
tragedy would soon take place. On November eighteenth, nineteen seventy eight,

(22:01):
after Congressman Ryan and his entourage paid a visit to Jonestown,
they left the settlement with a group of People's Temple
members who expressed their desire to defect, and traveled to
an airstrip in Port Kaituma in order to board a
pair of transport planes to leave. It wasn't long before
some People's Temple gunmen opened fire on the group, killing
five people, including Ryan, and wounding nine others, and unfortunately,

(22:25):
it wasn't long before Jones orchestrated a mass murder suicide
at Jonestown, in which his followers were forced to drink
flavor aid laced with potassium cyanide. Four followers died the
People's Temple headquarters in Guyana's capital city of Georgetown, while
nine hundred and nine of them died at Jonestown, and
the whole incident would become known as the Jonestown massacre.

(22:48):
Jones elected to end his own life by shooting himself
in the head, but before he did so, he recorded
a final forty four minute piece of audio, which became
known as the Death Tape. At one point, he specifically
made mention of Deanna Myrtle, who was known as Genie
Mills by this point, blaming her and Timothy Stowin for
causing the whole situation. He seemed to imply that surviving

(23:11):
members of the People's Temple from their former headquarters in
San Francisco would get revenge, stating quote, the people in
San Francisco will not be idle. They'll not take our
death in vain, you know. End quote.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
So in this moment when there when Jim Jones is
melting down, there had actually been a plan, right they
went to Guyana because they had already felt the political
pressure and he had convinced everyone that this was going
to be a place where they could have refuge and
they didn't have the American government kind of breathing down
their neck in the United States. And then you know,
he gets down there and it's supposed to be heaven

(23:46):
on Earth, but people who lived there said every time
he came in it was like this dark cloud and
almost like a storm was coming every time he came
into town, because it was getting worse and worse with
his paranoia, his drug use, those kinds of things. And
so when this massacre occurs, there is this sense of
this congressman came, people are leaving. Now we're going to

(24:08):
be exposed, and that kind of meltdown occurs and people
are begging him, let's not do this. You promised we
could move to Russia, that we could take our church
to Russia and then no United States oversight would be there,
and he's saying it's too late, right, We're going to
have to go ahead and take care of our elderly
and our kids and kill them. And the fact that

(24:28):
he literally blames Deanna known as Jeanie Mills now and
then another individual who's also helping lead up this family
organization back in the United States is so scary. But again,
I'm wondering, by the time all this breaks and it
starts to get dissected, how many people do you think

(24:49):
still existed in the US that said that all was
something to be avenge? Like, I know, there's still people
that would be radically influenced by Jonestown, but without their leader.
And by seeing this horrific nine hundred and nine people
which is laying dead covering the ground where you can't
even see the ground from the aerial pictures, do you

(25:09):
think that people were really there to quote get revenge
or do you think that for most people would have
sparked this. This is wrong. Something went dramatically wrong from
what we had been promised.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Well, we'll talk more about this later, but during this
time period, there were always urban legends about people's temple
hit squads, about how these surviving members of the cults
were going to go and wipe out all the Jones's
enemies and it would essentially be a suicide mission for
them because they had nothing else to live for since
the great Leader was now dead. But they were never
able to find any real documented proof that these hit

(25:43):
squads existed, Like even though the Mills family did get
murdered sixteen months after the Jonestown massacre, they never found
any other documented cases where people's temple survivors decided to
get revenge on people who defected from the cult and
try to get rid of Jim Jones's enemies.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
And I think if he had been alive, that would
have been more probable, you know, like if he had
been able to continue the mission, then there's something to
kill for. By the time sixteen months rolls around after
this massacre, I wonder how much is left to defend.
And also, I mean, you do see these tactics, like
you know, if you watch things about scientology and people
who speak out against scientology, please don't come after me,

(26:24):
but if you see people who speak out about organizations
like that, you do see harassment and bullying and those
kinds of things too. You know, lawsuits where people can't
afford to defend themselves and so they end up, you know,
having to settle or take all their finances and invest
in defending themselves against Scientology, and so I wouldn't be shocked.

