Morbid - Rodney Reed Mini Morbid

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

This case is one we planned to cover but has now become so time sensitive that we had to scrap our original Mini Morbid case for this week and do an emergency plea for everyone to check out the facts of this case and possibly take some action.  Rodney Reed is accused of raping and murdering Stacey Stites in 1996, but the evidence definitely leads elsewhere. Now, Reed is set to be executed November 22nd for a crime he likely didn't commit.  We urge you to check out some of these sources: https://theintercept.com/2019/11/08/rodney-reed-death-row-texas/ https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/us/death-row-inmate-rodney-reed-execution/index.html http://behindthebluewall.blogspot.com/2007/12/tx-who-chopped-off-fingernails-of-sgt.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2839595/Murder-victim-s-family-ditch-effort-save-man-convicted-killing-execution-saying-believe-19-year-old-strangled-death-cop-fianc.html https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2002-05-24/93214/ The documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLTcV664IgU If you are as convinced as we are, here is the petition to try and stop his execution. There are also numbers to call and actions to take here: https://www.freerodneyreed.com Check out our sponsors for this episode! Parcast Presents Villains: Masterminds. Evildoers. Savages. For every hero, there is a villain. The new podcast Villains from the Parcast Network highlights the psychological, political, and emotional factors that spawn both real and fictional villains. Ned!: Visit www.helloned.com/MORBID Use Code “MORBID” for 15% off your order Cowritten by Alaina Urquhart, Ash Kelley & Dave White (Since 10/2022)Produced & Edited by Mikie Sirois (Since 2023)Research by Dave White (Since 10/2022), Alaina Urquhart & Ash KelleyListener Correspondence & Collaboration by Debra LallyListener Tale Video Edited by Aidan McElman (Since 6/2025) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey weirdos, I'm Ash. And I'm Elena. And this is my mini morbid. It's Ash-centric, guys. Willy, willy, willy, willy, wooly, wooly. Ooh. Mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini, mini morbid. Mini morbid, mini morbid, mini morbid, mini morbid.

So this is kind of an interesting mini morbid because it is very time sensitive. We decided to jump on this case today because time is of the essence in it, really. Today we're going to be talking about the Rodney Reed case. So we actually originally had a different topic for this mini morbid today, but we switched gears at the last second to cover this Rodney Reed case pretty generally, but try to give you all the facts and all the information because this is really important, guys. So it's going to be a little shorter than it normally would be, but that's because we kind of just put it together as quickly as possible to get it out there to you guys. So yeah, I feel like a real live reporter. It was like Ash on the scene with news morbid. So let's crack into this.

I meant to say, let's dive into this. We're about to dive in. Oh my God, you did it. I did it. I've never been more proud of anybody in my life. I felt it and I had to go with it. Wow, I am alive and I just blew through the speakers. Sorry.

You can try to get to say wow. Wow. There you go. Okay. So everybody, this is a real bummer of the case, just so everybody knows. Sure it is. Here's a warning for you. It's a bummer.

But let's get it. Yeah. And just so everybody's aware, this does contain a lot of discussion of rape and sexual assault. Yes. So trigger warning. Yes, thank you. I couldn't think of the word trigger warning. I'm here for you.

Okay. So on April. 23rd, 1996, 19-year-old Stacey Stites never showed up for her shift at the grocery store where she worked in Bastrop, Texas. That's never a good start to a story. Never is. Stacey usually took her boyfriend's truck to work, but around 5.30 a.m., the truck was found in the Bastrop High School parking lot. At this point, Stacey hadn't been reported missing and the truck had not been reported stolen. So the officer who discovered it didn't really think much of it and just went about his business. But he did call it and to report it just in case.

Back at the grocery store, Stacey at this point was running about three hours late. And the woman who she was supposed to be working with, her coworker, was getting really worried and decided to call her mom, who was Carol Stites. So Carol receives this call and she's like, what the fuck? Like I heard Stacey leave for work this morning. I know she left for work this morning. That's a nightmare as a parent. I can't imagine that. I literally can't even imagine that. Just someone from the work calling and being like, yeah, your daughter didn't show up to work today.

