The Binge Crimes: Night Shift - The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 2. Risk Taker

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

The investigator visits a pair of sisters who begin to drop breadcrumbs of clues possibly leading to Janis’s whereabouts. The problem is, a few of those crumbs lead to more than one man known for mu...rder. Is the investigator looking for Janis–or her headstone? 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 A boy goes missing from a bus stop in Queensland, Australia. His disappearance made national headlines and launched the largest search for a missing child in Australia's history. There were over 700 persons of interest. It was absolutely enormous. Now, for the first time, his parents share with a global audience their journey to uncover what happened to their son. We'd said right from the start,
Starting point is 00:00:25 who's ever responsible had picked on the wrong family. So we just made it our life's work. We're going to hunt you down. And if not for the parents, the case might still be unsolved. But in the end, the pressure led cops to take shocking risks and go to extraordinary lengths to catch this perpetrator. The master deceiver was deceived and manipulated himself. We did to him what he did to Daniel.
Starting point is 00:00:49 From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, this is Where Is Daniel Morecam? Available now on The Binge. Listen wherever you get your podcasts Listen to all episodes of The Vanishing of Janice Rose Add free right now by subscribing to The Benge Visit The Benj channel on Apple Podcast And hit subscribe at the top of the page
Starting point is 00:01:13 Or visit getthebenge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Benge Feed your true crime obsession The Benge It's 2019, and the investigator Mark Ogden is at his desk at the Pearl River County Sheriff's Department. In front of him is Janice's file. Her height, weight, documents about her divorce and that custody hearing she never showed up for. There's this photo of Janice in there. She's seated on her husband's lap, her grin is wide, and open, like she's about to laugh.
Starting point is 00:01:58 And as he's scanning the file, he stumbles upon the name of someone rumored to be connected with Janice. I had learned about a couple of ladies that supposedly knew her. And the address that I was able to find, it was old, old, old. I kind of took a chance one morning, and I just drove down to the address. It's outside of Picayune, a town in the southern tip of Mississippi, about an hour or so from Columbia where Janice grew up. Ogden turns off the highway onto a blacktop road. Typical country road, you know, it's older houses, a house trailer here and there.
Starting point is 00:02:43 These are old country folks. That's where their grandma lived. That's where, you know, you get the picture. He pulls up to a one-story home at the end of a gravel driveway. Just the lady answers the door, and I asked, you know, so-and-so. And she's like, that's me. And I said, I'm looking into Janice Bullock. She said, who?
Starting point is 00:03:12 And I had pictures of her in my file, and I showed her a picture. She said, oh, that's Jan. I hadn't thought about her in years, and I'm like, do you? Do you have a minute? She motions the investigator in and offers him a seat. She's older, but beautiful in an ethereal way, with blue eyes and long silver hair. She pours him a mug and her sister comes over. We sit there and had a conversation, drinking coffee at the kitchen table.
Starting point is 00:03:42 And this is where Ogden learns. They knew Jan all right. I found out that they didn't too much care for. because she was actually seeing their younger brother. This Jan character swooped in on their baby brother when he was around 19 or 20, and Janice was a full six years older. The two met in 1977.
Starting point is 00:04:07 It's around the time she disappeared. So did she leave her family for this man? Was he keeping her from her children? If so, she never mentioned her old life. I had no idea she had kids or was married or anything other than whatever story she gave them. That's what they knew. I asked to speak with him, of course, and they got him on the phone, and I find out he's an over-the-road truck driver, and he's gone for a month or two at a time.
Starting point is 00:04:42 Out with a truck driver. That was one of the rumors about Janus. I said, please call him. me when you get back. A couple weeks later, he calls. He's in his 60s now, but he remembers Janice, especially remembers how they broke up. He tells the investigator he found her in bed with another guy.
Starting point is 00:05:08 So he ended it and tried to put her out of his mind. He doesn't have much more for Ogden to go on, but the family does leave him with one other important clue. She worked at a diner in Popperville. A diner attached to a truck stop. It was in a small town near where the sisters lived. As Ogden looks into this place, he gets a bad feeling. Because Janice didn't just work there.
