True Crime Campfire - Shadow of Death: Sinister Minister James Flanders

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

In the Bible, First Corinthians 13:4 says, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” It’s actually a pretty good definition of love—the kind most of us hope to have in our lives someday. And it's a definition you’d expect a man of God to live by. A pastor is called to be an example to his congregation. Not to be perfect, but at least transparent—sincere—and a soft place to fall for anyone who’s struggling. But for one congregation in Florida, their leader’s charm and charisma was nothing more than a trap. Join us for the story of Pastor James Flanders, the dynamic head of the Calvary Emerald Coast church in Fort Walton Beach--and Marie Carlson, the lovely young mother he lured into a web of lust, lies and murder.Sources:https://thecinemaholic.com/marie-carlson-murder-where-is-james-flanders-now/ https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/entertainment/local/2018/03/03/dateline-nbc-to-feature-local-murder-mystery-photos/13769313007/ NBC's "Dateline," Episode “Secrets on the Emerald Coast” https://www.sheriff-okaloosa.org/former-fwb-pastor-arrested-in-connection-with-disappearance-and-murder-of-marie-carlson/ https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news/2015/12/02/pastor-charged-with-murder-granted/32912916007/ https://2paragraphs.com/2018/03/dateline-marie-carlsons-daughter-6-in-custody-of-james-flanders-wife/ https://www.myheraldreview.com/news/willcox/mom-murdered-by-dad-custody-granted-to-murderers-cochise-county-family/article_440eb8a0-d936-5f04-b1b3-eca75ca6cccf.html https://www.destinchamber.com/news/details/eccac-board-welcomes-lt-nesli-suhi-moore TV show "Cold Justice," Episode “Devoted”*Thanks to patron and friend Megan for her help with this episodeFollow 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/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. In the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13.4 says, love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not bow. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. It's actually a pretty good definition of love, the kind most of us hope to have in our lives

someday. And it's a definition you'd expect a man of God to live by. A pastor is called to be an example to his congregation. Not to be perfect, but at least transparent, sincere, and a soft place to fall for anyone who's struggling. But for one congregation in Florida, their leader's charm and charisma was nothing more than a trap. This is Shadow of Death, Sinister Minister James Flanders. So, campers, for this one, we're in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, October 19th, 2011. The family and friends of a woman named Marie Carlson received a group text from her that didn't quite sit right. It read,

Yesterday I left Fort Walton Beach. There's something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and there will be no better time than now to do it. I didn't tell any of you what I've been planning or that I was about to leave because you would have probably tried to talk me out of it. I appreciate and love all of you. She'd supposedly left her new baby, little Grace, with her friend and pastor James Flanders and his wife, Tanya. This was just weird. It didn't sound like Marie's voice, for one thing, her way of texting, and for two, it didn't seem like her to pick up and leave like this without more of a real explanation. And without telling her loved ones face to face, especially her seven-year-old daughter, Paris.

But the weirdest thing by far was that Marie would leave Grace with the past. pastor and his wife, instead of with her own family. She and her sister Esta were best friends. Marie knew she could leave either of her two daughters with her any time she needed to. Why wouldn't she do that if she had to leave town for some reason? The text especially troubled Jeff Carlson, Marie's ex-husband, and Paris's dad. Jeff and Marie hadn't worked out as husband and wife, but they were still fond of each other. They co-parented Paris together. They were friends. So, when a few days went by without any further communication from Marie, Jeff decided it was time to pull the trigger. He reported her missing.

And he was pleasantly surprised by the investigator's reaction. Unlike a lot of police departments, which don't seem to take it too seriously when an adult goes missing, the Okalusa County Sheriff's Office jumped right on the case. One of their detectives, Nesley Sui Moore, just had her first baby. And although Marie had a history of being kind of a free spirit and occasionally taking off on impromptu trips and stuff, she'd never done it without talking to her little girl first. And now she had a three-month-old baby, too. Nesley knew there was no way in hell

Marie would just abandon that little girl, or her seven-year-old either. She just knew it. And from the moment she caught the case, Nesley was like a dog with a bone, determined to find out what had happened to Marie Carlson. But let's put a pen in that for a minute and talk a little bit about Marie,

who, according to just about everybody in her life, was a bright light, somebody who made you feel better, just for being around her. She had that kind of warmth about her, and she was beautiful, too. That was her favorite word, beautiful. Her sister Estée used to tell her,