That's a nightmare. Because you know those stories that start with your daughter didn't show up to work. It's always like, she always was on time to work. And like she oh, and I heard her leave. Exactly. It's like it's never like, oh yeah, she does this. Like it's always like, no, she's literally never done this. Right. So Carol calls Jimmy Fennell, Stacey's fiancé, who was a,

a Giddings police officer. He actually lived up, they lived upstairs from Stacy's mom. So Stacy's mom lived downstairs and Jimmy and Stacy lived upstairs. Okay. After being reported missing, unfortunately, Stacey's body was found around 3 p.m. the same day on the side of a rural road in a pretty like wooded area. I was going to make the rural juror joke, but this is kind of a very solemn case. So I did it, but I didn't do it. Okay. I just can never say the word rural. Rural. I have to stop and think about it. It's hard. It is. So, unfortunately, again, Stacey had been raped, sodomized, and strangled to death. She was actually strangled with her own belt that she had been wearing. Wow. That to me is someone who knows you. Yep. Like that kind of brutality.

100%. There was DNA from an unknown male found in her body. And strangely enough, her fingernails had been, it seemed as though they had just been cut. Oh, that's weird. Yeah. Not at all suspicious. And they weren't like, it wasn't like how like a typical girl would like cut their fingernails and file them. Like they were like. Jagged.

Yeah. Like it seemed as though she didn't do this herself. Yeah. Like somebody did it in a hurry perhaps. In a hurry and somebody else did it to maybe eliminate some evidence. Exactly. Without any care except just to get the fingernails off. Which is a weird thought to have unless you work in a criminal background.

Weird. Anyways. Real weird. Jimmy Fennell became the prime suspect because obviously he was the last person to see her alive. Of course. He was the fiancé, so that's just how it goes. Yeah. He just, I mean, this doesn't necessarily mean anything because lie detector tests we know are like...

About as useful as a hot dog in a trench coat. Exactly. I was waiting for that. So, but just know that Jimmy did fail. two lie detector tests. Oh, Jimmy. But the DNA found on Stacey's body did not belong to him. So he was ruled out as a suspect pretty quickly. And the case goes cold for about a year.

They have no idea who did this. Oh, damn. So then Rodney Reed, who was a suspect in a few other sexual assault cases, which he was never found guilty of. He was just a suspect in them. Yeah. To be clear. Be clear. Became the main focus in the case.

Rodney denied having any involvement in the murder. He denied even knowing Stacey at first. It's a bad move. Yep, especially because his DNA matched what was found on Stacey's body. Woof, come on, Rodney. So he definitely knew her at least. Yeah, for sure. When the investigators kind of obviously confronted him about the DNA,

obviously he changed his story and told them that he and Stacey had been having an affair and that they had had sex about two days before her murder. And you can understand why he would initially be like, I don't even know her, because there was a lot more to this. There was a lot to this case. I mean, it just has to be said. It's 1996 in Texas in a small town where a lot of people may have been racist. Yeah, it's just reality. It's just what was going on.

This is of the fiancé of a police officer. That's probably why he was like, I don't know her at all. Yeah, because he was like, what's going to happen here? Right. I admit that I'm having a family. Because again, Stacey was a Caucasian woman. Yes. And Rodney Reed is an African-American male.

Right. Just to, in case that everybody doesn't know. Yeah. So they were like, yeah, your DNA was found on her. And he was like, yep, well, we've been having an affair. We had sex two days ago. He said that they had been keeping their affair secret because, like I said, or like Elena said, he was a black man.

Is that okay to say? Can I say black? Yeah. Okay. And Stacey was a white woman. And they were afraid to go public with their relationship because, they didn't know what people were going to do say or think because the town and especially the town that they lived in was considered pretty racist at the time.

That's so sad. I can't imagine. And I know this was like a while ago, but it wasn't that long ago. And it's like, oh, it just bums me out. 23 years ago. Yeah, it bums me out that people think this way. Yeah, it's horrible. Rodney Reed apparently had multiple witnesses to confirm his alibi for that night and attests

to the fact that he was in fact in a relationship with Stacy. But pretty much none of them were called to testify at the trial. Weird. Weird. What I will say is a lot of them did have criminal convictions, so that could have been why they were not called to testify. Yeah, credibility can be an issue. But just know that they didn't. During the trial, women who had accused Rodney of sexual assault were called to testify.

And remember, he hadn't been found guilty in any of these cases. Yeah. But they were used to testify against him. That doesn't seem right. No. So on May 29th, 1998, Reid was found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to the death penalty. Oh, a jury of his peers, you say. Yeah, exactly.

An all-white jury. Is that legal? Like, could that alone be something to get him exonerated? I'm not sure, actually. Because that's not a jury of your peers. I'm going to look it up real quick. So we just took a quick break to look this up for you. and according to law.com, peer means an equal.

This has been interpreted by courts to mean that the available jurors include a broad spectrum of the population, particularly of race, national origin, and gender. So this doesn't seem right. It's supposed to be a broad spectrum, not a bunch of white dudes. Yeah, it's like Lizzie Borden all over again. Exactly. Not a jury on your peers. Not at all.

So yeah, he was found guilty. But a lot of people, including even members of Stacey's family, think Rodney Reed is innocent and was wrongly convicted. That should tell you something right there. Yeah. If the victim's family members are like, I don't think that man did it. Yeah. That says something.

Yeah, that definitely says something. The people that don't believe Rodney did it do believe Jimmy Fennell, Stacey's fiancé, is the one who killed her. I'm not shocked at all. But other people, including the lead investigator on the case, who is Lynn Rocky Wardlow, don't agree. Lynn says that Jimmy wouldn't have had enough time to kill his fianc say, drop the body, park the truck up a high school, then walk home 30 miles to be home

and answer a 645 call about where Stacey was. But do we have like medical examiner stuff to back that up? Nope, because that was super fucking botched. Ah, again, shocked. Yeah, most of this investigation was hella botched. Yeah, it's weird that it involves, you know, inside stuff. Wardlow never searched the couple's home and also never asked what the couple had been up to in the days leading up to the murder.

And just a reminder, Jimmy failed those two polygraph tests in which questions like, did you strangle your girlfriend were asked? And where his whereabouts were that morning. They asked him about that. And he failed two polygraph tests with questions asked like that. I'm going to say that's a bit fishy. It gets fissier. Gets more troutish in here.

Yes. It's very stanky. Very stanky. Rodney Reed's cousin, Chris Aldridge, actually said he was with Rodney. the night that Stacy, that he was allegedly murdering Stacy. Like, at that time, he was with his cousin. So he was like, I'm pretty sure I would know if he was murdering someone. Yes.

He says they hung out at a lot near his house until about 5 a.m. And then they walked to work together. The same cousin says Jimmy knew that Stacey had been having an affair with Rodney and had even pulled Rodney into his cruiser one time to tell him that he was going to pay for what he was doing. I mean, come on. Come on. The story was also confirmed by another witness, so it's not just the cousin that says this. Like, this happened.

There's way too much here in Rodney's favor. Yeah. Like, this doesn't happen to a guilty person. Yeah. At the time of the murder, the medical examiner said that the semen left on Stacey's body couldn't have been from two days prior. But a few years after the trial, he changed his mind and came out and said, since he only found very few sperm that they could have actually been from an earlier time.

And he also said that the injury Stacey sustained were more consistent with penetration by a rod-like instrument, such as a police baton. That's horrific. That just literally ruined my psyche thinking about that. Because if this, think about it, if this is her fiancé, the amount, yeah, the amount of just nightmare this is. is off the charts, especially like when you introduce like a police baton as the instry, it's like I can't even put myself in that. Well, and I mean, Jimmy Fennell, personally I think he did it. Same.

Either way, if you don't think he did it, you still should think that he's a really shitty human being. So I'll continue now. Exactly. Also, a weird thing is that, like I said, a lot of this investigation is botched. So they took pictures at the crime scene. And then when they got her back to the morgue, all these injuries that weren't photographed at the scene, like the medical examiner saw all these like burns and like stuff like that that hadn't been photographed at the scene. And it's like what the fuck? What are you doing?

Right. Why are you even there if you're not doing your job? And they literally started like examining her on the side of the road, like started undressing her and like checking into things. What? As she was placed on a gurney on the side of the road. No, that's not okay. Which probably destroyed crucial evidence. 100%.

And it's just like crude. Sloppy. Yeah. Exactly. It's crude. That's exactly it. So another interesting thing that was left out of the trial is that DNA was found on a few beer cans that were close by to Stacy's body. That DNA belonged to Jimmy's best friend, neighbor, and fellow cop, David Hall.

What the fuck? Yeah. Jimmy was known to be controlling, violent, and he had had a few run-ins during his time as a police officer that had to be taken care of. Let's talk about a few of those. Let's do that. He stalked a woman named Wendy Wallace so badly that she filed a complaint against him. He assaulted a man named Mario Morillo, along with two other police officers. Jimmy held a gun to Marillo's head while the other two police officers. like basically beat the shit out of him.

Oh, that sounds like a nice guy. After Stacey's murder, Jimmy started dating this woman named Pam Duncan, like pretty quickly after Stacey's murder. But when she ended things with Jimmy, because she claimed that he was possessive and jealous, after she broke up with him, he stalked her to the point where she also filed a complaint, and an officer came to her house assuring her that Jimmy would be leaving her alone. My God, this guy's a fucking monster. But when she went to go get a copy of the police report, it didn't exist.

Are you kidding me right now? Yeah. And he was literally like driving to her house, like calling her on the phone, shining his fucking police flashlight in her windows. That's horrifying. He was like fucking torturing this woman. He was a monster. And then apparently the other police people on the force were like, he can't be doing that. But they fucking got rid of the police report 100%.

So they just covered it up. But they were like, dude, you got to stop. But we're not going to do anything about that. this. Yeah. So Jim's getting away with all this fucking bullshit, like, torturing people. Of course. Like, who know, these are just reports that came out. Who knows all the shit he did that didn't come out? I'm sure there's much more. Yeah. So in the year 2000, it came out that Jimmy had previously talked about murdering Stacey if she ever cheated on him. And he even said that he would do it with a belt so that no fingerprints would be left behind. Guys, come on. He literally said

exactly how she was murdered before he fucking murdered. He laid out the plan that actually was put into motion. I mean, come on. And also, if you're talking, first of all, if you're talking about murdering your significant other in any, like, realistic scenario at all, you're fucked up. And two, if you're a police officer and you're doing that, come on. So finally, Jimmy's luck runs out. Oh.

In 2007, he was actually convicted of raping a woman and kidnapping her. she was named Connie Lear and he was supposed to be bringing her to the police station. That's disgusting. And he fucking raped her. That's disgusting. Yeah. He told her that he would kill her if she ever told anybody,

but she went forward anyways because she's a bad bitch. Good for you, girlfriend. And at Jimmy's trial, multiple women came forward with similar stories of what Jimmy had done to them. And they were just too scared to report it before. That's awful. Horrible. Jimmy was convicted of the rape and kidnapping and sentenced to prison.

He was sentenced to 10 years. So this happened in 2007. He stayed in prison until 2017. But he's out now. That doesn't seem like enough. No, 10 years for fucking rape and kidnap. Are you fucking kidding? Like, come on, dude.

