Cold Case Files - I SURVIVED: I Knew He Had Nothing To Lose So I Began Fighting Him

Episode Date: April 4, 2026

Terri and one of her daughters are taken hostage by Terri’s ex-husband who was a law enforcement officer. James’ home is invaded by two masked men who bind he and his wife before they threaten to blind him. Walter has survived a small plane crash only to find himself covered in aviation fuel.Apartments.com - To find whatever you’re searching for and more visit apartments.com the place to find a place.Tempo - Check out TempoMeals.com/SURVIVED for 60% off your first box!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode contains subject matter that may be disturbing some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. His eyes were literally popping out of his head. His face was red. He had a gun in one hand pointed at me and a crowbar in the other. Real people. Then I realized I was covered in aviation gas, and that's when the fear of dying really hit me.

who faced death. The next thing I know, there was another man also wearing a ski mask, pointing at 9mm clock at my head like this. And lived to tell how. He then told me that my other daughter, seven years old, was dead, and that my parents were dead. He had already killed them. This is I survived.

It's December 1989 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Terry is divorced and has a divorced, and has two young daughters. She starts dating Dawn, a policeman. And he began pushing for marriage immediately within weeks. I was hesitant due to my previous divorce, and my family and friends kept saying, you're just gun-shy, get married. He's a great guy.

Six months after they met, Terry married Dawn. The night we got married, he played baseball. for the police team and didn't invite me. He left my daughters and I at home, and I was hurt. The following morning, I talked to him about that. He became enraged, and when I walked across the room to go upstairs, he hurled a huge glass ashtray and hit me in the back of the leg real hard with it. And at that point, I thought,

What have I gotten myself into? He told me I was stuck with him because we were already married. I told him that I had been divorced before and I wouldn't live that way. What kept me with him was the fact that I believed he could change. And I cared about him very deeply. I was in love with him. Over the next three years, the couple separated and reconciled many times. And the irony of it was, my daughters cared about him now.

So I felt trapped. I felt like they needed a family. They needed a father. He had two sides to him. He was a very caring, loving individual at times. But then for no reason at all, he would become angry, moody, go into a row. go into a range, tear things up, and then turn on me.

I would call the police. They would pick him up. Many of the officers sided with him. There were a handful who were supportive to me, and they would pick him up, and eventually he would end up in jail. I decided to file for divorce at that time and did divorce him. Despite a restraining order, Don harassed Terry. I would change the locks on the door, and he would still manage to get in.

When he was arrested, they would take him to the jail, but he would sit in an office at the jail. They wouldn't put him in with the inmate population because of his position. He would threaten to kill me. He would threaten to kill himself. He told me that a restraining order would not keep me safe from him. And I felt like the violence was escalating to the point where we were scared to death, to go anywhere, to do anything.

I would be in a grocery store, and he would come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. He would leave notes on my car in parking lots. He stalked me everywhere I went. I went. We went through hell. It was a nightmare. One night, Terry's seven-year-old daughter stayed over at her grandparents' house. Terry and her 11-year-old daughter were alone in the house. My daughter and I were asleep upstairs in my bedroom. She slept with me that night. I awoke to the sound of shattering glass and instantly knew that it was dawn breaking into the home.

I picked up the telephone on the nightstand and the line was dead. My stomach dropped. I knew we were dead. I hear Don running up the stairs. I have never seen anybody with so much rage. His eyes were literally popping out of his head. His face was red. He had a gun in one hand pointed at me and a crowbar in the other.

He started screaming at us to get down the stairs. At gunpoint, Don forced Terry and her daughter down to the basement. As he pushed us downstairs, my daughter carried the two little Bichon puppies that I had gotten the girls for Christmas. She took them with her, and he pushed her into the furnace room next to the freezer and told her not to move. And he took the neck of my nightgown, and in one jerk pulled my nightgown off, ripped it completely off of me. He ripped my panties off as well, so I was naked. He began beating me, kicking me, punching me. He had on boots, and he was kicking me in my ribs.

