Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Killers Amongst Us: Mom of 3, Michelle Parker, vanishes after ‘The People’s Court’ appearance. (episode 2)

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Michelle Parker is a loving, hardworking mother of 3. She's also a student and a business owner, but one night this reliable employee did not show up for work. Her 11-year-old son, home alone after school couldn't find his mom. The alarm is sounded and the search for Michelle Parker begins.joining Nancy Grace today: John W. Dill - Personal injury lawyer, part of the Parker family's legal team  Sheryl McCollum - Forensic Expert & Cold Case Investigative Research Institute founder  Dr. Jenn Mann - Marriage and Family Therapist, Host 'Couples Therapy' on VH1, "The Dr. Jenn Show” on Sirius XM, Author: "The Relationship Fix." Bianca Prieto, former Orlando Sentinel Criminal Justice Reporter   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Welcome back to Killers Amongst Us, a production of iHeartMedia and Crime Online. A beautiful brunette 33-year-old mom seemingly vanishes into thin air. We know that just doesn't happen. Of course, there are the claims. Oh, she went away with a new and very secret lover. Oh, she took time to herself to quote, clear her head. B.S. This woman, Michelle Parker, had never done any such thing in her life in fact this woman is so together holding down multiple jobs even going back to school and taking care of her children like Wonder Woman this woman is not going to disappear with some unknown unidentified as of

yet spotted by any one lover she's not shacked up in some motel. She didn't take a, quote, break from her family, her children, the light of her life. What happened to Michelle Parker? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Killers Amongst Us. Thank you for being with us. Take a listen to our friends at WESH2. I've been doing pretty good, you know, but when I saw that, it makes me cry. Yvonne Stewart spoke with us at her Ravito salon about the two-and-a-half-minute video Orlando police just released today of her daughter, Michelle Parker. Look down towards the drive-thru window.

Police say this is Michelle Parker going through down towards the drive-thru window. Police say this is Michelle Parker going through a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Fern Park on November 17th at 12.22 p.m. The video is three hours prior to her taking her kids. She's in the vehicle alone. No one's in there. So this is even prior to her picking up the kids. This same evening, her parents reported Michelle Parker missing. Parker's mother hopes the video prompts more leads to her daughter's whereabouts. It may. I mean, you never know what tips could come in when people see that today. You just always have to have hope that somebody knows something and that somebody will remember and call. I hope they do. Last seen driving through a KFC. You know what? How many times

have cases been cracked by drive-through windows? I'm just thinking right now of the case of Drew Peterson caught at a drive-through the night his fourth wife, Stacey, goes missing. It goes on and on and on. What significance? Of what significance is this drive-thru video at a KFC? She's by herself. She's in her vehicle. No problems. Nothing's wrong.

So how does she suddenly disappear? With me, an all-star panel. Cheryl McCollum, director of the Cold Case Research Institute, crime scene expert, Dr. Jen Mann, therapist, host of the Dr. Jen Show on SiriusXM, author of The Relationship Fix, John W. Deal, personal injury lawyer on the team, Michelle Parker, and highly involved in the case. But first, let's go to Bianca Prieto, freelance journalist, former Orlando Sentinel criminal justice reporter. Before you comment, I want to nail down the timeline. Maybe this is going to help. Take a listen to our friend Matt Gutman at ABC. Parker was last seen around 2 p.m. Thursday, dropping her kids off.

At about 4 p.m., her brother received a short text from her, but she never showed up for her 6 p.m. bartending shift. Her iPhone last pinged at a cell phone tower at 8 p.m., then total silence. At this point, her 11-year-old calls his grandmother, Yvonne Stewart, to ask, where's mom? And her son called and said, is mom at the salon? We're like, no, honey. She went to drop off the babies. She should be home. She should be taking a nap.

She goes, well, I haven't seen her since I got home from school. The flag was raised by the 11-year-old boy who called grandma. So Bianca Prieto, formerly with Orlando Sentinel, we now know that the timeline is not clear because we don't even know that she's missing until her 11-year-old son calls grandma. What happened? He calls his grandma and says, hey, have you seen mom? I haven't heard from her. I don't know where she's at.

