Going West: True Crime - Jessica Ridgeway // 20

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

In October 2012, a 10-year-old girl disappears on her way to school in Westminster, Colorado. Investigators are starting to lose hope until a mother makes a phone call and the gruesome details come to light. This is the case of Jessica Ridgeway. **GOING WEST DOES NOT OWN ANY OF THE NEWS CLIPS PRESENTED** 911 call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHdmpoobW2g  Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is going on true crime fans, I'm your host Heath, and I'm your other host, Daphne, and you're listening to Going West. Today we've got a case that has sat with me for many years and I've wanted to cover it for a long time. We've covered some pretty messed up cases but this is the first case that I've researched where I've genuinely felt nauseous. But before we get into this story we've got some shout outs. A huge shout out to Molly. Thank you so much for becoming a patron and being so consistently supportive. We love you. Yes, thank you so much Molly, we really appreciate you, and we've also got some really great reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much to Courtney from Charleston, New Hampshire,

Marina and Irvine, California, Gary and Estonia, long ways away, Naomi from Youngstown, Ohio, and Sunny from Utah. Thank you guys so much for leaving five star reviews. We really appreciate that. All of your reviews mean so much to us and we get so excited when we read them. So thank you everybody for doing that. And if you guys want to shout out on the show, just go to Apple Podcasts and write us a review. Yep, leave us a five star review, but make sure you leave your name and your location. This is episode 20 of Going West. Let's get her please. Can I help you? Hi.

I need you to come to my house. My son wants to turn himself in and sort of a registered coverage way murder. And what's going on there? No, I'm not here. He just confessed to killing her. I know. I want you to tell me what's going on. Can you tell me exactly what he said?

But he did it and he gave me details and her remains are in my house. Did you see them? No. Is he there with you? Yes. Is he cooperative? Yes. Call the your son.

Okay. I understand that you're probably, you know, chilling to be crappy right now, but I want you to know that you did the right thing. He did it. He just wanted me to call. He's trying to help him. Okay.

Do you think that he's going to be cooperative with the officer? Absolutely. Okay. Do you think we he's gonna be cooperative with the officer? Absolutely. Okay. Do you think we have to get... Hold on. Okay. Hello. This is Molly at the Westminster Police Department.

Hi. Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on right now or how you're feeling or how to just come about? I don't exactly get why you're asking these questions. I murdered Jessica Richway. There is proof that I did it. There is no other question. You just have to send a squad car something down here and I will answer all the questions that you want to ask

or anyone wants to ask of me as soon as you get down here. Jessica Ridgeway was born on January 23rd, 2002, in Colorado, and was the only child to parent Sarah Ridgeway and Jeremiah Bryant. She loved to dance, play with fashion dolls, and care for and play with her many animals, including a dog, two fish, and two frogs. She would even sometimes watch her neighbor's hairless cat who she adored. She just loved being around animals in general. She loved watching teenage shows on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and was an incredibly

independent and mature young girl. She had many friends, and as a ten-year-old, joined the Stanley Lake-Pewi cheer clinic, telling her mom that she wanted to be a cheerleader when she got into high school. She even noted once to her mom that she promised to be a cheerleader who was kind to everyone. When Jessica went missing, she was just starting out her final year of elementary school as a fifth grader. She was adorable and usually sported a pair of glasses that covered her bright blue eyes.

Her hair was dirty blonde and she stood at 4 feet 8 inches. She was living in Westminster, Colorado at the time, which Heath could actually tell us a little bit about that area because he used to live there. I was actually living in Westminster in 2012 when Jessica went missing, and Westminster is clumped between Boulder and Denver and it's a really great place to raise a family. It's very community oriented. It's a great place to live, especially if you're not trying to live in a bigger city.