He was just enraged. He's calling me horrible names. He is telling me I'm worthless, that he's going to kill us, that we're going to die now. He then told me that my other daughter, seven years old, was dead, and that my parents were dead. He had already killed them. When he told me that he had already killed him,

He told me that he had killed my other daughter, my parents. There was no doubt in my mind that we were going to die as well. He turned on me with a vengeance. He was psychotic. He was crazed. He was like an animal. The whole time he is telling me that we don't deserve to live. He told me that he was going to

tie us up and set the house on fire and leave. Then he told me he was going to splatter our brains on the Christmas tree. He told us that we were going to have to watch while he killed the two little puppies in front of us. Don had locked Terry's daughter and the puppies in the room next door. Even though the door was closed to the little room where my daughter was, it was right next to us and she could hear everything. going on. And then he raped me. I was so petrified, but I knew our lives depended on my remaining

calm and trying to formulate a plan to get out of this situation. As the night went on, he would become enraged, I would calm him down. He would become remorseable almost. He would be remorseful almost. He would He would want to get back together. He would cry. He would tell me he loved me. And then he would go right back into the rage. This went on from around 11 o'clock at night until the sun came up the following morning.

At one point on the couch, he became enraged and jammed the gun threw my teeth into my mouth to shoot me. He pulled the trigger and it clicked. He broke my teeth when he put the gun into my mouth. I knew he had killed my daughter and my parents. I knew he had nothing to lose. So I began fighting him and telling him to go ahead and kill me and get it over with, but get it done because I couldn't.

take anymore. He began crying. He told me he was so sorry. It was at that point that I realized I had gained some control. He backed off a little bit, and I told him that we could get back together, that he could take my car and leave, and I would wire him money and meet with him later, and we could be a family again. I had to fight a gag reflex. It was so hard for me to say that. I didn't feel it. However, he wouldn't take my car and leave.

He wanted me to take him. Terry's 11-year-old daughter had been locked in the basement all night. He told me that she had to go with us. And I said, no, she'll be better here. I'll take you, and then we'll meet up with you later. When I went in to tell my daughter goodbye, I knew it might be the last time I saw her, but I wanted to be able to save her, even if I couldn't save myself. I told her I loved her. I hugged her.

I told her everything would be okay and that I would be right back. But I really didn't know whether I would or not. Her eyes were so big with fear. He allowed me to get some sweat pants and a shirt and we got in my car. We were driving down the street and the first red light I came to, I hit the gas really hard, trying to draw attention.

When I did that, he became enraged again and put the gun to my head. I can't describe the feeling, the fear of thinking I was dying again. He was infuriated. He was screaming at me again. So I continued driving to his home, trying to stay calm. He told me to stop. He indicated that he loved me and he loved my kids.

but that he was so screwed up that he didn't know how to stop hurting us. He didn't know how to control himself. He finally, he hugged me. I was crying too. He got out of the car. And as soon as he walked away, I spun a circle on the ice and went to, began driving back towards my house to get my child. daughter. I saw a police car and I pulled in quickly. I was barefoot and sweat pants and a shirt.

I had been beaten. I had a huge bruise on the left side of my face from the gun. I had broken teeth. I told the officer that Don had killed my parents and my other daughter and gave him their address. He called in and had somebody go out to check. When the officer took me home, I ran in, ran down to find my daughter still standing in the same spot. She still held the puppies. I was glad that she had them to have something to hold on to. She and I hugged each other and the officer finally said, ma'am, you've got to hurry. We have got to. We have got to. to get you to the hospital. When my daughter and I arrived at the hospital, they herded me through to another room and took my daughter from me. I turned around and saw my parents

and my other daughter. They were alive. After Terry was released from the hospital, the police told her they had found Dawn. The detective said, Terry, Don killed himself. I began to come. cry. I was both relieved and sad at the same time. My parents and my daughters came home and I embraced all of them. It was over. It was finally over three years of hell had passed. I survived because I had to for my daughters.

