Endless Thread - Grateful Doe

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

An unidentified man died in a car crash in 1995 with Grateful Dead ticket stubs in his pocket. Twenty years later, Reddit sleuths helped solve the case of the “Grateful Doe.”

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You're just going to hear from people who knew him or thought they knew him. The first person you're going to hear from who knew Jason or thought that he knew Jason is a guy named Isaac Hensley. he's a nurse. I'm also a dad. I should include that. I'm a dad that takes up as much time as the nursing part. Isaac's a dad now, but in the summer of 1994, he was a teenager growing up in Champaign, Illinois, who had just started to dip his toe into partying, which meant that his dad, who was an evangelical pastor, wanted Isaac to spend his summer break somewhere else, doing something productive.

That somewhere else was Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, and that something productive was a, youth leadership program with some other young energetic Christian teenage boys. I was not very into the church. So I went out there to kind of cool off for the summer, and none of these other young people that went out there for this church leadership thing were too into parting. And so I spent a lot of time on the beach. One day while teenage Isaac was escaping the religious agenda of his summer vacation by walking down the beach, he ran into another kid walking the other way.

My assumption is that one of the other of us was smoking a cigarette, and another one probably asked for a cigarette. I'm assuming that's how it started. While sharing this probable cigarette, the kid introduced himself to Isaac as Jason. He'd been at a party nearby that was busted by the cops, and to avoid getting into trouble himself, he had run out onto the beach.

Jason didn't seem sure what to do next. What did he look like? I mean, was the party the night before, or did it happen just then that he'd been kicking? kicked out? Did he look bedraggled? He did look like medium bedraggled. But yeah, just like

tie-dye shirt and jeans walking down the beach holding sandals. He looked like he could have been like hiding out running from the cops, you know, overnight in a good-natured sort of way. Isaac says Jason was easy to get along with immediately, super charismatic, talkative to the point of being a little bit

annoying, but clearly fun to be around. They had some things in common. I was out there living in a house with like, you know, seven guys that were really into their religion. And then there was me. And he kind of had a story eventually that he had taken off from me. He was living with his family because he had gotten into some sort of disagreement with them. I think that was the biggest thing we had in common is that we were both just a little bit lost and both in our late teens and experimenting a lot with chemical ways to make ourselves feel better about being lost, you know. Jason might have been a little more lost than Isaac, though, because he didn't have a place to go. So Isaac invited him to come back and stay with him.

I have no idea why anybody thought that was a good idea that we would let this kid that we didn't even know like how old he was come stay in the house, but that's what happened, I guess. It was a weird summer. When the weird summer ended, the arrangement continued. Isaac was headed back to Illinois, and Jason had no plan. So he came along. Isaac says Jason was a bit of a social chameleon. Did it ever strike you as strange that he had like basically, you know, showed up on this beach,

run into you, come and lived with you, and then came all the way back to Illinois from South Carolina to live with you? Was that ever like, I don't know, this sort of transience of his existence? Yeah, absolutely. Back in Illinois, Isaac started college, and Jason got a job. at McDonald's. They both leaned further into partying, mostly just beer and weed. What was your last clear memory of him? The clearest thing that I remember about him from like that period of time is like there was this particular kind of like excited, weird little like head cocked half smile that he would do as he would kind of like get prepared to like expound on whatever I had just said

that was funny or you know what just happened. That was awesome. That's the thing that's, the clearest is this particular, like, expression that he had. Isaac doesn't have a ton of memories about Jason beyond this, because pretty soon after moving in, Jason moved out without warning. I think I had gotten a job in a restaurant or something. I came home one night, and he was just gone. Like, some of his stuff was gone that usually would have been there. And then we really kind of figured out that he was for sure gone

when we got a phone bill, and there was a bunch of, like, 900 number calls to like Grateful Dead 900 numbers which I didn't know was a thing until then. This is part of a mostly forgotten pre-Internet lore among Grateful Dead followers, of which Jason was definitely one.

There were hotlines you could call. One was 1,900 run dead, 89 cents per minute, 20 different extensions. You could do everything from order tickets to check tour dates and hear last night's set list.