God, Marie, I wish I looked like you. And Marie would always tell her, you're beautiful the way you are. She meant it. And once you got to know Marie, you could tell it was important to her to make other people feel beautiful and cared for. Maybe it was because she hadn't had

such an easy start in life. She was born in 1974 to a single mom in the Philippines. and when it became clear that her mom couldn't take care of her, little Marie went to live with an American military man in his family. The man had a little girl, Esther, who quickly became Marie's best bud. They were so close, they felt like sisters. And funny thing about that, when Marie got a little older, her adoptive dad sat her down one day and dropped quite the bombshell on her. He wasn't her adoptive father after all, he told her. He was her actual biological dad, meaning Esther, her best friend in the first friend in the

whole world was her real-life sister after all. Felt right to Marie, and she and Esther stayed besties into adulthood. When they were old enough to move away from home, they got an apartment together, right next to a karaoke bar so they could go all the time and belt out their favorite songs, and they were the stars of that place. You a karaoke person, Katie? I haven't been in years, but I used to be a huge karaoke girl. Son of a preacher man was kind of my go-to. But I used to do duets. My brother and I did Man of Constant Sorrow one time. It was super fun. What about you? Well, you have a beautiful singing voice.

So I'm going to be real. I have done karaoke before, against my will. But it's truly my worst nightmare. Like, standing in front of strangers and singing. Okay, I do have a go-to song. It is the 1958 hit Tequila by the Champs. The laugh it gets is almost. worth of burning anxiety. And if you don't know, it's the song has literally three lines and all three

of them are tequila. You just stand there holding the mic, staring, waiting, smiling. It's a good laugh. It's a good bit. If you don't like singing, it's a good bit. That's how I got it. That's great. I love it. Marie was a ton of fun. She was adventurous and spontaneous. She loved to cook. She had a big, bright smile. And she was smart. too, driven. Despite being a little bit of a girly girl, she always wore pink. Marie was interested in a career in law enforcement. Specifically, she wanted to be an FBI agent one day. That was one of the things that really impressed Jeff Carlson when he first met Marie. Well, that and just about everything else about her. He was a smitten kitten from pretty much day one. And Marie fell hard for him too.

They got married and Marie went and got a degree in criminal justice. After graduation, she took a job as a deputy sheriff. It was the first step toward the FBI, and Marie was so excited. And she was even more excited when she and Jeff had their little girl, Paris. She looked like a miniature version of her mama, and Marie and Jeff both adored her. But sadly, the good times didn't last. Jeff later told NBC's dateline that Marie had some darkness in her past. She'd been sexually assaulted when she was younger, and Jeff felt like it made it

hard for her to love herself, as sad as that is. Marie struggled with the darker side of her personality, and their marriage suffered. They tried to fix it, but it just didn't take. But by the time Paris was three, Jeff and Marie were divorced, and Marie went off the rails a little bit. She had trouble holding onto a job, and she started moving around a lot. Jeff started to worry that it was a bad situation for Paris. Stability and routine are important for kids, especially kids that young.

after a lot of soul-searching, Jeff made a bid to take primary custody. At first, Marie was angry about it, wanted to fight it out in the courts, but eventually she realized Jeff was kind of right. Paris needed a stable home life, and Marie couldn't give it to her right then. So she told Jeff he could take her full time. Yeah, and I can imagine that was an especially hard call for her, given that her mom had to make a similar decision about her when she was little. But it was the right thing to do, and Marie still saw Paris all the time. This definitely was not a situation where her mom just up and abandoned her child. No, not at all. Paris just lived with Jeff. She got to see her mom a lot and Marie called her

every day. But I mean, obviously it wasn't a great situation for Marie. It hurt to have her little girl living somewhere else, not getting to tuck her into bed every night. So Marie was kind of scattered for a while, not sure where she was headed. Her dreams of pursuing a career in the FBI seemed to be on hold, or at least on the back burner until she could get back on her feet. And then, one Sunday, an acquaintance invited her to a church with them, a place called Calvary Emerald Coast in Fort Walton Beach. And just like that, at the end of a tough couple years, Marie felt like she'd finally come home again. A spiritual connection. That's what had been missing from her life since she and Jeff broke up. Marie threw herself into the life of her new church

community. The head of that community was a dynamic young pastor named Reverend James Flanders, and right away, he and his wife, Tanya, went out of their way to make Marie feel welcome. James Flanders. Oh my. So other than his love for the Lord, James didn't have much in common with his namesake Ned from the Simpsons. Ned Flanders is a dork and a green sweater and tie. James Flanders, on the other hand, well, he's not a regular preacher campers, he's a cool preacher. the kind who gets up there behind the pulpit and jeans and sneakers, you know? Kind who streams his sermons on

YouTube. There was nothing stuffy or stuck up about him. He kind of got the feeling he might even have a beer or two on occasion. Type a guy who tell the kids to call him by his first name. This is just a piece of TCC advice. Never trust a cool preacher. You want the Ned Flanders preacher.

