Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Eyes at the Window

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

The community is shocked when nursing student Jana Reynolds is raped and murdered. Without DNA testing available the case goes cold, but when the killer strikes again a detective with a hunch puts the pieces together.Homes.com: We’ve done your homework.IQBAR - Get 20% off all IQBAR products plus free shipping by texting COLD to 64000See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jana Reynolds was 22 years old in 1988. She was a newlywed. Her husband Jeff had been her high school sweetheart. The couple lived in Mount Vernon, Illinois, where Jana was attending nursing school to become a registered nurse, and she was working part-time as a licensed practical nurse. Jeff worked full-time at the Bindery Department at a printing company. friends and family of the couple described them as really happy. They had never seen Jana and Jeff argue.

On the night of May 5th, Jeff worked the late shift, meaning Jana was on her own for the night. A little after midnight on May 6th, a neighbor reported hearing noises coming from the Reynolds home. They said it sounded like a door being kicked in, or doors being slammed around. When Jeff arrived home at around 7.30 a.m. on the morning, morning of the 6th, Jana's car was in the carport. She hadn't left for school. Jeff walked into the house and then ran back out, and the neighbors reported hearing a different sound, Jeff screaming hysterically because Jana had been murdered. From A&E, this is cold case files. I'm Brooke, and here's the prestigious Bill Curtis with a classic case, eyes at the window.

I stopped by my parents' place, picked up a boat, and a buddy of mine was with me, and we went by my house because I wanted to change, change shoes. In 1988, Jeff Reynolds is 24, newly married to his high school sweetheart, Jenna. And her car was under the carport. Thought nothing up it. And walked in. Notice the back door had been broken into him. and walked in and hollered for her.

And I found her. Jeff finds his wife lying naked on their bed at a pool of blood. He was very shaken, upset, almost screaming in the phone if I can remember his nature. And that's all he said to him. I came home from work, I found my wife mutilated.

I need officers and paramedics here. First thing I see when I walked to the bedroom, doorway is this beautiful young lady laying there on her back with severe cuts. Her throat had been cut a number of times. Her right wrist had almost been amputated. Frank Cooper is a crime scene technician and one of the first investigators on scene. The last few minutes of her life, in my opinion, was a total fear. And she fought valiantly for her life.

until she couldn't fight anymore. Cooper collects the victim's clothes and bedding and tags them for forensic analysis. Meanwhile, Mount Vernon officers combed the neighborhood looking for any trace of a killer. We'd go down the street, down the alleys, we were looking in trash cans, and we were just basically looking for anything

that might have any kind of implications to being involved in this. The neighborhood search turns up nothing. By the end of the year, detectives are unable to charge anyone with the crime. And the case goes cold. First thing that we did was pull the case file out and read everything that we could find in it.

And it was in disarray. Ken McElroy is a detective with the Mount Vernon Police Department. In the summer of 2001, he and crime scene technician Roger Hayes are asked to reopen one of the town's most famous unsolved homicides. The rape and murder of Jenna Reynolds, 13 years earlier. Once we were familiar with the case file, then Detective Hayes started pulling out the evidence, a piece at a time, re-examining it,

looking at it with the alternate light source. In the back of my mind, I was hopeful that I could find something that either was missed or was not available at the time. back in 1988. From the knee area of the left leg of the thermal bottoms, you've got a stain here, a bigger stain in here, and one here, up around the crotch area. You've got a stain here and here.

And moving down to the right leg area, down past the knee. You've got a stain here, here, and here. Hayes ID's 23 different stains on Jana Reynolds' clothing, all possible sources of DNA. The clothing is sent to a lab for additional testing. We asked for presumptive tests first. We wanted to make sure that the illuminating stains that Detective Hayes had detected was simul fluid.

They came back and said, yes, it is seminal fluid. It seems to be not degraded, and we probably can get you a profile from that. Within probably two weeks, we had a profile. file of the person who had left the stains on the thermal bottoms and the panes. Jeff Reynolds is eliminated as a source of the seminal fluid, as are several long-standing suspects. With nowhere else to turn, detectives dig into old crime reports, looking for any similar types of attacks.