(26:46):
But without their leader there, I wonder what it looked
a little bit different.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Yeah, like Scientology when l Ron Hubbard stepped out of
the way, they had David Missgavige, who I think brought
Scientology to a whole new audience and it seemed to
just grow exponentially. So it looks a little bit different there.
But when it comes to Jim Jones, he didn't have
a successor, and basically all of the followers were gone.

(27:11):
So it's just you're right, it's an entirely It just
seems like a strange scenario that people would just be
so fervent in their.

Speaker 4 (27:19):
Beliefs still after all of those deaths, that.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
They would go and try to exact revenge.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
So, needless to say, Once worried about what happened in
Jonestown reached Berkeley, the Mills family, along with other former
members of the People's Temple and their families, were placed
under police protection for a while. There was fear of
potential retribution from Jones's most loyal People's Temple survivors, and
there were rumors that a hit list have been circulated
among the organizations remaining followers with instructions to kill as

(27:48):
many people on the list as possible. The FBI and
the San Francisco Police Department would perform an intelligence detail
to look into the possible existence of People's Temple hit squads,
but never found any evidence to corroborate these rumors and
ultimately came to the conclusion that the so called hit
squads did not actually exist and were nothing more than

(28:09):
an urban legend. In nineteen seventy nine, Genie published a
memoir about her experiences titled Six Years with God, Life
inside Jim Jones's People's Temple. Both her and al would
tour the lecture circuit in order to share their story.
He continue their work assisting People's Temple defectors, but by
early nineteen eighty Genie seemed ready to move on with

(28:31):
her life, and only a few weeks before her death,
she made this statement before a gathering of students. Quote,
I pretty much put all that behind me now. I'm
tired of being an ex member of the People's Temple.
I really want to get on with the business of living.
End quote.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
I have a lot of respect for that there's so
much abuse and trauma that she's dealing with, not just
for herself, but for her whole family. There had to
be a mense guilt. I subjected my children's to children
to this organize. I probably told on people in the
organization and got them in trouble. I helped foster and
grow this organization, and it's one that caused nothing but

(29:09):
hurt and trauma and at the end, catastrophe and the
loss of almost a thousand people. So that weight and
having to be known as a survivor of People's temple,
and that being her identity, that's not all that she is.
She had been a huge warrior for her family. She
had skills that she wanted to turn into a career.

(29:30):
She had a family she wanted to raise. So I
can totally see her saying, hey, this was a wonderful
chapter of my life getting to help people and to
kind of break away from this organization. But I need
peace away from this to heal so that I can
be just Genie and not the former cult member.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
She wanted to be more than that, And then the
fact that she lost her life shortly after that is
so sad.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
That is sad because I've always wondered what kind of
life they would have lived if they had not been murdered.
Would they have just gone on and experienced a happy retirement.
I know this was like a time period when Eddie
and Daphene were getting old enough where they could they
could attend college or university if they wanted to, and
move into adulthood. And I think because they had such
a traumatic childhood, I think Alan Jeanie probably wanted to

(30:19):
devote more time to their children to make sure that
they could become well rounded adults and put the whole
People's Temple behind them. But unfortunately they just never got
that opportunity.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Of course, once Al Jeanie and day Fene were shot
to death, rumors started circulating again about them being the
victims of an assassination from a People's Temple hit squad.
By this point, Al's children from his previous marriage were
no longer living at the family's residence in Berkeley, but
around nine point thirty PM on the night of the murders,
his daughter Linda claimed that she received an odd phone

(30:53):
call at her home from an anonymous female who told
her a quote, Alan Jeanie are dead. If I were
you I would the door. There would also be an
eyewitness account from an eighteen year old former boyfriend of
Daphine's who said that he was walking past the Mill's
residence sometime between eight forty five and nine p m.
And saw three young men exiting the home. They then

(31:15):
climbed into a Pontiac grand Am being driven by a
fourth man before they left. Police apparently did not find
this young man's account to be credible since he had
a history of run ins with the law, but when
they gave him a lie detector test, he did wind
up passing. However, this would turn out to be the
only sighting of potential intruders at the cottage that night.

