True Crime Campfire - Cross-Country: The Murders of Josh Niles & Amber Washburn

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

If you’re unlucky, you might have at least one person in your life who just drives you crazy, someone with whom every interaction has an edge of mutual antipathy, that makes you feel like you’re always on the brink of a screaming argument. Sometimes two particular human beings just do not fit together. And because human beings are strange, sometimes a couple like that hook up and stay together for years before finally spinning apart. But that undercurrent of anger can remain, a little toxic flame that doesn’t need much fuel to erupt into an inferno that destroys lives. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027, from Ft. Lauderdale to the Bahamas. Join us for Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp 2026 in Equinunk, PA! September 10-13. Visit badmagicproductions.com for more info, and to buy tickets. Sources: Fatal Vows S7E4, “Hell on Wheels” Dateline S28E3, “The Plan” Snapped: Killer Couples, S13E4, “Charlene Childers and Timothy Dean” https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/10/12/what-dateline-didnt-tell-you-tim-dean-charlene-childers/3917826002/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/in-depth/news/2019/10/10/tim-dean-sodus-ny-double-murder-sunray-texas-police-chief-dateline-nbc-the-plan/1356990001/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/10/10/charlene-childers-dateline-nbc-the-plan-sodus-ny-double-murder/3910812002/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/in-depth/news/2019/10/10/double-murder-sodus-ny-of-josh-niles-amber-washburn-children-dateline-nbc/1730190001/ Follow us, campers! Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/ Facebook: True Crime Campfire Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire Email: [e-mail] MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where is Daredevil? Am I here? Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? We're to take this city back. In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them.

I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If you're unlucky, you might have at least one person in your life who just drives you crazy, someone with whom every interaction has an edge of mutual antipathy that makes you feel like you're always on the brink of a screaming argument.

Sometimes two particular human beings just do not fit together. And because human beings are strange, sometimes a couple like that hook up and stay together for years before finally spinning apart. But that undercurrent of anger can remain, a little toxic flame that doesn't need much fuel to erupt into an inferno that destroys lives. This is cross-country, the murders of Josh Niles and Amber Washburn. So, campers, for this one, were in SOTUS, New York, a little town of less than 2,000 people close to the shores of Lake Ontario. It was October 22, 2018, a beautiful fall day in this peaceful little corner of the Empire State. Tiffany Thayer's two-year-old was being most insistent about what gummy bears, so she took the kid into the kitchen to grab some before they headed out to the grocery store. Through her kitchen window, she could see her neighbor, Josh Niles, talking to some of the same.

guy Tiffany didn't recognize. The conversation seemed intense, not friendly, but not argumentative, at least not yet. Then Tiffany saw Josh's girlfriend Amber start to pull into the driveway with her window down. She turned away to grab the gummy bears for her little one, and a second later, she heard the sharp crack of a gunshot and looked up in shock. She saw Josh grabbing at his own chest. The man he'd been talking to had a gun in his hand. Amber had gotten the car in reverse and started frantically pulling out of the driveway, but as she passed the man, he shot once through the open car window, hitting her in the head. Tiffany dropped, covering her child, and crawled to slam the bolts on the front door. She heard Josh calling out Amber's name in anguish than more

shots, too many for her to count. It would turn out that Josh Niles was shot ten. times, killed as he desperately tried to crawl under his truck to escape his murderer. Amber Washburn died instantly, her car drifting backwards out into the road to come to rest in the driveway across the street. Tiffany dialed 911. Plenty of people close to the gunshots did. As it happened, a Wayne County Sheriff's Sergeant was just a few houses down the street, supervising an eviction and heard the shots. He hurried over as a crowd of neighbors gathered and quickly determined, that both Josh and Amber were dead. In the backseat of Amber's car, he got a surprise.

