Dateline Originals - The Girl in the Blue Mustang - Ep. 3: Like a Voice from the Grave

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A retired sheriff’s deputy sees Michelle O’Keefe’s smiling face on a billboard and asks to join the investigation.This episode was originally published on March 21, 2023. 

Jason O'Keefe stepped up to the mound at Desert Christian High School. He gripped the ball and let it fly. Four years after his big sister Michelle was murdered, with a year to go in high school, Jason was an ace pitcher, six feet four inches tall, with serious college and pro prospects. And he looked the part. But with his strong chin and that cropped hair with the slicked back cowlick. Still, the passing of years hadn't done much to keep the grief at bay. Really, the only thing that helped, that I used to help me get through it, I guess, was baseball. But really, there was no getting over it.

He'd idolized her, his big sister, his protector. And she'd been so happy, zipping around in her Christmas present Mustang, that Michelle was shot to death in that bright blue car so close to home. Well, who in his place could get over a thing like that? Made worse by the outrage that there had been no arrest. So he immersed himself in baseball and it helped, as did a powerful sense of belief he carried around with him, like a shield. After my sister died, I started carrying a Bible everywhere I went. No matter what, whether it was on the baseball field or not, I had a pocket Bible in the back of my pocket.

He'd been given a Bible verse two years after the murder. It became his favorite. Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 11. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for you to prosper. Plans for your success. And plans for your future. Jason inscribed the verse inside his baseball cap,

began to share it with others. That's how you get through it. And, you know, take it day by day, you know. So, yes, this story is about surviving, or trying to. But it's also about the very tricky business of learning to read conflicting signs by turns obvious and opaque in the shifting light of the high desert.

It just means that it's your eyes that are doing the working right now. Yes, and it was ambiguous and confusing and absolutely demanding. You can't get that stuff out of your mind once you find out what this girl is about. In this episode, you'll hear from the eyewitness, the man who was there, the man who seemed to know so much about Michelle's last moments. Maybe too much.

When I first seen her, the gunshot in her chest, that to me looked like the very first shot that was fired. He knew what the top forensic investigator in the United States took over a month to figure out.

You'll hear from a lead investigator still determined to find that one little nugget of proof. It's very seldom you get a Perry Mason moment where they scream and yell, I know, I did, I did, I did it. And from the deputy DA who faced a prosecutor's worst nightmare. You know what you say, but you don't know what they hear. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is The Girl in the Blue Mustang, a podcast from Dateline.

Episode 3, Like a Voice from the Grave. Retired L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy Jim Jeffra was driving down the Antelope Freeway when he first saw a smiling Michelle O'Keefe dressed in her cheerleader's uniform on a billboard. She was asking from the grave for help in finding her killer. Jeffra knew about the case, knew it had gone stone cold, but he wasn't a cop anymore, not really. It wasn't his business. And yet, there was something, that face, it spoke to him. So this may be he was the guy to revive it. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can maybe spot something that looks a little

different. It doesn't mean that you're any more special than anybody else. It just means that it's your eyes that are doing the working right now. And it took a while to get there. Jeffra had a bald, pate, and sincere penetrating eyes. He was raised up and down the East Coast, mainly North Carolina, and then made the big move out to L.A. And after a 28-year stint at L.A. County Sheriff's, he was up for a new challenge. I had just gotten my private investigator's license. I decided I was going to branch out a little bit. Jeffra had a throwback look and sound to him, part Columbo, part old-fashioned Western sheriff with his big big broad shoulders.

You could easily imagine him walking down a dusty main street in a classic movie. The more Jeffra learned about Michelle's case, the more it felt like he knew her. She had a lot of strength. She would not quit. Maybe you can feel some of that energy. You can't get that stuff out of your mind once you find out what this girl is about and once you find out how grief-stricken the family is and watching her mother's eyes tear up all the time. Jeffra wanted to try something completely different, turn the investigation upside down. Instead of proving Ray Jennings was guilty, Jeffery decided he'd like to try to show that Jennings was innocent. So he picked up the phone and made his pitch to lead detective Richard Longshore. He wanted in. I said, I'm just an,

I'm an interesting person that knows the area pretty well. And I can maneuver through the system that if I found anything that was incriminating, I'm stopping. And he gets that information to carry forward with it. Because he is the investigator of record on this case. With Longshore's blessing, Jeffra dug in. His theory? That investigators had zeroed in on the wrong man. It seemed like it had bogged down, and it had bogged down around one person. And that was Raymond Lee Jennings.