(31:36):
Investigators uncovered an odd piece of evidence when they noticed
the Millses had attached a tape recorder to a telephone
answering device, which would automatically record all of their calls.
They soon found a cassette containing an older phone conversation
between Dayphene and one of her friends, where Dayphene was
asked when she was going to get the family's cottage

(31:57):
and she replied, I guess when I killed my parents. However,
since day Fene was shot twice in the head, and
there was no gun found of the scene. Investigators discounted
the possibility of the crime being a murder suicide.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
How old was Dayphene sixteen?

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Okay, so she's a brat at the time, which I'm
saying that out of pure love because I'm a mom
and when you have teenage kids, I think those kinds
of comments come out of this kind of immaturity and frustration.
It's like, I hate you, you ruin my life. Well,
I'm just gonna kill them then, you know it's I
think it's these comments that they don't think through and

(32:36):
it's a reaction because they don't have the ability to
express themselves in any other way. So my thought is
that it's her being an immature child who's expressing anger
with her parents, because let's say she's grounded, there's incredibly
strict boundaries on her, especially with what they've been through.
So I would say her saying, when I kill my parents,
that's a kid being a rotten child. That's not really

(33:01):
a child wanting to kill their parents. In most cases, right,
We've seen cases where you have children who do kill
their parents, But here, I don't see that. I see
this being a frustrated teenager who says, hey, yeah, I
guess when I kill them, I'll get to go out
of frustration more than reality. But I'm fascinated because in
the initial description, I really went with my gut. I thought, Hey,

(33:23):
I've heard this case before. I bet it's Eddie. But
there's a lot of other things happening here that point
away from Eddie. Where you have this anonymous girl calling
another one of the children about ten minutes after the
bodies are found and says that, hey, they're dead, right Alan,
Jeanie are dead. If I were you, I'd lock the door.

(33:46):
That's terrifying. And then you have an eyewitness who passes
a lie detector test, which has its limitations, but admits
to seeing multiple people leaving the house, and that puts
a whole nother like white on this case away from Eddie,
or at least Eddie could have been an accomplice with
these these three or four individuals. But this would have

(34:07):
been about twenty minutes before the family was discovered de ceased,
so definitely a valid possibility. Here.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
We would be his motivation for lying and to fabricate
that you would think that obviously he had nothing to
do with it, so wouldn't he want to get to
the bottom of what happened to day Feene. But I
also agree that day Feene was speaking in a way
that was hyperbolic. I don't think that she actually meant
that she was going to kill her parents. I think
the kids don't have fully developed frontal lobes, and I

(34:36):
think that they often speak so dramatically like that, and
it's not something that you would go, oh, yes, every
time you hear that, you need to be worried that
a child is going to kill their parents.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Oh yeah. I think it's just one of those recordings
which turned out to be an unfortunate coincidence where if
she had just said it and her parents had not
been killed for real, then nobody would have paid any
attention to it, because it was just a teenager mouthing
off because she was angry with her parents. And since
actually mentioned the Donnie Hanson case, that was one where
there were some neighbors who saw a couple of other

(35:07):
men outside the flaming house when the crime took place,
and I think that was enough to generate reasonable doubt
that Donnie wound up being acquitted at trial. And you
can't rule out the possibility that those men seen outside
were accomplices. I personally think that's what happened in the
Hanson case. I mean, I don't necessarily say that these
men seen outside the Mills residence were Eddie's accomplices, but

(35:30):
I do think that if Eddie was guilty, it probably
would have been impossible for him to do it alone
because the woman who gave the person who gave the
threatening phone call to Al's daughter Linda around the time
of the murders, that was a woman, and obviously Eddie
himself could not have made the call, which makes me
think that if he was involved, there were other people
around who had inside knowledge.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
Refresh my memory in the Henson case, was the person
that was spotted said to be like lurking in the
driveway and then they ran away.

Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yeah, pretty much where they didn't stick around for the
police and the fire department to arrive. So, and I
know that one witness thought they saw Donnie yelling get
out of here at someone when the fire took place,
which could be assigned if these were his accomplices and
he was telling them to flee the scene. So by
this point, most of law enforcement's suspicion was directed towards

(36:21):
the only surviving member of the household, Eddie, who continued
to maintain that he had been inside his bedroom when
his family was murdered and he did not hear a thing.
Eddie was given a GSR aka gunshot residue test, which
turned up microscopic traces of gunshot residue on his right hand.
A criminologist pushed forward the theory that Eddie could have

(36:42):
washed or wiped his hand after firing a weapon, which
would explain why there was such a small amount of
GCR remaining. A Berkeley police spokesman addressed this issue by stating, quote,
there was some trace of gunpowder on his hands, but
it was such a small amount that it conceivably could
have been come by innocently. The key word here is conceivably.

(37:03):
Eddie Mills is not a suspect in the case in
the sense that we are actively focusing on him, but
he has not been eliminated, and that is significant. A
number of doubts we have have not been cleared up.
Even though Eddie was a high school dropout and it
experienced issues with adjusting to a normal life after spending
his childhood with the People's Temple. He was described as

(37:24):
a quiet, non violent person who was currently helping his
stepfa the remodel old homes as student rentals, and show
no signs of being capable of murdering his family. The
biggest obstacle in the police's investigation was that they couldnot
find the murder weapon, and even after searching the properties
of about a dozen homes located near the Mills residence

(37:44):
that came up empty. The Berkeley PD even received a
Department of Justice list of all small gun purchases which
had taken place in the Bay Area in the six
months prior to the murders, but after interviewing each person
who bought one, they still hit a dead end. Eddie
hired an attorney who advised him not to take a
lie detector test. Eddie would move to Oakland to live

(38:05):
with his half brother Steve. Genie and al left behind
an estate which included thirteen properties and was worth over
seven hundred thousand dollars, and in nineteen eighty three it
would be dispersed among their surviving relatives. Since Eddie was
Genie's only surviving biological air, he wound up collecting the
largest portion of the estate and received around two hundred

(38:27):
and ten thousand dollars. The investigation into the murders would
reach a standstill, though the Alameda County District Attorney's office
described all of the surviving Mills family members as being uncooperative.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
Well, I mean, in some ways this is intriguing because
when you look at it, Eddie ends up moving in
with his half brother Steve, who would have been I
believe Al's child could have been Genie child.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
But it was Al's child, Okay, Al's.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Child, Steve right, So if Steve had any inclination that Eddie,
who's a kid and I don't think could necessarily parade
around and keep, you know, keep an appearance as well
as someone who's thirty or something like that. It's interesting that,
you know, Steve says you're coming to live with me,
You're gonna live with me after the death of our parents,
and he knows the experiences that Eddie's been through. I

(39:17):
think that speaks volumes in the relationship between Eddie and Steve,
and Steve clearly didn't think that Eddie killed their family.
And the fact that all the surviving Mills families being uncooperative,
they've been through a lot, a lot of mistrust of authority,
abused by authority. Yes it was spiritual abuse, but it's

(39:39):
still abused by authority. And so the fact that this
family's gonna shut down and reserved Eddie's been is a suspect.
There's concern for the only surviving person in that home.
So I could easily see why the family becomes very
insulated and quote uncooperative or at least putting up barriers
between law enforcement and themselves.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Yes, that pretty much h be a recurring theme of
this case, as all of Eddie's half siblings, where Al's
children from his previous marriage, have always defended him, like
they've never said that they believe he was capable of
murdering Al Jeanie and Dave Fiend, and they've supported him
NonStop for the past few decades and they probably know
him better than anyone thinking that this is not someone
who's capable of committing such a heinous crime like this.

