Anatomy of Murder - Where’s Tracey?

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Abduction, Murder, DNA. But how do you investigate a murder where there is no body?For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on soci...al media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

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Starting point is 00:00:00 There were a lot of bad times. I mean, for the first two years, I was depressed. You can't sleep. She's always on my mind. I still have to drive to find her, and that's really the most important thing. 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. Today we're going to talk about a case that is really meaningful to me in many ways. And I really hope that all of you stick it out to the end because there is a family that is still in need.
Starting point is 00:00:54 And you never know just which one of you might be the person that can help give them some closure, which they really need. In fact, many unanswered questions still remain 25 years later. We're going to talk today about Tracy Brazel. She disappeared in 1995. This story takes us to Everett, Washington, which is within Sonomish County. It's a rural bedroom community. I've personally never been there,
Starting point is 00:01:23 but I know it's just outside of Seattle. Tracy Brazel moved there when she was just 17 years old after her parents divorced. Her dad was in New Jersey, which I'm a lot more familiar with New Jersey than I am with Sonobish County, but it's 3,000 miles away from that area. I talked to Bill Brazel, Tracy's father, about his daughter and about everything that's happened over all these years. Here's what he had to say. In the household that she lived in in Washington State, she was pushed more to have a boyfriend or to go out and have fun, have parties at the house. It was a completely different environment there.
Starting point is 00:02:02 That's the reason that I think she went down the path that she went down. And unfortunately, that turn was towards drugs, getting into the wrong crowds, hanging out with the wrong people, and their drug use turned into her drug use. She had changed. In fact, the last time I saw her, her whole demeanor, her whole physical makeup had changed, In fact, the last time I saw her, her whole demeanor, her whole physical makeup had changed not for the better.
Starting point is 00:02:29 And I was concerned about that. And my daughter Lisa kind of cautioned me that Tracy was involved in some things she shouldn't have been involved in. That was something that opened my eyes, and I saw it when I was there. I was scared. Think about how hard it must have been for her. I mean, kids do things because they're kids.
Starting point is 00:02:54 But here she is. Her parents are divorced. She is now uprooted, whether she thought that was a good idea or not. Her life completely changed. And the one thing I do know about Out West versus the East Coast, because I went to college out there in Colorado, it is a very different vibe and a different atmosphere. So even if she liked it, I mean, that throws you out of sorts, if you will. She didn't have that same anchor that she had growing up. And it definitely took its toll on her.
Starting point is 00:03:22 I had hoped for more for her. I thought she could have been an attorney if she wanted. She was that smart that she could have been an attorney, doctor, whatever she chose. She just had the intelligence, the ability to learn. But she lost that ability to want to be more. She lost that when she moved out to Washington State, I believe. And yet he was so hopeful just two weeks before
Starting point is 00:03:46 that she said to him, Dad, you know what? It's time for me to make a change and turn my life around. And he had been thinking she desperately needed that. So he really left there last time together, really hopeful. But yet on Memorial Day weekend,
Starting point is 00:04:04 I mean, this weekend that is all about backyard barbecues and the unofficial start to summer, he never expected to get a call that his little girl, his 22-year-old daughter, was missing. And that information came from his other daughter, Lisa. On Memorial Day weekend, 1995, my daughter Lisa called me and told me that Tracy was missing. While the two sisters weren't particularly close,
Starting point is 00:04:31 they talked all the time. And no matter what was going on with Tracy, she would always answer the phone. And Lisa had been trying to reach out to her and hadn't heard anything from her since that Friday night going into Memorial Day. So she actually went over to her house. And when she got there, what she saw made her all the more concerned. They had gone to the apartment and the door was ajar from what she told me and the cat was gone,
Starting point is 00:04:54 her cat. So I got concerned about that, especially since she didn't say anything to Lisa about seeing a friend over the weekend or spending time with somebody. I was just hoping that she had gone to see her friend and had forgotten to mention to Lisa anything about it. But as time went on, of course, I saw what I believe had really happened. Often in these cases, when Lisa called police and started to describe her concern that Tracy was missing and talked about the circumstances potentially surrounding that disappearance, she felt that the police weren't as committed to the concerns as she was. And that's something that we've seen from both sides, Scott. I mean, certainly from a family's point of view, your heart has to go out for them because they know their child. They know there's something wrong. But from the law enforcement side, we also know that the reality in the numbers is,
Starting point is 00:05:55 fortunately, most of the time, that person who is quote-unquote missing is just all right. They've decided to take that time and get away. I mean, back in the day when I was in uniform, I remember so many cases where someone was reported missing. And you have to look as the investigating first officer on scene at all the circumstances. And the one issue here that steps out is her age. She's 22 years old. And at that point, that is not suspicious. A 22-year-old girl who may have gone down a bad path is missing. My radar is not going off in a big way. And without any witnesses saying she looked like she was in trouble, someone had seen her having a conversation with somebody and arguing.