Typically, they would talk every day after school, and he just hadn't heard from her. Grandma notices that's abnormal, and she raises the flag and says, hey, where is my daughter? We haven't seen her. We haven't heard from her. What's going on? You know what that's called? That is called routine evidence. Cheryl McCollum, I don't mean routine evidence in the sense that it's SOP, you know, routine evidence that comes into court i mean evidence of someone's routine i remember every single day we were latchkey kids

when we would get home i would call my mom at work and tell her we were all home and she would tell me what time she was going to get home that night for dinner from work. You know, that routine lasted through my whole life. My mom would call me even when I was a prosecutor at six o'clock in the morning when she got to work to make sure I was up, I was okay, I was on my way to work. And when I would be coming home from work late at night, I would call my mom and dad. That type of routine cannot be discounted. And here, even the 11-year-old little boy, he hasn't ever heard of routine evidence, but he knows something's wrong. Nancy, these patterns are critical because, as you said, even the 11 the 11 year old son knows something is not

right mama would be here when i got home from school so these routine evidence these patterns are extraordinarily important to law enforcement as soon as i see a break in a pattern when i'm working a case i stay right there until i can answer that question. Straight out to John W. Deal. You can find him at johnwdeal.com, PI lawyer on the Parker case. John, jump in. As far as patterns, this was a family that was always in touch. This wasn't the type of person to just disappear for days at a time or hours at a time. They were constantly in contact.

The extended family, the brother, the sister, grandmother, Vaughn Stewart. So this was out of the ordinary, even just in the way they communicated with each other, to have this blank time period, which raised everybody's suspicions and red flags right away. Dr. Jen Mann joining us, therapist, host of the Dr. Jen Show, Series XM, author of a new book, The Relationship Fix. Dr. Jen, question. I don't like discounting that feeling that witnesses and victims get around the time of a crime. When I received a call from my fiancee's sister, I knew immediately, I just knew that Keith was dead. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. This little 11-year-old boy, he knows something's wrong. What is that? I mean,

six senses are often discounted in our world of black and white and science, but what do you make of it? Well, it's a combination of things. And, you know, Gavin DeBecker, who's a security expert, talks a lot about the gift of fear and how we kind of instinctually take in information on an unconscious level. You walk into a room and something is out of place. You may not consciously go, oh, the cup was moved, but your unconscious sends you a warning signal that says something is wrong here. And a lot of the time, that's how we get our gut instincts. This is a kid who knew his mom well. She was raising him. She was a very active, involved, hands-on mom, super responsible. When she doesn't show up, he's going to have that instinct, something is wrong. Now, there's also what you're talking about in

the case of your fiance, that sometimes we just have this link to someone that is indescribable, that gives us kind of a sense that it's kind of a sixth sense that it's, you can't really explain with science, you can't really explain with, you know, things that we know of, but it just exists. And we've all had that experience or know someone who has. And it's important always to listen to that guy. And you're so right. The 11-year-old son knows something's wrong. He calls grandma and say, hey, where's mom?

Then we find out she doesn't show up for her shift at one of her many jobs as a bartender at 6 p.m. Straight back out to Bianca Prieto, freelance journalist formerly with the Orlando Sentinel on the criminal justice beat. Let's nail down the timeline as we know it. There's big holes in it. But what do we know at this juncture? So we know that Michelle was last seen around noon going through the drive-thru. She allegedly sends a text or a text is sent from her phone to her brother. And her son doesn't hear from her after school, which is totally unusual.

She's supposed to show up at a really popular bar where she's a bartender at six o'clock and she doesn't show up. No one's heard from her. And so at about 8 p.m., I guess that's the last time her phone was pinging. That means it was on. But nobody's heard from her since that text went out at four o'clock so we've got her at 12 22 at a kfc drive-thru everything's fine then by let's just say let's extrapolate 3 30 three hours later when her 11 year old gets off school mommy is gone. In the space of three hours, this gorgeous young brunette mom seemingly just disappears.