I was going to do what I could do to prove that he didn't kill this girl. Let's clear him. And if we could get past that, then we could move forward and go after the person that did kill her. It was a sunny winter day when I met Jeffra at the park and ride. We walked the hillside where it looked like Michelle's killer might have escaped. And we stopped in front of a sturdy cross that marked the spot where Michelle's blue

Mustang was found. Jeffra reached out, touched the cross, and felt as if she was speaking to him. I'm just me, you know. I think she kind of moved me around that parking lot a little bit. And on her behalf, he got busy. Looked at the physical evidence, of course, and read the police reports with his detective's eye for details. Might tell a different story than the one he'd heard from Longshore. But mostly, he wanted to hear from Ray Jennings himself. Not in person, didn't need to do that. No, he had all those videotaped interviews. Ray Jennings, own words to Longshore, and civil attorney Rex Paris. Jaffer wasn't any good at computer gadgets, but he did have a dusty old VHS cassette player.

It seemed like every time I got frustrated with any part of this case, which was a lot, I went back to the videos. I said, it's there. I kept telling myself, it's in the videos. You're an investigator. Find it. You did not see or talk to any human being? No, I did not. Jeffra listened, and he watched every minute of the dozens of hours of videotaped interviews with Jennings.

And as he did, his mind began to do a U-turn. It looked like a small case of a 9mm, a.45, or even a.22. I have seen it. He is telling a story that just doesn't add up in these videos. It was late at night and I was kind of getting tired, but I was looking at his gestures and movements, which I'd done throughout the time. And it just went, it went on, bam. So the guy killed her. There's no doubt that he killed her.

So what do you know? It started out thinking the guy was innocent, and now he had come full circle to the same conclusion reached by investigators. It was him. It was Jennings. If he didn't pull the trigger, he was standing next to the guy who did. No doubt in my mind. He was there.

I believe that he grabbed her and she hit him. She wasn't going to be taken against her will. She didn't have that kind of background at all. Very strong girl, actually. But there was one huge problem. Jeffra's aha moment was pretty much what investigators had already presented to the DA and what had already failed to persuade him to file charges. Another opinion pointing at Jennings wasn't going to cut it. Just more wasted time. Except, maybe not. Because just then, Michelle's dad, Mike O'Keefe, got wind of

what Jeffra was up to and thought he could help. The problem wasn't the evidence, figured Mike. It was the presentation, the packaging. So, together, they came up with an entirely new way to sell the evidence against Raymond Jennings. Here's Michael Keefe. So we put together a PowerPoint. There were actually about 35 key points that showed that this guy had to have some involvement in it. Bits of answers. That, to me, looked like the very first shot down the fire. Body language and tone of voice.

I had no motive. She had nothing I wanted. I didn't kill her. All assembled into one package. Airtight, Jeffro. Nothing I can say to defend. Just maybe their show-and-tell of sound bites was the best way to sell Michelle's case to the DA. And for Pat and Mike O'Keefe, it came down to this. Certainly a $6 an hour security guard is not going to have that level of information unless you were there.

So he knew too much? Oh, he knew way too much. He knew stuff only the killer would know. He knew the order of the shots. He knew the angle of the shots. He knew, he even described her. Accidental shooting? Yeah. In the ground? Right, right. Accidental discharge. He knew where the accidental discharge was. And this is the middle of the night. So, you know, you just don't, casual observer just doesn't pick up on these

things. He even talked about how her body shut down. Which he would not have been able to see from where he said he was. Right, exactly. He knew what the top forensic investigator in the United States took over a month to figure out. October 25, 2005. Michelle O'Keefe had been in her grave going on six years. For the living, it was one of those perfect fall days, make you want to live in L.A. Crystal blue skies, afternoon temperature topping out at 69 or so. When Michael Keefe met with Deputy D.A. Robert Fultz, he could be forgiven for not reveling in the weather. It was two weeks to the day after what would have been Michelle's 24th birthday. In preparation for the meeting,