There, sitting in his car seat, right behind his murdered mother, was the couple's four-year-old son, Josh Jr., holding a four-piece box of chicken McNuggets, terrified and confused. Neighbors told the sergeant they'd seen the shooter climb over the fence at the rear of Josh's property and take off running through the neighborhood's backyards, a tall, thin guy wearing a dark hoodie and a green baseball cap. There was an immediate response from local and state police. The police called everybody they could in the small town

and told them to stay inside and swarms of cops went through the yards and outbuildings searching for the shooter. They didn't find him. A canine unit tracked a scent to a parking lot where the shooter had presumably driven off from. Household security footage would show that he'd slowly walked up and down the street that Josh and Amber's house was on

before he'd gone to talk to Josh, surveilling the property, his face obscured by the hood and cap. On one driveway, sitting on top of the fall leaves and obviously recently dropped, police found a black underarmor ski mask. It didn't belong to the property owner, and that was suspicious. Those things cost like $30. Unless you're in a frantic hurry, that's something you'll stop and pick up if you drop it. They bagged the ski mask for DNA testing, but without someone to compare it to, that didn't really move the investigation forward. It was a similar story with the shell casings recovered from the scene, generic 9mm rounds that would only be useful if investigators got hold of a gun to match them to.

From neighbor Tiffany Thayer, they knew the shooter was a white guy with dark hair and a beard, but that didn't narrow things down a whole lot. Little Josh Jr. had seen the whole thing, but evidence from any 4-year-old is going to be of extremely limited value. And anyway, Josh Jr. was autistic and nonverbal and couldn't tell them anything. No suspects were immediately obvious. Josh had been 28 years old and Amber 24. They'd been together five years, a happy, solid couple who were deeply in love, had a kid they adored and were talking about getting married. Josh had just started a landscaping company and Amber worked nights at a local bakery, a small town couple whose lives were just starting an upward swing.

Almost everyone the police spoke to said they couldn't think of a single enemy Josh or Amber had in the world. Almost everyone. Josh's older sister Nicole and his best friend Keith both told police the same thing right away. You need to look at Charlene. Charlene Childers was Josh's ex-girlfriend, and they had two kids together, a daughter and a son. They'd started their tumultuous, toxic relationship when they were just teenage kids. kids. Charlene was 15 and Josh was 17, and they'd been together for five dramatic years before

breaking up. After the breakup, Charlene had moved down to Texas with her mom, and she and Josh settled into a mostly amicable shared custody agreement. Josh drove down to pick up the kids for every summer vacation and every other Christmas. We'll get into why that arrangement fell apart a little later, but for now, the kids were up in Sotis, living permanently with Josh, Amber and Josh Jr. They'd been at school when Josh and Amber were killed. Thank God for that. My Lord. An ex and a disagreement over custody is always something homicide detectives are going to look at closely. But an ex is also someone that a victim's sister and best friend are not guaranteed to have

neutral opinions on. Detectives would certainly look at Charlene, but they weren't jumping to any conclusions. Sheriff Rob Milby called her that night and discovered that Charlene was already on the road from Texas, headed north to look after her kids. She said she'd see news reports of the shooting on Facebook and recognized Josh and Amber's house in one of the pictures. That was when she knew something terrible had happened. Yeah, at the risk of a spoiler here, none of the news reports on Facebook that first day had actually included a picture of the house. Bad flag! I'm sure there are perfectly nice Charlene's out there. Shout out to Charlene's,

but so far, like, I'm zero for three. The show's zero for two. So not much of a spoiler, I don't think. So Charlene had hit the road, regardless of seeing photos of the house or not. Sheriff Milby told Dateline that on the phone, Charlene presented as a quiet, demure, Southern Bell. But it didn't take much to get her riled up on the subject of her ex-boyfriend, Josh Niles. They'd had a dramatic, argumentative relationship that was occasionally violent in both directions, a toxic mess that everyone who knew them thought was a bad idea. A couple of days after the murders, friends and family of Josh and Amber gathered for a candlelit vigil outside their home.