Rumor had it that the operator's voice was slowed down, so callers would end up spending more. The number has since been disconnected. The service you are attempting to use has been restricted or is unavailable. Maybe, like, he took off to see some dead shows. He had, I mean, he had referenced that. That was part of the deal he wanted to do all along as he was like, he wanted to go, quote-unquote, follow the dead as much as you could in, like, the mid-90s.

That wasn't just a clue for Isaac and his housemates. It would become a clue for family members and Reddit sleuths as they searched and crowd sourced information over the next 20 years looking for Jason, a nomad with a mixed-up family past whose whereabouts were unknown. When was the next time you heard about him? I guess it was a couple of years ago now. I don't know if it was a year ago or two years ago. And one of the guys that lived in the house with this, Steve had sent me a link with a, like a composite,

like some sort of computer composite picture. and was like, doesn't this look like that guy Jason that lived with us, you know, years and years ago? Today's episode, Grateful Doe. I'm Ben Brat Johnson. I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. The show featuring stories found on Reddit. We're coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. Emery, let's talk about the subreddit this story came from, which is also called Grateful Doe.

The subreddit community was started by a few people, but one of the most active moderators, is a user called Grey Metal. So my name's Layla Betts. I'm 28 years old, and I live in Queensland, Australia. Layla got into Unsolved Mysteries years ago. When she was just 14 years old, one particular unsolved mystery, thousands of miles away in the U.S., caught her attention.

It was a car accident in Virginia, 1995. The driver and the passenger were both killed. The driver was identified. The passenger was unknown to the driver's family. Male, no identification on the body. Why was the passenger called Grateful Doe? For two different reasons. The first is that he had a concert t-shirt on for the band The Grateful Dead.

He also had in his pockets of his jeans two ticket stubs for a recent Grateful Dead concert. which was held in New York. Over the next 10 years, Lela read everything there was to read about this case. She became an expert. And then, in her mid-20s, she posted about the case on Reddit in a community called Unresolved Mysteries, hoping to find new leads in order to identify this person, the passenger in the car with the Grateful Dead tickets in his pocket. The post got a huge response,

enough attention that Lela helped start a subreddit dedicated to the specific case. The Grateful Dead tickets. subreddit. I would spend maybe 12 hours a day working on the Grateful Go case. I so vividly remember going to a concert one night till 10 o'clock at night. I came home, had a shower, and then spent another five to six hours on the subreddit. I was absolutely obsessed with not only this case, but also the community that we started to grow. It started to become almost like a little family, and we were so supportive of one another. Grateful Doe groups started popping up all over the internet, on Facebook and on a site called web sleuths. But the larger Grateful Doe

community extended far beyond internet crime-solving hobbyists to actual law enforcement and some people in between. One of those in-betweeners is Todd Matthews. He's a guy who turns out knows a little bit about internet crime solving. That is a long and complicated story, but my father-in-law found a body of a woman in 1968 before I was even born. I heard about the case in 1987 as a 17-year-old, and she was known as the tent girl because she's wrapped in a canvas tent wrapper. After 10 years of marriage and the discovery of the internet, I put a case file online for her, so pretty much a be on the lookout for a Jane Doe. I did find a family that was looking for a sister. I contacted them, and it was her. And I became the first person that used the

internet to solve a homicide. Granted, this does sound like something that I would plaster on the outside of Ben's Burger Shack, inventor of the original hamburger. It does, but Todd's claim has been well documented. He was the first. And now, he works for a program run by the Department of Justice called Namus. And that's the National Missing and Unidentified Person System. Namus is a big online database. Todd calls it a virtual morgue. And it started as a list of unidentified people, people like Tent Girl.