You want the preacher that's going to be a little bit of a dork. A kind of guy that shows up to church bar Barbecues wearing his shorts real high up on his waist with a belt, cinched real tight, and his cell phone clipped to his belt, not a pocket, clipped to his belt. I went to my cool university chaplain once for advice, and he told me my problems were made up and gave me a copy of his book. The book that he got fired for writing during school hours, but I digress. After that, never, never could eat the monkey bread.

He made the team ever again. Wow, yikes. But Pastor James knew how to get the butts in the seats on Sunday morning. He was, as so, many of the good folks we cover on the show are charismatic. God, it's enough to make me wish I wasn't. I swear to God, not all us charismatic folks are eventually going to end up on the wrong end of a true crime podcast. Okay, I swear to God, we're really not. Humble brag.

Oh, hush. So, anyway, James was the kind of red-hot preacher everybody wants at the helm, and he and his wife, Tanya, had grown their californ. Elvery Emerald Coast Church from a tiny little seedling into a mighty oak. It wasn't a pretty place. It was in a strip mall and looked more like a defunct best buy than a house of worship, but it was, in the words of youth pastor Jason Anderson, a very happening place. Cool. The church was packed on Sundays and the congregation had a reputation for giving with both hands. They dug deep into their own pockets to help Hurricane Katrina

victims a few years earlier. Charity was a core value. One pastor James and his wife, practiced with conviction. And in 2009, Marie told her sister Esta that she was moving in with the pastor and his wife, just till she could get back under her feet, get stable enough to get Paris back full time. Estes was happy for her. Marie seemed happier than she'd been in years. This church, Pastor Flanders, and Tanya, they'd become like a second family to her. Esther was all for it. She figured her sister would take a little time to get herself together and then strike out on her own again, all spiritually renewed and reinvigorated. But the months went by and Marie stayed put. No word about moving out on her own. And then about a year after

she first moved in with James and Tanya Flanders, Esther noticed a hint of a baby bump. Still small, but unmistakable. Marie was pregnant. Now, as close as they were, Esther and Marie had always had kind of an understanding. Esta didn't pry into her sister's business. When Marie was ready to tell her something, she'd tell her, but she didn't take well to being pushed. So Esther figured, well, okay, she must be seeing somebody new. She'll tell me who the dad is when she's ready. The story going around Calvary Emerald Coast Church was that Marie's baby daddy was an abusive ex-boyfriend, an asshole who got her pregnant and abandoned her, leaving her with no choice, but to move in with Pastor James and his wife. Esta had no idea about any of that, but that's not particularly

unusual. A lot of abused women don't tell their families about it. They're embarrassed or they don't want the family to make it worse or whatever. Happens a lot. Anyway, in July of 2011, Marie gave birth to a little girl she named Grace, and Pastor James and his wife Tanya were right there to help take care of the baby and her. Youth pastor Jason Anderson said they told him Marie was down on her luck. They were just doing what they could to help out a new mom in need, the kind of thing pastors should do for their congregations. To the people who loved her most, Marie seemed to be in a great place, enjoying being a new mom again, spending time with her new church family. She seemed like she finally had some direction in her life again.

Everything seemed fine for the first few months of baby Grace's life, and then came October 19th, and that bizarre text message made even more bizarre by the fact that Marie had apparently left Grace with the pastor and his wife. So, as we told you before, Detective Nesley Suey Moore and our partner Keith Mott jumped right onto the missing person's case from day one. They did not buy the idea that Marie would abandon her three-month-old baby any more than Marie's family did, not to mention seven-year-old Paris. They'd also

quickly determine that Marie's bank account hadn't been touched. It's kind of hard to run off without money, so that was a flaming red flag. So, of course, one of the first things on their to do list was to talk to Pastor James and Tanya Flanders. They spoke with them about a week and a half after Marie went missing. James and Tanya both said they thought Marie had probably taken off to clear her head. I mean, she'd taken these kind of spur of the moment trips before. They expected, or hoped, at least, that she'd be back soon. But they were worried about her, no doubt. Marie struggled with mental illness, James pointed out. Marie was bipolar, he said, and she'd had to go off her meds because of the pregnancy. So she'd been having a

really tough time lately, depression and wild mood swings. And there was something else worrying the Flanders. Tanya showed them an empty prescription bottle with Marie's name on it, and the implication was clear that Marie might have taken the pills with her, intending to do herself harm. James said he'd been so worried about Marie on the day she went missing that he'd been afraid to leave her alone with a baby. He actually called into work so he could stay home and keep an eye on her. He said Marie had decided to take a nap at one point that afternoon, so Tanya took baby Grace out to run errands and give Marie some peace and quiet. When Marie woke up, James said, they'd had a brief conversation and then he went out for a run. And when he got back, she was gone. So was her white

pickup truck. She'd apparently packed a bag, too, James said, but she hadn't taken it with her. Hmm, that's weird. Yeah, very. It raised a little red flag for the investigators, too. Why the hell would she pack a bag and then not take it? So now we've got a woman who allegedly ran off without her children, her stuff, or her money. It didn't make sense. James and Tanya said that when Marie didn't come back after a couple of days, they decided to go out and look for her. Did you have around scanning around for her white Mazda truck?