Charlene was there and managed to get herself in front of the news cameras. She said, Whoever did it has now made it to where my kids grow up without a dad, and that's nothing a kid should ever have to do. The most I have to say to y'all is justice needs to be served. It's a weird clip, like she's saying the right things, but she's smiling. the whole time. Yeah, what do they call it doper's delight?

You know, when you're lying through your teeth and you can't help but smile. It's interesting. Alongside Charlene at the vigil was her kind of new boyfriend, Casey Miller. They'd first dated when Casey was 19 and Charlene was 14, which had earned him a spot

on the sex offender registry in New York, and now 12 years later, they were back together. The police were interviewing everyone adjacent to the case, and that included Casey Miller. He told them he was just Charlene's boyfriend and knew nothing at all about the shooting, and the police had no reason to doubt him. If you want to get an idea of what kind of dude Casey Miller was,

then in addition to the statutory rape charge, you just need to know that practically as soon as he'd left the police station, he started bragging about being a suspect in a double murder investigation. Like, our boy called up people he hadn't spoken to in years just to tell him the news. You know, he thought that was just really cool. Oh, good God. Like, imagine your worst high school classmate, like calling you up out of the blue to brag about that shit. That would fuel my gossip group chat for years.

Oh, good Lord, dude. Casey wasn't really a suspect, but because of his big mouth, a lot of people thought he was. And when they learned he was trying to sell a gun, they called the cops. The gun in question was a 9mm Glock pistol, a type of weapon that was the most likely sort. of the shell casings found at the crime scene. It also happened to have a hot pink frame, and Casey Miller didn't strike anyone as a pink gun kind of guy. The gun wasn't his.

It was Charlene's. Obviously, this got the investigators' attention, but the gun wasn't a match to the shell casings. So why would you try to get rid of it? Charlene's story was that she just forgot the gun was in the car, and although she had a Texas permit for it, she didn't have one for New York. She just didn't want to get in trouble, so she'd given it to Casey to try and sell.

And that made a certain amount of sense. New York does not mess around with gun laws, and although at the time possessing an unloaded handgun might well have just been a misdemeanor, it wouldn't take many additional circumstances to pump the charge up to a felony. So, yeah, I mean, it made some sense for Charlene to ditch the gun. And it also looks like she was desperate to avoid any police scrutiny. There are some basic facts that come up quickly when we're going to, police start looking into someone's background.

For example, they almost immediately discovered that while Casey Miller might be Charlene's boyfriend up in New York, she also had a husband down in Texas, Tim Dean. What is her problem? I know. This is getting messy as hell. So we should probably take a couple minutes to look at the slow rolling dumpster fire that is Charlene's romantic history. When she was 15, Charlene met 17-year-old Josh Niles through mutual friends, and they hit it off

like a match dropped on gasoline. Charlene had volatile relationships with everyone in her life, and that included her mom, and after one particular screaming fight, Charlene stormed out and swore she'd never go back. Josh's parents let her stay with them, and what happened next was kind of inevitable. When she was 16, Charlene got pregnant, and her and Josh's daughter, Gabby, was born in 2008. Two years later, they had a son, Bentley. Ever since she'd moved in, Charlene had been pressuring Josh to get married and that only intensified after the kids came along. But Josh wasn't into it. He felt like you didn't need a piece of paper to be bonded together. The fact is, the person you date in high school almost certainly is not going to be your long-term

partner and that's not surprising. Your brain's not done cooking yet, you know? You'll both be different people in just a few years. Sometimes adding kids into the mix might stretch things out for a little while, but the added stress is just as likely to blow the whole thing up, especially given how young these two were. Charlene was 18 and had two kids. Josh was 20. The moment you've been waiting for is here. GMC's truck month is on. For a limited time, get zero percent financing for 72 months on the 26 GMC Sierra 1500 crew cab pro graphite. Feel the strength of GMC Sierra's 5.3-3-liter V8 engine. Elevate your confidence with a factory 2-inch lift and off-road suspension. Ready for whatever lies ahead.

