Anatomy of Murder - A Disastrous Plan (Lisa Straub & Johnny Clarke)

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

A young couple are bound and killed and the question of ‘why’ and ‘by who’ swirled. The likely answer to the ‘why’ could never have been expected. View source material and photos for this episode at anatomyofmurder.com/a-disastrous-plan Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

Oh my God, you need to get the police out to Longacre Lane. My son is in the basement tied up with his house. They're unconscious, ma'am! Immediately, my head is spinning. This is something right out of a horror movie. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder.

Solving murders and prosecuting those responsible can take months, even years, of meticulous and exhaustive investigative work. But in the end, a conviction and a sense of closure for the family of victims is always the payoff that makes it all worthwhile. However, we sometimes come across cases that, even at their conclusion, seem to leave more questions than answers. Convictions that leave police, prosecutors, and most importantly, the families with the feeling that the full measure of justice has not yet been fully served. And in the worst cases, like the one we're highlighting today, a suspicion that one or more killers might still be walking free.

My name is Jeffrey Allen Kozak, and I am a retired detective from the Lucas County Sheriff's Office, which is in Toledo, Ohio. Toledo is a mid-sized city of about half a million people located on the western tip of Lake Erie. But the story we're talking about today took place in one of Toledo's quiet suburbs. Now, Springfield Township is not real big, but it's probably close to 20,000 people. Income ranges anywhere from very high to medium to low. And within Springfield Township is the Holland neighborhood, a community that always felt a safe distance from the rising crime of downtown Toledo. It was a very nice neighborhood, well kept, a lot of hardworking people there,

ranging from the medical field to a fireman to business people. But it was not the typical neighborhood you would think of where you would have a double homicide, for sure. Yes, a double homicide. The victims, 21-year-old Johnny Clark and Lisa Straub, who was just 20. Now, it's a crime that not just rocked the community, but shattered two families and has left many wondering if the complete truth behind Johnny and Lisa's murder has ever really been found.

This is something that you would see in a movie. I can't even explain it. I've never seen it before and I've never seen anything like it since. The night started like so many others in towns across America. Two young people planned to enjoy a quiet night together getting takeout and watching a movie. Johnny and Lisa were staying at Lisa's house while Lisa's mom and dad, Mary Beth and Jeff, were on a cruise. It had snowed heavily that Sunday night of January 30, 2011,

and Lisa and her boyfriend Johnny had her parents' house to themselves. But as soon as Lisa got off her shift at a local restaurant, the phone began to ring, an empty house being a little too tempting for many young people to ignore. The calls came from Lisa's friend, Tiffany Williams. Tiffany and a friend of hers were supposed to get together with Johnny and Lisa that evening. Lisa was working at a restaurant and I believe, from what I remember, she was getting off around 10 o'clock. Johnny was going to pick her up, take her back to her house,

and then Tiffany and her friend were coming over. They were going to watch a movie. They were going to shoot some pool, it sounds like. But as the night got later, Tiffany hadn't heard from Johnny or Lisa. Her concern was that the plans had changed, not that anything could be wrong. And when they didn't hear from Johnny and Lisa is when she started calling. Finally, Johnny answered the phone. But according to Tiffany, their conversation quickly went from typical to terrifying. I think the call when she got through was at 1040-something,

and she could hear him talking to somebody else, like, what are you doing here? Who are you? And then he said, hang on, Tiff, let me call you back. And that was the last time they'd heard from him, they said. After the abrupt end to their call, dozens of calls to Johnny and Lisa went unanswered. When Tiffany couldn't get a hold of Johnny and Lisa, they went over there looking for him, didn't find anything,

knocked on the door, and Tiffany ended up calling Johnny's mom. Now, Johnny was a young adult, but you can imagine when Tiffany described to his mother the strange way he had ended the phone conversation with what sounded like some type of confrontation, Johnny's mom, Métis Clark, did what most mothers would do. She got in the car and headed directly to the Straub's home. Johnny's mom talked to her son every day, possibly several times a day. So when she could not get a hold of him and when his friends couldn't get a hold of him or find him, it seemed like everybody panicked.

She panicked and everybody started looking for her when they couldn't find him. She called 911. Hello, Toledo 911. Ma'am, my heart is beating out of my chest. I just got a call from one of my son's friends. This girl says she was on the phone with my son and his girlfriend and all she heard was the phone drop and heard my son saying in the background who are you what do you want what are you doing here and she said she just drove by the house all the lights are on my son's not answering oh my god ma'am i'm so afraid something happened bad my tay clark did call the 911 and inform them of her son is supposed to be in that house. She wanted the police to go in and check. The police units got there.