But it also includes missing persons now. There are 15,000 cases in the NamUs database. Todd says hundreds are solved every year. And the number of cases always goes up around this time of year. We'll see a rise in cases around the holidays always. You know, that's when people's. start missing people. And you're going to see cases where people were missing for long term, and the family just realized finally that something's wrong. Todd says the beauty of Namis is its

accessibility. It's this rare example of a database that's being used by both law enforcement and everyday people. You know, criminal justice users can actually look deeper into the system. They can see the fingerprint record. They can see the dental x-rays. They can see the status of DNA, so they're going to know. But on the same token, we're sharing this with, families and the general public so that they can see basic data. They're not going to see any of the investigative notes, but at least we're all coming to the same table. All of this kind of information was uploaded to Namus in the Grateful Doe case. At first, it seemed like a dead end. It's really frustrating because it wasn't matching anything, so there was nothing. My thought was,

as many people, if we can get somebody to see this face and know that that might be their missing person, maybe they'll come forward and make a mistake. distinct person to report. Todd says the internet can be crucial to keeping cases like this alive long enough for the right person to see some detail and make a connection. One of the key moments for Grateful Doe came when Leila got a personal Reddit message about the composite sketches that she had posted on Reddit. That was a message from a man who stated that the reconstructions of the Grateful Doe reminded him of a young man that he lived with when he was in college. In the internet, I was a little bit apprehensive.

I remember that my first message back to him, I actually said, are you yanking my chain? But that first day, we spoke for something like eight hours. And the more information we shared, the more I realized, the more I realized. that this could actually be a lead. The guy who wrote that message to Leila from across the world was named Steve. Steve as in Isaac's old roommate, who had sent him the sketches that looked like that guy they used to live with. Jason. Jason Callahan.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Layla might have been on the opposite side of the planet from the Grateful Doe case, but she heard from a guy, Steve, who said the Grateful Doe sketches on Reddit looked a lot like a guy he used to know. Steve said that 20 years earlier, he lived in an apartment in Illinois with a bunch of guys. One of them, Isaac, we heard from at the top of the show. Another one? The guy who looked like the sketches? Jason Callahan.

Next step, find Jason's family to confirm. But there was an extra layer of complication. Jason's family was super disjointed. His dad remarried twice and had five more children. One of them was Shannon Callahan. I'm a stay-at-home mother of two, and I'm 32 years old. Shannon hadn't seen Jason since she was five years old. The family had some issues.

Shannon said that Jason didn't get along with their dad. But, you know, my dad had his own issues and demons, so to speak. So what do you mean? He was an alcoholic. So did Jason and your dad not have a good relationship, even though Jason was your dad's son, right? I don't believe they did, unfortunately. My dad is a very complicated person, or was a very complicated person.

I believe that there's good and evil in everyone, and he definitely had both. But Shannon's dad did tell her Jason was missing, back when she was 12 years old. And he had a couple of years, and then he told me, you know, Nobody had heard from Jason and, you know, his mother was worried, but he was sure that, you know, he would pop up a couple years later and, you know, not to worry. I've always been a curious person. I always wanted to know more. We don't know a lot about the details of Jason's family history or what made him leave home,

except that people who knew him, Isaac and Shannon, say that he butted heads with both of the father figures in his life, his biological dad and his stepdad. So Jason was estranged from his family. And remember, this was the mid-90s. The Internet was in its infancy. Very few people had cell phones. So tracking him down wasn't so simple. But years later, Shannon could turn to the Internet to look for Jason.

Google, social media. She'd check back throughout the years hoping something would pop up. At the same time, being fascinated by all kinds of missing person cases. I would look at unidentified pictures and reports just to try to, you know, You know, I always felt drawn to it, and I always felt connected to that, and I could never quite figure out why. And, you know, of course, it's just a bit ironic that my brother was one of those pictures. One day, about a decade after Shannon and Layla in Australia had both independently started

searching for Jason, Shannon tried Googling his name again. That search led her to a Reddit thread, which then led her to composite sketches of a missing person who looked familiar. What did you feel when you first saw that? I honestly started shaking. I felt extremely nauseous. Like I felt like I was going to throw up. My heart started racing. When I looked at that picture, it looked like my dad was looking back at me, like a younger version of my dad or my little brother, Ryan. He had the same face. And he even had a lot of my facial features, my forehead. and, you know, the shape of my face. And I knew in that moment, deep down, that that was him.