Fultz had watched their PowerPoint presentation featuring all those edited clips of Jennings' statements. They had everything very carefully kind of sifted down to what they felt was the important things to consider. So they goosed it. They goosed it. I felt it was compelling. Three weeks later, the day Michelle's family had been waiting for. I decided that as problematic as the case was,

it was not an impossible feat to get this case appropriately prosecuted. So I filed it. And the district attorney called me and said they were going to make an arrest. We're ecstatic. He said, finally, after all these years. But in a case where nothing was exactly what it appeared to be, the man at the center of it all, Raymond Jennings, was nowhere near the Antelope Valley.

Jennings, the National Guardsman, was halfway around the world, serving his country in Iraq. But all was not lost. His hitch was up in just a few weeks. Soon he'd be back with his five children in the Antelope Valley, altogether unaware of what awaited him. December 13, 2005. Sheriff's deputies staked out a tidy, low-slung apartment block in the Joshua neighborhood of Lancaster, California. It had been cold overnight, dipped below freezing. And then, as they watched, the desert sun cleared the terracotta rooftops. And there he was, Raymond Jennings, oblivious, unaware.

Walked to his car, stepped in, and drove away. Then, I asked Detective Longshore. Tell me how the arrest occurred. I had him under surveillance. He was living in an apartment with his wife and several children. And every time

the surveillance team would see him, he'd be with his children. And I didn't want to arrest him in front of his kids. It's something we just don't like to do. And so we kept the surveillance up, and on a given morning, he left by himself. And we took him down to a traffic stop, and he was ordered out at gunpoint by the uniformed deputies. And his statement to them was, I've been in Iraq. Is this about Michelle O'Keefe? By this time, it was personal for Longshore.

All those years going through boxes of evidence, poring over crime scene photographs of Michelle's body slumped in her blue Mustang in the dead of night. And now, finally, he had his man. But not all the answers, not yet. One puzzle in particular had been bugging him. The gun. Michelle was shot to death, so Jennings must have fired that gun. And yet, he'd sworn over and over that he wasn't carrying that night. Security company rules didn't allow it. But Longshore had done a little research, discovered Jennings was no stranger to guns. So, in the jail's interview room...

I asked him about carrying a gun. He carried a gun all the time in North Carolina. You know, why should I believe he didn't carry one in California? Well, that would have been illegal. Yeah, okay. And I said, I believe this was an accident. I don't believe you ever intended to kill anybody.

You had that gun. Things went bad. I can't make it go away, but I can get your side of the story. Explain to me why it happened. Well, I'm not going to do that. This is my story. And I said, I'll tell you, you know, like I said, I think this is an accident, but if I had been assigned to that guard post out there in the middle of the night in a parking ride, legal or not legal, I'd carry a gun. He said, well, I didn't know there'd been other accidents out there.

I said, accidents? You mean like what happened to Michelle O'Keefe? He said, yeah. But he never would roll over, never confess. Never would go that extra bit. Must have been frustrating, getting right up to the edge like that. It was. And you always want to look at, was there something else I could have done?

If we had kept him a little longer, would he have gone over the edge? But there's just too much risk in what we're doing there. Yeah. It's an art as much as anything else, isn't it? Getting into a person's head and getting that person to see that there's no alternative but to finally just relent. You try. You know, it's very seldom you get a Perry Mason moment where they scream and yell, I did, I did, I did it. Well, that certainly is true. But then the law didn't require a confession. And now that the DA had signed off, Jennings was formally

charged with first degree murder. They set his bail at a million dollars, an amount far beyond Jennings' reach, more than enough to keep him behind bars while they prepared for trial. And six years after the murder of his daughter, Michelle's dad took a breath. It had finally happened. It's interesting how you had to almost become the architect of your own personal case. Yeah, we were heavily involved.