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Message and data rates may apply see terms for details. It was good. I mean, I was married to my high school sweetheart. person I thought I would be married to the rest of my life. I enjoyed my life at that point. It was the night of October 22nd, and Dina Dahl was alone in her trailer home. I was laying on my couch, listening to Bon Jovi, trying to go to sleep. I heard a, you know, forcible push on my door, and looked up from the couch, and he was standing.

there. Dina struggled with her attacker. That's when he, you know, pushed me back down on the couch and proceeded to attempt to rape me. He wanted me to do oral sex on him, and I just kept my mouth clamped down. After a while, he finally left, and he told me if I told anyone or if I went to the place, he would kill me. Dina filed a report, but no arrest was made.

A couple months later, she saw a set of eyes outside her window. I just looked up from doing dishes and saw his eyes, and he was standing there. And I screamed, and I screamed for my husband. And by the time he got out there, he was gone. Dahl called the police, and several squad cars began to patrol the area. As I was driving east on Westcott, I saw a black male walk. a pretty good clip walking down the street a pretty good pace. And I stopped the car and got out, approached him.

And as I did, I recognized him as Joe Tucker, asked him what he was doing. And he just told me that he was out for a walk at that time of night. It was a cool evening, and really he should not have been sweating like he was. We're just out for a walk. Tucker was questioned. At the time, however, detectives could not connect him to the peeping time report, and Tucker was released.

A couple months later, Dina Dahl found yet another strange man in her home. Dina was coming from her neighbor's home, which is this trailer right here, and she was coming across to her trailer, which was parked right along this area here. Dina heard the front door open, and she asked who it was. I said, well, I said, who is it? And he said, it's me. and I knew it was him, and I hit the back door. He chased me around all the way around, down to the road,

and up into the neighbor's backyard before he caught me. And then he pushed me to the ground and attempted to rape me. And the whole time I was just fighting him. I was fighting for my life. The suspect fled on foot as Dahl called police. The investigation, however, went nowhere. A decade later, McElroy reviews the Dina Dahl case and sees an M.O. that closely tracks the attack on Jana Reynolds.

Playing a long shot, he asks the crime lab to run the peeping Tom, Joe Tucker, against evidence from the doll rape and his unknown profile in the Reynolds case. Tucker proves to be a match in both. Basically, I got a call from a scientist that was working on this. And I remember where I was at. We had a bomb threat called into our high school, and we knew what phone, the pay phone had been called from. And I was dusting to pay phone for prints when I got a calling my cell phone.

And basically, Kristen, told me that we got a match. McElroy digs into Tucker's personal history and discovers a connection between his suspect and the murder victim. Jenna Reynolds and Joe had worked together a few years prior to that at a local fast food establishment here in town, and Jenna only worked there a couple of months. It was the only job she had through high school. She was 16 when she worked there. Joe Tucker was a cook, and Jenna Reynolds waited on, you know, took orders, and so their paths had crossed. The connection between Tucker and Jenna Reynolds provides McElroy with ample motive for the murder. He puts a call in to Jenna's husband to tell him of the impending arrest. He called me on the phone and told me that he was going to go make an arrest. And we're going after him.

It could be over, you know, finally. After all these years, you know, we've finally got somebody who they think has done it. Detectives pull a warrant for the arrest of Joe Tucker, but will their suspect talk? And if so, what will he say? We knew Joe Tucker was going to be at work Monday morning was supposed to be. So we went to his place of employment, and they called him into the main office of the business he was working at.

On May 8, 2002, Detective Ken McElroy travels 300 miles to Springfield, Missouri. His mission, arrest the man suspected of raping and murder, Janeh Reynolds 14 years earlier. And once he came through the door, he's seen me, his head kind of dropped, and I thought him, Joe Tucker, you're under arrest for Janet Reynolds. Once we arrested Joe and had him back at the Springfield Police Department,

took him into an interview room. I read him his rights. Watch his foot. Should or should I talk with him? Do you want to talk to me without a lawyer present and you would guess or no, right there? He decides he's going to, so he signs his name. Okay, so you understand your rights.

Uh-huh, okay. Joe Tucker decides he can talk his way out of his handcuffs. The suspect soon realizes he might have made a mistake. Well, that hair was enough root material for the lab due DNA on you. They compared it to the DNA they found on her bedding and clothes. It was a one-17 trillion. If you noticed his head was down, there was a pause, and I thought that, you know, he may actually tell us about it there for a few minutes. Somebody got to be playing games, okay, because y'all are trying to tell me that I murdered a girl that I only knew for a short period of time.

