Anatomy of Murder - The 5-Year-Old Witness (Rufus Carmichael & Ashli Haigler)

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

A father missing and a mother dead. Their little boy is investigators’ best chance to solve both these crimes. For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

I don't recall having a murder case with a young witness, and then that witness be so crucial to the investigation. I mean, the young man essentially solved the case from the beginning. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasika Nikolazi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murph. Take a deep breath for a moment as I'd like to paint you this picture. A person is lost on the street. It's dark. It's just a few hours until the sun comes up. He's going door to door asking, rather pleading for help. His knocks on the door go unanswered. His cries for help are heard by no one.

His heart is pumping so fast you can see his entire chest shake. His face is covered in sweat, tears, and blood. He has just witnessed a murder. Now, imagine that person is only five years old, and the victim was his mother. In our agency, we have a team of on-call investigators, six to seven generally, and a supervisor who work nights and weekends. You're listening to Major Kevin Eisenhower from the Richland County Sheriff's Department. I got a call from the on-call sergeant who told me what they had going on. The time, 5 a.m. The date, March 13th, 2021. Deputies respond to a

neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. Where they found a deceased woman who had been shot and that they had been alerted by neighbors who called about a child going door to door asking for help. In the middle of the night, this young man, this very small young man was knocked on the door. Now, for obvious reasons, we are not releasing the name of the child because he was five years old at the time. He's still a child. And the child had also gotten his mother's cell phone from her

and called his aunt, and she was able to meet us, help us with the child. When deputies arrived, they were also directed to a car parked at the end of the road. Inside, a woman slumped over the wheel, unresponsive. They had found the young man near the vehicle who was distraught. And they located the victim inside the vehicle who had multiple gunshot wounds that appeared. The victim was 28-year-old Ashley Haigler, and she was the little boy's mom. So you have to wonder, had he just witnessed his mom's murder?

At this point, there are multiple prongs to this investigation. First off, attempt to determine if any witnesses in the area may have any information on a shooter or shooters. We know that our victim was shot, so then where's the gun? Establish your crime scene. Investigate whether anything in or around the vehicle could yield any evidentiary value. We didn't know if we had multiple shooters. We didn't know if we have other people missing from inside the vehicle. Was it more than one gun used? You know, that sort of thing.

So there are just so many variables and unknowns. While all of these questions are still waiting to be answered, in the end, they're still a shooter or shooters at large. So the one witness they did have, remember, was only five years old. And that makes it an entirely different playing field when speaking with him. We were able to get the young man in a controlled environment, you know, calm him down. Based on just the initial conversation with the child, investigators were able to determine that, yes,

he did witness his mother's murder. And how he is handled is so critical to the investigation. It has to be in the best interest, the best welfare for this child. But it's going to have to go different than the norm here because, again, the clock is ticking. So they need to get that initial information differently than they would if it was a less pressing situation.

We made a decision to interview him immediately. He would later have a forensic interview where he would reiterate everything he told us. So we tried to make the best environment we could. We brought in some female detectives to sort of put him at ease. His aunt was there. The child walks police through the events of what happened before his mother was shot. But keep in mind that he's just a five-year-old child. So not all the pieces of the puzzle are going to come together just in this single interview. He told us that his mom had gotten him out of bed. He was still in his pajamas.

And she said we had to go find dad. And then he climbed in the car and he was sleepy. And he was riding with his mom. And she goes right to their uncle's house because that's the last place that she believed her husband had gone. He answers and says he's going to take her to her husband. His uncle pulled up to the car. But he doesn't talk.