And then James had an idea. They should check the airport parking lot. What if she'd taken a plane somewhere and left her truck in long-term parking? And, lo and behold, that's exactly where James and Tanya found the truck. They had a spare set of keys for it, so they decided to take it home with them. Interesting. The detectives immediately searched the truck, curious to see if it would give up any clues, either to Marie's whereabouts or maybe the identity of her asshole ex-boyfriend slash baby daddy.

But no joy. The truck was clean as a whistle. Almost kind of suspiciously clean. So why was Marie's car at the airport in the first place? We mentioned that her bank account hadn't been touched. There was no sign of her having bought a plane ticket anywhere. Had somebody else bought it for her, maybe? The ex-boyfriend?

Or maybe she'd left it there as a sort of red herring, a way to convince her family and friends that she'd gone off somewhere, far out of reach. That was a possibility. Or maybe she didn't drive it there at all. Maybe somebody heard her and drove it there to throw investigators off the scent. The detectives wanted to know which it was, and they had an ingenious idea to find out. They went to the long-term parking lot, collected all the little parking tickets that had come into the toll booth the day Marie disappeared,

and went through every godforsaken last one of them, until they found the one that matched her truck. I am completely gobsmacked that they were actually able to find the damn thing, and I was rooting for him so hard that they'd get like a usable fingerprint or some DNA off of it. But no such look. they did find a fingerprint but it was too smeared to get an ID so all that work for nothing just ugh so their next step was to collect the surveillance video from that day and lo and behold campers who do you think they saw pulling into that long-term parking lot in marie carlson's truck who well nobody because the gut dang surveillance cameras weren't working the day marie went missing y'all why does this always happen i swear to god it's like satan's first law of murder

investigations or something. Thy security cameras shall be broken or grainy and thou wilt not get to see shit. Damn you, Satan. Anyway, Detective Nestle Suey Moore, who by the way is a true badass and the undisputed hero of the story, said later that this case was pretty much an investigator's worst nightmare. Everything that could go wrong did. So by this point, Nestle and her partner Keith Mott were pretty sure they weren't dealing with a simple missing person's case. This was a homicide investigation, and the most difficult kind. They felt certain Marie had been murdered, but they didn't have her body. And proving murder when you don't have a body is tough. Not that it can't happen, it can, but it's going to be an uphill battle convincing a jury.

So the investigators decided, okay, Marie had spent the past couple years of her life totally immersed in the life of this Calvary Emerald Coast church. And churches, as anybody who's ever been to one knows, are pretty much like small towns. Everybody knows everybody else, business and nobody's keeping their mouth shut about it. Nesley and Keith wanted desperately to figure out who this abusive ex of Marie's was, the one that got her pregnant and bailed. And they figured if anybody would know, it would be one of her church friends. And the church members did seem to know a lot about Marie's pregnancy. One person confirmed that Grace's biodad was indeed an abusive ex-boyfriend, but Marie had been planning

to have an abortion, he said. And when Pastor James and Tanya found out about that, they intervened. Told Marie, they'd been trying for a baby for a while now, but Tanya kept having miscarriages. They told her, if she'd have the baby girl, they'd adopt her. Next, the detective spoke to one of the church elders. This guy said that Marie and the Flanders had made an agreement. Marie would stay with them for three months after the baby was born so she could nurse her, and then she'd leave. He called baby Grace a gift to the Flanders. This idea of baby grace as a gift to Pastor James and his wife was a pretty constant theme in interview after interview with the church folks. And although many of them mention Marie's alleged abusive ex, nobody knew his name. And the

detectives, increasingly, could not find a shred of evidence that the guy ever existed. And when they spoke to Marie's ex-husband Jeff, they got a very different story. One afternoon when Marie was just starting to show her pregnancy, she came over to visit Paris. And Jeff, who wasn't as shy as Esta, was about prying into Marie's life, just put his hand on her belly and said, so, uh, what's going on here? Marie laughed. Oh, she said. I've agreed to be a surrogate for Pastor James and Tanya.

Jeff was shocked. He's like, wow, a surrogate? Really? Yeah, Marie said. James and Tanya can't have kids of their own. Those two have done so much for me over the past year. I just want to give them something back. No mention whatsoever of an abusive boyfriend.