Starting point is 00:05:38 She dated the owner. And that relationship might explain why Janice never made her way back home. The owner of that property, Dick Dito, he actually murdered his girlfriend. And it wouldn't be far off that he may have done something to her. From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, Media,
Starting point is 00:06:20 the vanishing of Janice Rose. This is episode two. Risk taker. I'm Larison Campbell. sure seems like Janice moved without her kids to a town not far from where she grew up, and also that she may have had a relationship with a dangerous man. So the big question is, what would make her leave? I'm a mom, but you don't have to be one to know that parenting isn't a switch most people can flip on or off. The longer I'm away from my kids, the more I talk about them. I kind of can't help myself. Was I wrong to assume Janice was the same? A couple of people close to Janice had described her as a doting mom, obsessed with her kids.
Starting point is 00:07:31 Of course, memory does have a way of putting a rosy tent on things, especially after someone is gone. Young kids are stressful, but more than one person told me, Janice never seemed stressed by her girls. Back in school, she hadn't talked about college. All she'd wanted was to be a mom. It just doesn't add up. Something must have happened to her.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Maybe this boyfriend in Poplarville? She would never leave her kids by choice. And no one was more convinced of that than her best friend, Kathy. I mean, Janice was the girl who made good grades. She participated in high school life. We were both always class officers. But Janice also embraced her impulses. We were risk takers.
Starting point is 00:08:30 Risk takers. And sometimes risk takers get in over their heads. Kathy has been replaying the years leading up to Janice's disappearance for practically her whole life. How did Janice find herself this young mother of four in an unhappy marriage, and what would compel her to leave it all behind without much of a trace? I asked Kathy about how Janice's life with her husband came to be in the first place, and she tells me this story. It's sophomore year. Janice had just finished up lunch at school, and there's some time before the bell rings. Kathy finally gets a chance to pull Janice away from the crowd for a moment.
Starting point is 00:09:14 It was just she and I, and she had just all week acted like something was wrong, and I'm like, what is the matter with you? And she said, you can't tell anybody. I said, you know, I don't tell anybody your business. Janice hesitates, and then finally spits it out. She said, I think I'm pregnant. I said, no. It's the single worst thing that could happen to an unmarried girl in Columbia, Mississippi.
Starting point is 00:09:42 You might as well have an A on your forehead. The sexual revolution had not yet come for Columbia. And if Kathy and Janice needed an illustration of just how bad it could get, there were two cautionary tales living right in the community. We had talked a lot about the two girls we knew. Each had gotten pregnant, and the men who got them pregnant wouldn't marry them. Everyone knew their names. and I felt so bad.
Starting point is 00:10:14 One of them, she was 19 and her baby was like a toddler. Her father and mother, they would only let she and the baby go to church. She couldn't go anywhere else, just to church. And I'm just like, oh my God, her life is over. And birth control?
Starting point is 00:10:31 Anyone that went to the doctor, I saw so-and-so went to the doctor. So, yeah, you could not have gotten the pill. So in Columbia, abstinence was a girl's safest option. And after lunch that Friday, Janice is telling Kathy
Starting point is 00:10:48 she hasn't been abstinent. And now, she's pretty sure she's pregnant. It was like panic washed over me for her. It's like I couldn't breathe. And I was just like, this is my best friend. And it's just terrible. Oh my God. What are you going to do? She said, Glenn and I were going to decide this.
Starting point is 00:11:10 weekend what we're going to do. People did not, where we lived, have abortions. None of us would have known how you would even go about that. And it was never considered. The only option was to marry. A lot of people I know as teenagers went to Alabama and got married. Kathy doesn't talk to Janice that night, but she's supposed to to see her early the next morning for some fishing thing at the lake.