They knocked on the door. They looked in the windows. They walked around the house. They did not see anything out of the ordinary. And this is how a typical welfare check would go. Police would knock on the door, look for any obvious signs of distress or break-in. But barring anything that would give them a reason to believe that people in the house were in imminent danger, there's really not much more they could do. And let's remember, while young, they were still adults, so it wouldn't be uncommon for them to not be in constant touch with everyone all the time. Despite the strange conversation that Tiffany

claimed she overheard, there really was no actual proof at this point for police to believe that Johnny and Lisa were in any danger. They are not gonna kick in the door in case they left and went to the store or they went to another friend's house, went to a bar. They're just not gonna do it. They did not see anything that warranted them to enter the residence. They deemed the residence secure, and they left. But call it a parent's intuition or Métis Clark's suspicion that Lisa's friend Tiffany Williams might not be telling the whole story. Johnny's parents were convinced something was wrong.

I think they thought to themselves, look, the only way we're going to get any satisfaction, get inside that house, find out what's going on is if we go in. Johnny Clark's father entered the house shortly after 4 a.m. He immediately encountered a harrowing scene. As soon as you go into the front door, you see two young people laying on the floor with their hands bound and plastic bags over their heads. The bags had been moved by Mr. Clark. He tried to see if they were still alive, but they were both deceased. So he stopped, and that's when the 911 call came in.

Both Johnny and Lisa appeared to have been beaten, asphyxiated, and then dragged to where they were found on the kitchen floor. Johnny Clark, the son of Cuban immigrants who friends described as the life of any party, was just 21 years old. Lisa Straub, a standout volleyball player in high school, beloved by her family and friends, was just 20. Her dreams of becoming a nurse and having a family of her own shattered at the hands of an unknown assailant. Shortly after the crews got there, I was notified via dispatch. I remember getting the call and them informing me and said, hey, we have two deceased persons. Looks like they've been bound and there were plastic bags placed over their heads. So immediately my head is spinning. This is something

right out of a horror movie. So I got ready as soon as I could and got to the scene. Dawn was breaking on what would prove to be one of the darkest days in this Toledo suburb. As the lead investigator appointed to what would surely become be one of the darkest days in this Toledo suburb. As the lead investigator appointed to what would surely become a high-profile case, Detective Kozak knew that all eyes were on him. I got to the scene and I talked to everybody that was there. I was told exactly what they found. I asked, is there any evidence?

What did you guys observe? They told me. I said, all right, don't let anybody in. Keep that crime scene closed. I said, we're going to need a search warrant. I said, we're going to need BCI out here. BCI in this case is the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations, which specializes in crime scene processing. We contacted them and got them notified. And I had the family who actually walked into the crime scene taken over to one of our substations, which was about 10 minutes away.

By this point, lights from emergency vehicles and the first media trucks were lighting up the quiet neighborhood as tension, fear, and yes, rumors began coursing through the gathering crowd. Well, a scene like that, you walk into total chaos almost. You have to slow everybody down. We have to remember our rules when we're working with a crime scene. You know, nothing changes. I know it's horrific. I know it's a terrible scene, but we have to do this the same every time. We don't want to miss anything. We don't want to mess anything up. We want to make sure we collect every bit of evidence. We talk to every person that we can. So slow everybody down and get everything organized and say, okay, this is where we start and we're going to go forward from here.

This is one of those unsung talents of a good investigative team. The ability to confront what is a horrific and emotionally volatile situation and then do your job. Secure the crime scene, limiting the number of people inside the home and minimizing the potential for corrupting any evidence. And that can be hard, not just keeping the family away, but also other police officers. The only people that go in are Detective Williams, who was assisting, and the BCI agents from the crime scene. I said, other than that, I want nobody there. Nobody. I want no onlookers. You know how it is. Everybody wants to see. I can't stand that. I can't stand it. But even a seasoned detective like Jeff can never be fully prepared for a brutal crime scene such as this, especially

when it involves young people. So when I walked in the kitchen, Lisa is on my left. She's laying on her back. Johnny is on my right. He is leaning on his back. They are approximately three feet apart. Hands and legs are bound with duct tape, plastic grocery bags like you would get at a grocery store, wore over their heads, duct tape around their necks, holding the bags down. A coroner would later confirm that both victims were likely alive when the plastic bags were duct taped around their heads before they died from a lack of oxygen. A death that could have taken not seconds, but several terrifying minutes. You think, how could somebody do this to somebody else? Especially people so young, a young lady that has probably never done anything in her life,

probably never hurt a soul, never did anything to anybody. She was a child. So obviously, it was time to start asking some questions. Whether he could get clear answers remained to be seen. I go back to the substation to talk to the Clarks. They basically informed me of the events of the evening. So the interviews went on, mostly with Mrs. Clark. But as far as any real information from her, she really had none.