It's kind of more spread out and there's a lot of other towns like Arvada and Thornton that are close by, so there's a lot of smaller towns within a certain radius. October 5, 2012 started out like any other day for Jessica Ridgeway. Her bedroom alarm clock rang at 7.45am as usual. She got up and watched some TV while eating a granola bar on her living room couch. After going to her bedroom to get dressed for school, she peeled an orange alongside her mom so she could enjoy it on her stroll to wit elementary school and Westminster, Colorado. Just before Jessica left the house, she called a friend and fellow classmate to see if he would want to walk with her to school. The boy's father

said that he would wait for her, and with that at 8.25am, Sarah Ridgeway watched her daughter walk out the door for the very last time. It was a chilly fall day in Westminster, but Jessica was bundled up as she began the very short four to five minute walk to her friend's house. So 15 minutes later, at 8.40, she still hadn't arrived. Jessica loved going to school, and the school was incredibly engaged with the community as well. They would often host family dance nights, and they had a school spirit club, and they offered community service projects.

When Jessica didn't arrive to Miss Grace's class, she sent a note to the office to warn them that Jessica had not shown up. Shortly after 10 a.m., the school's secretary called Jessica's mom to let her know that Jessica had not shown up to school that morning. Jessica's mom, Sarah Ridgeway, was a 31-year-old single mother. She worked nights as a tech support agent for a software company and usually worked between 10pm to 7am. Sarah definitely did not enjoy working this shift, but she did it anyway, and it worked out fine for her family schedule. When the school called Sarah's cell phone, it rang in a different room while she slept in her bed.

Since Sarah had worked till 7am, she usually slept well into the afternoon. She explained later that the reason herself on was in another room was because a college she'd applied to wouldn't stop calling her, so she put the phone in a different room so she could get some sleep. Sarah's mom and sister actually lived with Sarah and Jessica at that time, but they were at work.

Several hours later, Sarah finally woke up and noticed a voicemail on her phone. She immediately thought it must have been a mistake since, like we mentioned earlier, Jessica was an incredibly good kid and equally incredible student and skipping school just wouldn't have been on her agenda. Sarah started driving around the area desperately looking for her daughter, and she wasn't at any of the parks or any of her friends houses. Sarah finally ended up at wit elementary school hoping that maybe Jessica was just running

late that day and she did end up showing up but she still wasn't there. At 4.23 pm, so about eight hours after Jessica had disappeared, the Westminster Police got a phone call. Originally the officers did their usual routine, one of them went to the Ridgeway household, another officer went to the school. They started by trying to piece together what could have possibly happened to her. They started getting suspicious that Jessica's dad, Jeremiah Bryant, had been out of the picture for many years and he was living in the state of Missouri. Sarah and Jeremiah had been fighting about $267 in child support that Jeremiah needed to

pay every month. A court hearing had actually occurred on the same day that Jessica disappeared, so please try to determine if he had shown up or not so that they could see if he was the one that took her. At the same time, officers were trying to determine what else could have happened to Jessica. They talked to the wit elementary staff as well as the father of the neighbor boy

that Jessica was going to meet. The father said that they waited until about 8.40 for her, but since school started at 8.50 AM, he drove his son to school at that point. And he said that he had just assumed that since it was cold, that Sarah ended up taking Jessica to school and just hadn't called them to let them know. Police were quickly able to contact Jeremiah and determine that he did indeed appear in

court that day, meaning that he had an alibi and did not take Jessica. Police frantically searched for other possibilities at this point. Police walked through Chelsea Park, which is a park right next to Whitt Elementary, with bloodhounds. The dogs also sniffed around the school, cars, and various homes in that area. By 9.15 pm on October 5th, investigators came to the conclusion that the most likely situation involved Jessica being abducted. Then they issued an amber alert.

For those of you who don't know what an amber alert is or those of you who live in different countries, an amber alert is a child abduction alert system that basically sends urgent messages to all cell phones. I think it's in the country because I've gotten ones from Illinois before, even while living in California. So I don't really know the radius, but everybody gets them on their phone describing that a child has been taken and then including a description of the car. It really is amazing that we have a system for trying to locate missing children in the day and age that we live in because before Amber Alert there really wasn't a whole lot that could be done in those

situations so it's really a great thing. You'll basically be sitting around at work or you'll be with a bunch of people and all of your phones will go off at the same time and it'll just give you that little description and it doesn't say who is missing or really have that many details it just gives you the description of the car if they have one and where it is so that you can kind of keep an eye out. So in Jessica's case, they actually didn't have a description of the car because they didn't know who had abducted her, but an amber alert was sent out for her anyway, and it disclosed a few details. As Heath can tell you, the search for Jessica Ridgeway was pretty extensive. The community was covered with missing posters plastered on business windows and telephone poles and car windshields. The entire town was looking for this girl.