(40:22):
And I think the fact that they were described as
being uncooperative is not because he has something to hide,
but I think they just feared that the authorities have
developed tunnel vision on Eddie and are probably going to
railroad him, So that's why they pretty much held the mindset,
we're not going to talk to them at all because
that could turn out badly.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
So in two thousand and three, the Berkeley Police Department
decided to reopen the investigation into the Mills murders, which
would be led by Russ Lopes, a retired lieutenant who
was specifically brought in to re examine unsolved cold cases.
By this point, Eddie was living in Japan with a
wife and two children, who was still the focus of
the investigation. His surviving relatives were reinterviewed and asked to

(41:03):
turn over any additional evidence they might have had that
Eddie was responsible for the crime, but most of them
believed that he was innocent and maintained there was no
evidence to give. On December third, two thousand and five, Eddie,
who was forty three years old, decided to make his
first trip to the United States in several years in
order to visit family for the holidays. But after his

(41:24):
light landed at San Francisco International Airport, Eddie was detained
by customs officials, and he would soon be arrested on
three counts of murder and taken to the Berkeley City jail.
Russ Lopes had spent the past two years putting together
a case against Eddie and submitted it to the Almeda
County District Attorney's office. If Eddie was charged, he would

(41:45):
be prosecuted as a juvenile since he was only seventeen
years old when the crime took place. However, he could
only be held for a maximum of forty eight hours
while the District Attorney's office decided whether or not to
charge him. In the end, they felt there was still
some questions about the evidence and considered forty eight hours
to be an inadequate amount of time to perform a

(42:07):
thorough review, so they ultimately declined to file charges. Eddie
was released from custody and soon returned to Japan, where
he continues to live with his wife and children to
this day. Well reuss Lopes did not hesitate to express
his belief that Eddie was guilty of the murders. Eddie's
half sister, Linda, publicly voiced her support. She did not

(42:28):
think that Eddie was the perpetrator and openly criticized the police,
stating quote, they don't want to do the flipwork to
find out who really did this, so after forty five years,
the Mills family murders continued to remain unsolved.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
So I guess you could say the path went chili Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
So they arrest Eddie and then they say, wait a minute,
I guess we don't have enough evidence. Did the district
attorney initially say we're going to proceed with this? They
issued her an arrest warrant for him.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
I think it was just kind of a holding thing
where they felt, because as Eddie is returning to the country,
this might be our only opportunity to get him. We're
going to hold him, and the district attorney is going
to review the case. But they obviously thought that the
evidence wasn't strong enough to proceed further. I think if
there had been strong enough evidence, they would have gone
through with it. But all they really had were minute
traces of GSR on his hand, which was hardly enough.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
That's incredibly interesting. I wonder too, when you look at that,
is there another innocent explanation? Was he someone who operated firearms?
Is there a way because if he was asleep and
hidden away from the family, it wouldn't have been transfer residue, right,
Or did he touch their bodies or anything?

Speaker 1 (43:38):
That is possible. We're going to go into more detail
in this angle in part two, but one explanation has
been pushed forward that if Eddie shook hands with a
police officer who had fired a gun or handled a
gun earlier that day, minute traces of GSR could have
gone on his hand. There are documented cases of wrongful
convictions where people have been falsely accused of firing a

(43:59):
gun because they innocently touched something and got small traces
of GSR on their hand. Anyway, I'm sure many of
you are already familiar with the story of the People's
Temple and the Jonestown massacre. We elected not to go
into too much detail about it on this series of
episodes because it has already been so well documented and
their other true crime podcasts like case File, who have

(44:21):
already provided a thorough account of this story. But I
do have a major fascination with unsolved mysteries that have
a connection to famous events. Even though Jim Jones and
most of his followers had already been dead for fifteen
months by the time the Mills family murder took place,
did the People's Temple still have leftover survivors who would
have been loyal enough to get revenge by committing this crime. Now,