Like, this guy's obviously dangerous. 100%. While Jimmy was incarcerated, it seems like a lot of people were more comfortable letting out details that they might have been not so comfortable letting out. well, he was just Roman-free fucking torturing people. His former best friend did a CNN interview where he said that Jimmy hadn't been home with Stacy the night before. She was murdered like he had originally said because that was asked at some point. Like, where were you?

Blah, blah, blah. And he was like, oh, like we were at home. I had a little league game. And then we watched TV together. And it was like a fine night. So he's lying. Yeah. But he had actually been out drinking with his friends, including David.

Hall beer can man. I was just going to say the beer can guy. Mm-hmm. Into the early morning hours. So there's a lot of gray area when it comes to this case, I guess. And it seems as though a lot of the investigation was botched, like I said. And the evidence that was left out at the trial was really damning to Jimmy. Yeah.

All the evidence that they left out points the finger at Jimmy. That does not shock me at all. No. Um. And remember, the home that does. Jimmy shared with Stacey was never searched. Jimmy's truck was returned to him before the investigators could carry out a full forensic investigation.

That's crazy to me. Yeah. That's insane. And the only fingerprints that were found in that truck were belonged to Jimmy and belonged to Stacey. But the story that the investigator or that the prosecutors were trying to paint was that Stacey was driving to work and then Rodney like flagged her down somehow like and overtook the car and then blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. His fingerprints weren't found in the car.

And even better, Jimmy sold the fucking truck a few days after they returned it to him. We've heard that story before. Sure have. So now that all of this is coming to light, people who have long questioned Jimmy's role in this and have felt all along that Rodney Reed was innocent and framed are rushing to get. to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, about ordering a new investigation that could possibly shed new light on new DNA evidence to prove Rodney's innocent. If you want to look more into the case, this was like a brief overview pretty much, because we wanted to get it out in time.

There are tons and tons of articles. There's a daily mail article on this. I'll have Elena put in the show notes, all the articles that I use. Yeah, I'll put all the sources that you can find to see all the especially the new evidence that has come forward. And there's actually a really good documentary that you can watch as well. It's about like an hour long. It's called the state versus read.

So really, guys, just look into this case. This is kind of obviously like a brief overview, but this is super time sensitive. Like we said before, we just wanted to get it out. Because Rodney is supposed to be executed on November 20th. That is not far away, guys. No. So after sifting through all the evidence and all the articles. If you feel like he's innocent, which I feel like he's innocent, I also feel like he's

innocent. You can call the Texas governor at 512-463-2-200-0. Or you can sign the petition at freerodney reed.com. That's free, R-O-D-N-E-Y-R-E-E-D dot com. And you can stop the execution of Rodney Reed, which is scheduled for November 20th. This is honestly going to be so. such a travesty if this happens. This is going to be the murder of an innocent man as far as I'm concerned. A hundred percent. We can't let it happen, guys. So do what you need to do, call who you need to call, but make the right decision. Exactly. I mean, take a look at all the evidence that we've put forth, all the stuff that you can find online about this, the documentaries. Make your own decision, but I think you're going to come to the same decision that we did because, I mean,

the evidence just, we're not saying who did it because, I mean, evidence points to somebody, but we're not saying who did it. We're saying who didn't do it. And Rodney Reed didn't do it. No, I don't think he did it. I just don't think it's possible. No, I don't either. There's too many coincidences. There's too many things that take him out of this suspect pool. Definitely. So we'll post on the Instagram some of the links that you can just click right on our Instagram to go and check some stuff out. And you can follow us on Instagram if you haven't already. At morbid podcast. You can hit us up on Twitter at a morbid podcast. You can send us a Gmail about Rodney Reed's innocence. Morbidpodcast at gmail.com. You can check out the website

that Elena designed. Morbidpodcast.com. You can join the Facebook group and talk about how Rodney Reed is innocent. Morbid, colon, a true crime podcast. We hope you keep listening. And we hope you Keep it weird. I'm not going to do one for this. Not so weird that you don't think Rodney Reed is innocent. Perfect. Bye, guys. Bye.