Starting point is 00:06:44 Perhaps if she had told a friend, an ex-boyfriend was stalking her and she was having some issues with somebody else. Those were the kind of things that I would be looking for. I didn't get the impression that they were too inclined to do a quick investigation or to find out anything about Tracy. And later on, things came out that convinced me that police didn't care about Tracy's case. And I had a, I guess, a rocky situation with the police during that time. But there was a development in the case just a few days later. Tracy's car was found about a half a block away from the apartment complex. The right side passenger window was broken. But police also noticed two important factors.
Starting point is 00:07:31 One, that window, which was broken, there was no glass around where the vehicle was found. So it was determined that whenever it was broken or removed, it was probably not at the scene a half a block away from her apartment. And number two, there were some bloodstains on the outside of that passenger door. So now, between the fact that she and her family reported her missing and now we find her vehicle, now that kind of steps up the concern for law enforcement.
Starting point is 00:08:05 I mean, Scott, you have these investigators that, at least according to Tracy's family, didn't take this too seriously, but now they have this car with what appears to be a spot of blood and that has this broken window. I mean, is this now a crime scene? I mean, are they looking at this as a homicide at this point? What do you think? Well, I think it falls a bit into a murky area. I mean, did she disappear under suspicious circumstances? Detectives had to take a few things into account. I mean, did she normally communicate with her family? We do know that she did.
Starting point is 00:08:39 Did she use her credit cards? Did she have any usage from her specific phone? But there was something else about the car that I found really interesting. And that is the odometer. The odometer read 25 miles. And her dad, Bill, said to me that Tracy always turned that odometer back to zero whenever she gassed up the car. Somebody had taken her. They would have gone that radius of 12 miles, 12 and a half miles out from where her apartment was.
Starting point is 00:09:08 Because when the car was dropped off there, 25 miles is significant. So we realized that the person that took her must have dumped her body somewhere within that 12 and a half mile. I think that's incredible that they had that as a potential tool to trace what she had done. But in some of the early 1994 models, odometers could be altered or turned back by simply holding the reset button and turning the ignition on without turning the car on. And that would send it into a test pattern. But what would be interesting as a detective is that if that was a factor in this investigation, then someone would have known that detail. And that could lead us to a potential suspect if it was nefarious. You know, we talk about these things, but they didn't have cell phones as a tool. I mean, a 22-year-old, she may well not have had a credit card.
Starting point is 00:10:05 So they really are having to rely on their common sense and what they know about her. But to me, I turn my head right away when I find her car is there, there's a broken window, and there's a spot of blood. And while DNA was in its real infancy, and they certainly couldn't make a profile from it, they could, the best if I remember, was they could get a blood type at that point. It certainly seems that now they had a very serious potential crime on their hands.