Starting point is 00:11:45 The next morning, my brother John drove me out to the lake. And when we got there, the teacher, he said that Janice's mother said she was missing. A wave of panic ripples through the group. Everyone's worried for Janice. Everyone except Kathy. I knew immediately that they had ran away to get me. married. When Janice and Glenn return home, she's a 15-year-old wife, and you know what happens next. Adult responsibilities come at them avalanche style. By the following summer, Janice is a 16-year-old
Starting point is 00:12:26 mom, and not long after, a mom of three. According to the local paper, just days before her old classmates are graduating from high school, Janice is giving birth to twins. Her fourth daughter comes a couple years later. Could that avalanche of responsibilities have felt impossible to dig herself out of? Maybe she had started to wonder if this life that had been scripted for her, where she was a mother of four in a small southern town, wasn't the one she wanted. I asked Kathy about that first time Janice had briefly left her husband.
Starting point is 00:13:06 When she'd taken her daughters and moved up to Jackson, the biggest city in the state. It was another layer of complexity and this tangled web of Janice because the first time she'd vanished, she did it with her kids. When Janice left that first time, she found a job painting houses,
Starting point is 00:13:28 like her husband Glenn had back in Columbia. And in the evening, she'd come home to her girls in her apartment. The complex was new and full of other single people and young families. You could go sit out by the pool and people would gather together and talk, and her twins could play with other kids. But Kathy wants her to go home, to try and repair her marriage.
Starting point is 00:13:55 Janice is like, you don't understand. There's so much more out there. She said, I just loved that I have jam sessions with people. We talk about things. Is there God? Is there no God? We're about to have the apocalypse, you know, things to talk about with same-age peers. Glenn's house, she couldn't do that. There was no one there.
Starting point is 00:14:18 From where I sit now, I can see why she lived. But I don't know why she couldn't say he's gone all the time to work. His mother's on my butt all the time. You know, she didn't say any of those things. She couldn't put in words. But Kathy can. She had made the great escape. That's the feeling I got from her when she was in Jackson.
Starting point is 00:14:45 Eventually, Janice would return to Glenn, but not for long. Still, this brief interlude in Janice's married life had Kathy convinced she wouldn't leave her girls behind. That even if she did pop out for a break, date a few guys, she'd surely come back. She'd show up to the courthouse, bite for custody of her kids. Unless she couldn't. As the weather is cooling down, I'm swapping in the pieces that actually get the job done.
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Starting point is 00:17:28 guarantee. It's peace of mind that lets me focus on work and my kids. instead of worrying about what's happening at home. Right now, my listeners can save 50% on a SimplySafe home security system at simplysafe.com slash crimes. That's simplysafe.com slash crimes. There's no safe like SimplySafe. What could have happened to Janice this last time she left her husband? Well, that brings me back to where Janice went after she left Columbia.
Starting point is 00:18:03 It's the late 1970s, Dick's Diner in Poplarville, Mississippi. Think fried chicken, strong coffee, and a rotating cast of truckers. And when Janice walks up to the counter to ask for a job one afternoon, she makes an impression. Blue jeans, and she had big breasts, so she would really get that cleavage going on. I remember the cleavage shirt. She had the Vs with the cleavages, and she would wear her hair down. Because it was very, very pretty, naturally curly. Beautiful tea, beautiful smile. Just popped up one day, there she is.
Starting point is 00:18:42 Peggy Perkins is a teenager at the time, and she's drawn to Janice because Janice is vibrant. And, well, not a whole lot else is in Poplarville. One horse town, baby. Boring, streets rolled up at 5 o'clock. Yeah, it was everything closed at 5. Janice finds herself less than an hour from Columbia, where she grew up, in a town about half its size. The downtown has just a handful of storefronts and no bars.
Starting point is 00:19:16 In fact, alcohol was prohibited in Poplarville until a decade ago, 80 years after the national repeal of Prohibition. And while Poplarville might be boring to a teen like Peggy, the diner, it is alive. Oh, it was moving. It was shaking. Janice gets the job. Peggy's mom works the diner's lunchtime shift to bring in a little extra money. So Peggy hangs around the place with her friends. It has big windows and a stone fireplace in the center. The food's good, too.