One of Jessica's relatives had also posted on Facebook saying that Jessica was missing, and over 100 friends and neighbors came out to help look for her that night. At about 2am the next morning, authorities told the large group of volunteers to go home and get some rest, but then return in the morning if they wanted to help look. Nearly a thousand people showed up that day to walk through fields around her home. Many were friends and family, but most were complete strangers who just wanted to show some support.

More than 4,000 tips came into the Westminster Police Department, and they were getting assistance from 1,000 law enforcement personnel from 40 different agencies. So when I told you guys that I lived in Westminster, I actually lived right across the street from wit elementary when Jessica went missing. And the girl that I was dating at the time, her father was actually working for the Police Department of Thornton, which was a city over from Westminster. So me and my girlfriend at the time actually showed up to a search party at Whitt Elementary, but I guess we had shown up too late, so we weren't

actually a part of the search, but unfortunately we didn't get to search for her that day. There was actually a lot of people at the elementary school that day helping. They had cookies, and they had like apple cider for people, and they did a thorough search. I mean, this was hours long. I can tell you that there was a ton of panic around the community of Westminster and the surrounding towns. There was a lot of people that were really freaked out about this, and the community was basically in shock that Jessica had gone missing in such a community-friendly town. It's crazy to think that you were so close when this happened and as it was occurring, like little did you know that that was occurring, you know, technically you could have seen something or anybody could have seen something and the fact that nobody did is really surprising. Yeah, it was really shocking to everybody because it seemed like Westminster just wasn't

the type of place where these things would happen. You know, this is a place where people raise their families and, you know, very community-oriented and things of that nature. So it was very scary and to see like the constant news updates about Jessica over the period of this case was very eye-opening and shocking to me because I had never been so close to something like that. Well, except the Aurora movie theater shooting that happened, what was it like 25 minutes away from this, and you were living there then too, yeah? Yeah, that shooting actually happened about three months prior to Jessica going missing,

and at the time I was working for Coca-Cola, so I was a merchandiser distributing to different stores, and a store on my route was actually in Aurora, so I remember driving past the theater, and it was closed down, it had yellow tape all around it, and I remember thinking to myself, how strange it was that all of these different occurrences were happening in such a short span of time, all around the same area. Two days after Jessica went missing on October 7th, her backpack was found on a sidewalk about six miles away from her home in Westminster. It sat upright as if it were placed there carefully not thrown,

and inside were some child's clothes and water bottle. Originally, the man who found it didn't think much of it, especially because he found it after midnight, and when he noticed that it was still there the next morning, he took a closer look at it. That's when he saw a keychain hanging from it, with the name Jessica on it. But he wasn't very aware of the fact that there was a missing girl in the area by the name of Jessica, so he didn't report it to the police. But he did post it on the Westminster town list server, saying, if this is yours, come and get it. That's when someone commented on the post, telling him about Jessica Ridgeway,

and explaining that it could be hers. When the man saw this, he called the police immediately. After police were informed, they worked even harder to search for Jessica, because at this point, they knew without a doubt that something had happened to her. But at the same time, they figured that if someone had done something really bad to her,

they would never have left the backpack there. They would have taken it or gotten rid of it, not just thrown that evidence out casually. And I remember when police had found out about the backpack, a lot of people saw this as a huge potential lead. Once Jessica's dad Jeremiah was informed of the backpacks discovery, he flew from Missouri to Colorado to join the family. So at first they were pretty hopeful, but as days went by

and there wasn't any good news, police and the family were really beginning to lose hope. At this point, it's been five days since Jessica disappeared and police have ruled both Jeremiah and Sarah out as suspects in Jessica's disappearance. Law enforcement was pretty confident that the perpetrator was a stranger to her. Police began looking into other abduction cases in that area that had occurred that year when police began focusing on the attempted abduction of a 22-year-old woman a few months earlier on May 28th that year. She had been jogging around Kentner Lake, which is in Westminster when a man attacked her from behind and tried to shove a chloroform soaked rag in her face. He then tried to drag her into the underbrush near the trail she had been running on.