I had to protect my daughter, who was with me at the time. The night he broke in, he was crazed. He had cracked. It was the culmination of the entire marriage. It was what everybody anticipated and what I had dreaded, but was afraid what happened. And it did. During the week, my schedule is nonstop.

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It is Father's Day, but his daughter is away for the weekend. I don't remember us ever not spending Father's Day together. So I was a little bit sad that I didn't have my daughter with me on Father's Day Sunday, but I was going to watch the golf tournament and go out to dinner with my wife and plan just a wonderful day enjoying an early summer day. We generally wake up early on Sundays to enjoy a pot of coffee, and the paper together. James took his coffee outside and waited for his wife to join him.

But after 15 minutes or so, my wife didn't come down to join me like she should have, which that was odd. So I decided to leave everything behind and walk up into the house to see if I could find her. I saw her coffee cup sitting on the kitchen counter exactly where I placed it for her. getting cold, which I didn't make any sense. I thought to myself, she obviously went upstairs on her computer to maybe do some emails, and that doesn't seem like something she would do. I figured I'd grab her a cup of coffee and bring it up to her and see what was going on.

Naturally, I'm making sure I'm not spilling any coffee as I'm walking up to steps and I'm looking down. I got about four or five steps up when I looked up and I saw a man with a ski mask and dark turtleneck, dark pants, holding a golf club coming towards me. Knowing that he's in my house and I did not invite him and because he's wearing a ski mask, he's obviously means to do me harm. and because my wife is missing, obviously he's already accomplished some harm, so I then became aggressive. I grabbed the golf club and pulled, which kind of pulled him forward down onto the ground in front of me, and then I took the club and with the head side,

hit him over the head, and then took it and went around his neck with the club. I remember thinking to myself, this is going well. This is actually going well. So what do I do next? I remember him then yelling for help. Yo, I need help.

Very loud. So at that moment, I knew there was somebody else in the house. That's when I decided to make a break for it. I'm running for the door. I grabbed the door knob, but my hand kind of slipped off it because he had pulled my foot back. And that's what sometimes it comes down to is, you know, it's, it's, there's little things. And I thought to myself that was my chance. And the next thing I know, as I was turning around to deal with him grabbing my foot,

there was another man also wearing a ski mask, same clothes, bigger, pointing at 9mm mcm at my head like this. I haven't seen a lot of guns, I'm just not really comfortable around guns. I just, I don't trust them, I don't like them, I don't like them pointed at me, and this gun was pointed at me with urpus. He said you're not going anywhere, you're going to come down. into the basement with us. They pushed me down the steps and our basement is a large and it's corned off in the several rooms. They marched me into that part where they had my wife

sitting on the floor tied to a post. They had taken some plastic ties and had tied her wrists in front of her around the post and her feet in front of her around the post and she was sitting very uncomfortably on the floor. And it's just so unbelievable. It's just, you know, I can't believe that this is happening. I can't believe this nightmare is happening. The two men had broken in earlier that morning and hidden in the basement.

They told me to get up and took me to a separate part of our basements, like a laundry room that's totally cinder block. off and brought me in there. Certain he was going to be shot, James thought of his teenage daughter. My daughter had a life-threatening illness five years before. She's blind in one eye. She's been through so much. I just could not imagine her losing both of her parents.

I definitely thought that there was a very good chance that I would die. I said, please, please don't hurt my wife. Please don't make her an orphan. Please, don't do that. At gunpoint, the men drag James into another room in the basement. They dragged me over to a table and duct tape me to one of the legs. Used a full roll of duct tape. They also put plastic ties.

And at that point in time, I wasn't going anywhere. I literally couldn't move any part of my body. They were talking to me a lot, peppering me for information. Where's cash? Where's your valuables? Jewelry, anything. They went and tore our whole house apart. And I could hear them trudging around my floors. After three hours, one of the men,

and return to the basement. And he takes pair of pliers, and he starts trying to get under the duct tape, which was wrapped really tight, and trying to get the duct tape up. So he's like scrounging into my eyeball, and I was screaming, what are you doing? What's going on? And then I heard him shake an hour salt can, and then very quickly, starts right into my eyes. And all I remember at that point in time

was to shut your eyes as tight as you possibly can because he's trying to blind you. I just felt liquid pouring over my head, and that's when I really started screaming because I knew as soon as it hit my head, it wasn't water. It was some sort of chemical, floor cleaner, ammonia, something like that.