He goes back to denying it right to the end. He just denies everything. I'm saying I didn't murder nobody, and I truly don't know that. That girl, okay, is that your DNA at that house? It shouldn't be. No, but is it? Is it? I don't know. I was trying to overwhelm him with some evidence here.

If you did this, let's talk about it, and let's avoid this having to go in front of a jury. Because you're going to lose with the amount of evidence that we have. Let's just talk about it. Homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never just about the house or condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property. It's the location and neighborhood. If you have kids, it's also schools, nearby parks, and transportation options.

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We've done your homework. Joe, ain't a wiggle room in this room. None. It wouldn't make. It wouldn't make. Yeah. You're going to take your chances with the jury. You're damn right because that was not me.

If you're okay, in your heart with it. God's forgiving you. God don't need to forgive me because I've done no murder. One of the things he'd said to me right before I left was, you know, God will point out who did this, and I told him, I just kind of looked at him and said, Joe, I think he already has. McElroy and Hayes leave the room and give Tucker a chance. to think. On closed

circuit camera, they watch as their suspect starts to pray. We're watching this from another room, and we're wondering at this point in time, is he really praying about this case or but, or is he

wondering how many other cases is he going to get tagged with since they have my DNA? We've always thought Joe has done more than one homicide in a couple of rapes. We think that Joe has done many more than that. Tucker waves extradition goes back to Illinois and is sent to Menard prison on a parole violation. While he awaits trial in

the Reynolds murder, Tucker finds himself a lawyer. Unfortunately for Tucker, it's of the jailhouse variety. He sought out a person in Menard who had a reputation for having legal knowledge, and he asked this person to help him prepare a defense for this case, General's case. So he told Joe, write down everything you did in this case. So Joe writes down basically how he kills General's. It's on one page. Tucker's jailhouse lawyer tells Joe one page is insufficient.

So Tucker goes back to his cell and writes some more. So Joe goes back and writes several more pages, five or six more pages, even draws a diagram of the house of General Rimmel's house. The jailhouse lawyer takes Tucker's letter and quickly turns into a jailhouse snitch, offering up the handwritten confession to detectives. He showed them to me, and I was a little skeptical at first, but as I read the letters, I seemed that, you know,

knowing the evidence and knowing the case like, I knew it. I knew that the person that wrote these letters probably was the killer. On April 11, 2006, a jury deliberates for less than four hours before finding Joe Tucker guilty of murdering Jenna Reynolds. The only real courtroom drama, would Tucker ever be eligible for parole, or would he die inside an Illinois jail cell? She was like me.

She was terrified. A Joe Tucker's sentencing hearing, the state brings out its star witness, Dina Dahl. Even though the statute of limitations has run on her case, Dahl wants to tell the court about the night she claims Joe Tucker attacked her. You're trying to go to sleep. You wake up and you realize it's not your husband. You're blocked in.

I mean, there's nowhere to run. really and the only thing you think about is survival um and maybe just let it get over real quick and he'll go away unfortunately for her he didn't dene dahl has the desired effect on the jury they return with a sentence of life without parole detective ken mackleroy is in the courtroom with the reynolds family including jennas husband jeff jeff reynolds hug me and i thought he's going to break a rib and the whole family is very appreciative it's probably the most rewarding day i've had during my career as a law enforcement officer it was very rewarding and overdue for jeffrenolds the verdict means he can later arrest a piece of his past and give thanks to a detective who did

more than just a day's work. I think of him as a friend. I mean, he's just been very strong for me. Been a good friend. In 2011, Tucker appealed his conviction. Based on ineffective assistance of counsel, funds being denied to hire an expert witness, and his lack of remorse being portrayed as a sight of guilt. All three arguments failed, and his conviction was affirmed.

Joe Tucker is now 56 years old and carrying out his sentence in an Illinois prison. Cole Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McCamey Lynn and Steve Delameter. Our associate producer is Julie McGruder. Our executive producer is Head Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast 1. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me at Brooke Giddings on Twitter and at Brooke the podcast on Instagram.

Check out more cold case files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at AETV.com slash real crime. Just when you thought summer couldn't get any hotter. is turning up the heat with thousands of free movies. Presenting Summer of Cinema. Stream your favorite blockbuster films like Gladiator. I will have my vengeance. Good Burger. This is what I draw fast fit.

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