Starting point is 00:10:36 Somebody said that they had seen someone in her apartment over that weekend moving around with the lights out, the door open. The first thing I think about, or I thought about, was the involvement in drugs, and that somebody was looking for drugs in her apartment. We got to the point where we hired a private investigator, involved them in the case from the beginning to track down people who knew Tracy, people who had last seen her, who she was with at the end of the night that she was in that club, et cetera, et cetera. And we spent, I don't know, $100,000 for investigations.
Starting point is 00:11:15 What do you think, with your background, about a family going out and hiring their own private investigator in a case like this? First, in certain situations, some people just don't like to be questioned by police. They fear they may say something wrong or they may be pressured into giving information. And also, private detectives will use that to their advantage in getting information from people, telling them, you know, I am not a police officer and I won't arrest
Starting point is 00:11:42 you after this conversation. So that usually works in their favor. And the second part of that is private investigators get paid on results. So they will spend a specific amount of time on a specific case trying to get results. And I guess sometimes it works against the investigation. Most detectives feel like that could be an interference with the investigation, but it happens all the time. And families should feel that they have the right to do what they can do to get answers for their family. I also think about we have to really dot our I's and cross our T's and be very careful about how we speak to witnesses, how we collect paperwork, and make sure everything is documented. And now when you lose that control to the outside, you now also have maybe too many cooks in the kitchen sometimes.
Starting point is 00:12:40 She was with some friends that last night, and then they saw her leave at a certain time. It was 1.30, she left, and nobody saw her, they claimed, after that. Really interesting to me is that in his search to try to find answers, Bill decided to go to a psychic. And one of them actually said to him that his daughter was dead and that she'd been taken by two men. They told us that Tracy had been abducted because she made a threat against some people
Starting point is 00:13:15 regarding a drug deal and she was going to go to the police. And she told us that that was the reason why Tracy was abducted. In fact, she described that incident. She said, I see her being taken by a couple of men from a car, her car preferably, into another car. What do you think about the psychics? They certainly get involved in quite a few of our cases. Where do you fall on that line? Wow, that's a tough question. I have never had great success in any investigations or even working with a psychic. Down the road, I've always thought
Starting point is 00:13:54 maybe there would be one case or one situation that some credible information can come from it. And I do feel that families deserve to look at every possible angle, so I would never discourage a family from doing everything they could do to find answers they're looking for, but I really have not had, honestly, Anaseka, a lot of luck with that. I firmly believe there's something to it, and people can roll around all they want. I don't really care.
Starting point is 00:14:25 It's what I have to deal with and what I believe in that is most important. Well, two months later, on August 8th, there would be a discovery of a body that everyone would hold their breath about. Right behind the local mall,
Starting point is 00:14:44 the Everett Mall, there's a group of kids playing outside. And they're playing by the woods, and all of a sudden, they see something that stopped them in their tracks. There's a body. She is nude from the waist down. She is in her 20s. The autopsy revealed that she had died from multiple multiple stab wounds to the face and neck this young woman wasn't tracy so the body that they found in the woods was a woman by the name of Patty Berry.
Starting point is 00:15:28 She was 26 years old, blonde. Now, what people would write about her was that she was a dancer at a local gentleman's club, but she was also a mom. I mean, she had a two-year-old daughter, and that's really when they first figured out that something was wrong because when she didn't come home after working, everyone knew that this is not like Patty. Something bad's happened. And she was last seen Monday, July 31st, 1995 at about 1 a.m. And that's only two months before Tracy disappeared. And Scott, when we were looking at this, I mean, there's definitely
Starting point is 00:16:03 some similarities here between the two cases. Absolutely. I mean, finding the vehicle abandoned is one of the similarities. And even further, this vehicle had an excess amount of blood located inside the car. And there's the connectivity here, Anastasia. How can these or are these cases related, is a geographic consideration. The Gentleman's Club that Patty worked at is in the same strip mall as the bar, Kodiak Ron's. There's something about linking connectivity. It's putting these pieces of the puzzle together. Evidence can lead to a motive, motive can lead
Starting point is 00:16:45 to a suspect. Completing that puzzle of the connectivity of whether these girls knew each other or whether they were killed by the same person will play very important roles in both investigations. I read about Patty, that Patty had been absolutely torn apart by this guy, and her body was just disposed of. Tracy's case, however, the body's not found. He disposed of it some other way, which concerned me that maybe the cases weren't similar. Well, clearly, still two months later, we do not have a body. We have not found Tracy, right? So we have found Patty Berry, but we've not found Tracy.