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Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. We've already gotten into what a dramatic train wreck their relationship was. And two years after Bentley was born, they split up. Charlene's mom moved down to the endless plains and oil fields of the Texas Panhandle, and she followed not long after. Two weeks after she got there, she met an oil worker named Jace Childers, and a month after that, she found out she was pregnant.

Welcome to Texas, I guess. where apparently it's easier to buy a big hat than a condom. I so don't get this. And I know that, you know, this might make some people mad, but, like, it's just not that hard not to get pregnant. You know what I mean? Like, if you don't want to get pregnant, there are so many options to not get pregnant.

And a guy will tell you, oh, I don't like doing it with a condom. Oh, puppy. We'll stick it in something else then. And don't come to us in the comments and say, well, what if it fails? Don't bean soup us, okay? We're not talking about bean soup. She was getting pregnant. Like, it was nothing.

She was, it was like, this was not the case for her. There was no failures of contraceptives. She just met this guy. Yeah. Like, this was like six weeks after she met this man that she found out she was pregnant. That just can't be a good idea. Like, you know, just take some basic precautions for the love of all that is holy. Her love language was.

was procreation. Yeah. She loves a guy. She's going to get knocked up by him, okay? So shortly after nine months after they met basically,

their daughter, Skyler was born and they got married. About the same time Charlene was getting together with Jace, Josh met Amber Washburn. A sweet, pretty girl, he just clicked with immediately. You know how Sometimes your friend meets someone, you can just tell from day one it's a good match. That's how everyone felt about Josh and Amber.

Everyone except Charlene, that is, who flooded Facebook with snarky and passive-aggressive posts whenever she saw anything from Josh and Amber. The fact that Josh was moving on and finding happiness with someone else was obviously chapping her ass something awful, despite the fact that she was doing the same thing. She had a new husband and a kid. hypocrite much? Yeah. Like I said, what is her problem? Yeah, Charlene is the worst. Heck off Charlene. Heck off Charlene. Although they were married for four years, Charlene's relationship with Jace mainly matters to this story because of how it ended. Charlene worked for a while in private security, then got a job with Dumas PD as an animal control officer.

To get a clear picture of where we are, we probably need a little geography lesson. Most people in the Texas Panhandle live in Amar A mid-sized city with all the mid-sized city things. It's also the worst place in the world. No offense, if you look at it, I just can't. It's the worst. I've never been. It's awful. I went on a college visit there and it was a terrible, terrible experience.

They don't believe in air conditioning in their dorms. It was awful. Then there are a whole slew of small, mostly agricultural towns like Dumas. No one's idea of a metropolis, but big enough to have like both a Walmart and a pizza hut. Well, what else do you need? Come on. Taco Bell, maybe? I don't know.

And then there are little places like Sunray, about 10 miles from Dumas, just a dot in the endless flat field, home to barely 1,500 people. This is where Timothy Dean was proud to call himself chief of police, of a department that was just him and one other dude. Tim Dean had really wanted to be a cop. He tried out for the Amarillo PD, but they saw something they didn't like while he was at the academy, and they did not offer him a job. Tim had a real problem with authority. He hated being told what to do,

got furious at any criticism, and had a nasty temper. Just what we want to see in a police officer, right? Oh, for sure. It was a recipe for disaster. They only let him graduate at all because his dad was a sergeant in the department. So nepotism saves the day.

There's a type of guy who builds his whole identity around being a cop, and Tim Dean was one of those. Guys who flunk out of big city departments often move on to smaller towns who maybe have standards that are a dainty bit lower, and Tim eventually found work with the Dumas PD before moving on to the grand magnificence of Sunray police chief in 2017, where he could feel like a big man. without having much in the way of actual responsibilities.

He wasn't particularly liked or respected in Sunray. People thought he was weird and cared too much about projecting a tough guy image, which is difficult when you have a face that makes people remember the pet gerbils in their elementary school classroom. But he looks like an evil gerbil. It's not a cute gerbil. Like if Pixar made a film in the... It's like he looks like...