Marie told Jeff that they'd done a kind of homemade artificial insemination. and the sperm donor, Pastor James himself. Well, well, well. Yeah. So what was with the conflicting stories? They were going to need to get the truth, ASAP. Now, in their conversations with the church members thus far, they'd come across a group of women who described themselves as Tanya's bestest friends.

They called this little cadre of church ladies the inner circle. Okay, what is the plural for a group of church ladies? I mean, like with crows, it's a murder, with owls, it's a parliament, with cows, it's a herd. What is it with church ladies? A gossip? I don't know about that, but did you know that a group of unicorns is called a blessing? Oh, I didn't. That's so pretty.

So, anyway, they decided to bring the ladies in one by one and, you know, guilt trip the truth out of them. Oh, boy, Tanya's inner circle delivered like dominoes. See, apparently, over the course of several conversations, Tanya had gone from telling her besties that they'd used a turkey baster to impregnate Marie to admitting that they'd actually done things the old-fashioned way. The pregnancy was, as Tanya put it, homemade. Oh, homemade.

Such a nice, wholesome word when you're talking about cookies, when you're talking about babies. Oh, my God. Okay, Dr. Frankenstein, calm down. According to Tanya, James and Marie had actual S-E-X. And Tanya was there in the room, like, cheering them on, presumably including a foam finger and a Vuvazella. She said she was fine with it, wanted to be there when the baby was conceived.

Is it kinkshaming? corner time? I don't know if this is a kink. I don't know what this is. I feel like it's cuckolding. Like a weird. Well, no, it would be for some people. Weird religious cult cuckolding.

I wanted to, I wanted to be in there when the bait. That's wild. I don't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't king shame because they're not hurting anyone technically, right? They're just sharing it with their friends, which is still weird. Yeah. So I can't, I can't bring out the king. shaming corner, but like, I want you all to face it just momentarily. Tanya, James, face the kink

shaming corner momentarily. It just sounds excruciatingly awkward to me. It's so awkward. It's so awkward. Whatever. I can't even think about it any longer. I'll explode. I would want to cut a bitch. That's all. I mean, I'm unapologetic. Like, I could not. I'd be like, get off my husband. You wouldn't be, you wouldn't be holding up a sign? I would not have a phone finger. No. A few months later, some of the church people threw a baby shower. Not for Marie, for Tanya. There's a picture from that day. Marie and Tanya posing together.

Marie's there with her big pregnant belly, and Tanya's got a balloon stuck up her shirt to make her look like she's pregnant. Wild. This all sounded pretty far-fetched to the investigators. I mean, this is not exactly how you'd expect a preacher and his wife to go about having a kid, but the inner circle didn't seem to have any reason to lie. So the detectives invited the Flanders in for an interview to see if they could confirm this, frankly, banana pants story.

So they asked both of them to come, but only Tanya showed up. Huh. And it didn't take much to get her to spill the tea. In the kind of matter-of-fact tone you'd use to describe a lunch date, she told the detectives all about the night Grace was conceived. James and Marie had gotten all liquored up on sake, apparently. I was the only one sober, Tanya said. It was all fine with her, she explained to the detectives. Relationships weren't about sex, after all. Sex was just a bonus. Which was why, I guess, she didn't have a problem with James sticking his bonus elsewhere from time to time. See, the three of them had come to, I know, an arrangement, all nice and sanctioned by God. They were going to be in a relationship together, a plural marriage. She and Marie were going to be sister wives. Marie called it a thruple, Tanya said.

and Marie had told her she was so excited about the three of them raising Grace together. Now, this made the detectives prick up their ears. Remember, the church members had all said that they'd planned for Marie to stay on for three months to nurse the baby and then leave, that Grace was meant to be a gift for James and Tanya. But that wasn't the story Tanya was telling. Seemed like maybe the pastor and his wife hadn't let the congregation in on all their little secrets. Marie had been all for the sister-wife arrangement before Grace was born, Tanya said. But after, well, things changed.

Whenever she and James brought up adoption or the three of them raising the baby together, she said Marie would just kind of go quiet on them. This fit with what one of the inner circle ladies had told the detectives, that she got the sense that Marie had big, big feelings for Pastor James, that her motivation for the whole sake-scapade had nothing to do with the desire to give Tanya and James a baby. In this lady's opinion, Marie wanted to have a baby with James, a family with James. just James, and Tanya seemed aware of that. Marie was getting all weird and withdrawn any time she brought up the baby.

It had to have occurred to her that she was kind of the odd one out in this situation, what with Marie and James being Grace's biological parents, that Marie might decide to keep her baby now, and that James might decide that two were better than three after all. Now that Marie had given him the child he'd always wanted, he might decide to make a new family. All this was sounding an awful lot like motive for murder. And, of course, James wasn't off the hook either.

