The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 1. Like a Ghost

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

More than 40 years after Janis disappears from her Columbia, Mississippi home, Investigator Marc Ogden decides he’s going to solve the mystery of her disappearance. Has the most obvious suspect gotten away with murder for decades? Or is there more than one person who might want this mom of four dead? Binge all episodes of The Vanishing of Janis Rose ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment and Wildnight Media production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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ad-free right now by subscribing to The Benj. Visit The Benj channel on Apple Podcast and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit getthebenge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Benge. Feed your true crime, obsession. The Benj. What is it that makes us feel like we know someone? Is it their laugh, their favorite swear words, how they show up for us?

Or is all that just window dressing that changes with the seasons of our lives? Maybe the real self is more elusive. Of all the great Oscar Wild quotes, there's this one. The final mystery is oneself. It's an interesting and kind of terrifying idea, because, of course, if we never know ourselves, how can anyone else? And it's that idea, that mystery,

that sucked me into this story. When I first heard about Janice Rose Bullock, I had to find out what had happened to her and why it had all gone so, wrong. It's the summer of 1970, South Mississippi. Janice Rose Bullock is a young mom. She and her husband and their four daughters are moving into a new house, nestled in a grove of pine trees, outside of a tiny town called Columbia. That same summer, a rare cold front moved in.

on the county. On a Saturday in July, the heavens opened up. Hurricane force winds snapped pine trees like toothpicks and ripped billboards off their posts. South of town, a duststorm blanketed the streets. And then the storm passed. Business owners repaired their signs. Residents turned the felled trees into firewood, because this was Columbia, a picture-perfect community. and things had this way of working out until they didn't. Outside, it might have been the 1970s with long-haired men protest and feminism.

But in downtown Columbia, stores still closed at noon on Wednesday so people could go fishing. Women didn't need the pill because you didn't have sex until marriage. And after marriage, well, Well, children are a blessing.

If you saw Janice in downtown Columbia, at the drugstore or the beauty parlor, you'd probably think she was made for this mold. A gorgeous woman who'd married her handsome high school sweetheart. Or, maybe that was just window dressing. And the storm that coincided with Janice's arrival wasn't a brief aberration, but an omen. because after the storm, Janice would disappear, and it would be four decades before anyone began to learn what happened. All the town knew was that one day she was there playing with her kids on the floor.

The next, she was gone. Four girls were left without a mom, and the local gossips were left with plenty of theories. Over time, clues would emerge, but no answers. And most importantly, no Janice. I've become fascinated with this mystery. You could probably even say obsessed. And I have my reasons.

Like Janice, I'm also from small town Mississippi. I know what it's like to spend your childhood with the same tiny cluster of kids. to run into your doctor at the supermarket, and the church, and then a dinner party. I know the social dynamics and expectations, and I also know better than most how easy it is to hide darkness where no one is looking for it. And in those unseen corners where secrets are kept, lies deception, and murder run rampant. And yet nothing prepared me for this. The search for Janice Rose Bullock.

It's a mystery that has taken me across three states. It did have the state of Louisiana on it, though. And into two families. Because daughters wanted to find their mom. Even onto the trail of the most prolific serial killer in history. She needed to get away because she was afraid of him. The search for Janice sucked me. into a world built on fraud and stolen identities.

Feels like I was on one of them TV shows, on Salt Mysteries. They're just dead end after dead in. And just when it seemed like it couldn't get any weirder, it did. You just can't go one day and come back with a baby. Did she steal him? Did she buy him?

Get a room, get him some alcohol, and then go kill at night. He knew that people thought that he killed her. I don't even know what's caller. To be honest, I don't know, because it's twisted, trust me. From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, you're listening to The Vanishing of Janice Rose. This is episode one, like a ghost. I'm Larison Campbell. It's the middle of the afternoon when Kathy Ford's phone starts ringing. She just got her daughter

down for a nap, so she dashes down the hallway to get it, jogging over her quintessential 70s gold shag carpet past the harvest gold striped wallpaper, and she reaches for her matching harvest gold rotary phone on the wall. Kathy rips the receiver off the hook. Hello? It's Janice's sister on the line. She's calm, but her question is strange. Have you heard from Janice? And I'm like, no. Kathy is probably one of the first people Janice's family reaches out to. They were best friends, had been so since eighth grade. No, Kathy says, she hasn't heard from Janice. But that's not that weird. Janice and Kathy don't check in every day. They're young moms. Routine is more of theory than a practice, especially for Janice, which is why Kathy's first thought is that maybe

Janice took her girls on a last-minute trip. I said, maybe she went to New Orleans or something with the kids. Janice has family down there, and her husband Glenn works long hours during the week, so that's probably where they went. She said, no. She said, the kids are with Glenn. I said, the little one, she said, no, all four of the kids are with Glenn. Janice isn't with her girls? Okay, now Kathy's concerned. She stretches out the phone's extra long cord and drops into a stool at their bar. Janice is gone, and no one seems to be able to find her.