You know, he looks like he looks like the brain. of pinky in the brain. Yeah. Like that's, that's the expression on his face. Like, he doesn't have the roundness, but he has the

rat-like features. Yeah. It's like if some animation, you know, studio managed to come up with a genuinely unsettling looking gerbil, you know,

where you're like, oh, okay. Oh, thank you. So, you know, he tries to be Mr. Tough guy. Like, neighbor saw him wearing his gun.

just to take out the trash cans or mow the lawn. Everybody just rolled their eyes. And I know we shouldn't lean in too hard on state stereotypes, okay? But if you're so macho and gun obsessed that people in Texas think you're weird, you might have a problem, you know? Like if the Texans are like, dude, calm it down. That's a lot. In Sunray, police officers were apparently responsible for supplying their own firearms.

But just 10 days after he got the job, he went down to a pawn shop. and bought 10 guns on the city's dime. Okay, buddy, first, why do you need 10 guns? There's like two of you in the whole department. Are you planning to shoot some of them with your feet? Second, this is a small town. You've been here 10 days and you're already blowing a hole in the city budget. You know they can fire you, right?

Like one council meeting and your ass is in the wind. Tim is not smart, bless his heart. Tim does not make good decisions. While he was still a cop in Dumas, Charlene started working as an animal control officer there, and they got friendly. One month after she'd started the job, they were a lot more than just friendly. Charlene says she fell for Tim's down-home, how-to-ma-ma-kind of Texas courtliness, which very much glosses over the fact that they were both married and dirty, dirty cheaters. Screwing around behind your spouse's back at the Dumas' best western?

ain't nothing classier. There aren't any motels and sunrace, so after Tim moved there, things got even more romantic, the two of them just making out in the police station parking lot in front of God and everybody. Well, I guess it was like God

and that one other copenh town, actually. But still, soon enough, they both got divorced so they could be together. Charlene and Jace Childer's divorce was finalized on January 29th, and she and Tim got married six weeks later. But Charlene always found ways to make things complicated.

The night before the wedding, she was back in bed with her now ex-husband Jace, and she was right back there again the night after she got back from her honeymoon with Tim. Charlene, what are we doing, babe? Can you imagine being her friend? Oh, my God. And she's telling you this shit and you're just like pulling your hair out? I just can't. I'm speechless.

It would be, you did what the night before your wedding? At that point, you would just have to be like, okay, I'm washing my hands of my emotional connection to this and I'm just popping some popcorn. Go do what you're going to do, babe. For Tim, the wedding was just putting the keys into the ignition of the bulldozer

that would wreck his entire life with himself firmly in the driver's seat. Tim and Charlene moved into a new house with the two kids Charlene had had with Josh Niles. plus Tim's three-year-old daughter from his previous marriage, Madison. Charlene plastered Facebook with pictures and messages about how fantastic things were in Sunray, with the man she called her soulmate, tagging them with stuff like hashtag family is everything and hashtag life is great. Life was not great, at least not for everyone in the house.

One morning in May, just two months after they got married, Charlene surreptitiously recorded Tim and Maddie in the kitchen of their new house. Little blonde Maddie in a pink t-shirt was crying at the kitchen table while Tim leaned over her and screamed right in her face. Eat your fucking food! He told her to say, yes, sir, when she spoke to him. And between sobs, she did.

I don't want to hear any huffin and puffin, Tim said. Now grab your fork and put food in your... And then he broke off and just slapped Maddie across her face, hard, making her scream. Oh, I hate this fuck. Charlene shared the video. video with a few friends on Facebook, not to show that her new husband was a monster, but because

she thought it showed what a difficult child Maddie was. Oh my God. Wow. Yeah, when I found that out, I literally had never occurred to be that she would be filming it for a reason other than to like have proof for the cops. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're, that's insane. And I don't know what reaction Charlene expected, but at least one of her friends showed the video to the cops and three days later, the Texas Rangers arrested Tim Dean on felony charges of injury to a child. Five days after that, he got a letter from the city of Sunray with the subject line, termination of employment for good cause. Yeah, Leah.