If Marie had decided against the whole plural marriage idea, she might have also just decided to take her baby and go. If James didn't want to give up his wife, his church, and his rep as the pious man of God, that is. And that's a lot to give up for a guy like James. And as Nesley and Keith continued to interview church members, their suspicions gathered steam. Apparently, several people had heard Tanya say she could kill Marie.

Specifically, she'd said James could never kill Marie, but I could. You know, just normal conversation like you do. I know my husband and I talk all the time about which one of us would be capable of murdering our friends, don't you? And Tanya had another

possible motive, too. In one of his sermons posted, of course, on YouTube, Pastor James had referenced part of the Old Testament that's often used to justify plural marriage. The message was pretty clear to the congregation, and by and large it went over like a lead balloon. The reaction was basically crickets and sour faces.

Oh, come on, Flanders. That's a rookie mistake. You can't introduce bigamy to your congregation until you get them to the compound. By then, they're all drinking the flavorade and you can have your pick of the lady litter. It is a compound. I think that's absolutely where this shit was headed. Yes. It was headed to compounds and flavor aid and the whole thing. If James thought he was going to be able to use some of that charisma of his to talk his church around to the idea of letting him start a little Franklin mint collection of sister wives, he clearly had another thing coming. But of course, that was exactly what he, Tanya, and Marie had been planning to do. Before Baby Grace came along and Marie started maybe having second thoughts anyway. Were Tanya and James worried that Marie might let the secret out?

Cost him his unblemished reputation? People have been murdered for less. So, two months after Marie went missing, Nesley and Keith got permission to look at the cell phone records for James, Tanya, and Marie. And the results were pretty stunning. Cell Tower data put Tanya and Marie on opposite sides of town the day of the disappearance. But at the time, Marie's friends and family got that sketchy text on October 19th, cell tower info showed her and James' phones snuggled up right next to each other.

And at the time, her truck was being parked in the long. long-term lot at the airport, James' cell phone was pinging off a tower nearby. Trey suspic, as the French say. But it wasn't proof of anything. It wasn't enough for a murder charge. And then, youth minister Jason Anderson, popped up at the police station. Something had been weighing on him. And I gotta say, this cannot have been easy for this dude to do.

James was his boss, his mentor, and his friend. but Jason couldn't keep his mouth shut any longer. According to him, James had gone to one of the church elders soon after Maria went missing, asking if they could help him get out of the country, stat. The elder had asked if this was about Marie or Maria. James told him he couldn't talk about it right then, but it was bad. Real bad. The elder was so worried about James' mental state after that conversation

that he got in touch with a doctor friend and the doctor committed him to his psych unit for 10 days. While James was getting treatment, Jason took over his interim pastor at Calvary and World Coast, and he started hearing rumors, whispers about a possible three-way relationship between James, Tanya, and Marie. When James came out of the hospital, Jason got the elders together, sat down with him, and Tanya, and confronted them about it. James didn't deny it.

It was true. He'd been sleeping with both women. The elders could not believe. what they were hearing. Marie had come to the church in crisis. She was at a vulnerable place in her life. And this was their pastor's response? Gross. You know, kidding. Now, this confession was bad enough, but James wasn't done talking. He said he and Marie had a, quote, physical altercation before she dropped off the map. She'd scratched up his arms, but he swore up and down she was alive the last time he saw her.

Jesus, Murphy, can you imagine the atmosphere in that room when he let that little bombshell drop? Lord. Yeah, it's like, uh, bro, we didn't ask if you killed her. We just asked if you were sleeping with her. Fucking yikes. So I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to hear that in the quickest decision ever made in the history of decision-making, the church elders told James he had to resign his pastor. James seemed to take it okay.

He said he and Tanya were planning on moving out of town, like soon. and said they'd stop by the church in the morning and say goodbye to the congregation first. But they didn't. At about midnight that night, they took off for Arizona, baby Grace in tow. This all happened just a few days before youth pastor Jason decided he couldn't take it anymore and spilled the whole story to detectives. So our dynamic duo fled the state. Right after James admitted he'd been in a physical fight with Marie on the day she went missing. I feel like that seems a little bit suspicious.