She said, you know, Johnny was there with Lisa to watch the house as they were staying. Her parents were on a cruise. So she had talked to him earlier in the day, and she really provided no other information. Mrs. Clark describes her son as a good boy, not someone that would attract trouble. But if Tiffany's account of her last phone call was correct, trouble is exactly what came to the door. She's thinking that it was some type of robbery or a hit on her son, but it made no sense. I mean, Johnny and Lisa had no money, but it certainly sounded like a home invasion that went wrong. And there was some evidence at the crime scene that supported the theory that Johnny and Lisa were innocent victims of a robbery.

While I was upstairs, I noticed that her bedroom door had been kicked in. The bed was a mess. Things were dumped out. Closet had been gone through. Drawers had been pulled out. The door was kicked in, which made me think when the initial contact happened, did Johnny say, Lisa, run? Lisa, go? Lisa, get out of here? She took off, ran upstairs, went to her bedroom, locked the door. They chased her upstairs, kicked in the door, drug her out of there, back downstairs. That's a possibility.

That's what it looked like to me. But you know, Scott, while it's clear from the inside that that home was clearly ransacked, from the outside, it's also as clear there's no sign of forced entry, really suggesting that Johnny and or Lisa knew the person or people that came inside. Yeah. And just adding to the burglary theory, burglars don't come with weapons, don't come with tape. And in the end, if they're surprised, it doesn't feel as personal as a crime like this murder does. From the officers that were in the scene initially, it was like, you know, were they tortured? Because they had the bags over their heads and they were bound.

And I'm thinking it sounds like maybe they were tortured for information about something. Maybe there's something in that home that we don't know about. In January of 2011, 21-year-old Johnny Clark and 20-year-old Lisa Straub were found murdered in the Straub's family's home. This rocked the community. I mean, this was very big news for a long time after this. People are wondering, you know, who could have done this in this nice, quiet neighborhood, in this community? There was a lot of pressure to solve this case, to ease everybody's minds. Which is why Detective Jeff Kozak and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations were meticulous about the collection of physical evidence from the crime scene, especially in the preservation of any potential DNA.

We had tape that was on the bodies. We had the plastic bags. We had the clothing. We had items right directly near the body. Johnny's wallet was on his chest. It looked as if somebody had gone through it and just dropped it on his chest. Lisa's phone was picked up, it looks like, and somebody threw it against the wall, smashed it. Did they try to go through it first? So we're going to try and get DNA from there.

The knife that was out on the countertop, did they use that to cut the tape? So we had all these things that had potential for DNA. They would also have been keeping an eye out for anything that looked out of place, no matter how small. They were sweeping for anything else in the kitchen, in the vestibule, leading out to the garage. While they're looking at that, they find a cigarette butt that is not in the garage, the only cigarette butt that is inside of the house. So that was collected. In the meantime, detectives were keen to get more information from the two people who may have actually been on the phone with Johnny Clark the moment he was confronted by his unknown assailant, Tiffany Williams and the then juvenile we will not be identifying by name.

They said that they had made plans. They had been over to the house before, hung out with Johnny and Lisa. I mean, they had been friends for a while. They were going to shoot pool, watch a movie, hang out. This audio was from the recorded 911 call where Tiffany described to a dispatcher what she heard when she finally got through to Johnny Clark. He was yelling at somebody like, bro, who are you? And then caught him right back and he didn't answer. According to Tiffany, the short interaction she overheard sounded tense and fraught with potential violence. This is recorded audio from her interview with police just hours after the murder.

Was it, bro, what are you doing? Or, bro, what are you doing? Yeah, just like that. Did he sound like he knew them people? That's why I said I think that whoever did it, he knew. After the call, Tiffany persuaded her friend to drive to the Straub home on Longacre Lane to check on her friends. And eventually she called Johnny's mom. But one thing she didn't do is call the police. And that might have been a tragic mistake.