Little Maddie went to live with her mom, where she'd sometimes calmly say things like, Daddy used to spank me on the face. When she'd cried, Charlene had sprayed her in the face with water, and now Maddie wouldn't go swimming because she hated getting her face wet. Hashtag, family is everything. God, fuck this bitch seriously. Oh my God, so much.

But there were still two children in the house. The kids Charlene had with Josh Niles. Child Protective Services called Josh and said, look, you need to come get your kids. This was initially confusing because when they called, he was already on the road down to Texas to pick up Gabby and Bentley for their annual summer in New York. When he got them home, Josh filed for temporary custody, and he got it. In August, he petitioned for full custody and seen. Seeing as Charlene was still married to Tim Dean, he was granted that, too. Charlene's reaction, predictably, was not one of sober reflection. It was pure fury.

She was in New York for the hearing, and she called Tim to say she was too upset to drive. So he flew up and drove her home. And it was on that drive that they decided to murder Josh Niles. God, I wish he would just fucking die in a ditch somewhere, Charlene said, because every time I turn around, he's always bad-mouthing me, saying how I'm a fucking whore, blah, blah, blah. And that is interesting because most of the reporting of this story accepts her later explanation, which is that she would divorce Tim and then, when Josh was dead, she'd get custody of the kids. But her initial motive, the first thing she told Tim, had nothing to do with the kids.

It was just anger. It was all about herself. Just shoot him, she said. Just fucking shoot him. She told Tim that it was his fault she'd lost the kids and he needed to fix this. She did file for divorce from Tim and told him the only way he could get her back was to do what she wanted. This was probably a lie. Tim didn't know it, but she'd already started seeing her old boyfriend Casey Miller again.

And she really did blame Tim for everything that had happened. Yeah, and Charlene wasn't really a forgiven forget kind of gal. Yeah, I mean, obviously. Back in Sunray, Tim and Charlene started seriously discussing how they were going to kill John. and for some inexplicable reason, the weirdest part of this case for me, they decided to bring in a third party, a dude named Braun Bowler. And I'm sure you want to know why Braun got involved, but I'm just going to have to hold up my hands and say, I don't know. I do not get it. Braun Bowler was a police officer of the bearded, sweaty, chunky, chunky variety, and he and Tim had become friends when they both worked in Dumas. when Tim became chief of police and Sunray, he gave Braun a job as the sound's sole patrol officer.

And that was it. Braun was Tim's buddy. And when Tim asked for Braun's help to murder a guy, dude was just like, okay. I just, I do not get this. There was no money on the table. There was no blackmail material, no like secret gay love affair between Braun and Tim. They were literally just bros. It's bananas.

Like, what were you thinking when you joined the police for? Braun. Oh boy, this will teach me everything I need to know to clumsily help carry out a murder scheme. Anyway, the three of them started meeting regularly in the garage at Tim and Charlene's house to plot out the murder. Fucking dorkiest cabal in history. Cabal sack. As I'm sure will surprise no one, it was a dumb-ass plan. To get Tim to New York without leaving a trail, they decided that Charleston, Lane would drive Braun down to Amarillo to rent a car in his own name, which Braun would take to Sunray and give to Tim. Unfortunately, they hadn't counted on Tim being a massive schmuck. Trying to be inconspicuous on his way to New York, he kept off the interstate, so in the middle

of the night, he was driving on a two-lane highway in Kansas when he started panicking about running out of gas. He decided to make a U-turn and head back to a gas station, but he didn't notice for some reason that there were big old ditches at the side of the road and managed to get himself lodged in one, thereby trashing the car. Now, he's stuck on a lonely road in the middle of the night, so bless his heart, he called 911 for help. I just can't with the shit. Corey Nicolette, the sheriff's deputy who answered the call, had good radar, and he immediately felt his spidey senses tingling. Something was off about Tim,

and that didn't change when he checked the paperwork on the rental car and saw that the name on the rental agreement was Braun Bowler. Things looked even sketchier when Tim said he had a shotgun in the car. At Desjardin, our business is helping yours. We are here to support your business through every stage of growth, from your first pitch to your first acquisition. Whether it's improving cash flow

or exploring investment banking solutions, With Desjardin business, it's all under one roof. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. Where are my gloves? Come on, heat.