Luckily, the girl was able to fight him off and she called the police to report it. She describes her attacker as a white male, about 20 to 25 years old, and around 5-7 to 5-9 with an average build and brown hair. I had also seen this report on the news, the local news channel, about the 22 year old jogger. And I remember thinking that that probably wasn't connected to Jessica's case because typically abductors, they like to go after a specific type of person. So just knowing that the girl was 22 years old and Jessica was 10 kind of makes you think that they wouldn't be connected. Police collected the victim's

shirt and sent it off for analysis. A full DNA profile was created for the suspect, but there was no match yet in the system. When police ran the DNA off of Jessica Ridgeway's backpack, it matched the DNA profile of the jogger's attacker. There were still unsure who this man was, but they knew that the two cases were in fact connected. In Arvada, which is the town right next to Westminster, there's a place called Patridge Park Open Space. And it's basically just an isolated area that's very barren and there's pockets of mine shafts and barbed wire fences and lots of cactuses. On Wednesday, October 10, 2012, maintenance workers were walking the land and picking up trash, which is something they did fairly often to keep the area clean. Around 2pm, some of those workers came across a black plastic garbage bag.

It was in plain sight of the road, and when the workers went to lift it, they noticed it was very heavy. They immediately got a strange feeling because they didn't know what it was or why it was just there in the middle of the field like that. This wasn't something that they normally saw while cleaning. In that very moment, animal management officers who would usually catch stray dogs or escape livestock, happened to drive by the workers as they surrounded the bag. The workers flagged down the animal control officers to have them take a look. When one of the officers opened up the bag, he immediately noticed that the bag held

human remains. They also noted that the body was not intact, and it wasn't all there. It was just the torso, and most of the organs had been removed. Police were called right away, and hundreds of local police and FBI agents arrived at the scene to look for more evidence. This location was just nine miles from the Ridgeway home. Because the whole body wasn't there, they couldn't immediately tell if it was Jessica, but they had a pretty good idea that it was. And so did the rest of the community in

Westminster and Arvada. This was a really emotional time in the case, because I think just about everybody really thought that this was Jessica, and so you almost felt like everybody's hearts just drop at that point. Within two days, law enforcement confirmed that the remains found in the garbage bag were those of Jessica Ridgeway. The community was immediately terrified knowing that there was someone that evil amongst them and no one knew who they were. Police patrols increased around the schools because they feared another child would be taken. School districts began holding stranger danger courses to teach children not to ever take a ride from or go anywhere with someone they didn't know.

What's really ironic about this case is Jessica was actually doing a school assignment where she had to learn how to write exclamatory sentences. In her desk, they found a notebook and some of the sentences that she wrote down included. Do not play at the park alone and watch out for strangers. It's definitely really ironic and obviously it's something she knew and as we'll get into more details of what actually happened to her, you'll learn that it really wasn't her fault she knew to stay away from strangers, so it is very sad. Yeah, I find this to be one of the most ironic pieces of the case, and also one of the most tragic. Police discovered a wooden cross inside Jessica's body. They released a photo of it to the public in hopes of getting helpful responses.