I'm trying to figure it out, What, is it flammable? I mean, yeah, I think it is flammable. He's, and Jesus, please, don't set me on fire, please. If you're gonna light me up, just shoot me in the head. Please, just shoot me in the head. You know, he's saying, you call the cops, I am, I'll come back. And if you do what you're told, your wife, your daughter will not be an orphan.

But we know where she goes to school, we will come back if you call the police and kill her. and kill her. There was silence. I could not be certain that they have left because there was a lot of periods where there was just silence, where they were watching me. And I knew that my daughter wasn't coming back

from the shore until two days later. So I remember saying I could literally be sitting down here for two days. I don't know if we can survive that. I don't know what they've done to my wife. I assume they've put just as much duct tape on her. I could not hear anything of what was going on with her. The two men had loaded the stolen goods into James' car and left the house.

I knew they were gone because I could then hear my wife screaming for help. And she stopped. And I'm like, oh, no, what's going on? A little bit after that, maybe 20 minutes or so. I remember her she had a white t-shirt on that day and I remember through my blurry eyes

seeing a big billy white t-shirt run into the doorway to me. James's wife knew there were garden clippers in the basement. And with her feet, she was able to get the clippers over to her such that she could grab them with her hands. And then actually with pressure, clip her hands free.

It was just amazing calmness. And that was what saved the day. So not only did she get us out of the situation, but she was a real hero. She really lost. The built-in GPS in the stolen car allowed the police to track and arrest the two men within an hour. Luis Martinez is serving 26 to 55 years in prison for aggravated assault.

Jeremiah Nieves is serving 21 to 43 years in prison for aggravated assault. Well, I know I survived because my wife did what she did. I mean, that's clear. And she got loose. She never panicked and figured it out. She did it. That's for sure. I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't for her. Finding the one can feel impossible. And in today's world, it's even harder. False profiles,

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Make it easier to get a place that gets you. Visit Apartments.com, the place to find a place. It's June 2006 in Humphrey, Arkansas. Walter's house is next to a rural air strip. One afternoon, Walter's brother and a friend fly in for a visit. My brother and a friend of ours flew, actually flew over, kind of buzzed us in a plane and landed on a strip right beside our house. My brother was flying with a friend of ours.

They tried to fly about every weekend whenever they got a chance to get away. They'd take off and go flying, you know. They flew this little passenger plane, a little piper cuff. My brother Todd's getting out of the plane and hollered over at me. We'll know if I wanted to go up. Walter climbed into the front seat of the two-seater plane. This little trainer plane, actually, what it is. It's got a front seat in the back seat, and you can fly it from the front or back seat.

Danny was a pilot, and he sat in the back seat, and I was in the front seat. He leaned up and asked me, where did I want to go? And I told them, nowhere really. I just go up and fly around and go back. I had been in the pool. So the only thing I had on was swimming trunks and some flip-flops. He banked a plane around and went back toward town.

Seeing an airstrip, Danny, the pilot, decided to do a touch-and-go maneuver. A touch-and-go is landing and taking off again. without coming to a full stop. He dropped the plane down, and we're cruising along there probably about five, ten feet off the ground, just skimming across the ground. And he was pulling back to climb out,

and out of nowhere, this tree jumped up almost, and that's when we hit it. It was so fast that I couldn't say, look out, stop, nothing. It just, in a blink of an eye, that's it. With him sitting in the back, He probably wasn't able to see as clear as I was, you know, and see the tree in front of us. And it happened so fast.