Any day now? Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your grocery. groceries online at walla.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. The deputy sat Tim beside him in his squad car, and because Tim is an idiot, it took very little prodding to get him to start yapping about how his life was going to shit, and his wife was

divorcing him. He'd been a cop for 10 years and recently quit. That got Nicolette's attention. He said, why'd you quit copping? Well, I pissed off the DA, Tim said. I was tackling some pretty big public corruption cases, ended up with a target on my back, and got arrested by the Texas Rangers on a bullshit charge. Nicolet talked to Tim as if he was just making conversation while he did his paperwork and didn't give a crap about what Tim was saying, but actually he was listening closely. And to him, the only important thing Tim said there was arrested by the Texas Rangers. We've seen the Texas Rangers before in some of our cases, right? The Rangers do not do that for nothing.

They're some of the best detectives in the business. He asked Tim where he was going. Well, I've got a family friend that I was going to see, but where's that at? That's all the way up in New York. Tim had managed to make himself memorable to the deputy. In fact, he'd made himself look suspicious as hell, but he hadn't broken any laws and there were no warrants out for him, so Nicolette had to let him ride back to town with the tow truck and go on his way.

But after the murders, this encounter would be catastrophic for all three conspirators. After Josh and Amber had been killed, it didn't take long for investigators to uncover that Charlene's husband was a disgraced cop. Fired for hitting his daughter, not uncovering high-level corruption. And that made him a suspect. The FBI looked at Tim's cell phone records, and one thing that stood out was that 911 call he'd made one night in the middle of Kansas. They called up Deputy Nicolette, and he told them about his encounter with Tim and gave them the name on the rental agreement, Braun Bolar. So, in short, Braun found himself in an interview room being interrogated by the FBI and the Texas Rangers, which I wouldn't take as a sign that your life is going great. Braun initially said that he'd rented the car for Tim because Tim needed it for work,

but it maxed out of his own credit cards after getting fired by Sunray. But Braun was not made of stern stuff, and after flunking a polygraph, he collapsed like an overcooked souffle. Guys, don't plot a murder. And especially, don't plot a murder with someone else. And especially, especially, don't plot a murder with someone who has no skin in the game other than doing a favor for a buddy. Why wouldn't he crack? Bron spilled everything. The meetings in the garage where he, Tim and Charlene plotted Josh's murder and the cunning plan to have Braun rent the car for Tim. He waived extradition and was brought to New York on conspiracy charges. Charlene, still in

Sotis, was charged with murder. Josh's two kids were given into the care of his sister Nicole. The arrest of Tim Dean down in Sunray was more dramatic. officers knew he'd killed two people. They knew he had a large number of firearms, and they suspected he might be suicidal. A SWAT team surrounded his house, and on the megaphone, called for him to surrender. Apparently, they weren't in the mood for a lot of back and forth.

When Tim didn't respond, they blew the door off the hinges with explosive charges and tossed in a flashbang grenade. Damn. Soon, a rattled Tim stepped out with his hands up and was taken to Dumas to be interviewed. The interview had kind of a classic setup with Tim in a chair in the corner while a big FBI agent and even bigger Texas Ranger sat close in front of him, leaning forward and crowding him. If you watch interrogation footage, you'll see a lot of that. It's a technique designed to get inside a suspect's head.

We've boxed you in. There's no way out. But although he might not have been good at his job, Tim had been a police officer for 10 years and he knew to mostly keep his mouth shut. He denied any involvement with the shootings, and at first he said he'd ended up in upstate New York just by random chance. He'd been depressed and just driving without thinking, and somehow ended up in the small town where his wife's ex lived around the time he'd been murdered. What are the odds? Wow. Then he said he'd driven up there to kill himself, which made no sense at all, and after the interview, he was charged with two counts of murder. Tim's goose was pretty well-cooked. Josh and Amber's neighbor identified him as the man she'd seen shoot them both,

and his DNA was on the discarded ski mask found near the scene. Cell phone data tracked his journey through New York, headed straight for sodas. The case against Charlene was a little bit trickier. It rested almost entirely on the testimony of Braun Boehler, a damp little beef bouillon cube of a man who, to put it in the nicest way I can, did not roll high on charisma. that changed when investigators learned that after Tim shipwrecked himself in Kansas, he'd been unable to rent a new car because he only had cash.

So Charlene had driven up five hours to meet him, took him onto Wichita, and rented a new car for him to finish his lethal journey. Guys, bless your heart. At that point, it's time to pack it in, okay? We can't do it because we're leaving a paper trail a mile long. Just, no, abort mission. But these people are just so dumb and so obsessed, I think. Charlene was just like, no, we're doing it.

You know, I mean, just she had tunnel vision, I think, and couldn't see how wide open they were leaving themselves with this stuff. So Charlene was in trouble, and her attorneys called the prosecution asking for a deal. The prosecutors interviewed her, and initially Charlene tried to play the oldest card in the romantic co-conspirator deck. Oh, I didn't think he'd actually go through with it. Really? You think he's going up there for the fall colors? He's going leaf peeping, is that what it was?

But eventually she came clean. She said the gun Tim had used had been one of the ones he'd bought for the Sunray Police Department, and he ditched it somewhere on the drive back to Texas from New York. So the city of Sunray paid for that gun. Ugh. That's a long drive with a lot of bridges and a lot of rivers, and I don't expect the gun will ever be found. Charlene insisted that killing Amber

had never been part of the plan. The most widely accepted version of events is that when Tim had been talking to Josh up in Sotis, he'd been trying to work up the nerve to kill him and when Amber had pulled into the driveway, unexpectedly, Tim had decided to eliminate her as a witness. I am not entirely sure about that. There's no indication that Charlene had anything against Amber,

but even when she was discussing a deal with prosecutors, her utter rage at Josh was transparent. That's a level of anger that can easily engulf not just its target, but anybody he cares about too. Timothy Dean was convicted of both murders and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Both Charlene Childers and Braun Bowler testified against him and received some leniency. Charlene was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and given 28 years. and won't be eligible for parole until around 2042. Braun Boler pled guilty to conspiracy and was given one to three years and paroled after 16 months. He got off easy.

Josh's sister Nicole gained custody of the two kids he'd had with Charlene and Amber's parents took in Josh Jr. And I hope all of them do well, although it has to be incredibly difficult to lose essentially both parents because Amber was more or less a second mom to those older kids. And even if Charlene had gotten away with it and gotten everything she wanted, those wounds would be there forever. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got summer camp, December 10th through 13th.

It's called Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp. That's sound fun. An amazing four-day festival hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to Death, two awesome podcasts. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast astonishing, in addition to a roster of unbelievable stand-up comics and local bands. Go to Badmagic Productions.com for more information and to buy tickets. Then we've got our True Crime Cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12, 2027. If you want to come on vacation with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal

podcasts in the world, like Case File, True Crime Garage, last podcast on the left, scared to death, here's what you got to do. Tickets are on sale now and they are going fast. So if you want to go, make sure you get over to crimewaveatc.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave atc.com slash campfire.

So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Derek, Matt, Isa, or possibly Issa, either way it's pretty, Alex and Becky. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content,

like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And when you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.

It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, Let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.

It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Dukovney type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. From the parents behind Law and Order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Picklebottom,

a precocious 11-year-old with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Pickle Bottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grownups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now wherever you get your podcasts.