Absolutely. I mean, here's one person who might have a pretty good idea of what's going on, or at least senses that her friends are in trouble. And yet, she does not take immediate action. And we know that they lost precious minutes, and that sometimes can be the difference between life and death. Tiffany would later claim to detectives that she had delayed calling the authorities because she suspected there might be some narcotics in the house and she didn't want to get her friends in any trouble. And we run into that issue so many times in cases.

And it was that suspicious behavior that was enough to make Johnny's parents suspect that Tiffany and her friend knew more than they were letting on. Take a listen to this portion of a 911 call Johnny Clark's mother placed in the chaotic moments before the discovery of the bodies. I want to know where my son's at. I want to know where my son and his girlfriend are at. And it's pretty funny that this girl named Tiffany, which is there right now by the residence, waits two hours to call somebody and report this. At one point, she even confronts Tiffany directly. I have a feeling you set up my son.

My son is missing. He's nowhere to be found. Do you want to tell the police what you just got done telling me on the phone? Right away, they were saying Tiffany Williams and her friend had set them up. They were the ones that did it. But after speaking to Tiffany and the friend, Detective Kozak did not have the same suspicions. As far as Tiffany and her friend hanging around while the police were there, if they were setting somebody up, makes no sense whatsoever.

And if you're setting somebody up, you're certainly not going to call one of the victim's mothers to let her know that you can't find them. Detectives did agree with one thing. It seemed more and more likely that not only were Johnny and Lisa the intended targets of this deliberate attack, they may have known their assailants. As it turns out, Johnny Clark had been in some trouble with the law in the past and was known to sometimes be in possession of marijuana and other drugs. And this opens up a host of possible motives for the attack. Of course, it's something you have to look at. Now, we don't know, you know, was there anything there? Were they using?

Were they not at the time? But absolutely, it's the type of thing that detectives need to investigate with a critical eye because, as we know, drugs unfortunately beget violence all too often. You know, whether he was potentially buying or selling, we don't know any of that. It still opens the possibility that he may be in contact with and dealing with a criminal element where there's drugs, there's always money. But then detectives actually came up with another possibility, one that had to do with little of any of that. And here's a bit of a head turn. In their search of the house, they made a very interesting discovery, a large amount of foreign currency.

We found out later in the investigation, Mr. Straub had invested $5,000 into the Iraqi dinar. $5,000 American gets you $100,000 Iraqi dinar. And we're thinking that Johnny and Lisa may have bragged about that. Said, my dad just invested, he's got $100,000 in this money in the house. Because the money was actually in the house, this Iraqi dinar. So Mr. Straub had purchased this foreign currency as an investment, which was somehow exaggerated to sound like there were just piles of cash in the house. One of the motives we came

up with was, were they bragging about this money? We're thinking, okay, this could possibly be our motive. Rumors of a $100,000 payday may have reached the wrong ears, presumably belonging to someone that Lisa or Johnny knew. Someone capable, not just of betrayal, but murder. I continue to interview Tiffany Williams. I continue to interview Tiffany Williams. I continue to interview her friend. It just kept gnawing at me about what brought these people there that night. The people that are closest to Johnny and Lisa is the only place I can really go. At this point in the investigation, detectives still didn't have any really strong suspects.

And so they were open to any and all tips that were coming in from the public, which, as we talked about before, can be a double-edged sword. I was getting crime stoppers from all over the place. And, you know, when you get these leads, you want to follow up on them. At the time that this really started getting going, there were only two of us, two detectives. Morning till evening, every day, we were working on this case, doing interviews, bringing people in, going out and meeting them. As detectives began to piece together their relationships, romantic histories, and rivalries among the victim's large social group, suspicions eventually turned towards an ex-girlfriend of Johnny Clark's.

Her name is Alex. She's a young lady that lives on the east side of Toledo, was a friend of Johnny's, not so much of Lisa's. He had dated her for a while. Apparently there was bad blood between this Alex and Johnny that had to do with all sorts of things, from the purchase of a dog to the sale of Johnny's car, which had become so contentious,

enough to drive this ex-girlfriend to make some pretty angry threats. Now, I know Tiffany's friend is a good friend of Alex's. I find out that she and Tiffany's friend have a meal at a IHOP approximately, I would say, maybe a mile from Johnny and Lisa's house. I was informed that after the meal, they took a ride by this house and showed Alex where they live. So a young woman with a grudge against Johnny was reported to be in the vicinity of the Straub's house just days prior to the murder.