Starting point is 00:19:50 A little circle booth on the end down there. I mean, we loved it. That was our hang. Peggy's mom and Janice become fast friends working at the diner. They just click. She, you know, it's a frilly-the-first friend friend I ever knew my mom to have. And if Janice is haunted by something in her past, Peggy doesn't pick up on it. Her mom doesn't seem to either.
Starting point is 00:20:16 Never really said too much about her life. Nobody never asked no background where you came from, whatever, whatever, whatever. For all Peggy knows, Janice has never been married. In fact, she seems to be on the market. a flirtation with one customer turns into a fling. He was serious with an edge. Heart throbbed material. Tall, slender, very handsome. But that fizzles out. She does get serious with a different guy from work. The guy I don't want to place, Dig Dito. Dick, the guy the diners nicknamed after. Dick's also handsome. Kind of quiet. Hey, the girl has a type. He was a nice guy, and he really thought a lot of my mom.
Starting point is 00:21:05 I knew that. He had a trailer right up the road, and she lived with him. They were steady. Janice moves right in and makes the place her own. She even sews curtains for the windows. Teenage Peggy thinks Janice seems happy with him. We used to go over there with Mama all the time. They used to drink coffee.
Starting point is 00:21:24 What if she had something? She had to show Mama. We'd go by there, you know. Other diner staff saw a happy couple, too. Janice seemed safe and secure. But that's just the way things seemed. She was living with him, and I figured she had it good, but she didn't.
Starting point is 00:21:45 Jane hadn't been working with Janice long. To her, Dick was fine. He was a good enough boss. He was okay when he was there at the restaurant. I didn't think he would be mean to her, you know, and mistreat her. But one evening, she and Janice are walking outside, when Janice stops her. A friend in the building.
Starting point is 00:22:07 We were just about to leave to go home, and she started talking. Jane hasn't spent much time with Janice at this point, so she's surprised when her co-worker turns to her and makes a confession about her relationship. She said she had to get away from him because she was scared of him. Jane racks her brain. Where could Janice go? I said, well, I have a sister in Lockport. She works in a bar if you want to go down there.
Starting point is 00:22:39 I'm sure she can get you a job. Lockport's a couple hours south, Louisiana. Janice takes the information down and leaves. Jane never sees her again. I assume that she went. I never did hear anything else about her. It's like Janice is turning disappearing. into an art.
Starting point is 00:23:02 It was like a thief in the night. She was gone. Peggy was bummed. She was gone. Janice was like her mom's only friend. But Dick, Janice's boyfriend, moves on to someone else. And it's this later relationship
Starting point is 00:23:20 that reveals a different side of Dick. One that makes it clear that Janice was right to be afraid. And others worried, that she didn't get away in time. In October 1981, Dick Dito, a quiet but friendly diner owner who had seemed like such a safe choice for Janice,
Starting point is 00:23:44 goes over to his girlfriend's house with a loaded gun. He shoots her teenage son, and then he kills her. And then he goes home, and he turns the gun on himself. Same trailer to him and Jan. lived in two back in it down. Decades later, when Major Mark Ogden is investigating, he starts wondering if Dick could
Starting point is 00:24:10 have had a motive to hurt Janice. A friend of Dick said he remembered her, and that's when Ogden gets a different perspective on the relationship, because this guy tells him Janice had been stealing from her boyfriend. He thinks it was the third time. that Dick found she was stealing from him is when she disappeared for good. He never saw her after that. Stealing would have been a hell of a trigger.
Starting point is 00:24:45 But once again, it feels like all he's going on is gossip. Investigator Ogden needs hard evidence. He tries to get any old business records from the diner. Of course, they were destroyed years ago. They had none. It just dead-in after dead-in. I've wondered why Ogden was putting so much effort into this case,
Starting point is 00:25:11 especially when one of the possibilities here is that she left on her own, at least to begin with. But he tells me he's always hated unanswered questions, especially this one, a mystery that affected no one more than Janice's four little girls. It's become the kind of case he zones out on while mowing his grass. So maybe that's why, even as he's hitting all these dead ends, he refuses to see it as a case he can't solve.