What do you make of the timeline, Cheryl McCollum? The timeline is so critical because there's a short period of time that she would have actually gone missing. So what we know is she goes through the drive-thru at KFC, but she doesn't show up for work. So that's a short window where something happened to her. Guys, immediately the alarm is sounded. Take a listen to our friends at Fox 35. Hundreds of volunteers spent the day on foot handing out flyers, family and close friends walking for miles, checking every corner for Michelle. Every dumpster, you're like, oh, Michelle, I hope you're not in here. Baby, I hope you're not in here.

And you get up and you crawl on top of stuff and you look and you're like, okay, this one's eliminated. You're not here. Brothers Brett and Dustin staying strong for their sister. Something you're not used to every day. You don't want to wake up and figure it'll be your sister you'll be going to look for. It just hurts. Using maps and driving these ATVs around,

they've been turning everything they find over to investigators. We found a lot of possible things today and nothing. I mean, it's all got to get tested and stuff like that. So we can't, we can't say what's what. I'm just imagining her brothers, Brett and Dustin, her mother out there literally beating the bushes, trying to find missing mom, Michelle Parker, an absolute stunning beauty. Then a break in the case. Take a listen to Bob Keeling at WESH News 2. Michelle Parker, the mother of three children, disappeared. This is newly released video of her Hummer pulling up to a red light at Conroy and Vineland Road that very night. So this is what we know. You're hearing the latest regarding her Hummer.

Remember, have you ever seen those cars that look like they've been shrink-wrapped with advertising? Hers was with her business, Glow, G-L-O-W. And the video shows her car pulling up to a red light and then moving on. Now they call it nighttime, but this is four hours after her text that day around two o'clock. So it's about six o'clock. The car is in what area? Straight out to Bianca Prieto. Where was the red light? The red light is over near the mall at Millennium, which is an upscale mall. And it's about 20 minutes from where she had dropped off her kids. Oh, Lord, Bianca Prieto, you just put chills down my spine. I just finished a new book. It's on Amazon, Don't Be a Victim.

And I devote a lot of time to safety while shopping and parking garages and parking lots and parking decks near malls, dangers of malls. You being at the mall with your children at the mall. Cheryl McCollum, that's near the Mall of the Millennium. That's a huge mall that raises all sorts of specters about what may have happened to her. You're talking about thousands of people that come and go from that area every day. So again, if somebody were following her, if somebody had been stalking her from her job, if there was some type of road rage incident, you've got a lot of people in that area.

Man, you're not kidding. And not just in that area living there, but in that area just to go to the mall okay with nothing better to do all day long than mall crawl hanging out at the mall who saw her and i want to talk about her vehicle back to bianca prieto uh formerly orlando sentinel criminal justice reporter tell me about why her hummer is so distinctive. So she was driving this big Hummer and it had details on the back of it that advertised her airbrush tanning business. She worked in, she had many jobs and one of those was to go to people's homes and give them airbrush tans. Well, everybody was looking for this big black SUV with the decals on it. You know,

Bianca Prieto, you're right. You can't miss it. The whole back window of her Hummer, it's a black Hummer, has a giant advertisement on it, glow, and then a phone number and I think a website. You really can't miss it. That's very significant. Let me give you an example. Cheryl McCollum, do you recall the recent case of Molly Tibbetts, the college girl, and she goes home to her boyfriend's home. He's out of town. She decides to go jogging, disappears. This insane search launched for Molly Tibbetts. And it was only when residential video cam security cams, cops are gathered and cops notice a vehicle. And all they see is the car go back and forth a couple of times. They notice a distinctive marking on the side of the car, like a big scratch is what I think it turned out to be.