Sounds like perhaps more than just a coincidence. And let's just say that her behavior with police did not endear her to investigators. Here's just a bit of her conversation with the police. I didn't try on him. I told him that karma's a bitch. That's all I told him. And I still didn't say I feel bad I even said that because I'm as fucked up as I said that. What did you say, actually?

That karma's a bitch because he took the car from me. You never threatened Johnny? No, I never threatened him. I want my $ back. She was not qualified, but I knew she was very important to the case. So I tried to stay on top of where she was, who she met with, who she talked to. She would not volunteer any information whatsoever. But she was certainly a person of interest, especially after preliminary DNA results came back from evidence found at the crime scene, which revealed profiles belonging to five unknown males and one female. Detective Williams and I, we sat there in the office and Phil said it. He said it. He goes, you know what, Jeff?

I think science is going to is going to solve this case for us. It's going to give us what we need. Investigators intensified their efforts to collect DNA samples from anyone with a connection to Johnny or Lisa. The list included both friend Tiffany and the ex-girlfriend Alex. But when both women's DNA was submitted for testing, neither was a match to any of the DNA recovered from the crime scene, which meant both women could definitely be eliminated from the investigation. Or did it?

Well, that's really the thing with DNA, right? It's that it can prove you were there, but the absence of DNA, just like the absence of fingerprints, doesn't prove that you weren't. It just means that it isn't going to be a piece of evidence to show that you were. Yeah, just because your DNA is not at the crime scene doesn't mean that you're not part of a plot to murder. So certainly it is something to look at as far as your investigation, but you cannot eliminate someone just based on that. But again, at this point, whether they had to do anything with the plot

or the actual crime itself, well, that still remained to be seen. But in the meantime, Detective Kozak kept his faith in the process and the science. I think it was eight months of people I had talked to, interviews, DNA collections, all this stuff. And then over that time, we're sending pieces of evidence to BCI to have it tested for DNA. They had all the clothing, all the tape, all the plastic bags. They had all these other items that we collected from the crime scene. He knew that if he couldn't match the DNA they had with any of the current persons of interest, they would hope for a match with a profile

that was already in the system. And in September of 2011, nine months after the murders, they finally got the call they had been waiting for. Detective Williams, he got off the phone with BCI and he looked at me and he said, you're not going to believe this. And I said, what? They got a hit on the cigarette butt. They've got a mixture of two DNA. One, they identified as Samuel Todd Williams.

We got a hit on a person that had not come up in the investigation at all. Not a friend, not an enemy, not a phone call, nothing. Sam Williams had a criminal record that landed his DNA in CODIS. His DNA had also turned up on a discarded cigarette butt that had landed inside the house where Johnny and Lisa had been murdered. And just for good measure, Sam lived just on the other side of town on the east side of Toledo. We looked at each other and said, who the heck is this? Is this a relation to Tiffany Williams? So immediately my next phone call is to Tiffany

Williams. And I'm like, hey, who's Sam Williams? And she said, I have no idea. I said, you do not know a Sam Todd Williams from the east side of Toledo? This isn't a cousin, anybody, brother, anything? She said, I, detective, I have no idea who that guy is. But with a DNA match, Sam Williams is their best lead yet. So police would have to work backwards, starting with the knowledge that he was at the scene of the crime and then piecing together his connection to the victims to hopefully determine why. I went on to talk to the task

force people. I let them know. I said, hey, this guy lives at this address. I'd like surveillance set up until we can get him into custody. Now, that was on the 21st of September. We got that call on the 22nd of September of 2011. They were set up in front of his house and he was taken into custody. Sam Williams was arrested on September 22nd, 2011, nine months after the double homicides had occurred in Holland, Ohio. He was taken to the Lucas County Sheriff's Office to be interviewed. Here's a portion of that interview. That house looked familiar to you at all? No.

You ever been to that house since Springfield Township? No. Okay. You sure? I'm positive. We try to interview him, but he won't talk to us. He's basically saying he doesn't know what we're talking about. He has nothing to do with it. He's never heard of that house. He's never been there before. So Williams denies knowing Johnny Clark, Lisa Straub, or any of the names that had come up

in the investigation so far. But with his DNA found at the scene, detectives know they're holding the ultimate ace. Now, when these guys collected a lot of pieces of evidence in there that were involved in this crime, they sent it down to Bowling Green for testing, and items in that scene came back with your DNA on it. Okay? How do you explain that?