I want to say, you know, it was the sheriff's, I mean, it was the DA's decision, and it was the sheriff's department's decision to make their arrest. But if you hadn't been that involved, would it have happened? I kind of doubt it. Doubt it, yeah. It wasn't long before they took Jennings to downtown L.A., to the imposing monolith in Chinatown called the Men's Central Jail, and the long, slow march

to trial was assailed by doubters at every turn. There were a lot of prosecutors and supervising prosecutors in the DA's office that told Michael Blake, our DA, get rid of this thing, dismiss it, it's not going to go anywhere, you're never going to win it, It's a loser. Move on. And Michael Blake, the day of the preliminary hearing, was told, you know, get rid of this thing. And so, you know, he's got his people to answer to. Everybody's got a boss. And so he asked me, he said, what do you think? That's pressure. And I said, Michael, whatever you want to do, I'll back you. I said, but if we don't go ahead with this, it'll never go to trial.

And he looked at me and said, let's go. March 20, 2008. Dawn cool and clear. The air crisp with the first day of spring. As Raymond Jennings, jailhouse pallet, was led through passages the son had never seen to the ninth floor of L.A.'s high security criminal justice center. Famous place, the ninth. Infamous, maybe. It's where tabloid defendants like O.J. Simpson and Phil Spector were tried. To get to the courthouse, Michelle's parents had to make the same two-hour drive Michelle took on her last day, an emotional journey on the Antelope Valley Freeway,

cresting it over 3,000 feet through the Soledad Pass before descending into the L.A. Basin. And then they had to find parking and wait for notoriously crowded courthouse elevators. And then were met by deputies with metal detectors. Mike O'Keefe. Just getting to the courtroom after you got down there took, you know, 30 to 45 minutes every day. Besides the time that you spend in the courtroom, you've got six plus hours a day just, you know, dealing with the commuting part of it. And it just really took its toll. In fact, it had been eight years since an excited 18-year-old Michelle helped make that music video just across downtown of the grand old Olympic Auditorium when Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson called the courtroom to order.

L.A. courtrooms are a world away from the Antelope Valley, where Michelle was killed, and where Michael Blake, the prosecutor, usually worked. At the time, right or wrong, downtown L.A. juries had gained something of a reputation for being defense-friendly, difficult for prosecutors. I asked Blake about that. If you were to take the popular conception of what it does to a case to move it to LA and give it to an LA jury, then most of the country would say, oh, you poor sap, you're stuck with an LA jury. I've had as much success in Los Angeles as I have up here. So you weren't worried about that? No. No.

We're going to an experienced judge on the ninth floor, which is where the most experienced long-cause judges are in the central district of Los Angeles. Michael Blake seemed to take a certain presence with him to the courtroom. Intelligent, tough, lantern jaw, youthful vigor. Blake told the nine men and three women of the jury, and then later us, that Raymond Jennings assaulted Michelle O'Keefe for his own ugly reasons

and escalated his attack when she resisted. He knows she's still alive. That makes those remaining three shots to her face an execution. At first degree. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. In fact, said Blake, Jennings, in a way, convicted himself when he talked so freely to investigators. Even to civil attorney Rex Perez without a lawyer. He knew too much to

be innocent. What would you expect an innocent person to have said if he were standing 100 feet away? Say, I don't know. I wasn't there. I don't know, but the shot must have come from... I don't know, detective. I don't know. You're asking me where the shooter was standing. I never saw a shooter. Well, see, that's the other thing. He never saw a shooter, but he's able to tell us where the shooter was standing, how the shots were fired. And there's even, in that tape, there's even a part where he stands up. Before he says a word, he's almost on automatic. He's, with his hand, he's making the gesture like a firearm, and he's pulling the trigger like recoil. And it's almost like an automatic response.

And that's why I argue that he was remembering. He wasn't describing events. He was remembering them. Reliving them. Reliving them, right. Right. So, yeah, I would expect a person who had no involvement simply to say, gee, I don't know where the shooter was standing because I never saw the shooter. How easy would that have been?

Of course, if he had had a lawyer present from the get-go, would you have had a case at all? Well, he had an opportunity to do that. I know, but you wouldn't have had all of that stuff. Could you possibly have prosecuted the case without him talking? You're asking me if we would have had a case. Let me make sure I understand what you're saying. Would we have had a case if Mr. Jannings had not made those statements?