Starting point is 00:25:49 So Ogden goes back to his conversation with Dick's friend. Again, plumbing the gossip. Is there anything else here? Just begin wherever you want to, you know, I have nothing. You know, can you help me get anywhere with this? And this old friend of Dix tells the investigator something else about Janice, something that sends his search down another road. He painted a picture that wasn't real flattering. He said she would leave with different truck drivers that would come in.
Starting point is 00:26:26 she would get in a truck with them and be gone a day, sometimes a whole weekend, and then show back up for work. For the record, this is not the Janus that either Peggy or Jane recall. They also said they'd never heard of her stealing money from Dick. Or maybe Janice was just really good at only showing the side of herself she wanted people to see. And we do know she's dated at least one trucker. So if all Ogden has to go on as rumors, he's going to follow them. For the time being, he puts a pen in the theory that Dick had anything to do with Janice's disappearance. He has no hard evidence that she's dead, no proof that she was stealing from Dick.
Starting point is 00:27:14 For all he knows, she could still be out there. But the fact that she's been hanging around truckers makes him think. there's another alley you got to kind of keep in mind you know that's somebody in a truck did something to her you know she'd get in with the wrong truck driver and this is when he starts to suspect something about this diner and this dry county the kind of place where anyone who drove the highways of South Mississippi, after a long night of drinking, could stop to get something to eat, to pull themselves together. It's not a good idea to do this, but it's, as an investigator, but you kind of have to let yourself
Starting point is 00:28:02 think kind of outside the box. At the time, Samuel Little was creeping through South Mississippi. He's a serial killer. I knew he had a confirmed victim on the coast. You know, could he have come through way back then? Samuel Little, not just some random murderer, but the most prolific serial killer of all time, one who spent years of his life just miles from this sleepy Mississippi town.
Starting point is 00:28:42 And suddenly, it begins to seem so obvious that this trail would lead to the most prolific serial killer of all time because Janice wasn't just living in South Mississippi. She was working in a diner. Sam Little's thing was, his foreplay was watching you eat. This restaurant, with some of the best food in the area, well, that would be just the place for him to show up.
Starting point is 00:29:15 Check out the big stars, big series, and blockbuster movies. Streaming on Paramount Plus. Cue the music. Like NCIS, Tony and Ziva. We'd like to make up your own rules. Tulsa King. We want to take out the competition. The substance.
Starting point is 00:29:39 This balance is not working. And the naked gun. That was awesome. Now that's a mountain of entertainment. A boy goes missing from a bus stop in Queensland, Australia. His disappearance made national headlines and launched the largest search for a missing child in Australia's history. There were over 700 persons of interest.
Starting point is 00:30:06 It was absolutely enormous. Now, for the first time, his parents share with a global audience their journey to uncover what happened to their son. We'd said right from the start, who's ever responsible had picked on the wrong family. So we just made it our life's work. We're going to hunt you down. And if not for the parents, the case might still be unsolved. But in the end, the pressure led cops to take shocking risks
Starting point is 00:30:30 and go to extraordinary lengths to catch this perpetrator. The master deceiver was deceived and manipulated himself. We did to him what he did to Daniel. From Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media, This is Where Is Daniel Morecam. Available now on The Binge. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. We've all had moments when the boogeyman seems real.
Starting point is 00:30:57 When you're a kid and you leap into bed before whatever's lurking under it can grab your feet. As an adult, when your heart speeds up, when you realize it's dark out now, and someone's walking up the same sidewalk a few paces back. the way you catch a chill when you're taking out the garbage late and the breeze whistles through the trees. And if you were picked out by Samuel Little, that trigger would probably be the soft purr of an old car idling. Lieutenant Darren Versaigua with the Pascagoula Mississippi Police Department has come to know all the awful details of Samuel Little's reign. He started to kill it in 1970s. He normally would travel around to the east, go down through Georgia,
Starting point is 00:31:50 he would go into Florida, and then he would come through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and then he would go up to Texas, and then he would go up all the way to Los Angeles. Stopping in between, he did that constantly. And that's how he was so evasive and thus catching him, is he didn't stay long anywhere. He would kill and he'd move on to the next place. Pascagoula is just off Interstate 10. This was Little's Highway.
