True Crime Campfire - Perfect Stranger: The Murder of Jamie Laiaddee

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

How well do we know the people in our lives? Our coworkers, our friends, the loved ones we sleep next to at night? Everyone decides for themselves how much to share about their private lives. Some of us are over-sharers, posting screenshots of our breakup texts and lunches. Others are closed books, only sharing personal info on a need-to-know basis—and even then, reluctantly. But it’s an almost universal truth that everyone has secrets. We can only know another person as well as they let themselves be known. Most of the time, the secrets we keep are pretty mundane. But once in a while, they’re earth-shattering. Once in a while, we may dig into the life of someone we care about and find something we would never have imagined in our worst nightmares. Once in a while, a secret can be deadly. Sources:CBS "48 Hours Mystery," episode "The Stranger Beside Me"Investigation Discovery "Grave Secrets," episode "Ten Weeks Later"https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remains-found-in-arizona-idd-as-long-missing-woman-jamie-laiaddee/https://www.azfamily.com/archives/jamie-laiaddees-convicted-killer-speaks-from-prison-after-her-remains-identified/article_2b4a4a0b-e526-5f7d-9de8-6f87d5eb5d5d.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, a free sticker and more!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

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. How well do we know the people in our lives? Our coworkers, our friends, the loved ones we sleep next to at night? Everyone decides for themselves how much to share about their private lives. Some of us are oversharers, posting screenshots of our breakup texts and lunches. Others are closed books, only sharing personal info on a need-to-know basis. And even then, reluctantly. But it's an almost universal truth that everyone has secrets. We can only know another person as well as they let themselves be known.

most of the time the secrets we keep are pretty mundane but once in a while they're earth-shattering once in a while we may dig into the life of someone we care about and find something we would never have imagined in our worst nightmares once in a while a secret can be deadly this is perfect stranger the murder of jamie laity So, campers, we're in Chandler, Arizona, May 28, 2010. Police received a worried call from a Mr. Laity. His 32-year-old daughter, Jamie, was missing, he said. No one had heard from her since March. Now, remember, I just said this was May 28th.

So this was 10 weeks ago. Mr. Laity told police that he and his wife were somewhat estranged from Jamie. They weren't used to hearing from her on a regular basis. But nevertheless, Jamie's parents were still her parents. They loved her. And they'd been completely horrified when they realized that no one had seen or heard from her in 10 weeks, two and a half months. So by the time they called the Chandler PD, they were frantic.

Detective Nathan Moffat was assigned to take the case, and he says the hair on the back of his neck stood up a little bit when he found out how long it had been since anyone had seen or spoken to Jamie Laudy. He said, we were ten weeks behind the eight ball. The trail was almost already cold. Yeah, that statistic about the first 48 hours being the most important in a missing person's case is no joke. Yeah, definitely. Statistically, if you go missing, the odds of finding you alive and well, sharply drop after that mark. So the first thing Detective Moffitt did was to pay a visit to Jamie's house. He peeked in the windows, looked into the little garage windows,

And he noticed that her car was still in the garage, or at least one of her cars was. DMV records showed that Jamie had two cars, but Moffat only saw the one at her house. Nobody came to the door when he knocked, so because she'd been reported missing and it had already been so long since anybody had seen or spoken to her, Detective Moffat and his partner decided to go ahead and force their way into the house. Now, the inside of the house wasn't dirty, per se, but it was kind of unkempt. It was cluttered with clothes draped over furniture and some unopened mail on the table. but there were no signs of a struggle, no blood, no overturned furniture, anything like that. The fridge was empty.

Okay, there is nothing freakier to me about this case than that detail. Yeah. Because an empty fridge means someone isn't coming back. Yeah, that's true. I actually hadn't thought about that until you said it, but it is a little creepy. And the detectives were thinking the same thing at that stage. You know, could Jamie have just walked away from her life? It's been known to happen.

And here we have a young woman who's estranged from her family, so no close family ties. So it was a possibility, for sure. But as they continued to search her house, that started looking more and more unlikely. Mainly because she left behind a ton of stuff, clothes, her luggage, and other personal items that you would expect a young woman to take with her

if she was going to leave by choice. I mean, if you're going somewhere, you don't want to just leave with the clothes on your back. You want to take your stuff. You've got to brush your teeth, right? You've got to keep up your skin care routine. You're not just going to disappear in a puff of smoke. I mean, even Jack Kerouack.