Starting point is 00:17:31 So police would focus in on Patty Berry's investigation on potentially who could have been involved in that killing. And the first place they went to was where she worked at the Gentleman's Club. Think about how many people Patty came into contact with. I mean, there was in her work countless people that must have come in and out on a nightly basis. In her case alone, there was 39 potential suspects. That's a pretty daunting task. If investigators have to look at all those people that she came into contact with, I mean, how do you ever figure it out? I've actually been involved in investigations dealing with gentlemen's clubs and the dancers actually make very good witnesses, believe it or not, because they're very observant.
Starting point is 00:18:26 They watch out for each other. And I think they come up to a wealth of information. They protect each other. So I think even though there was a huge pool of witnesses to talk to and a huge pool of suspects, I would imagine that something would come out of those interviews. Investigators were able to develop a sketch early on of someone that Patty was last seen speaking to at the club. So investigators, they actually reached out to the local news to try and generate tips. They did get a tip from someone who says he was at the club
Starting point is 00:19:02 and he knew Patty Berry. His name was James Leslie. He comes in for his first interview, and guess what? He looks just like the sketch. So is he a witness or is he someone that's committed the crime, maybe, and trying to get involved? I mean, it's certainly not the first time that we've seen something like this. I mean, it's commonplace in arsonists, right,
Starting point is 00:19:24 that they light the fires and they come back to the scene to watch it burn and to see the reaction. And we also have it, too, with people that are involved in the crimes. I mean, I can think of quite a few that I've handled that the person involved actually all of a sudden wants to talk to police as a witness. And we find out later when we put the pieces together that they're trying to test and see what the police know. So you have to wonder, this guy that comes out of nowhere and now he's matching the sketch, is he really a witness or something much more sinister? He admitted during his first interview with police that he was at the club. He was there
Starting point is 00:20:02 because he was talking business with one of his friends. And he actually had multiple conversations with Patty. And it was in the middle of that interview with police that another detective walked into the interrogation room, pulling the two detectives out of the interview to say that a body had been located. And in fact, it turned out to be Patty Berry. And it wasn't until a couple days later
Starting point is 00:20:26 that James Leslie reached out to them to say, I need to change a couple things that I told you in our first interview. He's changing his story. He had given them an alibi, which when they looked at it, they couldn't even confirm the alibi. And then they found out that this guy
Starting point is 00:20:45 was telling people that he was currently the prime suspect in Patty's case. I mean, I'm turning my head in this. I've got to think that investigators were too. And they certainly must have been because when they asked him to take a polygraph exam, he said no. We come across all sorts of people in this line of work. People that want to be bigger or want to all of a sudden be on stage in some way, want to have something to do with a big case in town for whatever their own reasons. All of a sudden, maybe the guy's lonely, want to have something to do with a big case in town for whatever their own reasons. All of a sudden, maybe the guy's lonely.
Starting point is 00:21:28 Maybe he has no one to talk to. Now, all of a sudden, everyone wants to talk to him because he's involved in the case. What can he say? Again, you just don't know who you're dealing with. I mean, what's his mental makeup? Or did he commit the crime and there is something else wrong that's making him do all these kind of bizarre things? Or could it even be one step further, Anasika?
Starting point is 00:21:47 Could it be misdirection? It happens all the time. Which is why we have to be so, so careful not to take that final step and not to have tunnel vision as we're trying to figure it all out. Obviously, you refuse the polygraph test. You're telling people you're the prime suspect. I mean, if I work in this case, I want to get a warrant. I want to search his house. I want to know more about James Leslie.