Why was the car going back and forth and back and forth very slowly where Molly was believed to have been running, jogging that night? They tracked down that car based on the make, the model, the year, what they, the color, and they find the vehicle with the same scratches down the side of the car. I mean, in this case, this Hummer, first of all, a big black Hummer is identifiable enough, but she's got a huge sign on the back, GLOW, mobile airbrush tanning, and the phone number. You can't miss it, Cheryl. You cannot miss it, and that car would be recognizable as soon as anybody saw the back of that car. It takes up the entire back window. I want to go to John W. Deal at johnwdeal.com, high-profile personal injury lawyer who is on Team Michelle Parker.

You know, this woman did everything she could to push forward. She's a single mom. She's got these children, I think three children. She's holding down multiple jobs. She started her own business of airbrush tanning at home. That means, and you know, you've got her phone number right there on the back of her Hummer. That means she's going into homes of people she doesn't know to make a living. How do I know she wasn't meeting somebody at the mall following them home? How do I know somebody didn't pull up beside her at a red light, see that phone number and say, wow, she's beautiful and call her? What can you tell me about her personality, how she was trying so hard to make it in this world? Right.

She was, you know, a very outgoing, bubbly personality. You know, the type of person we admire pulling themselves up from their bootstraps and supporting their family, you know, always working and definitely was a visible person. She had a job in a busy bar. She had this thing where she would meet many different people. But when you look at that, is this the type of person who voluntarily just disappears or decides, hey, I'm going to take a trip without telling anybody? Those two things don't add up at all. It doesn't add up. And also to you, Cheryl McCollum, it's like an advertisement.

Here I am. Look at me. Here's my phone number. Now, you'd think it would be a great advertisement. But for her, it may have signaled her kidnap. Very easily. Again, if you've got a mobile TAN and somebody calls you up and says, hey, meet me at this address. You don't know maybe the house has just been broken into or abandoned.

It could be a very, very scary situation. With me, Cheryl McCollum, director of Cold Case Research Institute. You can find her at coldcasecrime.org. Just the other day, John David and I were in the car, and we came up at a red light behind a home pet grooming. And between the cat, the dog, and the two guineas, you know you have to cut. You have to trim the guinea's toenails, Cheryl. Little known fact.

Yeah, I have hell. And they try to get away desperately the whole time you're doing it. They shed like crazy. It's just it's just an experience you'd never forget. Usually I have to try to hold them and feed them a piece of lettuce while Lucy and John David try to trim their nails. I'm like, oh, my stars, I can't do this again. So we pull up behind this vehicle that says, we come to your home to groom pets. We called and called and called. Guess what? They're booked up for the next six months. So

we had to do it. Long story short, we were just sitting in traffic and happened to see this number and call them and we're ready to, you know, let the people, let the woman into our home. But that's the same scenario as Michelle Parker, Who saw that car? Who saw that number? Very, very distinctive. And it leads to more questions. Listen to lead detective Mike Maresci. What we're going to be releasing is a red light video of Michelle Parker's Hummer on the evening that she disappeared and at 855 that night at the intersection of Vineland and Conroy which is approximately three quarters of a mile from where the Hummer was ultimately discovered

the next day. In the video you'll see that there is the car is not following anybody. No one is following the car and the glow stickers that made it so prominent are no longer on the vehicle at that time at 8.55 p.m. And we are presuming that it was parked. It goes in the direction of Walden Circle where it was found, and we're presuming it was parked shortly thereafter. So the car is found, Bianca Prieto, formerly with Orlando Sentinel Crime and Justice. Tell me about where and when the car is found, the Hummer. The Hummer that everybody was looking for, it was found the next day,

and the stickers that were very prominent had been removed. It was actually located in an apartment complex near the mall at Millennia, which is an upscale mall when you say near the mall at millennia and you say upscale i also write about that in my book don't be a victim because people get lulled you know you're walking by sax fifth avenue and nordstrom and chanel and gucci all these really expensive designer stores and fancy restaurants, you're kind of lulled into a false sense of community, a false sense of security at these high price malls, luxury malls. That is so, so not true. There is no sense of security when people are traveling miles and miles to get to the mall, people that you don't know. But the banner here is the car is found hidden away,