He fires a gun over and over again. It's troubling that a child had to see this, but he was very descriptive on the injuries she sustained. The child was able to tell Kevin that he also feared that he would be shot. He talked about hiding because he knew he would be killed too. He knew she was dead. He was in the back and he hid in the floorboard. So he is literally crouching on the ground. You can picture right on top of the mats at the bottom of the back seat, hoping that the man with the gun doesn't know that he's there. Rightfully so, very proud of his ability to hide and how he couldn't see him. He doesn't think he

knew he was there. He tried to keep his mama awake, but he knew she was dead. So he got her phone and called his aunt, and then she told him to go for help. So that's why he went and knocked on the doors. So while he's able to give them a lot, there's still so many unanswered questions. Was this an actual uncle? Or as often it happens in families with young children, friends are sometimes referred to others by uncle. Where was the dad?

Isn't that who they were going to find from the beginning? And of course, what could potentially be the motive? So the person they're looking to for all this initial information is the only one who they know that was there. And that's this five-year-old little boy. And when you're dealing with a child witness, it is different in so many ways. There's risk factors, right? You have to always take into account their well-being, you know. But it's not just that because it is also their reliability because they are just that, a young child. So we were in a position where we had a very young witness who's providing us a narrative of what he observed. We are aware that there may be some things that he couldn't process like an adult would. But there was more to the child's story.

He described the vehicle that the person he described as his uncle drove. He said it was a big blue truck. In addition to that, he gave a name. He called him Uncle Jason. And an obvious question, was someone in Ashley's circle, did they have the name Jason and did they drive a blue truck? Ashley went to school in Richland County and graduated from Remington College of Cosmetology.

She was married to 48-year-old Rufus Carmichael. We got to take a look at her Instagram page. And the first thing I noted is how few photographs there are. But the information that it did give was that she worked as a hairstylist, and the few pictures she did put up of herself displayed a woman of confidence. We talked about Ashley's sister, the child's aunt, and she was also able to fill in one gap of the child's story. And she was able to give information about what had happened before Rufus left the house.

She told us a story where her sister was at home with her husband and the young man, and they were in bed. There was a knock at the door or a knock on a window, and her husband went to investigate. And she heard a conversation, something to the effect of, are you serious? Are you serious right now? And then her husband leaves. She gets up to see what's going on. Where's he going? When she gets there, she sees a vehicle driving off. Her husband's gone. At some point, there may have been a bang that she heard. She wasn't able to describe it. So once her husband leaves, she gets back and calls her sister on the phone, reports all of this stuff to her, and says she's going to look for her husband. Now remember, this is coming

from the victim to her sister, as the sister did not witness any of this. At this point in the investigation, it's still unclear if the shooter acted alone. Could someone else have been in the truck? And there's this. Investigators still didn't know where the husband was, so clearly they have to look to see if there's a possibility he may be involved. Now, we have covered cases in the past

where a significant other is missing after a victim is murdered. And it turns out that in some way, shape, or form, they're involved. And the case of Crystal Mitchell, which is something we covered a few months ago, is a really good example. You know, when you work these cases, violent cases, sometimes your victim and their families, you know, have some issues as well. That was not the case here. This is a normal woman. To my understanding, they'd had a pretty long-standing relationship. By all accounts, a normal, functioning family unit, employed, and taking care of a young kid.

But if Rufus, Ashley's husband, was not involved in her murder at all, well, then it begs the question, where was he? And was he indeed now missing, or rather, had he been abducted? You know, his phone, as I recall, was actually at the house. There was no communication back and forth. It's at this point where the sister tells police that the man who visited the home was Rufus's brother, Charles Jason Carmichael. There's a lot of speculation as to what was going on at that point in time, but we can tell in the investigation, she knew that her husband had left with him.

I mean, the obvious conclusion here, at least the one that would come to mind initially, is that all of this is going to have to have something to do with Rufus's brother. He is going to be the man that holds the key. Whether he's responsible, he's at least going to be the one most likely to know. Ashley was concerned enough to file a missing persons report. She believed that some type of altercation happened outside of her home and that her husband may be in danger. So now we're provided with information that the husband's also missing, the wife is now dead. We need to go back to this house and see, is there evidence of something that occurred there? So part of what they're going to do is even go back and look in Ashley's home. You know, try to see if there's any sort of clue of what happened when someone came and knocked on the door.