In the meantime, a beautiful memorial service was held for Jessica. Just days after her remains were found and over 2,000 people showed up to give their condolences and show their support. Police carefully watched the crowds and hopes that the killer would show up. Our friend and listener Molly was actually telling me a few days ago that there is still a memorial for Jessica in the town, because she lives in the area, so she says she passes it almost every day. And the fact that that's still there years later is really kind of shows what the community

is like. Police were kind of at a dead end with this case because they really didn't have any solid leads. But suddenly, police got a call from a concerned woman explaining that the cross looked familiar, and we'll get into that after this short break. This is Justin from Obscura, a true crime podcast. Do you like single-host narrative-driven true crime that isn't afraid to get graphic? On Obscura, we paint a picture of the lives of the criminals and victims before telling

a story of the crime and how it unfolded. Add atmospheric production and audio clips such as 911 calls, and you have an idea of what we're about. If that intrigues you, type obscure a true crime, and do your favorite pod catcher. You can't miss our logo, and we'll see you by the fire. The simple truth is that children kill. Kids have murdered their best friends, teachers, grandmas, and even their own babies. Children have killed alone and in groups with other kids and sometimes with adults too. Who can even begin to speculate as to how people can justify resorting to murder?

Not us. This show focuses on the facts, details, and circumstances which give rise to murderous minors, killer kids. And we're back. On October 17, 2012, police received a call from a concerned woman explaining that the wooden cross that was found in Jessica Ridgeway's body looked familiar. She said that her good friend's son had one just like it, and she was worried about him. She said she thought that he would have been capable of being her killer. With this tip, police went to the house of Austin SIG to collect DNA. When police arrived,

he willingly agreed to give them his DNA, but warned them that he was home sleeping at the time Jessica Ridgeway went missing. Police took note that he was wearing a cross around his neck. No search was conducted on the house at this point. Two days later, on October 19th, a message was left on the FBI's tip line from a neighbor of Austin's. The neighbor spoke anonymously, but said Austin's sig worried them and mentioned that he was attending mortuary school.

They also mentioned that they had a conversation with Austin's mother Mindy about body disposal and that Austin's behavior was incredibly strange in general. Austin's DNA swab was submitted for analysis and surprisingly was not a match to the swab they took of Jessica's torso, nor the DNA profile for Jessica's backpack and the jogger shirt. On October 23, 2012, just two and a half weeks after Jessica went missing, police received a confession. Mindy Sigg, the mother of Austin Austin Sig, explained to police that her son

had just confessed to her that he kidnapped and murdered Jessica Ridgeway, and that the rest of her remains were in the crawl space underneath the house. Austin Sig was born on January 17, 1995 in Westminster, Colorado, to Mindy and Rob Sig. Rob was a criminal and in and out of prison for drugs, identity theft, a mortgage scheme, and more, throughout Austin and his brothers' entire upbringing. Mindy and Rob divorced before Austin's fifth birthday, and Mindy raised her two sons alone. She worked as a tech for a lacek eye surgery provider in Westminster. Austin was often described as being incredibly caring and kind as a child, but when he started entering puberty, he developed some disturbing habits. At the age of 12, Austin would often watch

child pornography, which was somehow discovered by his mom who then sent him to therapy. The sessions didn't help very much, much though because his addiction for child pornography grew as he became older. His interest then escalated as he began searching videos where children were being raped, strangled, and dismembered. It was around this time that he became interested in mortuary science. It was also known that Austin enjoyed torturing small animals, which as we all know is a very clear sign of a future murderer. Austin collected knives and other weapons. He was an avid video gamer and mostly enjoyed war-based games. Austin didn't do well in school and was often bullied for wearing black,

being a loner, and having a high-pitched voice. Kids also made fun of him because they said he looked like a 45-year-old pervert. Austin actually dropped out of high school and eventually obtained his GED. It was then that he began studying mortuary science at the Community College in Littleton, Colorado. Before murdering Jessica Ridgeway, he had received an award for crime-scene investigation. Austin's younger brother remembers a slightly creepy comment that Austin made regarding one of the classes he was taking. He said that he was learning how to kill people and be able to get away with it, which to me is a lot more than slightly creepy. Yeah, seriously, that's not just

a slightly creepy comment. That's a fucked up comment to say. Yeah, seriously. That's not just a slightly creepy comment. That's a fucked up comment to say. Yeah. And Austin's family thought it was a bit odd that he aspired to be a mortician, but they weren't really frightened by it, and you know, many people choose this profession and lead perfectly normalize with no interest in murdering people. So it's not really fair to say that every mortician is a creepy person. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you can't just, you know, lump everybody into that whole thinking. I think it makes sense here because he's a super weird dude, but one of Mindy's friends, and again Mindy is Austin's mom, reported to have a conversation with her where Mindy admitted that she let Austin practice restraining someone with zip ties on her. Which this is so weird because that's not part of being a mortician you don't tie people up. They're freaking dead. Like, why was she not like red flags like alert alert? Yeah, now let's talk about this for a minute because this as a mother, I mean, what kind of mother would allow her son to tie her up with zip ties?