How can we explain that? How can we explain that? I have no idea. I wish the jury could have seen him during the interview. I mean, you could see his heart rate. Just, he was turning red. He was sweating. You could almost tell that his heart was pounding out of his chest as we're talking to him. You know, I came away from that interview feeling very good,

very good that I think definitely this is a guy that was part of this. Part of this, because remember, there were multiple DNA profiles found on items at the crime scene, which means there was likely more than one assailant. There was a mixture of DNA on the cigarette butt. So it took BCI some time to be able to narrow down the other person. I think it was in October that got another call from BCI, said, hey, second DNA sample comes back to a Cameo Petaway. Cameo Petaway was another name that had not yet come up in the investigation. Did some investigating, looked at reports, Cameo Petaway, Sam Williams are very good friends.

We were able to put them together through phone calls. They had made a lot of phone calls to each other. They were on police reports together. Petaway and Williams had been arrested together, but were they close enough to share a cigarette? Science doesn't lie. So we knew now that we've got these two, we definitely, you know, have two of our suspects. Both men were indicted on two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of aggravated burglary. If convicted, both men would be eligible for the death penalty. While DNA may have solved the case, it might not be enough for the conviction.

Fortunately, prosecutors would get an assist from Williams himself in building their case against him. And this happens more times than you think. For Williams, while being held in jail, he made the same mistake a lot of prisoners do. He started talking. He talks to Cameo Petaway's brother, who he's also a very good friend of. Most of the calls were attempts to come up with a viable alibi, recruiting friends to say that they were with him

at a local bar at the time of the murder. But in a recorded conversation with Petaway's brother, he went as far as to implicate his accomplice in the crime. He said, yeah, well, you were locked up. You know, I had to take little brother. He had to help me out. And if that wasn't enough, some of his fellow inmates told investigators

that William shared details about the crime that only the killer would know. He didn't have a lot of friends in there. So people were coming forward and talking about some of the statements he had made. So what do prosecutors think happened? In the jury trials of Sam Williams and Cameo Petaway, they painted a grim picture of that snowy night. Johnny and Lisa had just returned to the Straub home after Lisa's shift at a local restaurant. Tiffany Williams speaks to Johnny on the phone at 10.41 p.m. and overhears a confrontation between Johnny and one or more men. The attackers entered up the driveway and through the unlocked garage door,

leaving no footprints in the fresh snow. After bum-rushing Johnny in the kitchen and subduing him with duct tape, they chased Lisa upstairs, kicking down her bedroom door. Tragically, she was unable to escape her attackers. She did not deserve this. You can almost see where she had been, you know, and I hate to say this, but it looks like she was tortured. She was abused. She was beaten probably by fists.

We were thinking, were they beating her to get Johnny to talk, which I can see happening. You know, either tell us where the money is. Once they went too far with Lisa, I think, you know, they put the bag over her head. I think she passed away. And then they had no choice. They probably figured, look, so we can't leave him alive. We're going to have to kill him. Their motive? To steal a rumored stash of $100,000, which turned out to be just a small pile of Iraqi currency. I think it all comes down to they may have heard about that $100,000. And I don't think they understood the whole concept of what was going on here. When they hear $100,000, they think $100,000 cash. I don't

think they went as far as to say, well, it's not really American money. It's Iraqi dinar at the time, which really was worthless. The attackers left the Straub home empty handed. The only thing stolen, the lives of two innocent young people. In his defense, Williams waved a shaky alibi that he was drinking at a local bar, but the bar owner could not place him there, and there was no CCTV footage to prove it. His defense also pointed out that the jailhouse informant that claimed Williams had confessed was merely repeating publicly available information and had exchanged his statement for a reduced charge. But the one thing Williams and Petaway could never explain is why their DNA was on a cigarette butt at the house they claimed they had never been to before. Despite the DNA evidence,

Petaway was acquitted of all charges against him. In the end, Sam Williams would bear the full responsibility of the two murders as the jury found him guilty of kidnapping, robbery, and murder. But despite his conviction, many people surrounding the case felt like there were still some unanswered questions. Johnny was a big, strong kid. Two people could have done it, but to actually do this, get them bound, search a house, looking for... We figured there was more than two.