And did that have something to do with Ashley now being shot just, what, within hours later? Was there anything inside or outside their home that would provide some evidence to investigators of why this happened to Ashley and where Rufus was now? We called the neighboring jurisdiction. They did a protective sweep of the home, which was unsecure. A protective sweep is when you're approaching a residence

not knowing if anyone in the home is armed. Remember, the husband is a suspect until he's not. So the house would be surrounded and entered as if somebody within the home could be armed and dangerous. They weren't able to really provide us anything. There didn't seem to be any fights inside the home. There's no evidence of any violence. It's important to remember that the information that the police are getting is one, secondhand.

Remember, coming from the aunt. And then the other person is a five-year-old child. So there is always the possibility that one, if not both, could be wrong. While the search of the home was being conducted, investigators were still in the neighborhood where Ashley was murdered. Police were conducting their canvases, speaking to neighbors, and that's when this case gets another important lead. A witness who confirmed that they heard gunshots

early in the morning rushed outside to see a U-Haul truck speeding away. Developing a timeline based on those witness accounts, investigators were able to locate surveillance video from a local gas station showing a U-Haul truck leaving the area at 4.45 a.m. And when you look at the footage, which we've seen on a local news report, you can see the shape of the truck. And the first thing that many of us would say is, oh yeah, that's a U-Haul truck. And even though that's black and white, the footage, it has a pretty distinctive boxy shape. But there was one big but.

This is a box van U-Haul. The more interesting thing is the young man told us it was blue. Well, this is a U-Haul. It's not blue. But he described it as boxy. Well, if you picture a U-Haul truck or just look it up, well, U-Hauls typically aren't blue. So how do you reconcile that? And I say that's not really a significant point at all, and here's why. Often, witnesses, especially children, may pick out one individual aspect of that vehicle and ID the vehicle based on that one aspect, whether it's a color or a shape or something to that effect. In fact, as you know, we had a case here on AOM we covered that's titled Long Strange Trip It's Been. A child was hiding under a table as a killer walked past her without

knowing she was there. She told investigators he was black, but as it turns out, he was just dressed in black, and that misidentification delayed the killer's apprehension. So in this case, the U-Haul's color should be considered, but not rule out other sightings. You now have video footage showing a truck, which clearly looks like a U-Haul truck, and it is seen at the time exactly of what is in line of what they know about the crime. So now that gives the police something that is not open for interpretation and a lead to go on to try to find that truck. Police knew the next step was to locate Jason Carmichael and see if he'd be willing to come in and talk.

Kevin knew the clock is ticking and he needed to find him. We were able to identify a location where Uncle Jason resided, which is about five miles away from the incident location. Based on the fact that this was a homicide, Kevin felt it was important to deploy the department's fugitive unit, who are experts in locating, surveilling, and arresting a potentially dangerous individual. We had air support available. First stop, Carmichael's home. And even before approaching the home, they made an interesting discovery right in the driveway. At James's home,

investigators spot the U-Haul truck, and the conflicting accounts about the color of that truck start to make sense. These U-Hauls will have a theme. It'll be from one of the states in the United States. And this particular one, it had a lot of blue in the mural on the side. So from his point of view and him hiding and seeing out of a window, the angle that he would have been viewing this from, he would have directly seen this blue mural over the cab or near the cab of the vehicle. As Kevin and his team are finalizing their plans on how to approach the house, a man walks out from the home and gets into the U-Haul truck. They let him pull away and determine when they're going to make a felony traffic stop.

Obviously, we had to do something at that point. So they stopped the vehicle and apprehended him. Up until this point, investigators do know where Ashley was shot. There was a witness to the entire crime. But investigators do not know what happened from the time Rufus left with Jason until they then find him dead in a neighboring county, Aiken County. So could this truck provide further clues for that? Or going one step further, could this truck be the crime scene?