Yeah, I agree. It's a tad askew. And so was this. When the detectives talked to Marie's friend Kay, she told them she'd ask James and Tanya for Marie's stuff after she went missing. One of the things she ended up with was Marie's laptop. But when she turned it on to try and look for clues to where Marie might have gone, the hard drive had been wiped. The forensic IT folks had managed to restore a backup copy of Marie's cell phone from the

last time it had been plugged into a computer, but it wasn't doing investigators much good. Her text messages were there, but all jumbled up, just a gibberish of words and symbols. One thing they did find, though, a video of James hawking gold and silver online. This was apparently one of the pastors' little side hustles, and his vibe in the video was very unpreacher-like. There was definitely more to this guy than met the eye. Quite a bit more, the detectives were starting to think. And then one morning, an anonymous tip came into the sheriff's department. The caller refused to give their name, but insisted that Marie Carlson's body was buried in the pastor's backyard. The investigators landed on the Flanders

old house with a full court press of sniffer dogs and ground penetrating radar, but much to their frustration found nothing. And at that point, despite a swirl of tantalizing circumstantial evidence, the case pretty much stalled for a while. Detective Nesley-Suey Moore tried and tried to get in touch with James Flanders. But Pastor James never picked up his phone, and he never returned Nesley's voicemails. Not until a full year later when he finally picked up, to say he was represented by counsel and had been advised not to talk to them without his attorney present. But lawyer or no, James couldn't seem to restrain himself. He talked for two hours, and the common theme of the conversation was how hard the past year or so had been on him. Aw, puppy, doesn't your heart just

bleed for him? He talked about all the different ouchy-wouchy feelings he'd had since Marie's disappearance, including, quote, anger at Marie for going and not letting us know what's going on. He said he was mad at himself, too, for not getting her help. He was, quote, terrified of the prospect of Marie taking her own life. And if she did, and I pray she didn't, I hope she did it very, very, very, very, very, very far away. Because if they find her, one little bone that somehow could be connected with her, they'll, they're, it's my fault. I'm sure that's the way people would look at it. It's James.

Now, campers, I think we can all agree on one thing here. And that is that anybody who uses seven consecutive varies in a sentence is not in a sound state of mind. Thanks to Dateline and the show Cold Justice for the quotes from this phone call, by the way. So after letting him play the victim for a while, the detective finally asked him if he knew where Marie Carlson was. No, of course not, James said. If I did, I would go get her. Uh-huh. Right. James, the detective said,

Did you kill Marie Carlson? James's answer was a simple no. And he didn't want to talk much after that. In fact, after that call, the case stalled again. Nesley, Suey Moore, and Keith Mott moved on with other cases, but they didn't forget about Marie. She was always there in the background of their minds. And then three years after Marie went missing,

the TV show Cold Justice, hosted by former prosecutor Kelly Siegler and CSI Yolanda McClary decided to take a look at the case. Now, if you've never seen it, it's a fascinating show that resurrects cold cases and has actually led to a number of arrests in cases that had sat idle for years. So, anywho, Nesley and Keith are both in the episode, and you can tell how committed they both still were at that point to bringing Marie's Killer to Justice. And by the time the show got involved, they were in a much better position to do it. Forensic technology is always evolving, and in the three years since Marie went missing, the technology for searching an erased hard drive had improved a lot. When investigators used that new tech to take another look at Marie's laptop and phone,

they found a whole bunch of solid gold stuff. They found an avalanche of texts between James and Marie. Lots of sappy love notes, back and forth, and a whole lot of sexting, too. And James had been sending Marie, quote, pornographic pictures, which I can only assume means dickpicks, from the church computer. Oh, well, yeah, that's probably frowned upon. Probably. This was all pretty interesting in terms of proving there was a hot and heavy relationship between James and Marie.

But even more interesting was the fact that all activity on Marie's computer and phone had stopped the day she went missing. One of the last messages she sent was to a friend about how she was. she decided she wanted out of the whole sister-wife situation with James and Tanya. She just wasn't cut out for a polygamous marriage. She was going to get out of there, and she had no plans to leave baby Grace behind. So there we have it. The investigator's theory of motive spelled out in black and white. Nesley and Keith decided it was time to talk to the prosecutor about what they'd uncovered.

It was a circumstantial case, true, but it was a strong one. and on May 5th, 2015, shortly after the episode of Cold Justice aired, incidentally, they finally put the habeas gravis on James Flanders for second-degree murder. At first, James' attorney, who was also one of his former church members, was feeling pretty confident. He didn't think they had nearly enough evidence to prove a murder charge. They still didn't have Marie's body, after all. But once he got a look at the evidence, that confidence deflated like a little. leaky balloon.