tucked away amongst all the other cars in an apartment complex across from this big mall. And significantly, John W. Deal,lpi lawyer all of the advertisements glow mobile airbrush tanning and the phone number it's all been removed right correct correct and that was another thing you know there was some thought of well was this just somebody carjacker her or robbed her. Not too often, especially with a Hummer, that it's just going to be driven a distance and then the car somehow or the stickers are removed. That doesn't make a lot of sense as far as that. And that also points,

especially with the stickers being taken off, starts looking a lot more like foul play. Oh, definitely. And think through it,eryl mccullum not random because you know a random attacker would just grab her rob her or rape her and shoot her in the parking lot and take off who's gonna take time to think wow they're gonna find this car if i leave gloss decals on the back. Not only do they take extra time removing it, but they know there's some connection to that. They know she didn't borrow your car. They know she didn't stop working that business a year ago. They know that phone number is still significant.

You know, another thing, let me go out to our therapist, our specialist, Dr. Jen Mann, it tells me something about who took her. It's someone that, A, was not afraid that they were going to be caught or spotted on surveillance videos scraping that decal off. So it was not scraped off there. To get it off, they had to scrape it, I'm sure. It's a giant, giant advertisement on the back of her car. So they're here in an apartment complex. Where do you want to hide something so it won't be found? In plain view.

It's like leaving a stolen car at the airport. Who's going to be backing it in, you know, Batman style? Who's ever going to find it there? What does that tell you about whoever took her? It makes me think that whoever did it, either wherever they were in plain sight, they belong there and that they were someone who people knew.

So they would say, oh, yeah, of course, this person's here. He lives in the neighborhood. Or it's someone who's incredibly narcissistic and thinks, I can get away with anything. Meanwhile, the search is ongoing. Take a listen to Chopper reporter Dan McCarthy. West 2. See on right now, you can see the Orange County Sheriff's Command Center in the parking lot here at the community center just south of Curry Fort Road. Pretty impressive sight here. A lot of people, a lot of activity going on. We got on scene about 20 minutes ago. We actually saw some dogs going through the woods with their trainers.

I imagine, unfortunately, their dogs designed to sniff out a dead body. They're walking through the woods right now. We've also heard they have ATVs in the area. There are probably 50 to 100 people in this area searching the woods, searching the canals, searching the water. We have not seen any divers going into the water yet. Back to you, Cheryl McCollum, director of the Cold Case Research Institute at coldcasecrime.org. Cheryl McCollum, while this search is going on by land, by air, tell me about what's being done to process the Hummer. They're going to look for hair, fingerprints that maybe belong to the victim, but that are out of place, maybe on the passenger side. They're going to swab that steering wheel for DNA.

They're going to look for fingerprints on the window, maybe the rearview mirror, the outside of the door. They're going to look for blood, unfortunately. They're going to look for anything that might have been brought into that vehicle and left, like a weapon or some type of burglary tool. They're going to look, obviously, for whatever scraped that off the back. Did he leave anything in that car that could tell who he is? Now we know the car is being processed as the search goes on for missing mom, Michelle Parker.

But wait a minute. A woman like Michelle Parker, who is a single mom taking care of her children, juggling two jobs, juggling school as well. She's got to have a cell phone. I haven't heard a word about that. Where is the cell phone? Here's a clue. Take a listen to lead detective Mike Maresci. This is an important part of a timeline that we've had. We know it at 3.20 that day, November 17th of 2011, that Michelle dropped off the twins on Goldenrod Road at almost 4.30. She sent a text to her brother, Dustin, indicating that she was at Waterford.

And at that time, she utilized a cell tower near the Semiron at Hoffner. And now we know that her Hummer was at the intersection of Violin and Conroy at 9 o'clock and was parked there fairly shortly thereafter. So at 5 o'clock, her phone is still turned on, still powered up, and used at a particular cell tower. But where's the phone? And more importantly, where is Michelle? Nancy Grace, Killers Amongst Us, signing off. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.