It just doesn't make any sense why she would do that. And what did he say, oh, I want to practice tying you up because what? Why would you ever need to tie someone up? Exactly. Yeah, and the whole zip tie thing, that's just fucking creepy. I'm just going to say it. It's just really creepy. Well, because you don't need to.

There is no situation where you need to restrain someone unless you're going to torture or kill them. Exactly. That's like you're trying to acquire a skill to become a killer, not to become an investigator, but to become a killer. Austin didn't stay at home much when he was around 17 years old. He spent about four nights out of the house each week, and Mindy wasn't always sure where he went. Austin's girlfriend later reported that he usually stayed at her house one night a week, but no one was quite sure where

he went the other three nights. One night in September 2012, Austin began driving around the neighborhood, seeking a potential victim. After attempting to abduct a 22-year-old girl about four months earlier, he had decided he needed to go after someone smaller so he couldn't be overpowered. On the morning of October 5, 2012, Austin was parked in his Jeep Cherokee when he spotted Jessica Ridgeway on the short walk to her neighbor's house. As she began to pass his car, he jumped out the backside door and grabbed her.

He had never seen her before. He put Jessica in the back seat of his car and used zip ties to bind her feet and hands together. Jessica kept asking him questions about who he was and if he knew her mom. Austin later stated that he lied and if he knew her mom. Austin later stated that he lied to her whenever she asked questions. He told her everything was going to be okay.

He drove around randomly at first and then to his house and into the garage. Austin carried Jessica into his family home and up to his bedroom. Jessica noticed some litter boxes and since she loved animals, asked if he had cats. Then she asked what he was going to do to her. When they got to his room, he actually cut the zip ties off of her and told her that she was going to see her mom again. Then he put cartoons on Netflix for her to watch. Since Jessica had peed herself, he made her change out of her clothes and put them in her backpack. He then gave her clothes from his own closet, a white t-shirt and black shorts. After this, he told Jessica to turn around. And that's when he put a zip tie around

her neck and tried to strangle her. He later explained to police that he didn't have enough leverage with the zip tie, so he cut the zip tie off and tried to use his hands. He strangled her for three minutes. He also said that he noticed her body was twitching, which is what happens when your brain is deprived of oxygen. At this point, she would have either gone into a coma and still technically been alive but not conscious, or she would have died. It was then that he filled his bathtub with very hot water before putting her face into it to ensure she was dead.

He then began the dismembering process using a saw and a razor blade. He flushed parts of her hand and her organs down the toilet and placed her head, legs and arms in a plastic bag that he initially hid in the pool shed behind his house. So Jessica was dead before her mom even woke up and called 911. And I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I had read a couple articles that said that he removed some of her organs and placed them in containers and actually labeled them. It's very odd to me that this entire thing happened and his brother and mom never knew about it. And get this, the following night there was very heavy police presence in the area which

actually scared Austin. Since they were using cadaver dogs, he decided while using gloves to wash her body a second time before putting her remains into the bags. So again, how did you do that without anybody seeing or smelling or anything? You know what I mean? Exactly, yeah. I mean, he obviously did a very meticulous job, but it's very hard for me to believe that no one was able to detect something was wrong here. But after splitting her remains between the crawl space under his house and the open field, he planted her backpack. It was later found that Austin's DNA sample had gotten

lost and actually was never tested. Once they finally did test it, it matched one sample found on her torso, backpack, and the jogger's shirt. I mean, luckily he confessed because if they had, I don't even know how that got messed up where they thought they ran the sample of his DNA, but didn't. Like, they would have just assumed, oh, well, he's not the guy because his DNA didn't match, and then they would have just moved on and they never would have caught him unless he confessed, which is really sloppy on their part. I mean, that's real shit. Like, you don't lose a DNA sample in a murder case. Yeah, I think they really got some dumb luck on this because like you said, if he would have never confessed, we might not have ever known who killed Jessica Ridgeway.