(44:44):
I have to admit that when I first became familiar
with this case many years ago, I initially believed that
there was only one possible explanation for what happened here. Generally,
when an entire family is murdered inside their home and
there is one survivor who is left completely unharmed, you
have to be suspicious of them. I have seen a
number of home invasion murder cases in which several victims

(45:06):
were killed and the lone survivor decided to stage the
scene by inflicting a wound on themselves to make it
look like they were attacked by outside intruders. Yet in
this case, not only was Eddie Mills left completely unharmed,
but he claimed that he was in his bedroom directly
across the hall from the shooting and did not hear anything.
And if that wasn't enough, there were traces of gunshot

(45:27):
residue on his hands. On the surface, that seems pretty damning.
But the more I thought about the case, the more
I realized that it wasn't nearly as cut and dried
as I originally thought. I mean, this was a pretty
brutal crime, and if you believe Eddie did it, you
have to believe that a seventeen year old performed an
execution style shooting of his mother, stepfather, and sister and

(45:49):
did such a successful job at getting rid of the
murder weapon that no one has ever found it after
forty five years. As far as I know, the only
evidence against Eddie which has been shared publicly is the
gunshot residue on his hands. When a case was submitted
to the District Attorney's office to charge Eddie with the
murders in two thousand and five, It's unclear what, if

(46:10):
any new evidence they managed to uncover which compelled them
to charge him after so many years.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
Yeah, it's really interesting when you look at this, I mean,
to arrest somebody for the murder of their family and
to say that you're going to charge them with three
counts of first degree murder, you would think that was
a pretty flawless case that they had built, right, that
this is something that's huge. He has a family, this
is already a trauma that's happened to he and his
siblings and things like that, and so for Eddie to

(46:39):
be kind of snatched out of his family and threatened
with this idea that he's going to be charged with
the murders. Yes, it's very possible that Eddie's one of
the people who was involved, because he's the only surviving
member in that home, but there's not clear cut proof,
and so it seems pretty pretty powerful that they would
move forward and then have to take that back. It seems,

(47:02):
I don't know, kind of kind of wild to.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Me, and I really think the only reason that they
did it is because Eddie was living in Japan and
they knew that this was going to be one of
the rare times that he was going to be on
American soil and they'd have a chance to take him
into custody. But I do think that they got really
over zealous because regardless of whether you think Eddie is
guilty or innocent, when you look at the evidence that
has been released publicly, there's just no way you could

(47:26):
have ever taken him to trial and got a conviction.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
There's also a question of motive, but you also have
to consider the fact that Eddie had an abnormal childhood.
To see the least, he was raised in an environment
where children were often subject to beatings and psychological torture
such as sleep deprivation, and even though his family managed
to escape the People's Temple, it sounds like both Eddie

(47:52):
and his sister had issues adjusting to normal society. But
could the whole experience have messed up Eddie so much
that it drove him to murder or his family before
he even reached adulthood. Before we talk more about Eddie,
we have to discuss the victims. If you search on YouTube,
you'll be able to find a clip of Al Mills
being interviewed during a news segment for k QUED in

(48:14):
San Francisco, which aired on November twentieth, nineteen seventy eight,
just two days following the Jonestown massacre. You can tell
that Al was completely shaken up by the whole situation,
and he speaks directly to Carlton Goodlett, a civil rights
activist who had worked as Jim Jones's personal physician. Al
is obviously distressed by the fact that Goodlett almost seems

(48:36):
to be acting as an apologist for Jones, even though
it has just come out that Jones has been responsible
for the deaths of over nine hundred people. The Millses
had played a role in convincing Congressman Leo Ryan to
pay a visit to Jonestown, which is what ultimately led
Jones to the decision to orchestrate a mass murder suicide.
Even if Ryan had not made the trip, I think

(48:58):
there's a good chance the whole tragedy was inevitable and
that Jones still would have done the same thing at
another point in the future. But I'm sure this still
must have been a heavy burden for the Millses to
bear at the time the news interview was recorded. It's
unclear if Al had found out that Jones specifically mentioned
his wife on the final death tape and applied that