We hit probably at a speed of about 70 miles an hour. Just slammed it upside down. And it hit so hard the impact knocked the engine off of the plane. It kind of felt like you were in a carnival ride. One of these things that jerks you around. We were upside down. At the time, I didn't know it. I was disoriented. I couldn't tell what, you know, how I was setting, but I was pinned to the point where I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't move my, couldn't move anything, actually. My back was just, it was an unbelievable pain. The force of the impact had crushed Walter's spine. I hollered for the pilot because I hadn't heard anything from him.

I was screaming, trying to get his attention and nothing. I thought, you know, he was possibly dead. Then I realized that I was covered in aviation gas. It was pouring gas out on me. And that's when the fear of dying really hit me. It was pouring out and running down me. I tried to move because the second thought I had was this thing's going to blow up. I've got to get out of here.

I'm going to die. I'm going to burn up. And I struggled to try to get free, but there was nothing I could do. If you could imagine, two guys six foot tall, 200-something pounds wadded up into a grocery cart. That's the way we were. My left leg was approximately five inches from my face. My left arm was pinned against me, and my right arm was about the only thing I could move,

but it hurts so bad I couldn't do anything with it. I couldn't hardly breathe. It was hard to breathe, I guess, just for the fact that I was upside down and all this pressure was against me. I thought about my wife and my kids. I said, Lord, I want to see my wife, my kids again. I realized that the only option I had was screaming for help. It was probably about four or five minutes of doing this

that when I heard the pilot start moaning. And he came around, and he asked me what happened. And I told him, I said, man, we hit a tree. I'd asked him if he had a cell phone. He said, no. So I started screaming. just screaming top of my lungs. Somebody please help me.

Somebody helped. We were approximately three miles outside of town in a remote area. The only road that's close was a gravel road and it's about a half a mile away and you couldn't see the plane from there. Both of us would just scream as loud as we could for help and then it got to the point that we were exhausted.

I heard this four-wheeler coming. Well, I could tell it was coming in our direction, so we started all, both of us started hollering loud. Suddenly it stopped and turned the motor off. Well, I'm hollering and he's hollering, screaming, and it starts up and turns around, takes off and goes back in the same direction it came from. I figured it was someone who was coming to check water on a rice field.

So with them leaving, I said they won't be back until tomorrow at this time. And I knew I couldn't make it for 24 hours. When they left, we both kind of just was silent. We tried to fight to get out, but we kind of lost hope a little bit there. I thought, that's it. It's, we're going to die. I really started praying. I mean, I was praying all the time through this.

God, I want to see my wife. I want to see my kids again. I don't want to die out here. I don't know how long it was gone. It seemed like probably 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. I'm not for sure. But I heard the four-wheeler coming again. But this time, it came right up to the plane.

hanging there, he said, I've called 911. He said, they're on their way. Walter's son, Chad, a volunteer fireman, heard the emergency call. Him and one of his friends and another guy that's on the fire department. They were out looking for us, and when the call came in, then they took off. Chad got there about the time the ambulance did. He ran up to him and he said, Daddy said, How bad are you? I said, son, I'm bad. I said, get me out of this thing before he catches

it on fire. It took two hours to cut Walter and Danny free and airlift them to the hospital. Danny, the pilot, had back injuries and head trauma. Walter had multiple fractures, internal injuries, and a crushed spine. I first woke up. My wife was there and I asked her, if I'd been up any. And she said, no, honey, said, you can't walk. And I said, well, what's wrong? And she said, well, your back was crushed. My back operation ended up being 10.5 hours long.

Right now it's doing pretty good. They've done a real good job on my operations, and I'm real thankful for the hospital UAMS. and what they've done for me. After the ordeal of operations, my family, my wife and kids, they encouraged me and pushed me on because there'd be times where I just didn't want to get up. I just didn't want to kind of, not so much I'd give up,

I was just tired, you know, but they really, they were really there for me. A lot of people say I'm very lucky. Very few people walk away from a plane crash. And I believe that I'm not so much, I don't really believe in luck. I believe I was blessed. I survive because I survive because my family. I survived because Lord would give me a second chance.

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