Starting point is 00:22:10 But based on what? What are you getting the warrant for? I mean, he's an odd guy, no doubt, but no one could place him with her. Well, it's true based on just those two points. But was he in the proximity? Could he have committed this crime? What was his background? Did he have the capability and did he have the access to the victim? I would come to a prosecutor and say, listen, I believe I have enough as the investigator to get a search warrant. I'm not talking about an arrest warrant.
Starting point is 00:22:43 I'm talking about a search warrant. I need more information. So you have two young women that go missing, but there's a lot of differences here. I mean, first of all, and glaringly, Patty's body was found. People knew that she left to go home. They knew that she was having car trouble
Starting point is 00:23:01 and went to go get gas. Her whereabouts, her last known whereabouts were known. They had a path, a direction. Tracy, it's just a lot of question marks. They just knew that they last saw her inside of a bar and she didn't answer her sister's calls and she wasn't home. They really had to start looking very closely at what the evidence was and wasn't. But with Patty's case,
Starting point is 00:23:26 they had a crime scene. A judge did agree to a search warrant. Investigators did search James Leslie's house, but did not find anything connecting him to Patty's murder. So just based on the polygraph, they had to really start looking elsewhere.
Starting point is 00:23:42 And so if they're looking elsewhere there, they're still left with nothing in Tracy's case too. Because the question was always, were they or weren't they connected? But whether they were or weren't, they still had nothing. And Bill, he may have been 3,000 miles away, but he wasn't going to just sit back and wait. It was 1997.
Starting point is 00:24:02 We were on the Oprah Winfrey show. Explained our case along with several other people who lost their loved ones. Once the show was over, we got 107 leads. You know, an appearance like that could be so helpful to bring in a flood of potential tips. And sometimes that takes you down all types of paths. And there's always concern about whether that's taking the focus away of what investigators are doing in that very moment. Of course, Bill believed not enough was being done, but there was still being work done behind the scenes. Well, that's the double-edged sword of those type of media blitzes, if you will,
Starting point is 00:24:40 because it brings in, like it did in this case, a flood of information, numerous tips, and maybe it's the one. And then all the rest of the work, it was well worth it. But they had to look at every single one because otherwise, no matter how they get there, if they get there, the defense is going to say, but you didn't check out all these other things, and they're going to use it against them. So it really gives them an incredible amount of work that very often, unfortunately, leads them nowhere. But again, it just takes one. Unfortunately, it led them down lots of roads they had to follow up,
Starting point is 00:25:17 but they still came back with just a question mark. No answers, no Tracy. There is this heartbreaking thing that he said to me that it really just stopped me. I thought, on the dark side, basically, excuse me for a second. I, as I said, I thought about suicide and that went on for a little while. And I finally sat down and I said, you know, stupid, get a piece of paper.
Starting point is 00:25:52 Let's see what it's to live for and what it's to die for. And, of course, the pluses outnumbered the minuses. And I tore the piece of paper up and said, that's the answer. Doesn't that speak to exactly what so many family members feel? They just don't know if they can keep going on and survive the pain they must feel with this type of loss. I mean, over the years as a homicide prosecutor, you've talked to so many families and obviously as the host of the television show, the same, talk to so many families about the pain they go through and just the not knowing, and especially in the no body cases, right? It just, I mean, it hurts my heart, but it's also the thing that drove me, and I know that drives so many members of law enforcement, that you can't bring their loved one back.
Starting point is 00:26:51 But we have got to do everything we can do to find them answers and then hopefully bring that person to justice. But then 17 years later, there was a cold case unit. Sonoma County Sheriff's Department had just started that unit up a few years before. And with a lot of these cases that we deal with, forensics plays a really big part. And cold case units primarily take a fresh approach, a fresh look at these cases and re-interviewing witnesses, looking at forensic evidence. What was collected, you know, in this case, 17 years before, what could be utilized now? How can science advance the investigation?