Correct. I can't speculate on that. There's no way you'd have a case. I will have to say his statements were very important. They were pivotal in this case. The trial lasted six weeks, and then it went to the jury. I never take juries for granted. It comes back to the old adage, you know what you say, but you don't know what they hear.

How very true. Four days went by, no word from behind the jury's closed door. And then April 28, 2008, they all filed into the courtroom, and the foreperson stood up and told the judge they could not get beyond 9-3 for conviction. The judge declared a mistrial. Here's Mike O'Keefe. The foreman came to us right after the trial, you know,

and apologized, and he goes, look, I thought he was guilty. He actually had a tear in his eye. Yeah. I felt pretty strongly about it. And he said, of the three that had voted not guilty, he said, I felt like two of them could easily have been swayed. But there was one individual who had a bad dream of all things. A vision. Yeah, yeah.

That it was some sort of drive-by shooting or some sort of gang kind of thing. A dream, or perhaps a haunting. After the hung jury, life lost its focus for Pat and Michael Keefe. You go through the motions and just sort of pretend, you know, and you're just sort of sitting there waiting. And every minute seems like hours. And it goes on for days. After the eight years it took to go to trial, now limbo. What happens inside? I thought he was going to be let free.

That was my first thing. I was like, oh my gosh, they're going to let him go. Then the O'Keefe's got the news there would be a second trial. Justice has to be served. I know if it's not served here in this world, it certainly will be done in the next, but I certainly think it would do people a lot of good to know that's happened here on this earth. Do you some good too. Trial two began January 8th, 2009. Jennings had already been behind bars for a little more than four years and all that time he'd continued to maintain he was an innocent man. This time, Dateline cameras rolled in the same LA courtroom with the same judge, Michael Johnson.

We'll start with the people's opening statement and Mr. Blake. And the same prosecutor, Michael Blake. Good morning, everyone. This is our last opportunity to speak directly to you. So rather than slow things down or distract with images and so forth, I'd just like to take a moment to tell you what I believe the evidence in this case will prove. As the evidence unfolds in this case, you will have the sensation of stepping into a time capsule. Much of the evidence that you will hear is coming forward after years of an exhaustive investigation by the sheriff's department. And it will reveal in conclusion that Michelle O'Keefe was murdered that night by Raymond Lee Jennings, a security guard working at the Park and Ride lot.

Raymond Jennings, head cleanly shaven, goatee stubble, was seated at the short end of the defense table. He was wearing a long-sleeved blue Oxford cloth shirt and dark tie. Will the defense be giving a statement at this time? Yes, please. Mr. Houchen. Thank you. Jennings' defense attorney, David Houchen, took off his reading glasses and gathered his notes. He too wore a goatee.

Here's a salt-and-pepper version. And now he rose and turned his big frame toward the jury and began to speak. Good morning. Good morning. I represent Mr. Jennings. You see him seated at the end of the table. As the evidence comes out in this case, you will find that no fingerprint evidence connects Mr. Jennings to this crime. There exists gunshot residue, none connecting Mr. Jennings to this crime.

There exists no blood evidence of which there was plenty, but none of which connects Mr. Jennings to this crime. She put up a fight. It was brutal. And she has DNA recovered from her left hand, fourth finger nail. It is a mix of a male, not Raymond Jennings. And when this case is concluded, there's only one direction the evidence points, and it points away from Mr. Jennings. Michelle's friend, Jennifer Peterson, was the first person called to testify. She kept it together when she was shown several frames of blurry footage zoomed into an extreme close-up of herself and Michelle. They were frozen in time at the Kid Rock video shoot hours before Michelle was murdered. You see yourself and Michelle in this? Yes. And then the drop-off at the park and ride.