Immediately, I knew. But closure didn't come that fast. Eventually, Shannon found her way to the strangers who had been working separately on her brother's case, including Layla in Australia. Members of the Reddit and Facebook Grateful Doe communities connected Shannon to investigators on the case back in the U.S. There was one thing left to do.

Take a DNA test. That process itself took almost a year. Shannon and Layla and everyone connected to the story had to wait for the results. Once they came in, it was insane. The Grateful Doe was Jason Callahan. It was actually a phone call. I was actually at work. I was also going through divorce myself. And I just stepped outside and I started crying and shaking and, I felt a lot of things at once. I felt sad that I would never, as selfish as it is, I felt sad that I would never get to know him.

But then I felt extremely sad also for his mother and how, you know, as much as it's great that she finally had an answer, it's to have your son come back to you that way. I can't imagine how painful that is. What did it feel like to have all these strangers so invested in your brother's case? Well, it felt definitely a little strange at first, just because all of a sudden people were messaging me,

tons of people out of nowhere. But I am a very open person. And honestly, I had felt so grateful because had they not started that Reddit thread, had they in that Reddit page, and had they not started that Facebook page, I don't think I would have found my brother. I really don't.

And luckily I also do check in with Jason's mom sometimes. The only thing that did make me upset sometimes on a lot of these groups and on the media in general, people would constantly be bashing her. They'd be saying, how can you not know your son's missing for 20 years? What a family to not care. And it made me feel very upset because she was the opposite. She tried filing police reports and they told her he's 19. he's an adult. He has a history of disappearing for months.

You don't know what state he was last in. So when I read those comments, it kind of hits a nerve. We reached out to Jason's mom, but she never got back to us. Jason's dad died of a heart attack in 2009. He never got to learn about what happened to his son. He died thinking Jason just decided to never come home. What does it feel like now that that chapter in your life? is basically over, that you found him and that you have that closure.

It does make me feel good that I could do that. I mean, also sad, obviously, but I also feel very proud that I was able to, pretty much mostly for his mother to give her that closure, but also to the police officers who spent years with his file on their desk. And, you know, all the people in the, you know, the web sleuths who spent years of their life trying to figure out who he was. I feel good that there's one less missing person, and there's one less unidentified body.

When I used to research all the missing people and all the unidentified bodies, it would make me sick, thinking about all the families who just thought what my dad thought, that, you know, oh, he's doing his own thing, he'll call when he's ready. But the call never comes. It's incredible to think about that all of these people, in different places,

in different places in their lives, were all connected by this one case, spread over the internet. It reached out over undersea cables, through memories, and ended with a DNA test in real life from the person who was one of the closest to Jason by relation, a person at the beginning of his known past and around for his final ID.

For her part, Layla doesn't feel like a stranger. She cried when she got the news of Jason being identified. Brokedown Palace was the last song on the dead set list for the tour that we believe Jason would have attended. So we think that Broke Down Palace was the last Grateful Dead song that Jason heard live before he passed away. It was a very big. sobering moment to find out that Jason had been identified as the Grateful Doe. Because at that moment, it wasn't that this case had been solved after 20 years. It was that Jason Callahan was finally going to go home.

His family had a resolution. Now that the case that started at all has been solved, the Grateful Doe subreddit features new similar missing persons cases every month. Several of those have also been solved. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, and she's not a deadhead, but she's definitely... Old school cool. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she called this past summer...

Unexpected. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, and when they check out the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit, they're looking for... Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who recently took a DNA test and found out that she is part... Skincare addiction. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit,

and the last thing he ever wants to listen to is... Music, French people might play at a party or just with friends around. Josh Swartz is our producer, and he didn't solve any missing persons cases, but he did solve the mystery. of old people Facebook. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our intern is Candace Lim.

Woohoo. Our theme music is by Squelcher. Thanks to Redditor Zeta Beast for this week's artwork. It is called Unmarked Grave. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there.

And when you do, do me a favor and hit follow. Follow our account so that we can stay in touch. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.