Starting point is 00:32:16 He murdered up and down I-10 for decades. He developed a system, allowing him to be flexible with where he lived. He was as a professional shoplifter. That's how he made his living, a thief by day and a murderer by night. Scraping up just enough cash for a dingy motel room where he could freshen up before it was time to hunt. his next victim. He liked to pick up a woman and buy her dinner first. But this wasn't chivalry. He would take them to eat as they're swallowing. That's his foreplay. And so he's getting excited. And so when he gets ready to leave, he has already gotten himself up to the excitement that he needs
Starting point is 00:32:58 to be at. The woman's throat is important. When little's ready, he almost always ends the date by strangling them. He was an opportunity. If the opportunity was there, he would take advantage of the situation. If the situation was perfect and he could get away with it, he would do that.
Starting point is 00:33:20 Little tended to target poorer black women, sex workers, anyone who seemed vulnerable. Cases the police aren't going to put a lot of energy into closing. Causes of death were labeled as accidental or undetermined. And Versaigia says lots of times with a sex worker, police would just write a death off as an overdose.
Starting point is 00:33:43 Nobody gives a shit about them. We're not working a dose anyway. So just label it as an overdose. Lucky for Samuel Little. Bad for someone like Janice. A person no one was really keeping tabs on. Back in 2010, Versaillesius, took over cold cases in Pascagoula. He started off by working the 1975 case of 16-year-old Janie Sanders. She was a girl who had been found stabbed to death in the woods. Nothing about Janie's case matched other local homicides from that time, so Versaigia starts to look into out-of-towners arrested in the area. What he finds makes the hairs on the back of his neck sticks straight up. Two Pascagoula women accused little of attacking them back in the early
Starting point is 00:34:38 1980s. Soon after, Pascagoula police had him in custody. They suspected he'd murdered at least one other sex worker and probably other women. But ultimately, they didn't have enough evidence to hold him. I began looking at Sam Little as a potential suspect in the Jamie Sanders case. As investigator Versaiza Diggs, he determines that Little's M.O. probably doesn't match the killer of the teenager. But he thinks, Little has got to be involved in something unsolved. Couldn't find a file on him at all. It just notes. So I redid a file. And two weeks after that, I get the call from Los Angeles saying, hey, look, do y'all have a Sam Little file? The DA in Los Angeles was preparing to try Little for three murders there.
Starting point is 00:35:33 And I went, yeah, yeah, I do. I just redid it. And I said, I've got two witnesses that survived his attack. I became the southern eastern liaison for Sam Little. I start calling all these departments, and it was no lie. I would call him, hey, look, we got a serial killer, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they go, okay, we don't have any case like that. Have a night day, click.
Starting point is 00:35:56 Then in 2018, Little does something that raises his own profile, so to speak. He sits down with a Texas Ranger and meticulously begins confessing to each murder he says he committed. By the time he's done, there are more than 90 of them. The day that it came out in the press, that he was the worst serial killer ever, all these people start calling me again. And they start emailing me, hey, do you have any information on it? Oh, yeah, he does. These killings of vulnerable women no one seemed to give a damn about?
Starting point is 00:36:35 90-something murders later, it's like everyone gives a damn. All of a sudden, he starts talking about case after case after case, from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, all these other places. That's around the time, Major Mark Ogden, who's handling Janice's case, learns about little and realizes wait. He was active in South Mississippi during that time. When Janice disappeared from Dick's Diner, and Janice, she was open and definitely vulnerable.
Starting point is 00:37:13 She had to get away from the diner and her boyfriend. Could she have fled from one violent man and into the car of a different one? Ogden studies the file. Knowing what he knows, it's easy to see little as the boogeyman. His mugshots span decades from the butterfly collars and sole patch of the 1970s to his graying goatee. But his eyes are the same. Hard. Shark-like. Did this killer take her for her last meal? Did he strangle Janice? Ogden decides to ask him.