probably took a toothbrush and some spare jeans and t-shirts, right? I hope he took a toothbrush. Yeah. So the next step was for Detective Moffat to bring in Detective Jason Scouting, whose specialty was financial stuff, digging into someone's financial life to figure out if anything untoward is going on. Your money can tell a lot about you. So they wanted to know. Had Jamie been using her credit cards, her bank account, her email? Well, when's the last time she was active on any of this? Scouting, dove in. And while he was

getting started on that, Detective Moffat started digging in Jamie's personal life. He tracked down some of her close friends, and they all seemed really eager to help. They all said that Jamie was a private person, and it actually wasn't that weird for her to take off for a vacation and not tell anyone. As a matter of fact, this wasn't the first time her friends had gone months without hearing from her. And she'd rarely tell anyone where she'd been. Oh, so she's an international woman of mystery, like I pretend to be, to make myself seem more interesting. But she actually was. So a few of her friends had actually assumed Jamie had just moved away and hadn't had a chance to get back in touch yet. This was 2010, and people were still feeling the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

And as a casualty of the recession, Jamie had lost her job selling medical equipment. It was a great job, and she'd been really proud of it. And when she got laid off, it pretty much crushed her. I mean, in addition to the money worries that that created, it hurt her sense of self a little bit, which I can understand. I mean, it's not like she was the type of person who defined herself by her work or anything, but having this great job at her young age especially

was a source of pride, and it hurt to lose that. And like I said, I can understand that completely. And Jamie had struggled after she lost that job. But then, not long before she dropped off the map, she had told a few friends that she'd gotten a job off her out of state, and she was thinking about taking it. So, this lent some credence to the Jamie took off of her own accord theory. And the friends told Detective Moffat that wherever Jamie was, she might not be by herself. Jamie had a boyfriend, a personal trainer named Brian Stewart, and they'd been living together

since 2008. So this was huge, finding out that she had a boyfriend. I mean, here was someone who was probably closer to Jamie than anybody else. He might know where she was. He might be there with her. So Detective Moffat said about trying to track down Brian Stewart. But he couldn't pin the guy down. He tried unsuccessfully to find this guy for days. Now it was starting to look like he might have two

missing people on his hands. And on top of that, he couldn't stop thinking about how long it had taken Jamie's family to report her missing. Ten weeks. I mean, this could be bad. Yeah. So there was a lot of tension surrounding Jamie's family relationships. They definitely knew that.

And whenever they would ask her about her family, like her parents or her sister, Jamie's friends would always get a very firm, I don't talk about that. Like, end of discussion, brick wall, oof, right? Bad vibes. So as far as her friends knew, Jamie had sprung fully formed into adulthood the day she moved to Arizona. Like, no life before that. She did not talk about her background, except to let people know that she went to college at the University of Michigan. Yeah, Jamie was basically the Batman of her friend group. There's always one with the mysterious past that they don't talk about. Right, an international woman of mystery. So, in fact, she'd met most of her Arizona friends through a University of

Michigan alumni club. And she was still a huge fan of the college football team. That was, in fact, where she'd met her boyfriend, Brian Stewart. He was in Michigan alum, just like Jamie, and they would cheer together during the parties that the club threw at a sports bar and watched the games and everything. Everybody liked Jamie. She'd come bounding into the bar, big. Big, bright smile, always up and happy, greeting everybody by name. She was a breath of fresh air. People loved her. She seemed so easy to love, so easy to get along with.

So why all the tension with her family? They needed to find out. Jamie's father told Detective Moffat that the last time they'd actually spoken to Jamie on a regular basis was nine years ago. Damn, that's crazy. She thought I loved the older daughter better than her, Jamie's dad said. Now, the language of that struck Detective Moffat kind of oddly, the older daughter. Yeah. He didn't call her by name.

It felt kind of cold. Jamie's dad told Detective Moffat that they'd also fallen out over goals. The parents wanted Jamie to go to med school, and Jamie didn't want that. And that was it. They were at an impasse. But her parents were not the type to let it go. They were immigrants, very driven people. they didn't put up with what they considered to be wishy-washy behavior or weakness from their daughter.

Ooh, that sounds fun. Yeah, just a quick tip from me, by the way. Your kids are their own people. You got to let them be them, or you're going to have nothing but problems. Yeah, it seems like Jamie felt like they weren't respecting her choices, and that can be a rough thing to get past in a family. So Jamie hadn't really been involved with her family for almost a decade. She'd called them not long before she went,

missing to ask about coming to pick up some stuff of hers that they had at their house. But that was it. So obviously, that's why it took her parents so long to realize she was missing. They just weren't a regular part of each other's lives, like at all. Yeah, and it seemed like an unlikely possibility, but the detectives did wonder whether this tension with her family had anything to do with Jamie's disappearance. Jamie's friends told Moffat that Jamie had been going through a rough patch before she disappeared. And we already told you that she'd lost her job, right? Well, that happened right around her birthday.