I will have to admit though that the police in that area did a fantastic job searching for her and they used just about every resource that they had available. So I think, you know, there was a few things that were missed, but overall, I think law enforcement did a great job. And I'm not trying to knock that at all by saying that they messed up, but I think even they would agree that they dropped the ball in that sense, because that was the biggest piece of evidence in the entire case, and the fact that that got dropped literally probably was a huge mistake on their part and I know that they would agree, but you're right, they did work very hard on this. Yeah, and I agree with you. I mean, it's definitely one of those things where you have this missing girl and you're getting these DNA samples

and if you lose that, I mean mean that's a huge, huge thing. And they tested over 700 DNA samples in this case, so I get it, there's a lot going on, but DNA is very crucial. By 7.45pm, the night of his confession, Austin Sigg was arrested for the kidnap and murder of Jessica Ridgeway, as well as the attempted kidnapping and attempted murder of the female jogger. He admitted that before he attacked the jogger, he researched how to make chloroform and then poured it onto a rag.

He staked out at Ketner Lake and when the girl jogged past him the first time, he waited for her to pass him again before he lunged out at her. He said he planned to do to her what he had instead done to Jessica. When asked why he did what he did to Jessica, he explained that he was acting out one of his sexual fantasies. Not to take away from Jessica's murder at Right, and when they brought him in for questioning, he explained that he would drive around and when he saw a potential victim, that his heart would start pounding and he would like, kind of lose his vision and he could like

had this thing inside of him that he couldn't control, and also, he said that he never planned to abduct Jessica specifically, but that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can actually find Austin's Interrogation video on YouTube, and we're going to actually post a few clips of that on our Instagram page at Going West Podcast. So make sure you check that out. Austin noted that he didn't feel as much joy as he expected he would while killing Jessica. That's why he dismembered her body because he thought it would be more exciting for him. After an autopsy was done on Jessica's body,

it was determined that her cause of death was esphyxiation and suffocation by strangulation. So she had indeed died when he strangled her and was therefore deceased when he put her face in the bath and dismembered her. While being interviewed by police, Austin described every horrifying detail of Jessica's murder to them before saying that he was a monster. He also stated that he did not sexually assault Jessica, but then later said that that was a lie and he did, but not until after she was already dead. Austin Sigg was about three months shy of 18 years old when he murdered Jessica Ridgeway, so he wasn't eligible for the death penalty. However, they did make sure that once he entered prison, he would never leave. On November 18, 2013, Austin SIG pleaded guilty to all counts against him, including first-degree murder,

and was sentenced to life in prison, along with 86 years for sexual assault on a child, and the attack on the jogger. Austin stated, I don't know about society because I've never been great with it, but I know that personally I am a monster. There's no better word to describe what I've done than evil. Austin's SIG is now 24 years old and remains at the Colorado Department of Corrections. Thank you so much everyone for listening to this episode of Going West. Thank you so much guys for listening. This case has, like I said, sat with me for a very long time, and I know it's a really hard case to listen to, but I feel like it's very important to get Jessica's story out there. We'll have an all-new episode for you guys next Monday, but if you want some bonus episodes,

we have an all-new bonus episode coming out on Patreon this week. It's only $5 a month to subscribe and you get a bonus episode each month. And that's at patreon.com slash going west podcast. And like we mentioned earlier, we'll have a lot of videos and photos for you guys to check out about this case over on our Instagram at Going West Podcast. And don't forget to check out Going West on Twitter at Going West Pod. And if you guys like going West make sure you share with a friend because that's the easiest way to help us out and spread the word on these cases that we cover. Yeah definitely telling a friend is a great way to help us grow

this podcast. So for everybody out there in the world keep it real and stay weird. Cheerio! 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

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1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc Thank you. you