Starting point is 00:38:00 He reaches out to Texas law enforcement. He spoke with the ranger that was handling him, and bringing people in from other law enforcement agencies. And when he says he really wants to speak to little, the ranger is like, man, get in line. I wasn't able to get an appointment at that time. Little was nearing 80, and his health was declining. He said, look, he's really sick, and we're trying to clear up what we got in front of him.
Starting point is 00:38:34 If we can get you in, we'll get you in. But don't get your heart set on it. The U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, were not going to take any cases that he didn't actually confess to. And so far, Little hadn't confessed to Janice's killing. But he does confess to a Pascagoula murder under Versaigua's jurisdiction. Melinda LaPrie. The woman he was arrested for murdering in the 1980s. The one Pascagoula police didn't have enough to hold him on.
Starting point is 00:39:10 There aren't enough hours in the day for every officer with a possible little case to sit down with him and go through every single cold case they think might be his. So the FBI starts releasing portraits of the victims, drawn by Little himself in prison. He would draw pictures of the females that he killed. When he wouldn't remember a name or anything, he'd draw, you know, a picture of him. Investigators brought him paper, chalk, pastels, and the drawings have a childish quality. Like the artist was a talent. talented preteen, but they were accurate enough that they helped investigators close more cases.
Starting point is 00:40:02 Back in Pearl River County, Major Ogden sits at his desk for hours sifting through each of these bizarre portraits, seeing if any of them could be Janice. I've studied those pictures more than once, you know, trying to see if Jan was in there. Sam had already confessed everything he was going to confess to. There was no more confessions coming out. And so COVID hit. Everything stopped. That same year, Sam Little dies.
Starting point is 00:40:39 By then, he'd confessed to 93 murders, but not Janus's. I think you'd do a lot more than that. And of course, there's always the chance that Janice was killed by someone else. Those DNA swabs collected from Janice's family. They weren't just sitting in a lab. Agents were comparing them to Jane Doe's in Mississippi and across the country.
Starting point is 00:41:07 Still, no matches and no answers. The only thing Ogden the investigator knows at this point is that she was terrified of her diner-owner boyfriend. and no one's seen her since. After Janice fled, Peggy, the teenager from the diner, moved on with her life, and Janice kind of slipped out of her mind. After all, she was in high school. She's not even sure how long Janice was gone.
Starting point is 00:41:45 At least a year. Maybe two? And then one day she pulls her back at the house. A very nice car parks in Peggy's mom's driveway. Janice steps out of that car. So she's been in Raceland. South Louisiana, two hours away. Wow, Jan's here.
Starting point is 00:42:08 Mom's like, what? Yeah, Jan's here. She invited us to come down to Raisland. That's when she came to tell my mama she was pregnant. pregnant this woman who left behind four children has now shown up pregnant with a fifth you see everything ogden had learned has him preparing janis's family for a worst-case scenario another woman killed because she was at the mercy of a violent man but what he doesn't know yet is he's been underestimated her. See, vanishing wasn't just something that Janice did to get out of a bad situation. It was just something she did. Janice isn't a typical victim. In fact, she might not be a victim at all. The men she encounters might actually be at her mercy. And that includes Ogden himself.
Starting point is 00:43:13 because every time he's gotten close to her and just about figured her out, she's already two steps ahead. And he has no idea how far she'll go. Unlock all episodes of The Vanishing of Janice Rose, Add free right now by subscribing to The Benj 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 podcast. All ad-free.
Starting point is 00:43:59 Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Search for The Benj on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple. Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Vanishing of Janice Rose is produced by Wild Night Media for Sony Music Entertainment's The Benge. The show was written, hosted, an executive produced by me, Larison Campbell.
Starting point is 00:44:39 The executive producers for The Benj, 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 Papes is the story's fact-checker. Mixing and sound design for this series by Scott Somerville, with music from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. The show's theme song is Shake Me by Lydia Ramsey. Legal Review by Davis Wright-Tremaine. Thank you.

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