Well, that's just tailor-made to pee all over your Cheerios. Bless her heart. God, happy birthday. You're fired. Thanks. Great. Yeah, and she'd been having trouble finding something to replace it, especially something that paid anywhere near as much as her old job.

She'd been looking obsessively, but not having much luck. And she was in financial trouble. too. Her friends got the impression that despite the high-paying job she had before, she hadn't saved a ton of money. And now she was in really dire straits. Close to broke. She was depressed and anxious, and her friends both in Arizona and back in Michigan, were worried about her. Her Michigan friends hadn't been hearing from her as much lately, and that was out of character for Jamie. These women had been so close in college. They'd all shared a house together, gone to all the football games together, they were like sisters. And even after, they all kind of

scattered around the country for new jobs and relationships and whatnot, they still kept in touch. So for Jamie to go dark was worrisome. But they were hundreds of miles away, spun off into their own separate lives, and they didn't really know what to do about it. You can only reach out so many times and get no response before you kind of start to get the impression that, you know, the other person wants you leave them alone. And so they had kind of stopped trying. So Detective Moffitt, was hearing all this and trying his best to figure out whether he needed to be really worried about Jamie or if she just kind of set off on her own path. It really seemed at this point like it could go either way. So he tried to reach both Jamie and Brian by phone repeatedly in the first few days

of the investigation with no results. He dug into public records to try to find Brian, but it was weird. Jamie's Chandler, Arizona house was the only result that came up on him. Nothing before, nothing after. And when they looked around Jamie's house, there had been nothing to suggest Brian or any other man lived there. They didn't find any of his clothes, his mail. Bupkis. It was a Brian-free zone. Moffitt wondered if maybe Jamie's missing second car, a Ford escape, ironically, was the key to finding Jamie and Brian.

So the cops decided to devote their efforts to finding the car, which is often the first big step in a missing person's investigation. If you find the car, maybe you find the person. So they put out a Bolo, which means be on the lookout if you're not familiar with cop slang, for Jamie's car and license plate, and surprisingly, they got a hit right away. The SUV was only 18 miles away in Scottsdale. So, holy shit. Had Jamie and Brian just been hanging out in Scottsdale all along? They'd found the car via a license plate reader and they checked for an address near where the car had been recorded. The nearest place was a gated condo

complex, so they hauled ass over there and staked out the place. That night, hours into the stakeout, Jamie's SUV finally pulled up to the gate. So the officer staking out the condo complex got out of the car, approached the SUV, had his flashlight, shone it into the cab, illuminating the surprised mug of the driver. The officer asked the guy, you know, are you Brian Stewart, Jamie Laudy's boyfriend? And the driver said, I'm Brian Stewart, ex-boyfriend, yes. So he was careful to correct them about that, which is interesting, right? He said Jamie had moved to Colorado about two and a half months ago and he hadn't seen her since.

He seemed surprised to see them, I bet. He kind of chuckled and said, look, Jamie's fine, okay? She's not missing, I assure you. Oh, I'll take worse things to say to police investigating a missing person for $500, Alex. Make sure you use that word missing before they do. That's smart. And he said it was such confidence, and he kind of laughed. I mean, it was really not great.

So right out of the gate, we're doing great, Brian. Keep it up, bud. And the police weren't thrilled about the fact that Brian was driving around in a missing person's car. Yeah. And when they found out he was driving around on a suspended license, they put the habeas grabus on him and hauled him in for questioning. I cannot get enough of you saying habeas grievous. It's just one of my favorite things in the world.

When we do a side show, that's what we should call it. habeas grab us. Oh, I love that. Yes. Yes, that's happening. All right. So back at the station, in an interrogation room, Brian sat back in his chair and said, look, the backdrop on this story is that Jamie hated living in Arizona, and she wanted out

really bad. She'd accepted a job. He said he didn't remember the name of the company. And he told them that on March 17th, he and Jamie had a serious conversation. Jamie wanted to move to Denver and take this job, and she wanted him to go with her. She wanted to get married. She wanted to really start their life together. Brian said that that wasn't what he wanted, and he told her so. He told her, listen, I'm not going to Denver with you. I'm not going to marry you. Ouch, that stinks.

Uh, yeah. Jamie had been upset, he said, and it had been a long conversation, but eventually they'd made peace. They'd spent the night together, and the last time he'd seen her was when he kissed her on the forehead, still asleep, early the next morning on his way to work. It was March 18th, 2010. After that, he said, he had no idea where she'd gone. Now, Moffat sat there and digested all this for a minute. Then he said, why do you have her car? Brian said, Jamie gave it to me, like sort of a parting gift, something to remember her by.