Starting point is 00:27:38 And as in so many cases that we see that you and I have covered over the years, that's exactly the break that they were looking for. And one of the detectives in that unit, Jim Scharf, he had known about these cases from just being in the area and handling cases in the past. And so when he became a member of that unit, he pulled their boxes off the shelves and said, let me just take a look at this again and see if I can get these families some answers. And you know what? He did. Thank God Jim Scharf got involved. He gave me hope as well. There was some concern there about Tracy. He told me, Bill, I'm going to find her body before I retire. Let's just go back to the blood.
Starting point is 00:28:26 We had Patty's vehicle with a lot of blood evidence left in the car. And it was in one location of the car, which was the steering wheel where they pulled a very solid sample of blood that was tested. And 17 years later, that sample was entered into CODIS and bang. So the DNA from Patty's car was run through CODIS, and it came back to a Danny Ross Giles.
Starting point is 00:29:09 Now, he was unfamiliar to detectives, and when they started looking into his past, they also made a very important decision. Because of the connections we've already talked about, the proximity of where the two women worked, and the fact their vehicles were found abandoned, and the fact that it was only a few months apart. They decided to test that single drop of blood that was found on the exterior of Tracy's car, and it was a match also for Giles. DNA evidence showed that he was in Tracy's car or around Tracy's car prior to it being abandoned.
Starting point is 00:29:54 Let's talk about Giles' criminal record because I think that really plays in to the responsibility potentially of these two crimes. He had a lengthy criminal history. He first was sent to prison and convicted of second-degree rape for attacking a young woman in a tanning bed, believe it or not. He was released, and then he also got re-arrested for exposing himself to a sorority girl during rush week. He was sentenced to another five years in prison, and then that conviction was the reason why his DNA was collected and how it was available to be matched to Tracy and matched to Patty. I got a call, told me that they had found the match, that it was the same guy. And I was elated. I couldn't ask many questions.
Starting point is 00:30:40 And my biggest concern was finding Tracy's body. I was hoping that this was the link to get to the person who had done it. Fortunately, when they found Patty's body, there was no evidence of sexual assault, but they always felt that his crimes always had a sexual element. And just as you went through this laundry list here, Scott, I mean, you can see it. This is a guy who everything he does, it is always against women. There's always a sexual component. And he's really upping the ante. But how fortuitous that that one spot of blood for Tracy's family was kept for all those years.
Starting point is 00:31:16 You know, as investigators, we always have to think ahead of how this may play out in court, right? So even though we know that we have DNA connecting somebody to a scene, we have to anticipate that jurors may be asking questions of, okay, but what else do you have connecting that person to the scene, to the victim, to the area? Could they have had access to the victim? And that played a very important role. Investigators would learn in this case that around the time Tracy was killed, Giles worked as a landscaper, and that crew was working in the same area that Tracy lived,
Starting point is 00:32:00 which obviously is in the same area that her car was discovered because it was only half a block away from her apartment complex. Let's go back to something you just said, Scott, is that always thinking about what they do and what they don't have when it's going to get in front of a jury. Because that really plays in here. Investigators went in and they spoke to this guy when he was towards the end of his sentence. In all these cases, you have not only experience and you always take some luck too, but they also had a stroke of bad luck. Detectives wanted to get Giles to talk about if and how he was involved in the disappearance of Tracy. And when they were talking to him and getting him to open up very much about Patty's case, they started to make the turn towards talking to him about Tracy.