We have unknown DNA on the tape. We have unknown DNA on her phone. We've seen this in other cases, Anastasia, about unknown DNA. A sample could be collected from a crime scene, a DNA profile derived from that sample, but when they put it through CODIS, the DNA databank has no match. So the only possibility is, as you know, the DNA databank has no match. So the only possibility is, as you know, a one-to-one match, meaning that they'd have to ID a suspect

through other methods and then get a swab from that person and compare it to the DNA found at the crime scene. Or that scenario that we've seen happen before, that sometimes later, it could be days, months, years later, someone's profile then gets entered into those databases and then bingo, they have their match. But you know, if Sam Williams didn't know Johnny Clark, then who told him about the money that was inside the Straub home? In other words, there was another link potentially between these victims and the killers. And the name that just kept coming back over and over was Johnny's ex-girlfriend, a woman that had not only had a grudge against Johnny,

but also knew the killer. It turns out that she was the connect between the suspects that were eventually arrested and Johnny and Lisa. And that is the only connect I could ever find between the suspect that committed it and Johnny and Lisa. The ex-girlfriend's DNA was collected and was not a match for the DNA found in the house as well. She has always denied any involvement in the murders and has never been charged in connection with this crime. However, court testimony did bring to light a very disturbing series of threatening messages

that Johnny's ex-girlfriend admitted to sending just two days after the murders. And they were not to Johnny, Lisa, or their family, but to someone else. And in those messages, she said, I do this and went on to say, watch the news. People get duct taped and left for dead. Further clues to the girlfriend's possible involvement surfaced in Sam Williams' last ditch attempt to avoid the death penalty post-trial. Sam basically tells me, I got a call from Alex. She explained to me about this house. And she tells me that there's money there, there's this, there's that. And she's got

three guys from Mexico that are going to help her do this home invasion. All he's going to be is the driver for these guys. He said, I park on the street, they get out, they go walking up the driveway. Well, I'm sitting out there for a while and I'm smoking my cigarettes and this and that. And finally he said, they're not coming out. So I go up there and I go walking in and I see Johnny and Lisa tied up and bagged up on the floor and all this. And I'm like, what is going on here? Oh my God, I got to get out of here. So I left. And then a short time later, they came out, they got in my truck and I'm asking them what happened on and on and on. And we go back and

I drop them off. And that's the last I hear about it. So I said, wow, it's quite an interesting story. Can I take a polygraph? He said, I'll take a polygraph. So his attorneys agree and they polygraph him and he totally bombed. The one thing I'm going to take away from that is that Sam Williams was there. Sam Williams was eventually sentenced to two terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He continues to claim his innocence. But to this day, the case remains open. We're still looking at the unknown DNA in this case, and that continues today. We're still looking at that. I'm still in contact with the detectives at Lucas County. Of course, this has gone cold, but I assist and I do everything I can to assist them.

Which just goes to show that the quest for justice often goes beyond the interview room and the courtroom. It goes on until the entire truth is revealed and the entirety of justice has been served. Nobody has the right to do what these suspects did to Johnny and Lisa. And not just because it was horrific. It's because their lives were taken. Nobody has the right to take somebody else's life like this. As of 2024, no further charges have been filed in the murders of Johnny Clark and Lisa Straub. It's very sad for both families.

And, you know, I promised that I would do everything I can to bring everybody to justice. And I'm continuing. I'm not going to stop. This is one of the more complex investigations we've covered. A brutal crime scene with multiple offenders. A solid forensic examination of the home, where science once again played a vital role, but also didn't answer all of the questions. In these types of cases, yes, science can work miracles. Yet the age-old art of police work, detectives with a keen eye and seasoned intuition weave through witness

testimonies, dissect alibis, and trail the faintest of leads. And in the majority of cases, they find a way to get it done. This is a case that took the lives of two young people, Lisa Straub and Johnny Clark, but so many other lives were also forever changed. At that top of the list is the families, the parents of both Lisa and Johnny. And for them, in addition to the grief that they must forever bear, there still remain so many unanswered questions. The whys. Why this house? Why torture Lisa and Johnny?

Why take both their lives? They also live with the knowledge that one or more people are still out there, never held accountable for their role in this brutal, brutal crime. A homicide case is never closed until all the participants have been identified and hopefully brought to justice. If you know anything about this case, please reach out to the Lucas County investigators at 419-213-4917. Give the Straub and Clark families the answers they need and deserve.

Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?