And then I was worried because I didn't think she would have left her children. And she surely would have told her best friend if she was leaving on a big trip, right? Right? Why wouldn't she call me? You know, I would have expected her to call me. Especially if she planned to leave her kids behind. I said, yeah, you know she would not leave those kids. But Janice's kids were at home with their dad, all four of them. And Janice wasn't. And that could only mean one thing to Kathy. Something had to have happened to Janice. Kathy still remembers the way the conversation shifted

as they realized Janice's disappearance wasn't just weird. It was bad. But what Kathy didn't know then was just how bad it would get. At least one of her family members say they went to the police, told them she was gone, filed a report. As one story goes, Janice put her daughters on the school, school bus one day, and she was never seen again. I've also heard she took the kids to a neighbors and then disappeared. Either way, they don't see her again. It's the kind of story that never made

sense to Janice's best friend. She remembers her as this laid-back mom. They were well-behaved and they played good with my daughter. And I was there one time and they wanted to finger paint. My child and her three sat on the kitchen floor. There was paint on the floor everywhere. I was just like, oh my God. But Janice, you know, to her, it was just like no big thing. You know, if their toys were out, it's no big thing. You know, that didn't stress her.

There's always a chance Janice left on her own. And maybe she'd planned to come back. Or she got caught up in something she couldn't get out of. But even if Janice had left on her own, they still needed to find her, right? A mother of four was missing. The current police file on Janice's disappearance totals 300 pages. But every single note in that case file comes from decades after Janice went missing. Her family says they reported her missing.

But the police either didn't take it seriously. or not seriously enough to keep investigating or keep track of their records. For a while, the only real updates are Viatown Gossip. Janice comes from a big family in Columbia, Mississippi. She's the baby of six kids. If you didn't know Janice, you probably knew one of her sisters, a cousin or her mom who worked down at the hardware store. Her high school was small, some 20 kids to a class.

So when word got out that she was missing, people weren't just saying Janice, but Glenn Bullock's wife, Becky's sister, Minnie's daughter. Then one day, Kathy gets another shocking call. An old friend was passing through Jackson about an hour and a half from their hometown. And they went, you know, to a cafe for lunch. He looks over at a table and has to do a double take because sitting right before his eyes is a face he knows well. He said a group of people looked like secretaries sitting at a table, eating, chit-chatting.

And he said, that was Janice. Janice. She was well-dressed. She looked good. And so he walked over. And he said, Janice. And she said, I don't know you. And he's like, yeah, Janice. You know, Janice Sway.

She said, I don't know who you're talking about. So now he's mad. He was angry at her for leaving the kids. So he persisted. No, no, no. I know you. You know me. And she got up and walked out and left.

And he tried to follow her out. Kathy sits there hearing the story and can't quite believe it. Like, what if he's right that he had just for a second? stepped into a portal where Janice was alive and well. I mean, they'd all ridden the same school bus. You're together every single day, morning and evening. And they both went to Pine Burr, Baptist Church, you know. And he dated Janice. I dated him.

I mean, it was a small school. So he knew her well. Yeah, he would, wouldn't he? But this story wouldn't solve the mystery. It would only deepen it. What would make Janice leave? Maybe Kathy was the one who didn't know her best friend. Was she just out there living life as a secretary?

Some kind of break with reality? Amnesia? And then there were other Janice sightings. Like this guy who said he saw her driving by, honking and waving from a red car. Some of the other rumors stretched the best. bounds of credibility. In one, a relative gets a call from a young woman, claiming that Janice might be on the road with a truck driver. When she goes to the address, just a town or so over,

to check out the rumor, a woman living there has a picture of Janice, but no Janice. Janice isn't there. These encounters sound like ghost stories. And maybe, maybe. that's how Janice was starting to seem too, like a ghost. You'll catch sight of her, but as soon as you're close enough to touch her, you realize it's just smoke. If Janice were close by, wouldn't she reach out? Janice's longtime best friend Kathy chokes up all this gossip and speculation to just that. Talk. Wishful thinking. The way I After a loved one dies, you'll think you'll glimpse them in a crowd. Because by now, Kathy has accepted that there is one real possibility.