Did you see Michelle O'Keefe again after that? No. So, what happened? This time, the prosecutor opted to give the jury an idea about motive. So he called a retired FBI profiler named Mark Safaric. By that time, Safaric was a well-known expert. I typically, you know, in these cases come in as the last or near the last prosecution witness. Because one, all that evidence has to already been introduced. I can't talk about

things that haven't come in. But really, what I'm doing is I'm drawing the big picture. And that picture, Safaric told the jury, told the story of an attempted sex attack. Michelle had never parked in this park and ride. Now, this was an interesting location, because here's where, when you're looking at the dynamic between your offender victim and the scene the scene becomes important because this park and ride is out in the middle of nowhere there's nothing out here when you look at an aerial view of this park and ride it's just fields all the way around and then in the distance you have some residents you come here you park your car you get in with somebody else, you get in a van, and you travel into Los Angeles because it's right off of the freeway. Lonely place.

It's a lonely place. She'd never been there. Neither of them had ever been there before. So there's nobody that follows her there. There's nobody that knows that she's going to be there at some point in the night. So she wasn't a targeted victim. So I'm looking at, is she targeted or is this an opportunistic event for the offender? In other words, does he see an opportunity happen in front of him and take it?

And that's what happened here. That's what I think happened here. In other words, a sex assault. That is what must have happened in that dark parking lot, said Mr. Safaric. There was no rape. There's no rape, but there is a sexual assault. There's no completion. This sexual assault doesn't go to a completion.

It starts and then it ends. But there's a sexual component to the homicide. So what does that tell you? Well, it gives you a motive. Then the jury took the case. February 17th, 2009. Five weeks after the beginning of that second trial. Pat and Mike O'Keefe looked out the window of their Palmdale home.

The weather was the same as it had been nine years earlier, the night Michelle was murdered. It was cold and stormy in the high desert. There was rain and snow in the San Gabriel Mountains. And that's when the O'Keefe's got the word. Another hung jury. This time, 11 to 1 for guilt. It's horrible, you know, 11 to 1. You know, I think the answer was obvious across the jury. You just had one wild card juror in there. And what was the reason for that hung jury? There

was a woman that just didn't want to testify, didn't want to deliberate. She took exception to the manner in which I interrogated Mr. Jennings on video. They were shown the video. Sure. And I never raised my voice. I didn't throw telephone books around and that type of thing. It's what you have to do during an interrogation. Sure.

A hung jury and the person who hangs it is pointing directly at you. And there have been two trials. All that expenditure, public money, that time, that focus, commitment. What did that feel like? It was crushing. It really was. During the trial, Michelle's brother Jason had been seated in the front row of the Spectator Gallery, as close as he could get to Prosecutor Michael Blake

and to Jennings. To actually be in there and listen to the testimony, to watch that guy sitting there at the defense table, did you look at him? Yeah, me and Mr. Jennings actually had a number of staredown matches for whatever reason, where he would just stare at me and I would just stare back and I wasn't gonna break the stare.

And then he'd finally look away. Something to that effect. But where I was seated, I was literally three feet behind him. And then the jury went out and came back and said, we're hung. You can't convict a man. What was that like for you? I don't know. Well, I was a pre-law major at Widener College, so I was very familiar with the law system.

I would actually talk with a district attorney before court about certain motions and stuff like that, strategies that we could use of the legal system. So, said Jason, there was reason to feel hope and gratitude. Plan on going on and being a prosecutor after this is all said and done. That's been the influence of this case has made you think of being a prosecutor? Yeah, without a doubt.

The relationship that a district attorney has is so close to the family, and I want to be able to do that and help other families in the same way that Michael Blake's done that for us. You can see how much he cares about you. Yeah. And you want to do the same for somebody else. Yeah, without a doubt.

Yes, but the question that gloomy February was far more immediate than that. After two juries failed to convict, would they set him free or try him yet again? A question that would have sounded like it came from Mars. Had you asked this man back then? I was sitting at home and some force compelled me to go watch this episode of Dateline NBC. Some force indeed.

Next, on The Girl in the Blue Mustang. I realized that either this was an innocent man or this was a sociopath who deserved an Academy Award. And I just had to know which one was it. The Girl in the Blue Mustang is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Scott Frazier is the producer. Brian Drew, David Varga, and John Koster are audio editors. Thomas Kemmen is assistant audio editor.

Keone Reed is associate producer. Adam Gorfain is co-executive producer. Liz Cole is executive producer. And David Corvo is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, Bryson Barnes is technical director. Sound mixing by Bob Mallory. Dina Bisbano is associate producer.