Starting point is 00:32:50 And right in the beginning, investigators told me the fire alarm in the jail went off. Right there and then, they said to him, let's move to another section of the jail to try to continue this conversation because I believe or they believed they were getting somewhere with him. And he just shut down. And they never were able to get him to give them any information. And that
Starting point is 00:33:17 ultimately really played in much later because now that they had this guy linked with DNA to both, he was charged in both Patty's murder and also in Tracy's and prosecutors move forward all the way to trial. But the evidence in Patty's case just kept growing. You know, you had this statement, although they're denials, great evidence because they're provable lies. They could put him there. They had additional DNA evidence on Patty's jeans, other places in the car. There was just, unfortunately for Patty,
Starting point is 00:33:46 so much blood, but it ended being so strong as far as the prosecutor's evidence. So they went to trial. They wanted to try the two cases together, but that's always up to a judge. And the defense, I'm sure, made the motion saying, well, that's just too prejudicial to have these two homicides against these two young women together. And so the judge severed them. And really that made all the difference here. Told me that they were going to prosecute the cases. They were going to try and do the joint. And he said in the final analysis, they could only do Patty's because they had a body and they had the DNA link there with regard to her car. And at that point, I was disappointed.
Starting point is 00:34:26 I was hoping that Tracy's case would be included, but I understood that it would weaken the overall case for Patty. I have to imagine people are asking and thinking, why would prosecutors do that? I mean, how does the family handle that information? How do you go to a family and say, but we're just going to drop the case? I mean, that has got to be a difficult conversation to have. It's one of the hardest ones we ever have to have, but I understand it here. They knew they
Starting point is 00:34:57 had the right guy and they went into court charging. They were ready to go at him, but the cases, once they were severed, they really had a moment to look at them independently. And one thing that's important to note here is that when they dismissed the charges, they did it without prejudice. And what that means is that they could, they can still always bring charges against him or to anyone for her murder if that evidence develops. So they made sure to do it in that way. But what they had here was just that one spot of blood. Was the defense going to be able to get out from under by saying, well, maybe he had known her in the past. Maybe he cut himself when he walked by the car.
Starting point is 00:35:35 All these things that it just takes one to say, I think it's him, but it's not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution knew that he was going to jail, at least until if I calculated it right, in his 90s because he was convicted of first-degree murder for Patty Berry's case and sentenced to 47.5 years behind bars in 2014. If I have it right, I mean, this guy is going to be more than an octogenerogen, late 80s, 90s by the time that he gets out. And they said, we don't want to go into court and have too weak of a case to ultimately get that justice
Starting point is 00:36:08 for Tracy and her family that they deserve. Clearly, you know, bringing Tracy home, finding her body, putting her to rest, that's got to be paramount on his mind even today. It's all he wants. Adding a couple years to his life or to his prison sentence isn't going to mean a damn thing. I really just feel that he's going to be in prison for a long time. And just give me my daughter. I'm not looking to punish her anymore.
Starting point is 00:36:39 And that really is something that I've always seen throughout the years, is that even with the answers, even though they know she's never coming back, he just wants his baby's body so he can lay her to rest the way she deserves and so that he knows where she is, where he can visit her. And that to this day is all he still wants to try and do. And he's doing various things to try to still get that done. He hasn't lost hope. We're not talking about a huge crime scene here, right? We're talking about a 12-mile radius. I'm sure that has factored into their search.
Starting point is 00:37:16 Bill made a great point when I spoke to him. He said, yeah, they have searched the land, but in that area, there happened to be a lot of mine shafts. How do we know that her body isn't there? All these clubs that does exploration to see if they can go through some of these shafts or whatever out there and by chance find Tracy. I was thinking about going to a college that has geology majors courses there and to see if they have clubs that go out and do geology discoveries and ask them if they could keep a lookout for possibly bones of a human being. Throughout my career as both a journalist and a cop,
Starting point is 00:37:56 I am often asked how do family members deal with the pain of such an incredible loss, especially on cases that a body has not been recovered. And for them, including Bill, it's a numbness that they say that never goes away. You know, he has not given up. Homicide case is never closed until they get the person or persons responsible. And even when so, they're going to keep looking for that body if they have a path to leave on. And that's where all of you now come in. Because you know what? It just takes one.
Starting point is 00:38:34 If you are hiking or whatever it may be, be aware of the fact that my daughter could be there. Tune in next Wednesday when we'll dissect another new case on Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original, a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production. Sumit David is executive producer. Thank you.

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