This might be enough to put Pastor James away for life, and James knew it, too. They went to the prosecution and asked for a deal. In exchange for a charge of manslaughter instead of second-degree murder, James would tell them everything, including what he did with Marie's body. Marie's family was torn. They wanted James to pay for what he'd done to her, but they didn't know if they could live without knowing where she was, giving her a proper burial. So after a lot of soul-searching, they gave the prosecutor the go-ahead, and the deal was struck. So in an interview room at the sheriff's office,

Pastor James laid it out. He admitted to the polygibous marriage. I mean, obviously it was an illegal marriage, but James said he viewed Marie as his other wife. They were keeping it on the QT from the church members, for most of them anyway. I guess not the gaggle of Tanya's friends. Right. Continuing with the whole Marie was unstable narrative he'd been trying to sell from day one,

James said on the day of the murder, Marie had been in a downward spiral with her mental health. And when he suggested she'd go for inpatient therapy for her depression, Jane said she flew into a rage. She hit me in the chest, he said. And I grabbed hold of her and just hugged as tight as

I could. In the scuffle, we fell down on the floor. When we hit the floor, we hit hard. When I realized something wasn't right, I rolled her over, and she wasn't breathing. A hug. Marie died from a bear hug? To Detective Nesley Suey Moore, it sounded like pure uncut bullshit. But she sat there and listened, because what she wanted more than anything else from this confession was to find out what happened to the body. James had turned on the waterworks big time by this point in the interview, and through big, snotty tears, he admitted what the anonymous tipster had told them years earlier, that he'd buried Marie in the backyard the day he killed her. Now, this hit

Nesley like a punch in the face. She'd searched that yard five years ago. She'd brought in cadaver dogs and ground radar. There in the interview room, she passed the prosecutor a note. It said, I missed her. Which just breaks my heart. It's like, Nesley, you didn't miss her, okay? radar did. But in Nesley's mind and heart, it was just unbearable to think she could have found Marie as early as six months after she first went missing. Could have spared the family so much pain and uncertainty.

Just, I hate it for her. Bless her heart. After James's confession, they loaded him up in a squad car and everybody went out to the Flanders' old house. And in floods of messy tears, James pointed out the spot in the backyard. As he marked the place with little white flags, James chewed the scenery even more, collapsing to the ground theatrically and repeating,

I'm sorry, Marie, I'm sorry. Let's all pause for a quick barf. And we're done. So it took hours, but they finally uncovered Marie's body, five feet deep and wrapped in a blanket. Nesley cried, as they took her out of the ground, the culmination of five years of work on a case that had frustrated her at every turn.

Under the terms of his plea deal, James was sentenced to 15 years in prison. With good behavior, he'll be out in 11. His release date is scheduled for December 2029, at which time, if he wants to, he can join Tanya and Grace and help raise the child whose mother he choked the life out of. Yeah. Tanya's raising Grace.

Just deal with the gut punch of that for a second. In fact, in 2013, James filed for termination of Marie's parental rights on the grounds that she'd abandoned the baby and they hadn't seen her for two years. Guess he neglected to mention the reason for that, i.e. that she was buried in his backyard. Now, James has always insisted that Tanya didn't know about the murder until well after the fact. He swears he'd already buried Marie by the time she got back from running errands with the baby. Tanya's defense attorney is backed us up, saying he was the one who eventually told her what happened, and her reaction proved to him that she hadn't known anything about it.

Campers, I got to tell you, I don't believe it, for a hot second. If you watch that episode of Cold Justice, you can watch Tanya deal with the investigators over the phone, and to me her behavior just reeked of consciousness of guilt. Obviously, I have no proof, it's just my opinion, but the investigators have said they have their suspicions, too. They just don't have any proof. For their part, Marie's family is fighting for custody of Grace, who is now 10 years old.

And fortunately, thanks to a visitation order from the court, they are involved in her life to some extent. Paris, who's now a teenager, hasn't had a mom in her life since she was seven years old. her dad, Marie's ex-Jep, remembers how much it hurt to tell her that her mom was never coming back. Once Marie's remains were uncovered, her family held a celebration of her life, where everybody sang karaoke, Marie's favorite thing. Paris is close with Estes' little girl, just like Marie and Esther were when they were growing up,

and the two of them loved making music together, just like their moms once did. And we're going to leave you with this, Campers. There's a YouTube video of one of James's sermons recorded about a month before he killed her. Choked her to death, is my guess, and certainly not by accident. A fatal bear hug is not a thing. Anyway, the video is called How Tough Is Love? How Much Might It Cost You? And here's a direct quote. Now, whenever someone is backstabbing me, lying about me, gossiping about me, trying to tear me down or whatever, you know what I want to do? My feelings say, choke the life out of

him. At that, he laughs, wearing his stupid jeans and stupid sneakers and a Hawaiian shirt and looking enormously pleased with himself. I assume Marie was in the congregation that day, sitting in the audience listening to that line. She had no idea what was coming. 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 today our most important shout out is to friend and patron Megan, who did the research for this case and made me a fantastic

outline to follow for the script. Thank you so much, Megan. You were a lifesaver this week. I had so much work stuff going on. You really seriously saved us. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Rochelle, Elizabeth, Nicole, Laura, Jessica, and Kathy. We appreciate you 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 two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up, categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, which we've started doing more and more often, and we're

always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us. Yeah, I have an event this weekend, so if your patron, look out for the post on Patreon.