She knew I needed a car. A parting gift. See, I didn't know you got one of those at the end of a relationship. All any of my asshole ex-boyfriends ever gave me was bitterness and emotional baggage. I'd have much preferred a nice new car, for sure. Right? Like a consolation prize. Yeah, definitely.

Or at least like some chocolates or something. God. We're missing out, apparently, on the ex-boyfriend game. Well, again, I have shitty exes, so it's not a surprise. So until Brian said that, Moffitt was hanging in there with him. Sure. It all sounded pretty plausible. but a fucking parting gift?

Seriously? Yes, officer, my parting gift from the missing person is an expensive car. No, I can't tell you where she is. No, I have no proof. Yes, I expect you to believe that. And there was something troubling about Brian's body language, too. Arms crossed kind of defensively over his chest, a lot of fidgeting around in the chair.

It was all making Moffat's spidey senses twitch. He was starting to really worry about his missing person. So he just asked Brian point-blank. Did you hurt Jamie? Did you have anything to do with her disappearance? No and no, Brian said. But Moffat was worried. They could only hold this guy for a short time on this suspended license charge.

They hadn't yet been able to confirm or deny his claim that Jamie was in Colorado, and he was afraid that if Brian bonded out, he'd be in the wind. He could just feel it in his bones that this was the kind of guy who'd run like a rabbit. So the cops got a warrant to search Brian's house. And holy shit, y'all. So first of all, his place was almost creepily meticulous, perfectly neat. Like clothes, color-coded in the closet, cans and boxes in the kitchen, perfectly arranged, nothing out of place. Kind of like a movie set of a house, not a real house.

And, I mean, there's nothing wrong with being clean and neat. Listen, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder well-treated now, so I'm not judging. I get that. but like in Brian's case for some reason it creeps me out because it adds to sort of a general sense of coldness for me so yeah it was almost like a movie set and quite a contrast also to the way that they'd found Jamie's house I mean hers had been kind of cluttered and lived in and in the midst of all this obsessive perfection they found in Brian's study a woman's wallet on the desk and a white envelope full of something that rattled when they moved the envelope

And when an officer pulled open the flap and dumped out the contents, their stomachs dropped into their feet. Because it was Jamie Ladies, driver's license, and two of her credit cards cut up into hundreds of tiny pieces. Now, why the hell did Brian Stewart have this stuff? Okay. Hang on. Let's not jump to conclusions. Oh, all right. Well, let's slow up a second, then. What have you got for me? Well, I think I can come up with fairly good explanations for why Brian would have all this stuff. All right, well, lay them on me. Okay, one, she gifted them to him when she left.

Oh, right. Oh, like the car. Yeah, a parting gift of sorts. I'm sure. Two, she told him to use them as confetti for a party. Oh, no, that one I like. That makes sense. Right.

And three, he found them like that officer, honest. Oh, I've got one to add. How did those get there? I've never seen him before in my life. That would work, too, right? Okay, so then they found a ton of receipts in a file cabinet, receipts that showed what Brian Stewart had been using Jamie's credit cards for. Specifically, adult dating websites and a whole bunch of stuff that Jamie clearly did not purchase herself.

We'll just put it that way. They later found out that when they found Brian the night they arrested him, he was coming back from a hookup that he'd met on one of these adult sites he'd used Jamie's credit card to sign up for. Real classy there, Brian. and real responsible of him to keep the receipts. I know. Well, he is meticulous. We know this, right? So re-enter Detective Scouting, the financial records guy from earlier. He dug around in Brian's filing cabinet and found some very interesting stuff.

For example, a birth certificate that looked fishy as hell. Instead of being typed, as most birth certificates are, this one was handwritten. Scouting also found a priority mail envelope addressed to her Rick Wayne Valentini, to another address in Scottsdale. Now, who the hell is Rick Valentini? Is Brian stealing people's mail now? Is this an identity theft thing? Yeah, then Scouting found a divorce decree,

also in the name of Rick Wayne Valentini. Now, why the hell does Brian Stewart have somebody else's divorce paperwork? Something is askew here, campers. So the detectives tracked down the woman on the paperwork. She told them that she and Rick Van Gogh. Valentini had married in Michigan, gotten divorced, and Rick had moved to Arizona. She said, he'd stolen a lot of money and credit cards from my father, and he left. When he resurfaced, she said, he told her that he was going to start over under a new name.

Now, can you guess what the new name was? Can you play the Jeopardy music while I think about it for a second? Do do, do, do, do, do. Was it Brian Stewart? Yes, ma'am. Ten points to Ravenclaw. Thank you. Apparently, Rick slash Brian wanted to get away.

Not only from the problems he'd created with his ex-wife's father, but also from child support payments he owed to another woman for their daughter that they had together. Gross. And apparently he had a, quote, bad family situation. Holy shit. Then Detective Moffat asked Rick slash Brian's ex. if she'd ever known him to be violent and she said oh yes she sure had during one big fight he'd hit her and grabbed her by the hair because he said she'd quote made him look like a fool yeah something tells me he didn't need any help in that regard but okay yeah we'll learn that he he doesn't need help but

there it was rick wayne valentini aka brian stewart was a con man a con man with a history of violence against women. Yikes. Now cops had enough to hold on to Briarick for a while. Yes, we will henceforth be referring to him as Briarick. Yeah. The fraud charges would give them time to continue digging into Jamie's disappearance and figure out what other secrets this guy might be hiding. They kept digging through Brian's stuff, and eventually they found a bill from a storage facility. Now, they have expected to find Jamie's body in the storage unit, so it was a tense ride-out.

there. And everybody held their breath when they opened the door, but she wasn't there. What they did find was a sought-off shotgun, a shovel covered in clumped-up dirt, and a roll of plastic sheeting. Oh boy. Proof of anything? No. Enough to give you a sick feeling in your gut? Oh yes. Yeah, but let's put a pin in that for a second. We need to get a little background on Brian and Jamie. Initially, they'd seemed like a great match. They had the same sense of humor, and they'd play off each other, kind of riffing back and forth. Brian was solicitous of Jamie. He'd bring her stuff, brush her hair away from her face, little caretaking moves like that. Refill her drinks at the sports bar where they hung out with their Michigan friends.

At one point, Brian confided in a mutual friend that he thought Jamie was the one, the woman he wanted to marry. And Jamie said she couldn't see herself with anybody else but Brian. But after a while, there were some warning signs that all was not quite right with Brian. Jamie noticed occasional little inconsistencies in the stories that he told about his background. Nothing you couldn't shrug off, but there were enough of them that it would sometimes give her pause. And then, in the summer of 2007, he was arrested for burglary. Jamie paid for his attorney, and the charges were reduced to trespassing. But she was freaked out enough to hire a PI to look into his background.

The investigation didn't reveal anything, so she stayed with him. Of course, it didn't reveal anything because the background check the detective did was on Brian Stewart, not Rick Wayne Valentini. That's how they get you. Although it does make me wonder how thorough this private eye was. Like, didn't he notice that this dude's life started like a few years ago? Or maybe Briarick had just done a really good job of kind of seasoning the identity and faking some stuff earlier than them. I mean, you can do that. I don't know. I wasn't able to find that information. When Detective Scalton dug deeper into Jamie's credit card statements, by the way, he found the payment for that private eye, and he and Detective Moffat wondered if this was the

motive for the murder that they were now sure had taken place. Did Jamie finally figure out that Brian wasn't who he said he was? And did she confront him about it? And did he freak out? So as their relationship progressed, friends noticed Jamie becoming more isolated, more withdrawn. They had initially liked Brian, but he started to grate on their nerves. There was something about him that seemed insincereer. He'd overreact to the football games, almost like he was acting. They also sensed that he wasn't treating Jamie well anymore. Jamie was so private that she wouldn't tell anyone anything that went on between them, but something was eating away at her in the months leading up to her disappearance.

Was it just the job search? Or was it something else? Now, Moffat and Scouting were convinced Brian had shot Jamie and buried her somewhere, but they didn't have Jamie's body, and it is hard to get a prosecutor to take the case without that. But they did have Brian in custody for fraud, and eventually an inmate who had been housed with him reached out to detectives. Now, Brian had been a chatty Kathy. Bless his heart. Apparently, he'd been worrying aloud quite a bit, asking other inmates, they can't connect me without her body, right?

Oh, wow. Way to play it cool, Briarick. Good job, man. You know, campers, remember this for future reference, okay? If there's anybody in this bad old world that you can really trust, it's fellow inmates at the county jail. So if you're ever locked up for something, make sure you spill your guts to the first person that's nice to you. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, if you commit murder, actually do that, though. It saves everyone a lot of time. It saves a lot of time and money and resources.

Yeah. So the jailhouse snitch said that Brian had confessed to him. He said he'd shot Jamie with a sought off shotgun, like the one of the one of the one of the jailhouse. in the storage unit, and he dumped her in the desert. Along with the other evidence they'd gathered, that inmate's statement was enough to finally charge Brian Stewart-slash Rick Valentini with the murder of Jamie Laity in March 2011, about a year after she disappeared. Detectives and prosecutors also discovered, as the investigation continued, that Brian had

lied about lots of other stuff, too. He'd never even gone to college, so he wasn't a University of Michigan alum. the very way he'd met Jamie was a total lie. When asked about this later, by 48 hours Aaron Moriarty, he said, well, you don't have to be an alum to join the Boosters Club. Okay, possibly not, my man, but the point is, you told everyone you were one. And this is interesting.

It reminds me of a moment from the Scott Peterson case, if I may take us briefly down a rabbit hole. You guys know I love to talk about Scotty P. So this is according to Scott's half-sister Ann Bird, whose book Blood Brother is one of the most fascinating true crime reads I've ever encountered and it tells you a lot about the Peterson case if you're not familiar. Anne Byrd was a staunch supporter of her brother at first until she slowly, very painfully, came to the realization that he was the guiltiest guilt face and all of

guiltvania, right? Which was, again, very painful for her because she loved him. Anywho, at one point, Anne was talking with her and Scott's mom, Jackie Peterson, about the fact that Scott had called his mistress during the candlelight vigil they were having for his missing wife Lacey and lied to her that he was at the Eiffel Tower in Paris watching the fireworks. So as worried friends and family held candles and prayed for Lacey, who was almost nine months pregnant and had been missing for weeks, Scott found a quiet spot to get out his little cell phone and call his mistress. And he regaled her with all kinds of made-up nonsense about where he'd supposedly been during this quote-unquote work trip he was on to Europe the past few days, right? It was incredibly damning.

And when Anne brought this up to Jackie and said, Jackie, why would he do this? Why would he lie to his mistress about being in Europe while we're here looking for Lacey? Jackie said, well, Scott has been to all those places. He has been to the Eiffel Tower. I'm sorry, what? Okay, honey, whether he had or had not at some point in his life been to the Eiffel Tower is hardly the point. The point was he was telling his mistress he was there now when he was, in fact, at a candlelight vigil for his missing pregnant wife.

Cheese and crackers. But you see liars do this a lot to try and kind of justify their lies and not have to take responsibility. And they really should quit it because it doesn't work, number one, and it also just makes them look ridiculous. Oh, and Briarick had also lied about serving in the military. Charming. Right.

Yeah, got to love that stolen valor, right? Yeah, there's just something about that, man. It's really gross. So, like a good narcissist, Brian continued to be a chatty-cathy all throughout his trial. He talked to the show 48 hours, and it is a treat. Oh, it really is. He made an absolute fool of himself. We highly recommend watching it. Yeah, and there's also this fun blog where a criminologist named Ursula Franco does a linguistic analysis of Briarick's speech patterns and word choices to show where he's lying, basically, in that 48 hours interview, which obviously

you can't necessarily. It doesn't prove anything, but I find linguistic analysis kind of interesting. And she identifies some red flags. So we won't go into the whole thing, but we wanted to pull out a few points. So one of the things that she brings up is that he uses a lot of extraneous words and phrases in his answers. So for example, Aaron Moriarty asked him, when is the last time you saw Jamie? And Brian said, physically saw her? 3.15 a.m. March 18, 2010. Physically saw her. Okay. So why would he need to say physically saw her? Franco says, is he comparing physically was something else? Was she an inanimate body at 3.15 a.m.? Really interesting, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And she goes on to say, quote, when a subject asks the question and does not wait for the interviewer to answer, it may be an indication that the subject is reliving the event, working from experiential memory and speaking to himself, like just kind of in a reverie and walking himself through it.

Mm-hmm. Really interesting. She also identifies what she calls bad denials in Brian's interview. So, for example, Erin, Moriarty said, did you kill Jamie? Brian said, no, I've never killed anybody in my life, not ever. Now, according to Franco, all the words that he adds to that initial no weaken his denial. She says, I've never killed anybody in my life, not ever, is an unreliable denial, that he's altering his denial to avoid a direct lie. She says the word never is often used by deceptive people to avoid referring to a specific time period, which I had never considered before. But when you watch that interview, it does actually give that impression. And when I read that in her analysis, it actually rang really true to me after actually

watching that interview. So it's interesting, right? So according to Franco, a reliable denial has three components. The pronoun I, the past tense verb like did not or didn't, and the accusation actually answered instead of danced around. And if a denial has more than three or less than three components, according to her, it's longer as reliable. So she says if he had just said, no, I did not kill Jamie and maybe followed it with something like I told the truth while actually addressing the denial, that would have

been much more reliable. In fact, she goes as far as to say it would more than 99% likely be true. Now, that I have a hard time believing because I get dubious anytime people say stuff like this is 99% likely because it sounds just a little bit unscientific to me. Like you probably We just pulled that right out of your ass. But nevertheless, I think this analysis is interesting. Stuff like body language analysis, linguistic analysis, it's not proof of anything ever, but it's one more tool in the toolbox, I think, especially when someone is trained in it and when there's a sort of obvious logic to it, as there isn't a lot of what she says on her blog.

It's just something to add to the list of points to consider. You can't consider it evidence, but it's there as one of many tools. well and there's something to be said about your instinct because when you're watching his interview and we'll post it for you guys as well if we can find a link you guys have to watch this interview yeah it's a disaster just in your gut you're like he's lying he's lying he just telegraphs i mean he oozes deception and just about every word he says he makes a complete jackass of himself yeah yeah for example at one point during the interview erin moriarty absolute fucking queen said something and i met her at crime con in 2017

and I was super excited about it. Oh, she's so cool. I know I love her. So Aaron Moriarty at one point said something like, you've repeatedly said that all you'd need is a computer and you could find Jamie right now. Well, I've got my iPad right here. Can you do it?

Campers. You have never, ever seen anybody backpedal so feverishly in your life. Then when he goes, oh, well, I think. have to have my computer. There was like a special email site she used and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's so cringeworthy. Yeah, and that's part of what for me makes him extra loathsome that he's not even a good liar. He's not even a good con man. It just makes it somehow worse to me that he's so shitty at it. Yeah, you and I have talked about this before. It's like if we ever get murdered, at least do it. You better come. Yeah, come correct.

Come correct. Absolutely. So, Briarick's story was that Jamie had taken $100,000 of daddy's money, direct quote, and left the state. He said he taught Jamie how to assume a fake identity so she could escape her life and her demanding family. Which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, given that she'd already been estranged from them for nine years. But okay, bud, whatever. And if it wasn't for all the other evidence and how, like, crappy a liar he is, that might have actually been a fairly convincing defense. You know, she found out who I really was.

She said, hey, can you teach me? I taught her. But something tells me it didn't work out too well for Briarick here. Uh, yeah. Not so much. Against all legal recommendations, he took the stand. Yep. This man took the stand.

and made a total dip shit out of himself, insisting on being called Brian Stewart. On 48 hours, he blubbed about, Your name is the core of who you are. He's nauseating. And he said he changed his name, not legally, it should be pointed out, to Brian Stewart to escape his bad childhood. Uh-huh. Nothing to do with those fraud charges and all that back child support you owed back in Michigan, right? Sure. Sure, Pumpkin.

Yeah, and lots of people have bad childhoods, dude, and they don't do what you did. So we really cannot overstate what a loathsome little twat he is on that 48 hours episode. Like, you seriously, it is worth watching. One of the worst things, during the time Jamie was missing, her parents were all over the media, crying, begging for information about her whereabouts. It was heartbreaking to see. It's clear that despite their estrangement, Jamie's parents and her sister love her very much and miss her terribly.

And during the trial, Brian Fuckface had the nerve to stand up there and say, yeah, Jamie's living out of state incognito because of her absolute hatred and fear of her father. What an asshole. You know, it's not enough that you took this woman's life, took her away from her family forever, and now you have the almighty nerve to sit up there on that stand and twist the knife. Just fuck all the way off, you subhuman. sack of shit. Oh, I hate this guy. So when Jamie's mother testified, she cried the whole time. It was awful. And at one point, the prosecutor asked her, do you know where Jamie is? And she just

sounded so sad when she said no. And the next question was, and you're not helping her hide? And the mom just looked so desperate like she would just give anything to be able to honestly answer yes to that question, to be helping her daughter hide, because then she'd know she was okay. And she sort of just choked out this heartbreaking little, oh, no. And man, it takes a lot to really, like, hit me in the sweet spot, but that just, oh, my God. Yeah. It was so sad. It just, oh, heartbreaking. And also at the trial, one of Brian's personal trainer clients testified that during their sessions together, Brian constantly complained about Jamie, calling her a fat bitch. His nickname for her was Jamie the gut

which is just charming I mean Jamie was a beautiful girl like every picture I've seen of him like she was just absolutely like luminous gorgeous and he has the nerve to call her Jamie the gut and the client was horrified and finally she asked him why the hell

he didn't just leave her if he hated her so much and it should surprise no one to hear Briarick's answer that he stayed with Jamie because she paid most of the bills well since he was so eager to make fun of her appearance, I think I should get a couple roasts to even the score.

Now, I'm not going to make fun of his appearance, even though it'd be so easy, because I am better than you, Rick, buddy, pal, you may be in good shape, but that doesn't make up for the fact that you were too fucking stupid to keep your big, dumb mouth shut for long enough to keep yourself out of prison. And I've noticed people that body shame are always insecure about something. And I would like to venture a guess that maybe our friend Briarick is intimidated by people who are smarter than them, which I can only assume is 75% of the fucking population. I think that's generous, but yeah, definitely.

You kept a missing person's car because you were a greedy little rat. So maybe keep your porch swept before you start criticizing. other people. Dude, you had a 10-week head start and you still couldn't get your house in order. I know, right? You're a gross, pathetic little worm that belongs in prison for the rest of your sad, sad life. Go to hell, Brian. Take the twisty slide there, please. For one last moment of joy before you're just plunged into eternal torment. So I have to say that was impressive. That was a good rant. And for that, I think we can maybe just make fun of his appearance a little bit, just as a treat. And he's actually a decent looking guy as much as it galls me to say it, so whatever.

But he has maybe what you might call ill-advised hair, or at least he did when he was dating Jamie. I'm so excited. Ryric, your long hair looks like a cheap wig used for a bad fantasy-themed porno. Like the throbbit, perhaps. Yes. Or, Game of Mones. The sword and the bone. Lord of the cock rings.

See, we didn't really want to make fun of his hair. We just really wanted to make up some fantasy-themed porno names. That's true. That's true. So, shocker of shockers for a con man piece of trash like Brian, he was using Jamie for her money. And when she lost her high-paying job, she became surplus to requirements.

And whether he killed her because she'd found out he wasn't who he said he was or because she decided to dump his bitch ass and take that job in Denver and didn't want him to come along, who knows? But Brian Stewart slash Rick Valentini was convicted of Jamie's murder and sentenced to 22 years in prison, which in my opinion is not enough. I don't think you should ever see daylight again. No. And if we needed any further evidence of that, any further evidence of the shape of this man's soul, one of Jamie's friends says that at the sentencing, she made eye contact with him. And he had known her too. They were both members of that alumni club.

So she looked him in the eye, and he looked at her and said, and I quote, I'm going to fucking kill you, you stupid bitch. Wow. Holy crap. Definitely innocent. That's what innocent men do for sure, threatened to kill a missing person's friend. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a hell of a thing.

Like, you don't see that very often. Even with really shitty people. Like, even most serial killers don't do stuff like that. Because, you know, most of them are smart enough not to show their hand like that in a courtroom. But as we've established, Briarick ain't that bright. Bless his heart. Yeah, and Jamie's body went undiscovered for another 10 years. Then, in July 2018, some developers digging in a remote area in the Arizona desert finally found her.

Her official cause of death hasn't been released yet, but I imagine it's going to turn out that she was shot with a sought-off shotgun. Yeah, and there's a heartbreaking story. from right after the trial. So before they found Jamie's body, but after he was sentenced, her mother told reporters that she had brought Jamie home from the hospital in this little hospital blanket, which she had in her hands at the time. And she said, I just hope we can find her so that I can bring her home again in the same blanket. Oh, my God.

Just take a minute for that. Bless that poor woman's heart. And it really hurts me to think that Jamie died before she and her family could make amends, you know? I mean, it was so obvious watching them. I'm sure nobody's blameless in it. And I'm sure there were real reasons why they had so much trouble and probably mistakes made on both sides. But it was so obvious to me watching them at her trial that they do love her a lot. And they were completely devastated to lose her.

And I have a feeling that at some point, it would have been possible for them to get back together as a family. And that that estrangement wouldn't have gone on forever. But now, you know, they'll never have the chance to find out because of shit-stain, Brian Stewart, slash Rick Valentini. And by the way, have you noticed how often the middle name of a killer is Wayne? Yeah. Like, no offense if your middle name is Wayne, okay? I'm not saying you're a killer.

But it's just, it seems like it's always like Earl Wayne somebody or, you know, we got a Rick, Wayne Valentini. Wayne, Dwayne, Earl. These are all very common serial killer names. Yeah. Anyway. I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird. He still maintains his innocence.

He has an appeal pending. That narcissist piece of shit will know. never admit what he did, I'm sure. So we can only be glad that for the moment anyway, he is where he belongs and hope he stays there many, many, many more years. So this 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 we want to send some shouts out to some of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Anne-Marie, Claire, Caitlin, and Cheryl. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And if you haven't

become a patron, you're missing out. Patrons get every episode ad-free at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra Patreon exclusive episode every month, a free sticker, a super rad enamel pen while supplies last for patrons in the $5 and up categories, and more. We're always working on cool stuff for you. So if you can, come join us. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.