Once Jason Carmichael was placed in custody and the front portion of that vehicle was searched, police found a weapon inside. A weapon which was consistent with the caliber of weapon used to kill his sister-in-law, Ashley. Had the vehicle towed and obtained a search warrant for the vehicle. That truck is basically put on a flatbed. And it was tilted to take it off of the record on a flatbed. And as this truck tilts, blood actually starts to pour out of the back. It was pouring from the rear of the vehicle through the door jam on the passenger side.

The amount of blood inside was just amazing. The way that Kevin is describing the blood dripping from the back of that truck, spraying along the side, it's inconceivable. And as it was traveling down the road, it was flowing from this vehicle while it was in motion. So that's just an idea of how much blood was actually inside of the vehicle. And the grim realization is that this isn't Ashley's blood, which means it must belong to someone else. Because remember, Ashley is shot inside her car, and that's where she's found. So the blood inside the truck is obviously not hers. So the next question is is whose blood is it? Could it be her missing husband's or did it belong to somebody else?

Her husband's missing. He's most likely the one who is the source of the blood, but his body wasn't there. Where is Rufus Carmichael? Rufus Carmichael Jr. was from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and had four other siblings. When he was 18, he served his country in Operation Desert Storm, and he was not a stranger to tragedies. Just a few years before Ashley's murder, he had lost both his previous wife and his daughter.

And when it came to answering questions about Ashley's murder or about where Rufus may be, his brother Jason wasn't cooperating at all. So he exercised his right not to speak with us. He would be processed, photographed for injuries, his clothing taken. So if we're to presume that the blood inside that truck belonged to Rufus, well then where is his body? We know it's not in his brother's home. Is it still inside his? Could it be in his yard? Or has he taken it somewhere much more difficult for investigators to find?

We ultimately would execute a search warrant at his house. And they looked around the property. They found a hole. We would actually find where he had been digging what we characterize as a grave. So if James was making a grave, was it to bury his brother or maybe Ashley? And if so, why didn't he? And you have to start to think about what we do know is that Ashley went out into the middle of the night with her young son to find her husband, Rufus. And if she went to go see her brother-in-law, presumably she knocked at the door.

Did she interrupt him actually outside digging that grave? And did that now change all his plans? Or was it something else that stopped him from placing anything inside that hole? And Kevin would have to look closely at the relationship between Rufus and his brother James. Is there any signs of trouble? Could this help toward learning any potential motives? There were several sources of information that their relationship was very contentious, mostly because the brother had been abusing drugs

and had been swindling some family members and common friends. He had made comments to others that he was concerned about his brother's well-being, his mental health, that he had made statements consistent with drug abuse. In his mind, paranoia. He thought he may be losing his mind. He was speaking about people coming to get him, typical things that a lot of drug addicts will exhibit. He was very concerned with his brother's mental health and his well-being and was aware that his

brother was capable of violence. So if they're arguing about something the night before, what was it? Was it about money? Did it have to do something with the narcotics use that they're told about? Did it have to do with something unrelated to both and something between siblings or something no one would ever think of? We do know that illicit narcotic use can lead to paranoia and can lead in some cases to violence. Perhaps Jason Carmichael was continually asking his family to support his habit, and the family had to make a decision

to cut him off financially. Now, Kevin Eisenhower, a major, would obviously be well-versed in handling complex investigations, and by this point in his lengthy career, he's seen it all. My position as major is over the entire investigative unit, which includes

narcotics, fugitive investigations, property crimes investigations, special victims unit, rape and child abuse, and homicide. So when you look at the major's resume, there's a recurring phrase, and that is a couple years. He worked patrol for two years, and then he worked property crimes for a couple of years, and then he worked property crimes for a couple of years, and then he worked narcotics for almost two years. Was promoted to lieutenant for two or three years, was promoted to captain for two or three years, and now major. But here's a funny story about Major Kevin Eisenhower. He never meant to ever, and I mean ever, become a police officer. the sheriff's office and I thought about being a dispatcher and went into an interview and went through the interview. Then the questions started steering away from what I thought it would be.

And they commented on my age and wanted to know, did I have experience with firearms and how I felt about firearms? And I asked them, you guys give dispatchers guns? Like, why would you give a dispatcher a gun? It turns out that they had made an error, a pretty big one. Instead of interviewing him to be a dispatcher, they were actually interviewing him for the position of deputy sheriff. I mean, when I heard that story, honestly, I thought to myself, when I interviewed to be a deputy sheriff, should I have asked to be the sheriff or maybe something else, you know?

But it was an error and he got the job and it was the job that he did not apply for. And I'm thinking, well, I'll give it a shot and took it from there. So I've been here. This is the only full-time job I've ever had. We mentioned earlier that this is a multi-prong investigation.

So while some members of law enforcement are searching Jason's home, others are processing the truck. And while some are canvassing the area trying to gather information from neighbors, others are interviewing Ashley's family. And while the Richland County Sheriff's Department is racing to locate Rufus, deputies at the next county over are trying to piece together another crime. A murder. Ashley was found murdered on March 13, 2022, before 5 a.m.

That very same day, deputies were alerted to another crime scene in the afternoon in Aiken County. Another jurisdiction, separate from either the home that they lived in or ours, a little bit further away, maybe an hour away, had located a body. A person found a body lying in a tree line, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Which would later be identified as the victim, the husband of our victim. Outside of the body just being located,

they also found something else that investigators found interesting. Some larger stones that had traces of blood on them placed in a very unique way. It was almost like they put a marker there is what we were told. I thought that this semi marker scout was pretty interesting. Did it have some significance, some meaning because in fact he is burying his brother's body or was it maybe a marker so he could go back to this now makeshift grave site and move the body someplace else at another time? That's exactly where my head went, Anastasia. But

I thought, yeah, he's marking the spot to then pick the body back up and place it in that shallow grave at his home. So it seems pretty obvious at this point that it is going to be Jason Carmichael who killed his brother Rufus. I mean, so many things seem to be stacking up, motive, means, opportunity, but do they yet have an actual case? Because where is any sort of identification while you know that he is last apparently going to see the brother? No one really saw him at all. There's definitely a lot of unanswered questions at this point as far as a conclusive identification. Not far from where the body of Rufus Carmichael is located, police spotted a U-Haul vehicle. We would later find some camera footage which showed the vehicle exiting an interstate and going in the direction where

the body was found. So it showed the U-Haul leaving near the crime scene and several other locations through the city headed in the direction. So everything lined up time frame wise and direction of travel to put the vehicle here in our jurisdiction and then traveling to this other jurisdiction where the body was ultimately discarded. So it seems like that what it boils down to is this, that Carmichael called his brother Rufus over. Somehow when he gets inside, he gets him into the truck and he shoots him there. And so it seems most likely that he was shot in the front cab of the truck. Based on the blood evidence, the initial injury was in the cab of the truck

in the passenger area, but at some point he was placed in the back of the U-Haul. So we submitted that it occurred here in Richland County. Then he moved the body to the back for transit to where he was going to dump the body. And then maybe when he's digging that grave or doing something else, he's interrupted. Remember, Ashley is out in the middle of the night looking for her husband. And so while he doesn't know what to do, he says, OK, I'll bring you to him. And that seems like a pretty quick, not well thought out plan. But what he does do is has the gun, pulls up next to her, shooting her, killing her, not realizing that the young boy, his nephew, is there in the back. Timeline lines up that we were probably back doing surveillance on his house

after he returned within an hour or two. So it's a pretty tight window series of events. We do know that Ashley's body was found in one county and her husband Rufus's body found in another. Two murders in two different jurisdictions. And we've seen this movie before. It often complicates things as prosecutors begin to determine what to charge and who will be doing the charging. So we have an issue of jurisdiction all over this case. While our victim was clearly murdered in our county,

her husband was kidnapped from another county and found deceased in a third county. It is essentially their investigation at that point. Different jurisdictions are playing almost hot potato. It's in your county, not mine. And that is because part of that is because it's statistics. You know, higher crime when you have more crime occurring on your watch. Or is it that you want to take all of it? Well, if I have the one case, give me that from the neighboring county too. And then less often you have the possibility that they work side by side, both working together

on their own cases. And that presents a whole host of other issues. You know, one interesting thing here in South Carolina, case law will submit, and I've had several body dump situations that would cross jurisdictional lines. The offender can be prosecuted in either the location of the offense or the location, the final location of the body. And so then you always have this push and pull about, well, if you found the body, are they the ones who have jurisdiction? Or if the crime then goes back to a different place,

does it there? And most often it is the piece of the crime that we knew first. That is the jurisdiction that often ended up handling the case. So we submitted that Aiken County had jurisdiction to charge because of the fact that the body was found there. And that may seem like silly stuff, but when you're talking about proving in a courtroom, it seemed much easier to us for them to do that. They chose not to. They didn't agree with our evaluation of the law and essentially was not going to charge. Eventually, it would be determined that Richland County, where Ashley's body was found, would be prosecuting Jason Carmichael for both homicides.

We continued to work the case. We had our murder, but we continued to work it. As investigators gathered results from the blood found in the truck, in confirming also that it was Ashley's husband, Rufus, also confirming, as I mentioned earlier, that the weapon recovered from the U-Haul truck was in fact the murder weapon. Sounds like a very strong case, Anastasia. On its face, you'd think so. You have witness accounts coupled with forensic evidence, but there certainly are going to be challenges here too.

You have a five-year-old child as your main witness and all the issues that are going to come into play about that child's veracity, the reliability, the ability to recall. But most important, you also have to think about this child's well-being and the impact of what having to be a main witness in this horrible homicide of not one, but of both his parents, what that might do to the child.

But investigators would soon learn that he wasn't the only witness. And Anastasia, I wanted to ask you, really, what are the advantages and the challenges of having a five-year-old witness take the stand? There's a lot on both sides. As far as the challenges, you know, how is this child going to react on the stand? You know, even more than adults, they're just unpredictable. You know, it's the ability to recall. I mean, just think about talking to a child and sometimes they don't remember one day to the other, but others have the memory, you know, like an elephant. They don't forget a thing. And sometimes children embellish and it's harder to figure that out at such a tender age.

And again, as we said earlier, it's their mental well-being. But on the flip side, there are the advantages. You know, how obviously powerful the testimony of that child will be. You know, you would be able to hear a pin drop on every word that he said. You never know what a kid might say, but you also know how powerful the testimony of a child is, especially when they're talking about the murder of their mother and identifying the person who did it. You know, he will get the heart, the emotions, and the sympathy of the jurors. But there's a

real but there because you're not allowed to use any of those factors as a juror when you ultimately decide the case. But it's definitely going to be something that with a child, I think a great argument is that a child doesn't have the same motive for bias or, you know, shading the truth for a particular purpose that an adult would, at least not in this type of a case. You know, I would submit that if it goes across correctly and the prosecutor handles it correctly and protects the integrity of the system, it's overwhelming testimony, especially in a homicide case. It's just people believe

children. The testimony of the child would come only a few months after the murder. Kevin felt very confident that the child would be able to clearly lay out what he saw the morning his mother was murdered. But also, great care is taken in getting that testimony. They may clear the courtroom or have the child testify via video conferencing, different things to just lessen the traumatic impact of the position they're in. Carmichael's now being tried for two murders. Ashley's son is only a witness in one of those, so forensic evidence would play a huge part in the prosecution in the murder of Ashley's husband, Rufus. Prosecutors have a tremendous amount of forensic evidence in Ashley's murder. They have the murder weapon. They have the

testimony of her son, who was only five years old, but he was able to ID the shooter as being his uncle. But there was another witness who was with Carmichael in the events leading up to the murders. I think she was in the early stages of possibly a romantic involvement with the defendant. When it came to renting that truck, she was there. She helped him pay for it. She had some things she wanted to move. He had some things he wanted. So it was a mutually beneficial situation.

When Carmichael had the argument with his brother, she was there. She had been present for an argument over the phone. And when he hung up, he said he's going to kill his brother. When Carmichael was plotting to dispose of the body, she was there. So she gave us all these details about how out of control he was, how he was specifically talking about burying his brother

in the location where we know he'd already started digging a hole. And on March 12th, 2021, just hours before Carmichael kidnapped his brother Rufus, she was there too. She provided us with a lot of information. He was abusing drugs, where he was fueled on drugs, making threats, threats to her to the point where he pulled a firearm on her and she was able to calm him down and flee from the home and actually hid from him

in the neighborhood surrounding his house. This person provides firsthand testimony of what Jason Carmichael told her and the things that she witnessed herself. It takes also a little bit of pressure off of the testimony of the five-year-old child. Yes, his testimony is still key. He's an eyewitness to the actual murder, but her testimony really ties it all together.

So really with the two of them, it really comes down to, in my mind, does the prosecutor proof beyond any reasonable doubt? And right there, like you said, Scott, it takes the pressure off the child because the prosecutor can argue it's with his testimony or with hers. You come out to the same place. So you may be wondering how the child actually did on the stand. Well, I think Kevin explains it best. I thought he was amazing.

I was astonished by how well he kept it together and worked with us and communicated. He was phenomenal. I've never had a case like that before. But it also just wasn't the five-year-old boy who took the stand. Carmichael himself would take the stand, and he would attempt to shift the responsibility to somebody else. It was something to the effect that his brother had came over and his brother had left with a third guy in the U-Haul.

The guy brings the U-Haul back. His brother's missing. He sees the blood in it. The guy leaves, finds a gun in it, and hides the gun inside the car. Somehow, you know, it was that outlandish. I look at this as the imaginary third person defense because very often when you get something like this, this person who can't be named, they don't give any details about who they are. They are now the culprit, you know, this other person. Well, that makes no sense. Really, his story is nonsensical when you start to pick it apart any way you look at it, at least not to me. As you know, Anastasia, while it's rare that a defendant in a murder trial would take the stand, Carmichael may have felt like this was his only chance.

Would the jury believe history and not the testimony of eyewitnesses and forensic evidence? Well, I think sometimes, again, a defendant never has to testify. It's their choice whether they present any defense or not. Sometimes it's like just taking a shot because they know how much is at stake. And they actually do testify more than people think. But something like this, it's like almost taking the evidence as he knows it's been presented and trying to now place this other piece into it just to try to get reasonable doubt, at least from someone. If you can paint the whole story and you've got the young man testifying that he killed his mother, then our story is plausible and the jury would agree that it likely happened here. In December of 2022, Jason Carmichael was convicted by a jury of two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

He was sentenced to life in prison. And of course, all of us and thinking about this little boy, how that night he started by being woken up out of his sleep and it ended with both parents dead. But it's his courage that he showed throughout from having the wits to not be seen by his mom's killer and then to go and get help in the middle of the night immediately. And then it was his vivid account that jump-started this entire investigation. The bravery it took him to walk into the courtroom and testify against his uncle. And then it was the courage that he has shown every single day to move forward with his

life without both parents. He's in good hands for everything that he's gone through. I did speak with them at the trial. It was a good conversation. He seems to be doing as well as you can imagine. A parent's role is often to help forge a path in a child's life. But here, a child helped forge a path in solving his parents' death. 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 and Submit David are executive producers.

So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?