(49:19):
his followers would seek revenge, but the Mills were genuinely
concerned that surviving members of the People's Temple would come
after them. Even though Alan Jeanie both played prominent roles
in their public crusade against the People's Temple, I'd say
that Genie was the more high profile figure of the two,
especially after she published her memoir Six Years with God

(49:40):
one year later. If you go on YouTube, you'll also
find a fascinating documentary title Deceived the Jonestown Tragedy, which
was filmed in nineteen seventy nine and features interviews with Al, Jeanie,
and Daphene. It's quite chilling to see the three of
them talk about their experience in the People's Temple and
how they managed to escape, knowing that they would all
be rutally murdered less than one year later.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
My heart breaks when you describe Al being interviewed and
you hear about the family you know, sharing their story
and advocating for change and reform and healing for people.
Because Al sitting there and he's listening to this person
who's an apologist, an apologist who's making excuses for Jim
Jones and defending Jim Jones, and Al's thinking, I saw

(50:24):
it with my own eyes, the abuse you put people through.
And not only that, but the world saw right. This
idea of the world is going to see this right.
He's convinced this is before the massacre when he's having
this interview, but he's having to basically share why he
left and having somebody laugh at that and say that's
not true, that doesn't happen. And he knows it happened

(50:45):
to his own family and again likely was part of
it happening to other families in Jonestown, right, because you
were told, or in the People's Temple, because you were
told to tell on your neighbors, to tell on other
people if they were speaking ill of the organization. And
so I think the weight would have been enormous for

(51:06):
this family. And then there's a massacre where nine hundred
and nine people lose their lives. Think about that. There's
this idea that we asked the congressman to go, and
it caused this trauma and this this tragedy, It did
not cause it. Jim Jones was losing control, and any
surviving members that you see in documentaries talk about that

(51:28):
his drug addiction had gone insane, that he couldn't even
speak without slurring his words, that the audio recordings he
played throughout Jonestown on a normal basis were all about
threats and attacks and how they had to be ready
to sacrifice or flee, and so that was already in
his mind that this was not going to end well.

(51:49):
And then the congressman comes. So I think it was
a ticking time bomb, like you said, Jules, that it
was going to happen because of something because someone left,
because there was no investigation. It was not at all
a cause by Congressman Ryan's visit, it was just the
icing on the cake, and it was the moment Jim

(52:10):
Jones lost control of himself and snapped. So, man, the
whole thing is just really pitiful. And like you said,
they broke free from that. They survived this organization that
many people did not, and yet you go a little
over a year and they're going to lose their lives
and at this point we have no idea to who.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, and if you ever have time, I suggest going
down the rabbit hole and trying to seek out a
lot of these old interviews and documentaries involving the Mills family,
because even though they were obviously filmed before these murders
took place, they're quite fascinating to see all the work
they did and how this had such a profound impact
on their life. And it's always haunting when you do
a cold case and you're actually able to find old

(52:53):
footage and interviews of the victims before they became the
victims of an unsolved crime. So I think that about
that brings an end to Part one. Join us next
week as we present part two of our series about
the Mills Family murders.

Speaker 4 (53:07):
Robin do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail Went Cold Patreon.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three
years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like
early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers
and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up
with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars
tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in
which I talk about cases which are not featured on

(53:33):
the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon,
and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is
a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsawved Mysteries,
where you can download an audio file and then boot
up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or
YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in

(53:57):
the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids the
cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first
episode that I did a commentary track over was the
episode featuring this case. So if you want to download
a commentary track in which I make more smart ass
remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.

Speaker 5 (54:16):
So I want to let you know a little bit
about the Jeweles and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad
free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've bought our
Pathwent Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so
they're not very mini, but they're just too short to
turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those,
so we hope you'll check out those patreons.

Speaker 4 (54:33):
We'll link them in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
So I want to thank you all for listening, and
any chance you have to share us on social media
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You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com.
You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwin. So
until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold
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Speaker 4 (54:54):
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy