The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - 19 Days | 2. 10 Days Later

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Ten days after the mysterious first bomb, another package bomb detonates, killing 17 year-old music prodigy Draylen Mason and critically injuring his mother. As the Austin bomb squad tries to make sense of the scene and the FBI begins their investigation, a third package bomb goes off just a few miles away, injuring 70 year-old Esperanza “Hope” Herrera. It is now clear: there is an active serial bomber on the loose while South by Southwest, one of the largest cultural festivals in the world, is in full swing. From Campside Media, Pegalo Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Season 6 of Witnessed: 19 Days Unlock all episodes of Witnessed: 19 Days, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed: 19 Days show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts and @campside_media Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Witness 19 days. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season ad-free right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe

at the top of The Witness show page on Apple Podcasts or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast contains descriptions of violence and harsh language. Listener discretion is advised. Campsite Media. The Binge. Pick a little picture. March 12th, 2018.

Ten days after Anthony Stephan House was killed by a package bomb on his front porch. His death was as mysterious as it was shocking. Yet it's already been pushed out of the headlines. Partly that's because investigators have nothing new to report. They have no suspects, no motive, no news. And partly, mostly, it's because early March in Austin, Texas is a big deal. It's when the premier live event in a city renowned for its live events happens, the annual South by Southwest Conference. Austin, Texas!

South by, as it's known, runs for nine days every spring, covering two weekends and the week in between. It's a music festival, sure, but much, much more. There's film and technology and forums, a little bit of everything that's on the cutting edge or soon will be. That first weekend, starting March 9th in 2018, was dedicated to tech. Elon Musk spoke pre-Twitter flame out. I'm really quite close to, I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI. And it scares the hell out of me. As did London Mayor Sadiq Khan. We've seen in the recent past allegations of interference in elections and fake news. And we know there is technology that exists to spot this stuff.

And there were panel discussions on things like using psychedelics in mainstream therapy and the rise of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. Human intelligence is extremely complex. One day, maybe we can enable machines with a subset of that. Still to come that year would be the world premieres of major films like A Quiet Place and Isle of Dogs, and live shows from hundreds of performers and bands, large and small, in just about every genre, in parks, on street stages,

clubs, bars, hotel ballrooms, and coffee shops all over the city. Southby, over the previous 30 years, had grown into one of the more important cultural events in the world. Nearly 300,000 people come to Austin, a city of barely a million to begin with, and they generate a whopping $350 million in revenue. Three days into South by, barely anyone was talking about a package bomb. I think at that point, people had sort of either not heard about it or they'd written it off as a one-off thing at that point. So for the first couple of days of South by, it was totally normal. This is Jason Puckett, a reporter for KVUE. And I'm pretty sure I went and did an interview with Emily Blunt and John Krasinski.

And that's the kind of stuff that was being focused on even, you know, a week or so after that first bombing, because we thought sort of that we'd covered it, that we were waiting for police to continue to investigate that one and we'd see what would come next. But it wasn't impacting life. And then at 6.33 in the morning on March 12th, it happened again. That's the 911. Do you need police fire EMS? Oh, I need an EMS, please. Okay, hold on. Anyone touch the address? We got the address.

Something exploded. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Pegalo Pictures, this is Witnessed, 19 Days. I'm your host, Sean Flynn. Part 2, 10 Days Later. Rob Nunez, the chief of the Austin Bomb Squad, had spent the past week at a training seminar. He wasn't taking lead on the first bombing, the killing of Anthony House. That investigation was being run by the Austin PD's Homicide Division and by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

They hadn't made any real progress, and they were still working with the same unsatisfyingly thin theories that either House blew himself up or someone bombed him by mistake. Either way, an isolated incident. But then the next bomb exploded. That Monday, as I'm headed into work, we get another call out. There's been another bombing. We have another victim that is deceased.

The call came from a quiet neighborhood in East Austin, one of the minority neighborhoods in the city, about 12 miles south from where the first package bomb exploded 10 days earlier. Shemeika Wilson and her 17-year-old son, Draylon Mason, had gotten into the habit of going on a morning walk together. When they'd opened the front door to leave, a cardboard box was on the doorstep, lit by the porch light and the pink hues of sunrise.

Brought it inside, placed it on the counter. Mom was about to open the package. Draylon was hesitant. He's like, hey, this is kind of weird. We don't know what that is. Mom ended up opening the package. And when she opened it is when it detonated. They were both in very close proximity to the device. Just because of blast pressures or positions or where they were standing, Draylon took most of the hit from the explosion, staggered back through the house a little bit, fell, and died on the scene.

To reiterate, criminal bombings in America are incredibly rare. And most bombings that are intended to kill someone don't. Because either the bomb goes off at the wrong time, or it malfunctions in some way that keeps it from being deadly. But suddenly, Austin's bomb squad was dealing with a second fatal bombing in the span of a week and a half. That's beyond unusual. It's unheard of. But with two bombings, they can compare them, find clues in the similarities As we roll up to that scene, we know that scene one and scene two were both black males. We know that a lot of the methods were the same. We know that it was a package placed at the front door.

We know that the victims got the package and tried to open the package when it detonated. At scene two, we knew that we had one victim that was deceased and we had a second victim that was involved in the explosion that was being transported to the hospital. But that second victim was able to give us a lot of information about the scene to kind of help us determine what our next steps were going to be. One of the first things that happened as I got there as a bomb tech is one of the first responding officers came up with a rubber glove that was all tied up.

And he said, hey, this fell off of the female as she was being transported to the hospital. Now it was actually embedded, I think, in her arm. This is what they told us. this fell off of the female as she was being transported to the hospital. Now it was actually embedded, I think, in her arm. This is what they told us. I said, well, what is it? He goes, I don't know, but I think it looks like a piece of pipe. So that was one of the first indicators we suspected another pipe bomb. Now it appears they've got matching bombs.

It appears they've got matching MOs. Here's bomb tech Josh Oihus. I was like, okay, we have a big problem on our hands now. That means we could have an active bomber. We train for active shooter. There's tons of emphasis on active shooter. Very little, if any, have I ever had on an active bomber. Let's take a moment to really consider what Josh is implying here. Someone in Austin is seemingly leaving bombs disguised as packages in front of people's homes.

In 2018, we're already living in the age of Amazon and two-day shipping. Many of our day-to-day needs were no longer coming from brick-and-mortar stores, but arriving in boxes on delivery trucks. Think about how many packages are left on doorsteps everywhere. All day, every day. Think about how many times you pick up a package on your front porch. Or your parents do. Or your partner.

Or your kids. Joshua Hughes thought about all of this in those first moments on the scene. We start doing the whole checking for secondaries again. This time, it's a neighborhood in East Austin where I had worked patrol and I knew it really well.

So I grabbed a dog guy and another tech who had some x-ray material. And there was like a ton of packages. So we're running blocks and blocks, just x-raying packages. If there's another one, I want to find it before somebody in the neighborhood finds it. I remember seeing buses going by. I was like, God, if a kid comes off and opens up a package and blows them up, that'd be horrible. People started coming out of the neighborhoods.

It's mostly Hispanic and African American. And they've had a history of terrible interactions with the police. They were not too happy that we were taking up the street. We're basically handling their mail and their packages. As the day went on, they started to realize what had happened. And so then it shifted to the people in that part of Austin felt like they were being targeted. And with the second package bomb going off on Austin's east side, the possibility of these bombings being related to the victim's race, that they were hate crimes, was now front and center. So it was really a complex social dynamic that we were up against there.

While Josh was scanning packages throughout the neighborhood, Rob Nunez was inside the house where the bomb had gone off, gathering evidence. The inside of the house where this thing detonated was pretty devastated.

It was a big explosion. So anytime you take a bomb and put it inside something, it causes more destruction. If you have that same size explosive device in an open area, it'll do X amount of damage. But if you take that and put it inside of a structure, all those blast pressures are contained within that structure. So it doesn't have anywhere to go.

So it just stays there and breaks. First responders at the scene said there were other packages inside the house, unopened, which gave bomb techs a whole other issue to deal with. Rob's partner was Jeff Joseph, a veteran cop who'd worked in some of the more unique units in law enforcement. Elite patrol, dive team, that sort of stuff. He was kind of a badass. March 2nd, when the first bomb went off, had been Jeff Joseph's day off. He drove to the scene anyway to see if he could help, but he wasn't involved in the investigation.

Now, though, moving forward, he'll be an integral part of it. I just pulled out of my driveway, saw the page. On the way driving there, I was thinking in my head, I was like, that's strange, didn't we just do this a couple days ago? So I arrived on scene, met up with Rob, and he had gotten a body camera from a patrol officer because we didn't have a way to document anything at the time. And we went over what our plan was.

Something that the first responders told us is that there were other packages in the front room by the front door. I told Jeff, I said, there could be secondary devices in the house. We both felt that it was an immediate need to get in the house and find out if this is gonna be related or not related.

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and uncover her family's many secrets along the way. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS or Android. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was.

Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. We talked about, is it worth getting in there, you know, ourselves right away and exposing ourselves to these secondary devices. We both felt that it was an immediate need to get in the house and find out if this is going to be related or not related. So as soon as Jeff got there, we got geared up. What Rob means is exactly what you're thinking. That awkward beekeeper in outer space suit you've seen in movies like The Hurt Locker. That's a bomb tech's uniform in situations like this. Just putting one on is an ordeal. Never mind doing actual work while they're wearing it. It is a very heavy suit and it's hot. It's made out of all Kevlar, like the same thing as our

bulletproof vest is. just a lot of it. About 85 pounds all over your body, head to toe. The center plate is hard Kevlar, and of course the helmet is hard Kevlar. Now there's no air conditioning. It has a fan that blows air in the helmet, but that's only so your heavy breathing doesn't fog up the visor. That big, clunky suit will protect you from a lot of things that can maim or kill you in a close-quarters bomb blast. Multiple layers of Kevlar, foam, and plastic will stop most shrapnel, and the suit can withstand a thousand-plus degrees of heat.

But it won't make you invincible. There are, in fact, a few notable vulnerabilities. There's no hands and feet protection because we need the dexterity of our fingers to do our job, right? Use our tools or manipulate whatever we're doing. So at some point, your hands and fingers are a little disposable,

and it's just kind of the nature of the beast, right? We're gonna give the majority of the protection to our vital organs and our head. We actually entered the house through the back door because that's where the fire department had entered the house from. They had entered into the house to evacuate, I believe the grandmother who was in one of the back rooms.

Draylon was still deceased in the house and he was near the front door, so we didn't want to disturb where he was. I looked up at the ceiling and just devastation. There was parts of a device. One of those parts was identical to a part that was used at the other bombing. It was the same type of batteries that were at scene one. It was an AC Delco battery, which is kind of an unusual battery. It wasn't an Energizer or Duracell. We could see some of the pieces and parts of the triggering system that was used to hold the batteries together.

There was shrapnel that was added to the device. It was the same type of hex head screws that we found at scene one. So from all that, we were able to make a determination, this is the same person making this bomb. In this moment, these two guys, Rob and Jeff, sweating in their big bulky suits, fans blowing fog off their visors, they are viscerally aware of the gravity of the situation that Austin law enforcement,

the whole city of Austin really, is facing. We didn't know why or who or how, but usually with bombers, historically, is to have some type of signature. When they get comfortable making a bomb a certain way, well then that's the way they're going to proceed, you know, within a certain parameter. We came out, briefed the homicide investigators and all the other agencies on what we saw. From our perspective, we were confident that the same person that made device one also made device two. What Rob and Jeff discovered inside the house confirmed what most on the scene already feared.

That the bombs were almost definitely connected. Most likely built by the same person. Meaning a serial bomber was on the loose. Eighty miles south at FBI headquarters in San Antonio, the phone in Chris Combs' office rang. He's the special agent in charge. My assistant special agent in charge of Austin called me and said, boss, we just had another bombing.

So right away, that changes everything. I asked, is this confirmed? He's like, yes, this is had another bombing. So right away, that changes everything. I asked, is this confirmed? He's like, yes, this is confirmed. We're heading out. And I said, okay, this is different. Now we obviously have a serial bomber. We're going to send everything. We got to get on this. Now, very clearly, you have federal jurisdiction. Then I called Chief Brian Manley and I said, hey, Chief, obviously this changes the complexity. This changes what's going on. You know, we're sending a lot of people in now. We're coming hard. And he said, absolutely, Chris, I understand. So right from the beginning, it was a joint FBI, ATF, Austin Police matter. And one of the things I always say to the chiefs

when I talk to them is, let me put the $9 billion budget of the FBI behind you. I can focus singularly on this event. You're still running a city. So where Austin police, you know, hey, we can throw 20 detectives at this, literally with no exaggeration, I can throw 100 FBI agents at it in 15 minutes. Our Joint Terrorism Task Force, our Violent Crime Squad, part of our evidence team, our SWAT team on alert, all the bomb techs we had in our division, now they're getting recalled and going to Austin. The FBI, ATF, even the Texas Rangers were coming to Austin to help with the investigation. They don't have a lot to go on, just the wreckage and the remains from two bombs.

In those fragments, Rob and Jeff had discovered another, even more worrisome clue. There was a concern because the bombs had detonated differently. So the first bomb was a package left outside on the porch. When the victim picked it up, it detonated. The second bomb, victim number two, he picks up the bomb, brings it inside of his house, and then that functions when he opens the box. So that's a different initiation of the explosive device. In other words, the bombs were evolving, though not in the way you might think. Here's Jeff Joseph.

So on the news and really all over the place, they were like, oh, this is a sophisticated bomber and all of that kind of verbiage. Well, us as the people who go and do that stuff, we're like, it's not sophisticated really at all. It's very, very effective. The device itself, super simple to make. The components of it are available all over the place. You could probably go into 7-Eleven and obtain most of what you needed for that. I hate to give any credit to any of these people,

but that was the genius in the construction of it, was that it was just really stupid simple and highly, highly effective. Back at the scene of the second bombing, reporters had gathered and Austin Police Chief Brian Manley had arrived to address them. We are looking at these incidents as being related

based on similarities that we have seen in the initial evidence that we have on hand here today compared to what we found on the scene of that explosion that took place a week back. Jason Puckett remembers the newsroom that morning at KVU 24, the local ABC affiliate. Thinking back, that's still a day that sort of is just a blur. And it's also really tough to think back on because it was the day where not only as a reporter did we all step back and go, oh shit, this is something major.

But as someone living in Austin and as a member of the community, you know, you stop and go, what the hell's happening in my city? Reporters know even less than the police, of course. But what they do know is bad. Priorities immediately shift. I was still covering South by Southwest and the second bomb technically was still early in the

morning. So I wasn't in yet. I was planning to go to South by Southwest that day, but that was the one where the newsroom just hits the pause button. They bring everybody in. It's all hands on board. We're figuring this out. We're doing 24 hour coverage of this. Reach out to your contacts. Start coming up with different angles here. We need to talk to the community, to the families. Try and reach out to APD and see what other agencies are involved. We need to be doing anything we can to be kind of monitoring the conversations on social media and whatnot and see if there's any leads there, anything we can track down. It was just go, go, go, go, go. To be frank, I don't know that it was everyone's initial reaction on the second bomb that morning that it was even 100% immediately related to the first bomb.

It had been 10 days. It's still obviously a big enough deal. I think people went, what's going on? But it wasn't an immediate click. We have a serial bomber. That did come later when it was the third bomb. Hi, this is Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast, The Dinner's On Me. And whether you're a first-time wine drinker or a wine aficionado, you're guaranteed to like America's number one luxury Cabernet. Since 1981, Justin's Vineyards

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JESSE20 to receive 20% off your order today. That's JESSE20 for 20% off. We had an incident occur this morning in the 4800 block of Old Fort Hill Drive. Upon arrival, the police officers, the EMS technicians, and firefighters went to the residence, and what we found was an explosion had occurred. When Austin Police Chief Brian Manley was in the middle of a press conference at the scene of the second bombing in the past 10 days. A 911 call came in. Austin 911, do you need police, fire, or ambulance?

I know my police, I know my police, I was in the explosion. I'm a safety officer, I don't know what I'm going to do, please, please. About five and a half miles south of the second bomb, in the southeast Austin neighborhood of Montopolis, 75-year-old Esperanza Herrera had arrived at her mother's house. She was her caretaker, and before going in, she noticed a package on the front stoop. She picked it up. Let me get the ambulance. Hold on one second. Ambulance, what is the address of your emergency?

Okay, ma'am, this is the ambulance. What is the address of the emergency? Josh Oihus and Jeff Joseph heard about the third bomb just as the chief's press conference at the second bombing had ended. They're like, oh, there's just another bombing. So now my brain is shifting back into the military, basically. Like right at that moment is when, okay, I'm going back to Afghanistan here. We're on a sustained mission. Austin is no longer the permissive, happy-go-lucky city that I've been working in.

We're now in a combat zone. So time to act accordingly. Chief Manley did his interview where he's like, if you see something suspicious, call us. And then the phone started ringing off the hook. The detonation is southeast Austin. Kind of the rotation, the first one occurred in northeast Austin, and the second one was directly east Austin.

So by that time, a lot of people had started thinking of maybe these were hate crimes. That was the newest theory of where all this was coming from. I was really thinking like this is a coordinated attack. As I was driving there, I was like, they did this one, the one that got Draylon, to draw us away from that target. My brain is spinning, like trying to come up with a, what's going on here? So I immediately got in my truck, and it's like a Mario Kart race almost. To get down there with us and all the agencies

that want to get there and have part of the process into that scene. I arrived immediately. I talked with the patrol sergeant that was on scene. I'm still putting on protective equipment, standing at the back of my truck, talking to the sergeant, and there's some people running past me in windbreakers. The mad rush to the second scene of the day

led to a sort of brief jurisdictional chaos with multiple agencies on multiple scenes at the same time. Honestly, I was about to lose my mind. I was yelling out, I was like, come on, professionals here, let's not do that. The brakes were pumped really hard on that and everybody stopped. Because of the other bombing,

we already had kind of like a federal presence, I guess you could say, in Austin, in the area. So they got there super fast as well. Again, hey, we got to check for secondaries. So there's, you know, pipe fragments all over the road, a good bit of damage, but it was a tight street and like brick mailboxes, chain link fences.

So not as much open area. And I think the terrain, I guess, for lack of a better word, was able to catch a lot of the fragments and stuff and not hit anybody else. We have this live picture here. This is that scene on Galindo Street that we were just telling you about a few minutes ago. The second explosion today. Two package bombs, six hours and five miles apart. For Chris Combs,

the game hadn't just changed. He was now in an entirely different league. When the third bomb detonates, I'm still in San Antonio. And the minute that I got that call, that's when I said, we have to move our command to Austin. You know, when you get in a two-in-one day, obviously you're bifurcating resources. You have to go into something we call area command, where you have to start setting up two identical systems, two command and controls, two, we have a major event. We're going to probably be calling you for additional resources. And then obviously the alert goes to FBI headquarters to say, we're probably going to need some national resources. So now the whole FBI gets really turned on. So the thought process was, we're going to throw everything we have, every resource we need into this because we have to find this guy because he's setting off bombs all the time.

In the end, we had sent over 600 FBI personnel into Austin to singularly focus on stopping the bomber. It would become the largest law enforcement investigation since the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. But as Josh Oihus points out, despite all the additional personnel, they still had very little to work with. At that point, we were on our heels. We are literally no idea what's going on here. We're not making anything better because these devices keep going off. We're failing, basically, at keeping the city safe. We're all kind of at the same mindset, like, hey, we got to recalibrate here and figure out what's going on.

And then there's the bigger picture. Austin's live event tourism was being menaced by what could only be called domestic terrorism. Here's Chris Combs. The other problem we had is that South by Southwest in Austin is starting. There's hundreds of thousands of people coming. Here's Chris Combs. Austin is prepared for three major special events, and now they have three bombs go off. So that was also at the tip of our concern that, hey, where are we going with this? South by Southwest was especially concerning. It isn't like a standard music festival where there are specific grounds that can be swept and monitored. South by is thousands of medium to small sized events in hundreds of locations all

over the city and all happening at the same time. Joshua Hoos remembers the nightmare logistics. It was super concerning. We were very concerned about it. South by Southwest is something we staffed every year and we tried to have a very visible presence at. It's not like Austin City Limits where you kind of get everybody into this moderately secure area and you feel pretty good about their safety. South by is a challenge. And then there's only like 10, 11 of us.

We're not going to be able to handle the actual work that's going to need to be done. Captain Rob Nunez already had a plan in place for his unit during South By, but now it took on a new intense tone. One of our normal duties during South By Southwest is we always have bomb techs and canine handlers staged downtown, in and around all these South By Southwest events. With that happening, we knew that that could be a target, you know, for a bomber. There's so much happening and so many different events.

It would be very easy for somebody to place something somewhere to try and detonate a device downtown. With hundreds of thousands of tourists descending on the city for three major events, while a relatively sophisticated serial bomber ran wild, and law enforcement had no real leads on how to stop that person or persons, there was an obvious question to be asked. Why not shut it all down? Because that's actually a bad idea, as Special Agent Chris Combs explains. We would never tell anyone to cancel an event. And then again, the bad guy kind of wins if you do that. So our attitude was, we are going to give South by Southwest, the golf tournament, the racing circuit, all the information we had, all the intelligence that we have.

We always tell people, hey, if you shut down a school for a bomb threat, you just got three more. The idea is let's investigate it aggressively. Let's stop it. But we don't want to shut the city down. That adds to the panic. And now with three bombs, we are starting to get to a place where the attitude in Austin is changing. People are getting more and more concerned. We're starting to get to 24-hour news coverage, which is never good. So we also have to manage that aspect of keeping the city safe, keeping the citizens in the city confident that, okay, law enforcement's on top of this,

while also, you know, tracking down a serial bomber. By the afternoon of March 12th, the bombings were headline news, not just in Austin, but across the country. We're going to begin tonight in Austin, Texas, where someone is leaving package bombs at homes. Tonight, police in Austin have an urgent plea. If the package that is delivered to your doorstep looks suspicious in any way, call 911. It has happened three times this month, leaving two people dead and two others wounded. It was all happening so fast. Investigators didn't have any answers yet, which meant reporters like KVU's Jason Puckett didn't have anything new to report. Just that there was a bomber on the loose.

I had some contacts at APD, and after the second and third bombing, they went quiet. And that happens occasionally in very severe cases where it's like, internally, they're getting a message of, stop talking now. It definitely was frustrating as a reporter. We're getting stonewalled, but I don't hold anything against them for what they were doing. This is such a sensitive area for them. Any misspeak, any word wrong could lead to more panic, could lead to more chaos. On the flip side, if they don't give out the right level of information,

people could come at them later on and say, you know, if you'd warned people X, Y, Z, people could have acted in a certain way and avoided it. So they're in an incredibly tough position. Still, it does freak you out a bit when they go radio silence because it makes you realize that things are the next level. What authorities wouldn't say, couldn't say, was that whoever was planting those bombs, there was nothing to stop them from doing it again and again. And everyone chasing that bomber would find themselves stretched to their limits.

We have hundreds and hundreds of suspicious package calls that are coming in every day. I went to 25 just in that day, and that's insane. You're in charge of this massive investigation. Right now, we literally have no leads. There's no question. It's a lot of pressure. And I ask those questions, why? This has nothing to do with why does it happen to good people. Just why her?

That's next time on Witnessed 19 Days. Unlock all episodes of Witness 19 days ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series that's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Witness show page on Apple Podcasts,

or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Witnessed, 19 Days, was reported and produced by Eli Khoras and Joshua Schaefer of Pegalo Pictures and Alvin Cowan. Executive produced by Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, Ashley Ann Krigbaum, and Matthew Scher of Campside Media.

Hosted and co-produced by me, Sean Flynn, co-produced by Brian Haas, and co-produced by David Leffler. Written by Eli Khoras. Edited and assembled by Nicholas Sinakis. Original series theme by Kevin Ignatius of Das Tapes. Additional music by Bally Yaw. Interviews recorded by Nicholas Sinakis,

Eli Khoras, and Alvin Cowan. Sound mix by Craig Plackey. Production legal by Sean Fawcett of Raymond Legal PC, and fair use legal by Sarah Burns and Diana Palacios of Davis Wright Tremaine. Please rate and leave us a review if you like what you've heard, and thanks again for listening.