Somebody had murdered her. I went to visit her mother. Maybe that's what made me see that. And her mother said, someone must have killed her. And as much as Kathy didn't want to admit it, this one possibility, it had one likely suspect, the husband. Glenn, I know he knew that people thought that he killed her. Hey, everyone, it's Jonathan Van Ness.

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subscribe today. Plus, they offer a happiness guarantee on the first box. So if you're not completely satisfied, you'll get your money back. That's OLLL-I-E.com slash better and enter code better to get 60% off your first box. This episode is brought to you by Defender. With its 626 horsepower twin-turbo v8 engine, the defender, Octa, is taking on the Dakar rally, the ultimate off-road challenge. Learn more at landrover.ca. The longer Janice was missing, the more the people of Columbia, Mississippi, began to whisper about the man she'd married in high school, Glenn. Janice's best friend Kathy says, despite sharing four daughters, Glenn, didn't appear to be anxiously waiting for Janice's return.

In fact, not long after, he moves a much younger maternal figure into the house, ten years younger than him. I guess he divorced her for desertion, and then he married the babysitter. Yeah, not the best look. By the way, I wasn't able to find another source confirming she was an actual babysitter, but she was 18 at the time. so definitely babysitter aged. Glenn didn't want to participate in an interview,

but Kathy, she'd been observing Glenn and Janice's relationship since high school. It had started typically enough, acute flirtation on the basketball bus while traveling to away games. And our bus didn't have a starter, so we pushed the bus off, and when they'd pop the clutch and start it, we'd all run and get in in a hurry. the girl sat on one side of the boys on the other across the aisle there was glen textbook handsome strong jaw full lips a heavy brow that you could describe as brooding and janis beautiful popular involved in every school club always a class favorite homecoming court all the guys wanted her to be their girlfriend and she picks glen but it wasn't like a quarterback dating the cheerily situation. While Janice was throwing parties at the Lake Pavilion, dancing to Motown, Glenn was quiet, kind of in the background. Glenn was always more serious, and Janice was just

playful. He wasn't as, I don't know how to explain, as connected, as bonded with the other in their class like they were the others in our class and the class above us going to swim holes and we did a lot together but Glenn did not for Janice there was that total acceptance

for him you know he had not dated anyone else that I know of he loved her did she love him too yeah neither were scrutinizing their long-term compatibility or red flag

Lags. Looking to the future in high school meant counting down the days until the weekend, when they get together and double date to the drive-in and then the driveway. Her mother would let us sit out in the car a little longer, you know, and kiss, yeah. At the time, this all seemed sweet, like Janice was breaking Glenn out of his uptight shell. But once Janice disappears, people like Kathy began screaming. scrutinizing anything they'd ever noticed about the two. Glenn and Janice get married when they're still in high school and start having kids. A daughter, then twin daughters, then another daughter.

All of a sudden, Janice is a 20-year-old mom for four kids. She'd barely had time to learn how to be a mom to one. Life is coming at them fast. I think things really started to turn when they built the house by his mom. This is the house they lived in way out in the country on Glenn's family property. They move in, and Glenn's working as a house painter. It's backbreaking physical labor and long hours. But it's what he's got to do to support his big family.

He worked out of town, and she's there by herself, with new babies and a toddler. And when he's off work, from Kathy's point of view, well, he seemed to just want to decompress. He was always hunting or fishing. So he's gone all week, and then he's hunting and fishing. And now that Janice is gone, like everyone else, Kathy's analyzing every fight, every disagreement Janice had confided about to her. It's what people do when they're desperate for answers.

I know this firsthand. I have an unsolved murder in my family. Over 20 years ago, my own grandmother was killed just a few hours up the road from where Janice disappeared. In my case, this need to know was so consuming that I made a podcast about it, Devil in the Ditch. And what I learned is that it's human nature to try to make sense of tragedy.

So we reach for certainty where there isn't any. In the case of my grandmother's murder, the whole town blamed someone in my family with scant evidence. So when Kathy tells me about replaying, her conversations with Janice, it feels familiar. But this mystery is much bigger, because in this case, Janice's loved ones don't even know what happened to her. Could the easiest answer that her husband had something to do with her disappearance turn out

to be the right one? What started as a sort of opposites attract dynamic, between Janice and Glenn had calcified. His coolness had probably started to feel like neglect, her impulsivity, like your responsibility. Then one afternoon, Janice calls Kathy with a shocking update, something more consequential than a minor tiff. Janice tells her she's left Glenn,

moved into her own apartment, and taken a couple of the kids with her. I was like, why? Why are you leaving him? What did he do to you to make you leave? I mean, that was my attitude. What has he done to make you leave? She's like, nothing. I'm like, has he hit you?

No. Are you sure? I'm sure. Does he drink? No. I just don't want to be married anymore. This blows Kathy's mind. I mean, sure, Glenn could be stiff and self-important.

He wouldn't have been Kathy's first choice. But this was the 70s in the deep south. Marriage wasn't a guarantee of happiness. It was about stability and safety. And it seemed like Glenn provided both of those things. This cry for something more was something that women around the country were starting to make. She just didn't want to be married anymore. But Janice was in the wrong place at the wrong time for such a declaration.

Even if she'd tried to get out, she couldn't legally. Right now, it's 2025, and Mississippi law still doesn't allow a no-fault divorce if only one party wants it. Legally speaking, Glenn had the upper hand, and from where Kathy was sitting, he intended to keep it. Glenn wanted her back. I know he was angry that she had the children. He wanted his children. And the way Kathy saw it, Janice should want her back. want to keep her family together. And then after so many months, she went back. But I thought, well, maybe whatever was wrong has been fixed.

But it wasn't so much fixed as buried, the way you do when you're in an unhappy marriage. And Kathy will wonder if this decision to save her marriage could have cost Janice her life. One of the last conversations Kathy ever has with Janice about her marriage is at the funeral of an old classmate. I said, how were things going? And she said, better. But she didn't really sound like that was really true. Afterwards, Kathy's husband tells her he had a dramatic run-in with Janice's husband, Glenn.

He says, man, I can't believe that, Glenn. I said, what? He said, he really didn't appreciate me talking my wife into leaving me. But he said, no, we didn't. we didn't know, she was up there until she called us, and we tried to talk her and to go, no, I know you, I know you, you know, you know. He was real, real mean about it. And so, but he wouldn't go to their house after that. And soon, there won't be reason for Kathy to go over there either, because Janice and Glenn

will split up for good. Glenn will divorce Janice Janice in 1974 before she goes missing. Glenn will then get custody of their oldest daughter, Janice, the three younger ones. And then, Janice just vanishes. And unlike Janice's sisters, Glenn never calls up her best friend looking for her. Never, never. I thought he was glad she was gone and left the children. And I thought if he killed her is because he didn't want her to take the children. It's not an outlandish theory.

After all, a third of women who were murdered in the U.S. are killed by an intimate partner. No surprise, those same stats for men are drastically lower. Then Kathy finds out that Glenn has moved on, with that 18-year-old. When I heard that he married the babysitter, then I was like, oh, it was Clint. And for more than 40 years, that's a little bit more than 40 years. What's what people in Columbia whispered to each other, even though he was never a suspect. And then one day, things changed. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure.

Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. By 2017, Janice's loved ones had stopped hoping they'd find her alive. They just wanted to find her. For decades, they'd had little to go on, but town gossip. Until one day, an online sleuth changes everything.

She runs a website called Mississippi Missing and Unidentified Persons. On this day, a message appears in her inbox. It's a woman telling her about her grandmother, Janice Rose Bullock, who'd been missing for decades. She passes along the tip to the sheriff's department, and they work the case until they find evidence that Janice may have been last seen in Pearl River County, Mississippi. Now, that's the same place where it was rumored she'd been out with a truck driver. Town gossip. That's when Major Mark Ogden's phone rings. Called me and let me know about this case, and I said, send it.

We'll look into it. Ogden is retired now, but at the time he was overseeing a team of investigators' working cases at the Pearl River County Sheriff's Department. Every now and then I'd pick one up, like this case came in. It was so old. I signed it to myself to look into. I really didn't think much was going to come out of it. But my guys and girls were outworking current cases.

So Ogden's on the case. He starts by reviewing the file from the department that started the investigation about two years earlier. Inside, he sees a special agent with the FBI had met with Janice's daughters and swabbed their cheeks for DNA. It was the daughters that started looking for their mother. Janice's daughters. When Janice disappeared, they were young. Her oldest daughter wasn't even 10 yet. It's around the same age my twins are right now.

So it's easy for me to imagine how much those little girls would have still needed their mom. Ten-year-olds still wake you up when they've had nightmares, and they still absently grab for your hand when you're walking. To me, Janice's daughters are what make her disappearance so sad and so odd. One of her daughters told me that their mother's absence colored every part of her childhood. And local gossip didn't help, of course. She didn't know what to feel. She said her dad insisted that looking for Janice was a waste of her time,

and he didn't want them to even talk about their mom. Janice left them, he said. And maybe he was right, and they should be mad at her. Except, of course, what if something had happened to her? shouldn't someone look? Ogden reaches out to one of Janice's daughters. She said, you know, I don't know she's alive or dead. I want to know.

I said, we'll try. Turns out that even though Janice has been gone for decades, and even though at least one of her family members went to the police, there was no record of an original missing persons report until one was filed in 20. 2017. What he does have, however, are dozens of unofficial records of Janice's whereabouts before she disappeared. That's because up until she disappeared, Janice and her family were a fixture in the social pages of the newspaper. In the days before Facebook and Instagram,

Columbia Society could broadcast their Sunday lunches and summer vacations via the local paper. And it Seems like few took advantage of this column, more than Janice's family. In Mrs. C.J. Fairchild's column, we hear about all the times Janice came over for Sunday lunch. About each time she and Glenn brought a new baby home from the hospital. But if you want more color or context than that, you're out of luck. Like an Instagram post, there's a sense here that people are reporting only what they want their neighbors to discuss. We hear about the family fish fry in the time Janice brought her oldest daughter to attend services at Pine Burr Baptist Church. Over the eight years of her marriage to Glenn, Janice appears in Mrs. C.J. Fairchild's column 77 times.

Her last mention in this paper is different, though. It's not in the column. It's a classified ad that runs in the summer of 1974, summoning Janice to a hearing, on the subject of her divorce. This is where the judge grants Janice custody of her three younger girls. Then the investigator, Mark Ogden, finds another official notice

from 1977, summoning Janice to a custody hearing. Records show, she never showed up, never appeared to claim custody of her four girls. And so, custody is granted to Glenn. But even though she wasn't in court, Ogden finds a key detail in the summons. It said served. He's thinking, okay, great, now we've got evidence that someone in law enforcement may contact with Janice.

Ogden tracks down the deputy who served Janice hoping he'll remember anything about her circumstances from that time. But of course, he was dead. so I couldn't talk to him. So he pivots and turns to Janice's husband, Glenn, the person some people locally had always wondered about. Well, he interviewed. I had no reason not to believe him. He worked his butt off trying to, you know, provide for him,

and she would run around on him. He'd catch her running around on him. He really had grief with her. As he listens to Glenn, Erra's grievances, Because Ogden doesn't feel a prickle of suspicion. He believes him. Absolutely nothing there that said he did anything other than the right thing. I did not feel like he had anything to do with it.

He was concerned, you know, because daughters wanted to find their mom, of course, and he felt for them, you know, they didn't have any answers. So Ogden rules him out. But if Janice's husband didn't kill her, then what happened? to her. Did she go somewhere by choice or did someone take her? And why? Was she out with a truck driver or a group of secretaries? And what would be keeping her from coming back? That's when Major Mark Ogden made a disturbing discovery. The Social Security number. I was able to check that. And it had been used since the 70s. So that means no bank account. That means no tax form.

That means no use, no nothing. So it kind of was starting to creep into my mind that she was probably deceased. I thought we were going to find a headstone if we're lucky. Not only had her trail gone cold, Ogden discovers something that all but confirms his greatest fears. After her first husband, there was another man in Janice's life, one whose lasting legacy was murder. She just all at once told me she needed to get away because she were afraid of him. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of The Vanishing of Janice Rose

ad-free right now by subscribing to the Benj podcast channel. Search for The Benge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? Head to getthebenge.com to get access wherever. you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the binge channel page on Apple Podcast or getthebenge.com to learn more. entertainments, The Benge.

The show was written, hosted, and executive produced by me, Larison Campbell. The executive producers for The Benge are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. The show's senior producer and story editor is Lindsay Kilbride. Sheba Joseph provided additional production assistance, and Aaliyah Pape's is the story's fact-checker. Mixing and sound design for this series by Scott Somerville, with music from Epidaville, with music from dynamic sound and blue dot sessions. The show's theme song is Shake Me by Lydia Ramsey. Legal review by Davis Wright-Tremaine.